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Navigating the Customer Experience

Join host Yanique Grant as she takes you on a journey with global entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that can help you to navigate your customer experience. Learn what customers really want and how businesses can understand the psychology of each customer or business that they engage with. We will be looking at technology, leadership, customer service charters and strategies, training and development, complaint management, service recovery and so much more!
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Aug 29, 2023

Tom Martin is the CEO at Glance, a CX and contact center strategist, product lifecycle expert, and partnership builder. Tom has led Glance through a successful “pivot,” transitioning from a small business screen share tool to a provider of omnichannel visual engagement solutions for some of the largest enterprises in the world. 

Since that pivot, Glance has experienced multiple years of 70% year on year growth. Prior to joining Glance in 2013, Tom spent over a decade at Verizon building and managing strategic partnerships. Outside of the office, Tom is an avid backcountry skier, mountaineer and competitive cyclist.

 

Questions 

  We always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about their journey, how you got to where you are today.

     Now, could you tell our audience a little bit about Glance and what it is that your company does?

  Can you share with our listeners a little bit about how it is that you can still integrate personal experiences or personal connection with emotion even though we have so much of our connectivity being done in a digital space.

  What is your view on empathy? And do you believe everyone has the ability to exercise it? And if not, what are some tools that you believe can help to strengthen that particular competence in a team member?

  Can you also share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

  Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently.

  Could you also share with our listeners, what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

  Where can listeners find you online?

  Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you got derailed or demotivated, this quote will help to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?

  

Highlights

Tom’s Journey

Tom shared that he’s always been fascinated with people which drew him down the path of really understanding what people like, how people buy, he cuts deep into sales and marketing early in his day. And no matter what he was doing, he was always interested to understand how to connect with other people. And the part of like connecting with other people, as you realize that as we have moved from business where we were always together, like you walked into a store you connected with people, you learned a lot of information when someone walks through the door. If you're in a clothing store, you could size them up and be like that person's this size jacket. And you could also recognize all the other cues. 

It could be like Valentine's day or the day before, and a gentleman walking in and he's in the women's section. There's all that context that you get. So, you understand, like the challenges that businesses today have when you start to move, sometimes completely into the digital realm. 

And so, it's sort of been an area of focus of his, throughout his career, just understanding people. And in today's landscape of customer experiences, where the battleground is no longer a product, it's really the experience that people have.

  

About Glance and What Your Company Does?

Tom shared that they are a in-brand collaboration platform that brings real human beings into a digital space, to be able to provide that personal connection at just the right moment. And that translates into thinking about any type of a journey that a customer is doing, where it could be better served by bringing a human being in, so many people have become more digital native and of course, the familiarity of digital tools has skyrocketed with the pandemic because people, that was the only modality that they had. 

But now you realize that, instead of thinking about how do I actually do something, it now comes down to what advice do I need to complete something. And can I reach out to get advice, guidance from someone who can help me understand the inner workings of something, demystified fees, whatever it might be. And that's what they focused on doing is really bringing the digital and the human elements together.

 

Integrating Personal Experiences or Personal Connection with Emotion Even Though Our Connectivity is Being Done in a Digital Space

Me: So, that's what Glance is all about. Now, at the beginning when you were explaining about your personal journey, how you got to where you are today, you mentioned something that piqued my interest, which was the connection that you make with someone, really getting to know that individual and connecting on a personal level. 

Now, a big part of customer experience, I believe is an emotional connection that you have with someone and I do believe people buy from organizations that they like and love, and there's some emotion that's there that's driving them to want to do business with that organization. 

Can you share with our listeners a little bit about how it is that you can still integrate personal experiences or personal connection with emotion even though we have so much of our connectivity being done in a digital space? 

Tom shared that the things that we talk about today and also where things are headed, that are going to be supported by technology is recognizing that today….customers are forced to really be in the driver's seat to go down in many of the different channels. 

And many times, if you ask someone, have you had a good experience with a chatbot?

If it's outside of something that's very simple, like, what are your hours of operation, oftentimes leads them to switching channels to get somewhere else. And when you think about the emotional component and realizing that if we're able to meet the customer where they are versus forcing the customer to go through many different channels to find out that they can't get what they need done, either abandoned, or they come up with another channel, like making a phone call that maybe goes into a centre, or into a store. 

And the part about like emotion is realizing that, what if we want to insert the human being into the journey at a certain spot, or maybe in a couple different spots, where you can provide that level of connection or empathy really demonstrating genuine care and understanding towards the customers’ needs and concerns. 

And the part of what we've experienced over the past number of years is this idea of we need to deflect away from those channels because they're inefficient. But we also recognise that while digital is becoming better at getting information, at helping people through certain workflows, there are moments in a journey where, “If I could just talk with you to be able to understand something to help me make a decision.”

Because oftentimes, you think about what a bot can do, it's going to be doing things based on information it knows. And many people don't necessarily want to share everything about their personal life, they're going to hold it guarded until they actually speak with someone to say, “Hey, this is what my situation is, is this going to meet my needs? Is this going to help me live my best life? Should I go and get this mortgage.” 

And so, emotion has a bunch of different components and he thinks of how Forrester thinks about these things, empathy being the most important part, but also having bankers or agents or specialists, be able to not just combine the empathy, but also be given the empowerment to actually solve a problem. 

And today, there's a lot of focus on things like personalization, really tailoring interactions to meet a specific customer's preferences and expectations. And also realizing that people take the shortest path, like water, they take the path of least resistance. 

And so, finding ways that we can delight a customer, how we can simplify the process and oftentimes, once you get so far, being able to connect with someone, you realize that wow, I am interacting with a real business, with real people, and he likes to say that people want to do business with people that they know, like, and trust, it's an important aspect. 

And when he’s connecting with you, and he goes, “Gosh, I can have a personal connection with you, I can now have a better relationship with the business because you're now representing the business, you might be better representing the product or service that I'm buying.” And so, it becomes multi-dimensional when you're able to connect with a human being not just personal one on one, but it just changes your view of the business.

Me: Agreed. And so, the human connection is even more important now I believe as you were mentioning just now, different interactions that customers have with a business, because then they feel more connected to that business, they feel like somebody's actually listening to them and they're being heard. 

Tom agreed and stated that he thinks one of the challenges that businesses today are facing is really going forward is how to infuse that human element into the digital experience and realizing that it's not a oh, digital failed, now we're going to go to a human being. It's how do we bring these things together so that while we're in that immersive experience, while we're in the digital channel, you suddenly have multiple modalities. 

And as we start to think about data, and when businesses start to go, oh, yeah, we have a lot of data, but then it becomes, wow, the data lives in so many different places, how do we organize it? And how do we actually take information and insights that suddenly become actionable?  

For many businesses, they realise, “Wow, we have some work to do, there's some homework, there some clean-up, there's things that we need to do.” But when you start to think about understanding what your customers are doing, and you can design an action, a journey, an experience for a customer that's informed by data that suddenly says, “You know what, we're going to create that the high speed lane on the highway, we're going to clear all the clutter.” 

Because many times when you interface with a business, it's almost like a labyrinth, someone designed these things, you have to go left or right, straight, backwards, it feels like and you realize that they were designed for a variety of different things that require clicks and navigating through different things. But what if that data and some of the design informs a better journey that streamline saves you time, that gets you just what you need, and brings the human being into it? He thinks that's really the future of where we're headed, there's a lot of work to be done to get there.

 

What is Empathy? And Tools That Can Help Strengthen Empathy in a Team Member 

Me: Agreed. So, you also mentioned in your explanation of personal connection, empathy and it's definitely something I believe that is critical for customer experience, especially for organizations, you have some industries that need empathy more than others, I do believe every industry needs it. But I think some needed even more, for example, like the healthcare industry, but what I wanted was your insight as a CEO, you sit at the top, I'm sure you integrate with your team members at all different levels, but it's important to kind of hear from the leader of an organization, what is your view on empathy? And do you believe everyone has the ability to exercise it? And if not, what are some tools that you believe can help to strengthen that particular competence in a team member?

Tom stated that it's a really important piece. And he does think empathy is something that you can lead with, it's almost similar to like a value that they have there in the company, which is like assuming positive intent. But having empathy, which is, can you walk a few steps in the other person's shoes, the customer’s shoes or a colleague, and he thinks there are people that are higher on the they'll call it the EA spectrum that they just have a higher sort of emotional quotient, EQ is the phrase. 

And he thinks the part that we're starting to see is, what if there are things that can fall into the category of having information that based on the conversation that is being had, you can have tips and tricks, you can have information that's being done. And this is where technology, imagine natural language translation is working to listen to the conversation and is helping coach the specialist to have a better conversation. It can listen for tone, it's doing the translation on the actual words, and can bring information in to the conversation to recommend to the specialist how to have a better conversation.  

And part of empathy is demonstrating that genuine care, but also, it falls short, if you're not empowering the people that are delivering the empathy. Because empathy without empowerment can work in the opposite direction, it can actually be kind of like a falsehood. You say you're sorry, but you're not willing to actually do anything to help me out and so you really need to couple those things together, and be able to solve problems, to be able to get the customer where they need to go as efficiently as possible.

  

App, Website or Tool that Tom Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Tom shared that the thing that he finds with modern day smartphones, is probably he can't live without his smartphone more than anything because he suddenly have access to all the different systems personally at his fingertips. His business phone can ring, he has access into things that need to be HR or finance for approvals. But he feels like we're now in this world where mobility has created this opportunity to be connected wherever you need to be connected. He knows that's a bit of an overarching statement, but he feels like the mobile device has really become a game changer for so many people in business because it gives you access and information at your fingertips.

Me: All right, so your mobile phone is your tool. All right, love it.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Tom

When asked about books that have a great impact, Tom shared that one that he read a long time ago that he still thinks today is amazing. An author who we see in the New Yorker, Atul Gawande, he wrote a book called The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. And it really went through a process of just understanding what are the things that need to be done, and he speaks from the voice of a surgeon and thinking about performing surgery on someone, and to have the right outcomes, there's a checklist, and there's so many things within a business that can be assisted and aided and improved by doing things around a checklist. 

Another book that he just finished that he really liked is 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan, and the concept of that is pretty simple, in that 2x is very easy to see, you and I can say, “Oh gosh, we need to do 2x more.” It's just a matter of like working harder, a few things that you streamline, but it's something that you can see how to achieve 2x. To achieve 10x, oftentimes, you have to say, “Gosh, we're going to have to do a lot of things differently. And first and foremost, we're going to have to stop doing a lot of things.” 

Because to 10x isn't to say we're going to 10x everything, it's one of the most important things we're going to 10x and it means that all the other things don't matter as much. In fact, some of those things can be eliminated, stopped, it can be deferred, you can hand it off to someone else to do but it's really about how to think about 10xing anything, your personal life, your business. 

And if you think about the 80/20 principle, it can be applied in so many different ways. You really think about saying, “Gosh, to 10x, I've got to put 100% of my energy on the 20% of my life or my business, which means I've got to figure out how to deal with removing that 80% that gives me that 10x leap.” 

And then the last one, this is a fun one. He bought this for his daughters, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, it came out in the beginning of May. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. He loves this book, it's something that you can open up every day and get a little seed that can grow an idea in your head, it's a fun little book to have on the side of his desk.

  

What Tom is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s excited about, Tom shared that probably the thing that's the most exciting is something that, you think about the parts of any type of business, they've spent so much time really thinking about how do they build great experiences, but what people want to know more than anything else, is when and where should we have those great experiences. And the part of that is to understand where people need help. And there's a piece of this, which is realizing that oftentimes people and human beings want to be able to do things and they don't necessarily rely on or can understand all the information, all the cues. 

And so, if they as a company can figure out how to help businesses know when and where to have experiences that can transform how they compete, and how they deliver an exceptional experience that really puts them at the forefront of where they're going as a business. 

And in doing that, a lot of this work that they're doing is really informed by taking a more data centric approach. And so, they're spending a fair amount of time really rethinking how we look at things. They've always looked at them through a few sets of lenses and now they're really taking a step back and saying, “You know what, we're going to look at the same thing. But we're going to look at it through a different set of lenses to really rethink how we approach those things.” 

Because oftentimes, inexperience happens because a lot of other things have informed that experience as to like when and where it happens, didn't just happen. It happened because of a lot of other things. And if they can understand what the best things are, then they can inform more frequently and consistently how to have them to deliver the right outcomes.

 

Where Can We Find Peter Online

LinkedIn – Thos Martin

            

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Tom Uses

When asked about quote that he tends to revert to, Tom shared that there's a quote from Scott Peck. And he’s also thinking about one other one, but the one from Scott Peck is pretty simple, and it rings true. But when you talk about adversity, the quote is, “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. And it's a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand it and accept it, then it no longer becomes difficult.” 

And so, as you realize that there's another part of this about optimism, optimists view challenges and hardship as temporary things that can be overcome. And so, he’s a big believer in optimism because to get anywhere, you must first imagine it, you must first dream it and then you can work towards that dream. And then that dream can become a reality. And it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be challenges or pitfalls along the way, but you recognize that if you believe that those things are only temporary, you can continue to thrive.

 

So, we want to thank you so much, Tom, for taking time out of your very busy schedule and coming on this podcast, sharing all of this great information, what your company does Glance, your views as it relates to creating that personal connection, ensuring that the digital is interceding in a very great way with the human connection, because both need to work together in order to deliver that fantastic, exceptional experience that we want our customers to have. And of course, to be very intentional about designing that experience in a way that our customers actually value the efforts and the experience that we've created for them.

 

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

 

Links

     The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

     10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan

     Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdon I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly

 

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Aug 22, 2023

Joey Coleman helps companies keep their customers and employees. As an award-winning speaker, he shares his first 100 Days® methodology for improving customer and employee retention with organizations around the world, for example, Whirlpool, Volkswagen Australia and Zappos.  

His Wall Street Journal #2 best-selling book, Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days, shows how to turn any sale into a lifelong customer. And his upcoming book, Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Rention, details a framework companies around the world can use to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement.

 

Questions

  Could you tell us a little bit about that book – (Never Lose a Customer Again)? And then we can go into the new one that you recently launched.

  And your book (Never Lose an Employee Again) focuses on the phases that you should use to try and retain these employees. And those phases are Assess, Accept, Affirm, Activate, Acclimate, Accomplish, Adopt and Advocate. So, can you just give us maybe a brief summary on each of those and why it's relevant? 

  Could you share with us what are some of your favourite things you've seen brands do to create the kind of culture that you're talking about where employees are advocates?

  What is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

  Can you also share with us maybe one or two books that you have read, could be books that you read like a long time ago, or even ones that you've read recently, but they have had a great impact on you.

  Now can you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

  Where can listeners find you online?

  Now, Joey, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you got derailed or demotivated, it kind of helps to get you back on track.

 

Highlights  

About Joey’s Books – Never Lose a Customer Again & Never Lose an Employee Again 

Me: So, let's start off with a little bit about your first book, Never Lose a Customer Again, for those of our listeners that may have just recently started listening to our podcasts and unfortunately weren't able to tap into that awesome episode. Could you tell us a little bit about that book? And then we can go into the new one that you recently launched.

 

Joey shared that so about 5 years ago, he wrote a book called Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days. And the premise of this book is that we spend so much time trying to find new customers that we forget to pay attention to the customers that we've already acquired, people who have already raised their hand and said, “I want to do business with you.” The premise of that book is based on some staggering research that they both did, and came across that showed that somewhere between 20% and 70% of new customers will decide to stop doing business with you before the 100 day anniversary of becoming a customer. 

So, as quickly as you're bringing customers in the front door, they're running out the back door. And the book outlines a framework that's based on 20 plus years of his experience as a consultant and speaker and agency owner. And it outlines a framework for how do we navigate our customer through eight phases of a journey, where we're creating the kind of remarkable experiences that will keep them coming back for more.

  

Me: Alright, so before we actually started the official recording, you and I were kind of having an informal discussion as it relates to employee experience and your new book, Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Rention, really focuses on what are some strategies, what are some tools, you've provided us with a great framework as to how it is that organizations can keep talent that is really impactful to the organization and they won't leave, because at the end of the day, the employees grow, the company grows. So, can you tell us a little bit about this book? And then I have some more specific questions I want to ask you based on my own reading as well.

 

Joey shared that he often thinks of customer experience and employee experience as being two sides of the same coin. We can't expect to have a remarkable experience for our customers if our employees aren't delivering that remarkable experience. 

And the way our employees deliver remarkable experience is they have a context for what that is and they have a framework for how to continue to deliver that to the people they serve. Interestingly enough, when he set out to write this book, he had that first 100 days research from his first book in mind, and when he went and looked at the parallels in the world of employee experience, he found that they were shockingly similar, that same significant percentage of people who leave as a new customer in the first 100 days was mirrored in the world of employees who start a new job, and then quit that job before the 100 day anniversary. 

In fact, depending on which research you looked at, it was again somewhere between 20% and 70%. And these numbers he found to be absolutely staggering. He thinks many organizations have felt the pain of an employee leaving, but very few organizations are paying attention to the speed at which employees are leaving, and the myriad reasons why employees are leaving so that we can hopefully develop frameworks and structures and philosophies and methodologies that will keep our employees engaged and retained for the long term.

  

Never Lose an Employee Again – Phases You Should Use to Try and Retain Employees

Me: Yes, and your book (Never Lose an Employee Again) focuses on the phases that you should use to try and retain these employees. And those phases are Assess, Accept, Affirm, Activate, Acclimate, Accomplish, Adopt and Advocate. So, can you just give us maybe a brief summary on each of those and why it's relevant?

  

Joey stated absolutely. And he'll try to go through these quickly because there are 8 of them, we could spend an entire podcast talking about any one of these phases. But for context before he describes them, the reason they all start with the letter A is he wanted folks to kind of have this thought that if your employees felt you were succeeding in each of these 8 phases, it's like getting straight A's on your report card in school, you're doing a great job, and you're worthy of continuing to be advanced, because you're delivering a great experience. 

So, the first phase is the Assess Phase. This is when a prospective employee is trying to decide whether or not they want to come work with you. They're looking at your job descriptions, your want ads, the about us page on your website, the careers page on your website. They're submitting an application, they're going through your interview process, they're sharing their resume, you're doing reference checks, all the things that lead up for an employer to decide whether or not they want to hire this specific person. And the time period where the potential employee is also assessing whether or not they want to join your enterprise. 

We then come to phase two the Accept Phase. In this phase, the employer extends an offer, and if we're lucky, that desired candidate accepts our offer. 

We then move to the Affirm Phase. Now, this phase occurs immediately after the new employee has decided to accept the job offer. And he’s sure all of Yanique’s amazing customer experience experts are very familiar with the concept of buyer's remorse. What they may not be as familiar with is the concept of new hires remorse. It's the same thing as buyer's remorse, it's scientifically proven that this happens anytime someone accepts a job offer, they begin to doubt the decision they just made. And in the affirm stage, we need to reaffirm their choice to counterbalance that fear and doubt and uncertainty they're naturally feeling and in their new hires remorse stage. 

We then come to phase four, the Activate Phase. Now, of all the 8 phases, this is the only phase that is limited in its duration, first day, and that day is the first official day on the job. 

What is it like you come to work for that first day? 

And in the immortal words of country music legend Bonnie Raitt, “Have you given us something to talk about?” Because every employee is going to go home that night to their spouse, their significant other, their children, their parents, their roommate, whoever it is in their life, and that loved one, the first question they're going to ask when they come through the door is, how was your first day at work?  

How are your employees going to answer that question? Have you created such a remarkable experience on that first day that they have something to talk about? 

We then come to the Acclimate Phase, phase 5. Now, the acclimate phase starts on the second day on the job and can last for weeks or even months as the new employee gets used to your way of doing business. They learn the various roles and responsibilities they're going to have, they understand better the requirements of what they're supposed to do, they understand the relationships with their co-workers and colleagues, and how all those pieces fit together for them to be great at their job. They're also learning your tools and your cadence of communication, and the chain of command and the various things of how your business operates. We need to hold our employees hands while they acclimate to the job and too many employers just kind of push the employee into the deep end of the swimming pool and say, “Well, just go ahead and swim.” Instead of taking care of them and making sure they understand what's happening. 

We then come to phase 6, the Accomplish Phase. This is when the new employee achieves the goal they had when they originally decided to accept your job offer. See, every employee has a vision of what this new career will be like. Whether that will be more responsibility, more autonomy, more opportunities to develop new skills, they have a vision of what they're hoping to accomplish. The challenge is most employers not only don't know what that vision is, but they're not paying attention to the employees progress as they track towards achieving those goals. If we don't do that as organizations, we can't celebrate with our team members when they accomplish their goals. 

We then come to phase 7, the Adopt Phase, this is when the employee becomes loyal to you and only you, they're committed, they're not going to look for jobs elsewhere, they're not listening to those calls from head-hunters or recruiters that want to hire them away. Almost every business on the planet desires adopters. But what's fascinating is very few businesses do anything to acknowledge when an employee becomes an adopter. We have a tendency to take those employees for granted, even though they are the lifeblood of our enterprise. And if and only if, we've helped to hold our employees hands through those first 7 phases do we have the right, the privilege, the honour of having them transition to the eighth and final phase. 

The Advocate Phase, where our employee becomes a raving fan for us, singing our praises far and wide. They're going on glass door and writing reviews. Anytime we have a new position open, they're recruiting their best colleagues, the people they've worked with in the past, the smartest humans they know to come apply for this job because they know it's a great place to work and they want amazing people to work there with them. 

The way he always test with business owners who say to him, “Oh, Joey, a lot of our teammates are advocates. And so many of our people are advocates.” He'll say, “Great. Here's a little test to see if that's true or not. The last time you had an open position in your organisation, what percentage of the candidates you interviewed were direct referrals from your existing team members?”  

What's interesting is those people who were previously saying, oh, everyone's an advocate….kind of go, well, actually, no one. So, he’s like, well, then you really don't have as many advocates as you think you do. 

So, those are the 8 phases and the last thing he'll say on this is that when an employee is promoted, they go back to the beginning, they go back to that assess phase, trying to decide, “Is this a promotion I want? What am I going to do? Okay, I'll accept the promotion. Oh, should I have accepted the promotion, I liked my old job. But this new job even though it maybe comes with more money or a better title, it also comes with a lot more responsibility and a new learning curve.” And then we've got to hold their hand and acclimate them. And what happens is the longer an employee is with the organization, the more they cycle through these phases, yet, most organizations aren't paying attention to the fact that the employee is going back to the beginning. And we have an opportunity to reengage and reconnect with them as they navigate through the 8 phases the next time.

  

Me: I love those phases and I love that question that you asked, like that really puts them on the spot and makes them practically say, “Okay, do we really have advocates in this organization?”

 

What Brands Joey Has Observed Creating a Culture Where Employees are Advocates 

Me: Now, Joey, could you share with us what are some of your favourite things you've seen brands do to create the kind of culture that you're talking about where employees are advocates, especially in this remote driven world that we have, I mean, the pandemic and COVID has definitely changed how organizations are approaching their business models, many of them are taking on a more hybrid approach. I know, for example, in Kingston, Jamaica here, you do have some forward thinking organizations who genuinely recognize that their employees can still be just as productive or even more working from home but then you find you have some dinosaurs who still believe people need to physically sit in traffic and go to work from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, and they just need to see the people in the office to know that they're doing the work. But what are your thoughts on that?

 

Joey stated that Yanique is correct. There's still a lot of dinosaur era thinking going on in many organizations today, despite the fact that we have proven both statistically and across almost every industry on the planet, that remote work is just as effective, if not more effective than in person work. In fact, most of the research and the studies show that when employees work from home, they are more productive, they are more engaged, they are happier, and they feel a stronger connection to the fact that they are able to balance their work with their life. 

So, if your organization isn't actively pursuing, at the very least hybrid, if not pure, remote work, he can set a stopwatch for how much longer you're going to be in business. It’s just the reality that the landscape has changed. If we were to roll the clock back, and he was to say to you, “Yanique, you can still run your business, but you're not allowed to use the internet.” Most businesses would be like, “Oh, my God, how am I supposed to function?” This is a fundamental aspect of business, remote work, work from home, non-centralized, come to an office work. When we get about, he thinks 10 years down the road, it's going to feel like saying to someone, you can't use the internet, saying to someone you have to come to the office is going to be the equivalent of a shock to the system and a foolish statement as saying, you have to run your business without using electricity, or the internet or a phone. The ship has sailed, this is over. 

Now, when you asked him about his favourites, it's kind of a tough question because there are over 50 case studies in the new book from all 7 continents. And so, asking him to pick a favourite is kind of tough, but here's what he will tell you is a common thread, especially amongst the organizations that are recognizing the benefits of hybrid and or remote work. And that is that in an increasingly digital era, the smartest companies in the planet are making sure to invest in analogue interactions to attach to and be compatible with their digital interactions. What does he mean by that?  

Well, if you've got everyone working remotely, and you're not having that office water cooler time, and you're not having everybody come to the same office, while it is beneficial for your productivity and your engagement and your employee happiness, they're still humans. So we need to find ways to build additional connection with them, that transcends the digital sphere. So, that could be sending gifts to their house, it could be hosting in person events every once in a while maybe, a group gathering twice a year, most of the research shows that if you have a fully remote team, you should strive to get together in person at least twice per year with the whole team. 

But here's the secret on that, it's not about getting together in person to have meetings and to do work, it's about getting together to create connection. So, one of the companies that he profiled in the book is LEGO Corporation. Most folks listening are familiar with LEGO the children's toy, or the adult toy in his case, he loves building, he was building LEGO sets this weekend. And his 2 boys who are younger came up and they were like, “Daddy, can we help build too?” To show you, he was building on his own and then they wanted to play and he included them, and it was great fun. 

But LEGO does something where every year they have a play day. Now, LEGO is a company that makes toys. So, of course they believe strongly in the concept of play. And every year they shut down all of their offices globally, for a full day, all their stores, all their corporate headquarters, all of their factories, and everyone comes together and what do they do that day? 

They play, that's all they do

They don't have team meetings, they don't talk about the vision of the future, they just play. And in interviews with LEGO employees globally, when you ask them what one of their favourite kind of traditions or rituals within the organization, they say that the LEGO Play Day is something they think about all year leading up to it. Humans are not that complicated, we like the idea of social interaction, we like the idea of play, we like the idea of getting to know people personally so we can have a personal and emotional connection with them, not just a work connection.

 

Me: I agree. That kind of dovetails nicely into my next question, Joey because with your new book, Never Lose an Employee Again and I find a lot of times when I talk to some of my clients, especially not necessarily those who are in a HR function, but even the business owners themselves. They will grapple or struggle with the fact that if they're losing employees, they believe it's a lot of times monetary. And I have found that a lot of times when an employee has reached a point where they're resolute in their decision to say I want to leave this company and go somewhere else, even if they're offered more money, they still wouldn't stay, they'd still leave. So, I believe that a lot of them would look forward to more non-monetary benefits, like simple to the example you gave about LEGO, a simple play day something that people look forward to, it's our sense of community, you get to meet and connect with people. And to me, there is no dollar value that you can put on those types of experiences. So, I guess my question is do you agree with me?

 

Joey stated that only 100% does he agree with everything Yanique just said. It's really fascinating, if we look at the research that has been done on why employees leave, the typical study on why employees leave is based on a sample set of somewhere between 200 and 500 respondents. Now, if you know anything about statistics or anybody listening has experience with statistics, a sample set of 200 to 500 results is not nearly as robust, as if that number were larger, and arguably significantly larger. 

In doing the research for the book, they came across some studies that had been done by the Work Institute, where they interviewed 234,000 employees who were quitting their jobs and asked them, “Why are you quitting?”  

Now, many business owners around the world will say, “Well, my employee quit because they got more money somewhere else are someone's going to pay more money somewhere else.” They make it all about the dollars, all about the money. But the research doesn't show that to be true. Only 9% of employees globally, quit for more money

So, then that led him to wonder what about the other 91%? 

Why are those people quitting? 

And what this research found from the Work Institute was that the number one reason, the greatest reason given 23% of the respondents, so almost two and a half times the number of people quit for this other reason. And that reason was, they didn't see a clear path forward for their career at that organization. They didn't know what their next job was going to be. So, when we as employers, an employee comes in, and they're like, “Oh, I'm going to leave” and we're like, “Oh, we'll pay you more, we'll give you more benefits, we'll give you a better title.” These are not the things they're looking for. So, it's kind of like we're offering them things that at this point in the game really don't matter as much. And it almost feels insulting, because we're not listening to why they're leaving. 

Instead, we need to move the conversation forward. We need to have the conversation before they come to us saying, “I want to quit” and have a conversation around….

“What are your goals as an employee?

We have goals for you as your employer, things we'd like you to do.

But what are you hoping to accomplish in your life?

Are you trying to get out of debt?

Are you trying to be more fit?

Are you trying to start a family?

Are you trying to buy a house?

Are you trying to take care of ageing parents?

Are you trying to go on vacation?

What are the things that are goal?

Are you trying to run a marathon?

What are your goals?

What are the things you're hoping to achieve?" 

And then as employers, we need to look for opportunities to support our people in those goals as well. See, for all too long, he thinks we've had this belief, “we” meaning most organizations globally, that well, there's business and there's personal. And when you're at work, we've just want you to focus on the business, don't bring your personal life to work. But what's interesting is almost every employer on the planet expects you to think about work when you're not at work. They expect you to answer emails, to have your phone on you, we need you to work a couple hours late or if you're going on vacation, we might need you to do one or two calls. 

The business has no problem asking the employee to chip into their personal time to do business related work. But God forbid we ask the business to allow the employee to chip into their business time to do personal things. For some reason we think that's offensive or improper.  

Humans are humans, he would posit this, the employer of choice in the future is going to be the employer who pays as much attention to what happens in their employee’s life between 5:00 pm and 9:00 am as they do compared to what happens in that employee's life between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm.

  

Me: Agreed 100% Joey, I am there with you.

 

App, Website or Tool that Joey Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Joey shared that since the last time they had a podcast was about 5 years ago, he must confess he’s not 100% sure of all the specific answers he gave then. But the one online tool that he’s using right now that he finds increases efficiency and productivity, but also makes for he thinks a pretty great experience is the online scheduling tool Calendly

And the reason why he loves it, because often, as he’s sure you do, he has folks saying to him, “Joey, we'd like to arrange a time to connect, we want to have a call, we want to talk about a project, we want to talk about a future speech.” Because he spends most of his days giving speeches. “We want to interview you for a podcast.” Whatever it may be, when he can send them a link that allows them to see the days he’s available and it syncs up beautifully with his calendar, it makes everybody's life faster, and more efficient, and more seamless. There isn't the back and forth of, “Well, what about next Tuesday at three?” “Oh, I can't do that.” “What about Thursday at nine?” “Nope, I can't do that.” “What about the following Tuesday?” And it makes things work better, so he’s a big fan of Calendly.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Joey

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Joey jokingly stated that this is a completely unfair question only because he loves reading books. He tries to read a book a week, there are so many wonderful, wonderful books out in the world that he absolutely loves. So, he’ll give an example of a book that is in the customer experience space, because he knows a lot of listeners spend most of their time in the CX space. And then he'll give one that's in the employee experience space since that's what they've been talking about. 

So, in terms of the customer experience, he absolutely loved the book Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates by Brittany Hodak. An amazing book, it's been out not even a year yet, it came out earlier this year in January of 2023. Fantastic book, incredibly well written, Brittney Hodak is very much an emerging but also a well-established voice in the CX space. She's smart as a whip, she's got an amazing story. She's incredibly talented. If you're not paying attention to Brittney Hodak and if you haven't read her book, Creating Superfans, go check it out, you will not be disappointed. 

Now, on the employee experience side, he would look to the book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships by Michael Bungay Stanier. Now, what he loves about Michael's book is it helps us with very practical tools for creating better connection, and better relationships with the people we work with. It's a fast read, but it's a powerful read, how to work with almost anyone. 

Michael is smart as a whip, he's an amazing human being, he's been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. And he just has a really tactical, yet powerfully thoughtful premise in this book, that we need to be spending more time investing relationships we create with our colleagues and our co-workers and really diving into the relationship side instead of just, “Oh, well they work at the same place as I do. And so, we have to interact with each other.” He's about building the relationships. So, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone by Michael Bungay Stanier is absolutely fantastic.

  

What Joey is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Joey shared that there's so many. He’s an excitable guy, you probably pick up on that and anybody who's listening to the conversation. There's so many things he’s excited about, right now he would say the thing that he’s most focused on is getting the word out about this new book. He’s so excited about the response, the book debuted at number 5 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list. There is clearly a need for employee experience enhancement globally. And just the chance that he gets to speak at events, to do workshops for individual companies to help them get better at both engaging and retaining their people has him incredibly excited. 

They're delving into exploring creating some customized workbooks that folks will be able to avail themselves of and purchase that are going to really bring the ideas in the book. He likes to think the book stands alone by itself and that it gives you as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, it gives a high picture strategy, but it’s also tactical on the ground thing you can do.

One of the challenges of writing the book is that you can't fit everything you want into the book because otherwise the book would be 10,000 pages long. So, he’s excited to create more tactical tools that people can use on an almost weekly basis. Like what is the thing we're going to focus on making our employee experience better this week and give people those kinds of ideas and suggestions so that we can make it more fun to go to work. We can create more play, we can have more excitement with the things we do. 

Yeah, you mentioned something about Gary Vaynerchuk just now, but you chipped out for a bit. So, could you repeat that part for me, please?

Joey stated that he was going to say, Gary Vaynerchuk has this really interesting concept of dirt and clouds. This idea that we want things that are very tactical and practical that we can do down in the dirt, but we also want big picture strategy. We want things that are kind of in the clouds, kind of the 35,000 foot view and it's something that he really tried to create in the book, which is there is strategy in the book, but there are also really tactical things you can do.

One of the things he’s excited about is adding even more examples on the tactical side

available as workbooks and downloads and things like that that people can access to continue to work at enhancing their employee experiences on an ongoing basis.

  

Where Can Listeners Find Joey Online?

Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention – Hardcover – e-book – Audiobook

Website – www.joeycoleman.com

LinkedIn – Joey Coleman

             

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Joey Uses

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Joey stated that he doesn't necessarily have a quote that he comes to, but in those scenarios, he likes to try to get very clear on what the situation is they're dealing with. Let him explain that a little bit. He used to be a Criminal Defense Lawyer, and so his job used to be to keep the wrongfully accused out of prison. And if he misspoke, now he’s a full time professional speaker, but in those days, speaking in the courtroom, if he misspoke, someone went to prison. And that usually meant they went to prison for a long time.

So, whenever he’s faced with a challenging situation, he asked himself two questions. Number one, “Did anyone die in this scenario we're dealing with? Is there a death that has happened?” And thankfully it's very rare that he would ever answer that question yes, usually no one has died.

The second question that he ask is, “Did anyone go to prison without the possibility of parole in the future?” Because if you go to prison without the possibility of parole, you've got a really big problem. If someone has died, you've got a really big problem. But if no one died and no one went to prison without the possibility for parole, you actually don't have that big of a problem. You've got a situation, you've got a circumstance, you've got something you maybe need to focus on or address. 

But he finds that that criteria of evaluating the situation allows him to keep some perspective on how much he should be getting worked up or frustrated or angry about a scenario. And instead say, “This could be a lot worse. This is a challenging time to move through. But the consequences aren't that terrible and irrevocable that we're not going to be okay on the other side.”

 

Me: I like it. I've asked this question to over 150 guests because we're approaching close to 200 episodes for this podcast. And it's amazing that most guests would give maybe a motivational quote, not necessarily ask themselves a question. So, it's interesting the perspective that you take because then you're able as you identified to really recognize is this really an issue that we need to be raising our blood pressure and losing our mind, or can we just adjust our approach and decide, okay, we're going to tackle it this way, these are steps we're going to take and this is how we're going to approach it. 

Joey stated that's definitely what he tries to do because he agrees with Yanique. There are very few things that we should be raising our blood pressure in a negative way. If your heart's beating faster because you're inspired, you're eager, you're in love, you're feeling those things, great. But if your heart rate is raising because of stress, because of worry, because of fear, he thinks there's an opportunity to approach the situation from a different perspective to kind of keep things a little more calm.

 

Me: Thank you so much for coming back on our podcast. I just want to express my greatest gratitude to you. And of course, congratulations again on your new book, Never Lose an Employee Again. I think it really will be a great complement to your original book, Never Lose a Customer Again. You brought up some excellent points, really practical stuff that employees and employers across different parts of the world in different industries can definitely think about, hope everyone that listens to this episode will go and grab a copy of your book as you mentioned in whatever version they like to listen to it in, whether it be audio or e-book or the physical book where they read. But it was really, really insightful. I love these types of conversations that get me excited, it doesn't even feel like I'm doing a podcast, it feels like I'm sitting down with a friend having a cup of coffee or a nice glass of lemonade and just having a great conversation. And these types of conversations really fulfil my soul, makes me feel good inside. So, I hope it was as fun for me as it was 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

 

Links

·  Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sales inot Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days by Joey Coleman

·  Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention by Joey Coleman

·  Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates by Brittany Hodak

·  How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships by Michael Bungay Stanier

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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Aug 15, 2023

Randy Mercer is an omnichannel product content expert with over 15 years of industry experience. He leads 1WorldSync’s global product management and solution architecture teams, aligning the company's portfolio with current customer needs and emerging market trends.

A frequent commentator for national and trade media outlets covering retail and e-commerce news, Randy leverages his extensive background in item and data content alignment, e-commerce application development and solution designed to guide 1WorldSync’s strategic product roadmap and vision. 

Questions

  Now, could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey? How it is that you got from where you're coming from, to where you are today?

  Could you tell our audience a little bit about 1WorldSync, what it is that your organisation does?

  What are some key things that if we had a listener, tapping into this podcast, who was in that similar space looking to strengthen the architecture of their user experience, whether it be the digital web, or even the face to face or even through the contact centre that you believe they should be focused on primarily at this time?

  What have been some maybe one or two emerging market trends that you've seen in the whole customer experience space, not just necessarily from a face to face interaction, but even digital?

  Could you share with our listeners based on your experience especially from a design perspective, what are some key things that you need to consider in order to ensure or at least to get as close to being consistent?

  Could you share with our listeners as well, what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

  Could you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently?

  Now, could you also share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

  Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed? It kind of helps to get you back on track.

 

Highlights

Randy’s Journey 

Me: Now, could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey? How it is that you got from where you're coming from, to where you are today?

  

Randy shared that he started out as an application developer about 20 years ago, and through that, doing some customer development for a few customers, he found himself developing applications for the space that he’s in today, which is product content and sharing and distribution of that content. And fast forward, about two decades, he’s now been with 1WorldSync for about 10 years, and had been leading the product organization for about the last 5 years or so of that.

 

What is 1WorldSync and What Your Company Does?

Me: Could you tell our audience a little bit about 1WorldSync, what it is that your organisation does?

 

Randy shared that they're a SaaS platform that sits predominantly in the retail space and they sit between large manufacturers, CPG manufacturers primarily, and large retail organizations, many of which you would know, and they allow those organizations to share master data and e-com content back and forth between the two organizations to power pretty much any channel.

 

Strengthening the Architecture of the User Experience Whether by Digital Web, Face-to-Face or Contact Centre

Me: So, you're in that digital space, I was reading something that Shep Hyken sent out recently about the different acronyms that you have now, you have EX, CX, WX, UX and he was kind of giving a breakdown in his newsletter as to the different user experiences that exist on what the acronyms represent. Just thinking about the different experiences that the customer has, based on your experience and your area, what I picked up from your bio was you focus a lot on the landscape and the architecture of the experience. What are some key things that if we had a listener, tapping into this podcast, who was in that similar space looking to strengthen the architecture of their user experience, whether it be the digital web, or even the face to face or even through the contact centre that you believe they should be focused on primarily at this time?

 

Randy stated that when they look at their customer base, and their target market, what they're primarily helping them with is to the consumer experience associated with e-com primarily. But they also extend that into the in store experience as well. So, they're often very focused on for them, that consistency between the in store experience and the e-com experience, in terms of the content that they're using to power all of that. So, a very consistent product representation across all of the channels to include the imagery, the search engine optimized copy, rich media, in the terms of videos - AR, VR, all of those things. 

But aside from all of that, when you think of just how all of that comes to be something that they help their customers with a lot is what they describe as orchestrating the content or the consumer experience. How do you get from creating content, managing it, distributing it into the marketplace, and then monitoring how it's selling for you. All the things that go into orchestrating those behaviours and those activities is just secondarily something that they help their customers with a lot.

 

Market Trends in the Customer Experience Space

Me: Now, in your space, your business and what you're doing. What have been some maybe one or two emerging market trends that you've seen in the whole customer experience space, not just necessarily from a face to face interaction, but even digital seeing that many customers, that's where they hang out, it's easier for them, the convenience is better, and it's less hassle for them.

  

Randy shared that the biggest thing that they recognize today is just the expectations of the consumer that’s shopping online, in terms of the types of information and the types of content that they're expecting to see when they're doing their shopping on any e-commerce site. Beyond that, he just mentioned the consistency related to that, what they know in the consumer surveys that they do is that consumers today are not just shopping on one site, they're often looking at items across a number of different digital properties before they finally make a buying decision. And they're looking for more and more content. 

So, one of the expectations that they see evolving is just this expectation of consistency across these digital channels, if they don't see that, it damages the trust they might have in the information they're seeing. If it's not the same, like which one of them is correct. And then sometimes they just move on to other products, and things like that. 

So, the other thing that they see evolving around the online consumer experience, is the fact that consumers don't like to read, they like to look at pictures. So, when they help their customers with the imagery that they use to depict their products, more and more, they're starting to create imagery that contains some of the verbiage that is actually in the SEO copy. But again, consumers don't often read that, they're just looking at the picture so annotated images becoming more and more frequent, hotspot images where they've got spots on the images, where you can click and pull up some specific details. 

And then hero imagery, where they take a front facing product image and they call out a few very key details about that product as a way of just informing the consumer without them having to read some of the text.

Me: Right, so you kind of have to find a way to make the information pop, making it less frustrating for them to try and dig through your website to try and find what they're looking for, but it's there.

 

Key Things to Consider in Order to Ensure Consistency

Me: You mentioned expectations and consistency and I quite agree with you as it relates to both. I find a lot of organizations, it's not that they don't deliver a great experience or maybe that's their intention is to give a great experience. But the challenge is that they don't do it consistently. Could you share with our listeners based on your experience especially from a design perspective, what are some key things that you need to consider in order to ensure or at least to get as close to ensuring because I know nothing in life is guaranteed, to get closer to being consistent?

  

Randy stated that it is just attention to detail. So, within their platform that allows the manufacturers to manage and prepare their data to be sharing that with the marketplace, they just provide a lot of tools that help them with the finer points of the content. A really good example of that is, a significant percentage of their customers are in the food CPG space, so selling food products into retail channel. And today in the area of transparency and an intense interest in nutritionals, allergens, those kinds of things is related to food, the key to all of that is the nutrition fact panel that you often see represented on the back of food packaging, being represented digitally online, if that is not absolutely consistent with the package itself and then maybe other digital representations of that, you're very quickly going to damage the consumers trust in that particular product is related to what they're putting in their body or feeding to their family. 

So, they provide a lot of things, a lot of tools to help ensure that consistency all the way down to the point that they'll assemble that information on behalf of the brand, driven by imagery of the packaging and they use OCR, so optical scanning and some AI to digitize that information. So, just an example, that's just a really key one in their space. 

Beyond that, just always goes back to the imagery, that's the first thing that consumers are looking at when they look at a product online on any digital channel is that imagery. So, the degree to which you can distribute that all from one point of origination, which in for their customers oftentimes is their platform, the better chance you stand of having it consistent across the digital channels that you're trying to sell that product on.

 

Me: And of course the consistency leads to trust because if you're consistent then you become a brand that they trust and if the trust factor is there, then they're more likely to continue purchasing from you. You also mentioned at the beginning, the expectations and I find a lot of times that there is a big disconnect between what is advertised and marketed, and of course, that's what sets up the expectations of the client. And then what the client actually receives, what has been your experience in trying to ensure that there is as close an alignment as possible between customer expectations and what is actually communicated by the brand?

 

Randy stated that that is a really good question. And it's something that they talk about a lot on the retailer or the e-tail side. They talked to those customers about making sure they're not manufacturing returns, right. And you can manufacture return by doing exactly what you just described, misrepresenting the product online, somebody buys it, they think they're getting one thing, they get it, and it's not exactly what they thought they were buying, and so they return it. And then as the e-tailer, you're in a worse position than if you had not even sold the thing in the first place, because you're dealing with the expense of that return. 

So, again, when they work with their brands, relative to how they can provide the best content out into the marketplace to represent their products online, oftentimes, for some of them that they're encouraging them to just let them do it, ship the product to them, they'll take the imagery of the product, they'll drive the product information, and that way they know when it leaves their platform, out into whatever retailer or e-tailer is going to use that content, they're confident that it's absolutely representative of the product itself. 

That said, they never do that without the brand sign off on it, right, they give them the chance to say, “Yep, that accurately represents my product.” But as opposed to just letting the brand provide some content that they don't really have visibility for the origination of that. It's just easier often if they just do it on behalf of the brand, to just makes sure it's absolutely representative of the product.

 

App, Website or Tool that Randy Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Randy stated that they use a lot of tools that provide digital read only representations of product data that they assemble from a lot of different sources. And often they're using AI to do that to draw up a number of sources within their applications, create that representation as a way to visually represent the items that will be in in ecom. So, in their case, they use an application within their enterprise called Digital Catalog and it's literally what it says. And that's just the primary mechanism they have to cross check, what is the product going to look like when you actually do publish it online across any channel? So, that's a key one right there.

  

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Randy

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Randy shared that he tends to read a lot of books about product management. And so, most recently, can't remember the titles, but two of them are the most recent ones are just around the evolution of product Management. And how folks think about doing that today in ways different than they used to. And what he means by that is at one time, it was very driven around the expectations of specific customers and trying to drive your products based on maybe some expectations that may not be pervasive to your entire community. And today, we think about it a lot more from a pragmatic perspective. 

In fact, pragmatic marketing is one of those areas of materials that they leverage in their product management practice. And the net of all of that is, think very pragmatically about the solutions that you're developing or the products that you're managing, in a way that the solutions you're providing are pervasive to your customer community is something that they're willing to pay for because you're solving a valuable problem for them. So, he thinks pragmatic marketing is probably one of the most recent things that he can refer to.

 

What Randy is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Randy shared that for him, in their organization specifically, they've acquired a few technology platforms over the last to 2 or 3 years, that the fun part of that is not only having access to some additional technology to add to your solution portfolio, but just the opportunity that you have to work with just brand new sets of people that come along with whatever platform you might acquire. 

And what they always find is, in addition to the value of the technology itself, it's the value of the people that comes along with it, right. So, just new skill sets, new personalities, new energy. So, for him, he’s literally on the road right now just visiting one of their recently acquired organizations. And it's just very exciting to him to just have that new experience and bring new people into the organization. And you get a lot of new perspectives and so for him, that's top of mind.

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Randy Uses 

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Randy stated yes, he just used it earlier today. And it might sound kind of negative when I says it but he always say, “Don't come with problems, come with solutions.” And it's just so often that folks want to expose or draw attention to an issue without much forethought to what you can do about it and just the approach that he just tries to encourage is, if you see an issue or some friction within either the organization or maybe something that you're trying to do, think through it first, how can you solve that problem and then that's what you bring forward. And that's what you shed light on, versus just the issue itself. 

So, he always tend to draw back on that, even with himself because the knee jerk reaction is to just moan and groan about something that isn't working quite the way you want it to. And he just has to remind himself, think about it first and find the solution and then that makes the rest of it much easier to deal with.

 

Me: Thank you so much for coming on our podcast today and sharing all of these great insights as it relates to your organization and your expertise. And also some of the things that organizations can consider as it relates to consistency and expectations when they're trying to design a landscape for customers across the different channels that they're serving them to ensure that they have a delightful and a fantastic experience. I'm sure our listeners gained great insights from the information you shared with us today. Thank you so much.

 

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

  

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

Aug 8, 2023

Peter Mullen brings more than two decades of marketing leadership to his role as Interactions’ CMO. Previously, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing at Payactiv, where he led customer success marketing, lead-gen programming, customer acquisition, product marketing and more. 

Prior, he held prominent marketing and communications roles at VXI Global Solutions, Comcast and Netflix.

 

Questions

  We always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about your journey, how it is that you got to where you are today.

  So, you are currently the CMO of Conversational AI at Interactions, correct?

