This episode with Yanique Grant will be the first solo episode after doing 38 interview based episodes and we will be sharing with you some tips, nuggets that we have collected over the last 38 weeks of releasing 38 amazing interview based episodes. We want to give a shout out to all of our guests locally and internationally that has come on board to support and share the wealth of knowledge that they have shared and we are amazingly inspired by each and every person that we have come in contact with as a result of starting this podcast
Highlights
Today Yanique will take about customer experience and are some of the different opportunities that exist for a business going forward in 2017, what are some considerations that they need to take into account. Whether or not a business plans for it, your brand provides a customer experience to your customers; customers collect experiences throughout their journeys with your brands, regardless of your effort investment or intent to deliver cohesive and satisfying experiences. It’s important that your brand and your advertising and your marketing that they are cohesively connected and they are all singing the same song, we’re all on the same page, singing the same verse at the same time, singing the same chorus at the same time because if not, that’s where the disconnect occurs.
People base their decisions based on what they experience and hear about your brand, every experience you provide to your customer can provide encourage or discourage, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy and for those who are familiar with the book Customer Satisfaction Is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless: How to Make Customers Love You, Keep Them Coming Back and Tell Everyone They Know by Jeffery Gitomer, you would know that if a customer leaves satisfied from your business, that does not guarantee that they are going to remain loyal to your business and so because of that, you have to consistently deliver on quality experiences, if you’re not, then it’s quite possible that the customer will switch and customers these days have choices.
The Internet has given everyone the opportunity to do their research before they come into your business. They go online, they go to your website, they go to your Facebook page, they look at what other customers are saying about your business, if they ask their friends and family about your products, they read reviews, they are fully informed at least by 60%-75% statistics say, before they even interact with a member of your organization, so with all of this in mind, you have to consistently deliver on whatever it is you’re advertising that your company is going to deliver and that is seamlessly what your brand is all about. People like to have simple experiences, that’s the reality. Yanique stated that she loves to go to a business that when she walks in, she doesn’t need to try and figure out what the business is trying to offer, what should she do, where she should go, she knows exactly what to do and where to go.
They have this index called The Global Brand Simplicity Index and in it, it talks about what simplicity is. Each year this company called Siegel and Gale, they survey thousands of consumers from around the world as it relates to evaluating hundreds of brands and how the brands deliver on their experiences. Simplicity by definition is freedom from complexity, intricacy or division into parts. This is the definition by www.dictionary.com and it is freedom from deceit or guile, sincerity, heartlessness, naturalness. People want to do business with companies that it’s very easy to transact business with them in all the channels that they provide service through whether it’s online, whether it’s face to face, over the telephone; it’s a seamless and a simple process, a simple experience.
According to the 2017 Global Brand Simplicity Index, simple to the consumer in 2017 means being clear, it means being human and it means being useful. It's is powerful and if those are the 3 things that simplicity means, it means that in everything that a business does, they need to figure out, “Is this process clear, is this product delivery or service delivery human and are my consumers valuing this experience as being useful?” because if you’re not meeting 2 or 3 of those options, then you are loosing out on all of the money you are leaving out on the table for not creating that simple experience for customers, so we cannot implore enough why it’s important. It is so important as well for your brand or people that interact with your brand to recognize that you are real, a lot of companies say in their marketing advertising that, “We are offering quality service, our customer service is the best, we take care of you.” They use all of these endearing terms that when you listen to the advertisement whether it’s on TV or on the radio, you feel a sense of emotional connection, however, when you go to the business and have the interaction - it’s a completely different experience, so your brand is what people feel and say it is, not what your brand believes or says it is, "Perception is reality to the person that perceives it", this is a popular quote that she gives in all of her workshops all the time. A lot of people believe that service delivery or the service that they offer is based on what they feel it is and it’s not what you the company feels it is, it’s what the customers says it is, it is their feedback, it’s their perception that matters, that’s what determines whether or not you’re a great or a good company, so your brand is owned by the customer not you, it is created and fashioned in the minds of your customers and prospects. You are what they think you are or what they hear from others, sometimes people form a perception of a brand just based on what their husband says to them or what their girlfriend says to them or what their co-worker says to them, they have never interacted with the business before but they are basing their thoughts or giving feedback to other people based on what someone else said, with that in mind, you have to remember that your brand is what others say it is. What your brand does is more important than what it says, action speaks louder that words and because body language is 55% of the communication process, it’s so important that your leaders, team members, everyone is walking the talk, your brand will be ultimately evaluated by it’s customers and what it does for them, not what it says in the ads, emails or on its website, so again, if your marketing is not congruent with the actual experiences that your customers are having, then at the end of the day, it’s not what you believe your service experience is but is what your customers are actually experiencing.