Seeing that you work at an organisation that you're dealing with troubleshooting of customers challenges on a daily basis, could you share with us maybe one or two success stories that you've had with clients? And you know what the impact has been for their business as a result of your approach and methodology?

  How do you maintain the human touch even though you're using AI and how impactful has that been for your clients?

  What would be two to three things that you would recommend that they need to focus on for the latter part of 2023, preparing for 2024, in order to ensure that they stay relevant, and they're able to hopefully do a better job than their competition?

  Could you also share with our listeners what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

  Could you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but still has had a great impact on you.

  Could you also share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

  Where can listeners find you online?

Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests in times of adversity or challenge, do you have a quote that you would use or revert back to, to kind of help you to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed or you felt demotivated or you just got off the course of what you were doing? Do you have one of those?

 

Highlights

Peter’s Journey

Peter shared that he lives in Silicon Valley. He’s been doing marketing for more than 20 years, which means he had the opportunity to arrive in Silicon Valley just as the internet was becoming massively adopted across the world and began to change everything. His background is as a journalist, and more on the liberal arts side of things. So, for him, his journey was one of spending several years moving into the tech world, and really focusing on narratives, how do we tell the stories about the great things that we're building?

How do we make it understandable, digestible?

And ultimately, what type of impact can we bring to people in many cases who are seeing things for the first time?

And Netflix was a defining moment where they reinvented how the world gains its entertainment, with all the beautiful personalization and customization. 

Throughout the career, his journey has been sitting in that intersection of new ideas, new technology, making it explainable to people, and how the CX element has come in in the last decade is really simple. 

What he discovered was that we could build the greatest things in the world, we could communicate in the best way. But if it was not embraced by CX, if CX was not leading how we presented that to the rest of the world, we would stall. So, for the past decade, his focus has been in the CX world, working in all elements from BPO’s, from contact centres, and right now with a wonderful technology company that helps provide better digital experiences for customers around the world.

  

What is Interactions?

Me: So, you are currently the CMO of Conversational AI at Interactions, correct?

 

Peter confirmed, correct. It's a really simple explanation of who they are and what they do. They are the digital front door for the brands around the world that care the most about that first front door experience. They lead with voice and what that means is that when millions of people call into any of these brands, they start their conversations with, “How may I help you today?”

They have AI, plus human in the loop, it's unique, they're the only ones who do that. And it enables the customers to speak in their natural language, ask natural questions and all of their technology processes that really efficiently. The outcome and what that means for millions of call centre agents and businesses alike, is that they have customers that are more satisfied, they're having better experiences without the friction and when they ultimately have to talk to an agent in a human experience when that's necessary, they are further along the customer journey and it's a quicker resolution, so that adds to operational efficient in a significant way.

 

What Has Been the Impact for a Business as a Result of Your Approach and Methodology?

Me: So, seeing that you work at an organization that you're dealing with troubleshooting of customers challenges on a daily basis, could you share with us maybe one or two success stories that you've had with clients? And what the impact has been for their business as a result of your approach and methodology?

 

Peter stated that it's a great question, he’ll give two answers of examples. So, they work with one of the top five financial institutions in America, and a customer of that financial institution will call in with a lost credit card, they're able to process that fluidly and effectively without having to have a human agent engage on that. 

And in this sequence, this customer journey, they can actually with their digital technology and their AI cover over 40 different requests that the customer may have just on that simple one call in. They can do it all in one call, leading to an overall better customer experience. 

Another example, they work with one of the largest consumer technology companies in the world, they have outlets around the world, you can schedule an appointment at any one of them around the world, call up, talk to their automated assistant, reschedule it for any time, any date with different products that you want to come in and discuss and any different location in the world. Again, without ever having to talk to a human being that can be handled in mere minutes, with their solution, there's no hold time, no waiting in any way. And the processing is just effective and fluid for everybody.

 

Me: Wow, no wait time, goodness me. Sounds like we need your company here in Kingston, Jamaica.

 

Peter shared that they did a customer survey in the spring of US base consumers, what their biggest concerns and complaints were, this is no surprise, there are 77% of us who complain that wait times are the number one problem in customer service. If we could eliminate that one thing, let's even reduce it by half, the entire CX experience is transformational for the rest of the journey.

 

Maintaining the Human Touch While Using AI and How Impactful Has That Been for Clients

Me: Could you also share with us that as an organization, I know you mentioned that you're heavily into AI, but you're one of the few companies that also has a human touch that's integrated with the AI in your methodology and approach. How do you maintain the human touch even though you're using AI and how impactful has that been for your clients?

  

Peter stated that first, he will just acknowledge this remarkable moment in time in the second half of 2023. We are all trying to figure out what to do with generative AI, the world truly changed in November of 2022 last year, when open AI debuted and everyone could see how powerful it was and it's only scratching the surface. So, he’s had more than 100 customer conversations this year, he’s been to more than a dozen events, walking the floors, talking to everybody. And AI is the number one word being spoken in all of those corridors. 

Number two word, however, is human, and this is really important because as all as these businesses around the world and all these people around the world are trying to figure out what the New World Order is going to be. The aspect of having the human touch, the human empathy, the human brain is absolutely essential. 

And we all have to acknowledge that the greatest computer for the foreseeable future is going to be the human brain, it is today, it will be over the next coming years. Let's see where it is in the next decade. But for now, let's use that as our baseline. 

Now his company is a company that was one of the OG’s, the original gangsters of Conversational AI with an emphasis on the artificial part of it, the AI. They started 18 years ago, when they started 18 years ago, AI was not that good. So, from day one, they had put a human in the loop. What that means very functionally is if the technology cannot understand what the customer or the client is looking for, they've always had a human in the background ready to nudge the conversation forward. That agent he or she is not engaged in the whole conversation, but rather, will catch a snippet of the voice conversation or the text or the chat and be able to say, “Aha, this is what Yanique is trying to do, this is where she wants to go next in her journey flow.” 

And the agent will, as he said, nudge it forward. That's unique for what they do. So, they focus AI first, and about 90 plus percent of the time AI is all that's needed. But for that last 10,% it's essential that the human helps move it onward. And other companies today don't do it that way, other companies are typically starting with the human first and then augmenting AI on the back end for automation. Does that make sense?

  

Me: Right? So, basically, you're saying because the human comes in at the tail end of the experience, you're able to have the resolution done quicker. Because now it's moved up, it's escalated, especially if it's something that can't be fixed that first point of contact.

 

Peter stated that that's exactly right. If you think about the IVR, and the prompts that typically exist in many frontline solutions, the moment that we run into trouble, we get into a loop, or we can't move forward in a way we want, we start pressing zero, we start yelling for the agent, 33% of us swore at a robot last year, that just let you know just how peaked, he thinks that percentage is low, but it shows how peaked people are with their customer experience. And for what typically happens, as you know, as the first one or two engagements are okay, then it starts getting more complex, more layered, more nuanced, that's where a human can play this essential role of coming in and understanding what you want to do and then pushing it forward.

 

Recommendations Companies Need to Focus on to Ensure They Stay Relevant and Do a Better Job Than Their Competition

Me: Now, you mentioned that we're like halfway through 2023 and it's so true, a lot of us are looking to what's next, what's the next innovative, creative, exciting thing that my organization can do that would set me apart from my competition?

So, if you were to give advice to our listeners that are tapping into this episode that are in the customer experience space, what would be two to three things that you would recommend that they need to focus on for the latter part of 2023, preparing for 2024, in order to ensure that they stay relevant, and they're able to hopefully do a better job than their competition? 

Peter stated so first, he wants to use the word he used earlier, which is baseline. He thinks it's really important to have a baseline understanding of what AI is doing, and what it's going to be doing over the next several years. His perspective and opinion is that it is much more significant than even any of us understand that this is truly a game changer that is going to impact every aspect of the customer contact centre world, customer experience itself, that's his baseline. 

Now, on top of that, here's another trend that is not just for the rest of this year, but essential to understand how fast it has changed the world. Personalization, and customization is transformational. You and I have had all of our behaviours changed by that incredible computer that we hold in our hand, we expect instant resolution, we expect customed and tailored experiences, AI then offers the solution for that expectation. 

Over time in the next several years, we're going to be able to automate, we're going to be able to speed up resolutions or experiences. And we're going to be able to customize and personalize those experiences, these are essential to understand as macro themes. And they're secular, which means they are long standing, it's not just going be a blip on our radar. 

So, if he’s a young person in a contact centre, moving his way up, ambitious, he leans forward, he’s thinking about how rapidly this can potentially impact and change the ecosystem that he works in today. So, as an individual, he’s thinking to himself, how am I going to evolve and ride the wave in a way that will be beneficial for me, for my family, and for those around, there's tremendous opportunities. But it's absolutely essential to understand how big this is.  

If he’s a business, so, now moving up the food chain a bit, he needs to be thinking about how AI can bring operational efficiency, improvement in Op X - operational expenses, and how we can truly automate and streamline my overall operations. And if he’s that person, which many days he’s talking to those people by the way, he’s thinking to himself every day, how do I take the incredible human capital and the talent I have, and build solutions around them so that talent can be unlocked? 

You and I both know how much processing takes place, how much wrote automation occurs right now with human beings. Think about what it's going to mean as we can start to unlock all of that talent, because AI can put in the automation, freeing us up to do a lot more important and essential things which ultimately reinforces at that whole personalization opportunity back to the clients.

 

App, Website or Tool that Peter Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Peter stated that this will probably not surprise many people, he believes that Slack is absolutely a game changer for businesses today. So, the challenge that we have is that in the past three years, our worlds have turned upside down and we've gone hybrid, we've gone remote, we've gone back to the office, typically kicking and screaming in that case. It is a true challenge for business leaders to understand how do you effectively communicate with your teams in this new disrupted world. 

He'll give you one example. If you are a business that has veterans who have worked there for multiple years, they have a tonne of tribal knowledge, they also have positive relationships that they've formed over the years with each other, then you have now new people coming in who don't have any of those connections, they don't know where things even are. A tool like Slack has one beautiful element that he doesn't think is talked about enough. It enables you to process both business in real time, but it also enables you to process personality and more of the informality that used to take place in offices all the time, even a smiley face or a thumbs up is a different type of communication then you would have on email, you have on the phone. This type of connecting of the fabric is absolutely essential to be doing right now for business success.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Peter

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Peter shared that there's a book that is called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. He's a Stanford Professor and this came out about a decade ago, Hooked is a very friendly, easy to read, B to C book, describing how to capture the curiosity of people online, typically using apps. It's simply how you build their confidence, which leads to trust, trust leads to engagement, engagement leads to loyalty and sales. And the reason that he’s calling that out is because it is so darn simple. He keeps it on his bookshelf and reread it at least once a year simply to reinforce how important it is to build confidence and trust with a buyer no matter B2B, B2C, client, customer, anyone. Trust is the absolute currency of the next 20 years.

 

What Peter is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s excited about, Peter stated what a great question. So, he’s going to speak about people and team for a second. It's been a rough 18 months for many of us, it's been a rough 3 or 4 years for many of us. He’s really excited about how to think structurally about teams, think about this hybrid environment all of us are in and think about how to motivate groups of people to lift their heads above all of the different conflicting confusions and excitements and pressures that are hitting us to deliver good results. So, very specifically, he’s using this year to think about how on a one to one and a one to few and a one to many, he can help the teams and the people around him optimize their own success.

 

Me: And do you have some tools that you have in mind in getting that done? Are you kind of just still in the strategy phase?

 

Peter stated that he believes that there is a tremendous power in having slogans and using those slogans repeatedly to help build momentum, build a movement, almost like a sports team. So, this year in 2023, from a team approach, which is one of the things that's very important to him, he has 3 of them. 

One is a zero to one mentality. And what that means and what he share with the team is that there are massive things that they are trying to change but if they take a quote, unquote, one, zero to one mentality, what it means is that they constantly want to think about start-up and start-up innovation. Take small steps forward, look at everything you're doing as going from nothing to something. And what that does is it enables you to have small fast wins. It enables you to appreciate those wins. And when you have setbacks, and we all do, it puts those setbacks in a framework that says they're minor and the next day we can move forward, that’s zero to one. 

Second slogan is “Rungs on your ladder.” And he learned this by working at one of the top 20 largest BPO’s in the world. It's incredible to him to think about nearshore, onshore and offshore, millions of folks who are moving up every day with their careers. And so, we focus a lot on rungs on your ladder, what's the right thing for you, wherever you are in your career stage to take the next step up. And they're very explicit with that on his team, every person knows what the rung on the ladder is for their teammate. That type of transparency means that they are a team all working together. 

The third one, and the third slogan is lean forward, he has a very strong bias that people who are going to lean forward in their chair are going to be the ones who are going to move forward and be the most successful. But really importantly, because of those first two ideas, if he’s getting his team to lean forward, it's in a cooperative, supportive way and that radiates around and their teammates start leaning forward as well.

 

Where Can We Find Peter Online

LinkedIn – Peter Mullen

LinkedIn – Interactions

Website – www.interactions.com

             

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Peter Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tend to revert to, Peter stated that that is a surprise question that he will answer very authentically. He’s a cancer survivor. He has had setbacks at multiple times in his life in various ways and spaces. And he thinks many of us have, he thinks that there's a lot of hidden challenges but also triumphs that all of us have experienced. And so for him, a simple phrase that he often uses for himself is, “Always tomorrow.” And what that reflects and means for him is that no matter what setbacks we have, no matter what move forwards we have, there's always going to be the next day to do it again and do it a little better.

  

Me: Brilliant. Always tomorrow, I like it. Thank you so much, Peter, for taking time out of your very busy schedule and hopping on this podcast with us, sharing all these great insights as it relates to AI is wonderful, but the human touch is also very critical. I'm glad that you did reinforce that in your message and our conversation that the human element isn't going anywhere and it's still going to be the baseline of everything that we're doing, I think that was really critical to what you brought across. And also, some of the recommendations that you believe our listeners can focus on as we move towards closing off 2023 and tap into 2024, what are some of the areas that they need to really engage in. Whether from a as you mentioned, B2C approach, or B2B or even in just building your career. We really appreciate it and just want to say thank you so much.

  

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

 

Links

·  Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!
 

Aug 2, 2023

Eric Melchor is a mediocre tennis player, Texas, expat living in Romania and Partnerships & Evangelists for OptiMonk. With over 600 5-star review and powering more than 30,000 brands, our mission is to empower the average online business with Amazon-like personalization superpowers. How? 

By giving brands the power to use AI to create better headlines, product descriptions and run A/B tests to tailor the product page and shopping experience - on autopilot. Thus, saving you hundreds of manual hours while your conversions increase in the process.  

Questions

  Could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, we always like to hear from our guests in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today.

  You are the Partnerships & Evangelists for OptiMonk. Could you share with our listeners what is OptiMonk? And what does OptiMonk do?

  Could you share with us why you think it's important to integrate AI? Do you think it will make the process a little bit more seamless? Is it giving the customer more steps to take? What have been some of your experiences with your customers? What has their feedback been?

  What are some ways that the AI can help to personalise that experience, or the shopping experience for the customer?

  So, in terms of an online shopping experience, what are some key things that you think is critical when you're trying to design that journey for the customer. What would be, let's say three or four things that you would say to them that needs to be critically engineered into that process to ensure the customer has a great experience?

  Now, Eric, could you share with our listeners what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

  Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently.

  Can you share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

  Where can listeners find you online?

  Now, before we wrap our episodes up, could you share with us if you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason at all you get derailed.

Highlights

Eric’s Journey 

Me: So, Eric, could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, we always like to hear from our guests in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today.

 

Eric shared that prior to moving to Romania, about 3 years ago, he held director level marketing and CX customer experience positions for publicly traded companies in Houston, Texas. And he really loved what he was doing. And he got to manage large teams and large budgets, but then when he decided to move to Romania with his family, he wanted to start in a new industry, and so he got into tech and SAAS, and complete shifts of big corporate America, moving into the start-up world where he was working with companies that had maybe around a dozen employees and he was wearing multiple hats. 

So, completely different way of looking at marketing, and how you approach things from a customer experience perspective. So, he’s enjoyed it, it's been a fantastic journey so far. But he’s definitely a lot busier now than when he was working for the larger companies and he had bigger teams that can manage multiple things.

 

What is OptiMonk and What Your Company Does?

Me: So, your bio says that you are the Partnerships & Evangelists for OptiMonk. Could you share with our listeners what is OptiMonk? And what does OptiMonk do?

 

Eric shared that OptiMonk is like an all in one conversion optimization platform. So, anything that you need. Well, just to take a step back, they have over 30,000 brands that use the platform and many of the brands use them to increase their AOV, which is their Average Order Value, because there's some pretty neat things that you can do to make that very simple. And there's other things that you can do as well, like grow your email subscriber list and redo cart abandons. But increasing your AOV is something that a lot of brands use them for. 

Really excited that the past few months, they’ve been focused on AI and they've released a couple of features that allow sort of like a hands-off approach to doing conversion optimization. And so, they're really going that route after speaking with a lot of customers, it seems like the big hurdle to really trying to get the most out of conversion optimization is just time, time to learn how to use the platform, time to implement different campaigns. So, they're trying to automate this so that you don't really have to do much, and AI can do most of the work for you. 

But OptiMonk, again, they've been around for about 8 years. They're integrated with many different CRMs, and platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo, and Active Campaign and HubSpot, among many others. And check them out, they're on G2, and you can look at their ratings and reviews. They have over 600 5-star reviews on G2 and Shopify.

 

The Importance of AI – Will it Make the Process More Seamless?

Me: Now AI, that's a big thing that a lot of organizations are focused on now, especially with so many different options emerging, ChatGPT being probably the most recent in the last six to eight months. Could you share with us why you think it's important to integrate AI? Do you think it will make the process a little bit more seamless? Is it giving the customer more steps to take? What have been some of your experiences with your customers? What has their feedback been?

 

Eric stated that he thinks why they're implementing AI, first is because there's no human being that is smarter than a machine, than a computer, it's just not going to happen. He thinks even the greatest chess player in the world was beaten by the IBM supercomputer a few years ago and now pretty much any computer can beat any chess player in the world, it's just not going to happen, computers and AI are a lot smarter than then we humans. 

So, we're just trying to take advantage of that and there's certain things that you can do like A/B testing, like A/B testing headlines, landing pages or the homepage or product page. And then rather than having the user, the customer come up with different headlines to test, their feature will come up with headlines that you can test automatically. And it could run different experiments automatically and automatically pick the winner once one has been statistically significant, proven to be the winner. 

So, to answer your question, it's going to reduce the amount of time and the effort that is required to implement such conversion optimization campaigns. And then the second thing is that it's just a lot smarter than human beings, it's going to pick winners faster, and make those updates and changes on your website in real time faster than you could if you were doing it manually.

 

Ways that AI Can Help Personalize the Experience for the Customer

Me: Now, personalization is also so important. I feel even as a consumer, when I do business with organizations, I want to know that I'm not just another transaction, and they see me for who I am, what my personal interests, requests or needs are, and I'm not being compared or grouped into a set of people, because we're all different. What are some ways that the AI can help to personalize that experience, or the shopping experience for the customer?

 

Eric shared that they haven't started using AI for that specific use case. However, one of the things that their platform allows is being able to collect zero party data in a very easy and friendly way. So, for those who don't know, zero party data is basically data that you would get directly from the visitor that comes to your website and you can usually get that in the form of asking a question. 

So, here's a very simple use case, let's say you're shopping for Mother's Day, and Yanique, you go to a website, and you're looking for a gift for your mom, or maybe a godmother or maybe even a sister or something. And a simple question could appear that just says, “Hi, welcome to flowers.com. Are you shopping for yourself or for someone else?” 

Very simple question, and then based on your answer, let's say you choose shopping for somebody else, then a response can be, “Fantastic, let me take you to the part of the website that's most valuable for you and show you our most popular items, giftable items this season.” So, that's a very simple way of collecting zero party data. But once you have that, that information, that data, then you can basically change the experience in real time for that visitor. 

You're not really using any AI or anything, you're just basically doing different segmentation based on responses to the questions that you're answering. And that's what they recommend to a lot of their clients, a lot of clients who are able to collect more email subscribers, who are able to get a lot more repeat visitors, who are able to get a higher AOV, they're doing a lot of things, take into account collecting zero party data, in a very fun and engaging way. He likes to think of them as micro conversions. 

Another example could be a pure health and wellness website. And let's say you primarily sell three products. One is weight loss, one is to increase muscle mass and another one is to help you sleep better. 

Well, you can ask the person visiting, “Which of these three are you primarily interested in?” And then depending on their answer, let's say the person chose to increase muscle mass, then you could say, “Fantastic, here's our most popular blog posts that show you how to increase muscle mass. And by the way, here's our three most popular products for increasing muscle mass.” 

And so, that's done in the form of zero party data once again, another example. But it's done in such a way that it keeps the person engaged for much longer, spending time on your website much longer into conversions as a result, the conversions increase because of the zero party data that's being collected and the ability to change the journey in real time for that end user.

 

In Terms of Online Shopping Experience, Key Things that Needs to be Critically Engineered to Ensure the Customer Has a Great Experience

Me: Now what's interesting just listening to you speak just know, Eric, I was thinking about the whole journey of the customer, right? Because you're talking about how it is that they land on the page, what kind of experience do they have? What are some of the questions that you ask them in order to channel them down a particular road and that's kind of you orchestrating or engineering the journey you want them to have. So, in terms of an online shopping experience, what are some key things that you think is critical when you're trying to design that journey for the customer. If you had a client who came to you and they're looking to improve on their customer experience, improve on the journey that their customer is having through their online platforms, what would be, let's say three or four things that you would say to them that needs to be critically engineered into that process to ensure the customer has a great experience?

 

Eric stated that one example he would like to share is this brand called Obvi, have you ever heard of them Yanique? 

Me: I have not.

 

Eric stated that they competed in a heavily saturated market. They a protein powder and they've been around about 3 years. But here's the interesting thing about them, when they started out, they started out with a $10,000 investment, bootstrap investment. 

Three years later, they are a $3 Million Dollar brand and competing in a very saturated market among protein powders. What's so special is that when you see interviews of their CEO, Ronak Shah, he says they heavily focus on conversion optimization, particularly by the experience when somebody clicks on a Facebook Ad, that moment when they click on that ad, that's the moment that they are the most interested, and the most curious about a brand. Not two days later when they get the email in their inbox, not four days later when they get the SMS message. No, that time exactly when they click on that ad, that's when they're most curious and they want to learn more about the brand. 

So, what they did was, is that all the landing pages that they created, they just created one landing page. But what was different about each landing page or experience was that the headline mimicked what was on the Facebook Ads, so if they had a Facebook ad that talked about grow healthy hair faster, then the headline on the landing page, said something like, are you losing your hair and you want to regrow it or something like that, it aligned with the ad that was clicked on. 

Now, Obvi had a bunch of different value propositions, they had other ads that said something like the best tasting collagen protein, once that ad was clicked on, they went to the same landing page, but the website was able to recognize the Facebook ad because of the UTM parameters, he doesn't want to get too technical there. But because it recognized the ad, the headline on that landing page change to mimic what was the main copy on the Facebook Ad, even though it was the same landing page. 

So, they were able to do this very easily without having to create duplicate landing pages, something he used to do as a marketer back in the day. And they were able to scale Facebook ads, which is really unheard of the past couple of years because of the iOS 14 upgrades and updates and things like that. But they were able to do it very efficiently and scale that way through Facebook, because they're able to mimic the headline on the landing pages with their advertising campaigns on Facebook. 

So, that's one example he likes to share, something that all brands should be doing. Because when a person clicks on an ad, and they go to the page, the website, they want to make sure that what they clicked on is the thing that they're interested in and not some sort of bait and switch. Absolutely. So, he thinks that's one tactic. 

Another tactic is Average Order Value, he thinks that's something that every brand should really focus on, especially if you're seeing cost per requisitions anywhere around $20 to $20. If you're seeing a high cost per acquisition, then definitely you should have an average order value somewhere of at least $70, $80 plus. And within the platform, they make it super easy to be able to increase your AOV, you can do things very easily, like add shipping thresholds. So, depending on the value that's in the shopping cart, let's say you provide free shipping for orders that are more than $75 and somebody puts something in there that equals $50, then there could be a little message that appears in a horizontal bar on the website, like on every page, and it just says something like, spend $25 more and you get free shipping. And that's a very easy tactic that works for a lot of brands and they're able to utilize that and get increased their AOV that way. So, that's a second tactic. 

And then a third one he likes is around global visitors. So, the global visitors, he thinks Shopify released a study a few weeks ago, and the market was almost something outrageous. It was in a Billion Dollar market, it's going to continue to increase. And if you're a website that gets more than 20% of your visitors internationally, then you should be creating a personalized experience for those visitors. 

Here's one example. If he goes to a retailer in the US by the name of Woodhouse Clothing, and he’s based in Romania, and he goes to their website, there's a little message that will appear that says, “Hi, we ship to Romania, our prices include taxes, you can shop in your local currency, which is Romanian Leu. And our orders are free shipping if you spend more than like $200 Leu.” something like that. So, it's a very easy and a very fast way you given that international shopper assurance, and just kind of just made yourself more trustworthy by just letting them know, beforehand, before they even waste time looking around whether or not you shipped to them, just letting them know that hey, welcome we do ship to you and here's some of the other questions that you may be wondering around tax or the currency on our website. So, he thinks that's a pretty cool example.

 

App, Website or Tool that Eric Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

Eric shared that the one online tool that he uses a lot is Notion, and he’s starting to use it more and more. First of all, it's free, or at least the one that he uses. And he’s starting to use it as a CRM. He used to use Trello a lot as a project management tool. Are you familiar with Trello, Yanique? 

Me: I am, yes.

So, Eric used to be a big fan of Trello. And somebody pointed out that, “Hey, you can do everything you're doing in Notion, but it's actually more streamlined and easier to navigate.” And so, he believed him, because he does use Notion for other things, but he’s just not too familiar with it. And he sent him a free template to use and he’s been using it ever since. And it is more streamlined, it's just quicker, it can do everything that Trello can do but it's just faster to navigate, less clicks. You can see more things on one screen. And so, he’s becoming a bigger, bigger fan of Notion, he would say.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Eric

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Eric shared that one book that he read recently is called Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland. Have you ever heard of the agency called Ogilvy? 

Me: I think so, yes.

Eric shared that he's (Rory Sutherland) the vice Chairman of Ogilvy, really smart guy. He saw him speak live and he got his book and it's so fascinating, because the whole premise of the book is that there's a lot of answers to solutions that are unorthodox, they are a bit crazy. But we don't spend enough time trying to think of what those crazy solutions are because we've been programmed to think logically. And also, when you're in big companies, you can't show up to a meeting and like pitch this outrageous idea, because you're afraid of the repercussions and maybe being let go, right? So, you're always trying to think of what the logical solution is to problems. 

But he has a number of good examples, for example, nobody was banging on the door asking for an expensive, sexy looking vacuum, but look at Dyson. There are a lot of examples like that that he gives. And it's just a really interesting book and it's helping him to think in different ways rather than trying to think of like what's the most logical solution.

 

What Eric is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s excited about, Eric shared that the one thing right now, obviously, for OptiMonk, they have the AI functionality features that are coming down the road, pretty excited about that, not just for their customers, but also future people who want to try their platform. 

Personally, the other thing he’s pretty excited about is on the side, he is launching a new service for companies that are based here in Europe, where they're having a tough time that are trying to reach their audience, especially if they're tech companies. And the past 3 years he’s been building, you would say, an audience with the podcast that he hosts, and he interviews European start-up founders. And because of that, he's been able to grow his network among people in the start-up scene. 

So, the service is basically combining sponsorship opportunities with his podcast, his newsletter, and then also in person events. And so, every now and then he likes to host in person cocktail party/networking events, and people that attend, they really enjoy them. They say that are a lot of fun, he likes to have a lot of fun with them, he has icebreakers, he likes to make sure that everybody has a great time. And so, in that in person event, the sponsor will have a chance to have a live short one to one interview with him in front of everybody there. So, it's another great way if their audience is also tech entrepreneurs, and tech start-ups, then it's a great way that they can get their brand in front of a live audience. So, that's what he’s pretty excited about and he’s been focused on he would say the past couple of weeks.

 

Where Can We Find Eric Online

LinkedIn – Eric Melchor

Innovators Can Laugh Podcast

Me: So, I did remember reading a little bit about your podcast before when I was reading the bio, and I didn't get a chance to ask you about that. Could you share a little bit about your podcast? What it's about? Where does the podcast live? Is it available on most podcasts, if all platforms? And who are some of the insightful people you interview? Like I'm having this awesome interview with you now. 

Eric shared that his podcast, it is available on all the major platforms like Spotify and Apple. He likes to think of the show as the Tonight Show, but for entrepreneurial related podcast, it's like a coffee, a casual coffee, like chat with the start-up founder, but the audience feels like they're just hanging out with the host and the guests. He tries to make just very light-hearted and witty. They share the ups and downs of the start-up founders, entrepreneurial journey, but they also like to have some laughs during the conversation. And so, he would say pretty recently, if he recorded an episode, and if he really listened to it and didn't think it was that funny, then he’s just not airing it. So, that's how focused he is in trying for the show to live up to its name.  

Some of the guests that have been so funny, a recent one not too long ago was Valentin Radu, it was episode 99. And that one almost had him crying because his story was just so funny. And all the crazy things he did just to hustle when he was younger and make $1. But there's a lot that anybody can learn from him. But he's just a good storyteller too, and quite funny.

 

Me: So, that's the Innovators Can Laugh Podcast, just want to reiterate that to our listeners. Feel free to tap into that as a free resource that Eric has been gracious like myself, to have a podcast and share all of these great insights with you as our listeners. 

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Eric Uses 

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Eric shared that the one quote that he always reverts to is, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.” by Anais Nin And whenever he’s on frits about something or unsure about something, he always kind of revert to that quote. But that's his favourite quote. Have you ever heard that one before? 

 

Me: I’ve never heard it, but I like it. It kind of reminds me of some of Brene Brown’s quotes.

 

Me: Now, I just want to thank you again, Eric for taking time out of your very busy schedule. What time is it there in Romania?  

Eric shared that it’s 7:30 pm. 

Me: Yeah, so, you're here with us at night, you could be with your family having dinner, playing cards, doing something way more fun, I'm sure and talking to me about customer experience. But we are truly grateful that you took the time out of your busy schedule to hop on this podcast and have this conversation with us. And we really learnt a lot about AI and of course your organization OptiMonk and different ways that we can look for opportunities to personalize the experience for the customers as well as engineering the customer journey in such a way that it makes it seamless and frictionless and just a better experience that at the end of it, the customer would want to do business with that organization again. So, thank you for sharing that, I'm sure listeners gained a great amount of knowledge and value from our conversation.

 

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

  

Links

·  Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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Jul 25, 2023

Declan Ivory Intercom’s Vice President of Customer Support is an experienced senior leader with a passion for building and developing high-performing teams and applying digital technologies to support organizations through major business transformation.  

Prior to sharing his operational expertise and strong leadership to support the growth of Intercom’s customer support team, over the last 10 years, Declan has held senior support leadership roles with Amazon Web Services, Tableau Software and Google Cloud.  

Questions 

We always like to give our guests an opportunity to just share a little bit about themselves in their own words, how did you get to where you are today?

So, for those of our listeners that don't know what Intercom is, could you tell them what your company does?

So, AI, it's covers quite a bit of things. Could you tell our listeners maybe, I would say, two or three top areas that you think organisations need to focus on as it relates to AI? And maybe what are some of the skill sets?

Could you also share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very a long time ago or even one that you read recently.

Could you also share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed.

 

Highlights 

Declan’s Journey 

Delcan shared that that’s a good question. So, he originally studied engineering and graduated as an electronic engineer and went straight into the kind of technology industry. And he’s stayed in the tech industry for the last 35 years. But one thing he kind of realized very quickly, one component engineering background that gave him a strong problem-solving skill, and two any business only lives for customers. 

So, he’s always been obsessed by doing things for customers and making their life easier and delivering a better customer experience, that's kind of driven him from early on in his career. 

And the result of ended up in various kinds of customer support roles. And in particular, over the last 10 years, he’s been working with organizations who are growing very fast, building out a compelling customer support experience, trying to apply technology to how they're enhancing and improving the customer experience during the support journey. So, he has had the opportunity to really work in high growth environments. And how he landed in the current role, he was kind of a little bit disappointed that at the speed at which the customer service or customer support industry was really adopting technology and felt like there was a gap there. 

Some examples of businesses being very innovative, but it wasn't pervasive across the industry. And moving to an organization like Intercom, whose whole kind of raised data is about delivering customer support and having a compelling Customer Support Platform. It was an opportunity, one to work for an organization that was very innovative, and was really driving the technology capability within the customer service base. But also gave him the opportunity to use the things too that customers support are using as well, which meant that he could be a genuine voice to report back to the product team, and really implement a product roadmap, product direction, and really drive the level of transformation around how support is delivered using technology. And at the end of the day marrying technology and compelling human support to really drive a value-add experience for customers.

  

What is Intercom and What They Do?

Me: So, for those of our listeners that don't know what Intercom is, could you tell them what your company does?

 

Declan shared that Intercom is an Irish founded company, very much focused on delivering the next generation customer service platform, built for what they call an AI world. But very much recognising that combination of AI technology or automation, working in conjunction with human support that actually delivers the best customer experience possible. 

That’s kind of is the focus of Intercom, it is building and delivering has stated, the next generation customer service platform. It's got a very strong heritage from a technology and innovation point of view. 

For example, it was one of the first organisations to use messenger technology for allowing or enabling customer communications in support world, was very early in terms of adopting Chatbot, adopting AI ML to do kind of conversation analysis. And now is adopting kind of the latest generative AI capabilities well incorporating that into their platform.

 

Top Areas Organizations Need to Focus On as it Relates to AI

Me: So, AI, it's covers quite a bit of things. Could you tell our listeners maybe, I would say, two or three top areas that you think organizations need to focus on as it relates to AI? And maybe what are some of the skill sets because one of the things that they had mentioned when you were introduced to me was, organizations are taking on artificial intelligence, but they don't necessarily have the skill set to manage and integrate it fully with what they're offering to customers. So, could you share with us maybe some of the things that organizations need to look at before they even embrace that type of technology?

  

Declan shared that the first part of question, the three areas where he thinks AI can be applied, the first area is on customer engagement and really the advances that have happened in generative AI and technology like ChatGPT, etc. Now there's an opportunity for the AI interaction with a customer to actually feel a lot more genuine, authentic, more contextual, you're being able to leverage a level of reasoning within the technology that wasn't there before and a lot of chatbot technology. 

So, the first area where he thinks the current manifestation of AI can be delivered is in delivering a better customer experience in dealing with that technology and that technology being able to automate a particularly transactions or issues that are very easy to resolve, you're taking a lot of friction out of those particular simple transactions. And yet, then being able to handle the work, the more complex transactions to human support team that have all the context that the AI engagement has gone through, understand the customer situation. And it's basically a thing that handover to the human support funding. 

Secondary, for that human support team themselves with AI tools we can help that team to drive a lot of efficiency and to help them do their job and in a much better way. Even simple things when able to prompt, what they call Smart Reply is the trying to understand the customer problem and suggest possible solution for the support rep. So, that they can then make an informed decision on what's the best solution, applying their own subject matter expertise to the guidance that's been given by the AI co-pilot. And basically, you'll ultimately drive a better solution for the customer. 

There's even simple tooling that AI can provide, like summarizing a case or a conversation that customers had particularly important if you're doing 24/7 support, and you're handing over from one agent to another, you'll be able to have a tool to actually generate a summary of what has happened today, in a very kind of concise and factual way and use that as the handover mechanism. Again, just makes the life of the support team a lot easier.  

And the third area where AI can be applied is actually running a support operation. So, they can use a AI technology to really understand the nature of the work that's coming into you whether that cases or conversations being able to analyse those that scale and volume, and look at the trends that are appearing there and use that and to drive improvements, whether that's in the product, whether it's in your support processes, whether it's within the field that you have within your team, those operations inside, the third area where AI can be applied and really drive value. They're kind of the three areas where AI particularly as it is today can be applied and drive a lot of value. 

The second question you had, which was around what skills that are required. And that's a really interesting question, because there's lots of people are focusing on “Well, you take it all the transactions and your handling them in an automated way, does that mean that the job of the support rep is going away?” Absolutely not, like the job of the support rep is actually changing with AI, they're changing in a very positive way. 

One, you're taking out a lot of the easy transactions or the easy issues, which ultimately don't provide the billing work for support agents that you like the more complex issues where they can actually demonstrate their subject matter expertise, they can hone their skills, hone their problem-solving skills and effort, they're actually providing far more fulfilling work to support reps in that environment. 

From a yield point of view, problem solving skills are really important. Generally, if customers are coming through the support team is for the more complex issues. And generally, they're expecting a level of empathy, a level of understanding of them as a customer. So, you've got to have your support rep to can really understand the customer context, provide a personalized experience as a result of that. And that's kind of the traditional support role is changing, but new roles are emerging. 

Well, a very simple example, like he’s hired in what he calls a Conversation Designer in the last few months, because ultimately, if customers are interacting with automated technology, and then dealing with a human support person, you really want to make sure that it’s a seamless experienced. 

And you've got to constantly look at what is that customer experience, is it actually as seamless as it needs to be, is the handover almost seamless from a customer point of view, and you're taking full advantage of all the context that has been gained through the automated that was dealing with that the customer, the customer does not have to duplicate information, you'll actually feel like they're being heard from the very onset of their engagement with you as a support organization. 

But that has to be designed in, it doesn't happen by chance, like people kind of feel “Oh, I can turn on ChatGPT. Or I can turn on the AI technology and it just worked.” It worked to a fashion but if you really want to make it stand out for you as the business and really drive value for your customers, you got to be very thoughtful around that whole conversation flow. And you've got to understand that not everything can be automated. And you have to think about the human support piece as well. And it's really about AI augmenting and supplementing that human support piece. 

The roles like conversation designer, or a new role, prompt engineering, how can you educate your customers, like to interface with your AI technology in the best way to actually get the maximum value back in terms of getting their questions answered, etc. 

So, it's a really, really interesting space at the moment because it's evolving. No one has all the answers, there is the blueprint around exactly how this works. We're almost creating the runbook as we go along and adaptive technology and really understand what that mean from a customer experience point of view. What does it mean from a corporate point of view as well. So, from that point of view, new skills are required, the AI technology is only as good as the information and knowledge that it has access to, who generates that knowledge and information, our human support team, again, much more emphasis on our team developing knowledge articles, developing knowledge artefacts that can be used by the AI. 

And that’s really important as well, like you've got to make sure that you've got a very strong problem solving mindset in your team, that they're really thinking about, “Okay, well customers had this issue come through to me the human support rep, how can I ensure that I can provide knowledge back into the ecosystem that makes sure if another customer has the problem, they're not going to come through another the automated.” That again, another skill set that the whole knowledge management, knowledge creation skill set is really important in support world. So, his own hypothesis is that support role is actually going to become far more valuable in this world of AI first and there are new skills, new capabilities required. So, it's going to be really, really interesting space for people from a career point of view.

  

Me: Very good. So, all of what you said a while ago, I even hear things like new careers coming up, new opportunities, the scope is so wide for persons who are emerging and trying to figure out what they want to do in life. I mean, when you think about where the world was 20 years ago, and some of the careers that exist today, I'm sure 20 years from now, there are careers that are, as you mentioned, just emerging that are going to become top areas that people would want to be pursuing in like we're in 2023 now, so 20 years from now will be 2043, what would be really existing by then?

  

Declan shares that absolutely, there's going to be a whole new set of skill sets required. And it evolve, like when technology has emerged at any stage over the last number of decades, people have been able to adapt technology and change the nature of the roles that they undertook. 

With that technology is complementing roles and augmenting roles as detect them with AI like complementing the human support experience for our customers and driving the ultimate value for customers. And that's a really exciting because it can be frustrating by the pace of adoption of technology, particularly with the customer support industry. He thinks by and large, we deal with customers the same way we dealt with them a decade or two decades ago. And now there's an opportunity to really transform how support is delivered and that for him is really, really exciting.

 

App, Website or Tool that Declan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Declan shared that he could be very flipping and say Intercom itself, you're probably looking for a different answer. So, while their team do use Intercom, they really love it, he kind of took that back and there are lots of kind of productivity tools he could mentioned, but he’s actually going to give one, it's probably maybe a little bit of a surprising answer. But LinkedIn for him is a really, really vital tool for a whole lot of reasons. Like in the support world, it's all about connections and networking and very often in LinkedIn, you get access to people who have new ideas, new opinions, they're sharing thought leadership particularly around AI and customer service, etc.  

So, it's been a really, really rich ground for getting information around.

What are people really considering as best practice?

What are they thinking in terms of some of the challenges that they're facing when they adopt AI? 

Getting those connections and getting access to some of the top leadership articles that are appearing in LinkedIn, for him at the moment, makes LinkedIn really compelling. It's also really useful for there are sometimes situations where you may really need to reach out to customers in a different way, so maybe not through your traditional channels, but you want to kind of have a different channel to talk to maybe someone in a customer’s organization that you deal with in an ongoing basis, LinkedIn is great just for getting those network set up and actually engaging customers in a different way. 

And then from a recruitment point of view, like understanding what talent is out there, who are looking for roles, what are people's experiences, who's a good match for maybe a new opportunity that you have? 

So, for him, when he took a step back, he thinks of where is your productivity, etc. And actually LinkedIn, the tool that he uses most on a day to day basis, the company and that's what he does in the role there.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Declan

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Declan shared that the first one is a book called Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. And this is really around the fact that you can drive improvements very incrementally. And he talks about improving 1% per day and how that accumulates over time. And it really gets you thinking about changing your habits, and making very small changes in how you are, but that ultimately delivering your very beneficial result, at the end of the day. 

The other book is a book called The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller. And this is around really allowing you to focus on what's the most important thing that you need to do right here, right now, not that you neglect everything else, but you make sure that you give the right priority to the thing that's going to have the most impact right here and right now. 

And then the final one book called The Creative Problem Solver: 12 Smart Tools to Solve Any Business Challenge by Ian Atkinson. And that gives a framework of 12 problem solving techniques that he found really useful to share with teams and get them thinking about how can they approach different problems in different ways. And that framework of 12 tools or 12 approaches ultimately, if you apply one or two of them to a particular problem, you will come up with some very creative solutions, very creative approaches to actually solving a particular problem. They are three books that he’s kind of consistently gone back to in his career, and he’s found them very impactful both for him and for teams that he’s been working with.

 

What Declan is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Declan shared that it goes back to the excitement that he talked about applying technology. So, at Intercom, they have built what they call an AI bot called Fin, that's the name. And he’s been really kind of excited by the fact that he’s been able to get early access technologies that they were the first beta customer for them. And that kind of thing that he’s working on is how can they apply Fin in the context of their own business, and really drive a different customer experience. And he's got all the team engaged in that, again, for adoption of any technology, you really got to get your team excited, motivated by it, you’ve got to allow them to influence how you introduce that technology. That's kind of the biggest thing that he’s working on at the moment, is allowing him to develop different perspectives around how you can apply this technology, getting his team involved, getting their insights around, what does it mean from a customer perspective? What does it mean from a teammate perspective, and really beginning to build out, what does a support operation of the future look like when you are in what they call an AI first or an AI led world.

And it's really interesting, because a lot of things will change around the metric that you use to measure your team, the scale that the team need, how you think about capacity planning, there's lots of different things that can lead into building an operation of the future in this world. 

And that, for him, is the thing that kind of energizing him the most and allowing him to learn the most as well. And equally for his team, like everyone in the team was really learning through this process and they're really being very thoughtful around how they can introduce this technology in the right way. So, deploying Fin for their own use case, and then to coordinate their customers who are using Fin, that's where his staff and the team are really focused. And he would say he actually don't think he’s been this energized in work for many decades.

 

Where Can We Find Nathan Online

LinkedIn - decivory

      

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Declan Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Declan shared that he has a quote from Henry Ford. And the quote is, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” And he thinks that really captured the benefit and the essence of the failure, everyone fails and he thinks people need to be comfortable with failure, once you're learning from it and in Henry Ford words, moving forward in a more intelligent way on the back of that learning.

 

Me: Now Declan, I just want to extend our deepest appreciation and gratitude to you for taking time out of your very busy schedule, for hopping on our podcast and sharing some of your insights, sharing a little bit about what your organization does, about what artificial intelligence is bringing to different industries, what are some of the opportunities that exist not just from a development and customer experience perspective, but even in terms of new career opportunities and developments that can emerge out of this new phase that we're going into. It was really insightful, and I really thank you so much for joining us today for this interview.

 

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

 

Links

·  Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

·  The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller

·  The Creative Problem Solver: 12 Smart Tools to Solve Any Business Challenge by Ian Atkinson

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience Webinar – New Date

Register Here

Jul 4, 2023

Nathan Yeung is an experienced marketing strategist with over 10 plus years of expertise in advising B2B businesses. Throughout his career, Nathan has helped numerous companies build their marketing teams from scratch, delivering successful go-to-market deployments and launching new products into the market.  

Nathan's diverse background brings a unique perspective to the marketing world. Trained in marketing, he has also worked in finance and management consulting, providing him with a comprehensive understanding of business operations and strategy. Nathan's ability to think outside the box has helped his clients to stand out in their industries, and his expertise has been recognized by numerous organizations over the years. 

 

Questions 

Could you tell our audience a little bit about how you got to where you are today?

Could you share with our listeners kind of how you advise your clients to kind of close that gap and make it a more seamless and frictionless experience for the customer?

What are some things maybe three things that as a top marketer that you would advise your customers in terms of ensuring that they're able to keep their existing clientele, and of course, attract new customers and still maintain a quality experience?

Now let's say our audience, they're looking to build their marketing team from scratch, what are let's say three or four qualities that you believe your team in marketing needs to possess in order to be successful?

Could you share with our audience what's the one online resource tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Can you also share with us maybe one or two books that you've read, it could be a book that you read very recently or one you read a very long time ago, but it has had a very big impact on you.

Can you also share with our listeners, what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you got derailed, or you got off track, and this quote kind of just helps to get you back on track.

Highlights 

Nathan’s Journey

Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share a little bit about their journey in their own words. So, could you tell our audience a little bit about how you got to where you are today?

 

Nathan shared that it's a bit of a long journey. So, he originally went to school for entrepreneurship with a specialty in marketing. And afterwards, he actually ended up going into finance. So, it was a bit of a massive change. Managing conditions and kind of really making sure that the acquisition is transitioned, well, kind of synergies and managing sometimes moving the business model into completely different markets. And one of the things that I had fundamentally seen in almost every single one of his jobs and careers was how important marketing was, and also how he felt that he didn't feel like marketing was really getting as much attention as it really needed.  

And he often felt like a lot of the people who had the money or had the authority to make decisions really kind of didn't appreciate marketing. And he thinks that came from a couple of different perspectives. One, he doesn’t think they quite understood marketing. And two, he thinks just in the sense of the pool of practitioners, he thinks the pool of the practitioners are quite small. And so, he thinks there's a general under appreciation for marketing and that's kind of one of the things that drove him to it, obviously, being trained. And even while doing all these jobs, he was always doing kind of marketing things on the side. 

So, he’s always kind of enjoyed marketing, and kind of after his management consulting stint, he started Find Your Audience and really focusing on what he believes is what he calls it sustainable and practical marketing, and the very operational versus that of a typical creative shop.

  

Advise for a Seamless and Frictionless Experience for Customers

Me: So, can you share with our audience, based on your experience, you've been in this area for quite some time. And I do believe marketing is very much directly related to customer experience. One of my greatest pet peeves is organizations invest so much in getting the name out there, the brand out there, the image, the product and then when you actually have to interface with them, whether it be on the phone, or through their app, or through a website or face to face, what they've advertised in terms of what you're getting and what was in the marketing, there is a totally different disconnect, there's no correlation. So, could you share with our listeners kind of how you advise your clients to kind of close that gap and make it a more seamless and frictionless experience for the customer?

 

Nathan stated that that's a great point. And he always talks about customer experience, because you're absolutely right, it's incredibly jarring for a lot of customers to go into a funnel, be sold on some particular benefits, then obviously purchase that product, and really not have a great way to experience those benefits in a seamless way. Therefore, really making that experience quite negative or some say you want things frictionless, this very having a lot of friction. He tells a lot of clients that when you sell something, the customer experience is directly correlated, obviously with retention and kind of the attrition rate of your customers. And it's incredibly important for you to be as aligned as possible, but also as self-serving as possible to the customer in the sense of those benefits and making sure that they know how to experience those benefits, how are they going to get access to those benefits and how they can essentially get what they need to drive a successful outcome from that purchase from whatever that expectation is. And a lot of clients tend to overlook that because he thinks a lot of clients are very, very focused on just gaining that acquisition of a customer versus really making sure that they nurture that customer.