Brands that cannot retain customers, they just won’t win in this world that we are living in, if you are not able to really recognize that the customers that you have currently are your gold mind, those are the ones you need to be nurturing and ensuring that they’re satisfied, ensuring that they want to come back, so that they can go out there and be evangelists of your business, then you lose right there, as said before, it’s money you’re leaving on the table, so your brand, acquiring customers is a costly activity, it requires you to go out there and tell people what you’re about and spend money to woo someone that you really don’t have a relationship with, rather you could be nurturing and building up existing relationships and having those persons woo people you are trying to get because it would be an easier sell because that customer who you’re trying to get would be persuaded by someone who has had an experience with your business and the acquisition of that new customer would be based on what that existing customer shares with them.
Brands that cannot motivate their customers, to share positive sentiments will ultimately diminish the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. The aim is to ensure that when your customers leave your business, they feel like they’ve just done business with the best company on earth, if you cannot absolutely say that, then it means that there is room for improvement. People trust each other more than they do brands and word of mouth is a powerful force for improving awareness and consideration, that’s why social media is so powerful, there are all these brands out there that basically, you can go online and you can read up about where you’re going and what kind of experience to anticipate, you can even get a rating and so if your customers are not speaking positively about your business, even if you have the most upgraded building, the best uniforms, the mission and visions on the wall, state of the art technology, state of the art equipment, machinery, if the experience is not congruent and people are not leaving feeling like they are valued and appreciated, then you are definitely going to experience a diminishing return in the long term.
Your brand can’t be all things to all people, customers have different needs, expectations and values so the better your brand can understand and reflect these through focus, segments, personas and personalization, the more powerful the experiences it can deliver, you have to know who your customers are, what’s your marketing segmentation, who represents that 80% of your business, what 20% of your customers gives you 80% of your business and how can you have those 20% become evangelists of your business so that you can continue to increase on that percentage. It’s a work in progress but it’s possible, it’s all about making that experience very simple.
You listen to your customers to understand them, marketers spend a lot of time and money studying what gets people to buy too often and sometimes they ignore what gets them to be satisfied, loyal and willing to tell others, listening is important in the whole customer experience process and the voice of the customer programs are essential to defining and measuring customer experience performance. When you hire someone like Yanique to train your team members or hire her company to do market research, it’s very hard to see a return on investment the following day and that’ what a lot of businesses fail to realize that customer experience is a very tangible measurement and because of that, it’s so important to continually be engaging and hearing from your customers because if you’re constantly getting positive feedback and recommendations that you get from customers are actually improving on them and customers can see that their feedback is not just being put in a box and no one is taking it into account but they are actually using it to make changes, then that’s when you see repeat business over and over.
Joseph Michelli is an Internationally sought after Speaker, Author and Organizational Consultant who transfers his knowledge of exceptional business practices in ways that develop joyful and productive workplaces with a focus on the total customer experience. His insights encourage leaders and front line workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives. Dr. Michelli is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Neilsen Book Scan and New York Times number 1 bestselling author. His latest book is Driven to Delight: Delivering World- Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way, some of his other titles include Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People, The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW, Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World Class Customer Experience from UCLA Health System, The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary and The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, as well as When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. Joseph holds a certified speaking professional designation from The National Speakers Association and is a member of The Authors Guild; he received his Masters and Doctorate from the University of Southern California and he has won the Asian Brand Excellence Award as an Editorial Board Member for The Beryl Institute Patient Experience Journal (PXJ) and is on the Founder’s Council of Customer Experience One, he is also named one of the top 10 Thought Leaders in Customer Service by global gurus.
Question
Highlights
Yanique shared that she found that the companies that really understand their journey also recognize that things are not going to go smooth all the time so service recovery is so important.