 

Me: Agreed. So, it's all about the acquisition and not necessarily about the experience.

 

Nathan shared that the experience is an afterthought. And especially with newer companies, that's very much the case, he thinks with more mature companies, you'll see that they focus a little bit more on customer success teams. And those customer success teams, and product managers have an actual focus on that customer onboarding process to make sure that experience is great.

 

Keeping Existing Clientele and Attract New Customers and Still Maintain a Quality Experience

Me: Now, let's say if you could give our listeners maybe three things, we're already halfway through 2023. And so, they're looking on ensuring that they can continue to sustain the business that they already have and they’re looking to acquire new customers, what are some things maybe three things that as a top marketer that you would advise your customers in terms of ensuring that they're able to keep their existing clientele, and of course, attract new customers and still maintain a quality experience?

 

Nathan shared that he thinks the number one thing is it sounds so simple, but he finds that a lot of clients don't even do this is really in HR, there are these pulse surveys, and these pulse surveys are really to get a pulse of your employees. He thinks very much when you have customers, there should be a pulse survey for your customers. Some companies obviously, do this by annual NPS surveys, Net Promoter Score surveys, for those that don't know what NPS means. But it is really just important to have a kind of a quarterly checkpoint with your customer and saying, “Hey, how are you doing, I really just wanted to call you today, is there anything that I can do differently?” 

And this needs to be very clear, you have to say differently, because you don't want to imply something negative or positive, you really actually just want to ask for their advice. And typically, if there's anything different, that means it's something that they probably want. So, he thinks really leading into that conversation with is anything that we can do differently is really, really important. And he thinks that's a great way just to maintain relationships with your current clients, but two, to constantly get a great level of feedback on your current business, to ensure that you're always keeping up that level of service or level quality that hopefully, you desire to have. 

The second thing is you have to just respect that everyone is busy. That also means everyone's quite lazy. And he doesn't mean that in a negative way, he just means that in a kind of general human sense that humans tend to have a lazy factor to them, and you have to really handhold them through any activity. So, when you're doing these surveys, when you're doing these things, just know that it is not a priority for them. And that you have to be incredibly patient, and making sure that whether this is the survey you're asking them to do, or it's the onboarding process, don't assume that they actually know what they're doing. And be mindful to actually build out anything to help them understand what they need to do in order to get that outcome again. 

And so, if it's that survey, make sure that that survey is incredibly easy to do. If it's a customer form, make sure that customer form has a loom video talking about how to answer the questions. If it's an NPS score, again, also send them another loom video just showing what an NPS score looks like because they also maybe don't want to go into a huge form, or survey and waste their time. So again, kind of have this humility in the sense that every one of your customers has a lot of things to do, they're naturally lazy, that the best way you can get their attention is by making sure that you do everything you can to make sure that that expected journey is visible, and they know exactly what they're getting into.

 

Qualities for Building a Marketing Team

Me: Brilliant. Those are really, really good points. Thanks for sharing, Nathan. Now let's say our audience wanted to build out their own marketing team. They're looking to build their marketing team from scratch, what are let's say three or four qualities that you believe your team in marketing needs to possess in order to be successful?

 

Nathan stated that that is an incredibly difficult question. For anyone that's listening, he’s going to preface this that marketing is incredibly complex right now. And they're a firm that firmly believes that they do not prescribe solutions. And why this is really important to those three or four qualities that Yanique is mentioning, is because those three-four qualities really are dependent on your organization. And he knows that's not a great answer, because he’s sure you guys want a simple solution. So, he'll try to make it simple, but he'll still preface that it is really going to be dependent on your situation. 

So, one of the number one things that he thinks is difficult for a lot of businesses is content generation. And so, he feels like if you were to be forced into decision where you have to hire someone, or you're really looking for someone to come in the organisation, find someone who actually has a lot of experience in content generation, and that can mean a lot of things. So, content generation could be social, content generation could be producing videos on Tiktok or reels on Instagram. Content generation could also mean the written form of content such as search engine optimization, and creating authority articles, authority blogs and things that really speak about your industry. He thinks that's one core skill set that no matter the company, you're going to get value from that

The other thing that he thinks is really important is to find someone that maybe has some experience on brand. So, if you're a B2C company, you're really going to want someone who has a creative background with a bit of art direction, because when your B2C, creative plays a massive role and you standing out in the market. 

Now, he will then take that back, that statement, saying that if you're in B2B, while he does think having a creative background is incredibly important, probably what's even more important than that in a B2B business is someone that's a product marketer. And so, a product marketer is really going to be that person that's going to help translate your services, solutions, packages, products into real tangible materials that are going to be benefit leading and can be brought to the market. So, they're the ones that are going to really create all the assets required for you to be successful in selling your product into that market and they're really hyper focused at doing that. They're also hyper focused on getting customer feedback, and making sure that that feedback loop is actively going into your marketing materials, and addressing any of those pain points and friction points that your customers are having. 

So, it’s a long-winded answer so he'll make it simple. Again, content, if you just want to be general, find someone with great content experience, that's going to pay you some dividends. And if you're a little bit more of a complex business, he would recommend first prioritising what you're doing, then kind of finding an individual who has those qualities.

  

Me: Okay, so your answer kind of piqued my interest a little. And I'd like to dig a little bit further as it relates to content generation. So, let's say I have somebody internally in the organization already who has some shown a little bit of potential as it relates to marketing. They don't have a lot of experience in content generation, but I see potential for them to be able to be strong in that area. Are there certain things that someone can do to become a better content generator?

 

Nathan shared that he thinks the best way for them to become the best content generator is really to focus on first, what form of content right. And the first question before you go down that route is you have to ask yourself is that form of content generation, the form that is going to be the most influential for your business. So, for a lot of people, they've jumped on the bandwagon of like search engine optimization, and search engine optimization in particular, businesses make sense, because the traffic numbers in the search numbers make sense.

 

If you're in a hyper focused niche type of product or service, you may not actually get a lot of benefit from doing SEO. So, you might be more interested in doing like videos, or reels or a podcast, for example. And so really, it's first, let's focus on what asset do we actually need to create content for and make sure that's first aligned. And if you think that person has the capabilities to do that particular type of content and asset, then let's go ahead and figure out what that looks like. 

Now, for them to get better at that, it would be simply it's doing research into what the market is looking for, right? The reality is, is that he hates to say this, because he thinks it's like an overplayed thing, you want to go viral, like that's the ideal thing. 

If you have a great article that goes viral, that's fantastic.

If you have a great reel that goes viral, that's fantastic.

If you have a great video on YouTube that goes viral, that's fantastic.

We're all looking for that virality.  

And so, the game plan for that content person is really, okay, so I'm good at this type of content, this type of asset for this type of channel, let's go find out what are people really interested in this space, and really just looking at those hashtags, looking at those influencers that are doing well and trying to identify trends in what they're doing, and creating a small framework to create that content. 

There is no perfect former all for virality, there is to a certain extent, if you want to do really outlandish thing, like give out a million dollars to people randomly on the street, that's easy, but no one has that kind of money all the time. 

So, he thinks having that person just do that research in the specific channel and understanding their market and then trying to copy that and he knows that sounds terrible, but they have to learn, so he would suggest just copying that content.  

And then more importantly, he thinks the number one thing is getting efficient at content generation. He thinks content generation itself is easy, being incredibly efficient is actually the hard part.  

So, can that person learn to create 12 to 15 pieces of assets in an hour? And if they can, that's amazing, that's fantastic, that's incredibly valuable. You don't want this person creating one piece of content a day, that's not going to be effective for any business. 

So, one, figure out, does whatever the content match your market. Two, have them research whether or not you can actually create content efficiently and effectively for that market. And then three, optimize the living crap out of that operational process so that that person can produce as much content as possible.

 

App, Website or Tool that Nathan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Nathan shared that everyone's going to hate this but he’s going to say ChatGPT. So, he’s going to say that, he’s going to stop there, because everyone's going to roll their eyes and say, “Good, great.” So, ChatGPT, obviously, please use it. 

Now, he'll actually provide a much better source. I have Sunday Product Hunt Days. And people go well, what does that mean? It means every Sunday, he goes to www.producthunt.com and he looks at the latest listings. And the reason he looks at those latest listings is because these are all bootstrapped entrepreneurs creating mini SAAS products, solving mini problems. And it's a great way one, for you to find new SAAS products that could obviously benefit your business. 

But two, it's also kind of an indication of the pain points in the market. Generally speaking, these entrepreneurs who are bootstrapped, who are producing these things are actually solving a pain point. There's another question of whether or not that pain point is large enough for it to be a lucrative business. But regardless, it's a pain point. So, going on product on every Sunday, reviewing the latest releases for the week, it's kind of a great way for you to get a feel of the market, but two, it's also a great way for you to find new SAAS tools that no one knows about that you can use to benefit your organisation.

 

Me: Okay, I've never heard of that strategy before. And I'm sure our listeners will be impacted in a positive way from that strategy, because I'm definitely going to try this Sunday for sure.

 

Nathan stated that it's lovely, you learn not only is it a bit of like a new centre, too, because a lot of these bootstrap entrepreneurs are using the latest API's, the latest generative AI things, the latest language models. And so, you'll end up learning just from reading the descriptions what they're doing, that will also keep you up to date with kind of the latest and greatest things too.

  

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Nathan

When asked about books that have had a big impact, Nathan shared that one of the his favourite books by far has been Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) by Verne Harnish. Scaling Up is really a beautiful book on how to scale your business. And for any of those listeners right now that are thinking about scaling up your business, he recommends it, like absolutely hands down. If you're looking to build your business, look and read at Scaling Up, the book fundamentally just changed how much he really thought about structure. And as much us entrepreneurs love the idea of having kind of a very flat and horizontal organization, the reality is that scale creates problems. 

And when you have scale, you have to have structure. And if you don't have structure, you really can't scale particular parts of your function because the reality is that there's just a certain point where you actually really need to have somewhat hyper focus doing only a portion of that operational process. 

So, that book really aligned his thinking on what is required to build and sustain a scalable business. And two, it just gave him a lot of frameworks to help build his own organization, they're at 25 employees, they grew from 14 employees in just like less than 6 to 7 months. And if you think that having more employees is going to be possible in a horizontal manner, he can say absolutely good on you. But you're going to have a lot of leaks. So, highly recommend that book, he’s read it multiple times, he’s shared it with his business friends. And so, he would recommend taking a look and lucky enough, you have a digital, you have audible, you have the paper book, you can get whatever version you want, it's got great exercises, and it's really going to broaden your perspective on thinking big.

 

What Nathan is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Nathan shared that what he’s really, really excited about right now is he’s a little bit of a like coder in the back end. And he loves creating small little apps for himself. For those listeners, it has never been easier for you to create small tools for yourself. And if you haven't learned to code at all, that's okay, it's not that difficult, it is certainly a time investment. But he would really recommend taking a look at some Python courses, and utilizing ChatGPT, or any other generative AI tool to help you generate code because it's never been easier for you to automate random things that are kind of important to you.  

For example, he has a little script that kind of does product research for him. And so, what he does is, if he’s looking to buy maybe the latest camera, or the latest ring light, or the latest headphones or earbuds, he simply has ChatGPT just kind of go out into the internet and produce him a summary. So, think about it as on the call Coles notes for literally everything you want in life, you want to know the best baby bottle, it'll do the research for you, you want to know the best soda stream, it'll do the research for you. 

And you can really do this for any part of your life, and you can do it now in a fraction of the time. So, he thinks that's the one really fun thing is actually creating these mini apps for himself, and getting a bit more proficient at that because it really is a time saving activity.

 

Where Can We Find Nathan Online

Website – www.findyouraudience.online

Instagram - @fya.marketingbytes

LinkedIn – Nathan Yeung

           

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 he has so many quotes. One of the most recent ones, and he learned this from one of his clients who had faced an unfortunate event, he's a very, very smart man, he mentioned that his wife was going through something quite ill and he had no control over it. And he was very upset, and he dealt with that for many years. 

And one of the things that is really important is, “You can't control outcome, you can only control process.” So, this idea of going into conversations with this negative feeling, this negative energies is really not required, you can only control what you're doing towards that conversation, you can't actually control the outcome of that conversation, you'd like to think you can, but you can't. 

And so, letting go of that control, which is honestly a very much like an ego thing, it's almost, someone could say ego death is just realizing you can't control, can't control everything in the world and letting go of control is definitely one thing that he’s certainly still learning but it's something that he has to kind of really lean into in tough times in the business. 

The second one that he has also from the same dinner that he heard was, “The grass is greener only where you water it.” And so, there's a long folktale behind that. And you guys can probably find that online. But it's very much on the standpoint that we always like to think the grass is greener, but the reality is, is the grass is only greener where you water it. So, the grass is greener and the folktale behind that has two meanings. One is obviously sometimes you forget to see the grass that you have watered. But two, he thinks in the more nuanced new age perspective is it is only going to be greener if you focus on it. So, he thinks both of those things are really important and he thinks that's important just for your day-to-day activities, but also for your business.

 

Me: So, we just want to say thank you. Thank you so much, Nathan for taking time out of your very busy schedule to hop on this podcast with us and have this awesome conversation about marketing and how it's connected to customer experience and why it's important for us to ensure that we're looking at the entire process, the journey of the experience, not just selling or marketing the product or service, but also ensuring that our customers have a seamless experience, a frictionless experience.

And of course, the qualities that you shared with us as it relates to ensuring that we have the right people on our marketing team, depending on our organization type. So, the conversation was great, the information was great and totally insightful. I know I gain a lot from it, and I'm sure our listeners will gain a lot from it when it is released. So, thank you so much.

 

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

Links

·  Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) by Verne Harnish

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience Webinar – New Date

Register Here

 

Jun 28, 2023

Rich Edwards is the CEO of Mindspan Systems, helping community financial institutions transform themselves with data driven strategies and technologies. Community banks and credit unions have incredibly strong connections with their local customers when they're in the branch, Rich's expertise is crafting customer experiences to strengthen these relationships outside the branches walls. 

After serving as a captain in the US Army, Rich went on to IBM spending over 20 years working with financial institutions on Wall Street and across the world. As the Product Management Lead overseeing the launch of the IBM Watson Developer Cloud, he helped financial service firms leverage market leading analytics, AI, and machine learning approaches, which is so relevant in this time that we're operating in.

 

Questions

In your own words, could you tell us a little bit about their journey, how did you get to where you are today?

And since you're an expert in the finance sector, could you give us maybe two to three, I would say maybe points or influences that organisations would be looking into in terms of ensuring that they are listening to their customers, they are adding value to their customers experiences.

If you could share with our listeners maybe one piece of advice that you'd give them, we're basically halfway through the year. But let's say you were to give them one piece of advice where data is concerned in their businesses, what would that piece of advice be to kind of propel them in the direction of what you believe is the best way to go?

Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

What's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Highlights

Rich’s Journey

Me: We always like to give our guests an opportunity to share a little bit about their journey. I know we read your bio, and it kind of gives us a summary of who you are, but in your own words, could you tell us how did you get to where you are today? 

 

Rich shared that it's a rather unlikely past. Like you said, he started off his career in military and this was in the 90s, so it was a completely different experience than it is today. And did a little short stint working in manufacturing, in communications, in the fibre optic cable industry. And then ended up at IBM and he was working in the software business in IBM and spent the 10-11 years on the enterprise side and worked an awful lot with large banks, financial institutions, the population side like Social Security Administration, several national banks, federal banks, exchanges, things like that, that had like hundreds of millions of entities to keep track of.

And around the end of 2013, he got approached to join a new business unit in IBM that eventually became IBM Watson, it was the artificial intelligence business unit. And up until that point, it had largely been around some ongoing knowledge management solutions that were tied to healthcare. And this is kind of what you saw a lot of the public facing material with commercials and interviews like that, was around some of the work that was being done in cancer research. 

And they were looking to build a new solution where their partners could build on top of the technology. So, instead of buying a ready-made solution from IBM, which was very much in the model of the traditional professional services solution or product, they wanted to give them a platform that they could build on top of. 

And this was a somewhat novel idea in 2013, there were some things that Google was doing, particularly along the lines of voice recognition that was kind of tied to their mobile play with the Android ecosystem, but nobody was really doing say natural language processing as a service, certainly not as a commercial offering at that point. And so, that's kind of what they built out, that's what they did and is very much at the cutting edge of what was being done at the time.

And it was a really, really interesting time to be involved in that. And once they kind of got through the initial offering part, which was really what his job there was, was to figure out how to make all the cogs work inside an organisation like IBM to bring a new product to market. It became about the customers and the customer facing side of it, and particularly beginning to explore all of the use cases that were out there and how they could apply what was becoming a much more accessible technology to a lot of places that really didn't have access to it before and certainly didn't have access to a lot of the technology that was sitting inside IBM and IBM Research. 

And him having had this background in financial services and banking, he kind of became like the banking guy, right, it made all the trips to a lot of the large financial institutions and government entities and in the public facing side. And so, that was that was really, really exciting to kind of be part of that. He ended up doing that for almost four years, built out a couple of different teams, they had a developer evangelism team, which was basically helping their customers build on top of the technology and that was a somewhat novel approach, for at least this part of the business for IBM. And so, it was a lot of like doing brand new things. So, that was really interesting and really exciting. 

And in 2018, he really thought there was a lot of potential around this and didn't really see how he was going to be able to exploit that or take it any further within IBM in the direction they wanted me to go. And so, he ended up leaving, and he bought Mindspan Systems. And the reason he bought Mindspan Systems was they had a very long background in hard data skills, data analytics, data manipulation, data warehousing, all of the things around how do you take control of an organization or help an organization take control of their data and get the most out of it.

And he really saw that this is where the future was going to be for a lot of organizations to be able to get ahead, meaning the technology around artificial intelligence, the technology around things like natural language processing, and kind of what you see today, with large language models like ChatGPT, etc. That layer of it is quickly becoming commoditized, it's not to say that it's not exciting, that there's not a lot there. But that's not where all the value is going to be, the value isn't going to be in the way in which you're able to configure in the UI of the date of everything, it's going to be in the data itself. 

So, the individual companies that are able to control and harness and leverage their data in a way utilizing technologies like parts like with metals and other things that are available out there, that's where the value is going to be. And so, it's having those data skills and the data capabilities in house to leverage your own data, your first party data, that's where he believes, we're beginning to see an awful lot of evidence of this, that's where a lot of the value is going to be for companies in how do they reach out to their customers.

 

Listening and Adding Value to Customer Experience

Me: So, that was really, really good, great insight on your journey and how you got to where you are today. I was really intrigued by you focusing on the fact that the data is what will drive how you have the conversations with your customers. And since you're an expert in the finance sector, could you give us maybe two to three, I would say maybe points or influences that organizations would be looking into in terms of ensuring that they are listening to their customers, they are adding value to their customers experiences, like what are customers in that space looking for now?

 

Rich shared that he'll give a couple of examples and talking about it from banking and financial services. But these trends are much broader than that, this isn't like an industry specific or only limited to those types of companies. 

There is a huge consumer preference for personalization, meaning people want to be treated like individuals, they want to be understood and valued by the companies and the brands that they do business with. When they begin to feel that, it's almost like a herding cattle situation, and that they're unable to get the service level that they believe they deserved or what they thought they were signing up for, that’s a good way to ruin customer satisfaction and ruin the value of a brand.

There certainly are aspects of where very highly leveraged, highly automated industrialized processes work. You look at like at Amazon for example, famously, there's no phone number for Amazon. You have a problem, you are never going to get somebody on the phone to help you resolve that. And by and large, it seems like, at least in the US, people have agreed that that's the deal that they have of customer service for the convenience and the price advantage of what they get. 

Now, in return, they get very good products, they sell this as a service, product recommendation, next best offer like they're very good at that, they are able to leverage the information they have about the individual consumers to continue to be relevant to them, they continue to be someone that they go, their go to. Well, that's one example of that. 

Now, he will say in the financial services space, particularly community banking, their business model looks a lot more like a retail organization than it does say, a Wall Street bank. And the reason for that is the long legacy is the local branch, the local experience of going in and working with a Teller or working with a local banker for your financial transaction, whether you're getting a mortgage, or dealing with your day to day checking, or bill pay situation or a car loan, you have this place that you can go to and go in and meet them and the experience of that for community banks, a lot of these institutions are over 100 years old and they have very carefully honed that experience. 

When you go into a bank or credit union like that, you're dealing with someone who works for a local organization, they are all the way up through management your neighbours, they understand where you live, what's going on in your community, what it's like to be in that experience to deal with the situations that you ran, or the opportunities that you have. That's why you see things like community financial institutions are way over indexed on business lines in commercial real estate, which is very much a local business, and participation in small business administration loans, because they're tied into that local community. 

They know things, they are much closer to their customers than large regional or national banks are. And they leverage that and that's their experience, where that seems to fall down for them is when you leave the branch, when you're not there in front of the Teller or not at the drive thru, and not at one of their ATMs, but you're dealing through the web or through a partner or through their app, that level of personalized services begins to fall off, it begins to be not as sharp and crisp as it is in branch. And that's where he believes there's a major opportunity for companies like this to improve both the customer experience but also their differentiation, their ability to stay relevant compared to much larger, much more well financed institutions.

Me: It's interesting you said that it falls off, the service is not the same, do you think it's because it lacks a human component? So, that personal touch that you get when you're in branch talking to a live human being is a completely different interaction if you're dealing with an application, or you're dealing with a website.  

Rich agreed, absolutely. And part of this is up until even through the Great Recession, he’s trying to remember, he doesn't have it off top his head, but even through about 2014-2015, a good chunk of community business was in person, it was foot traffic in the branch, it was certainly dropping off. But then you saw this big influx of investment dollars that went into financial technology or FinTech industry, and that started around 2018 and that slowly began to kind of erode their relevance, their position in the market. The two big ones there that come to mind are in the peer-to-peer payments segment, so Venmo and then later Cash App had this incredibly explosive growth where they just kind of stepped right in front of what would normally be a cash or transaction that might involve your bank into this completely separate thing that was mobile first, mobile only and began to see more and more relevance for companies like this to stand in place of at least a slice of what the services a traditional bank would provide.

And then COVID, and then everything fell over and it just accelerated everything nearby 5 to 7 years. So, they're in that position now, where this incredible experience that they're able to provide in person, they've lost that advantage, or at least from a percentage of time percentage of customers that they're able to get in front of, and the core providers for community banks that do their core banking, how to think like ERP for banking. 

For banks this size, there's only a handful of providers. In fact, he thinks the top 3 have about an 80%/85% market penetration. So, it's not quite a monopoly, but it's all with gobbly. And they are notorious for being very slow to offer new offerings to them. 

So, this need to say, well, we need to be able to translate this great in person experience that we have into our digital channels, they're hampered by that, they're not provided the tools there. And there's plenty of tools out in the market for, but most of them are geared towards more an online retailer or a brick and mortars retail that has an online channel, it's more geared towards a retail transaction, which is very different from banking. 

Different enough that you're either going to find a lot of these institutions, either just going without, and skipping it, or trying to contort themselves into a set of offerings and tools that really wasn't built for them, and is suboptimal, and they spend a lot of time trying to make it work and it really isn't. So, from a customer engagement standpoint, there really is a hole in the market for financial services particularly when it comes to that engagement level of customers, the customer facing their right.

 

Using Data to Propel Business

Me: If you could share with our listeners maybe one piece of advice that you'd give them, we're basically halfway through the year. But let's say you were to give them one piece of advice where data is concerned in their businesses, what would that piece of advice be to kind of propel them in the direction of what you believe is the best way to go? 

Rich shared that technology is great, it has benefited society immensely. But there's always a mistake to kind of engage with or buy or try out technology for technology's sake. And as a marketer or as an entrepreneur or somebody who's running a company, you always kind of have to take a first principles approach to it and think about, from a customer standpoint, what problem am I solving here? And how is technology going to help me do that better or do it in a more efficient manner? So, you always want to kind of put it through that lens, you need to be a little bit of a pragmatist when it comes to this.

We're sitting here now at the end of the second quarter of 2023, massive proliferation of the use of ChatGPT and things like it in a lot of different use cases. And a lot of them when you kind of dig deep into the layer of it, they kind of look like a hammer looking for a nail, that is really neat, it does some cool things, but it's not really in service of probably a persistent or an important problem, either for the company or for the customer.

And so, really being to layer that on there and use that as a lens for how do you evaluate this? How do I evaluate what I'm doing? That's an important consideration. 

On the data side, he will say, just in general, and it's especially true for regulated industries, like financial services and like healthcare in particular, but the data that you have about your customers, about your market, about how your industry works, the bigger the data that is not held by anybody else. Understand that that's becoming increasingly a valuable asset. That's going to be something that even if you don't have a clear use case today or clear path for how you can leverage data today, understand that that's only going to get more and more valuable, first party data, the data that you have about your business and your customers only gets more valuable, as things like the commoditization of artificial intelligence, and other aspects of it get broader and broader. 

Think of it this way, the market for writing a boring press release effectively the price for that has gone to zero. Doing anything that is generic or bland, or something that you can leverage in open-source database about or even the things that are available like ChatGPT. 

If ChatGPT can answer the question or develop it for you, it is now a commodity, everybody has that, it doesn't make you special, it will not help differentiate what you're doing, or how you present it to your customers, you may have to do it because everyone else is and it becomes a cost of doing business but it's not going to be a differentiator. But your data that you have when you can take something like that and layer on what you know, think of a really simple situation like, he can go to ChatGPT and can say, “Look, write me a Facebook headline for a display ad or women's purses that are vegan leather in red with gold accents on it.” It can give you like 10 or 12 versions.  

But your ability, say, as an ad agency to say like, yes, these 12 are options, but these 4 at the top are going to double your chance of conversions and reduce your costs of acquisitions by half, that's where all the value is. Your ability of knowing how you're going to leverage this and the impact that it’s going to have on your customers, that's where you're going to be able to get that advantage. And so, that whole idea of really understanding what you know and the level of which it's codified in your data that you can look at it and hold on to it, that's really going to be a point of differentiation and competitive advantage going forward. 

Me: Awesome, that was an excellent example.

 

App, Website or Tool that Rich Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Rich shared that really to do tracking and there's a lot of options there. He uses Mac for work, and he uses a programme called Things, which does that. But for a long time, he was on paper and it's not so much like having these long lists of to-do's and it's about personal productivity. It's more the idea and this comes from there's a book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, which is very much like the Bible on personal productivity, it goes into a lot of things. But the value isn't so much the forcing yourself to do things, it's when something comes up, you have a bulletproof way in which you capture it, and you don't have to think about it anymore. And it's that ability of not having all these things floating around in your head, distracting you from what's really important and what you need to focus on, that's really the value in it. 

So, that ability to not have to worry about particularly as an entrepreneur, the 20, 30, 40, 50 things that you're eventually going to have to deal with. But put all of your focus and your energy on that one really important thing that you're working on right now and know that you're working on the most important thing. He doesn't know that he could run his business without the ability to do that. 

 

What Rich is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something he’s really excited about, Rich shared that this tipping point in artificial intelligence, just based on his background, because he’s now been involved in it very much on the on the bleeding edge of it for 10 years to kind of really see it begin to tip over into the mainstream is pretty exciting. 

And one, it's obviously that to see the thing begin to pay off the way that it's been promising for quite some time, but also the way in which it's a lot more acceptable from a mainstream standpoint. The idea of incorporating machine learning or artificial intelligence into a business process is not as crazy idea as it was even 2 or 3 years ago, and everybody's looking to kind of do it now, even if only from a competitive parody standpoint.

And he thinks the biggest thing there and this is kind of his angle and his company, their reason for being is really around giving parody to smaller businesses, particularly more agile businesses that are willing to step out and take a risk on something like this. It is the ability to really enhance small businesses, sometimes start-ups, sometimes established small businesses. And like he said, where they focus with community financial institutions, it's the ability to kind of give them that competitiveness with what they’re for a long time, just the goliaths of their industry. And he thinks, particularly now in 2023, as we're looking at a potential economic slowdown, it's really the small business sector, and in particular job creation that comes out of it is the big leading indicator, and certainly, the determiner of how quickly an economy comes out of even a slowdown, let alone a full-blown recession.

So, the more that that's there to kind of help that along to speed it to reduce a lot of the friction from a patient at that level at the small business level, the better off we're going to be and the quicker we're going to be able to return to a real growth setting, a growth posture of company.

 

Where Can We Find Rich Online

Website – www.mindspaninc.com

LinkedIn - Rich Edwards

Twitter – Rich Edwards

         

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

Links

·  Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

 

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John Livesay, aka The Pitch Whisperer, is an incredible keynote speaker. His TEDx talk: “Be The Lifeguard of Your Own Life” has over 1,000,000 views and was featured in Larry King’s Show. He has an innate ability to motivate company's sales teams to turn mundane case studies into compelling case stories so they win more new business. From John's award-winning career at Conde Nast, he shares the lessons he learned.

Best-selling author and creator of the online course “Revenue Rockstar Mastery.” He hosts his own Podcast “The Successful Pitch” heard in over 60 countries. John has a new book, The Sale Is in the Tale, is a business fable set in Austin, Texas, and he's about a sales representative whose old ways of selling are not working anymore.  

Questions 

Now, John, could you share with us in your own words a little bit about your journey? How would you say that you got to where you are today?

What are the three techniques that you teach, or that you promote, believe in that will help sales representatives or sales professionals to be more customer oriented and be able to really drive the sale home?

Now, as a Revenue Rockstar Master, because you have this online course Revenue Rockstar Mastery, what are some things that you teach in this course to help people to master their revenue?

You have a new book out, it's called The Sale is in the Tale. Can you tell our audience a little bit about that book?

Could you also share with our listeners what is the one tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

Now, could you also share with us maybe one or two books that you've read recently, or even a book that you've read a very long time ago, but it has had a big impact on you?

Now, there's a lot more AI opportunities like platforms such as ChatGPT and Open AI. Are these tools that you believe for organisations, regardless of the industry, that these AI opportunities that are existing can help to propel sales in the business? Do you think it will probably even replace at some point the human interaction and storytelling?

What are three skills that you believe a sales professional needs in order to be successful?

Now, can you share with us as well what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Do you have maybe one or two tips that you would give to our listeners as it relates to sales and customer service, just some golden nuggets based on your experience and all of the different things that you've garnered over the years?

Where can listeners find you online?

Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or something happens, and you need to just use that quote to get refocused and just jump back on.

Highlights 

John’s Journey

John shared that he felt that he’s always been motivated by connecting with people emotionally and that's where storytelling really comes in. He had a background working for an ad agency, creating commercials for movies when they were coming out on home video and that's really where he learned his storytelling skills and then selling multi-million-dollar mainframe computers against IBM, he learned that whoever told the best story is the one that got the sale, and that people buy emotionally and not logically.

 

Me: That is so true. It's funny is that people buy emotionally and not logically because I've been preaching that in customer service for ages that the customers emotions are so important to the experience, because it's what they walk away feeling, what they remember most not necessarily what you said, but more so the feeling that they walked away with? 

So, can you share with our listeners, I'm sure you have way more experience than I do and you probably even have statistical data to backup this particular principle. Share a little bit about that, in terms of why is it that emotional has such a greater impact on the buying journey?

  

John shared that we're wired for storytelling. So, if you think back to the days of when we all lived in caves, we told stories like fire. Now, we typically tell stories around PowerPoints at events. He thinks part of the reason is that it taps into a different part of our brain, if you start presenting a bunch of facts and figures to somebody, then they're in this analytical, sometimes decision paralysis mode. But if you tell a story, it taps into a different part of our brain, where people will relax a little bit, they think, “Oh, this might even be entertaining.” And it allows them to retain the information in a completely different way and that solves a big problem because most people after they have a sales presentation, or even a customer service experience, whatever they said is forgettable. But if you told a story that makes people feel seen and heard, that makes you memorable.

  

Best Story-Telling Techniques to Get the Sale!

Me: So, sales and customer service go hand in hand and I think more and more as businesses evolve, and they recognize that they're not two separate activities in a business and they really need to be combined in the best way possible. What are the three techniques that you teach, or that you promote, believe in that will help sales representatives or sales professionals to be more customer oriented and be able to really drive the sale home?

 

John shared that the premise is that whoever tells the best sale is the one that's going to get the sale. So, honing your storytelling skills, the three things he teaches people are that a good story should be Clear, Concise, and Compelling. So, let's break those down. 

Why does it need to be clear? Because if you confuse people with a bunch of acronyms, they're not going to tell you they're confused, they're just going to say no, the confused mind just said, “I don't think so, too much work.” 

Why does it need to be concise? Well, you want them to be able to remember and retell your story to other people to become your brand ambassadors. And if your story goes on and on and doesn't have a point to it and isn't concise, nobody can remember, let alone repeat it. 

And finally, why does it need to be compelling? Because when you tug at those heartstrings, you get that all-important emotional connection that we talked about. People have to feel something in those stories, the stakes have to be high in order for us to care about what's going on in this story.

 

Me: So, John, can you tell us what's the best sales story you've heard that had all those three components?

  

John stated that he will tell a story about a client he worked with, they had a piece of equipment that was making surgeries go 30% faster and they would present that fact to doctors, and they would sell some, but not very many. And they kept saying, “It's so logical, why are they buying?” And he said, because people buy emotionally, not logically even when they're a doctor

And so, he asked them questions, and they crafted this story that has totally changed how people perceive them and buy the product. 

Imagine how happy Dr. Higgins was down at Long Beach Memorial using their equipment when you go out to the patient's family an hour earlier than expected. And if you've ever waited for somebody you love to come out of surgery, you know every minute feels like an hour, the doctor comes out and says, “Good news, the scope shows they don't have cancer, they're going to be fine.” 

And then turns to the rep and says, “You know, this is why I became a doctor, for moments like this.” Now that rep tells us this story to another doctor at another hospital, and the secret here is the other doctor sees themselves in the story and says, “You know what, that's why I became a doctor, I want your equipment too.”

 

Me: Very good. I like examples because they definitely tie into the real part of the show.

 

Revenue Rockstar Mastery Online Course – what is this course about?

Me: Now, as a Revenue Rockstar Master, because you have this online course Revenue Rockstar Mastery, what are some things that you teach in this course to help people to master their revenue?

 

John shared that one of the things he teaches what he just did there, which is a case story instead of a case study, and teach people how to tell a story that other people see themselves in. 

When the client heard that story they said, “Oh gosh, that gives us chills. Not only are we not telling a story like that, it never occurred to us to make a patient's family a character in the story.” 

And so, he teaches you how to figure out how to tell that story and how to pull people in, see how he uses that technique, “If you've ever had to wait for somebody you love.” And even if you haven't, you could imagine what it would feel like to wait for somebody you love to come out of surgery that it would feel like every minute was an hour. And so, there are some techniques that he teaches people, so they go from just being a good storyteller to a great one.

 

Me: And what if you have a sales professional whose storytelling is weak, like they've never communicated like that before. This is definitely like a learning curve for them that is extremely steep, it's not like they've had maybe a few techniques down pat, they just need to kind of craft it a little bit better but it's all new to them. And they're shy, they don't like talking to people very much, how do you lift them out of that?

 

John shared that it sounds like there's two challenges there. One, being shy, not talking to people is completely separate, maybe sales is not the career for you. But second, he gives people a structure on how to tell a story because the good news is, you don't have to be a gifted athlete or singer to become a good storyteller, there's an actual structure to it.  

There's the exposition where you describe, you paint a picture and pull us into the story and then you describe a problem as he mentioned, there has to be some emotional hook there that people care about what's going on. 

And then the solution and then the secret sauce is what is the resolution? What is life like for somebody after they've bought something from you or hired you?

 

Me: Because at the end of the day, every business is solving a problem. So I guess, if you can change the perspective of the story, where the benefit is to the person that you're trying to sell to, and as you mentioned, create an image or a story that they're able to see this problem being solved in the easiest way possible, then they're more inclined to want to make the purchase.

 

John agreed. And you don't have to be pushy. When you tell a great story that somebody sees themselves in, then they just want to go on the journey with you, you pull them into the story and you pull them into wanting to work with you. It's like landing a plane, it's that normal and expected.

 

About John’s Book – The Sale is in the Tale

John shared about his book The Sale is in the Tale, it's set in Austin where he lives. So, it's a little bit of a love letter to Austin. And it's a story about storytelling, so you're being entertained and going on a journey of somebody whose old ways of selling of just pushing out facts and figures isn't working anymore. And they start to learn about the power of storytelling and it helps them not only in their career but in their personal life too.

 

Me: And where can our listeners access that book? Is it available as yet?

 

John stated that yes, it's anywhere you buy books, Audible, he’s narrating it or Amazon wherever you want to buy a book, you can find it.

 

App, Website or Tool that John Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, John stated that calendar scheduling, it's between time zones, so he just can't imagine going back and forth with five different emails or phone calls trying to book people that way or getting himself booked that way. Those calendar links are everything.

 

Me: Is there a particular calendar application that you use or just the regular one on your phone?

 

John shared that he uses something called schedule OnceHub.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on John

When asked about books that have had a big impact, John shared that a book he read a long time ago, is Tim Sanders, The Likability Factor: How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams. And he's done all this research on how the more likeable you are, the more empathy you connect with people. And doctors spend more time with patients they like, teachers spend more time with students they like. And so, it's a great book on how to up your likability factor. 

And then he also wrote another one, more recently called Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges instead of brainstorming, it's about dealstorming and how important it is to collaborate across divisions to get everybody on board to win business.

 

AI Replacing Human Interaction and Storytelling

Me: Now, sales is one of those things in an organization that is the lifeline of the organisation, right? If the company doesn't sell anything, you can't make any money. And if they can't make any money, it cannot pay staff, it cannot reinvest, it just cannot continue.

So, could you share with us, we're just emerging out of a pandemic, I know a lot of organizations definitely had to diversify and pivot and take on technology a lot more, especially if they didn't have it integrated into their business.

Now, there's a lot more AI opportunities like platforms such as ChatGPT and Open AI. 

Are these tools that you believe for organizations, regardless of the industry, that these AI opportunities that are existing can help to propel sales in the business? Do you think it will probably even replace at some point the human interaction and storytelling?

 

John shared that he doesn't think AI will ever replace the need for soft skills of storytelling, empathy and listening because what they can do is maybe help you write a proposal or a cover letter or a little faster than starting from scratch if you're someone that doesn't have that skill set innately honed in or worked on, but people are still going to want to buy from people is his prediction.

 

Skills that a Sales Professional Needs in Order to be Successful

Me: And what are also let's see, three skills that a sales professional needs outside of the storytelling, the three C's that you had mentioned. What are three skills that you believe a sales professional needs in order to be successful? Because I believe people buy from people who they like and people who they know. And so, how do you get people to like you?

 

John stated that instead of getting people to know, like, and trust you, which that concept has been around forever. The problem with, “Oh, let me get you to know me” people think they should send more data and more facts. “Let me send you one more email about some data point.” 

So, he’s reversed that, and he says it's a gut heart head order, you have to start with trust in the gut. Is this safe? Is it a fight or flight? Is this email safe? The introduction he got that's a trust gets transferred, making eye contact. So, you start with trust, and then it moves up to the heart, which we talked about is where the likability factor is. 

And the more empathy you show, the more likeable you are. And then finally, it goes to the head. And it's still not the time to get into the intellectual left-brain stuff. But you're answering by telling a story, the unspoken question everybody has when they hear you present or pitch anything, including yourself. Will this work for me? They might trust and even like you, but if they don't think what you're offering is going to work for them, they're not going to buy.

 

Me: Agreed, that makes sense for sure. So, you said that they need to like you and there's the heart component in terms of the empathy. And I've been asked the question quite a few times in some of my customer service training sessions, how do you teach someone to exercise empathy? Is that something that you touch on in your interactions with sales professionals?

 

John confirmed yes. An example is what's the difference between empathy and sympathy? Let's start there. Sympathy let's say you are a sales rep and you're walking in and you have an appointment and you see the receptionist has FedEx and UPS and the three phone lines ringing and two other people ahead of you. You could say, “Gosh, I'm sorry to bother you. But I have an appointment.” It's a little bit of sympathy maybe but empathy is you literally put yourself in their shoes. You go, “Wow, you must feel like an air traffic controller today, whenever you have a minute, let me know.”

  

Me: So, we focus on ensuring that we have more of those types of experiences then.

 

John affirmed Yes!

 

What John is Really Excited About Now!

John shared that one of the things he’s really excited about is he’s crafted a new keynote talk called Tell Stories, Recruit Top Talent. And the Society of Human Resources has had him come speak and as well as Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. A lot of people are still struggling to find really good talent and they may be good at selling a home or selling whatever they do but they're not good at telling a story to recruit people to come work there. 

And so, once they learn how to tell a story about what the culture is, and what it's like to work with them as a leader, and what stories of other people who've come on board, and how happy they are, then that totally allows them to get the top talent, typically from competitors to come work there.

 

Me: Is this like in an application or is it more through a website?

 

John stated that it’s neither. It's something that people hire him to come speak at their sales meetings.

 

Me: Oh, so you're going in physically?

 

John shared that that's what he does for a living, people hire him to come speak at their sales kick-off meetings, typically on how to tell stories to win sales. And now they realize that HR is a sales function as well.

 

Me: Very true, because you want to recruit the right persons. And I find with customer service, as well, John, that if you can focus on getting the right people, it will mitigate a lot of the customer service issues that you have in the future. Have you found that for sales as well, if you get the right person to sell, because the hiring process is quite expensive, it's time consuming.

 

John stated that you want to develop relationships with people that you sell, so that they either buy from you again and/or send you referrals. And so, if you have a salesperson that knows how to do that, then they're not starting from scratch every day to try and find a new sale.

 

Tips as it Relates to Sales and Customer Service for 2023

Me: So, we're almost halfway through 2023. Do you have maybe one or two tips that you would give to our listeners as it relates to sales and customer service, just some golden nuggets based on your experience and all of the different things that you've garnered over the years?

 

John shared that one of the things that salespeople struggle with is they get stuck in what he calls the friend zone at work when someone says, “Oh, I'm interested, send me some information” and then they get ghosted, just like when you're in the dating world. And so, He thinks one of the key things to do is to realize that it's up to you to tell a story to intrigue people enough to want to continue the conversation and not get stuck at the friend zone at work. 

And so, that's why storytelling is so crucial to continuing that path and also really allowing people to go at the pace that works best for them. One of the he thinks the worst things he’s ever seen somebody in customer service do is, “Well, we've never had anybody else complain about this.” 

When you say that to somebody, you've invalidated their experience and their feelings, they don't really care, “So what, I'm the first person to ever have a problem with this. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't fix it.” And a lot of customer service people like to say that to people, “Oh, wow, this has never happened before.” If he’s a customer, he doesn't care it's ever happened before, it happened to him fix it.

 

Me: Agreed. That kind of dovetails into my next question. So, I know that your expertise is to go in and pitch to these organizations how to tell a story especially to sell. But let's say for example, you had to go into an organization to teach them.

 

Well, you wouldn't be really teaching them to pitch but let's say you're trying to get them to convince them to purchase a programme that will help to improve on their service. Because I find a lot of times with organizations buying the product is one but if the product requires a high level of maintenance from the organization, that's where it falls off. 

I hear it a lot in Jamaica, you buy a car, the sales rep was running you down to buy the car and now you have the vehicle and you have an issues with it. Maybe something came on the dashboard, you can't get the sales rep, you can't get support at the dealership. How do you get them to that point where they recognize that the service is just as important as the sale because if the person doesn't choose to renew or buy a car again in five years, you practically lost that first sale.

 

John shared that he thinks it goes back to painting a picture again, telling a story of what happens if you don't have the service, like, “Do you need this warranty? I don't think so. Well, let me tell you a story of somebody who felt the same way that you did right now. And then six months later, something happened and versus a story of someone who did get the warranty and how grateful and happy they are they have it. 

So, you have to paint that picture of what happens if you don't do what I'm suggesting versus what happens if you do do what I'm suggesting, and what you're really selling his peace of mind.

 

Where Can We Find John Online

LinkedIn – John Livesay

Instagram - @thepitchwhisperer

Website – www.johnlivesay.com

           

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity John Uses

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, John shared that it's a quote from Arthur Ashe, the famous tennis pro, he said, “The key to success is confidence. And the key to confidence is preparation.” So, anytime he feels concerned about something or overwhelmed, he realizes he has to think of himself like an athlete. And they practice, practice, practice before they get to the Olympics. And he needs to make sure that he’s as prepared as possible for any new situation when it comes up.

 

Me: Thank you so much, John, for hopping on to Navigating the Customer Experience, sharing all of these great insights as it relates to sales, customer service, some of the key things that you need to be a great storyteller, why it's important to create that picture, create that situation so you can change the perspective of the person that you're trying to sell to. And even in a customer service situation as you said, create that feeling that they walk away feeling good and they can't walk away feeling good if the narrative that you're selling is not one that's giving them that feeling. So, your message was definitely well heard by me, I hope the listeners will get value out of it as well.

 

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

Links

·  The Sale is in the Tale by John Livesay

·  The Likeability Factor: How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams by Tim Sanders

·  Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges by Tim Sanders

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience Webinar – New Date

Register Here

 

 

Jun 13, 2023

Saira Taneja is Chief Experience Officer at Cover Whale, a leading commercial trucking insurance provider and fast-growing insurtech.  

Taneja brings over a decade of experience in the health insurance sector across various functional areas where she held multiple leadership roles. Her passion for innovative market offerings led her to Cover Whale. Leveraging her expertise in scaling businesses, while also achieving customer-centricity has been instrumental in the company's success. She currently oversees the Growth, Marketing and Customer Success organisations. 

She holds a BA in International Business from Bentley University, and an MBA from Bentley's McCallum Graduate School of Business.

 

Questions

 

Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words a little bit about their journey. So, could you take a few minutes just to share with our listeners, how it is that you got to where you are today?

What is Cover Whale for those of our listeners that don't know what your company does, could you share with us?

One of the things that I think would be important for these kinds of experiences to have a more of an omni channel approach to your service experience or your service delivery, could you share with us maybe three things that your organisation is doing that creates that kind of experience? Or if you're not doing it, maybe something you're working towards doing.

Could you also share maybe two to three pain points that your end users pretty much complain about with your service that you're providing? What are some of your pain points that you're solving on a day to day basis?

Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can’t live without in your business?

Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that you have read that have had a great impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently.

From a leadership perspective, what are some things that you do to ensure that your team is motivated, and your team is doing all the best they can do to deliver that experience, not just for your end users, but also internally to each other?

Now, could you also share what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, if for any chance you got derailed, or you got distracted and you kind of use that quote to kind of just to get you back on track, get you back focused? Do you have one of those?

Highlights 

Saira’s Journey 

Saira shared that she likes to say that her career took a corporate path, albeit, not a linear one. And she tends to follow her passions for the next step. And so, without going into every twist and turn in her history, really it is that she started out, as mentioned, in sort of the International Business track, that's where she thought she wanted to go, worked in Embassy for a summer in DC, decided that was not for her and wanted to go into business.  

And so, really work from sales and marketing, product, strategy, CX all with a common thread of strategy and CX throughout her career and ended up in the health insurance sector. It happened by chance and a lot of them that are in the insurance space, say they got here by chance, that they stayed here because of the opportunity and really have developed a passion for it. 

And so, Cover Whale came knocking about a year ago at this point with this amazing opportunity that was really an amalgamation of all of her corporate experiences into one beautifully challenging job and she said yes. And so, that's what led her to her current post, as mentioned, overseeing the growth organization, marketing, customer success but really leading the charge on experience for Cover Whale.

  

About Cover Whale – What Does the Company Do?

Saira shared that Cover Whale is an Insurtech, so that's shorthand for an Insurance Technology company, and MGA. And for those of the listeners that are not familiar with an MGA, that's an Managing General Agent. So, an MGA is really a go between between the carrier partners. So, they have relationships with a number of different insurance carriers, and the Managing General Agent have functions that allow them to really underwrite. And so, they've been granted underwriting authority by the insurance companies with which they partner to bind, to underwrite, to price, to settle claims, and to point in retail agents. 

So, all that to say is they are an entity between their carrier partners, and then retail agents, that's really their primary distribution channel in the commercial trucking space. So, you think of truck drivers driving across America, they need insurance, that's what they're providing. And they're doing it in a digital user-friendly way that hasn't been seen before.

 

Me: So, your primary customer are your truck drivers, and when you said insurance, you're talking about like health insurance? Are you also referring to life insurance?