Joseph stated that it is simple as Starbucks has a promise that, “If you don’t like your drink, we will replace it for you no questions asked.” Joseph gave an example, he stated that there was a prankster, a person who pranks corporate America, so he bought a Starbucks drink, he brought it home, it was a milk based drink, he put it in his garage, he left it there for a week and a half, he brought it back extremely rancid inside of a plastic bag and he brought it into a Starbucks and handed it to the Barista and saying, “Look, this drink does not meet my satisfaction.” They have been trained so well by this brand simply said, “Let me take this take this to our back dumpster and in the mean time, what drink might I prepare for you that you might like today?” It was that simple, many people would say, “come on, obviously this is not a freshly made drink that we are in any obligation to replace” In truth, this prankster went on to write a blog about the fact that he had hoped that they would fail their recovery promise and they did not do so and he was the one who got pranked and that advertising and that promotion and the fact that he’s telling the story today has far more value to the brand than the $4.00 they would have saved had they argued with the customer in suggesting that he was not entitled to the recovery.
Yanique stated that she lives in Jamaica and most of the stores already have a sign on the door that says, “No exchanges, no refunds” so you as a customer, once you enter or start to browse that store, you know, “If I purchase this, clearly it’s a final purchase, if I have an issue with it, I can’t take it back.” It’s truly amazing to know that the promise is that they are going to replace it for you no questions asked, that takes real guts, real courage.
Joseph stated that there will be those who abuse it and this would have been a case of abuse, clearly it went well beyond the perimeters but most people will not. There is a speaker in the USA who at the beginning of every presentation hands out a bowl of quarters and he says, “Please take all the quarters” and no one has taken all the quarters in any audience that he has ever put that out to and the message largely is, most people will self regulate, most people are business owners, most people have a sense of fairness, there will be those who abuse it but assuming the entire population is out to get you creates an animosity between yourself and the customer that’s hard to recover from and as a world traveler, he has been to countries in the Caribbean that are open and warm and he has been to ones that are locked down and he knows which ones he doesn’t want to go back to.
Speed and Convenience for todays customer - Joseph stated that we have to maximize the speed at every turn and we do have to manage customer expectations because there are certain expectations that have gotten ahead of customers and in order to have everything that fast you also give up some tradeoffs on artisanship and quality so it is an educational on tradeoffs that with speed comes some compromises and we are willing to make them in these regards because we know what’s best and in delivery of this particular product you know you need speed, we know you need speed, we are working to maximize that but you also need quality and if you compromise and buy something very hastily crafted in order to meet the speed, it probably won’t last long, so it’s baiting what is value and speed is a part of the value equation but there are other dimensions that you have to education. Sometimes we can do things while they are waiting for those 5 days for a product, we can educate them, and we can stay in relationship with them. The art of Disney if you go to Walt Disney World, you are in massive lines, it is not speedy at all to go through the experience but they often distract you, entertain you, transform you with other things happening while you’re in line and he thinks that’s the art sometimes, how else can they add value, “The product will be there in 5 days but in the mean time I want to give you 5 days of information about how maximize the use of your product as soon as it arrives so there isn’t such a learning curve.” So maybe there is a not speed to delivery but there’s a speed to use because he has done something in that delivery time that adds value.
Beta Brand – company that did not have a product but they provided their prospects with entertaining stories.
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Isabel Hundt is the author of The Power of Faith-Driven Success: A Journey Toward Living Your Dream by 30 and certified vision and Transformation Coach and International Speaker. She’s a world visionary and an ambassador of Global Presence Leadership. She travels all over to share her enlightening message of tuning in to our true selves by understanding the connection between our heart and our brain. She is also teaching how to use our emotions as a powerful guide for success in all areas of our lives instead of experiencing emotions as a distraction. She’s a proud Christ follower, wife and a mother to son Jonah. Isabel enjoys kick boxing and body combat.
Question
Highlights
Isabel stated that emotions aren’t just emotions; they are what we make them, who would determine that anger has a certain chemical reaction in your body, we define it and we can acknowledge, “oh, that’s what’s going on, it’s okay, I am okay, I just don’t have to act on it react to it by pushing it on someone else”
Isabel stated that most of her clients are online. She said that for one, it is more convenient with a child at home that young but it allows her to work with people from all over the world, from France, Sweden, and India and all over the USA and she found and it depends on where you live. She stated that where she lives people are very conservative so it takes a lot to break through that wall and outside of it people are more open to what she’s talking about and what she teach and coach on. She does work mostly online but when she speaks, then she is travelling.