 

Saira shared that that's interesting, she came from the health insurance space. So, what they're really offering is Commercial Auto Insurance. So, for their box trucks, auto haulers, semis, those are different types of vehicles, and for the cargo that they carry. 

So, they are offering Commercial Auto Insurance for the end users or the policy holders, which are the truck drivers or owner operators. And they're doing it through their retail agents. So, she’s really excited for today's conversation because it's a pretty complicated space and they really have multiple stakeholders. So, when they think about experience, not only is it about the end users or drivers, it's about those that are distributing the insurance to them, which primarily for them is retail agents or wholesalers with whom they partner with.

 

Creating an Omni Channel Experience 

Me: So, one of the things that I think would be important for these kinds of experience to have a more of an omni channel approach to your service experience or your service delivery, could you share with us maybe three things that your organization is doing that creates that kind of experience? Or if you're not doing it, maybe something you're working towards doing.

 

Saira stated that she loves that question, so, it's really interesting that Yanique said the word omni channel. And she thinks that means different things to different companies. But really, where most companies start is, you have service, so you have a place where people who might have questions or an issue can go to and call you as a company, right? They (Cover Whale) and others have a call line to be able to reach out to them, so that's one point in the experience. 

And really, they also allow their partners to reach out to them via email, that's another point. But really where the majority of their experience is delivered is through their proprietary platform that they've built in house. 

And that's where they go to bind coverage for policyholders. And so, what she'll say is, what she just described really is a multi-channel experience, right? You have various points in the interaction with Cover Whale and other companies where you can reach out, but multi-channel are siloed.  

And so, she thinks you're asking about omni channel, which is how are you connecting all those points together, and that's something that they are working on internally that she knows every company is really after, because some of the best experienced companies in the world have figured out, you reach out to them one way, they know when you've reached out to them a different way and they're able to take the data that you've given them or information you've given them through those different channels and put it all in one place so that your experience is standardised across various channels. 

So, that's something that they're working towards and getting better at every day. And really, it starts with centralization of data. And so, just with your questions of three different ways, she just described them. So, email, calling, as well as the platform as well as they have an app. And what she loves to say is that, in today's day and age, there are so many different channels from which customers can reach out and it's a matter of marrying all of them together into one omni channel experience.

 

Pain Points Cover Whale is Solving

Me: Could you also share maybe two to three pain points that your end users pretty much complain about with your service that you're providing? What are some of your pain points that you're solving on a day to day basis? 

 

Saira stated that that's a really great question. And she'll be very honest with you, Cover Whale grew really, really quickly. The company was founded in 2020 and they're sitting here almost midway through 2023, they did not realize they’d experienced this level of explosive growth. 

And so, with that, obviously come service challenges. When customers used to reach out to them, they wouldn't hear back in really a very quick fashion. And so, what they've done over the last year is really work on their timeliness. What they done is, they stood up a number of self-service tools. So, a knowledge base, a chatbot. They've stood up internal service level requirements for their team to achieve on the service side for getting to first contact resolution of an 85%, for an email response time of four hours. 

And so, she would say to the question, it's really about speed of service that they've worked on and done really well at and you know what, at the end of the day, it's leveraging technology to be able to help and anybody can staff with hundreds of people to get to the hundreds of inquiries that are coming in, but it's really about being smart and applying technology so that you can drive down inquiries and also make improvements. The questions that were coming in, it gave them real insight into the pain points that they should be solving, sort of at the top of the funnel, rather than staffing for on the other end.

 

App, Website or Tool that Saira Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business

When asked about an online resource that she can’t live without in her business, Saira stated that she loves this one. She likes to stick to and there are so many but for her, it's Miro. What she loves doing and if you ever visit their Cover Whale offices in New York and she welcomes you to do so. You're going to find post its everywhere. When they're in person, folks have known have visited the office when they're post its all around the room and more of the team is leveraging them now. 

But she thinks it's really important to map the end to end journey for whatever it is that you're trying to solve for. Because sometimes one part of the company may be doing something that another part of the company may not be aware of. So, sitting and mapping step by step from a user's perspective is so important. And so, Miro is really the digital version of that. If you've ever used it, it's essentially a whiteboard with sticky notes, digitally, they can be any size, shape, colour, and you essentially do the same thing. And so, she uses that fairly often in a virtual setting.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Saira

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Saira shared that one that she loves, if folks that are listening that have not read before, it's really old, it's probably from like the late 90s, but it had quite an impact on her life, it's called The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book). So, she loves that one. And not to steal the thunder of the book. But really, it's four agreements that you can apply to your life, starting with being impeccable with your word. To always doing your best and a lot of really good wisdom in the middle. And just to give credit where credit is due, that's by Don Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican author. 

And the other one is by an Organizational Psychologist, Adam Grant, called Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. And she found that one really enlightening and eye opening, because there are a lot of assumptions and biases and everybody's thinking that they may not even know that they have. And it's really about questioning everything that comes to mind and really encouraging others to question also, facts that we all may think are facts are likely have changed over time, the world is a dynamic place. And so, it's about thinking and thinking again, so she would encourage listeners to read that one if they haven't yet.

 

Ensuring the Team is Motivated to Deliver the Best Experience to the End Users and Internally

Me: Now your role, Saira at Cover Whale is Chief Experience Officer and that's a very big role. I can imagine in terms of leadership, you have to have strong leadership, certain kinds of skills to ensure that you are leading a team that is not just doing things because you've told them to do it, but they are intrinsically motivated to do it. And so, from a leadership perspective, for those of our listeners, who are tapping into this episode, and they’d like to sharpen their leadership skills, especially with post COVID, lots of people are burnt out mentally, they might not necessarily like everything about what they do and sometimes that energy comes over in their drive and the work that they get done. What are some things that you do to ensure that your team is motivated, and your team is doing all the best they can do to deliver that experience, not just for your end users, but also internally to each other?

 

Saira stated that she loves that question. So, when you think about experience, it's not just the experience that you're delivering, it's the experience of the people with whom you're working with every single day. If the experience of the people you're working with is not good, more likely than not, your customers are not happy either. And so, it starts with the culture, it starts in the organization and for her, her leadership style is really one of being a servant leader. It's about listening to those that she leads in her organization and understanding what's working well, what isn't. 

Saira shared that she is actually on a listening tour right now with their agent partners, she’s trying to meet with one every single day, it might take her years to get through all of them because there are thousands but she offers this as a suggestion to other leaders who are listening to this podcast because leadership has a tendency, we want measurement, NPS, customer effort, customer satisfaction, what is the data telling us, and you will get insights from surveys, absolutely and that should be happening too. 

But just pausing and calling your customer, reaching out to them, having a meeting, sitting down with them, asking for feedback is so powerful. She has learnt so much in the last x months of sitting down with partners every single day that she doesn’t think she would have gotten the same colour from a PowerPoint presentation on sort of survey insights. And so, she just encourages listeners to reach out and have a conversation, you might learn something that your customers would not have offered in an online survey or other medium. So, just ask and listen, active listening is such an important part of what we can all do.

They've hired the best of the best, really, and so it's about making sure they have everything that they need to do their best work. And what she can say to you is that in terms of their experience, they've purposely developed the culture internally at Cover Whale to be one that's employee centric. And in being employee centric also means that they have the power to do right by their customers and their stakeholders. And so, what she asked the team to do is in every interaction, or anything that they're standing up, whether it be at the product level, whether it be in communications, is this something that you would like to be on the receiving end of if you're in the shoes of their customer? 

She thinks that's so important. They're not just going to a company everyday working and going home and turning off, they're actively building something and creating something that their customers are experiencing, that they experience, frankly, 1000s of times a day in their interactions with other companies. So, she thinks it's really about bringing that message home and empowering their people to be able to do right by their end users.

 

What Saira is Really Excited About Now!

When asked what’s one thing that’s going on right now that she’s excited about, Saira stated that that's a great question. She stated that it's figuring out how to harness technology for service. And when she says service, she doesn't just mean their service centre. When it comes to insurance, once somebody signs on the dotted line, everything that comes after over the next year is service, if they need to reach out, if they need to make a change, if something has happened unfortunately, that’s service and so how do they harness technology to be able to help with that service and ChatGPT is such an interesting point in their life, and in society to figure out how to mindfully apply technology so that we can free up humans to do more value-add work, and really drive the empathy that all people want. 

At the end of the day, people are looking for a connection at a certain point, they may not want to talk to a person for a common question that they can get responded to via Chatbot or that they can find a knowledge base. But she thinks that's one of the most interesting things that they're really thinking through right now of how do you apply technology to be able to free up people to be able to do more value-add work? And she thinks this is not just a question that she has internally with Cover Whale, she thinks this is a question that leaders are asking throughout. And really everybody's asking of what is this going to mean five years down the road?

 

Me: Agreed. It's interesting you mentioned ChatGPT because I don't believe that is going to replace people. And I totally agree with you that the question should be, how can we use the technology to answer more mundane, run of the mill kind of questions, and then the more complex tasks that require a high level of empathy, the emotions and the workings of a human being that chat or a bot or any form of artificial intelligence can't deliver, the humans can be freed up to deal with those kinds of scenarios.

 

Saira stated yes, she totally agrees with that.

 

Me: So, in continuation of that whole point, do you see ChatGPT evolving, and exploding, or even something that's being added on to that like in the next, I would say, 12 months? Because it's definitely a buzz thing that's happening, have you found ways in your organisation to make it work?

 

Saira stated that they have and it's interesting. So, what she would say is, she thinks that her inclination right now, based on what she’s seen, is that she would not want to apply it just front and centre to their customers. She thinks from a service standpoint, it's really unpredictable. In terms of what you might get back, but she thinks it's really compelling to use as a tool, which is where she hopes we all end up going, if you think about a calculator being introduced to the world, and everybody's saying, “Oh, no, nobody's going to learn how to do math.” And it's like, well, you learn to use it as a tool for analysis, for research. 

And so, that's really how they're trying to leverage it, of are there certain things that they might be able to input into it? Can it crunch massive amounts of data to be able to give them insights that otherwise would have taken them weeks to do? 

For instance, are they able to take certain inputs and filter it through, of course, nothing proprietary or sensitive, and then understand what's working well from the proprietary technology they've stood up. What might be a production error that they're seeing or others. So, she thinks that if organizations can figure out how to optimise their back-end operations by using ChatGPT as a tool, she thinks it would just make us more efficient. But in terms of it being customer facing right now, she doesn't think we're there.

 

Where Can We Find Saira Online

LinkedIn – Saira Taneja        

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Saira Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that she tends to revert to, Saira shared that she does. The one that she always tends to go back to is Alice Walker, she's an American novelist. She has said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.” And she loves that because we all have the power, each and every day to drive change. No matter what aspect of life it is and this is what she shares with her teams as well, is that you have the power really to change something. Don't pass the buck, don't think somebody else will do it for you. If you can do it, you have the power to do it, do it.

 

Me: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing, Saira. And I think if anything our listeners should take away from this interview is focusing on ensuring that we really pay attention to all of our stakeholders, our employees, our customers, and ensure that we really listen to them as she mentioned, active listening, it's something we take for granted, it's something that we have to do every day in order to communicate. But are we really designating that time and effort to the people who really need to be heard so the real change can be made?

  

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

  

Links

·  The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Teoltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz

·  Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience Webinar – New Date

Register Here

 

Jun 6, 2023

Zack Wenthe is the Customer Data Platform Evangelists for Treasure Data. He often speaks about the marketing and customer data industry at industry events, webinars, and virtual conferences. Having spent a majority of his career in marketing and marketing consulting working with large enterprise brands like Walmart, Nationwide Insurance, FedEx, and many more, Zack now gets to tell the CDP story to help marketing teams eliminate the friction caused by silos, inefficiencies, and lack of understanding of their true customers. 

Zack lives with his amazing wife and two kids on the bluffs of the Mississippi River and has one more who is away at college. Outside of work, Zack enjoys cooking, spending time with his kids, writing comedy, and maybe someday a screenplay.

Questions 

We like to ask our guests in their own words, if they could share about their journey, how it is that they got to where they are today?

So, you work at a company called Treasure Data. And for those of our listeners that are not familiar with your organisation, can you tell us a little bit about what you do.

Based on your experience, and your knowledge in this particular area, what are maybe three of the top pain points that utilising this methodology, helps with customers overall experience with a brand.

How do you think ChatGPT can help organisations with the overall service experience?

As it relates to creating emotional connection and personalization, can you share with us, how you think that will help to deepen brand loyalty and of course, improve overall customer experience?

Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Could you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that you've read? It could be a book you read recently, or even one you read a very long time ago, but it still has had a great impact on you.

Could you share also with our listeners what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you are really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason at all you get derailed or side-tracked and you kind of just need that quote to get you back on target, back on track. Do you have one of those?

Highlights  

Zack’s Journey

Me: So, even though we read a little bit about you, a little bit of professional, a little bit of personal, we still like to ask our guests in their own words, if they could share about their journey, how it is that they got to where they are today? Could you do that for me, please?

  

Zack shared that he would say it's a long winding road to how he got to kind of his career. He went to college thinking he was going into theatre and yet, somehow, he ended up in marketing. But when you think about it, marketing is a lot of theatre. So, he started college, he realized he wasn’t going to make any money if he went into the theatre route and kind of wandered around for a bit and kind of landed into the marketing space, ran teams for a while before he made the jump into the consulting world. 

And most of his consulting career was tied to martec, he was enough of a nerd that he was a marketing technologist before that was like a title or a thing. And he could kind of translate, he could tell the marketing story to the tech people and then he could translate the technical requirements and limitations back to the marketing team and they can kind of work through the details. So, he spent a lot of his career as a strategist doing implementations and family, it got to be a lot to be with a client every week.  

So, he kind of made the jump over to the product world. And he sits now as Yanique said, as the CDP Evangelist, so he gets to kind of talk about their product, and he talks to marketers that he’s worked with for his entire career and kind of understand their pain points. And so, he gets to kind of come and talk to businesses, owners. And so, that's how he ended up here.

  

About Zack’s Company – Treasure Data

Me: So, you work at a company called Treasure Data. And for those of our listeners that are not familiar with your organisation, can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

  

Zack shared that Treasure Data is an enterprise customer data platform. And what that means is they work with typically complex organizations who are trying to bring all of their customer profile, transactional behavioural data together into a single location. 

So, you may have email systems and eCommerce systems and physical point of sale systems and all these different things that have fragments of the individual kind of scattered within these different systems. 

And so, the goal of a CDP or Customer Data Platform is to bring all of those profiles together. So, we're looking at a single kind of 360 degree view of that customer and therefore, they can create better customer experiences, they can create better connection, emotional connection with their customers, so that they’re not having these, well, he calls it into the call centre, and they don't even know that he made a purchase kind of experiences, which unfortunately, happened way too often. So that's the pain they solve.

 

Me: So, let me give an example. Let's say for example, I go to my doctor and the week before I had gone to a different doctor and I did a blood test, and in the week before that I did a mammogram. And so, is it that your platform allows this doctor to see all of this medical data merged into one space and they can look holistically at the person?

 

Zack stated that, so with obviously with privacy and consent kind of in place, so assuming that that medical system was sharing the information, and you had consented to that, absolutely, it would bring all of that profile together, and make it available to the electronic medical record in that case or to a scheduling when you call them later now, and you have to schedule an appointment, they'd be able to see that, “Oh, by the way, you were in here a week ago, and you prefer this location.”

So now they're not going to send you to one 20 miles away from you. 

So, all of those little details, and it works across retail, travel and hospitality, big B2B, medical, absolutely. All of those scenarios.

 

Utilizing this Methodolgy in Helping with Customers Overall Experience with a Brand

 

Me: So, share with our listeners for me, Zack, based on your experience, and your knowledge in this particular area, what are some of I would say maybe three of the top pain points that utilizing this methodology, helps with customers’ overall experience with a brand.

 

Zack shared that he would say the top three or the number one that they think about is this idea of the fractured individual. So, at any given time, when he’s a consumer, and he’s dealing with a company, he’s not dealing with a department, he doesn't care whether you're the online team, or you're the marketing team, whether you're the email team, whatever variation of that departmental hierarchy you are, he just deals with the brand as the consumer. 

And, unfortunately, corporations don't typically operate that way. We have structure and teams and silos. And so, what ends up happening is you end up with this fractured view of an individual, and it's frustrating from the consumers perspective, because now one day they're talking to, they're physically in a store, and they're shopping, and they're talking to somebody that's under one team, and one data system. But again, later on, they're online, and it's a whole other system. 

And they recently just had a new customer joined them, and this is the exact scenario that they were trying to solve, they said, “Look, we're a high-end jewellery retailer, and during the pandemic, 80% of our people were shopping online, they were buying and spending large amounts of money. And it's not acceptable for them to walk into our store and talk to a salesperson, and the salesperson has no idea who they are, no idea about their past purchases, that's not the experience we want to create.” 

And so, by democratizing or making all of this data available, they eliminate that friction, or that kind of pain point of dealing with the customer. So, that's the first one. 

The second two are kind of offshoots of that is, once you've solved that major problem, then now you can start to have conversations amongst multiple teams, because you're all working on the same set of data. So, no longer are you arguing over when the last customer visited based on which system is in charge, it's all combined. And so, you're able to have a conversation, you don't go to a board meeting and hope your data is correct, because you're working on a unified set of truth. So, your analytics, your insights, all of the reporting is better. 

And then the last one is now they also break down the access to data. So, a lot of times with silos, the challenge becomes, if you're in the marketing team, you're going to have to go to somebody in IT, they're going to have to pull report for you, they're going to have to go in, and it's going to take a couple weeks, they make it easier and faster for all these teams to access this information so that they can move faster, and they can move more nimbly. So, the three really is access to the first the total customer to begin with, then you can trust the data and then you can move nimbly and interact with the customer as a result of that.

 

How ChatGPT Can Help Organizations with the Overall Service Experience?

Me: So, data is king, right? And as we’ve emerge out to the pandemic, and now we have all of these wonderful AI tools. Now we have ChatGPT, I would love to know your views since you're in the data world in terms of how do you think ChatGPT can help organizations? I mean, there's a lot of chatter about ChatGPT replacing people but I personally don't believe that any technology is going to replace a human being. But I would love to hear your views since this is an area that you operate in on a day to day basis across different industries, how do you see this helping or not helping the overall service experience?

 

Zack shared that this is a great question. He thinks ChatGPT allows us to access more information faster. But really, that's never been the problem. Really, it's never been an issue, there's no shortage of information or data, and it's never going to get less.  

The problem now still lies in organizing it, accessing it, and trusting it. And so, he thinks as these models, whether it's open AIs, ChatGPT or any variation of that, or some of the other competitors, as they mature, and you start to see, he thinks the biggest question, the plugins, where you can start to bring in information, so not only can you ask your assistant, your AI assistant, “Tate, help me plan a trip to Mexico. I want to stay in an all-inclusive resort with this weather.”  

And they're like, “Oh, yeah, here's some options.” Well, that's historical information. But now when you pull in a plug in, for example, and it can real time access travel, it can access weather patterns, it can access all this other information. Now, that becomes useful and now it becomes a matter of indexing and organizing and making that data accessible. 

And so, he thinks that's where he gets excited, especially personally, just being able to speed up a lot of the mundane things we do on a day to day basis as a consumer, but also as a business, they, customer data platforms are going to be a source for a lot of those AI systems. 

If he knows everything you've purchased from them, and he knows everything based on that what other customers have purchased, all this other information, he can feed it to an AI system, and you go shopping, and you can say, “Hey, pick out my summer wardrobe.” 

And the AI system can make recommendations based on what you like, what you don't like, and it's super personalized to you because it's not just looking at what you bought maybe at the store, but because the AI is tied into other stores, it looks at what you buy in other stores, what shoes you have, how you tend to use those clothing items. Do you travel? Do you speak? All these ideas. But the idea is, by being able to really personalize at a level we've never been able to get to because of just resource scales. He thinks that's where AI gets really interesting. 

Will it replace people? No, he doesn't think so. He thinks it's going become a skill much like googling is, you have to know how to Google to get through your day. He thinks interacting with AI is going to be a very similar scenario.

 

Creating Emotional Connection and Personalization – How Can That Help Deepen Brand Loyalty and Improve Overall Customer Experience?

Me: That's interesting, like learn to Google, learn to ChatGPT, that kind of leads to my next question, as it relates to creating emotional connection. And I think it's important to recognise that all customers are human beings, and everybody has their personal preference and personalization has been one of those buzzwords for quite a few years now. But as you mentioned, before, we haven't really been able to get to that level of granular specification with customer to customer, I don't just feel like I'm a transaction, or just another person, but I feel like this was for me, only me, nobody else in the world, but me. So, can you share with us, how you think that will help to deepen brand loyalty and of course, improve overall customer experience?

 

Zack shared that when it comes to improving the customer experience and brand loyalty, at this point, being loyal to a brand is often not enough. We all think about all the loyalty programmes we're all members of, the average household has 20 plus loyalty cards, if not more, it doesn't make you loyal, it just means you've kind of learned to operate within that mode. 

He thinks really what it comes down to is the level, which is the next level, which is brand attachment. Are you attached to that brand? And are you happy when you interact with them? And would you be sad if they weren't around? And that's a level that a lot of brands still don't operate at. 

There’re obviously degrees of that within different industries and different verticals. But if you think about it in that lighter, in that lens, people came out of the pandemic who were very loyal to brands and then couldn't shop in them anymore, so they found an alternative. They learned to shop online, they're like, “Oh my gosh, this was super easy.”  

People who are scared of eCommerce aren't scared of eCommerce anymore, they have groceries delivered to their door. We all went through a massive shift in our buying behaviour as a result of the pandemic. But he thinks it's not just a result of that, we just accelerated what was already happening. 

And so, we're in this world now where the consumer is in charge, they get to pick what they want, and brands have to keep up, they're not in the driver's seat, it's no longer, “Here's my experience. And if you want to do business with me, you have to bend to my will.” Consumers are now saying, “Hey, this is how I expect to be treated. This is the brand I want to deal with.” And we're being a lot more forceful as consumers in making those decisions, in breaking up with the ones that we don't like, and so forth. 

So, that means now as we get to the personalization side, personalization has to evolve. We can't just geo target advertising to people or target based on, “Well, you bought this in the past, you're going to buy this in the future.” There's a whole other level below that, which when we get into the idea of creating those emotional connections, creating those tying into as individuals, as people, whether that's through personalization, whether that's through AI, whether it's through new ways of creating ads, we can create content at scale, that we've never been able to. 

So now, he can serve you, if he knows you're an introvert, and he’s a travel company, he can serve you out ads or content that shows people sitting on the beach reading, that's more appealing to you, that seems like that's vacation, versus if you're an extrovert, being able to show a group of people hanging out on the beach, socializing. And for the introvert, that's exhausting, for the extrovert that's exciting. And so, and that's a really simple example. 

But if you think about that, before you'd have to create all that content, you'd have to write all that, well, AI can do all that now. You can generate those images, and you can process it and it's only the beginning, it's only going to get better, faster, easier, cheaper to do.

 

Me: It's amazing the amount of things that AI has allowed and when I look across the different platforms that I use, and I get these emails on a weekly basis about the platforms integrating AI into their existing solution, making it easier for the consumer. And as you mentioned before, things that would have taken 10 hours, a whole month to do ten/five years ago can literally be done in like 5 minutes or less.

 

Zack stated absolutely and he thinks we're just scratching the surface. He thinks right now, it's still, in a lot of ways a gimmick. Because people are just trying to figure out, what is that killer use case for his business for AI? And so, let's try something. And so, much like we had 20 years ago when people started creating websites, everybody kind of jumped online, and then they figured out what worked. And then same thing, 10 plus years ago with social media, it was like everybody needed a social media platform. And then you're like, “No, I just need a page.” Okay, but this is what this page means and then it became Instagram, AI is going to be the same thing, we're going to have this kind of wave as we figure it out.

 

Me: Agreed. One of the things I loved about what you said earlier, when we just started talking about the emotional connection was brand attachment. And if you think about a brand that you can't live without, like, if they were no longer in existence, how would you operate? Would you be able to find a substitute? And when you said that, what came to mind was my Apple ecosystem. So, I'm just like, I don't see any other product out there that moves so smoothly and easily. And honestly, if there was no Apple, I don't know if there would be a substitute. I would find a substitute, of course, but I wouldn't be satisfied because if they're not offering what Apple is offering, then it would mean that they're not meeting my expectations, because Apple has set the bar so high.

 

Zack agreed absolutely. And we all have those. And he’s 100% on board with the Apple ecosystem as well, that would be his challenge. And there's probably five or six other brands in your life that if you had to replace them, you would, but you'd be frustrated by it, you'd be sad by it, you'd be upset. And he thinks that's the level that we as companies need to kind of strive for now. Now, it's not just are they loyal? Do they do they buy from us repeatedly, but do they want to buy from us repeatedly?

 

Me: Very true. Because want and need are two different things, right?

 

App, Website or Tool that Zack Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Zack stated that that's a good question. He does a tonne of research and writing and notes. And so, he'll give you two. So, he has both Evernote and Notion as his kind of a second brain for collecting and managing information. And so, he loves notebooks, he loves writing and moleskin notebooks, but he loses them, or he forgets what he wrote down in one and then it sits somewhere in a desk drawer. So, getting it into a digital system was a huge change in how he personally operates, how he manages his workload. So, Notion is probably his number one recommendation right now. And it's integrated with AI, so you can be on the cutting edge, because you can use AI write within it to summarise notes and do to do lists and all sorts of cool things.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Zack

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Zack stated that he’s got a couple here and he has a couple different ones. So, he’s always been a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell, so Tipping Point, anything by Malcolm Gladwell is a good one. But when we're thinking and we're talking about personalization and we're talking about psychology, a book that actually came from a recommendation by Malcolm Gladwell, he made it a comment in one of his books. But he went from the source, it's a textbook. But it's called The Person and the Situation: Perspective of Social Psychology by Lee Ross and it's like perspectives on kind of social psychology. And since he’s a marketer, social psychology is a huge interest area for him. 

And the thesis of this book really comes down to the idea is, how much does the situation that we're in influence the way we behave versus the person and the personality? So, in other words, all things being equal, does the person behave the same regardless of situation? Or does the situation really drive? 

And a lot of times when we think of personalization, and when we think persuasion, and we think writing copy, and all these things, we focus on the person, we spend too little time focusing on the situation that they're in. And so, this was definitely a kind of a deep dive into social psychology on how much the environment around you can impact how you behave, how you interact, and how you respond to stimuli.

 

Me: That's a very good point, because I think the environment definitely affects you. I mean, let's say you're buying something in relation to a plumbing issue that you're having at your home, but there is an emergency, clearly, the urgency of purchase is going to be much greater just based on the environment on what's happening on the situation, versus you just randomly walking into the store and making that purchase.

 

What Zack is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that going on right now that he’s excited about, Zack shared that he’s writing a book, he’s been working on a book for a while. So, a lot of his job and his career has always been centred around storytelling. And about three years ago, he sat down, and he said, he can talk to you about that but what the heck does he mean by storytelling in business, and so he started just kind of pulling all these notes together. And then he started diving into the research and pulling a lot of things out. And so, that's been what he’s been working on furiously for the last six months or so is getting that manuscript done and whatnot.  

It's been amazing because he thinks the art of writing, it is one of those things that every marketer, every business owner should dedicate time to writing. So, even if you're not going to write a book, sitting down and taking the thoughts that’s in your head and distilling them so that somebody else can learn them is an incredible way to not only teach yourself, but to refine your thinking and realize where you might have a gap or where you might need to explain better. 

And so, even if you're not going to write a book, he would say any anybody should pick up a pen, grab a keyboard, and start writing about your passion area or your interest area, because you will unlock a lot of things about yourself when you're staring at a blank screen and you're trying to get words out of your head.

 

Me: Very true. Awesome. So, I'm excited about your book. I hope that when it's released, we can have you back on our podcast to discuss all the exciting buzz coming out of that book.

 

Where Can We Find Zack Online

Website – www.treasuredata.com

LinkedIn – Zack Wenthe

Twitter – Zack Wenthe

  

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Zack Uses 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Zack shared that he has a lot of concepts and stories and notes. And he thinks one that drives him as a marketer, and one that drives him personally, he uses it often. There's a jazz performer, his name is Art Blakey, and he had a quote, and it was simply, “If you're not appearing, you're disappearing.” And so, he kind of apply that in a lot of different ways. From marketing perspective, if you're not showing up in front of your audience, they're going to forget you, you're going to fade away. 

He (Art Blakey) obviously was talking about it from a performance perspective, as a performer. If you're not up in front of the audience, you're losing that connection. But Zack thinks it applies to our personal lives as well. If you're not showing up and you're not bringing your authentic self, then you lose those connections, out of sight, out of mind is such an easy default for so many people. So, to him, that's one that he always kind of go back to, which is, just show up, be present and be out there.

  

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Links

·  The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology by Lee Ross

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May 30, 2023

Richie Jones has experienced both client side and agency life across multiple sectors. Having spent the majority of his career to date being just in front of the curve, he is now in the sweet spot having found his niche. Launching vvast has allowed Richie to blend his agency experience and brand expertise to deliver an innovative, low-capital entry to market for brands but crucially plugging them into a relentless R&D roadmap to accelerate revenue. He is passionate about the concept of creative destruction and feels genuinely privileged to have seen the inception and gradual impact of the internet on society and brands. 

Ritchie builds teams with a shared love of brand, a stoke for surfing, mountain biking and music, and drive to deliver epic work. Having embarked on B Corp journey in 2021, Richie has discovered how aligned it is with his purpose for vvast, it is so much more than environmental impact, it's about considering our contribution to the wider community, and understanding the way we do business through an ethical lens.

 

Questions

We read your bio, your formal bio that they sent over to us, but we always like to ask our guests to share in their own words, a little bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today?

So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about vvast? What kind of clients do you have? What kind of work do you do? so they have a better idea of what your organisation is about? I know you mentioned just now that it was formed six years ago, and it's about 35 employees that you have in your complement.

So, I'm sure many of our listeners may have different organisations that they are a part of, and they may outsource some aspects of their business. And so, when you outsource a lot of times, the customer may not necessarily have the same experience across the board, could you share with us maybe two or three things that you found has made your team successful to make that experience so invaluable for the customer that they're not even able to pick up that you are a third party? But you're just all one.

What are maybe I would say, two things that you believe is important to grow a profitable and purpose led business focused on transparency, and communicating values, because especially the values part?

Can you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it has had a very big impact on you.

Could you also share with us one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests if you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you feel off track or you get derailed, this quote kind of helps to get you back on track, remind you of as you said that Simon Sinek says, “Why are you doing what you're doing?”

 

Highlights

Richie’s Journey

Richie shared that the bio really sort of summarises the journey he’s been on. And he thinks the concept of being in front of the curve for quite a long time in his career has definitely been something he guess, paid for in the early parts of his career, because he was almost too early with the internet and technology. So, what's amazing now, having first founded a company that was about 20 years ago, he sold it about 10 years in, that was an amazing experience to see what it's like to start something and take it all the way through to selling to a A-listed marketing group. So, it's what you do when you've sort of found things and see what it turns into is really exciting.

After that, he went brand side as they call it for a five-year period where he was on a private equity, and also venture capitalist funded board, where they selected brands and kind of took them to a whole next level really. After that, he went what they call brand side and worked, got a big learning for how brands operate, some of the challenges they face. And the crucial thing he kind of learned on that long sort of period as well was how to create amazing brand and consumer experiences, what will actually really make consumers want to buy again from a brand and why they enjoy doing it. 

And most recently he founded vvast six years ago, and they’ve now grown to sort of 35 people that handling approaching 15 million pounds worth of revenue for their brands at the moment. So, it's been a really great journey. And crucially within that they have a whole customer services or customer centric elements of what they do as well. That's what he’s done in a nutshell so far.

  

About Richie’s Company - vvast

Me: So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about vvast? What kind of clients do you have? What kind of work do you do? So they have a better idea of what your organisation is about? I know you mentioned just now that it was formed six years ago, and it's about 35 employees that you have in your complement, correct?

 

Richie affirmed, yes, that's correct. So, what they do in sort of summary is they’ve created an approach to be able to bring brands to market, initially in the European marketplace, but they’re expanding into the Middle East, they actually have some brands in Australia and New Zealand as well. And fairly similarly going into the US, as well. So, it will be a global thing they’re doing. But in the early stages, what they’re doing now is they’ve set up the business so that a brand, some of the brands they work with brands, like Yeti and they have Stance, they have some of the Truly brands, so Truly Designs and brands like Jansport, which is one of the VF brands they work with. 

And all of these brands, they operate in the European market, primarily, they set them up. So, it's actually, this is crucial on the eCommerce channel, but also on Amazon as well. It's actually a very complicated channel to navigate. And if you're saying based in the US and you’ve worked with a lot of California West Coast based brands, it's actually very quite risky setting up an entity and trading in the European market in the first place. They have all of the teams, the infrastructure and crucially the technical platforms to be able to launch a brand in Europe, navigate all of the challenges around the 28 countries that exist in the main sort of European Union trading block, things like language, how to price correctly, how to go to market, and also creating amazing customer and brand experiences. So, they’re able to do that. And it's actually very low cost for a brand to use them, compared to them setting up the sort of one to 2 million US dollar cost of setting up your own local team and market. So, instead, they can talk to them and they basically act as the brand, they don't see themselves necessarily as an agency, they see themselves as a genuine extension to what the brand does, and in sort of customer facing side of what they do, especially, they're trained by the brands that they work with as well. 

So, if you were to contact one of the brands they work with, you might talk to someone who works at vvast, but actually in effect, the consumer or customer is none the wiser they are being dealt with as they are the brand. And they take great pride in that and they feel like they’re huge sort of custodians of that as well. This year, they’re going for a B Corp as well, as mentioned in his bio, and they’re particularly excited about that, because they were able to apply a lot of the learnings from their B Corp, to the brands and make recommendations and how they can be more sustainable and more ethical.

 

Strategies Found That Has Made Your Team Successful to Make Experience Invaluable for the Customers

Me: Amazing. So, I loved what you said about talking to someone from vvast but you didn't know you're talking to someone from vvast, because it was almost like you're talking to someone from the actual company, because that experience was just so seamless. So, I'm sure many of our listeners may have different organisations that they are a part of, and they may outsource some aspects of their business. And so, when you outsource a lot of times, the customer may not necessarily have the same experience across the board, could you share with us maybe two or three things that you found has made your team successful to make that experience so invaluable for the customer that they're not even able to pick up that you are a third party? But you're just all one.

 

Richie stated that is really crucial with the kind of brands they work with as well. So, a lot of high end. So, the expectation from a consumer point of view is that it should be a like a premium, incredible experience. So, the real challenge of it is that if there's if common issues that are coming up, but it's having good software to track, so they use Zendesk as their main platform, but there's others out there, obviously, they're having really good software to track what are their consistent problems that the consumers are contacting them about? And that's where because they own the full 360 user experience, they call it 360 so they can actually change if it's a problem with how you're describing the sizing, for example, on the website might be one specific product. 

And that's particularly important when you're importing products from say, the US where sizing is completely different, and they don't use it, they use Imperial not metric to do it, making sure all those things you address. If it's a really common issue, and it's reoccurring, making sure they have a really clear process that addresses that, so you can actually reduce the amount of inbound you're getting around that particular issue. That's a real kind of big advantage that they have, because they will have visibility. That's definitely the first thing he'd say.  

He thinks as well. The other one is what is really immersing their brand team, sort of customer experience facing team in the brand itself. And again, with a premium brand that they’re working with, they’re very fortunate that they actually extend the training, the onboarding, and also product update training with their team. And that's been really instrumental in terms of their success. So, often the US team will just treat their team exactly as an extension, which is exactly what you need. And likewise, they will share their excitement. So, if there's a product update, for example, that addresses one of the key issues, because a lot of these products, they're driven by the consumer. So, if there's a key issue that comes up like the latch is too tight or too hard to close on a key kind of piece of luggage, for example, when there's an update, and there's a really great accessory that comes up that addresses that issue, their team are the first to know from those brands that there's a brilliant kind of solution to this. And that is just a great example that the brand is listening to the consumer, which is again why consumable repeat with a brand. 

He thinks the third one he'd say is that glue that exists between the trading team that they have who actually trade the eCommerce websites and also things like Amazon, and the insights that team kind of getting so there’s a great trust there. So, if there's an issue with a website, which he’s happy to say doesn't happen very often, they their trade team will be the first to tell their customer experience team that there's an issue. 

And it might be on one particular payment type, for example, like Apple Pay has gone down or MasterCard isn't working in Germany for some reason, or whatever it is, their trade team are very quick to tell the customer experience team just say really quickly, “Okay, we're aware of this issue. We're working on it, here's a resolution, can we help you with an alternative payment method?” That kind of thing really. So, those are probably the kind of biggest things and it really leverages their 360 model, because they've got that visibility across the entire business, so to speak.

  

Me: Amazing. So, you mentioned the glue, the technology and the training and development. And that's kind of how your methodology works in order to ensure that seamless experience. That's really, really good.

 

Important Factors to Grow a Profitable and Purpose Led Business Focused on Transparency and Communicating Values

Me: Could you also share in working with your company vvast and all of your high end clients and brands across different countries across Europe, what are maybe I would say, two things, let’s narrow it down to two that you believe is important to grow a profitable and purpose led business focused on transparency, and communicating values, because especially the values part. Because you're working with many different people, many different personalities, we're all socialised and grown up differently. So, how do you kind of get everybody on that same page, and then your consumer buys into those values that you have for your organisation and they can see those values permeate in your day to day interactions with you?

 

Richie stated that it's such a kind of question of now. And often it's very pertinent to the kind of the zeitgeist of purpose led really, and we're in a smoothness age now, especially the internet and post COVID, where the brand is the biggest brands in the world, and even the smaller ones and operations like vvast do as well. If you're going to embark on a purpose led mission and use things like the amazing movement is being fought to make it a transparent process, you absolutely 100% have to live and breathe your kind of company vision fundamentally, that's the most important thing. And he thinks anchoring it back to your company vision, and reminding your team of what you're doing and why you're doing, it not only creates a feeling of belonging and excitement in that you're on this bigger mission, it isn't just about making profit, it's actually about what excites their team so much, him especially that really makes him happy about that, it's not just making money thing, is that you can really feel like they're on a mission that is going to potentially not just influence the brands they work with, but ideally, also influence everybody else, their peers in the industry. And our peers could be either competitors to what vvast does, and there's not many at the moment, or the actual competitors of some of their brands that go, okay, that's a really good idea that if, for example, they deploy a type of version of Shopify, there's much more low energy for the end user and also for the hosting environment that they use. 

So, they're willing to share how they've actually achieved that, in the same way that Volvo did when they designed the seatbelt, they made the Payton open source that meant the whole car industry could then adopt that and save millions of lives.

So, they feel like they're in a place where they can create just a great passion for what they did in terms of like, they can address the climate emergency, they can start to, or at least be part of that solution to the climate emergency. They can start to say to people, that they've got a way of engaging ethically in eCommerce selling techniques.

And all those things join back to this kind of common purpose that exist in the business itself, it's phenomenal how the B Corp kind of framework gives you this, what it does is literally a framework to actually implement some of the findings and learnings to actually get you to turn your company mission statement into a set of values that then your team will do and live day in day out and you can attach those to the team objectives. 

So, if someone has a team objective for that particular quarter, for example, an individual has an objective, you can say what company value are you actually going to attach that to and you can benchmark it. And they actually have an award that they give out once a month, it's called a vvasterfy award, it’s quite bizarre in a shaped you mentioned surfing earlier, he’s not sure if you're familiar what a shackle is, which is you stick your two fingers up on each end of your palm, but your thumb out and then your finger out the other way and you sort of do a shackle, which is a surfing thing.

 

Me: I've never surfed before, but I'm a good swimmer.

 

Richie stated that It's basically a golden shackle that they give to people each month who have demonstrated the best, they've exemplified their values in the best way. And an example of one of their values is for planner and community. And it's like demonstrating how they've managed to lower impact to improve their impact on obviously on the planet, but also on their community as well. 

And those are great ways to meet. They’ve given away a month's worth of charity days in terms of their teams, so each team member can spend a day and maybe two, if it's a great sort of thing if the workload or allows working at a charity that they believe in, or an NGO. And that's another example, they are just living that example by their kind of company mission, really. And it's all made possible, really by that whole B Corp sort of framework that they can then report against, really. Those are probably the biggest ways that they demonstrate that purpose, really.

 

App, Website or Tool that Richie Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Richie stated that that's a great question. So, where they're at now, and he promises, it's not an advert. He thinks a tool that is a kind of a playbook, where they store all of their insights and their processes in terms of a new product launch, or a new starter joins, or someone leaves or whatever it is, is a platform called Asana. And they've gone through two or three tools that have a similar to Asana. But they now using it to a point now where they literally can just fire up all kinds of processes and tasks, simple things that if there was a data, he’s just thinking now in terms of the more customer centric stuff. If someone did a data request, “Okay, I want you to delete all my data that this brand has on me. Can you confirm your do that within in 48 hours?” Which is what the legislation says they need to do. So, they have a process, they just fire up in Asana and bosch it’s done, the team, they are pulling in the right sort of way. He thinks that that has been a game changer for them. And it exists the costs in a web browser and also in app on desktop as well. So, that's probably the one he would choose out of all of them.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Richie

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Richie stated that the classic one at the moment, he’s referencing quite a lot at the moment is The Power of Why, which is a Simon Sinek book, which is was probably his first kind of big mass market success, he'd say. And that talks about going right back to what is your purpose? Why does your company even exist? What gets you out of bed? It literally will pull you right back out of all of the kind of mode you’re in to a to go on that journey about literally why is so important, and is definitely worth a follow on LinkedIn, if you can, Simon Sinek he's really great. And he is now really sort of taking things, his success with COVID was phenomenal, is taking it to the whole next level, and what you can do, but that's a great, great book to start with. 

He thinks another one is one called Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, which is the story autobiography, actually, written by the founder of Nike. And just on a personal level, but also, we all know about the kind of sacrifices you have to make when you start a business. 

And he encapsulates that whole summary. And also, he should say, is also the founder of Nike as well, which is Phil Knight. And in that book, it takes you on such a journey about him going from bedroom start-up literally from his, his classically educated academic dad questioning why on earth he wants to set up a trainer brand in the first place, all the way through to the end where the business is obviously worth billions.

The most successful kind of shoe and apparel business on the planet, so to speak, really. And he thinks it's a fascinating read, and it's actually very inspiring. He relates to it because of how he's engaged in community in such a clever way, especially through active sports. And they obviously started in running but when diversified, obviously, all kinds of areas like basketball as we all know. So, that's a really inspiring read or recommend that to anyone, even if they're not in the kind of lifestyle, fashion businesses. It's a great read.

 

What Richie is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Richie shared that they are like six years old and that feels like they're older, but feels like at the moment, they're going through the stage where they're really going up from being like teenagers who are probably coming home late at night, and their parents are worried about them sort of thing, to actually go in into this amazing stage where they're going, they're really, really accountable. They've always been accountable at this next level of accountability, where they're now doubling down on their processes, how teams are iterating things. And they've been on this amazing journey with an external company, he’s going to name drop them, which they're based in Bristol, a company called Lunos. And a good friend of his who runs it as well, two friends of his, and these guys have done an amazing job in terms of coming in and evaluating where they're at as a business and in providing them krushi with these really simple tools to help them transition into this grown up versions of themselves. And the process is called Launchpad. And it's been an amazing, it's gruelling as well, he'll be honest, in terms of how he’s running the company at the same time, you got to keep all your people on the same page, that this journey is worth it. 

But he can really see already from the green sheets, he’s seen already that this process is going to be transformative in terms of how they get on to the amazing work they do for their brands that he internally call this the gold that they're creating, out into the ether to demonstrate all of the value to their brands, because they don't talk about it enough. They see so many things, but the passion doesn't always come out sometimes. And that's just purely a product of people just delivering the day to day and not taking that time, like Simon says to ask what the Why is and go, “Oh, by the way, we've seen this, look at this solution we've got, would you be interested in doing it with us?” So that probably is the single biggest piece and he can't wait to continue on the journey to keep on delivering against that.

 

Where Can We Find Richie Online

Website – www.vvast.net

LinkedIn – Richie Jones

Lunos - www.heylunos.com

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Richie Uses 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Richie stated that he thinks it's probably a quote he just tell himself so when adversity strikes, and sometimes you'll be on top of something that's even more, you've been dealing with, just for the business, you might be in peak trading, or whatever the challenges are, he just tells himself that, “This is what you do, you can do this. You can face this adversity.” And the saying that comes in his head sometimes, it's kind of “This is what you're here to do. And you can do this, you demonstrate this to yourself multiple times that you can just navigate.” If you'd have to stay up until 3:00 am one day and just navigate something because you have to do something you need to do last minute, you can do it. And he thinks it's that reminder that we've got the ability to push on through to that next level, way beyond what you think you can do, mentally and also physically. He learned that from sports especially. So, it's that thing that it's what you were meant to do. And if it's meant to happen, you will be able to do it. That's the kind of thing he tells himself and at the moment he seems to be proving to himself that that he can do that which is a cool feeling.

  

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

 

Links 

·  Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience Webinar – New Date

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May 23, 2023

 Jim Oliver founded Create Tailwind in 1988 in Denver, Colorado. Originally, a full-service financial planning firm, Jim and his team weathered two major corrections on Wall Street and pivoted Create Tailwind’s focus to building wealth beyond Wall Street. Teaching clients to create wealth without Wall Street brokers and financial planners took off, to most people becoming their own banker was something they couldn't envision.

Most people park their money in qualified plans or with a broker and hope that the money grows. Jim reminds his clients that hope is not a strategy. He teaches his clients that becoming their own banker means they accumulate money, and they deploy it to make it even more money, this is the mind shift.

Under Jim's leadership Create Tailwind exploded to become a multilocation nationally recognized firm helping 1000s of individuals and businesses around the United States. 

 

Questions

So, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share with our listeners a little bit about their journey, how they got to where they are today. So, could you take some time on share that with our listeners, Jim?

Could you take some time to share with our listeners a little bit about your company – Create Tailwind? I know I read about it in the bio, and in terms of what you help them doing, just share with us, what are some of the value-added opportunities that you are offering to your clients?

What are some of the key things that you try to do with your clients in terms of supporting them? I know you offer the courses and you're teaching them a theory. But let's say for example, you're working with a client, this mindset that you're trying to encourage or envision, it's not clicking for them. What are some strategies or techniques that you utilise, to kind of get those persons on board to transition them from where they are to where you want them to be?

What are some things that you found, give me three things that you find tend to be general obstacles that prevent persons from reaching their maximum potential when it comes to wealth? And then you listen to all of these podcasts and you listen to all of these or read these books, and they say there's a difference between being rich and being wealthy. How do you get people because if you look them up in the Oxford dictionary, they pretty much have the same meaning. So, how would you differentiate?

Could you also share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Can you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently.

Could you also share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Before we wrap our episodes up, Jim, we always like to ask our guests, could you provide us with a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this code, it kind of helps to get you back on track, if for any reason you got derailed.

Highlights 

Jim’s Journey

Jim shared that he was born in Los Angeles. And he has five siblings, and he was a middle child, but he was given up for adoption. And this is kind of the PG version, but his mother, his birth mother said that she was raped, and her husband thought that she had an affair. He (Jim) found out at 55 years old that he was actually his father. But he grew up in foster care and then he grew up in a very poor area of Los Angeles. 

And he became fascinated with money and he also became fascinated with business owners because he started working in a casket factory when he was 13 years old, swinging a hammer and he watched the business owner and he knew that he lived on the hill of Palace Vertis, which was a foreign country to him. 

It was where people had wealth, they had abundance, they had all of these things, that the people in his neighbourhood, they didn't have any of those things. And he really just was driven by what do those people that live on the hill know and by the beach know and in Beverly Hills know that the people that live in Inglewood and neighbourhoods like that, that they don't know. And he went to school, did everything the way that he was supposed to, learned about Wall Street and investments. And he did that, and he was very successful at building a financial planning firm. 

But then he realized that his clients weren't getting wealthy in Wall Street. And he analyzed all of his clients and he threw out all the ones that got lucky. They were the janitor at Google and they just made millions of dollars. He threw the lucky ones out and he said, “What is it that my clients, my really wealthy clients, what have they done to become wealthy?” And it came down to two things, business owners and real estate. And he changed his whole focus to teach people how to be business owners, and how to own real estate, and how to build cash flow and assets, instead of Wall Street instruments and government-controlled plans.