Isabel share that sometimes we take My Why a little bit too easy, it’s not just, “my WHY is to support my family financially” it needs to serve for the greater good. She stated that her WHY is to create a deeper connection inner culturally to understand that even though your background is different or the way you grew up or the traditions are different, it doesn’t make you any different as a human being. Her big Why is to bring people together to really connect on such a deep level that we can understand that without each other we can’t do anything and even if we live a thousand miles away from each other, we still impact each other in the way we think, in the way we operate, it has a ripple effect, that’s her greater purpose, that’s greater vision that she has so if you start with the WHY and only say, “my WHY is supporting my family” that’s not enough, that keeps it too limited and you don’t think outside the box.
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Louie La Vella’s clients are entertainment personalities, night clubs, concerts and festivals and he creates brand and marketing strategies to engage and connect with their audience. Working within the shark infested waters of the night life and music industry as a Marketing and Branding consultant, La Vella has been delivering high profit solutions to live entertainment events, musicians and venues for years. With over 20 years in the night life industry, an extensive development and production experience with national television projects, authors, speakers, event producers and coach. La Vella has produced and marketed over 30 live music concerts in the past few years. Winner of the Niagara Music Awards Promoter of the Year in 2012, The Junior Awards Canadian Music, Dance category committee. He has been called a “Mediapreneur”, combining a successful television executive producer and host role with being sought after marketing and branding consultant in the night life and in the music industry. In his television days, he had the opportunity to interview the likes of Lady Gaga, Richard Branson, Backstreet Boys and more.
Question
Highlights
Louie stated that talking about events whether its festivals or night club events or smaller concerts, going to the events are always great for him to either wine down and enjoy the event or do a little bit of research on what everybody else is up to and he fine that a lot of the places that either spend too much money to market to fill their room or just not filling their room is because they are stuck back in the day. Louie shared he was on a panel at the International Night Life congress a month ago and everybody was talking about Millennials and how they’re on their phones all the time and it’s ruining the experience going to a club or going to a venue to have their phones out and they just want to be on social media and he sat there and thought about his experience going in and he said, the usual behavior is not just because they are on social media and need to tell their friends or talk, it’s their documenting, they’re documenting everything they do and we do the same things, maybe not as much as the generation because depending on our age demographics but we want to tell our friends what we are up to, we want to share what we are eating, we feel like we are all media companies and we need to document. He told them going back to the experience of him experiencing a night life venue, “What are you guys doing differently than 20 years ago? You have a concert hall or a night club with a nice deejay or a band with some lights and a bartender but that’s the same concept as 20 years ago.” He was trying to poke fun by saying that he doesn’t use VHS tapes anymore, we have all changed, why have you not changed if you think about 20 year old concept of the night club, it’s exactly the same, and we have different sounds and different lights but that’s not a huge step in the experience. When he walks into a club and its dead and the bartender is on their phone and it’s the same old, same old for 20 years, he’s thinking well no wonder nobody’s here or it’s too busy and the promoter and the venue owner thinks, Hey, Louie look how packed it is, look how great it is here, it’s over packed” and he’s thinking, “Go ask 6 girls right now what they think about your club and I bet you 4 or all 6 of them will say it’s too busy here, I can’t get a drink, I wanted in line too long, I Iost my friend when I went to the bathroom” and you think that the over capacity of the club is your success but I bet that you’re even losing money because they want to leave early, they get frustrated to get to the bar to get a drink. He has seen that with his own experience by going to these places and thinking….these are issues that are going to bite them or already bit them.
He stated that it’s the same with Facebook likes, he has 10,000 likes. Likes do not equal sale at all. The amount of time that your organic reaches 1% you still have to target people, you might be targeting specific intricate ways of targeting like somebody that likes your page but also likes these certain items. A lot of people are just going for likes and it’s a visual thing and he understands as a branding play but that’s a small piece of the branding pot, you have 5,000 likes or 10,000 Twitter followers that never equal actual sales, you have to think outside of that, so you spend all of your money trying to get likes but he never do that, he tries to spend the ad budget on your actual target, let’s try to create a funnel, let’s sell tickets, let’s sell music, people will like your page indirectly because they see the ad and they don’t like your page currently and they’ll it like but that’s not the metric we go for so a lot of people are not thinking the new way of doing marketing and still thinking of the old mentality, we want more likes, we want to pack the bar, we want to do the old school way because it’s easier and it just doesn’t work.