 

About Jim’s Company Create Tailwind and Value-Added Opportunities for Clients

Me: Could you take some time to share with our listeners a little bit about your company – Create Tailwind? I know I read about it in the bio, and in terms of what you help them doing, just share with us, what are some of the value-added opportunities that you are offering to your clients?

 

Jim shared that the other thing that he realized is that every financial planner in the world is trying to sell something to their prospects, clients, customers, and he didn't like that, he didn't want to sell. So, what he decided is that the reason that he decided to personally start to build cash flow instead of instruments, assets instead of instruments, and not try to build up this lump sum, nest egg, is he became more and more educated about cash flow and assets, and banking, and becoming his own banker, and how he could control the banking function in his life. 

And so, he decided that what he would do is he would just educate other people. So, the way that they serve their clients, and really help them understand the landscape out there, and how to build wealth, is they educate them. They have a community, that's Create Tailwind community. And it's Create Tailwind, because they’re all fighting a financial headwind, and he’s showing you how to turn that around so that wind will actually push you forward, instead of fight against your progress. 

And at the community Create Tailwind, they just teach people, they teach people and the community members teach each other. But they have courses, they have discussions, they have book recommendations, they have book reviews, they have all of these different things that is intended to do one thing, educate their customers, and anybody really that is interested, anybody can join the community for free. And they learn about taxes and how to be more tax invisible, they learn about becoming their own bank, how a bank works, and how you can control the banking function in your life instead of the commercial bank. How your need for finance over your lifetime is much greater than your need for an investment. All of these things, they’re basically teaching people so that if they choose, they can change their mindset. And they can change their path to where they're on the path of wealth, instead of the path of financial slavery, like most people are.

 

Strategies and Techniques Utilized to Transition from Where They Are to Where They Want Them to Be

 

Me: What are some of the key things that you try to do with your clients in terms of supporting them? I know you offer the courses and you're teaching them the theory. But let's say for example, you're working with a client, this mindset that you're trying to encourage or envision, it's not clicking for them. What are some strategies or techniques that you utilize, to kind of get those persons on board to transition them from where they are to where you want them to be?

 

Jim stated that that's a great question. And what they do is they do Zoom meetings, even way before COVID. They did Zoom meetings, and originally it was WebEx back in the day. And they will get on there and they will do Q&A…whatever questions you have….whatever things aren't making sense. And he has this board that he draws on, it's a graphics board.

And he finds that people learn visually, a lot more than they learned verbally and so, when you're thinking about money and the way money flows, and the way that money works, they need to see numbers, they need to see the flow. So, he draws that out, or the team draws that out for them. 

And they can see it and they can say, “Hey, but I don't understand this. I don't understand that.” They can ask any question they want. They do that individually and one on one on a Zoom meeting, so you don't have to ask the question in front of a group. 

They also occasionally do live Q&A meetings where the community will ask questions live, and they answer those questions live. And so, that's really the big focus is that and they’re always building more content, more content to help their clients understand what they need financially out there in the world, and how to protect themselves and their families and their businesses.

 

Obstacles Preventing Persons from Reaching Their Maximum Potential When it Comes to Wealth

Me: Now, Jim, you've been doing this for quite a bit a years now. What are some things that you found, give me three things that you find tend to be general obstacles that prevent persons from reaching their maximum potential when it comes to wealth? And then you listen to all of these podcasts and you listen to all of these or read these books, and they say there's a difference between being rich and being wealthy. How do you get people because if you look them up in the Oxford dictionary, they pretty much have the same meaning. So, how would you differentiate?

 

Jim shared that the first is show them what is happening now. If you put money in a 401 K, or an IRA, or some government backed programme, that has rules, penalties, all this stuff, or if you put money in Wall Street, here's what's happening to it. Here's how inflation works. Here's how fees and expenses inside those funds work. Here's how commissions work. And so, it's kind of like, if you know what's happening, you'll know what to do. So, the first thing if somebody doesn't realize what's happening to their money, he has to show them how a bank works. And so, they kind of show them what really is going on. 

The second thing is, the second obstacle is that we've been filled with noise. And the funny thing is, he heard this number, and he really think that it's accurate, is that we see 5000 marketing messages a day. Now, it could be on TV, it could be a logo on somebody's shirt. But all of that is designed to get our money to flow away from us. We see a shirt that we like on TV and it has the logo, and you think I want that shirt, I want those shoes, somebody is wearing shoes, they're driving a car, if you think of all the input, all of that noise every day, but there's nothing that's designed to help us increase our cash flow. It's designed to get us to flow our money away from us to someone else. And the difference between wealthy people and poor people, is wealthy people get money to flow to them. And poor people, all their money flows away from them. And so, that's the second obstacle. 

And then the third obstacle is, “Okay, I understand what's happening, I get that I've been taught the wrong things about money. But I don't have anybody to help me, I don't have anybody to help me get from where I am to where I want to be.” So that's the third thing that he would say is that you have to find a coach. Whatever community that you're in, it doesn't matter whether you're in a lower income community, inner city, rural, it doesn't matter. There are people in that community that are buying assets that own the apartment complexes, the mobile home parks, the RV parks, the businesses, they own those things, and they are more than happy to help you if you ask. 

So, the third thing and how what he really believe that you have to have is you have to have a guide, you have to have a coach, if you think about it, in every movie that you've ever seen, the person that has a problem meets a guy, they need a coach and that coach helps them overcome their dilemma. Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer of all time, he has a coach and the reason is, is that so the coach can help him learn how to do what he does better and better and better and give him the confidence. 

So, those are the three things that he believes that are obstacles for people to grow their wealth and have everything in life that they want and have that abundant mindset that is limitless in creating cash flow to them.

 

App, Website or Tool that Jim Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about online resources that he cannot live without in his business, Jim shared that he would say that it’s Zoom, because that's how they communicate with their clients and there are other competitors, but he finds Zoom to be the easiest for his clients and customers to use. It doesn't require that you join or login or anything else, you can just go to the www.zoom.us and plug in the meeting and plug in the password if there is one, and you're in the meeting. And you could be meeting with anybody at any time 24/7 and you could see the person, the person can share and use a whiteboard, and they can do all kinds of things. So, that's the one thing that he wouldn't be able to operate his business without.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Jim

When asked about books that have a great impact, Jim shared that he'll give one from a really long time ago and it always kind of surprises people, but it's Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition and it's by Richard Bach. He's the author and they used to, he’s (Jim) 57 years old, so they don't make kids read this anymore. But here's the gist of the book is Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a seagull and seagulls don't have very exciting lives, they eat, they fly from here to there, they don't do anything.

But Jonathan, he wanted to fly and do stunts, and he wanted to go out and see what was out there in the world. Well, when you grow up poor in Los Angeles, and you think, is this it? Do I just have to stay here and accept my life as it is, and be poor the rest of my life? Well, Jonathan Livingston Seagull taught him, “No I don't, I can go out and do other things. I can be anything that I want to be.” And so, that book had a huge impact on him. 

And then the second one is Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! By Robert T. Kiyosaki, because it gave him an example, he didn't like school very much. And so, if the path, the only path was to study hard, get a good job, get straight A's in school, and then work his way up the ladder and hope that he was in the good old boys’ club. He doesn't think he could have done that. But Rich Dad, Poor Dad showed him an alternative, it showed him a different way that it didn't really matter about his formal education, it was how he educated himself outside of school, the mentors that he had, the people that had what he wanted, and that would share with me how they did it.

 

What Jim is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Jim shared that the one thing that he’s really excited about is he has a book coming out in June 17, 2023. And like he said, he struggled in school. So, he was a stutter, he didn't write very well. So, for him to write a book, he’s really excited and proud of the fact that he’s telling his kind of life story in the beginning, in his humble beginnings, and kind of where he is now. And then if he can do it, you can do it. And so, he’s excited to share that message with people and give them the foundation of how to start today to change their lives.

 

Me: Nice. So, we will definitely ensure that we are able to keep in touch with you so that we will have first dibs on that book when it is released.

Jim stated that he would love that.

 

Where Can We Find Jim Online

Email – jimoliver@createtailwind.com

Website – www.community.createtailwind.com

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jim Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jim shared that one thing is there's an old quote that he changed it was, “Adversity introduces a man to himself.” Now, that's an old quote. So, he says, “Adversity introduces a person to themselves.” And it reminds him that in the Bible, it says that we are going to have trials.

And that trials, it says that, that those trials will introduce us to ourselves, that it will create confidence, that it will create strength, that God is like stirring this pot of silver and getting rid of the impurities until He can see His reflection in us. And so, getting rid of those impurities is adversity and obstacles and they just make you stronger, they make you who you are, so when you're in the middle of it, just remember that that adversity is going to introduce you as a person to who you really are and it's only going to make you stronger.

  

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

 

Links

·  Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition by Richard Bach

·  Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Rheir Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! By Robert T. Kiyosaki

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Service

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience Webinar – New Date

Register Here

 

May 16, 2023

Lisa loves a good puzzle. After witnessing the confusion that ensued after new technology systems were integrated into offices in the 90s, she didn't panic, she saw an opportunity to establish effective processes that support employees and businesses grappling with evolving technology. Then a pattern emerged: internal teams kept failing to communicate with one another in the wake of change. To respond, Lisa founded Lcubed Consulting. As CEO of Lcubed, Lisa helps companies align people, processes, and technology to utilize agility as a strategic advantage and acknowledge change in a business constant.

Her secret sauce to success is leveraging key elements of Project Management, Process Performance Management, Internal Controls and Organisational Change Management to build teams with the skills and capabilities to drive strategic results.

Lisa is the #1 best-selling author of Future Proofing Cubed, a book she created to share her insights on productivity, profitability, and process refinement in business. Lisa's goal is to prepare her clients with the skills, capabilities, and self-reliance they need to thrive in the future without Lcubed’s guidance. With this notion, she has broken the typical consulting model.

Lisa holds her Bachelor of Science in Electronic Media Management from Northern Arizona University. She is a Project Management Professional and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Lisa enjoys spending free time with her family and basset hounds.

 

Questions

We'd like to hear in your own words, did you arrive on this journey? How did you get to where you are today? Could you share that with our audience?

Now, could you tell us a little bit about your company, Lcubed Consulting and also your book, Future Proofing Cubed?

If you could share with our audience maybe you could skew it down to a particular type of industry, maybe 1 to 3 things that if you're really trying to run a successful business with the right people, what are 1 to 3 tips that you'd recommend in terms of the culture and the environment needs to be existing for you to attract and keep the person that you want?

Emerging out of the pandemic, what has been your experience with some of your clients in terms of customer experience, have you seen customers maybe be more demanding for service experiences or delivery? Are they putting on their foot to ensure they're getting a certain type of service? Or have you seen maybe a more relaxed type of customer, what has your experience been with your clients as well as you as a customer yourself?

So, I would also like for you to share with our listeners, Lisa, what's the one tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that you've read recently, or even a book that you read a very long time ago, that has had a big impact on you.

Could you also share with our listeners, Lisa, let's say, we have listeners who are business owners and managers who feel like they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. So, the people are just not motivated. If you're sitting in a room with that person right now, what's the one piece of advice you would give them to have a successful business?

Could you also share with our listeners, what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share with us a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed. Do you have one of those?

 

Highlights 

Lisa’s Journey

Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about how they got to where they are today. So, I know that your bio kind of gives a pretty good summary of how it is that you got to where you are today. We'd like to hear in your own words, did you arrive on this journey? How did you get to where you are today? Could you share that with our audience?

  

Lisa stated that because the journey really is the story, it's what matters in our personal lives, our professional lives. She is an accidental entrepreneur, she left college with the desire to find safety and security in a corporate job, she was looking for a place where she would go to work, she would have paid vacation time, she would have bonuses, she would have things that seemed like they would give security. And those were important to her because her parents were entrepreneurs. And that journey isn't always a smooth one. 

And so, she wanted something that she perceived at the time to be easier and to be safer. Fifteen years into that journey, she realised it was the early 2000s. And actually, things were a little difficult. And it was in 2008 and 2009, she was working for a start-up, it was her dream job, it was everything she had hoped that it was going to be, she was building a project management team, they were growing and scaling and going to do amazing things until she looked around and realised that every executive leader had built a fiefdom of external consultants who are coaching and guiding and advising them on how to protect their fiefdom. And none of them were working with each other and it was not safe and it was not secure and the economy tanked. 

And she looked around and said, “Oh my gosh, I can do something better.” And in that moment, she became an entrepreneur, and started a business and it’s 14 years later, it has not been seamless, it has not been without obstacles and challenges. But it's been fantastic because she’s the one designing the journey and the bumps in the road are learning moments, and she wouldn't change anything. It's been great.

 

About Lisa’s Company Lcubed Consulting and Lisa’s Book Future Proofing Cubed

Lisa shared that Lcubed was born out of that frustration that she had watching consulting teams come into environments over her entire career and land and expand. And she would see that they were in these environments under the auspices of helping the client, but really what they were doing was growing their revenue stream. And she finds that somewhat abhorrent and counter to what consulting is supposed to be about. And she decided that she wanted to do things differently. She wanted to take all of the knowledge and the skills and the experience that she had built up in larger corporations, learning and understanding the impact of Project Management, Process Management, Organisational Change, and using all of those tools and capabilities to help her clients deliver better products and services for their clients, while building self-reliance so that she can take herself and her team eventually out of that equation. She didn't want them to become dependent on her. 

The book Future Proofing Cubed: The Definitive Guide to Improving Productivity, Refining Processes, and Bolstering Profitability takes their business model, what they call adaptive transformation, and sort of explains how they use all of those baked best practices in a much more effective and efficient way so that companies can build those skills and capabilities without large investments in internal teams, or large consulting groups.

 

In Running a Successful Business - Tips to Attract and Keep the Person That You Want

Me: Now, in an organisation, as a consultant, I'm sure you know, there's some key things that a lot of companies still struggle with, having the right kind of synergy among the team. A lot of organisations struggle sometimes with recruitment, getting the right person and actually keeping them. And so, if you could share with our audience maybe you could skew it down to a particular type of industry, maybe 1 to 3 things that if you're really trying to run a successful business with the right people, what are 1 to 3 tips that you'd recommend in terms of the culture and the environment needs to be existing for you to attract and keep the person that you want?

 

Lisa stated absolutely, it may be an oversimplification. But she thinks that knowing what success in the environment looks like. With some of her smaller companies, they do work and they use Lencioni’s idea of hungry, humble and smart, that if you have an employee who has the ability, they're hungry, they want new opportunities, they want to learn, they want to grow, they want to make an impact. If they're humble and able to say I don't know what I don't know. And they're smart, meaning that they can pick up and reader a room and understand what's going on with internal and even with your client engagements. If you have those three things, any technical capability can be taught. But if a person shows up hungry, humble and smart, you can build a team of people who can do anything.

 

Experiences Customers Are Desirous of Now

Me: Great. So, I love those three points that you just brought across. So, we've identified the three things we want to ensure that the team member has and as you mentioned, you can teach any technical skill, I guess it kind of goes back to you really want to ensure you have persons with the right attitude versus aptitude. Because you can't train on attitude, right? But even getting further and deeper into that, our programme is about navigating the customer experience and the experience that the customer has is not just on the outside, but also on the inside. And I'm a firm believer that if you really want to have a strong customer experience, it starts from within. If it's strong internally, then it's quite easy for your employees to perpetuate, and relive that externally with your actual clients that are paying, they're the reason why you're in business. 

And so, what has your experience been? We've just emerged out of the pandemic, some countries are still feeling somewhat of the effects of it. I mean, COVID is not completely gone. But what has been your experience with some of your clients and wherever you are in, in which part of the world in terms of customer experience, have you seen customers maybe be more demanding for service experiences or delivery? Are they putting down their foot to ensure they're getting a certain type of service? Or have you seen maybe a more relaxed type of customer, what has your experience been with your clients as well as you as a customer yourself?

 

Lisa shared that there's so many things in that to play with. She wants to play with the language right, that the experience starts within. She absolutely agree with that, that internally, we have to understand the experience we want our customers to have. There's a disconnect, more often than not, when we think from the inside out and think that we know what our customers want and need. And she likes to sort of flip that upside down a little bit and teach her clients to think from the outside in

And what she means by that is actually asking their customers what they want, what they need, so that they’re not making guesses. And they’re not making assumptions, and they’re not applying their own wants and needs onto potentially what their customers wants and needs are. Because oftentimes, when we do that, on the inside, we're really wrong and we don't truly understand. So, starting on the outside and understanding the customer, where are they at? What do they need? And with her clients in the pandemic, they had to do a lot of that because all of their wants and needs in March of 2020 changed dramatically. And so, polling and getting that data and asking the questions so that they can adapt their products and their services to those needs. And it's the need they have today, but the big impact is what does their needs going to be tomorrow, in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. 

During the pandemic, she had the opportunity to watch one of her clients respond to the shutdown. So, the company is a food distribution organisation and they have a national presence in the United States. Their primary job is to take food from a warehouse and deliver it to restaurants, and service providers in hospitals, in airports, in large conference centres, getting food to places where it's going to be cooked and served and sold. Overnight, their business shut down for two weeks or so they thought. And they had the opportunity, they basically froze and did nothing initially, until they brought the leadership team together in this world called Zoom that they had never interacted in. There were people meeting each other, seeing each other in face to face interaction for the first time in 20 years, they've just never been in the same space together. They're panicked, they’re at home, everything is a nightmare. 

And one person is raising their hand literally shaking their hand in front of the camera trying to get everybody's attention to say, “Hey, I have an idea. We have all this food in our warehouses. And it's not getting to people who need to eat, we have produce, we have things that are going to start spoiling and serve no use to anybody if they're rotting in the warehouse. How about we figure out how to take our food and deliver it to shelters, to food kitchens, to places where there are people who cannot get to food, we're going to spoil it off, we're going to write it off, it's going to waste one way or another, why don't we make it a donation.” And for the first 30 days of the pandemic, that national company donated food because their customers, people who need to eat needed food. It had nothing to do with their bottom line, it had absolutely nothing to do with anything except doing the right thing. 

In that first interaction where one individual had an idea, they all thought about it, they experimented about how to make it actually happen. They learned how to innovate on the fly. And that's important because they were speaking to the customers need and for them, it wasn't their customer, it was their customers’ customer, a hungry person. And they were solving a problem that did absolutely nothing to drive their business forward except they did the right thing. 

What they learned from that was how to innovate and how to think outside of the box, think from the outside in. And as a leadership and management team today, they are still doing that on a quarterly basis and trying to evolve their business model in a way that it hasn't in 40 years. It is wow because they thought from the customer's perspective wants and needs, they solved the problem. We need to solve problems.

 

Me: And as you mentioned that, Lisa, that we need to solve problems. That's the primary reason why everyone is in business. I remember when I started my company in 2009, it was because one of my greatest pet peeves was I thought service was just so poor. And I said, I'm going to stop complaining. And I'm going to start being a part of the solution, and try to help these organisations to improve on their service delivery. So, when I go and have interactions, I can walk away with a better feeling than the one that I'm currently having. So, I think every business is solving a problem, whether you're selling a pencil or a fan, or you're servicing somebody's motor vehicle, or you're providing some innovative solution or product that's going to revolutionize the industry for aviation, or whatever it is. I think all businesses are solving a problem for someone. And I think, if we come, as you mentioned, from the outside in, to kind of understand where the customer is coming from, and how can we ease their frustration? How can we make life easier for them, that we can definitely create a better experience, both internally and externally.

 

App, Website or Tool that Lisa Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business

When asked about online resources that cannot live without in her business, Lisa shared that there are so many, but she’s going to go with the one that surprises her the most, because she would never have imagined this, she cannot live without Canva. She would never in a million years have ever thought that she would use a marketing tool, a graphic design, well, now it's kind of an everything tool, right? Presentations, video, audio, whatever, it does it all. She loves it, it makes everything so much faster, so much easier. She’s doing work for herself that she probably should be outsourcing but it's kind of fun to do it and it looks really good. So yeah, she cannot live without Canva.

 

Me: Agreed, Canva has definitely revolutionised the industry and it's made graphic designing not seem like, “Oh, my goodness, I can't do this.” Because simple things that you'd have outsourced as you mentioned, you can do on your own. And they look pretty good. So, you're saving a few bucks there for sure.

 

Lisa stated that saving a few minutes of time even right? So, you outsource it and things turn into, hopefully days, not weeks. But it's easy enough that a person who has no skills in graphic design can turn something out in minutes, it's fabulous.

 

Me: My daughter is in her final year in high school and she's a part of the school newspaper and she sees me use Canva and she asked me if she could, like play around with it a bit to put out some stuff that she wanted to do promoting for the newspaper and for the school. And I guess at that age at 17, you're creative and innovative. But she wasn't even using the platform for like an hour and I was just so surprised that the newsletter that she produced, the video that she was able to generate from all of the pictures that she had taken. I mean, just simply amazing, I'm not saying that she couldn't have used other applications but as you mentioned, Canva kind of found a way to bundle everything in one so you could just do all the things in that one platform.

 

Lisa absolutely agreed. And they made it easy for an end user who has no skills in those areas. There are lots of applications out there and she’ll use video editing as an example, but you have to be very, very, very skilled in the application to make it work properly. And Canva just sort of magically does it for us.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Lisa

When asked about books that has had a big impact, Lisa shared that the number one book that always comes to her mind first and foremost is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson. As leaders and as people, we need to understand how to communicate effectively and that one, it's so foundational to everything that it affects your personal life, your business life, how we show up, how we support others. It's always kind of the first thing that pops to her mind. 

There's another book called Flip the Script: Getting People to Think Your Idwa Is Their Idea by Oren Klaff. And as her business was growing and evolving, and off the top of her head, she can't think of the author's name. But it's taking people who run and have their businesses, sales is part of what we have to do. But we may or may not have ever been trained to be salespeople. And we may or may not even like the connotation of being a salesperson, and Flip the Script really did a lot in her mindset to help her understand that selling is a by-product of building good and effective relationships. 

And that is far more comfortable to her than the idea of going after and creating a sales pipeline and all of the technical things about what selling is, and reminding her that after now 14 years, she obviously must be able to close a deal, or she wouldn't still be doing what she’s doing. And she doesn't have to have the traditional sales process to make it work, because relationships are really where business comes from.

 

Me: Agreed. I liked that statement you made, Sales is a by-product of building effective relationships, that's really, really true. And you said that you got that mindset, or it shaped your mindset towards that from the book called Flip the Script.

 

Advice for Business Owners and Managers who Lack Constant Motivated Human Capital

Me: Could you also share with our listeners, Lisa, let's say, we have listeners who are business owners and managers who feel like they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. So, the people are just not motivated. If you're sitting in a room with that person right now, what's the one piece of advice you would give them to have a successful business?

 

Lisa stated that there's a challenge in that question because if we have a room full of employees who aren't motivated, there is a very flippant part of her personality that wants to say, “Do you have the right people in the room to grow and scale your business?” 

And that's a very scary question because if the answer is, “No, I don't”….then what. 

So, and then, the then what mindset we need to understand what motivates our employees and if we have really good people that have been with us, and are no longer performing, do we understand what's changed in their world?

Do they need a new opportunity, internally within the organisation in a different role? Have they lost the drive to contribute to this type of business?

Do we need to help them find an opportunity outside of this business? 

Which is a scary thought, but sometimes the right one, and just because we're separating from a relationship doesn't mean that we're ending it poorly. And Lisa’s experience, she’s had several examples of times when she’s taken employees, help them find their next opportunity. 

They were so much more successful, her existing team was more successful, and they’ve maintained a relationship over time. So, finding that alignment of what's in it for me, and why are they still there? And if they aren't being fulfilled, are there opportunities to train them, coach them? Give them the opportunity to make a change inside or is it that it's time for them to move on onward and outward?

And there's nothing wrong with that, if that's the right choice.

 

Me: Love it. I've asked this particular question, I don't ask it very often. But I've asked it a few times since I’ve started podcasting and I must say your answer, I really like it's different. Most people didn't take it from the angle that you took it from and I liked the fact that you focused on the fact that maybe we just don't have the right people. And if so, even though it's scary, what can we do to make that transition? Because that's the only way we're going to be able to have success, right?

 

Lisa agreed, absolutely. And the reality is, it's a little bit of everything. You're going to have some people who probably need to move on, you're going to have some people who probably need upskilling….training new opportunities. There's lots of different things, it's never going to be just one thing. But taking on the scary one of “Oh my gosh, I don't have the right people in the right roles.” That's totally addressable.

 

What Lisa is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that she’s working on that she’s excited about, Lisa shared that the one thing that she’s working on right now that's exciting for her is taking the stories that she has from her business and starting to share them as a keynote speaker, and having the opportunity to inspire through some of her great foibles and some of the successes. 

But the very real journey that she’s had over the last 14 years to help other emerging leaders, potential entrepreneurs, or business owners, be able to attribute and say, “Oh, gosh, I've been there done that.” or “Oh, my God, thank you for sharing that story. I never want to have that experience.” 

And that opportunity and sharing to larger audiences is really a lot of fun. And it's eye opening for her to hear and get the response that something hit and it was meaningful. And hopefully, she’s sharing some golden nuggets along the way that will help them learn lessons from her mistakes rather than having to make them for themselves.

 

Where Can We Find Lisa Online

LinkedIn – Lisa L. Levy

Website – www.lisallevy.com

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Lisa Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that she tends to revert to, Lisa shared that there's a quote, but it's a Hemingway quote that has been butchered by many. And so I'll continue to do it. But it takes from the idea that if we break something, if we break a bone in our body, when it heals that spot on that bone is stronger than the original bone around it. And so, when we're having difficult times, the purpose and the reason that it resonates for her is that we can learn from our hardest moments. She likes to think of everything as an experiment and it's not about success or failure, it's about what we learn from the outcome of the experiment. 

And so, all of those things are always kind of in her mind whirling around in a not coherent fashion, the way that she’s talking right now is very much what's in her head. But it's about being willing to take the risk, do an experiment, if something breaks, it'll heal, and it'll be stronger. And we don't really necessarily fail, we learn things so that we can make different choices the next time. And those are the things that drive her forward every day.

  

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

  

Links

·  Future Proofing Cubed: The Definitive Guide to Improving Productivity, Refining Processess, and Bolstering Profitability by Lisa Levy

·  Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson

·  Flip the Script: Getting People to Think Your Idea Is Their Idea by Oren Klaff

 

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May 9, 2023

Scott Baradell is a writer and entrepreneur who grew his PR agency Idea Grove, with business generated by its popular blog. Idea Grove is one of the top 25 tech PR agencies in the United States, a three-time Inc. 5000 company, and an inc. Best Workplaces in 2021 and 2022. 

In 2020, Scott started a second blog, Trust Signals, to provide news, analysis, and practical advice on what it takes to build trust with customers and the public in today's post-truth world. The blog inspired and culminates in this book.  

Before Idea Grove, Scott was the chief communications officer for two Billion Dollar companies. He's the co-founder and CMO of a venture-backed start-up and an award-winning journalist. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife Maria, and children, Juliet, Benjamin, Jack, Christopher and Maggie.

 

Questions

Even though I read your bio, which is a formal description of who you are, we love for our guests to tell our audience in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today. So, could you share that for us?

So, can you tell us a little bit about your book Trust Signals, maybe two or three themes that the book talks about and why it's important if you're running a business to be aware of some of these things?

What do you mean by post-truth world?

Why do you think trust is so crucial for people when they're making a decision? And do you think it has increased or decreased in recent years?

What are maybe three to five things that consumers look out for that gives them that confidence that they can trust, they can rely on this organisation?

We have some listeners who are not very savvy in the online space, but they want to be known as a subject matter expert, what are some steps or trust signals that they could be successful in that online space?

Could you also share with our listeners what is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently.

Can you also share with our listeners, Scott, what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

here can listeners find you online if they wanted to reach out to you?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote? It kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed.

Highlights 

Scott’s Journey

Me: Okay, so we always like to ask our guests at the beginning of the conversation before we even delve into the real juice of our conversation a little bit about your journey, Scott. Even though I read your bio, which is a formal description of who you are, we love for our guests to tell our audience in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today. So, could you share that for us?

 

Scott shared that like a lot of people, a lot of things happen by accident. He started out, not really interested in business, per se, he was a writer, he was interested in history. In college, he was editor of a college newspaper, and then he got tired of spending time in the library and decided not to become a history professor. So, he had to go find a job, his parents basically said, find a job within two months of graduation or your cut off. So, he use his clips, his writing from the newspaper that he was editing to get a newspaper job. And it kind of went from there. 

He was a journalist for 6 years before he kind of saw the writing on the wall there. And then he went into corporate marketing, which he did for about 15 years and then decided back when blogging and things like that on the corporate side, were first starting to emerge that he wanted to be part of that. 

So, he started his own business at that time. But from one space to the next, it was definitely a journey in an evolution where it wasn't all planned out, it's what he likes to tell his 15 year old daughter as well as just young professionals, it's okay, if it's not all planned out, just go in the direction of what you love, and it should work out.

 

About Scott’s Book Trust Signals

Scott shared that trust signals are just defined as evidence points in the book, he primarily focuses on evidence points online that make you more likely to trust a brand. So, for example, it could be coming across a positive review of a company where the use case sounds similar to how you might use a product or someone you trust, a creator you trust on social media endorsing a company or a media story in which puts the company in a positive light, these are all things that kind of can create a breadcrumb trail that can lead you to a company's website or hopefully, you've reinforced that website with lots of other trust signals like testimonials and case studies and other third parties saying good things about you. 

So, that's really the book is about that idea. And he wrote the book specifically with PR people in mind, because PR people have for 100 years primarily defined their roles as getting media coverage, getting their clients mentioned in the media. And in today's post truth world, there's so much fragmentation that there aren't any shared sources of truth anymore. 

People go to the media and the other sources of information influence that they trust. And so, what he tries to communicate to his profession since he was a PR pro after he left journalism is, in this day and age, you have to move beyond just trying to get stories for your clients in the media, you have to look at all these other kinds of trust signals that together, help to help your clients to win over audiences and to grow their businesses.

 

What Does the Concept Post-Truth World Mean?

Me: So, trust signals are critical as you mentioned to grow your business. You mentioned post truth world and I have kind of an idea of what that concept means but I’d love for you to share with our audience, what do you mean by post-truth world?

 

Scott shared that what he means, is simply that in today's world, as opposed, as recently, as 30-40 years ago, the public doesn't rely on shared sources of truth. It used to be the New York Times was all the news that's fit to print, but now you've got probably a third of the country that says they don't believe a word in that publication. People get on the internet, and algorithms all pointing them towards information that confirms what they already think about things. They go into rabbit holes where they can dive deeper and deeper in a one perspective on things, which could be very different from someone else's and someone else's. And it didn't used to be that way. It used to be that you had a relatively small number of large media organisations that served as kind of the gatekeepers for information, the gatekeepers for public opinion, and it's not like that anymore.

 

The Importance of Trust and Has It Increased or Decreased in Recent Years

Me: And in an organisation, right, you have customers and well, there is the popular saying that people buy from people who they know, like and trust. And I still believe that to this day, despite all of the technology and artificial intelligence and just so much that has advanced I think that concept still remains whether it's an individual or an organisation. Why do you think trust is so crucial for people when they're making a decision? And do you think it has increased or decreased in recent years?

 

Scott shared that well, it's crucial to not just business but everything, you're not going to get in your car and drive to the supermarket if you are worried that the red light at the traffic stop is not going to work or that when the green light goes that a car coming from the other way is not going to go, you're trusting that they're going to stop.

Our whole society, everything we do, is built around this intricate system of trust. Most of the time we don't even think about and you're simply not going to buy anything from someone who you don't trust them, because it's impossible to vet almost any product unless you've already used it and it’s the same product thoroughly enough without believing in the source of the product you're buying in. 

That's kind of the shorthand that all of us use every day to figure out who I should buy from, who I should work with, who I should work for. An employee is going to potentially someone who's looking for job is going to look at their employer’s glass door ratings before they go work there, that's a trust signal. And if they did find a company they want to work for and they put their resume together, they're going to put in all the best endorsements and kudos they can think of and those are trust signals. So, it makes the world go round.  

But you asked, do you think it's decreased? He doesn't think it's decreased because he thinks it's kind of immutable. He thinks that we need it. 

Studies go back to even before the earliest days of mankind, and even to primates and stuff in their hunting rituals, they do trust building rituals before they go out and hunt in a group to make sure that they will support each other and share their kills, for example. So, it's just intrinsic to every form of human relationships. So, a lot of people said, “Oh, it's post-trust, not just post-truth, but post-trust, people don't trust anymore.” And he would say that it’s not trust, a trust deficit so much as a trust displacement. 

In other words, you used to trust certain big institutions that you don't trust anymore. And so, you have to go find something else to trust. It's like, a big example in politics would be Donald Trump, for example. Donald Trump is someone who many, many people would consider very untrustworthy, however, in looking at his following, it's important to understand that clearly one of the reasons he's been able to develop this following is that many of those people had faith and trust in institutions that they lost that trust in. And people can't be without trust, they had to find somewhere else to put it. And they invested their trust in this person. So, in that way, he says trust is displaced, sometimes you're confused about where to put it. But you almost can't live life without putting it somewhere.

 

Things Consumers Should Look Out For That Gives Them Confidence to Trust an Organization

 

Me: So, could you also share with our listeners, maybe, I would say, three to five things that as a consumer you should be looking out for or what are maybe three to five things that consumers look out for that gives them that confidence that they can trust, they can rely on this organisation?

 

Scott shared that he can give you an actual example, from someone who works for him. She had a baby recently, before she had the baby, she and her husband had been planning a nursery and they'd gone over budget for the nursery. And so, they still hadn't bought a crib mattress and so, they just said, “Let's go get the cheapest crib mattress we can find because we busted our budget already.” So, Laurie is her name, she was going to go do that and then she remembered that like a year earlier, before she'd even become pregnant, that there was an influencer, creator that she followed on Instagram, who was talking about the importance of getting a non-toxic crib mattress, and that had stuck in her mind. 

And so, even though her inclination was to just go buy something inexpensive, that stuck in her mind, so she did a Google search on safest crib mattresses. And, sure enough, she could recognize the name of the crib mattress that this influencer on Instagram had mentioned a year earlier. And then once she found that then she looked and looked up all the reviews she could find online, found a bunch of 4- and 5-star reviews. And then that drew her in further and then she found that there was an article in Parents Magazine, saying good things about this crib mattress. 

And then finally she went to the company's website and found out they had a seal from the certifying organisation that was vetting non-toxic, environmentally friendly products. And then finally, she was already on the website and she bought the product. And all of those are examples of things that consumers use as a collection of trust signals that they follow to either make a purchase or whatever destination they’re trying to go to.

 

Me: Brilliant, that's really good. And she did quite a few steps. She did her due diligence thoroughly.

 

And most people do and when he tells PR people and when he tells that story to them, he says, but would she have bought the crib mattress if she had just seen the Parents Magazine article? Probably not. So, why are you only focusing on that? Why don't you give your customer what they want, your customer wants you to help them build trust.

 

Trust Signals that Can Be Used to be Successful in the Online Space

Me: So, let's say for example, we have some listeners who are not very savvy in the online space, but they want to be known as a subject matter expert. Similar to what you were saying, that Instagram influencer was able to lodge that piece of information in her mind, right? And it stayed with her up to a whole year later. What are some things that you could do online to establish trust in an online space? Because it's so hard, there's so much noise, there's so many different platforms. And I mean, I know everyone has their own audience and at the end of the day, if that customer is meant for you, they will come to you because whatever message you're sending out there, your message will be attracted to them. But what are some steps or trust signals that they could be successful in that online space?

 

Scott stated that if someone's interested in becoming a subject matter expert or influencer or building their own personal brand, there's really no substitute for producing great content. People don't know you, they haven't met you in person and they're only going to know who you are, if you show them who you are online. So, he would start by two things, figuring out what channel is most important, are most relevant to your goals that can be LinkedIn. His agency works primarily with B2B tech clients. So, LinkedIn is typically the most important channel. But on your audience, it could be Tik Tok, or Instagram or Twitter or something else. So, it can seem definitely overwhelming out there. So, it's always best to start with a single channel. 

He’ll tell you a channel that he used that helped him tremendously when he was starting to write the book is Quora. Quora is a great channel for questions and answers. And maybe you don't always want to talk about PR and marketing, maybe you want to talk about a movie or something like that, it kind of gets your juices flowing in terms of writing. And what he likes about Quora is that, generally, the comments and the engagement is respectful compared to like a Twitter or somewhere where it can be so nasty. So, for him, everyone's different. But whatever channel you choose, choose one channel to start with, and build out from there. 

He’s seen again, and again, people that start out on TikTok, for example, build a following, they move over and add Twitter, they move over and add LinkedIn or start on Twitter and then add LinkedIn. So, that's definitely the way to go. Don't try to do it all at once. That's the first most important thing. 

And then just like you want to be focused in terms of your channel, be focused in terms of your content. There's so much content out there, it's overwhelming, and half of its being generated by ChatGPT now, so how do you stand out the two ways you stand out, are by talking about the same thing, not the same exact thing, but the same general thing that you're building over and over and over again, because what someone told him once is, by the time you've talked about something 100 times, maybe you might feel tired of it, but the people you're trying to reach are just now hearing it. 

So just keep going, keep trying to find new wrinkles, find new ways to stay excited about it, don't move on to some totally different topic before you even build an audience for the first one. So, he thinks being focused in terms of your channel, and focused in terms of your content are the most important things.

 

App, Website or Tool that Scott Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Scott stated that in his business, they produce a lot of content and content is not very valuable if people aren't seeing it so for him, he’s a huge fan of Google Search Console in their everyday for sure for checking their own two websites. They have Idea Grove, which is his agency, their website, the agency website, as well as the Trust Signals website. He’s looking at that everyday for insights into what content is resonating, what content to produce next, and really helps to inform and drive strategy and they use it for their clients too. He’s got a lot other tools he uses, but that's probably his favourite.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Scott

When asked about books that have had impact, Scott shared that there's a book he read a long time ago, actually in college, which unfortunately, was a very long time ago for him but it stayed with him. And it informed a lot of choices he made since actually. It's a book called Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality, it was written by a historian named Richard Kluger. And he encountered this book, which is a very long one, it's thick, in a yearlong legal history class in college at University of Virginia, and the book was basically a history of illegal cases, which sounds extremely boring. But what it was, that was so amazing, was it was a sweeping history of the entire African American experience as told through the American legal system. 

So, in other words, from Dred Scott to Brown versus Board of Education, everything in between, before and after. He took all of these court cases and told the human story behind them in such a way that it was like reading a novel that you couldn't put down and told him that taking something that someone would inherently think, is not that exciting and making it exciting, is really fun, it's a fun challenge. 

He works in B2B Tech, or his agency, and they work with some clients that work in very arcane spaces, they do this fairly obscure stuff, sometimes they think they're boring, they're like, “Oh, you can't do anything for us, we're too boring, you can’t get PR for us we’re boring.” But to unlock that and capture the story in there, because there's always a story in there somewhere, to capture that, and to have the client kind of light up, because you help them find that is really exciting. And he kind of, in a lot of ways, goes back to that book and how he went from “Oh, boy, this long book of legal cases to wow” this book that he couldn't put down, it's definitely had a big influence on him.

 

What Scott is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Scott shared that something that’s exciting that they’re doing now is they've began offering their first package product, they're a traditional agency, so like lawyers or accountants, they build by the hour, basically, they sell their time, that's what most agencies do. They've never had a product per se, but they found they've had a lot of success with a specific kind of digital PR campaign where they kind of combined PR and SEO, they put out this really cool piece of content, which is a survey, a base piece of content that ties to their clients, industry, and got it gotten a tonne of media coverage and links back to their client site from them. 

But they realised that they could package it up and just sell it separately and do it the same way every time to increase margin on it. And so, they've been having a lot of success selling a product as an agency, this offering and they've never done that before and Idea Grove has been around a long time now and they're all really excited about, doing something they haven't done before, that's always fun.

 

Where Can We Find Scott Online

Website – www.trustsignals.com

He did a lot of the work that led up to the book on that site. Not only that, but if you're interested in the book, but don't want to go out and spend $20.00 on it. He’s excerpted the entire book chapter by chapter on that site for free, and he’s also now started a podcast where he’s breaking down the audio book into chapter by chapter, so, that's available for free. So, all of that if you go to www.trustsignals.com, you can find links to either the audio or text version of the book or Kindle version as well. As well as a lot of other stuff, as well as contact information if you'd like to reach him directly.

  

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Scott Uses

 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Scott shared that there's a great quote by a Japanese poet named Kenji Miyazawa from maybe 100 years ago, but he said, “We must take pain and use it as fuel for our journey.” At times, where he’s had loss or other setbacks that are very hard, and you just kind of want to give up. It's a really good statement of what life really is. 

Life is about resilience, and no one goes through life without having things that they have to endure and suffering. And if you can come out the other side, and burn it as fuel for your journey, he thinks that's a great way to take something hard and turn it into a positive.

 

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

 

Links

·  Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Service

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

 

Our Next Webinar – May 16, 2023 at 10:00 am

 

Register Here

May 2, 2023

Romaine Piper is the Founder and CEO of Call Center Escape - an “Upwork” built for BPO companies. Known for his cross-dimensional approach to company growth, he has helped some of the fastest growing start-ups across Silicon Valley, the U.K, and Europe to identify and hone their top growth levers - adding millions to their bottom line. 

No one would’ve guessed his 6-year remote work journey in customer success, sales and growth hacking started in the Jamaican BPO industry as a customer support agent for Microsoft - which is why he's back to his roots to make BPO companies that are scaling remotely 1.5 to two times more profitable with an industry-first solution.

 

Questions

So, we always like to ask our guests in their own words, if you could share a little bit about your journey, how it is that you ended up on this path?

So, the BPO industry, it's a very evolving industry, an industry with a high level of attrition. What has been your experience as an owner in this industry for attracting the right talent, and actually keeping the right talent?

Could you share with our listeners, seeing that you're helping the BPO to strategically position themselves as a value center versus a call center, what are two or three things that you do to help them get to that point?

What are your views on Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing human capital?

Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Could you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that you've read that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently, that has definitely left a strong mark on you.

Could you share with our audience what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Can you tell our listeners where they can find you online?

Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed.

 

Highlights 

Romaine’s Journey

Romaine stated that as Yanique mentioned a lot about his background, and the whole tech industry and everything. But here's the plot twist, he actually started off pursuing his career in medicine. And he had really high grades, he got a scholarship from St. John's University in New York. But the thing is, even though they're willing to pay half tuition, he still couldn't afford the other half, so anybody out there that's listening, it's not easy to give it up a scholarship that you've worked really hard for, it's very emotional, he experienced like weeks of crying. 

And so, the BPO industry was to him a quote, unquote, fall back period, if that makes sense, where, he just wanted to like dust himself off, put some experience on his resume, and just try to figure out, “Okay, what's next?”

Then he realize this is actually a blessing in disguise, because he worked for Sutherland Global Services, and they placed him on a Microsoft account. Being on the Microsoft account, like fresh out of high school, it's a whole tonne of learning for him. And just to give you like the idea of what it's like, at the time, across all of their customer support teams, they had over 500,000 articles, which is the most he’s ever seen in a knowledge base, ever. 

And so, this was what pushed him from liking the tech industry to literally loving the tech industry to craving, to for having that passion, and also into what allowed him to work with start-ups around the world. Within those four years, customer success, sales, growth, hacking, etc, and to be advising start-ups. He remembered to that his mom, he thinks around 3 or 4 years ago say, “Hey, now that you can actually afford to pay the tuition for medicine, like do you ever consider going back?” And he said, “Hey, I'm pretty good at what I already do. I love it.” And like that ship was long sale. So, anybody else out there with the BPO industry being your fall back period, literally, you just take it serious, do really well, and you'll figure it out.

 

In the BPO Industry – Attracting and Keeping the Right Talent

Me: The BPO industry, it's a very evolving industry, an industry with a high level of attrition. What has been your experience as an owner in this industry for attracting the right talent, and actually keeping the right talent?

 

Romaine shared that Call Center Escape is radically different because they are a call center, they aren't a BPO. What they instead do is they help contact centers to evolve. In other words, to increase their profit per hour per employee, by 150% to 200% by focusing or helping them to strategically focus on two core things, which is their payback period for every new hire. In other words, how quickly can they break even in all the things that they used to invest in that new hire, as well as the employee lifetime value. In other words, how much is their ROI for each employee over the duration of their tenure at the company. 

And so, this is what allows them to help to take contact centers to break away from this traditional cost center model, it just no longer works in this post COVID and post ChatGPT environment anymore, this is a new era. 

So, they help them to shift away from that, and to shift into the new era of what he calls earning more with less. So, that's also why they call themselves quote, unquote, Upwork for BPOs in terms of like to describe what they do, because everybody's familiar with Upwork, even if they're not, they're familiar with their virtual assistants. So, they certainly know the autonomy, they know the approach that they will take now to having a person on their staff, etc, it’s the same exact process when a contact center partners with them is just that the reason why they added built for BPO part to it, it’s because they optimized for those two core things that makes them more profitable.

 

Helping BPOs Strategically Position Themselves as a Value Center versus a Call Center

Me: Could you share with our listeners, seeing that you're helping the BPO to strategically position themselves as a value center versus a call center, what are two or three things that you do to help them get to that point?

  

Romaine stated that to understand that, they first have to mention, what are the core money sucking areas that contact centers usually have to struggle with. So, it's usually three areas, its operations, or what he calls like focusing on pleasing the client, whether it's customer experience, solutions, or investing more in coaching, etc. 

And then you have retention is the second one, which is the largest one. In other words, employee replacement costs. And then also hiring, and training, which is also a huge part of the pie. The thing is, the contact center industry hasn't really been innovative at all since the foundation in most of the areas, it's only been innovative in one area, which is operations. Polishing how they deliver that CX experience, but not really focusing on hiring and training, not really focusing much on retention. In other words, if every single Contact Center Executive wants to wake up tomorrow, and see a 10% yearly annual attrition rate, or $100 new employee costs, the industry wouldn't be in the mess that it’s in today. 

So, those are the things that they focus on, the two core things that especially when you're scaling remotely, it's just harder to solve. 

So, he’ll give you an example of how they do it more strategically. So, let's take hiring. When you add up internal recruiting costs, external recruiting cost, the fact that around 30% of new hires don't make it to production, he even remembers seeing some numbers of around 50% of new hires leaving within 30 days. 

He thinks it's best or in other words, he and his team have decided that the best way to really approach hiring would be from like, how you would see like a grocery shop grow. A grocery shop, for example, which is a really good analogy they tend to use would have a variety of different customer segments, whether it’s from like low value to high value customers. 

So, some customers would spend $100 for the month, some would spend $600 for the month etc. What if you market to only one spending $600 per month. In other words, the high value wants. That same principle can be applied to HR, that same principle can be applied to talent acquisition, where the high valued ones, at least based on their guidelines are the ones over three years of experience and have already been working with like previous Fortune 500 clients.

So, when you market to them, it requires you understanding their motivations and not trying to go after the motivations of everybody across the board. You cannot fight Goliath using the resources that you don't have, in other words, the ones that are at the top, they have all the resources that they need to build these gyms or health centers or anything that you normally see, like the huge corporate BPOs using to attract a lot of people. But if you do the same thing, you're going to crash and burn as a smaller company. And so, what they’re saying is don't try to mimic them, try to out compete them, by competing differently instead of similarly. So, that's one of the ways.

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Replacing Human Capital

Me: So, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation about artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, that's a big thing now since November of last year, what are your views on AI replacing human capital? I do recall us having a previous email conversation where you mentioned that they're building computers with human brain cells.

 

Romaine stated that he doesn't know why he always love talking about this topic. But growth hackers, we tend to see these things like very regularly, whether it's Google Glasses, or even with Crypto, we tend to see these new things and the hype built around them, he thinks ChatGPT is the same thing. 

It's a good product, but they have even better marketing. Because they use the fear of people possibly losing their jobs, to drive the exposure to your product. But growth hackers they always try to realign back to reality. 

In other words, they ask themselves two things, does it move the needle for our business? And another thing that they ask is this something that can be easily adopted amongst the masses?  

They knew that cryptocurrency wouldn't grow radically as other people would put it, because it has a lot of friction just to be a part of it, it’s the same thing with ChatGPT, it doesn't really move the needle when it comes to customer service, because customer service, more has to deal with customer relationships. 

These are things that businesses rely on to get more revenue, to get higher customer loyalty, and all of these other things. When you put something that is at the ceiling or near to the ceiling of what it can do in terms of mimicking humans, in control of your customer relationships, it's not going to end well. 

And a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University mentioned this, they didn't call ChatGPT, but they said AI is nearing its ceiling. And it takes he believes the research said like over a million times more energy just for it to perform exactly like the human brain for 40 minutes, which isn't sustainable at all. 

So, the only way that they can really get to that next level of AI is to merge human brain cells with artificial intelligence, in other words, they call it organoid intelligence, where they use themselves to mimic brain cells or tissue that can operate like the human brain cells, and then to try to configure that or merge that with AI to enhance automation abilities. So, unless that is done, which is around decades from now, or if not a few years, ChatGPT and any other AI tool that's going to be created will just be good at automating processes, and not so good at automating relationships or being creative as human beings because it just doesn't have that ability, it's more of a process based thing and less of a, “Hey, I know exactly what I'm doing” type of thing, because it's only mimicking, that's all it’s doing.

 

App, Website or Tool that Romaine Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Romaine stated that definitely Webflow for sure, it's better than WordPress, in his opinion. WordPress has a few kinks when it comes to like plugins and SEO, especially with technical SEO, etc. but Webflow is more, you’re like, hey, just handle design and we take care of all of that, all of that backend stuff. So, definitely the Webflow.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Romaine

 

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Romaine shared that the one that he always resorts to is Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis. So, Sean Ellis is literally the person from Silicon Valley that coined the term growth hacking. 

This book will allow people just to understand the realities of growth hackers, and why is it that we tend to always aim to look beyond the surface of things. Why is it that we tend to always focus back on the question, does it drive the needle? 

And also, why is it that allows us to be change agents within organizations like with Volkswagen hiring growth hackers to lead their innovation team so that they can take on either Musk and Tesla. So, this book can literally help you to just have a greater appreciation for the work of growth hackers across the world.

 

What Romaine is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Romaine shared that he knows this is going to sound a bit cliche, but definitely Call Center Escape and it's a good reason why, not just because they’re helping contact centers to do what was once impossible such as influencing external retention factors or just finding more innovative ways to increase profitability. But also, because one of the solutions, or upcoming things on their immediate roadmap, at least within this year, is it solves a problem that contact centers usually face that would allow or would push clients to cancelling their contracts. What they’re doing is they’re turning this thing, because he can't really reveal too much right now. 

This solution they’re pushing, they’re enabling for this problem that's been there for decades to no longer have an impact on any contact center that partners with them to scale remotely, which is a huge deal, because that means that they can go into their sales meetings and say, “Hey, we've partnered with Call Center Escape, we have this guarantee. And just like our other clients that are benefiting from it, you're going to benefit from it as well.” 

That's going to lead to them literally closing more deals, and even capturing some of the clients that's been just shopping around for just more providers, so better providers, which has been a lot according to Everest Group's Research. 

And then the last one is, he would say, one of their big hairy, audacious goal. And that is to follow up on research that was released recently, which stated that when you increase employee engagement significantly, you can boost revenue by 50%, and profit by 45%. 

This is a very notable piece of research, because the Head of Global Growth for Salesforce was one of the persons on a team of researchers, which is a huge deal. And so, what they want to do is to partner with researchers of their own to do a follow up on that report with the help of the contact centers that they’ve partnered with to scale and to present this research to her, as well as to Salesforce, so they can get their endorsement to get Salesforce endorsement. 

In other words, to get the leader of the customer experience space endorsement, this would mean that they’re no longer just putting contact centers at the front runner of the contact center of evolution, but it would also mean that they’re changing the way in which they assume instinctively work, which is a pretty big deal. And he thinks with a prestigious universities such as the University of the West Indies that's in the top 1.5% globally, by their side to help with that research, he thinks this quote, unquote, dream will be much easier to achieve. So, to answer the question, he’s very much excited about it.

 

Where Can We Find Romaine Online 

Website – www.callcenterescape.com

LinkedIn – Romaine Piper

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Romaine Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Romaine stated that definitely. He’s not sure how many of the listeners know Charlie Munger, he is Warren Buffett's best friend, they're both billionaires. He has a quote that goes, “Spend each day becoming wiser than you were when you just woke up.” This is powerful.

And Romaine tends to literally live by this quote. It's also why he was able to break into the growth hacking industry. It's an industry where there are lots of people in their 40s and 30s, he hasn't yet hit his 30s and yet still have gotten in only because he spends each day just becoming wiser and wiser at what he does. So, it works.

  

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

 

Links

 

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

 

Our Next Webinar – May 16, 2023 at 10:00 am

 

Register Here

 

Apr 25, 2023

Brad Hawkins has been with ServicePower:Field Service Software since 2004, where he currently serves as Senior Vice President of products and solutions, overseeing operations, development and product management. He's a long-time veteran in the world of field service technology and Brad brings more than 20 years of experience in workforce management software. 

 

Questions

Could you share a little bit about their journey, how is it that you got to where you are today. And just in your own words, why you're doing what you're doing and how you got there.

Could you explain to our listeners a little bit about what field service is exactly? Maybe just break down some examples of what types of work does that entail?

What has your experience been with field service? And do you find it differs based on maybe the culture of the country? Or how do you optimize for a great experience with all of those variables that are so uncontrollable? 

Can you share with us what you've seen AI's role been in elevating field service to create better customer experiences?

Could you also share with us maybe I would say let's say 1 to 3 different types of solutions that you've seen that have been pretty innovative in the whole field service space? Have you seen things being done differently, more efficiently? Are there trends that you're seeing you think organizations should be tapping into more in order to improve on their service delivery? Or has your company been pioneering that in any way?

Could you share with our audience what's the online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in running your business every day?

Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently, but it definitely has impacted on your professional competencies as a Chief Solutions Officer?

Could you also share with our listeners, Brad, what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Where can listeners find you online?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you’ll tend to revert to this quote? It kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed.

 

Highlights

 

Brad’s Journey

Me: Now, Brad, before we start off our conversation with our guests, we always like to give them an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about their journey, how is it that you got to where you are today. And just in your own words, why you're doing what you're doing and how you got there.

 

Brad shared that it's an interesting journey for him as somebody who's been with ServicePower for a long time. And in field services in general, even longer. Because he started out as a self-taught programmer, he had sort of one other career job before coming to the field service world, which was all about data management, he worked down in the Caribbean, where they had very innovative ways, this was back in the 90s, of how they captured data across various mechanisms, the biggest being intelligent character recognition, where you're scanning things, and he can intelligently read what he can decipher off of a piece of paper.

 

And in that job coming to an end, he came back from living in the Caribbean. It was in need of finding work and he ended up at a place called Key Prestige, which was then acquired by ServicePower but that was where they built a warranty management platform.

 

And that was his first foray into the world of field service. It was understanding, there's this world out there of workforces that are out in the field, how do you optimize them best? How do you use an employee versus an independent contractor and then building out that initial platform, they then became part of the ServicePower world.

 

Along that journey, he ran development. He’s since run their consulting and professional services organizations. He’s on his second tour running product. But they then combine those platforms, again, with the sort of the ServicePower ecosystem to provide all of these various ways of field service solutions where sort of a big differentiator of ServicePower is do I work with an employee workforce? Or do I work with an independent contractor? And what's the best way to do that?

 

So, just over time, he’s had new and interesting challenges at ServicePower, he’s been able to take on other areas. And he’s got to work basically, across the business. He runs product, but he still works very closely from a development standpoint. He’s working with marketing and sales all the time. So, it's still exciting to him as a long timer but that's kind of how he got there.

 

What is Field Service?

Me: So, you've done a lot of work in field service. Could you explain to our listeners a little bit about what field service is exactly? Maybe just break down some examples of what types of work does that entail?

 

Brad shared that he'll give a couple of examples of some industries. But specifically, when you think about, I'm an end consumer and I have a product or a service that requires someone to come out and do some type of service. And there are organizations then who have these workforces that they leverage. 

So, an example would be very simple a homeowner example. I'm in my house, I'm an in consumer, I've got a refrigerator, it breaks, who do I call? Is it in warranty? Is it under a service contract, depending on that, that's going to determine, let's say it's Electrolux, I'm going to call them about my fridge, I'm having an issue, it's not cooling.

They make the decision, oh, we're going to send a resource to your house to fix that. 

So, the entire process of entitling that service event, the transparency to the consumer of everything that's going on, if you think about those events happening on a larger scale, the optimization of that workforce to gain efficiencies, identifying contractors in the moment to say who's the right guy to go out and run this job, ensuring people are getting reimbursed for their work properly from the proper organization. And again, just to come back up a little bit high level there, think of that across multiple industries. 

So, major appliance, consumer electronics, actually anybody who has a home warranty on any products in their home, the insurance industry who has adjusters for you may have a catastrophe event and have a need to call up your homeowners’ insurance, they're going to come out and do inspections. It can get larger, apartments, facilities, they have needs for workforces to come in and do inspections, repairs, any of that really. 

So, it's any organization that has a field workforce, whether that workforce is employed, or they're leveraging independent businesses. The goal of a field service platform should be how do I optimize that? How do I ensure a world class customer experience along the way? How do I defend my brand along the way? But that's high level.

 

Me: So, you touched on quite a few things. So, field service is definitely something I believe that all consumers at some point will have to engage in throughout the course of their lifetime. How has it been for you on the end of as you mentioned, optimizing to get the best experience when you have to deal with so many different personalities. And I hear you mentioned that you lived in the Caribbean for a while, would you mind sharing with our listeners, which Caribbean island or country that was?

 

Brad stated that he was going to ask, he feels like Yanique’s accent got to be Caribbean, he could be wrong. But yes, I lived in Grenada for about a year.

 

What Has Been Your Experience with Field Service?

Me: So, I am Caribbean, I'm Jamaican, and I am currently in Kingston, Jamaica. Here in Kingston, Jamaica is listening to you speak just now about the fact that you would have a fridge for example, and the fridge breaks down and you call the person that you purchased the fridge from, especially if the fridge is still under warranty. I have found, for example, in Jamaica, contract persons like plumbers, carpenters, painters like those kinds of trades people, they are highly unreliable. They tell you, they're going to come tomorrow and probably you’ll see them in another two weeks, you have to be constantly following up with them. And I find the service experience to be extremely poor. What has your experience been? And do you find it differs based on maybe the culture of the country? Or how do you optimize for a great experience with all of those variables that are so uncontrollable?

  

Brad shared that culture and geography does matter, it absolutely matters. Again, as somebody who lived in the Caribbean, he knows the differences there. As a company, ServicePower, they very prominent in North America, but also in Europe, they rolled out in multiple countries in Europe. The geography and sort of the interaction that the customer can have, can change. But the key that they try to push along the way is, you're going to have a better experience, if you understand how best to interact with the resources involved, or he’ll give you a word that they use in the product world is the personas involved. 

So, he has to understand that he has an end consumer who has expectations of a level of service, he has to provide a way for that consumer to have full transparency of everything that's going on. One of the things he thinks is, in our world today, it's very clear that consumers, they want to know up to the minute what exactly is going on in any event they're doing whether it's where's my pizza that's on the way to my house? Where's my Uber? Same thing. 

When he books a technician to come out to his home, he wants to know everything that's going on, if he's trying to order a part and it's delayed, you have to give full transparency to that. 

That's better than not hearing anything, it's like you said you're constantly having to follow up. So, one of the key things is to have a system that is very proactive and is going to inform the consumer and keep them in the loop of everything that's going on all the way up to the point of “I'm on my way, I'm in route.” And ensuring that the resource that you do send, how do I make sure in the moment, that that's the best possible resource that's going to provide the best possible outcome for that end consumer. 

And again, that's all about what the ServicePower platform does is it understands whether it's an employee or a contractor, if it's a contractor, who is the contractor that is performing to the level that I expect them to, so I can rate and rank them. It's again, it's really about those principles.

 

AI’s Role in Elevating Field Service to Create Better Customer Experience

Me: Brilliant. So, you've mentioned optimizing for a better customer experience and the fact that you have real time up to date information for the client so they know every step of the way what's happening, as you mentioned, if the person is en route, if a part hasn't been ordered, that kind of stuff. So, artificial intelligence is pretty big now. There's a ChatGPT, there's Bing search engine.

There are lots of them and lots of organizations are using the AI to integrate into their current systems to make it smarter, to make it bolder, to make it more informative for consumers.

Can you share with us what you've seen AI's role been in elevating field service to create better customer experiences?

 

Brad stated absolutely, and he’ll add another term in there along with AI, which is machine learning. It's very much in the forefront of what everybody's doing these days. But in the world of field service, again, if you think of that service event, and somebody, whether they make the phone call, they go on a website to schedule service for self-service, it's in that moment, based on what he knows about that event. What can I predict? That's what AI and machine learning offer in their world. And that's the biggest one right now is, if he knows it's this product, this model, this is the description of what is being told to him that's wrong and he can even then look at past repair history, how can he just use AI to predict? 

Well, the technician, he needs to send out likely needs these three parts. Or he can triage them, he can give them some information to say, try this first, try that. And it's using AI and machine learning to make those intelligent predictions. What they’ve really learned about it is, people are using historical data to do that today, it's really about building the feedback loop of as you continue to get that data and ensure that the model you've created continues to learn over time. 

But again, another good field service term for this is if you can make those predictions intelligently and he can send a tech out with everything he needs ahead of time, that ensures a first-time fix. Because again, imagine when your contractor comes out, he looks at it, he goes, “I don't have the parts on the truck. I'll reschedule you for next Tuesday.” That's a bad experience. So, using AI and machine learning, they can make the predictions of how do I ensure you have all the tools you need so that when you get on site, you are insured of doing a first time quality fix, because that will lead to a happy customer.

 

Innovative Solutions in the Field Service Space

Me: Could you also share with us maybe I would say let's say 1 to 3 different types of solutions that you've seen that have been pretty innovative in the whole field service space? Maybe especially since we've been emerging out of the pandemic, have you seen things being done differently, more efficiently? Are there trends that you're seeing you think organizations should be tapping into more in order to improve on their service delivery? Or has your company been pioneering that in any way?

  

Brad shared that he thinks we've certainly pioneered it. There’re two things he’ll talk about there. Because there's actually not that many field service companies that have, they have already thrown around the term optimization. And every company will tell you they do optimization but what we've learned and we've seen, is there are some specific definitions of things you need to be able to do to truly optimize a workforce. And there really, again, not many companies that actually do it. 

So, when he talks about optimization, imagine an employed workforce. So, let's just take North America as an example. If he were to have 2000 resources across North America, he’s got jobs that where he has to offer up appointments to consumers, he may have SLAs for inspections. So, a job comes in where he’s got to be there in three days, that's his agreed upon contractual SLA. But he has emergency jobs that may be coming in throughout the day. 

True optimization, and one of the things they offer is they can continually evaluate a schedule that's been built out over time. And that's one of the ways where they use AI, they use a specific algorithm as part of that, to be constantly evaluating that schedule. And as events are coming in, he can sort of rip that schedule apart, move jobs around, understand what's the best possible most optimal schedule for all of his resources across however many jobs he has. And that's running constantly, throughout the day. 

When most field service organizations tell you they do optimization, what they're really doing is, “Well, I have an optimized route. Like I went to Google Maps, and I made sure that my optimized route.” And that's fine. They can use the term optimization for that. But that doesn't necessarily take into account things like you can have your route, you can have drive time, is there access hours to a particular building, you may be going in and doing an apartment maintenance or facilities maintenance, and there's access hours. What's the cost of overtime? And am I considering that in the schedule? Just the schedule in general, my text, the knowledge and skills that those texts have. Again, how do I ensure that I'm taking all of that account into the schedule I'm creating. 

And again, that's sort of what creates that again, that's how they refer to optimization. They know others use the term but they're not doing AI based optimization like they are that can really based on any number of parameters that any of their our clients want to use. The KPIs that drive the business, the important key indicators of the business, all of those with AI. So, that would be one of them. 

The other one that again, this is technology and just sort of a general shift in where field service has gone is most software platforms that relate to field service, they sort of choose one method of solving a problem or another and the two main ones are, do I have an employed workforce? Or do I leverage independent businesses, and where most make a mistake and what they’ve really driven in the in the field service world, he would even tell you, he feels like ServicePower is the one who has been on the forefront of this all along, is the idea that you have to understand both of those types of organizations work very differently. But you still have to be able to blend them together because whether he sends his own employee or an independent business, he has to ensure that the experience is exactly the same for the customer

Again, when he employs someone, he has control of their schedule, he can dictate technology to them, he knows everything about them. When he’s working with an independent business, he sort of have to be able to rate them and score them based on how they performed for him, and he has to know like, “Okay, you're an independent business, I have to authorize you to work for me, which means I want to ensure your background check. You've been through all the proper trainings.” And again, some of those terms he talked about, what are your first time fix rates? What are your costs? He needs the transparency to see into that business because he’s only giving them maybe 10% of the work they actually do, they're not dedicated to him. 

So, one of the things again that they think they brought to the world of field service, and they continue to innovate on is, how can I have a rules engine around that understands? 

He’s got two different types of workforces he’s working with, but he’s going to provide one unified world class customer experience where that customer doesn't know any different. He doesn't know that it’s an independent business who showed up, he just thinks, again, “My GE product or my LG product, I got it fixed, they did it the first time, that's all that matters. It was a great experience. So yeah, that's a couple there.

 

App, Website or Tool that Brad Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

Me: So, we’ve spoken a lot about optimization and what are some of the pioneering, I would say, talents and attributes that ServicePower has been demonstrating and those are excellent, really, really a good way for us to dovetail into my next question. And so, we'd like to know if you could share with us, Brad, because it's all about the tools and resources that you're using to ensure that you're being most efficient in whatever task you're completing. Could you share with our audience what's the online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in running your business every day?

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in running his business, Brad that in running the business, he can name some tools here. But he tell you, they all have a common theme, which is tools that provide analytics. We live in a data driven world and understanding the analytics underneath your business are crucial. 

And some examples of that, again, when you think of ServicePower as a software company, it all start by coming at it from the development side, they have to know exactly the velocity of their development staff, they have to know how much time they're spending on which initiatives are they putting their time into innovation and roadmap versus support and issues, implementation, whatever, they can break all that down. That way they can plan and forecast for the future, what directions they want to go. 

Obviously, from an analytics standpoint, sales pipeline matter in that. So, they have a bunch of tools underneath that they obviously use things like HubSpot, as it relates to sales and marketing. And there is a component of Salesforce, they use for that for the development side. There's a couple of tools they use Jira being one to sort of track and it facilitates them gathering that data. They actually have their own, why say their own, it's a tool that they use called Domo, that it's basically a data warehouse with an analytics engine over the top of it. So, from their use, again, anything related to analytics. 

And that's the other thing he would tell you beyond just their business is they then have to take all that data that comes out of their platform and present it the same way to their clients, where they can see how is your network performing, how are your employees performing? What's your customer satisfaction? 

He'll just give you one example of that, there was a sort of a great story at ServicePower was, they came out, it's probably been about three or four years, they came out with their consumer portal, that's where consumers are notified of everything of their service event. They can be driven into a portal which gives them information about it. 

One of the great key value points of that was their clients who are receiving calls from consumers just like you said, going, where's my contractor? Their call volume went, they were able to show through their analytics that their call centre volume went down by 40% when they put that tool out there to say, I can now have a system that's informing the consumer, there's no need for them to call you because they feel informed. So, again, back to the question, he'll just tell you anything analytics based. So, again, data driven world and you want to be on top of the things that are driving your business through analytics.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Brad

When asked about books that have had the greatest impact, Brad stated that he'll tell his, because in his schooling days long ago, he sort of became very enthusiastic about the idea of culture in business. And there's a book called The Culture Code: The Secret of Highly Successful Groups, it's by Daniel Coyle, and it is all about how do I build a culture that brings your workforce together? Has you all enthusiastic about working towards a common goal, it gives you the tools for that. He read it a couple years back, in his opinion, it's more relevant now because post pandemic, you have people who are disconnected, a lot more people working at home, and it just gives you tools of how do you bring about a workforce that they're just as much invested in the mission and the goals as you are? So, that's the book he would recommend, as it's called The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

 

What Brad is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that’s going on now that he’s excited about, Brad shared that for him, he'll give a personal one, because this is a podcast, and he finds podcasts can be fun that way, and he'll try to do both. But for him, he’s in a kind of a new transition in life, maybe he shouldn't say this to the public, he’s 53 years old. Through the pandemic had some struggles in life, and started reinventing things with a new blended family. And so for him, personally, he feels like he’s getting another round of being a dad again, his children are grown. So, personally, that's very important to him, he’s a huge believer in family, and creating a tight knit family. And so, that's a big thing for him. 

From a work standpoint, he'll just tell you that ServicePower has been around a long time. But it does feel like they’re always on sort of the edge of innovation as it relates to field service. And this is a year that they actually talked about heavy investment from their ownership. So, it's an exciting year from the things they’re building, they’re kind of reimagining the entire user experience of the platform, so they find that very exciting. So, even in his 20 plus years that he’s been doing this, he still finds it rewarding, exciting, the initiatives they’re driving. So yeah, again, he’s done this for a long time but hopefully you're getting that from this podcast is that he’s still very passionate about all of it.

 

Where Can We Find Brad Online 

Website – servicepower.com

LinkedIn – Brad Hawkins

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Brad Uses

 

When asked if he has a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Brad shared he does. He’ll quickly look it up. He did this on a previous one he did, it'll just take him a second because he missed to be prepared for that one. This is one of his favourite quotes, matter of fact, he will tell you that all of the people at ServicePower have heard this multiple times from him. This is the quote, “Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that they've been robbed. Most putts don't drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey there's delays, sidetracks, smoke and dust, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling burst of speed. The trick is to be thankful that you are on the ride.” He loves that quote.

 

Me: And do you know the author of the quote? Is it anonymous?

  

Brad stated that he’s seen a couple people attributed to it, the person he knew that said it his name is Gordon B. Hinckley.

 

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Links

·      The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle

 

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Apr 18, 2023

Robert Jordan is the CEO of InterimExecs, which matches top executives with companies around the world. Based on research with thousands of leaders and companies, he and co-founder Olivia Wagner wrote Right Leader, Right Time: Discover Your Leadership Style for a Winning Career and Company, and they've launched the FABS Leadership Assessment, a free assessment at RightLeader.com designed to help leaders and organizations perform better.

Jordan also authored How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America and help plug publish Start With No, Jim Camp’s bestseller on negotiation. 

 

Questions 

Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity, especially guests that we've been interviewing for the very first time a little bit for you to share in your own words about your journey and how you got to where you are today.

Could you take some time to share with our listeners a little bit about the book Right Leader Right, Time, just some of the core things that the book talks about?

Now, do you believe that there's any examples globally, of a leader who embodies each of the four leadership styles that we would have just looked at the fixer, the artist, the builder, the strategist?

Could you give me one example for each leadership style that our listener could take away, maybe a practical activity that they could do or something that they could do to strengthen them to be a better fixer, a better artist, builder or strategist?

Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you read recently?

Could you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Could you share with our listeners where can they find you online?

Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote? It kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed?

 

Highlights

 

Robert’s Journey

Robert shared that in some ways, he’s your classic entrepreneur. He was in graduate school, but he was not the greatest student and dropped out to start a publishing company and started the first magazine in the world that covered online services and then the internet. 

And in the beginning, he made every mistake you could make in business. But eventually, of course, the internet came around, the worldwide web and then he could do no wrong and the business grew very fast to put him on to the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing businesses in the US. So, that was his first company. 

And then he kind of fell into a very weird job title. He was an interim CEO for a number of technology companies, mostly early stage and that led to forming an organization called InterimExecs and he gather they’re going to get into this because at InterimExecs, they had about 7000 executives show up who wanted to be placed, they’re a matchmaker around the world in organizations that need leadership, and fractional or interim executives. And so, from that, they also wrote the book just referred Right Leader, Right Time.

 

Me: Amazing. So, this book was published in 2022.

  

Robert stated yes, Right Leader, Right Time just came out.

 

About the Book – Right Leader, Right Time

Me: Could you take some time to share with our listeners a little bit about the book Right Leader, Right Time, just some of the core things that the book talks about?

Robert shared that when you've been asked something a long time, you can spot patterns, and with all these 1000s of executive showing up, they spotted a pattern which was not so good and then another pattern that was really good, and the not so good pattern was that the majority of executives were having career experiences, leadership journeys that you would describe as okay, but you wouldn't say they were remarkable.

The flip side was that if you just looked at the top 2%, 3%, 4% of executives, they're having exceptional careers and leadership journeys. And in that exceptional group, they saw 4 distinct styles of leadership, leadership style referring to somebody having a system or an approach or a process. And they gave them 4 labels, Fixer, Artist, Builder and Strategist.

 

Me: So, Fixer, let's start with that one. Tell us a little bit about what are some of the key skills or competencies that you'd have to be considered in the fixer category.

 

Robert shared that Fixer is the energy, it's the person that has to run into the burning building time after time. So, they’re not trying to pigeonhole any one person into one style, they think all leaders, they bring all their capabilities to bear. But fixer energy is this dominant kind of style that needs crisis. And for a fixer-oriented leader, it may take them 6 months, a year, 2 years to solve the client relationship, to fix a broken division. 

When that is done, that person needs to move on to a new crisis. Does that give you a picture?

 

Me: It does. So, this could be applicable to any type of leader in any type of organization?

 

Robert shared that it could be, what they're saying is that if you have dominant energy around fixer, it is best for you and for the organizations you're with that most of the time - you need crisis, you need a hot mess. And if things are too stable, or going too well, as one of the leaders put it you'll break it just so you can go fix it.

 

Me: It's almost like you're self-sabotaging because that's how you perform, that's how you're at your best.

 

Robert stated that you need to be in those roles so if you look in the world today, as he and Yanique was talking, there's a business called FTX, headquarter’s in the Bahamas and of the leading Crypto Exchanges, and it went bankrupt a few months ago, and the CEO who was appointed, who is a classic kind of fixer, because there are a million creditors and there's alleged fraud. Well, that executive prior to FTX, he was at Enron, he was correcting Enron, he wasn't the cause of the problems in Enron, but that's his wiring.

 

Me: So, we have Fixers, those are the ones that are good at solving problems, and they need things to be broken in order to fix it. What about our Artists?

 

Robert shared that artist is the energy that sees the world as a blank canvas, or a piece of clay to be molded. So, you think about right now a leader like Elon Musk, he is driven by his innovative ability. Historically, you look at someone like Thomas Edison, or Steve Jobs. This is that kind of creative drive coming out.

Artist energy though, the way they put it in the book is sometimes it's at that leader’s peril. And he’s strongly worried with artist energy and he gets that, which is to say you can't stop thinking up ideas, that doesn't mean they're all going to come to fruition, they're all going to be great, they're all going to be operationally terrific, which is why you need a mix of styles around you.

 

Me: Agreed. It's almost like that book by John Maxwell, How Successful People Think and there is a thinking activity that he does in there that has a different thinking styles. So, you have big picture thinker, focused thinker, creative thinker. And in order for an organization to really function at its best, you need a blended approach in terms of people's thinking style versus just all of your team members thinking in a particular way.

 

Robert agreed. Absolutely right. And one of the things exceptional leaders do better is they're better at collaboration. All of us talk about it, and he thinks everyone thinks they're good at it, the problem is that if you're not really confident and directed in your own style, it's less likely that you're actually effectively collaborating with everyone else.

Because the primary thing they saw in this average of leaders who were having okay career experiences, but not great. The primary flaw was attempting to be all things to all people, it never works but it is the thing that a lot of people do knowingly or unknowingly.

 

Me: Yeah, that is crazy. So, we looked at the Fixers, the Artists, what about the Builders?

 

Robert shared that everyone in organization loves to be a builder, they get that. They mean something specific here with builder, which is the energy that can take the small, the nascent product, service, team, client relationships, and take it to market domination.

So, you can think of, for example, someone who creates a new technology, and it grows fast, and they have an IPO, that's builder energy. What you tend to see with builder is that when that person has achieved an IPO or has achieved market domination, in many cases, they need to move to a new company, a new division, a new product, new client relationships, because they need the challenge of taking something small and getting to market domination.

 

Me: All right. And then we have our Strategist. And it's funny, but would you say that most people believe that in order for you to be a great leader, you need to be an excellent strategist because business is all about the strategy and executing that strategy?

 

Robert shared that it's a good question. And all leaders have to be good at strategy, strategy, he would say with a small s, the leader label strategist, we could have called pilot, conductor, captain, quarterback, it's referring to the kind of energy that excels within large vast or complex organization, the kind of language that strategists leaders use, it's around loyalty, and being mentored and mentoring other people. It's about longevity, typically within one organization, it's being cross trained, it's about gratitude to an organization. And that kind of language, you're just not going to hear that from typical Fixer, Artist or Builder leaders.

 

Leaders Who Embodies the Four Leadership Styles – Fixer, Artist, Builder and Strategist

Me: Now, do you believe that there's any examples globally, of a leader who embodies each of the four leadership styles that we would have just looked at the Fixer, the Artist, the Builder, the Strategist?

 

Robert stated that that's a good question. So, when we're talking about Fixer, John Ray, who's now the CEO of FTX, has a massive job to clean up FTX, it's a disaster. The founder is now facing all kinds of criminal charges and there's funds missing and that would be fixer energy. And as they said, he had been at Enron before. 

An example of Artist, Elon Musk is a good example. If you think about any friend of yours, and they're highly creative on the team, they may be the renegade, they're the rebel. They're not necessarily the most popular, but they're the one that's capable of these discontinuous leaps for companies, and it's absolutely the energy that a stagnant company needs, that's the artist builder. 

So, if your listeners are familiar with Sheryl Sandberg, until recently, she was the number two at Facebook now known as Meta. Sheryl Sandberg’s, first 7 years at Facebook were phenomenal, she took an organization of a couple 100 employees. Facebook at the time was probably about $100 Million Dollars in revenue. Seven years later, there were 70,000 employees, it was $70 Billion Dollars in revenue, if that's not the standout example of builder leader in the modern world, he doesn't know what is.

Sheryl was also a cautionary example of what were one of the points they make in Right Leader Right Time because she ended up staying at Facebook, Meta for 14 years and what happened in the second 7 years, Cambridge analytical scandal, election scandals, the pivot to VR Meta which might not have suited her as well. Taking tonnes of arrows in the back for writing a best-selling book called Lean In.

And it's a little cautionary because again, builder energy tends to be focused on market domination and once market domination has been achieved, that leader really kind of needs to move to a new company, new project, new division.

So, strategist leader, great example would be Fred Smith. He just retired from Federal Express, FedEx. He was there 51 years and most leaders, we think, it's not like you have to round the basis, you don't have to have tried everything. In the book, they’re fond of this phrase, highest and best use. And that is something we all aspire to as leaders to arrive at a point. There's no arriving but kind of a Zen concept of coming to understand your highest and best use. 

Fred Smith started FedEx as a paper he wrote while in college, that's pretty innovative, artistic. He's famous, he's been interviewed many times. When he couldn't meet payroll early on, he went to Las Vegas and gambled just to meet payroll and if that's not fixer energy, he doesn't know what is.

Builder, of course, to scale an organization like that was amazing. But he really arrived at a place of being one of the best strategist leaders of the modern era.

 

Me: Okay. So, we have some real-life practical examples that our listeners can definitely envision or even tap into because they're a part of what we know. They've written books, we've seen their history to see what they've done so that they can really identify what the leadership styles are and what are the qualities that they embody.

 

Examples of Practical Activity To Strengthen Your Leadership Style

Me: Now, let's say for example, you want to develop these skills or want to develop in these four areas. Could you give me one example for each leadership style that our listener could take away, maybe a practical activity that they could do or something that they could do to strengthen them to be a better Fixer, a better Artist, Builder or Strategist?

 

Robert stated that it's a great question and one thing you also touched on earlier, they’ve launched at rightleader.com, a free 3 minute assessment is called FABS Leadership Assessment for any of your listeners who want to get a little bit of input and they'll get a result after 3 minutes. And they’d also appreciate feedback to asked whether they got it right, how you're labelled. But they'll also get a free summary in terms of descriptions of each of the styles. 

So, each one of the 4 is different. And it's not a generic answer. So, for example, fixer energy, it tends to be the someone in organization, they're smart, they're hardworking, and someone around them throws a problem that nobody else could solve. And that's how fixer energy tends to develop. And it is in the best interest of fixers, if they're hooked and they solve that problem that no one else could solve, the best thing they can do is to seek out the next crisis. You have to pick yourself for these things. 

Artist energy, they think, and they’re going to see how the research goes based on all the FABS Assessments being done, feels to them a little more like a mode that is internal to you that you cannot help. And what that energy needs within an organization is to be surrounded by people who are more operational. As a way of kind of protecting the ability to keep on doing it.

Builder is an energy in a way similar to fixer, it's more linear. A fixer tends to only work on one problem, one company, one crisis at a time, or put it this way. If you have a friend and they say they're a great fixer, but they're trying to put out fires at the three companies at a time, that's not a great fixer, that's probably not going to work. The opposite is you have a friend and they're strongly artists energy, very renegade, rebellious, they need multiple canvases to paint on at the same time. It's not an accident that Elon Musk has SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company at the same time.

He's also a cautionary example because as he and Yanique are talking, he still has Twitter and Twitter was not his classic playbook, Twitter was a broken or maybe he contributed to making it a broken organization and he's using a playbook there and there's no other fixer on the planet that gets to do what he does. It doesn't tend to work well.

But builder energy, what that person needs is to put themselves into situations of maybe not unproven product services, companies technologies, but something that has not yet reached scale, has not reached domination, they need to be in the position of where they're helping the product, the people, the process, the team to grow, their putting system and process in place.

And strategist, strategist just needs to be within an organization where cross training and mentorship are going to be those components. So, those are some of the things that people should be aware of, that the overriding thing that they would say is that in observing exceptional leaders, they tend to reject more of what is not for their highest and best use.

They reject more of what's not for their highest and best use. And so, it's easy to say, and it's very hard to do, very hard to do. But that's the thing on your career journey is, as you're going along that you become more and more intentional. Your first job, you need the money, you need the direction, your family is looking at you and you can't refuse anything. But what happens over time, as you discover what you like, and what you don't like is you start gravitating in one place or one direction over another, you start making more and more intentional decisions. And decision comes from the Latin word, meaning to kill off. And you have to do that with options that are not right for you, as you got to kill them off. That's very hard because we live in a time of FOMO, the fear of missing out.

 

Me: Agreed. And, just listening to you speak and explaining that. I've definitely seen my career grow in that way as well, in terms of being more intentional about the jobs that I take, or things that I invest my time into and the ones as you mentioned that don't serve me, I tend to not get involved in, maybe 10-15 years ago, my decision would have been completely different.

  

Robert agreed. Exactly and hindsight is 2020, it's hard to see at the beginning of your career, it's just easier when you look back. And so, that's the thing to kind of inform where you are now and where you want to go is to look at your journey and not to judge it, just to observe it. No judgement…..just observation.

 

App, Website or Tool that Robert Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Robert shared that it's an obscure one but he’s on the road a lot and he has to send people PDFs and so he uses a TurboPDF app.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Robert

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Robert stated that he'll share two books, one is personal bias, because he was involved with it. Yanique mentioned it, Start With No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don’t Want You to Know by Jim Camp. It's one of the foundational books on how to be a better negotiator. And they think is something that just stands everybody well, because the foundation of that book is understanding your own mission and purpose. And the clearer you get on that you start getting clear on how it is that you're negotiating with other people and to have a sense of mission and purpose in those negotiations.

The other book is more recent, it's a book called The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks. And if you consider first mountain, are the things you do in career that are about money and power and status, fame, whatever. More of the earning your living, as opposed to second mountain, which is when you're going for significance. What is it that you are called to? What are you committed to? He thought that that was pretty powerful.

 

What Robert is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that is going on right now that he’s really excited about, Robert shared that that's a great question. He has to go back, this assessment has them really energized because they would just love to see what happens as more and more people take it. We are recording this, and it's very new, it just came out and only about 1000 people have taken it so far. So, they're putting forward a lot of ideas here and they may be wrong or right about them, they’re going to see as all of the data comes back in how it plays.

 

Where Can We Find Robert Online

Website – InterimExecs.com

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Robert Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Robert stated that that's such a good question. “I fairly sizzle with zeal and enthusiasm as I spring forth with a mighty faith to do the things that ought to be done by me.” 

Robert shared that’s a recording he heard many years ago, a Minister named Jack Boland and he was quoting his mentor. I can't remember the name of his mentor. But he said that on a number of recordings, and it just hit him between the eyes. 

And so, in his spare time he paints, and he actually painted a Canvas at one point with that expression, because it just energizes me.

  

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

 

Links

·  Right Leader, Right Time: Discover Your Leadership Style for a Winning Career and Company by Robert Jordan

·  How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America by Robert Jordan

·  Start with No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don’t Want You to Know by Jim Camp

·  The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks

 

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Apr 11, 2023

Matt Swain is Head of Communications Insights & Experience at Broadridge. He is a recognized Customer Communications industry thought leader and the host of the Reimagining Communications podcast. From delivering keynotes around the world to defining best practices, hundreds of well-known companies have relied on Matt's expertise and research for their current and future omni-channel communication initiatives.

As Head of Communications Insights & Experience at Broadridge, Matt brings invaluable market research and consulting expertise to clients relative to benchmarking, customer experience optimization, and digital transformation.

 

Questions 

  Our last interview was maybe about a year ago, how have things been for you in the last year? Any new changes or new emerging trends that you've identified in the last year?

  Your 2023 CX and Communications Consumer Insights Report, one of the first things I'd like for us to start off talking about is, there is a very big disparity between customer expectations in 2019 being 35% versus 2023 being 69%, that's like basically a double, it's about half more than what it was before. What do you think is a primary reason for this? Why are customers’ expectations not being met?

  One of the things that your report also generated and spoke about was personalization. And even if companies have a good handle on it, are they really executing it in such a way that the customer feels like that experience is personalized? Could you share a little bit about the data on that that was collected?

  Now, in delivering that quality experience as you mentioned what the customer is looking for. In the report you spoke quite a bit about digital transformation and just making things easy and simple for customers to access. Could you share with our audience, maybe two or three key takeaways or trends that may have come out of the report as it relates to that particular area?

  I found it quite interesting that there was your mention, or the reporting gave mention to the fact that there was preferences for physical mail versus digital. So, can you explain to us a little bit about why it is you still have some people that are interested in physical mail? Do you think it's generational? Or do you think it's just as a backup?

  Based on the report, what are maybe one or two things that organization should be focusing on based on what the data is showing you because we do want to make data informed decisions.

  Is there any new books/content that you've been exposed to that you think you'd want to share with our audience that you think would add value to their journey?

  Could you also share with us what's one thing that you're working on right now or going on in your life right now that you're really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people?

  Could you tell our listeners where they could find you online?

 

Highlights 

New Emerging Trends Identified in the Last Year

Me: So, we are having you back on based on the fact that you have published a new paper that we're quite intrigued for you to share with us some of the high points from that paper. But before we jump into that, could you share with us? I think our last interview was maybe about a year ago, like last year May I think. So, just a little bit under a year, how have things been for you in the last year? Any new changes or new emerging trends that you've identified in the last year?

 

Matt stated that certainly, there's been a lot happening in the past year, certainly, they looked at some of the changes in the economy and how that might change the way that consumers and customers would want to interact with the companies they do business with. The other one that has emerged even more recently is Chat GPT. And looking at generative AI and how advanced that has gotten, has certainly had a lot of their clients asking about how and where they might be able to apply that in the future.

  

Disparity in Customer Expectations

Me: Amazing. I'm so happy you brought up Chat GPT, because it's certainly a hot topic these days. So, back to the report, your 2023 CX and Communications Consumer Insights Report, I had a chance to look through it and I'm quite intrigued with some of the insights. So, one of the first things I'd like for us to start off talking about is, there is a very big disparity between customer expectations in 2019 being 35% versus 2023 being 69%, that's like basically a double, it's about half more than what it was before. What do you think is a primary reason for this? Why are customers’ expectations not being met?

  

Matt shared that this is one of his favorite stats. And he bet they talked about it last year as well, when it was at 65% of consumers that said that most of the companies they do business with need to improve the experience they provide. So, that 35% in 2019, jumping to 69% in their latest report. Over the last five years they are headed from a consumer perspective where businesses are not delivering quality customer experience and the caveat is, it's most businesses, right?

 

So, we all have our favorite and whoever offers the best customer experience for you today, that kind of sets the bar for what your expectation is for how you interact with all companies you do business with. And what concerns them is that those leaders are pulling further ahead. So, they mentioned generative AI and Chat GPT. Let's say those leaders start using that as something to simplify his customer experience. Now, how does everyone else catch up that might not necessarily have as deep of pockets or might not have the resources to deliver on that experience? We're seeing a bigger gap from the leaders and the rest of the field.

 

Me: Amazing. And would you say that based on the disparity in the percentage that it's more prevalent in some industries than it is in others?

 

Matt shared that he thinks so, the way they asked the question was generically across all of the companies you do business with, but he thinks when they look at who's providing the best experiences, consumers lean toward banking as providing among the best experiences, but that was still only 3 in 5 consumers that suggested that their banking relationship was best.

 

The next one after banking was credit cards and that was less than 2 in 5 consumers only 38% of consumers thought that their credit card provider had the best experience. So, it does show banking is a clear leader, there's still 39% of banking customers that don't think their banking relationship is among the best. So, it really is dependent on the specific company, more so than the industry.

 

Me: Now, one of the things your report also mentioned is that what the leaders do better than the persons that are clearly lagging behind them are things like, ease of transaction in terms of navigating account details, that was 43%, communicating clearly was 43%, making it easy to talk to a real person 41%, sending notification when there's important things to be looked at 34%, and allowing the customers to select how they want to receive communication is 25%. So, what I noticed across all of those, they could actually be grouped under one topic communications, right?

  

Matt stated exactly and where he was headed with that is he thinks that that is one of the big takeaways for them is, they think so much about customer experience being broader than communications, which it is there are aspects that are not communications driven, but the communications play a really critical role in what that overall customer experience is.

 

Me: Agreed, agreed. And it's something I always think that a lot of times, it's always the little things that can make an experience amazing or fantastic or phenomenal, versus making an experience unbearable, and uncomfortable and just frustrating.

 

Simple things like maybe just as you mentioned, a follow up telephone call or an email to let you know where things stand. Just yesterday, I was speaking to a friend who is looking to switch insurance companies for his health insurance. And he mentioned that the previous provider that they had, had a portal that you could log in, and each time you had a health claim, you could see the status of the claim online.

 

Whereas this new company, even though their rates are better, and they're known as the industry leader in the market, it's just so frustrating. He has to call the broker and sometimes he's not aware of the process. And, of course, there's no online portal to log on so there's no way for you to know what's the status of your health claims. So, again, communications, because one of the reasons why he thought the previous provider was better was because of the fact that it was easy to get information instead of him having to take so many steps to get the same information.

 

Matt shared that he thinks that that aspect of friction, certainly, we talk about friction in any process relative to customer experience, but for accessing information for just being able to get into the system and navigating to the things that are most important to you, those are really centered around a strong communication strategy.

 

Personalization vs. Customization in Customer Experience

Me: Indeed. Now, one of the things that your report also generated and spoke about was personalization. We've been hearing that word for quite a few years now, I don't know if every company has a good handle on what personalization really is. And even if they have a good handle on it, are they really executing it in such a way that the customer feels like that experience is personalized? Could you share a little bit about the data on that that was collected?

  

Matt shared that from a consumer perspective, the people that responded to the survey, personalization, certainly for them means make it about me, make it relevant to me. For the company that's sending that communication, which is the Broadridge client, if you will, they're more thinking customization or not necessarily one to one personalization, but configurability and configuration. So, certainly with your data, obviously that is personalized to you because that is your account balance or how much you owe or whatever it is.

 

But then there are those peripheral things, marketing messages, the cross sell, the upsell, the imagery, and those are all things that can turn somebody off if for instance, there's a picture of a retired couple, and the consumer is just starting his career, and they're talking to him about early retirement, certainly early retirement would be great. But he doesn't think that that's going to be the reality for him today. And then that makes him question the rest of the communication, because he’s been put off by that initial visual as an example.

  

Me: Very true. So, could you maybe give our audience one strategy of how an organization could combat that type of perception of customization versus personalization?

 

Matt shared that he doesn't even know if it's combating it, he thinks it's for the recipient. It's just making sure that they recognize that who they are. So, he guesses the way that you would do that is you have various personas, or different demographics. So, if he’s using that image personalization, as an example, since we started down that route, it might say, anyone who is 18 to 25, show this image, 26 to 45, show this image, 46 plus, show this image, just as an example of how you'd still be able to do that at a customer level, but not fully personalized one to one.

 

Digital Transformation – Takeaways That Came From the Report

Me: Now, in delivering that quality experience as you mentioned what the customer is looking for. Technology is also very, very big. And I did know for this report that you spoke quite a bit about digital transformation and just making things easy and simple for customers to access. Could you share with our audience, maybe two or three key takeaways or trends that may have come out of the report as it relates to that particular area?

 

Matt shared that certainly, one that comes to mind, right away is around that simple way to interact across all channels. So, as a person in the industry, he would be talking about this as an omni-channel experience, but for the consumer, they simplified it to just make it easy for him to interact however he wants to interact. And they had 92% of consumers in the survey that said that that's important to them and that was up from 87% last year.

 

But then when they asked if these consumers were getting those communications delivered across channels in a simplified way, they only found that 35% were receiving them this way. So, 92%, it's important, but only 35% are actually seeing that from the companies they're doing business with.

 

Me: And again, it goes back to their strategy. Yes?

 

Matt agreed absolutely. And there's a strategy component to it and there's also a platform like the underlying technology component. Sometimes the companies aren't organized in a way to make it easy for their customers to interact across channels. There are companies that have a mobile team, an email team, a print team and if those teams are working on separate platforms, or with independent strategies, it's really hard to roll up to a consistent unified experience.

 

Me: So, your recommendation would be that they should either all be on the same platform, or they should be talking to each other, so the customer at least feels like it's one experience versus silos of experiences.

 

Matt stated that ultimately, if you can get to a unified communications platform that everyone's working from, they can still have their own processes and add ons to that platform. But if everyone's working from a central platform, where all of the data is stored, preferences are stored, so if his preferred nickname is Matt, instead of Matthew across all channels, across all communications types, everybody looks for that same data point, what's your preferred nickname? Instead of having him to provide that multiple times. The same point would be for communications preference, if he’s working across different lines of business. 

 

So first, he was just talking about channels like mobile, print, email, but then different lines of business within the same company. Sometimes those are siloed as well. So, he has to set his preferences in for banking, but then again, for his mortgage, and then again for his insurance or for his investments. And it's really important to have that more centralized to provide a better experience for the customer.

 

Preference for Physical Mail Versus Digital

Me: So, another big thing that I found interesting, this was a definitely a personal topic for me because I'm all about digital. I found it quite interesting that there was your mention, or the reporting gave mention to the fact that there were preferences for physical mail versus digital versus physical and digital. For me, for example, there are some organizations that you do business with and depending on how the print is prepared and given to you, it can fade over time which doesn't make any sense, in my opinion, because if I wanted to keep that as record for, let's say, 24 months down the line, it's quite possible, I won't be able to read what's on the paper.

 

But if it came in a digital format, it can last a lifetime, because it's not going to fade once it's in your email, or on your computer. So, can you explain to us a little bit about why it is you still have some people that are interested in physical mail? Do you think it's generational? Or do you think it's just as a backup?

 

Matt shared that it's interesting to address your fading comment, he actually hadn't heard that as one of the primary reasons and it's one of your key reasons. But it's really an interesting angle that they haven't uncovered yet. The research what they had was, in what they’ve seen over time, has been that consumers like to keep a paper record, so that's usually the top reason that they hold on to paper is for the hardcopy archive.

 

The second point is that it's a reminder and if it's a bill, it's a reminder to pay, if it's a statement, it's a reminder to review account balances. But it's a trigger and that might be a reminder that to then go online, and review but the physical document, cut through the clutter for some people.

 

And then the third reason is one that they see both sides of, those that hold on to paper say they're concerned about data security and privacy going digital. And then conversely, they hear the same thing from people that are digital and not print that say, sending a paper copy feels like there's a concern about data security and privacy if that paper copy goes to the wrong householder, somebody else opens it. So, they see both sides of that one, but obviously, it is an important factor for consumers on either side of the discussion.

 

Me: And so, did you find that it was more generational in terms of it was more, let's say, baby boomers who had the concern of wanting to keep the paper trail or it creating a trigger, as you had mentioned, for them to go online? Or for them to review their statements? Or is it a case where across the board regardless of age 25, 38, 56, pretty much everybody was in that bracket?