Louie stated that the night clubs are your basic bar and night club, there can be a 500 person venue, 1000 person venue but through your typical night club every week they have events going on or students nights so it’s a different atmosphere all together where as a Festival your talking 30,000 people showing up a day or more or maybe less and it’s such a massive cool undertaking and you work on marketing for 8 months, right now he’s working on marketing, even in September 2016 he was working on festivals for June 2017 but it’s really cool. You have a tight nit team and they organize everything to do with the festival and when it finally comes to fruition and you’re on stage with 30,000 people in front of you and this massive production and you’re thinking, “I’m the marketing guy, I was a part of bringing in these people in that’s really awesome.” And that a cool feeling and it’s a larger scale and not everybody gets to do that, if you’re a good marketer and you have friends and you know deejays, you might be able to jump in as a promoter at a night club but that’s not something that he does anymore, he consult and train a lot of owners and promoters because he knows marketing but he has a small hand full of bars and clubs now just because he knows them well and they are friends now and he helps them out but for the most part he has expended away from that and there’s different monetary value between a large scale festival and a night club so he can do different business and not work so hard but work on 3 projects instead of 15.
He stated that in festivals now you’re dealing with million dollar deejays, million dollar bands, some of the biggest of the biggest and you get to discuss with their management things, forge friendships and that’s just a whole other ball game as oppose to the night club which is still fun and great but you’re working with the local club owner or the local deejay and sometimes they bring in acts but not usually not the larger scale because there is no way they can afford someone of that caliber for a 500 person venue so it’s a completely different ball game but it’s a lot of fun.
Louie shared listeners can find him at –
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Brett Campbell, from journeyman cabinetmaker to fitness entrepreneur having built one of the fastest growing fitness brands in Australia is a man on a mission and he’s living the dream life of a young and successful entrepreneur. Impacted and inspired by the passing of a childhood friend, Brett is now taking his mission to the next level, helping the generations of entrepreneurs and professionals realize their true potential and assume a life of freedom and abundance that is possible for all who dare to take charge of their destiny. Brett’s mission is to help over 100 Million people discover, design, develop and deliver their passion and expertise to the world so that they can make more money, help more people and ultimately live a lifestyle of their design. Brett is also the owner and CEO of Fiit International, a global health and fitness company whose products and services have helped over 45,000 clients and the Authority Academy, an online community for Internet marketers, coaches, speakers and small business owners. He’s also the founder of the Unleash Your Greatness Movement, an international live event series to help others pursue living the life of their dreams. Having grown up in New Zealand, Brett now lives in the gold coast of Australia with his lovely wife Emily and their two pugs, Burt and Pugsley.
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Highlights
Brett agreed that he has had a very excited and adventurous journey thus far and there is a number of things that have happened and reason why these things happen is that he is the that guy, you hear the saying, “Ready, Fire, Aim”, he let off 20 rounds first so he’ll fire, fire, fire, ops he’s ready and then aim, hence the reason why he is able to do so many things because he has had that attitude from day one which is engrained that he just doesn’t give up, he’ll keep moving forward. He just wrote his first book and he shared in it that, “We work on the right things, just at the wrong times” and it’s something for entrepreneurs and business owners to really be aware of and with the opportunity that they have right with the online landscape and how easy it is to get your message in front of people. Too many people right now are working on the right things such as: maybe it is the right thing for you to be learning Social Media and Facebook but if you haven’t got the foundations, you haven’t understand what your business is all about, why you’re doing the business that you are doing, you can certainly be like he was; build a franchise with 35 locations in 6 months then realize that maybe this franchise wasn’t the path he wanted to go down.
Brett shared that the book Right Now!: Why Not You and Why Not Now? by Brett Campbell can be found at www.rightnowacademy.com/book, you can also find it on Amazon and in book stores around the world.
Brett Campbell Podcast – Deep Dive Podcast
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