 

Matt stated that it tends to be generational that you'll have more of younger demographics being comfortable as digital only and more of older demographics, baby boomer plus being more comfortable in paper. But it is interesting, because they have clients that will state that as fact and say, everybody wants to be digital, our client of the future is this up and coming generation and everybody wants to be digital, therefore we will only be digital. And the reality is, you still have some preferences, some people that that say, “Hey, I get everything digital.” So, the paper, like he said, cuts through the clutter.

 

So, you have some younger demographics that actually say, “No, still send me something by mail, because I actually don't get all that much mail anymore. So, this actually is something that I look at.” There is also the kind of the longer-term strategy of moving as many people to digital as feel comfortable and as aligns with what's important to you as a business cost reduction, quality of experience, etc. But then there's going back to that simple way to interact across channels, it's really important that we still think in this omni-channel strategy.

 

So, even if you have 80% of your customers that want to be digital, or that's your goal to get digital, you still have 20% that you need to service in a paper-based environment and how do we optimize that communication and make that the best possible experience as well?

 

Summary from 2023 CX and Communications Consumer Insights Report and Recommendations for Way Forward 

Me: Can you just give us like I would say a summary, maybe three key things that came out of the report and recommendations for audience depending on whatever industry they're in, whatever role they play in their organization as to going forward where we basically completed the first quarter of 2023 and we're embarking on our second quarter. What are maybe one or two things that they should be focusing on based on what the data is showing you because we do want to make data informed decisions.

 

Matt shared that there were three key takeaways that came out of the research. The first was where they started, which is that CX expectations continue to rise, where they found that 69% of consumers were underwhelmed by most company’s customer experience, and that had nearly doubled since 2019. So, the takeaway for listeners is to really look at where your customer experience is falling short, across the customer journey, and then implement a get-well plan.

 

The second point was one that they did not address, but they talked around it, which is relative to the importance of the communication as relative to a consumers’ view of how innovative your company is. So, 61% of consumers said that they judge a company's innovativeness based on the communications it sends. So, he thought that was a really interesting aspect, which also ties back to how important communications are to overall customer experience. So, for their clients, and for companies at large, it's how do you ensure your communications in print and digital are working for you, not against you.

 

And then the last point is, they have a lot of companies that comes to them with a desire to take paper out of the process, because they're looking to say it's the operational savings, can I remove print and mail. And the challenge is, those consumers that they talked about that have digital access, but still hold on to the paper. And what they found was those double dippers that have paper and digital, 82% of them would go paperless if they received a more engaging digital experience. So, they really think that part of what creates a better digital experience but also helps achieve these paperless goals of their clients is to really focus on creating a better mousetrap, creating a better digital experience, a more engaging digital experience that gives somebody a reason to let go of that paper. And it's not the reason that the companies they do business with have which is saving on print and postage, the consumer doesn't care about that, they want a better experience.

 

Books/Content That You’ve Been Exposed to That Is Value Added

 

Me: Could you share with us, I know we would have asked you this question last year. But I want you to think about the books that you've read in the last year. If you've read any new books that you'd like to share with us, that you think would support a lot of what you've mentioned in the report, but also just support the overall customer experience initiative that organizations are embarking on. Is there any new content that you've been exposed to that you think you'd want to share with our audience that you think would add value to their journey?

  

Matt shared that last year, he probably leaned toward an interesting book, which was QR Codes Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business into the Ground and it was a Scott Stratten book that's more of a flipbook but it shows you examples of poor implementation of QR codes, but also speaks to the importance of being smart about how and when you incorporate technologies like QR codes into your communications. Now, he will say in their research, they found that 57% of consumers want companies to use QR codes and print to drive them to more information digitally. So, there is a way to balance that.

 

Now, in terms of something else that came to mind that he didn't read in the last year but is another one that he really enjoyed. It is Seth Godin’s book, which is Meatballs Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync.

 

It's probably 10 or 11 years old now but it's geared toward marketers. And it focuses on doing what you're good at, but also telling a good and cohesive story. So, he thinks it's actually a really good analogy to tie in the research that they do with the products and services that Broadridge offers. So, it's the research supports the storyline on how and why they’re developing their products and services the way they are to deliver on that better experience for their clients and those end consumers.

 

What Matt is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Matt shared that it can't be the research it because that's what he’s most excited about.

  

Me: Are you planning to take the research outside of just doing podcasts interviews and talking about it? Are you going to do like a workshop around it? Are you thinking of maybe having an international conference, there's so many things that could spin out of this research?

  

Matt shared that they use it throughout the year. And so, he always gets excited when they’ve launched the newest, latest research, and it's always a great time to catch up with Yanique because it's fresh and new. And then they use it over the course of the year in presentations at events, not their own events but sometimes their events as well, but presentations at events, but also it creates a really good client dialogue.

 

And so, he gets really excited about bringing the research to clients saying, “Here's what we're hearing in the market from your customers, and how does this align with some of your priorities as a business today? And where are you headed?” And they get into some really great strategy discussions that ultimately leads toward their clients adjusting their priority list or adding new items to that list. But also, it gives them a chance to validate the findings within each of those clients and across those industries.

  

Me: That’s a very good point, because now you're actually using the data to see if the decisions that you're making will actually come in alignment with what the market is saying. And you get to see if it was a success or a fail.

 

Where Can We Find Matt Online

 

Website – www.broadridge.com

Podcast – Reimagining Communications Podcast

LinkedIn - @askmattswain

Twitter - @AskMattSwain

 

CX Survey Landing Page: https://www.broadridge.com/report/brcc/2023-cx-and-communications-consumer-insights

 

Meatball Sundae: https://www.amazon.com/Meatball-Sundae-Your-Marketing-Sync/dp/1591845351

  

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

 

Links

·  QR Codes Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business into the Ground by Scott Stratten

·  Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? By Seth Godin

  

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

 

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!

Our Next Webinar – May 16, 2023 at 10:00 am

Register Here

Mar 31, 2023

Tim Attinger is Co-founder and President of OvationCXM, with nearly 30 years of executive management experience in financial services, financial technology and digital transformation. Prior to Co-founding OvationCXM, Tim held executive roles in digital transformation and growth with successful exits at Monitise, a global mobile money platform acquired by Fiserv and Blackhawk Network, which went public in 2013.

Before this, Tim had an extensive career with Visa. He managed a $1 Billion plus global portfolio of digital businesses, led product innovation development, and was part of the executive team that took Visa Inc. public in 2008. Preceding roles including building and managing strategic growth initiatives for First Data (now Fiserv) and managing client engagements for a host of Fortune 100 companies with Windermere, a McKinsey-spinoff boutique strategy consultancy.

 

Questions

 

Could share in your own words, even though we did read your formal bio, in terms of your background, a little bit of your journey, how you got to where you are today, in your own words, and why you do what you do?

Can you share with us a little bit about why it's so important that organizations should have customer experience as a priority for their business. What can businesses do to differentiate themselves and set themselves apart?

There's a lot of digital or digitization that's happening across different industries, and because of the digitization, and also artificial intelligence, people are losing their jobs. It is as a result of increase artificial intelligence and they're increasing efficiency, but they're also reducing the level of human input that they're utilizing What are your views on that?

What are some of the key things that we need to think about in the customer journey?

Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website, or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?

Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it still has left an indelible mark on your life.

Could you also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people?

Where can listeners find you online?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to keep you on track or get you back on track if for any reason you get derailed? Do you have one of those?

 

Highlights 

Tim’s Journey

When asked about his journey, Tim shared that the funny thing about it is, it wasn't as though what you just read off was something he sat out to do consciously from the outset. And it was a bit of opportunistic starting in a consultancy, then it basically offered a role with a former client to help drive strategy and then recruited from there by some friends to go to yet another company.

 

So, he’s spent most of his time in a particular industry and a particular kind of role. But it almost feels as though that was a happenstance rather than sort of a conscious thing that he was driving, which he guess means in retrospect, his career is a fascinating thing for him to see, because it's been highly varied, and at the same time, not necessarily overtly managed, if that makes sense.

 

The Importance of Prioritizing Customer Experience and What Businesses Can do to Set Themselves Apart in the Financial Sector Space

Me: Well, thank you so much for sharing. We're in a very unique environment globally, as it relates to customer experience. And so, I'd like for you to share with us a little bit about why it's so important that organizations should have customer experience as a priority for their business. I know most of your experience is in the financial sector, so it'd be good to hear from your perspective, especially seeing that that space is a competitive space. What can businesses do to differentiate themselves and set themselves apart?

  

Tim shared that he thinks part of the challenge that enterprises find themselves in today, in particularly with respect to sort of customer experience, and how that intersects with digital transformation is that a lot of organizations are looking at customer experience as a way to optimize sort of touch points or channels of communication with customers, as opposed to sort of the way that we look at it, which is thinking about holistically the customers journey with an enterprise.

 

So, the customer's journey with a business, which is more than just an interaction, but it's a series of engagements as the customer tries to accomplish something in their lives or in their own business.

 

And so, he thinks part of the challenge that businesses have seen today is that they're thinking about touchpoints as opposed to customer journeys, which creates a challenge in how you solve for delivering great customer experience. And he thinks the reason why customer experience is increasingly important is, it's a fairly simple thing, but it bears repeating with most enterprises, that all of your revenue as an enterprise comes from paying customers.

 

So, the most important source of growth for your business is your customer base, frankly, the lowest cost position you can possibly have in any marketplace is to have a satisfied customer base that continues to do business with you.

 

So, he thinks customer experience is increasingly important in the marketplace because recruiting and then retaining and growing a customer relationship is increasingly challenging in competitive spaces. And those organizations that focus on doing it right, and particularly in orchestrating great customer journeys, which we can talk about in a little more detail. But sort of orchestrating great customer journeys will have a competitive advantage relative to organizations that are looking at the sort of either optimizing touchpoints or trying to re architect their entire sort of back-end business from a technology standpoint, as opposed to focusing from the customer back into their business.

 

Digitization and Artificial Intelligence – Reducing the Level of Human Input

Me: Brilliant. So, you spoke about customer journey which I do want to talk about. But before we get onto the customer journey, what I wanted to find out also, especially seeing that this space is competitive. And there's a lot of digital or digitization that's happening across different industries, especially in the financial sector, for sure. And so, as a result of the digitization, and also artificial intelligence, people are losing their jobs. I'm here in Kingston, Jamaica, and over the weekend, I read an article in our local newspaper, stating that 100 persons in the BPO sector are going to be laid off. And I imagine that it is as a result of increased artificial intelligence and they're increasing efficiency, but they're also reducing the level of human input that they're utilizing What are your views on that?

  

Tim shared that it's unfortunate to hear that news, because the best kind of deployment for artificial intelligence, for machine learning, for automation, is not as a replacement for people, but as a compliment to them.

 

So, a large part of sort of the platform capabilities and again, just taking from context in sort of his company, OvationCXM, and how they think about it, but a large part of the deployment capability that they put in place is, is essentially helping people be better at the live interaction, and the live engagement and the direct engagement with a customer.

 

And he thinks about the sort of the analogy of the airline industry, when you think about sort of the check in process, if you've got a fairly straightforward, I just need my boarding pass, I don't have any bags to check, and I'm on my way to the gate, right. That's, something that absolutely, because it's always the same, it's never complicated. Automating that stuff is great, because what it does is it frees up the humans who are there to deal with the family of 5 who just had their flight cancelled, they've got a connection, the luggage is already on the way.

 

So, when you look at sort of AI and digitization, a lot of the initial investment has been in exactly what you're describing sort of these point solutions where I'm just going to try to automate conversations, and digitize a particular channel, but still I'm not looking at what is the overall customer experience of trying to navigate my entire enterprise? And who are the people, the people who are going to help me do that, the Sherpas who helped him sort of climb this hill that is getting himself live with a product or opening a business and having a financial institution helped him do that.

 

So, he thinks over the long term, the pendulum will swing back to equilibrium and organizations will realize that conversational automation is great for certain things. But having intelligence inside of systems to help deliver the right answers to the right people in the right moment in the context of what the customer is trying to accomplish and then having humans engaged with that customer is really he thinks where the industry is going to go.

 

Key Points to Think About in the Customer Journey

Me: So, let's go back to the customer journey. So, the journey of the customer, for our listeners that I mean, I've had episodes in the past where we have guests that talk about customer journey. But because I want to get a little bit more granular, let's talk about the customer journey, let's say for example, in a financial institution, if you are, let's say, getting a product, like a credit card, for example, when you look at the journey that the customer will take from application until however long they use that card for, what are some of the key things that we need to think about in the journey? And is a journey just giving the customer the card? Because now we have new business, now we have a new loan that we've booked, or is it more so the maintenance of having that person on board.

 

Like in Jamaica, for example, one of my greatest pet peeves is, if you pay really well on your credit card, you automatically get an increase annually. I think a telephone call should be given to the customer to find out, “We see that you're a great customer in terms of payments, and we'd like to offer you an additional increase, is this something you'd be open to?” Versus just getting your statement and seeing that you've been given an additional X thousands of dollars on the card.

But what are your views on that?

 

Tim shared that to back it up into sort of where his firm spends most of their time, which is in sort of business relationships. So, banks to take the analogy Yanique just had, imagine a bank helping a business owner who's opening a new business apply for a line of credit so that they can fund equipment and site improvements and setting up a payroll service so that they can sort of disperse funds to employees. And if you think about sort of journeys in 3 basic increments, they're sort of the discovery and buying journey, where he sort of figure out what it is he need, and who has it, and from whom he'd like to buy it.

 

And then once you finally committed to buying it from someone, what is one of the most challenging things they’ve seen in financial services is getting a customer from, “Hey, I'd like this solution from you, Mr. Bank, all the way through to it's working for me today and I'm finally live with it.” And in business banking, that process can be fairly complicated with multiple steps. Imagine what it's like as a small business owner applying for a lending relationship, you've got paperwork you fill out, there are forms you have to send in, there are credit checks that the bank does, there's an entire internal process of reviewing your risk and underwriting requirements that you don't even have any visibility into. And then somewhere out the other end of it, you find out whether or not you qualify.

 

And then on the tail end of the sort of what they call the Go Live journey, there's also the ongoing relationship, which is quite frankly, where most of the experience of a financial institution comes from, which is what's it like every single day for me to use this and solve problems? And what are some of the most important things in sort of thinking about, let's just take that Go Live journey as an example, most businesses are blind to what's happening.

 

I bought something from you and then it kind of disappears into a black hole, I don't hear from you for 3 or 4 weeks, except every couple of maybe twice you asked me for things completely out of the blue, I have no idea why and then. And then another couple of weeks go by and I get some kind of decision. It's sort of like one of the most opaque things that you can possibly imagine, as opposed to you think about the experience of that business owner, as a consumer when they take advantage of something like a food delivery product, or, God forbid, they just buy something from an online merchant, like an Amazon.

 

There are really clear steps that are communicated to you, here's where you are, here's where you're going, here's how many steps there are from here to there and step 4, we're going to ask you for something. It's as simple as saying, make it really clear to the customer, what are sort of the stops along the way on the journey that you're about to undertake with them, make them aware of where they are. And even internally in organizations that are trying to deliver to that customer, you quite often have departments that don't talk to each other. So, everybody internally is kind of like, who's got the ball? Who's got next? What am I supposed to be doing now? When does this get done?

 

And so, he thinks a large part of making experiences go well, it's just connecting all of those humans and systems and teams into a fabric that makes everybody aware of what everyone else is doing. Where are we in this process and communicating that in simple terms to the customer, so they know where they are.

 

When you think about it a large part of customer experience is just visibility. And, frankly, one of the best ways to disappoint someone is to not meet the expectations that they have. And so, a big part of having a journey go well is just setting expectation upfront, here are the 5 steps that we're going to go through, here's how long it's going to take, here's what we'll need where and when. And here's who you can talk to on this stage, right?

 

Me: Agreed, agreed, managing expectations and communication is so important.

 

Tim stated and invisibility, just simply where am I? Who's got this now? And what do they need so that I can make sure it's moving forward, because at the end of the day, the customer is just trying to accomplish something and the journey through your enterprise is just a means to an end, think about that small business owner, I'm just trying to open a business and start selling pizzas. I really don't want to be an expert in underwriting. I just want to know when it is that that process is done, what do you need from me to make it go as quickly as possible?

 

Me: Indeed. Because at the end of the day, they also have their customers that they're trying to get to serve, but they can't do that if you don't do your part.

 

Tim agreed that's exactly right. And so, one of the interesting things, you sort of brought up credit cards, one of the most important things that a financial institution can do for a small business owner, is give them a way to accept payment, right?

 

That sort of what they call accounts receivable, right, which is essentially managing your revenue from your own customers and making that something that's easy to do, that works every time that gets that money from your customers into your bank account on a regular basis. You can make payroll, you can buy supplies, all of that.

 

The role that banks play in helping small businesses survive and thrive, really is it's critical in those kinds of activities. So, if something goes bump in the night, or there's a hiccup in that process, being on top of it, and giving the customer an expectation when it's going to get solved is super important, particularly for businesses that basically need that cash flow to operate.

 

App, Website or Tool that Tim Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Tim shared that what's super, super, super critical for them, they use their platform and then a combination of that, and then an online tool set called Miro, which is almost like it's a group whiteboard capability. They use that with their bank clients in the way that you do these things today, because everybody's all over the place, you get on an hour, or two Zoom call and they actually facilitate discussions with their clients on what exactly is it like from a customer's point of view to try to accomplish something inside of your bank.

 

What is it like from a customer’s standpoint, and particularly, not just your bank, but also increasingly, I know, you've seen this, financial institutions are partnering with other companies and external providers and financial technology providers to deliver solutions to businesses. So, increasingly, it's not just, how are you doing things internally, but also, what does it like for the customer to get bounced between you and some other company they've never heard of that you happen to be sourcing a solution from.

 

So, that capability and the ability to map all of that out in real time with their clients and then so that they can see what that looks like today and then start working to make it better, has become a critical component of sort of how they help those banks improve their business.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Tim

When asked about books that have had an impact, Tim stated that absolutely that's an easy one. In the interest of full disclosure, again, back to he didn't consciously set out in this path to be in financial services. He was originally studying to be a Literature Professor.

 

Me: You like to read.

 

Tim stated that he decided he liked it so much, he didn't want to have to do it for a living. So, after he finished his master's degree, as he was thinking about maybe do I or do I not want to go get a doctorate and become a professor. On a lark, moved out to the Bay Area in San Francisco and just backed into a job at a management consulting firm. And the founding partner of that firm encouraged him to read a book by a couple of his McKinsey colleagues called In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters.

 

And because he had almost no business education whatsoever, he eagerly dove into it. And the interesting thing about that book is that it's a fairly straightforward analysis of how have companies across a number of different industries been successful. And almost all of the stories come back to a fairly simple premise, that if you build your business from the marketplace back, you start with the customer, you start with a customer group, or a portfolio or a type of customer you want to serve, and then you design everything else about your business around being really great at meeting that need for that customer.

 

You think about sort of what the typical airline experience was before Southwest came on the scene, or what the typical shopping experience looked like before somebody like an Amazon came on the scene. It's like I'm going to rethink what it is a customer is trying to accomplish, what needs they're trying to fill, and then focus really intently on doing that very well, and strip away everything else that doesn't absolutely serve that need. And so, that was a real revelation for him, sort of as a newbie in the business world.

 

And that's continued to be a touchstone for every career stop he’s had and particularly in the role that he has now, which is basically helping a host of different enterprise companies of various stripes, mainly in financial services now, but also in a number of other industries, get to that realization, focus intently on what is the experience of the customer in trying to accomplish something in their lives and how does he design what he’s doing around meeting that really well. So, it's kind of come full circle for him from that sort first introduction to how good businesses operate.

  

What Tim is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something exciting that’s going on right now, Tim shared what's really exciting for him, sort of as he’s gone through his career, he’s made a study of how businesses create ecosystems, sort of how networks of organizations come together around a common delivery to a customer or to a segment or to create a product, or solution and you think about the companies he’s worked in Visa, Blackhawk, sort of which are network business models where you've got sort of, you build a platform, and then you have companies onto that platform and do business with each other through the capability you're delivering.

 

And they're finding in the business today, OvationCXM, which is their audio sort of customer experience management software platform, that they’re starting to see the same kind of ecosystem dynamics that they have in sort of major enterprise banks and insurance companies and healthcare organizations. Partnered with a host of providers of services and solutions, whether that's financial technology, health tech, what have you and their customer experience management platform is becoming a way for them to collaborate and interact as an ecosystem in delivering great experiences to their customers.

 

And it's fascinating to see that sort of network effect begin to take off. Even something as simple as their customer experience management delivery platform in this industry, it's just fascinating to see network effects start to materialize in the software business, which is it's really exciting for him because he’s spent a lot of his days helping to manage and grow network effect businesses, and they’re starting to see that in theirs today. So, it's super exciting, at least for him, maybe geeky for most folks, but for him, it's fun to watch.

 

Me: Okay, it’s like you're forming your own community.

  

Tim agreed yes, exactly. And that's the funny thing about it is that in the same way that communities are super important to our lives as individuals, right, and families, businesses are actually not that different, the immunities of companies that are delivering capabilities or delivering on something tend to be stronger, more resilient. And, frankly, more adaptive.

 

Where Can We Find Tim Online 

Website – www.ovationcxm.com

  

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Tim Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Tim shared that he does and it's from a longer poem by Rudyard Kipling and the entirety of which he doesn't remember off the top of his head, but one line in particular, which is about sort of one of the most important things you can do in times of duress is “Be the person who's keeping his head while everyone else around you is losing theirs.” And he thinks that has helped in a number of ways, in particular stressful situations, it is just to step outside of the challenge that you're currently in and realize that the only way to respond to and solve the challenges is to not let it cloud your mind. And he thinks that that quote has helped immensely in difficult times professionally.

 

IF ~ BY RUDYARD KIPLING

(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  

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

 

Links

·  In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

Mar 21, 2023

Tony Sternberg is the CEO and Co-Founder at ProsperStack, a platform that helps subscription businesses with automated retention. Prior to ProsperStack, Tony was president at CATS software, having joined the company as an early employee and playing key customer facing product and operations roles.

 

With over a decade of experience in SaaS, Tony is passionate about building customer centric organizations, while applying those same sorts of philosophies to help shape the culture of the company and create an environment where people love to work.

 

Questions

 

Can you share a little bit about your own experience, your own journey, how you got to where you are today? Why it is that you're on this path? Is it your lifelong passion? Did you kind of just stumble on it? Just a little bit about yourself, in your own words?

So, ProsperStack, could you tell our audience a little bit about what your company does?

Retention is so important to a business. As you're in the business of retention, you could possibly explain to our audience why it's so important to try and retain the customers that you already have. And from a financial perspective, why is it more expensive for you to attract new customers, versus trying to retain the ones that you have already?

Now, in exchange for giving customers a frictionless experience at the point of cancellation, what are some things that a company could possibly ask to find out why their customers are leaving? And more importantly, when they get that information, what are they going to do with it to ensure that it doesn't impact future customers to have the same reason?

What are maybe some retention strategies that organizations can employ to reduce their churn from increasing on a year to year basis, because I imagined the aim of our businesses to ensure that they have less churn year over year.

What are some of the trends that you're seeing, things that if they exist already, organizations should try and continue to do those things? Or is there anything new that you think organization should be trying to do that they weren't doing before?

Could you share with our audience, what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

Could you share maybe one or two books that you've read maybe recently or books that you've read a very long time ago, but maybe one or two that have had a really great impact on you? It could be books that would have helped to develop professionally or even personally.

Could you also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.

Now, can you share with our listeners where they can find you online?

Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed or distracted.

 

Highlights

 

Tony’s Journey

 

Me: So, Tony, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share a little bit about their own experience, their own journey, how you got to where you are today? Why it is that you're on this path? Is it your lifelong passion? Did you kind of just stumble on it? Just a little bit about yourself, in your own words?

  

Tony shared that like Yanique mentioned, he got his start in SaaS in about 2007, at a company called CATS software, he knew coming out of college that he didn't want to join a large organization, he came from an entrepreneurial family. So, the smaller business definitely appealed to him, just having more visibility to ownership.

 

So, he ended up joining a startup in the HR technology space, at that point in his career, which is very early and had an opportunity to serve a lot of role there, customer support, testing, product management and operations before scaling up and being president of the company.

 

And it was there where he learned a lot of his life lessons and his professional life lessons, he would say and also there were they encountered some challenges that that really shaped what he’s doing today and why they’re building ProsperStack. And it's been a fun journey so far.

 

About ProsperStack and What it Does

 

Me: So, ProsperStack, could you tell our audience a little bit about what your company does?

  

Tony shared that ProsperStack is a service that helps subscription businesses retain customers. And specifically, they focus on the cancellation experience at the moment. So, their goal is to really provide a platform that's going to inform them, give them the data points why their customers are leaving, and ultimately try to overcome, maybe some objections and retain customers that are still able to be saved through maybe educational means, or even offers incentives to stay subscribers.

 

Me: What are some of the obstacles you find that customers experience using a subscription service?

 

Tony shared that he thinks the customer mindset changes along the entire lifecycle, it might be that your product was a very good fit for them at one time, but no longer it either outgrew it or just it's no longer needed. So, he thinks when you start crafting experiences in your product, you have to recognize and expect that their needs will also change.

 

So, creating, for them, applying that mindset and creating a cancellation experience that is not only beneficial to their customer, which would be the business but also the end user, which would be their customer is extremely important. And they really try to craft a balance between that because they don't like to create friction, just for the sake of creating friction, but it's a good balance between collecting information and being friendly to the customer.

 

Importance of Retention in a Business – Why Is It Important to Retain Customers That You Already Have | Why is it More Expensive to Attract New Customers?

 

Me: So, retention is so important to a business. As you're in the business of retention, you could possibly explain to our audience why it's so important to try and retain the customers that you already have. And from a financial perspective, why is it more expensive for you to attract new customers, versus trying to retain the ones that you have already?

 

Tony shared that that they are both good questions. And he thinks from just from his experience coming into the subscriptions, specifically the SaaS space in about 2007, the landscape was much different, and there wasn't as many SaaS companies obviously, but in the last 10-15 years, it's really exploded. And really, anyone can start a SaaS business.

 

There's a lot more competition, which means that acquisition costs with AdWords and spending and advertisements on LinkedIn or wherever you're spending are up, which means acquisition costs are up. And it's actually 5 to 7 times more cost effective nowadays to retain your customers versus acquiring new ones to just replace that kind of with the ones dropping at the end of funnel.

 

So, they're seeing more and more attention especially in tougher economic climates shift to retention strategies, and companies are doubling down and investing in it. Another department that you've really seen take off and thrive in the last 10 years would be customer success. This wasn't a department that existed when he started his career in SaaS.

 

Giving a Frictionless Experience – Questions Companies Can Ask to Find Out Why Their Customers Are Leaving

 

Me: That's so true. It's funny, you mentioned that because I did attend a podcast conference in October of last year in Washington. And it was primarily geared towards persons in the Customer Success space. And I was quite impressed to see that there are so many organizations that are giving attention to that area to ensuring that their customers are getting what they've signed up for, if they're having any trouble along that journey, working out those kinks. And, of course, trying to keep them as you mentioned, rather than having them just disappearing, you don't realize until you're checking your balance sheet at the end of the year. And you're like, holy cow, you know, what happened to this percentage of income that we used to get?

 

Now, in exchange for giving customers a frictionless experience at the point of cancellation, what are some things that a company could possibly ask to find out why their customers are leaving? And more importantly, when they get that information, what are they going to do with it to ensure that it doesn't impact future customers to have the same reason?

  

Tony shared that they always recommend, it really boils down to asking kind of two core questions with any cancellation experience. And you can, of course, add beyond that. But when it boils down to it, you want your exit survey to ask why? Like, what's the primary motivator for why you're leaving? This would generally be a multiple choice, drop down, or options, select and have about 5 to 7 reasons that are pretty common to why people leave, it might be price, customer service, maybe lack of features and so on.

 

So, whatever is more pertinent to your business, you'd want to fill in there. And then as time goes on, and you're getting more feedback, you can obviously change those reasons. And then the second one is a lot more open-ended. And this is what he really loves to read responses and help people dig into why their customers are leaving, but just asking open ended questions like, “What, can we do better? Or where did we fall short? Or even asking them, what did you love about us?”

 

So, asking some sort of open ended question that's going to get maybe more unprompted unsolicited feedback that isn't so fixed, that you can then read through and gain an understanding of and then taking that to another level, you can always run that through whether it's in a spreadsheet and servicing common keywords, or having a software that does that for you so that you can actually learn and have takeaways from that particular feedback. But those would be a couple of quick recommendations he would say, if you were going to put in a cancellation flow today, those are the two things you'd want to have in there.

 

Me: Excellent, excellent. Very, very good. It's funny, I'm happy that when you gave the example, you indicated that it should be a multiple-choice question for the first option, with a few frequent reasons why people would want to walk away because that was my next question. What type of question should you be positioning?

 

And how would you even know what the most common reasons why people walk away are in order to know what we would put in a multiple-choice option. So, I'm happy that you addressed that for us.

 

Retention Strategies That Organizations Can Employ to Reduce Their Churn from Increasing

 

Me: Now, Tony, churn is one of those things that all organizations go through. And it's hard, it must happen, I believe in all businesses, unfortunately, you cannot avoid it. But what are maybe some retention strategies that organizations can employ to reduce their churn from increasing on a year to year basis, because I imagine the aim of our businesses to ensure that they have less churn year over year.

 

Tony stated that there's certainly a lot of stages of the customer lifecycle that you have to invest into to ultimately impact churn and retention. What they're just focusing on is really one kind of area of it. And he always tells people that they’re not the end all be all solution to churn either. It's really, from his personal standpoint, it's having a customer centric mindset instilled in your company at the top and being aware and he touched on this earlier, but there's so many SaaS companies and competition out there now and everyone can kind of spin up a technology that has a website and a subscription service, when really the only true way to stand out in his perspective is just providing that ultimate customer experience.

 

And having just a world class kind of top to bottom experience for your particular customer. So making sure that when you're in your marketing messages that you're really honed in on your ICP, when you're onboarding on your product, making sure that they kind of reach that aha moment and get value out of your product as soon as possible in the mid stage of their lifecycle, what analytics are you looking at and monitoring within your application to know that they're using the product and getting value out of it.

 

And then at the end, making sure that they're having a quality experience even at the end of their lifecycle because this is something he talked about a lot too. But there's a disproportionate amount of weight, and especially someone's memory, at the end experience with any sort of product, service or experience in their life. So, you want to make sure that the end experience even with your product, if that is the end is positive, so that they can remember you in that good light and want to come back and use your product.

 

Me: That's a very good point. So, a lot of people, as you mentioned, will probably focus more on the onboarding, but maybe they're not giving as much attention to the off-boarding, for that experience to be a positive memory in the customers mind.

 

What are some things that an organization needs to take into consideration in the off-boarding process? Outside of the questions that asked, why are you leaving?

 

Tony shared that he thinks it goes back a bit to having to balance that scale between getting the information that you as a company you want from your customer, but also giving them the self-service and as frictionless of an experience as possible to respect that you don't want them to jump through hoops so that the impression of your brand, and your company in their mind it still remains positive at the end.

 

And that's really something that is called the peak end rule, which is, again, just making sure that that last experience is great, so that when they look back and think of your brand, they're going to probably remember that experience more so than anything that happened in the middle of the lifecycle or that first onboarding stage. And that can influence what sort of customers and recommendations that you might get as a result of that, or their likeliness to return.

 

Me: Recommendations, so important, because word of mouth advertising is still the most effective type of advertising.

 

Tony agreed and stated that potentially the cheapest long term.

 

Trends if They Are Existing Organizations Should Try and Continue to do

 

Me: Now, Tony, you're in the customer experience space and we're in a new year, we've just emerged out of a pandemic. What are some key things that you think customers are looking for as we’re emerging out of our first quarter of 2023, as a consumer yourself, what are some of the trends that you're seeing, things that if they exist already, organizations should try and continue to do those things? Or is there anything new that you think organizations should be trying to do that they weren't doing before?

 

Tony shared that coming into the new year, he definitely noticed, especially when working with potential new customers that budgets and uncertainty in the economic situation are top of mind. So, budgets aren't flowing like they were even last summer or a year ago. So, he thinks being recognized that people are struggling right now in that sense and doing whatever you can to get them on board, even if it's a temporary price concession might be something you want to look into. Just the fact that the budgets are working with it, every department is certainly facing those challenges.

 

And then he thinks, as far as looking forward and saying, what do I need to get into that's emerging today? He would say that you can't really go anywhere, at least he can't, online without reading something about AI, artificial intelligence and examples of ChatGPT everywhere.

 

So, he’s not big on saying AI for the sake of saying AI and he thinks you're going to see a lot of regulation around that, as that continues to mature and progress. But he thinks every business needs to take a step back and evaluate what technology is emerging in the AI space and how can I apply this to my business to benefit my customers, not just to say I have it, but to actually benefit my customers, and start planning for that and seeing what you can do on your product roadmap to leverage that sort of feature.

  

Me: So, amazing ChatGPT, it's phenomenal.

  

Tony shared that It's really interesting, just to play around with it and ask it questions, and it's kind of amazing actually.

 

Me: It is. What I personally like about it is the fact that you would normally do a Google search, and you will literally have to do all of the fine tuning and picking what you don't want and what you really want, but with ChatGPT and what I've found is the quality of the question or the prompt that you give ChatGPT determines the quality of the response it gives you back. So, of course, the more specific you are, the more likely you are to get literally on target what you're looking for, which cuts down your research time, astronomically.

 

Tony totally agreed. And it just feels like one of those technologies. Like when he started his professional career, SaaS was very much in its infancy. But you could tell that this was the future of software, and even all the kind of old school brands that used to buy a license for every year, the Adobe's of the world of all shifted to a subscription model. So, you kind of knew that that was going to be, web-based software was going to be the future. But this also feels like one of those inflection points where AI is getting to a point where like, everything that we're going to interact with and do not only just in software, but in life is probably going to be impacted by that sooner than later some way.

 

App, Website or Tool that Tony Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

 

When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Tony stated that just a little bit of context, ProsperStack was founded in April of 2020. So, it was right as the COVID pandemic was hitting, and the world was changing very quickly. But it also forced them to be remote first company from the get go. So, they maintain that way and he’s sure a lot of people probably say this as well.

 

But for him, he would say it’s Slack, really, all of their communication is essentially surrounded around it. And they have employees that are in different time zones, they work different hours. And asynchronous communication is very essential to their way of working and without that he would have to have something to replace it, and he hasn't found anything that would be better.

 

Me: Very good. I'm happy that you touched on that. Because I've had so many conversations with so many clients, I would say in the last 6 to 8 months that they definitely want their team members to come back face to face. It'll be good to hear from an organization that started remote and you've decided to maintain that remote, you haven't said to yourself, “Well, things are back to normal now, so I think we can set up a main location, everybody needs to come into office.”

 

What are your views on that as a business owner? Why do you think people are so stuck on wanting to see their employees come back if the work can be done remotely?

 

Tony shared that he thinks the biggest fear is kind of the maybe unknown of the long-term impacts that it can have on your culture. And he thinks it's just about weighing the pros and cons. So, he came from an office situation that kind of an 8 to 5, Monday to Friday, everyone's in the office every day up until the pandemic, and then having started his own company, and shifted there, they do maintain an office space that is entirely optional for their local employees that come into, but they also look at the pros of being remote first company and opening themselves up to a talent pool that just isn't restricted to their geographic location, giving people the freedom to kind of have a better work life balance, and use it as a perk that are going to make employees want to stay, especially, maybe not so much now with a lot of tech layoffs happening, but coming into the new year, talent was very, very hard to come by. So, you just kind of use it as a tool there.

 

But he thinks the biggest thing is the cultural impact and the unknown of not having that face to face time. To compensate for that, they do stand ups, everything's on video, just have in their handbook, they say, if you're worried about whether you need to communicate something and you’re not err on the side of over communicating versus just keeping things to yourself, because these are all things that we would probably talk about in person, but you don't want to like make it a point to write it in Slack, they try to encourage over communication in this case.

 

Me: Brilliant. You're one of the few guests that I've interviewed in the 6 years I've been podcasting that I've actually heard use that term. It's something that I use in customer service all the time. And I encourage people to do it and this is from an external customer perspective, but it's definitely applicable to an internal customer experience as well, that it's better for you to err on the side over communication, because people don't know that you're having delays, they don't know what's going on. And so, it's better for you to over communicate than to under communicate, because, unfortunately, the flip side of under communication is people assume, and they don't normally assume for the positive, they assume for the negative. So, I'm happy that you're of that opinion as well.

 

Tony stated that he couldn't agree more.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Tony

 

When asked about books that have a great impact, Tony stated that he would say the one that he keeps coming back to. And this is one that helped him later in the stages of the prior company he worked for and as an entrepreneur having to dive into sales without having a formal sales background was The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million by Mark Roberge.

 

And that is a book about how HubSpot scaled their sales process in the early days using more of like an engineering data driven approach. And, again, as someone who didn't really have a lot of professional experience in that side of things, he found that he could relate a lot to the processes there. And he took a lot of inspiration from that book and obviously applied some newer technologies to it. But that was kind of the basis on how they landed their first X amount of customers.

 

What Tony is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about something that’s going on that he’s really excited about, Tony stated that from a personal perspective, being someone who's in front of a computer for so long every day, he always finds himself having like an itch to do something like a little bit more tangible with his hands than just producing documents online all the time. So, just for his personal growth, he really likes to take on projects, whether it's just a small building of something or a larger project like remodeling. So, he does have a small cabin that he’s adding on to right now and doing a majority of the work himself and having some help as well. But he just finds that that being able to build something with his hands is very therapeutic to him.

 

Where Can We Find Tony Online

 

LinkedIn – ProsperStack

Twitter - @ProsperStack

Instagram - @ProsperStack

  

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Tony Uses

 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Tony shared that he'll preface this by saying he’s not the biggest quote person out there. But in his experience, and especially being an entrepreneur, there's a ton of things that they do, and they try that just don't work out as you'd hoped or succeeded. And he thinks the ability to recognize when those failures happen, and just having the mindset of keep going and trying new things is a really admirable quality and something you need to have quite frankly as an entrepreneur. So, he guesses an old quote that came to mind was, “If at first you don't succeed, try again.”

 

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

 

Links

 

·  The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million by Mark Roberge

  

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners 

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!

Mar 7, 2023

Welcome to Navigating the Customer Experience. Thank you so much for joining us today for another episode. We have been on a little hiatus, our last episode published was the latter part of December 2022. It's been a roller coaster of 2023. And I'm so happy to bring you another episode of Navigating the Customer Experience. This episode is not an episode with a guest, it's a solo episode.

 

And I just wanted to kind of start off the year with some key reminders that I believe as a business regardless of whether you're a solopreneur, or you're an entrepreneur with a small client base, medium client base, large client base, whether you're service based, or product and service based, that we take some time to look at the importance of being responsive.

 

And I think it's critical for us to be responsive as business owners or employees in an organization with team members as well as with customers. Now, responsiveness is so important and it's not just about being polite and friendly, it's actually a very key component that can guarantee whether or not you're going to be successful, or you're going to be unsuccessful.

 

So really, and truly, what does it mean to be responsive, it really means being available and attentive to your customers’ needs. And those two needs are their emotional and their intellectual needs. If you've listened to my podcast before, you will know that emotional speaks to how you make your customer feel. Whether it's your internal or your external customer, and intellectual speaks to on a cognitive level, what do they understand from what you've communicated to them?

 

Being responsive means that you're quick to respond to any inquiries, complaints or feedback. And it means taking the time to listen to your customers and to make them feel heard and valued. So, you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, of course, I respond to my customers. That's just basic customer service.” But there's some more components as it relates to responding to customers.

There are things that you have to take into account such as when do you respond to customers? How quickly do they actually get a response from you? Now, the global standard for response time pre COVID was 24 hours. And by 24 hours, I mean, at least giving some acknowledgement to the person who sent you a message or gave you a call, or send an email asking for information, it could be a request they're asking to be fulfilled, it could be an issue they have that they need to be resolved, that's highly time sensitive.

 

Regardless, you take the time to respond, post COVID, the expectation of the average customer is at a level of response within an hour, blows our mind that the time has been reduced. But it just shows you that COVID has definitely brought to the front that we need to pay attention to our customers, we need our customers and we need to ensure that our customers know that we value and appreciate them. So yes, I'm sure as a business you do respond to your customers but if you were to do an audit to identify what is your response time? Is it fair to say that you are responding within the expected times? Or is your communication delayed? And if your communication is delayed, how is that impacting your customer and their business.

 

So, being responsive means being proactive in addressing your customers concerns. It means anticipating their needs and addressing potential issues before they become problems. It means being available to your customers across all of your different channels, whether that be live chat, telephone, face to face, email, social media, you name it, whatever channel you're available on, can your customers realistically get a response from you?

 

So, why is being responsive so important? Well, for starters, it's essential for building trust with your customers. Your trust is going to be broken down with the organization or with the employees in that organisation if they don't feel like you are truly valuing them as a person and they can depend on you and they can count on you. So, they're more likely to trust an organization or a person in an organization who is highly responsive. Those are some of the bedrock components of really ensuring that you build a strong bond or strong relationships with your customers, and of course to ensure that you have future business.

But beyond that, being responsive is also crucial for resolving issues quickly and effectively. Now, most customers reach out to a business for primarily two reasons. They either have a request, and it could be a new request or a request adding on to existing services or products that they have with you already. Or they're calling because they're having a problem and they want you to fix the problem. Those are absolutely the only two reasons that customers reach out to a business place.

 

And so, you want to ensure that depending on the importance of the issue of why the customer is reaching out to you that you get back in touch with them as soon as possible. I recently had an experience with a freight forwarder that I use here in Kingston, Jamaica. I ordered some parts, and it was for a fridge. So, it was very sensitive. The vendor that I did business with overseas, they were really quick, I didn't pay for expedited shipping or anything, but they were able to get the item to my freight forwarder within two days of placing the order. However, it took almost, I would say 15 to 18 days, including weekends for me to actually receive the product here in Jamaica in my hand physically.

 

I had to send an email to the organization with the invoice asking what is the status, you have received this item from the 13th of February, it's now the 25th of February, what is the status, nobody has responded to my email that I've sent, days have passed, I'm now having to call and request to speak with a supervisor. In speaking with a supervisor, she's giving me information that's not consistent with the information that's on their website, or on their app that's on my phone. And it was just so frustrating, the whole experience was extremely frustrating. But what really floored me in that experience was in the conversation with the supervisor, I asked her for her last name and her response was, “Why do you want to know that?” I was totally floored, I was like, “Is this lady for real?” Is she really in customer service?

 

So, I took it a step further and I asked her, “May I have your position at this organisation?” And she said, “I'm the supervisor for customer service.” And that was just even more mind blowing, because I'm thinking to myself, you work in an organization, giving your first and last name is not a secret, you should be open to giving information, you should not be hiding or shying away from your customers, they have chosen you over other organizations that are in this space and they're having a genuine issue that is very serious. And they've called you, they've reached out to you, they've sent an email to you, they've reached out to you on multiple channels.

 

And they're asking for your name as a reference point, and you are being defensive, you're not being cooperative, you're operating as if I've called you at your home and I'm asking for some very personal information that is beyond your ability to give to me. And it just really turned me off completely from the experience. And I'm actually even considering thinking of moving my business from them just because of that one interaction.

 

Funny enough, at the end of the whole experience, I actually gave her some advice. I told her that I'm a customer service trainer, and I just wanted to give you some feedback on some of the experiences that I had with you through this entire process. And she was quite defensive when I gave her the feedback. She was like, well, the reason why I did it was because of this. And she was giving all sorts of reasons instead of humbly just saying, “I really, truly appreciate your feedback. And we definitely will try and improve going forward.” That to me would have been a more acceptable response than her high level of defensiveness because it's clear based on her response and her tone, she genuinely didn't see anything wrong with her behaviour or what she did.

 

And it just goes to wonder if that as a Supervisor, “What role model behaviour is she presenting to the team that she's supervising?” And what are they being guided by? And what kinds of interactions are they having with their customers?

 

So, being responsive is more than just answering a question. It's more than just ensuring that you're providing feedback in real time to your customers, but it's also ensuring that you're giving accurate information. It's ensuring that if you're not sure about something, you verify that information before you relate to the customer on whatever channel it is that you're publishing this information to for your customer.

 

It's also ensuring that you don't get defensive when you receive feedback because we're not perfect as human beings. We are imperfect, we make mistakes, I make mistakes. Yes, I'm a customer service trainer and I do know best practices. But I'm human, I make mistakes too. And I'm big and bold enough to say, “I'm sorry, I really didn't mean it, that was not my intention, I will try to do better. I apologize.” And you say it from a place of authenticity, that the person that you're apologising to, genuinely realizes that you are being sincere about your behaviour.

 

So, as we embark on the remainder of 2023, we've just started the third month. I just want to remind you, those of you loyal listeners that have been on this journey with me “Navigating the Customer Experience,” since May 2016, it’s been such a rewarding and amazing journey, that being responsive is one of the key ways that you can ensure that you build strong relationships with your customers, it shows that you value them, it creates a positive experience, it definitely will lead to greater word of mouth advertising and a positive perception of your brand. And persons will be more inclined to intrinsically want to recommend you to their friends and family based on the experiences that they have with you.

 

So, as we wrap up today's episode, I just want to give you some tips as it relates to being responsive. So, keep in mind that in order to be responsive, you need to ensure that the channels that you have your business or your service, your product out there on that you have someone monitoring those channels, and that you are getting in touch with your customers and keeping them up to date as to any delays or challenges that they may be experiencing.

 

It's also important that you respond to any inquiries and complaints in a timely manner, and set reasonable and clear expectations so your customers know exactly what to expect and when to expect it. Customers aren't mind readers and as I said to you before, we're not perfect, we're going to make mistakes. But it's important if there are delays, to take that telephone up, give them a call and say, “Hey, we're having a delay” or jump onto your email and send out that email and say, “Hey, we know we had indicated that the product will be delivered by x or that you'd be able to pick up or you'd be able to have this delivery. However, we are experiencing a delay and we do anticipate that the new delivery date or the new time for expectation of this service is x.” So they know.

And if they have to make any changes on their end, there is more than enough time for them to put that in place.

 

And thirdly, try to be proactive in addressing potential issues. So, you want to keep abreast of what's happening. Ensure that you're aware of all of the things that are going around, make sure that you are communicating with your customers and try to make yourself available. We are in the age of information and customers have so many ways that they can reach out to us.

 

So, regardless of the channel that you put yourself out there on, try to ensure that you're monitoring those channels, that you're being proactive, that when you receive feedback, you receive it in a very humble and positive way, and look for opportunities to make it better the next time. Because those customers that complain and give you feedback, they genuinely want to continue doing business with you, that's why they've actually taken the time to give you that feedback.

 

So, those are my recommendations, that's how I kind of want to start off with you for 2023. Just remember that you should treat others the way you would like to be treated and if you genuinely don't appreciate when people don't call you back, when people don't give you accurate information, when people don't respond to your requests or queries in a timely manner, don't practice doing it with others. Try to give what you expect. Try to give what you would like to receive and you'd be surprised to know that life is like a boomerang, whatever you give out, it will roll right back into you.

 

So, just want to remind our listeners if you'd like to follow us on Twitter, feel free to hop onto Twitter, our handle is @navigatingcx and if you'd like to join our private Facebook group, it's called @NavigatingtheCustomerExperienceCommunity.

 

And of course, always have to give a plug, if you're interested in purchasing our book, “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.” that actually has a chapter on response time. You can head over to Amazon and purchase either a digital copy or a physical copy for you or your team to help enhance all the behaviours and competencies that you want to ensure your team members are continually delivering on it in your customer interactions, whether those be internal or external. So, thank you so much for listening, until next time I'm your host Yanique Grant.

 

Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners  

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!

 

Dec 20, 2022

Sarah Diegnan is ChartHop’s VP of Customer Experience, after leading implementations at Acuity Brands, Opower and Oracle, she brings operational excellence to creating and delivering a world class customer experience for all ChartHop’s customers. She is an expert in leading a customer journey, partnering with customers from the first moments of onboarding through successful execution of all account goals, making sure customers are getting the most out of CharterHop.

In addition to her SaaS experience, Sarah was a practicing structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and worked for the commercial real estate developer, Tishman Speyer.

 

Questions

 

  • Can you share a little bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today? What catalyst got you into the customer experience journey? And just a little bit about who you are in your own words?
  • Could you tell us a little bit about your company ChartHop and what is the service or product that you provide?
  • What is your view on the customer journey through an HR lens. And how do you think EX impacts customer outcomes, the ins and outs of a customer health score?
  • Are there any emerging trends that you've seen in the CX space, in the employee experience space that you think organization should really be paying greater attention to or tapping into as we embark on our new year?
  • Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Now could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you read quite recently, but it surely has created an impact maybe had great value in your leadership delivery and you just really would love to share it with us.
  • Could you share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
  • Where can listeners find you online?
  • In times of adversity or challenge, do you have a quote or saying that you tend to revert to, it kind of helps to get you back on track or get you back refocused if for any reason you get derailed.

 

Highlights

 

Sarah’s Journey

 

Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share with us in their own words, a little bit about their journey, how you got to where you are today? What catalyst got you into the customer experience journey? And just a little bit about who you are in your own words?

 

Sarah shared that sometimes she likes to say that she has a bit of a meandering path to where she is today. But she thinks that's actually something that is common amongst customer experience professionals is it takes a lot of different skill sets and she thinks you can build those at a lot of different areas. And so, she started her career as a structural engineer, was something that she always wanted to be when she was a little kid, people would ask, what do you want to do, and she wanted to design buildings, she wanted to design skyscrapers.

 

And so, that is what she did, she set out to do it, and she went to school, she went to engineering school, and she loved it, she really did. And she thinks architecture and buildings will always have a very, very special place in her heart. However, what she started realizing when she hit about year 4, year 5, being a structural engineer is that it's a very narrow piece of a we'll call it building lifecycle, very, very narrow.

 

And she had the fortune to work with a project manager who was representing the owner, and she really had purview of the whole project, sort of end and all the pieces coming together to build these amazing buildings. And she had lunch with her and said, “I would like to do your job, can you tell me how to do it?” And one of the first things she said was, “Well, I went to business school, because you need to learn the business side of the business or of buildings.” She was like, great. So, she did that, she went to business school and coming out of business school, she thought working in real estate development was the place for her.

 

She did that for a couple years, and again, realized it was still a little too narrow in a lot of ways. And living in the Bay Area, it's really easy to get the start-up itch, you sort of look around, and tech is everywhere. And she had the fortune of literally running into a friend, running in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. And she said, “You need to talk to my sister. She is at a start-up and they're selling commercial lighting controls and they need an engineer who understands buildings, building operators, engineers.” And she said, “You know what, I know that person, that person is me.” And that was her very first job. We called it project operations and this was a long time ago. But it was customer experience.

 

It was the start of customer experience, and it was sort of the start of her journey to where she is today. ChartHop is her fourth start-up and throughout her career, she’s sort of grown into taking on more and more teams and have gotten to a point today where she leads all of customer experience at ChartHop, and that includes professional services, their customer success team, their technical support team, and their account management slash renewals team.

 

So, sort of a crazy story how she got here, but the reality is, it's working with customers that she loves. It's the project management and the operational piece and she’s sort of grown that throughout the years as an engineer, as a real estate professional and now as a tech professional.

 

About ChartHop and What Service or Product Does ChartHop Provide?

 

Me: Amazing. So, Sarah, you are at a company called ChartHop and for those of our listeners that don't know what ChartHop does, could you tell us a little bit about your company and what is the service or product that you provide?

 

Sarah stated that it's a great question, she’s happy to talk a little bit about it. So, ChartHop is really transforming the way companies think about managing and supporting their people. So, what that means is, they can take people data from all your different systems, so your HR system, your talent acquisition, system equity, and put it all in one place.

 

And the thing that makes ChartHop really special is that it's not just for HR professionals, or it's not just for the CEO, it is truly for every single person at the company, your individual contributors, all the way through to your CEO. And the reason why that's so important is because what you're doing is you're creating a very transparent organization; you're creating a one stop shop for everybody in the organization to get all the information that they need.

 

If you're an individual contributor, it's really all the information that you need to understand and navigate the organization, or someone in her role, it gives her the ability to look in one place to understand everybody in her organization, where might they be on a vesting schedule?

How long have they been at ChartHop?

What has their performance look like over the years?

 

And so, it's, it's really designed to create a transparent organization. It's designed to make sure that leadership is making good decisions, especially when we start thinking about DEIB in the workplace. And one of the key attributes is really, it's for everyone at a company, not just the HR team.

 

Views on the Customer Journey – How Does EX Impact Customer Outcomes – Ins and Outs of a Customer Health Score

 

Me: So, HR plays a very important role in an organization. And I'd love for you to maybe take a few minutes and discuss with us your view on the customer journey through an HR lens. And how do you think EX impacts customer outcomes, the ins and outs of a customer health score?

 

Sarah shared thar those are all great questions. And she thinks part of what attracted her to ChartHop was this sort of, she’ll call it intersection of HR and or employee experience and customer experience. Like most people that are listening to this podcast, if you're managing and leading a customer experience team, it probably means that you are leading a pretty big team. When you're talking about services in an organization, it's human capital. If robots could do our jobs, if a health score, which she’ll get into in a minute, was just two plus two is four, we wouldn't be here.

 

And so, you have to take care of your people and she thinks that's first and foremost why EX and CX are in a lot of ways the same thing, and they influence each other. She thinks time and time again, we've learned that happy employees, employees that understand the mission, employees that are driven by that mission, are going to be your highest producers, and they're going to be the most productive.

 

And if you think about putting that motivated, high performer on a call with your customer, that's infectious, absolutely infectious. That motivation and that desire to drive value with the customer is going to translate every single time. And so, it is so important as CX leaders to really be thinking about that. And really thinking about how to engage your team, not just in, “Hey, these are the metrics, we need to hit as a company,” or “Hey, this is what you need to do with your customers.” But really investing time, investing professional development, and really thinking about the employee experience, because it is going to translate.

 

She also thinks one of the interesting things she’s been able to do at ChartHop is really work closely with head of HR and think about how the employee experience is truly also how we think about a customer journey. If you think about those magic moments for a customer journey, there's onboarding and implementation, you have to nail that, you have to have customers coming out of that phase of the journey, and just feeling so excited and so pumped that they bought ChartHop and that they're using ChartHop, that's the same thing you want your employees to feel when they're coming out of onboarding, internal onboarding, you want them to feel so excited, you want them to feel so empowered. You want them to understand what they’re doing at ChartHop.

 

And so, you can really see the overlap, and this is something she’s worked really closely with their head of HR at ChartHop to make sure that they are tracking together so to speak. When you start thinking about driving adoption for customer journey, that is the exact same as working with someone on your team on what their professional development is. You chart out someone's professional development the exact same way you're going to chart out a customer's objective planning with you.

 

And so, really thinking about all of those things and making sure that they’re aligned. And one of the questions asked also was to talk a little bit about health score. She thinks health scores are absolutely fascinating. And also, just really where you get to sort of like, leave your fingerprint, your true unique fingerprint on how you think about your customer base. She mentioned this before, two plus two is four, that's great and she’s sure all the professionals out there could put together a really, really smart mathematical equation to take you to the number of support tickets, bugs, time to launch, outcome of a use case and sort of put a number together and come out with a magic number at the other end.

 

But that doesn't really capture everything that goes into customer health. It is truly an art and a science. And she thinks science is really important, it is important to calculate that number, that magic number that says, “Hey, if they're above 80%, they're happy, below 80% they're yellow, below 30% they're red.”

 

Great, so we have a stoplight. But what is the customer saying to you on the phone? What is the customer bringing to you in your weekly calls?

What is the customer saying during quarterly business reviews?

 

That's going to be a different level of understanding of how happy that customer is.

 

And one example that she gives a lot to her team is just thinking through if you have a customer who is really excited about working with you on beta features, or alpha features, and it's like, “Hey, I want to be there, I want to test it with you.” Then if you're basing their health solely on sort of like number of bugs, it's not going to look pretty.

 

But if that customer is signing up for it, and excited about it, then there's a different overlay that you need to put on that customer. And so, she really truly thinks it's an art and a science of how you think about health score.

 

And again, just to sort of come full circle, it's the same exact thing with employees.

 

You can't just look at one dimension, humans are multi dimension, and you have to look at a lot of different factors to really assess. Is this person a flight risk or are you going to keep them for another couple of years. And so, it's really thinking about things both from just a pure human perspective and from a numbers.

 

Me: Brilliant, awesome, thank you for sharing all of that Sarah, great insights and nuggets as it relates to HR customer experience, the health score, integrating all of that looking at the human dimension is so, so important if you really want to create a strong culture.

 

Trends Emerging in 2023 as it Relates to Customer Experience and Employee Experience

 

Me: Now, you've been in the customer experience space for quite some time. And I just wanted to know, as we exit one calendar year and jump into another, are there any emerging trends that you've seen in the CX space, in the employee experience space that you think organizations should really be paying greater attention to or tapping into as we embark on our new year?

 

Sarah shared that this is such a great question. And something she’s been definitely thinking a lot about, especially as she’s sure most people are doing this too, going into planning, going into next year's fiscal planning. She thinks it's a couple of things. And she’s used this word before, and so she doesn't want to overuse it, but it's relevant, is transparency.

 

If she thinks about the CX organization and just employees in general, they're sort of demanding, she thinks that's the right word. They're demanding more transparency.

 

We've seen a lot about pay transparency and really posting pay scales. And that ripples through all parts of the organization, it's not just pay, it's truly transparency in who reports to who and what are people working on and what deals are closing. And so, she thinks that's a really big trend that folks need to take a step back and make sure that they're being as transparent as possible with their employees.

 

She thinks that also leads true because of the remote environment. She knows a lot of companies ChartHop is one of them, they’re still remote and so really focusing on transparency to her also means focusing on communication, sort of overly communicating with your employees, making sure they truly understand what we're all doing right, what direction are we pointed at, what is our mission? What should we be thinking about day in and day out.

 

And she thinks that that actually also is something that she’s thinking about with their customers. Transparency with their customers looks a little bit different but it's something that she’s continuing to see and think about.

 

Every one again, this goes back to sort of the human nature, like humans have different ways of learning and that is something that she’s hearing customers really sort of demand again, use that word demand from us right now, as customer success professionals is customers want to learn how they want to learn.

 

And what she means by that is she actually truly spoke to a customer this morning, that was like, “Hey, your CSMs are great. But I sort of want to figure some of the stuff out myself. I want to read a help article.” She has other customers say to her, “I want more videos. I want more in app communication.”

 

And she sort of feels like all of that is about communication, all of that is about transparency, all of that is about sort of meeting people where they are. And so, she thinks that's a big trend to be thinking about as you're thinking through your customer journey for your specific product is all the different ways to communicate with your customer. And a not be annoying.

 

So not to be annoying, but just sort of meet the customer where they're at, like, “Hey, if you want to read something, here's the link to the doc, if you want to see a step by step video, here's driving to you're learning centre.” And so, that's a big trend that she’s seeing right now is customers really wanting to choose their path and sort of choose how they want to learn about your product.

 

Me: It's interesting you said that because I actually attended a Customer Success Conference in Washington in October, and I sat in a session where they spoke about community and more organizations building out their community pages on their websites where if you do have an issue, you don't actually have to get in touch with the company because the community can help you because other people have had similar issues, and I thought that was so brilliant that if we could really get more of that.

 

When I think about my own devices, like even my Apple computer or my phone, if there's something wrong or something I'm not sure about, I automatically go to Google. And usually, Google populates based on the SEO, the Apple community comes up like in the first two or three resolution options that Google provides you with and 9 out of 10 times someone else has had that issue, and the answer is right there waiting for you. So, I totally get when they say they want to have the opportunity to be able to fix it on their own.

 

Sarah shared that she loves that. She thinks community is so important. She also thinks that that's where you get really cool thought Leadership. You get folks that are using your product in ways that you had no idea, you're like, wow, she would get on the phone with customers and be like, “Wow, that was super clever. I never thought about doing it that way.” And so, she loves the concept of a community, and we can all learn from our peers in so many ways. She loves that.

 

App, Website or Tool that Sarah Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business

 

When asked about an online resource that she can’t live without in her business, Sarah stated that that's such a great question. So, first and foremost, she do have to say it is that again, she mentioned this a couple moments ago is that part of her job description is leading a large team, it's just always what it's like in a customer experience organization. So, to be totally true, ChartHop has really changed how she manage teams. And so, she'd say that's tool number one. Even at some point, if she were to leave, she would definitely advocate for that platform. It helps her navigate so many things with her team that it's so important.

 

She thinks number two, is video conferencing. She knows that there is Zoom fatigue in the world, she truly appreciates it, and she feels it. But being face to face with your customer is priceless. It is so hard to pick up on tone in an email, it's so hard to really convey what you're trying to say without having that face to face and with so much less travel, that is so critical. You have to put a face to a name, that's how you build relationships and build rapport.

 

And then the last one she’s going to say, which goes back to her very nerdy engineering days because she at her core, she is an engineer is really Excel or Google Sheets. She uses Excel all the time, it's what she needs to run her business.

 

Me: Brilliant, brilliant Excel is a very powerful tool.

 

Sarah agreed absolutely, people don't get as jazzed about it, but she does, it's truly her go to.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Sarah

 

When asked about books that have had an impact, Sarah shared that she has one in mind that she read probably about 8 years ago, and she recently reread it, because their CEO loves it as well. And so, he had all the executive team read it, it's called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, the title of it is so great. It's by Patrick Lencioni. It's so great, because it's transferable both from a leadership team perspective, but also from a CX perspective.

 

And so, what she means by that is, the whole concept of the book is that there is a first team, and your first team is not who you think it is, a lot of people think that your first team are the people that report to you. And the concept is that that's not actually true. Your first team are your peers in the organization and the reason why it's your peers is because together you are a matrix. You're a matrix organization, and together, you all need to work to reach the ultimate company goal, not your own goal, it's not like “How does Sara reach her goals across customer experience?” No, no, no, it's how do we, as an executive team work together to reach our goals as a company?

 

And so, it's really this concept of you have to have a common goal number one, and like, your team goal can't outshine the common goal. And the reason why she likes it for customer experience, as well and it's something that she drives with her leadership team, is they are a matrix environment, they have four separate teams that report to her, but together, these four teams need to work together for the one common goal of creating the absolute best customer experience for their customers.

 

And so, if that is what we're keeping in mind, if truly every single day we show up and say our goal is to provide the best customer experience to our customers, then the right thing to do is very easy, or who does what becomes very clear. And so, it's a book that really resonates with her, and she recommends, it's a very quick read. And she recommends it as both a CX professional, but also just as you're continuing to sort of move up the ladder as you think about working across teams as well sort of cross functionally, it's an absolute great read.

 

Me: Very nice. So, we'll definitely have the link to that book in the show notes of this episode. While you were explaining what the book was about in summary, especially the example you gave off, one person's goal should not outshine the overall goal of the company. I thought of football, I guess because we're in World Cup season now. And I said to myself, one person's goal cannot outshine the overall team's goal, which is to win the game.

 

Sarah agreed, exactly. So, she coaches her two boys’ soccer team. They call it Soccer, Football. There are some really great football soccer commercials happening now by the way.

 

And it's so true, it's something that she really talks to the kids about from a young age, both when you score a goal and when the team scores against you, it’s not the goalie’s fault, it went through every single player before it got to the goalie. And same concept, the person who scores it touched a lot of feet before it got to that person that eventually put the ball on the back of the net. So, you are exactly right. She is a sports nerd. Same concept, so she loves it.

 

Me: That just popped in my mind a while ago, I was like wow, it's such a simple statement. But it's so profound and you everybody kind of has that mindset in an organization, I think the employee and the customer experience can be phenomenal.

 

What Sarah is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about something she’s really excited about, Sarah shared that that's a really great question. So, she’ll give two answers. Personally, what she’s working on, she’s a member of an organization, it's a women's networking organization. And they meet once a month with a peer group, is actually interesting, this is now becoming a theme, a peer group. So, other women who are at her same level and sort of going through sort of the same things and they’re all in the same macro environment.

 

And so, even if maybe some of them are not customer experience professionals, they're marketing professionals, most are in the start-up environment. But it's something that she’s really embracing. And each month they meet and we all bring to the table something that they’re facing or something that they’re thinking about or challenge that they’re going through with the company, and really working on being reflective, that is something that she’s working on is, when you are in it every day with customers, you sort of create this world where you're sort of go, go, go, go go.

 

And she thinks that a little bit more reflection is always really good. And so, that is something that professionally she’s working on is sort of taking those, it's only two hours once a month, but really taking the time to reflect like, sort of prepare for those meetings and sort of reflect on herself.

 

And then for her team, this might sound a little funny, but she’s actually right now, hiring a new leader for the for the customer success team. And she’s so excited to partner with this new leader because the customer success managers at ChartHop are absolutely phenomenal, truly phenomenal. And she’s excited to get a leader in seat that is really going to work with them, both from a professional development standpoint, and also just a process perspective but really dive in and take that team to the next level. And so, that's really her focus is just finding and hiring such an amazing leader for an amazing team.

 

Where Can We Find Sarah Online

 

LinkedIn – Sarah Diegnan

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Sarah Uses

 

When asked about a quote or saying that she tends to revert to, Sarah stated yes, that's a good one. One of the things she thinks about is, and the folks out there listening, and the customer experience org can sort of relate to this is that some days you show up and you have a list of things to do and none of those things get done. Because at the end of the day, we are going to follow the lead of our customers, and so, if a customer needs to talk to her, she’s going to drop everything to talk to that customer and she’s sure every single person that's listening does the same exact thing.

 

And so, in the moments when she’s thinking to herself, “Wow, I am buried. Like, how am I going to get all of this done?” She goes back to something that her mom would always say to her, “It'll all get done, Sarah, it will all get done.” And it's something that she thinks about a lot. How it all gets done is sort of in the background, it's truly just believing in yourself, and believing that you're going to figure it out and having that confidence that as her mom would say, “It's all going get done, Sarah, it's all going to get done.”

 

Me: Thank you so much for sharing Sarah, for taking time out of your very busy schedule to hop on this podcast, have this great conversation, give our listeners greater insights as to what they can do, what they can improve on, what are some of the emerging trends that you’ve seen, the fact that we need to be more transparent, we need to be more collaborative. Some of the different applications that you’ve used and are continuing to use to enhance your work that you do daily to improve your productivity as well as to get your job done. And of course, working towards the overall goal which is to create that magical experience for your customers at ChartHop.

 

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

 

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Links

 

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Dec 13, 2022

Rama Sreenivasan is a co-founder and CEO at Blitzz, a live remote video support and inspection platform. Rama has led the company through its initial inception launch and subsequent growth to several million video support minutes per month. Major customers include BMW, Sealy, FedEx, and Rogers Telecommunications.

Before founding Blitzz in 2017, Rama spent several years working as a Scientist and Educator. His biggest joy comes from helping others solve their problems and he is passionate about finding effective ways to disseminate knowledge. Rama has a PhD and MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park. He also did his Postdoctoral research at MIT in Cambridge, Boston.

 

Questions

  • We always like to give them an opportunity to share in your own words, how you got to where you are today and why you ended up on this journey that you are on?
  • So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about Blitzz? What does Blitzz do? Is Blitzz an acronym for something and may I ask? I'm not sure if you actually have a reason for it. But like, what inspired you to name the company Blitzz?
  • The whole method of augmented reality enabled Smart Glasses that your company is using to enable hands free support, making it even easier to fix a car stereo appliance and more. Could you share a little bit about how that works? And what the process is? And how easy has it been for customers to transition using this new method of resolution?
  • What are some trends that you see emerging in 2023 and beyond as it relates to technology, maybe one or two that you have observed, or you see that are emerging that you'd be willing to share with our audience?
  • Could you also share with our audience what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read very recently, or even one you read a very long time ago, but it really has had a great impact on your life, and you just believe it would be a good value to share with our audience.
  • Could you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two things that you do personally to stay motivated every day, despite any challenges or adversities that you may face?
  • Could you also share with our audience, what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can listeners find you online?
  • Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you’ll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed.

 

Highlights

Rama’s Journey

 

Me: So, even though we read the bio of our guests, the formal constructed background of where our guests history is, and how they got to where they are today, we always like to give them an opportunity to share in your own words, how you got to where you are today and why you ended up on this journey that you are on?

 

Rama stated that that's a pretty deep question. Start with a little bit about his background, he grew up in India and Indonesia, so two countries far away from here. And always been guided by a lot of the values from his parents, his dad was an engineer. He's retired right now and back in India, and his mom was a teacher as well. So, a lot of great values growing up and the fundamental thing was always trying to care for people, to help them. And his strength in math and science naturally led him to be an engineer, just like his dad.

 

And he always looks for opportunities to help people out with technology. And that's been his journey so far. But one thing led to another and here he is, running a software company, although, all his education was in chemical engineering, he did my Master's, his PhD post-doc, worked for a couple of semiconductor companies. But it was during that journey that he saw the need to help people with technology, as they struggled to troubleshoot equipment.

 

And so, the equipment came in through his engineering, the desire to help came through his value system. And then he started looking for technologies, he stumbled across technologies and he puts all these together and that's how Blitzz was born when he met his co-founder, KR, who used to work at Google before he joined him in starting Blitzz.

 

What Does Blitzz Do?

 

Me: So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about Blitzz? What does Blitzz do? Is Blitzz an acronym for something and may I ask? I'm not sure if you actually have a reason for it. But like, what inspired you to name the company Blitzz?

 

Rama shared that he’ll start with the name Blitzz. Blitzz with one Z actually means getting something done fast and efficiently. There's also another meaning, which refers to the Blitzkrieg during World War. But the second meaning is what they’re referring to here. The reason why they went with two Z's was honestly because one Z the website was already taken, so they went with two Z, that it was also a little cooler with two Z's. So, that's what Blitzz means to get something done fast and efficiently.

 

And regarding what it does, so they provide a way to have an app free live video call with anyone on the planet. As most people know today, in the video calls are pretty rapid, especially the pandemic got people started on video calling, especially in not just personally but at work as well. But many people don't know that it can be done without an app download.

 

And there are specific reasons why you want to do it without an app download especially when you're helping out a customer who's calling in into a contact centre, as you very well know, in customer service, you get a call in from someone that you've hardly met, you probably talking for the first time, they're probably frustrated with a piece of equipment, or perhaps their internet router, right? And to get on a video call with that person by asking them to download an app only frustrates them even more. So, there's got to be an easier way and that's what Blitzz is. He hopes that explained clearly what Blitzz is.

 

Smart Glasses – How it Works and the Process

 

Me: So, what intrigued me Rama, about interviewing you was this whole method of augmented reality enabled Smart Glasses that your company is using to enable hands free support, making it even easier to fix a car stereo appliance and more. So, I am all into customer experience, as you know, because that's the podcast Navigating the Customer Experience.

 

But I thought this was so cool that you could literally work with a client to not physically be in the same space but be using that technology to help them get their issue resolved. Could you share a little bit about how that works? And what the process is? And how easy has it been for customers to transition using this new method of resolution?

 

Rama shared that let him clarify that the Smart Glass hands free use case is, it's a different use case when it comes to someone, a consumer calling a contact centre. So, the Smart Glasses doesn't apply to that. That applies to technicians out in the field who are probably climbing up a windmill or cell phone tower or need their hands free to hold them to the study as they climb a piece of equipment or hold tools in their hands to follow instructions from a remote expert. So, that's the Smart Glass site.

 

But with consumers calling and say, if you've got a problem with your charger, as you charge your car in your ED vehicle, and you're not able to charge it, and you call the one 1800 number in the US, for example, that’s what do you typically call for customer support. Somebody at a contact centre picks up the call and today they want to help you out, the whole idea is to get you going on your way.

 

But today, most of them operate blind meaning that they can't see your problem. And when they operate blind, they tend to ask a bunch of questions, which is typically aggravating because you're thinking to yourself in front of the car, if only you could see this. Well, that's what Blitzz is. At that point in time, the way it works is as a contact centre agent, you would simply send them a text link, they would get it on their phone.

 

So, while they had the phone to the air, now they will get a link to look at the phone take it away from their ear and look at the screen, they would click on the link, immediately the back camera turns on and within a few seconds without an app download, the contact centre agent is actually looking at the charging port of the car. So, just cuts down all those extra questions and they could point to things, they can mark images up, they can communicate very clearly as if they were standing right next to the person in front of the car just through remote video.

 

Me: All right, amazing. And how do you find technology helping customers because a lot of organizations are using technology and I do believe that it really should be used to enhance the experience to make things frictionless or effortless for the customer. But I also believe that the human element is still very critical to the experience that the customer has, because technology can fail. And so, how do you think as we transition and we move forward because I'm sure there's more opportunities for technology to be infusioned into the experience that we have, that we blended in such a way that they complement each other rather than create further frustration and pain and discomfort for customers.

 

Rama shared that he couldn't have said it any better. But right on point. The blending of technology and the human empathy is very important and that's what they focus on when they take Blitzz to the contact centres. So, the ability to get the customer agent eyes on the problem brings in that technology piece. And because of being able to see the problem and connect with the consumer who's calling in a pain free, frictionless manner, like you just mentioned, make sure that they're in sync, they understand each other. And then as they see the problem, now they can solve it better and perhaps, most of the cases, what happens is they're able to solve the problem and avoid sending out a technician or avoid sending the product back to the manufacturer and saving a ton of trouble by just being able to see it and solve it within a few minutes.

 

Trends Emerging in 2023 as it Relates to Technology

 

Me: Have you seen, you're in the whole technology space, I would say trends that you see emerging in 2023 and beyond as it relates to technology, maybe one or two that you have observed, or you see that are emerging that you'd be willing to share with our audience?

 

Rama shared that yes, absolutely. There are lots of tools that are AI related, even in the case of video, as video’s getting more rampant in businesses, not just in personal communication, technologies like Blitzz come in almost every other month and capture more data and that data is fed into machine learning. And you can use that data very effectively to make downstream processes more efficient.

 

For example, even during a Blitzz call, how do we empower the agent to provide the right solution to the caller? Imagine the agent is able to immediately get access to an instruction manual based on the make and model of the equipment that the agent is supporting to troubleshoot, being able to pull that resolution step or the answer to the problem and giving the agent immediate access so that they can help the customer and have them go about their day, very, very quickly, is very powerful.

 

So, AI, augmented reality video are all the tools that are coming out with great efficiencies, much like 10 years ago, chat came about for customer experience. So, he would like to say that video is like the new chat, because now your eyes are on the problem.

 

App, Website or Tool that Rama Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business

 

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Rama shared that that's a good one. He’s been thinking about it for a bit. He would say, for him, the biggest value is just the cloud, even if he loses his laptop today, and there are lots of tools, but all those are cloud based tools. Even if his laptop is lost, he can go get another one and just seamlessly continue working as if nothing was missing. Because all the data, be it Gmail, be it tools, collaborative tools like Slack, or be it a CRM like HubSpot for his business. All these tools are on the cloud and he could just go get another laptop and continue working.

 

So, he would say, connectivity to the cloud is what he would need absolutely for the business. And they're all cloud-based tools important to migrate. It's really important to migrate to the cloud for businesses who are looking to the future because of the ease of working in the cloud is just incredible.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Rama

 

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Rama shared that the book that comes to him was The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. That's more of a personal journey of being very mindfully aware of his strengths and weaknesses, it's kind of a metaphysical book, but it really made him aware of his own thinking process, and who he is as a person. And what does he want to do with his life.

 

There's also another book, he’s actually looking for around as he speaks. It’s a more recent book, it's by the author Dan Bapani and he has written a very good book on the ability to concentrate or the power of concentration. And he’s really enjoyed reading that book because it again, helps him be very mindfully aware of everything he does on a daily basis and be the best he can be. Both these things have really helped him be very present and live consciously.

 

How Rama Stay Motivated

 

When asked about how he stays motivated, Rama shared that he would say that would be definitely some yoga and meditation, that really puts him centre and it makes sure that things that really keep him keep me on track, he doesn't give up on those habits.

 

The funny thing about great habits is they get you to a spot where you're really enjoying life and that paradoxically also makes you not pursue those habits. So, you have to keep doing what you did to get there in order to be able to stay there. For him that is yoga and meditation.

 

What Rama is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about something that’s going on right now that he’s really excited about, Rama shared that he would say being a father of two small kids, 5 and 7. And running a company, trying to scale it. He’s always trying to find more balance and one of the other things he’s added in his life that he’s actually gotten back to because he couldn't do it when the kids were younger, was climbing. So, he loves climbing and what he’s really excited about is to get back to Yosemite, which is really close by in the valley and do some multi pitch climbing, which means climbing several pitches of rock. And that is pretty, pretty adventurous and exhilarating for him.

 

Me: Yes, that sounds very exciting and dangerous. But I suppose it depends on your perspective.

 

Rama shared that it's actually surprisingly, if you do it well, a joke to people, what typically is more dangerous is driving to Yosemite, rather than climbing because it's easier to get into trouble driving a car too fast than doing something very slow, like climbing, which is actually very controlled, provided you're very mindful.

 

Me: Yeah, and I do imagine there's some amount of skill involved in climbing as well.

 

Rama agreed, yes, there is but it does take some time and definitely getting trained with a good teacher is important, but again, what he’s realized is being very conscious about everything you do, being very hyper aware of what you do, really helps to be safe.

 

Where Can We Find Rama Online

 

LinkedIn – Rama Sreenivasan

Website – www.blitzz.com

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Rama Uses

 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Rama shared that he thinks of Bill Watterson, he's the author of Calvin and Hobbes, and he tries and bring in a little bit of humour in the face of adversity, and he said it through Calvin, his quote was, “God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now, I’m so far behind that I am certain that I shall never die.”

 

Me: Okay. And would you like to expound on that for our audience and explain what that means?

 

Rama shared that he just thought it was really funny, he was kind of a self-deprecating humour. I'm here to accomplish a certain number of things. And we all get stuck in the rat race, right, trying to do so much but what when you stop back and think, right now, it's nice to laugh at yourself and say, “Hey, we're so far behind and all the list of things that I have to do that if I have to get all of them done, according to God, I should never die because I'm so far behind.”

 

Me: Oh, my goodness. Yes, it's quite comical. If only that were true, we all do have an expiry date, we just don't know when.

 

Rama agreed yes. But sometimes he feels at least his personality, he tends to take himself too seriously. So, he has to remind himself to also lighten up, let go and we're all here to help each other out and have a good time and take care of other people.

 

Me: Indeed. Well, thank you so much Rama for taking time out of your very busy schedule, to hop on our podcast, Navigating the Customer Experience and just share with us some of the trends that you see emerging in the technology space, why technology needs to still be fused in with the human interaction, the human experience, because at the end of the day, neither of them can function on their own and blended together that will definitely create a better experience for customers. And so, we appreciate you sharing all of the great nuggets and insights in our conversation today and so we just want to express our gratitude to you for 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

 

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Dec 6, 2022

Amanda Ono has spent her career learning to maximize a company's most valuable investment - it's people. Boasting over 20 years of international experience in organizational development, HR consulting, and change management, she has implemented successful talent and leadership initiatives in six countries across four continents. You can currently find her at Resolver, a Kroll business and worldwide leader in defining risk intelligence, making her mark as both VP Customer Experience and VP People & Culture.

For most of her professional life, Amanda has been on a mission to understand what makes highly effective organizations tick. As an undergraduate in psychology, she saw pioneering research on the effects of unconscious bias and racism in resume screening up close. After graduating, she honed her craft by tackling training and organizational development at talent management firms across Canada. Soon her skills were in such demand that invitations to implement leadership programmes across the globe started to roll in - first in South Africa, followed by Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Since joining the Resolver team in 2016, she's only expanded on her record of success. Implementing processes and strategies that have enabled Resolver to scale by over 120%, expand into four countries and acquire three companies. Amanda's efforts have led to being recognized as one of Canada's great places to work six years in a row. Despite her accolades, Amanda is determined to continue engaging, accelerating and giving her colleagues at Resolver to deliver on the company's motto: Aim big, Be Great, and Be Loved by Customers.

 

Questions

 

  • We've read, the formal background of who you are and where you are today. But we'd love for you to tell us the audience and myself, in your own words, a little bit about your journey and how it is that you got to where you work today.
  • Could share with us maybe three to five things that you think is critical for leaders to embrace and practice on a daily basis in order to really have successful teams in an organization?
  • Sometimes I find that HR in an organization, very few organizations where I've interacted with the team members of a company, and they feel so comfortable going to their Human Resource people, how could we change that, what are some ways that we could look for opportunities that HR can really play the role they're supposed to play?
  • Could you also share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
  • Could you also share with us what are some books that you have read that you believe have had the biggest impact with you? Maybe one or two you could share with us, could be that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you read recently, but it really has impacted you.
  • Could you also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
  • Could you share with us one or two benefits of HR or the people arm of the business actually using it technology to enhance the experience that employees have in the organization? How can technology help that?
  • Where can they find you online?
  • Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, and the quote kind of helps to get you back on track and kind of refocus you on what you're trying to achieve?

 

Highlights

Amanda’s Journey

Amanda stated that as you can hear, she’s had a nonlinear career path and she truly thinks that a lot of the opportunities she’s had both to lead teams and grow processes have been a result of that. So, she started, as Yanique said, actually went into her undergrad wanting to be a clinician and wanted to be a psychologist. And then she took abnormal psychology and didn't really know if that aligned with her long term, but taking organizational psychology really clicked, how do people, leaders and organizations work together to achieve results.

So, she’s had jobs in sales and marketing early in her career, she’s worked in both the private as well as the not for profit sector.

But the common thread that she really had across was how do you get the most out of people?

How do you maximize people's potential?

And so, it's been a great journey for her, she also had an opportunity to oversee the customer experience side of their business for about two and a half years and that includes both professional services support and learning operations.

And so, she thinks from the range of opportunities she’s had, and just a little bit on her mindset, where she’s pretty open, she thinks you focus on the skills and the work you want to do versus the title, she’s had an incredible journey thus far and look forward to continuing.

 

Key Best Practices for Leaders to Embrace and Practice to Grow and Develop a Successful Team

Me: Now, people are so important in a business and of course, our podcast is focused on navigating the customer experience. And we're all customers in everything that we do, I live by the motto that we're all here on this earth to serve each other, in everything we do we serve each other, in our communities, in our schools, with our children, at church, just everything you do, you're offering some level of service to someone.

And so, could you maybe share with us being that you have so much experience, developing people skills and talents and working on teams, where you've really been able to hone the best out of people.

What do you think are maybe I would say, especially seeing that you have so much experience working with leadership teams across different continents and cultures. Maybe you could share with us maybe three to five things that you think is critical for leaders to embrace and practice on a daily basis in order to really have successful teams in an organization?

Amanda stated that this is a this is a great question. And so, she thinks when you start as a leader, there's a peace around what are your values?

What do you care about as you grow your business or your organization?

 

And she thinks that becomes the first foundation in terms of how you're going to grow the team. And so, she thinks there's been this great movement over the past few years where people have really said, bring your authentic leadership style to work, she thinks it's an incredible movement, because you can't be everything to everyone.

And, and at the end of the day, you are who you are, and your company or your business is who you are, you're able to serve a certain customer base, you’re able to engage with your employee base a certain way.

And so, you really want to be rooted in that. She thinks employees are smart, they know that if they've been sold something in a recruiting process that's different when they show up to work, they might decide that they want to work somewhere else. So, she thinks as leaders, it's very important to be really strong in what you believe in, because there's a role for everyone and a company for everyone but being authentic and honest about it is so important. So, she always says start from that.

 

And certainly, it Resolver and as they continue to expand with Kroll, they have a deep value in the fact that employees are their customers, they're one of the customers that they serve, and she couldn't agree with Yanique more. Service is a key part of how leaders become really successful. And she always says if people in culture teams, they exist to serve the employee base. And so, they have to understand and learn from them and listen, and that's really why one of her values is that continued curiosity to understand how people operate and understand how she can continue to serve them. So, that she believes is really fundamental.

She would say the second thing for leaders, just to give a couple is to really think about who are you going to recruit into your organization?

So, once you know what your values are, how do you attract people that are going to align to those values?

Again, there's a company for everyone and having people you can decide that you want to build a company that is extremely high performance, extremely metric driven.

Well, there's people that are going to suit that environment that are much more competitive and much more driven towards those metrics and goals. So, making sure you have that alignment in the recruitment process is really critical.

 

She would say the third thing that made them really successful is building good onboarding programmes. So, she’s always found it curious that companies invest a ton in recruiting great people, and then sit them in front of a workstation or at their home office, and hopefully they have a laptop, hopefully they have credentials, hopefully they know what they're doing.

But setting people up for success early is really, really important. One thing they did at Resolver, is they really looked at how do you build an onboarding programme for a professional services team that was servicing their customer base, and they were able to get people successful and fully utilized at around four to five months versus around eight to nine months.

So, when you're able to really drill in on those programmes, this is sometimes where people think that “Oh, it's just an HR programme, or it's just something HR is asking me to do.” But when you do it well, you can really start to generate revenue. And so, she would say to leaders, have your values aligned, attract the right people, and then make sure you're onboarding them extremely well. Not only does it help with engagement at the employee level, because she genuinely thinks people want to get up and be successful, they don't want to get up and do a bad job.

 

So, it helps them be successful. But there's also real monetary gain that you can have when you build those programmes well. But she would say those are the three right off the hop that she thinks if leaders do really well, they're going to create a really strong service culture within their organization.

 

Opportunities for Human Resource to Play Their Role

 

Me: Great. Now, apart from leaders, like the CEO and the CFO and the CMO, and all of the top-level leaders in an organization, HR plays a very integral role in an organization. And sometimes, the name HR stands for Human Resources, which is the human, as the name suggests, the resources of the business that are human. Sometimes I find that HR in an organization, very few organizations where I've interacted with the team members of a company, and they feel so comfortable going to their Human Resource people, how could we change that, what are some ways that we could look for opportunities that HR can really play the role they're supposed to play?

I mean, apart from the standard things like benefits and ensuring that the organization is providing the teams with all of the resources that they need to get the job done, I think there's more that HR can play in terms of really supporting the team members. And sometimes when you talk to employees, they feel like HR is not for them. Do you get that feeling sometimes when you work with organizations or your interactions?

 

Amanda shared absolutely. This is such a great question. So, one thing they were really thoughtful about because when she joined the organization, she was the first hire to be within the function and she was really specific, because as a software company, very small software company, 90 people at the time when she joined, they're really afraid that HR was going to be seen as the police, the people that drove compliance, and you have to do this and don't step out a line.

There was a philosophical alignment that was really important to have with the leadership team. And honestly, even for her as a professional, she wants to join an organization where HR is seen as strategic versus administrative. And so, they were very thoughtful, they’re an early maturity team. And so, they called themselves the Talent Team, because they want to sit where be thought of as holding talent in the organization and enabling them to be successful.

They've since broadened and evolved, and now we use the term people and culture, which she thinks is a bigger reflection. But she thinks there's a philosophical approach that if an organization, where do you sit on the spectrum as HR as administrative versus strategic, and so if you're part of an organization where HR is seen as strategic, you're probably really empowered to build programmes that think of employees through an employee lifecycle, much like we think of a customer lifecycle, you acquire, you onboard, you retain, you land and expand, same thing as you think about the employee journey.

And so, she thinks if you're part of the organization where you're a little bit more on the strategic side, she thinks you're able to build some of those programmes, it's a sliding scale, she doesn't think there's any organization where you necessarily are sitting at hard either ends of that spectrum. Because certainly, there's a bunch of stuff in HR that is administrative, you've got to administer benefits, and you've got to make sure paperwork is done, that's super critical to a well-run people and culture organization, but it's just making sure that you work with leadership that truly sees people as the most significant investment they're going to make.

 

Most companies, if you're a knowledge-based organization, you probably spend between 60% to 80% of your operating budget on people. So, if you don't view it as strategic, you're really going to miss out on the opportunity to grow your business. And so, she thinks it's just how the organization thinks about it, she’s always believed that change and success is rooted in results.

So, she doesn't think you can necessarily change everything all at once. But if you change a really small thing early and you get success, the rest of the leaders in the organization will say, “Hey, maybe HR isn't as administrative as I thought it was, maybe it could do more. And maybe I should be relying on them to consult with the business.” So, she thinks it's got to kind of work both ways. There's a philosophical piece where you want your leadership to buy into, but it's also build programmes that are successful, because then you're going to be able to do a lot more.

 

App, Website or Tool that Amanda Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business

 

When asked about online resource that she cannot live without in her business, Amanda shared that for her personally, it's Asana, which is a task management and project management tool. They are a relatively flat organization and they do a lot of cross collaboration. And so, being able to have teams from product, people in culture, engineering, marketing, product marketing see one view of how they have to collaborate and work together and commit to timelines she thinks is a total game changer in terms of how they’re able to manage accountability and push things forward.

She thinks most organizations don't necessarily have a ton of maturity when it comes to project management or programme management, she knows certainly, that was a huge skill set she learned in her time at Resolver. And so, she thinks any tool that makes that faster, especially in a distributed world, where you can’t always just rock up to someone's desk and say, “Oh, hey, did you finish that for me?” She thinks having that tool has really allowed for them to still deliver results and manage accountability and have a shared collaboration space. So, they’re big Asana users, and she’s a huge fan.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Amanda

 

When asked about books that have an impact, Amanda shared that she just reread John Kotter’s Leading Change, With a New Preface by the Author, because change and change leadership is a huge part of how leaders have to continue to push their organizations to be innovative and to continuously improve. And so, he has a breadth of research and a ton of really good nuggets in there, which she’s really appreciate it and she thinks are great for her as a leader.

And then she’s just a huge Brene’ Brown fan, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transform the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, so that was a little bit more on a personal level. But she thinks it was really informative for her. And part of the hard work of being a leader is looking inside, it's not always pretty in there but it's what's going to make you better to serve your employees and your customers is looking inside and asking yourself the hard questions. And so, those are ones that she often recommends to people, they're very top of topical for her and have really helped her advance and continue to challenge herself in the way she leads.

 

Me: Amazing. I love Brene’ Brown, I think her content is truly amazing. And she actually has a video that I found a couple of years ago on the difference between empathy and sympathy that she did at a TED talk, that I thought was really, really good, because I think a lot of people just really mix up the difference between being empathetic versus being sympathetic. And sometimes even the words that we use sends a signal of sympathy rather than one of empathy.

 

Amanda stated that she totally agrees. She thinks the work she's (Brené Brown) done on empathy, especially as it relates to the workplace, she's done an incredible job with that. For them, as Amanda has built various programmes on the employee side and on the customer side, she always thinks about ensuring that they’re rooted in empathy. Because at the end of the day, understanding each other and supporting each other to achieve things is really how they’re going to get results. So, she would say it's extremely central to how she’s had an opportunity to build things. And for many companies, empathy is at the root of how you are going to be in service of both your employees and your customers.

 

What Amanda is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about something that’s going on right now she is excited about, Amanda stated that that's a great question. So, recently Resolver was acquired in the spring of this year by Kroll, which is professional services company. And Resolver as well as several other technology companies are going to be the digital arm of Kroll, so Kroll Digital Services.

So, she was very fortunate to be given the opportunity to step in as the Chief Human Resource Officer for that role, again, going back to her point about the HR title, but that's how they level them so that's fine. So, as a business unit that's emerging, that's going to be digital first inside a company, she’s been given the very tall order to work with the team on how do we form a great culture within a digital first business unit?

What does that look like? How do you integrate these companies that have slightly different cultures, but still want to achieve great things through technology for a vast array of customers around the world?

 

So, that's a very recent shift. So, it's really exciting, lots of work ahead. But she realized in her career, she likes building stuff, she has a value around getting to build stuff and getting to test and pilot things and so that's the next chapter for her. So, she’s really excited for that.

 

Benefits of HR Using Technology to Enhance the Experience that Employees Have in the Organization

 

Me: So, when you were talking just now in terms of your new role and using technology, it piqued my interest to ask another question as it relates to human resources and technology. Maybe could you share with us one or two benefits of HR or the people arm of the business actually using technology to enhance the experience that employees have in the organization? How can technology help that?

 

Amanda shared that employees, especially over the past 10 to 15 years were such a tech first society, especially in North America, but globally, and so employees look at how they engage with their employers like they would as consumers. And so, they are, again our internal customers or consumers of processes and programmes that any organization is going to run.

And so, being tech-enabled is super important, making it easy for people to update their employment records and it's not a piece of paper, but they can do it on their mobile, she thinks being able to do things like a performance review process through a technology that is fast and easy to do.

And, again, potentially mobile enabled, super important. She thinks technology can help enable most things. She always say that technology doesn't solve the process, it just makes the process faster. So, what some people try to do is they say, “Okay, finally, I've got some budget, I'm going to put in a technology.” Which is great, it's wonderful, certainly she’s worked with various organizations that were super paper based, which becomes a barrier for employees to engage with things like performance conversations.

And so, again, the more tech enabled, you can make it the better. But the hard work is actually to step back and say, “What do we want this to look like? What are we trying to drive as the result, and then let's make sure the technology makes that true for us.”

 

 So, she thinks technology has a wonderful capability to drive efficiency, specially drives reporting, because it makes it really easy for all information to be in one spot. But the hard work of the leadership team is to step back and to say, what do we actually want to achieve? Let's draw out a process that makes sense and then let's enable it through technology.

She thinks sometimes people go the other way and she’s seen it the other way and it ends up being a major challenge. Because at the end of the day, the process has to be good, it has to be simple for employees. To Yanique’s point earlier about employees being customers, we as a society now really have a high bar for things being easy, for it being a few clicks, for it being enabled by technology.

And so, if organizations are thinking about their employee base is not thinking differently when it comes to HR tech and how they interface with HR tech, they're probably going to have people that kind of moan and groan about the stuff they have to do on paper or an excel spreadsheet or anything like that. So, huge fan, think there's lots of work to be done to make it really effective. But she thinks certainly the reality of a pandemic and being most companies now having some form of distributed work team makes it doubly important to what it was three years ago. But that's definitely a frontier for people to make sure that they're crossing to ensure they're serving their employee base.

 

Me: Yeah. Wow. You know, you said three years ago, totally unrelated to what you're talking about and I just realized, wow, January, February makes it three years since we've been in this pandemic.

 

Amanda shared that it’s wild and honestly, she thinks she’s an optimist by design and one of the best outcomes from COVID for employees specifically and employers is twofold. One, it made us totally rethink if employees need to be in the office full time. And there's some jobs where that's still true. But there's many companies, Resolver, and Kroll Digital included, where you can be hybrid. And so, she thinks shifting that narrative was as true, we mark the three-year anniversary of that win for employees.

And the second thing is people became a lot more open about talking about mental health and the impacts of mental health because the wall between work and home was just shattered for most of us. And so, she’s certainly within their employee base notice a difference in the courage to have those conversations and to bring more vulnerability to work. She’s seen that shift and it's a positive one because it allows them to understand that what people are going through and how they might support them moving forward.

So, three years in, lots of stuff that she’s sure we'd like to go back in time on. We're here or what we have. And she certainly thinks from an employee perspective, there's been some great wins and she hopes now what most companies are able to do is to say, “Okay, let's take what we've learned, and let's make the offering and how we serve our customer or employee base even better.”

 

Where Can We Find Amanda Online

LinkedIn – Amanda Ono

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Amanda Uses

 

When asked about quote or saying that she tends to revert to, Amanda stated that she thinks this one needs to get printed on a T-shirt for her. Her granny told me when she was little, and it’s constant on repeat for her, especially during COVID. But she thinks as you continue to evolve, “It's just controls what you can control.”

There's so many things that are dependent and you can't really influence but if you really narrow focus on the things that you can move, even on days where you're not feeling the best, you have control to go out and get some fresh air and go for a walk and get some perspective, you have control of engaging with very kind relationships with people on your team, you have control to just kind of laugh off maybe that colleague that always is a little bit harsh on a call.

So, that's her t-shirt, stated that probably she should wear it daily, maybe actually next time she pops onto a Zoom call with her team, she should have it on a t-shirt, they’ll probably like that. But that's definitely hers, control what you can control.

 

Me: Control what you can control. Love it. Well, thank you so much, Amanda for hopping on to our podcast and Navigating the Customer Experience, sharing all of these great insights and nuggets as it relates to people and culture, building strong teams, the importance of leadership and some of the key things that leaders need to do in order to build successful teams and great cultures. And just sharing with us, based on your journey, your experiences that you've had, and allowing our listeners to really tap into what are some ways that they can explore to really navigate and create great success. We're embarking on a new calendar year, lots of great opportunities that we may not have been able to tap into in 2022 and those doors may still be open in 2023. So, we really appreciate you sharing this great content with us today.

 

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