Matt LaClear is an SEO expert and Founder of the marketing agency Your Ad Squad, LLC. Matt’s team pursues the very best referral prospects available in any given industry with the purpose of doubling the size of a business. They are experienced in working with the big fish, yet they love small businesses and never act like a candidate is above working with them. They help their clients to set their sites on the biggest referral targets in their industry resulting in huge dividends. It forces clients to up their game to the next level and grow business. Rainmaking!
In 2004 Matt had his house buzzed three times by a Apache Helicopter because of his aggressive follow-up efforts on a $3 Million proposal he had submitted to the owner. The project crashed and burned, but that encounter changes Matt’s thinking forever. It changed the way he approached business and as a result, how he helps others to grow their companies through SEO.
Questions
Highlights
Matt shared that 25 years ago he came home from work and all his neighbours were in front of his house. He didn't know what was going on and then he noticed a little girl was riding his daughter's bike they had just bought her for Christmas. All their stuff was at the curb because they were being evicted. And he was a coward at the time or at that moment at least. And instead of stopping to get his belongings and his family's belongings, he just drove right on by. Long story short, his wife ended up going back an hour later once she got out of work.
But by then, almost everything was gone. They'd lost all their childhood pictures, she lost her childhood pictures, there's not one left from that time. So, it was all because he wasn't a good provider at the time. And he vowed at that time that he was going to become a better provider. And he started his own business a little bit after that. And that's how he got in the business was just through that, that situation. Now, since then, he has been running a marketing agency for 20 years and a lot has happened since then.
But he understands and most small business owners, they get to a position where they get hit by something like that and it changes them. And that's why he likes helping small business owners, because almost every one of them has a story like that, why they got into business, why they're doing what they do. He just likes helping small business owners. So, that's why he helped them, because they almost have the same story he has, that eviction or something bad.
Me: And sometimes it's the negative things in our life that really propel us to do greater things.
And because you can always do better. “Oh, this must be rock bottom. Okay, well, I'm going to do much better and better.” And to be honest he has made some mistakes back then that he would never make now. And he wasn't making this much obviously. But he was young but that's how he got in the business. And almost everybody has that type of story negative, the rising phoenix from the ashes.
Matt shared that SEO is nothing more than getting free traffic from Google in the way you get that free traffic is you take care of their customers and you give them what their customers want. And if you do that, the customers end up; Google sends you the traffic for free to your website and you make a lot of sales and you don't have to pay for the traffic. So that's SEO.
Me: Give us an example of a business that you've had….that you've helped. Let's say maybe a mechanic store or a retail store or maybe a restaurant, how it is that you are able to use your services to transform.
Matt shared that it's kind of hard, in the years they've been doing this, they've had he thinks their last count was well over 13000 different businesses they worked on. So they've got all types of rags to riches stories happen all the time. They're working on a campaign right now where it was an affiliate business, of all things, and he had a hard time getting traffic and getting Google to help them and help him give them that free traffic.
And being an affiliate, you don't have enough money to pay for traffic. It's not like you get 100% of the sale and that's it. Usually as an affiliate, you get 10%. So, even if you make a sale as an affiliate, it's really hard to pay for traffic.
And they ended up, tripling his traffic for his main money pages. And what is meant by that is they find out what pages make money for a business and then they go find those pages. And then it's a matter of just making sure that they're taking care of Google's customer, which is the user. And if they do that, they can optimize that page so Google sends more traffic to it. And since it's a client's money page, it usually converts, well, better than the rest of the sites.
And that's how they make their clients money. It's just a matter of finding the money pages, the ones that are actually earning the business, and then get that right. And too many SEO companies, they ignore the 80-20 rule. It's really that 95/5 rule where 5% of your pages on your website are producing 95% of your profit. He bets it's 99 and 1%, he can go as far as he can in the math and keep moving the decimal point.
But the fact of the matter is most businesses that are surviving from their website traffic, they're doing so with just a few pages and most SEO companies, they start coming in and they start trying to treat every page as being different or as an equal, and they do SEO and all these pages. And that really hurts the campaign because a lot of the pages aren't making money. Why are we trying to rank a page that doesn't make any money, find the pages that make money, then make sure that it's in alignment with Google's user.
If somebody is searching the keyword for that page that's making money for you, then you just have to go and make sure that you are taking into consideration why the user is searching that, what they're looking for, what solution they need and what you could give them to take them one step further into the selling cycle and get them deeper into the funnel. And usually he can say it's only a few pages. So, they look like heroes a lot when they get hired because, “Wow, you've increased sales by X amount.”
And all they did was, they focused their first month on those pages. And then that creates extra revenue. And then all of a sudden, they can start working on ranking other pages and actually getting that same process moved across to the rest of the website. But anybody starting SEO and they're in business, he highly recommend you start with the money pages and just stay with it and stay with it until it converts for you, because it doesn't matter if that page doesn't convert.
You want to rank it, of course. You could make some money with it, it's better than not ranking, but it's better. If you really consider the user what they're looking for and take care of them, that's taking care of Google because it makes Google's product much better. Because he remembers 8 years ago, it was easy, they could rank for anything, anything and usually a couple of days and it didn't matter the quality of the website.
But if you remember back then, Google wasn't a very good tool, it wasn't the sharpest crayon in the box because you wanted to search for something and you could end up on affiliate sites, you can end up on click bank sites, you can end up with somebody trying to sell an e-book with. You’re looking for an attorney maybe to do a will, some estate planning. And then you search estate planning and all that comes up are how to sell estate planning leads to attorneys.
Well, you’re not interested in that, Google wasn’t very good back then, but now they are. It's a very good search tool. We can find whatever we need using Google. So, because of that, now we can reverse engineer the algorithm. So, let's see what pages are ranking well for our key words. Then let's study those pages because Google is placing the pages for that keyword that the people want and it's satisfying their needs.
And the best way to do it is just to look to see who's already ranking, don't reinvent the wheel. Find out what's going on, why is that site ranking? What is it user intent and a lot of the times the people who are ranking well, aren't going as far in the process as they could. So there's opportunity, you can pass them. “Okay, maybe they have some of the user intent, but maybe there's more I could do.”
You could take them deeper in a relationship, if they're searching green algae in pool, maybe they have a pool that has algae in it and they've got a party coming up, they want to get it cleaned up in time.
So I could then have that whole article be about it, not only talking about how to clean your pool, but how to get it done in time, how to make sure that it's going to be done by the time of the party and then end it with a checklist on how to get your pool cleaned by the time by the time of your party.
Well, that's going to be a piece of content that the user is going to find very useful. It's going to be something that when they click it and they find it, they're not going to rush out and hit back on their browser so they can go to the next person on the Google listing or the search result rather than find out who's ranking. No, they're going to stay at your site and they're going to get their information.
Google's watching all that and they know that. So they know that you're taking care of the people coming to your site.
And that's the best SEO tip he can give anybody, if you take care of the user, Google's always going to take care of you. Why? Because you're taking care of Google.
If somebody searches Google for something and they can't pull up results for it, you’re going to get in a situation where people are going to stop using Google.
So, Google loves finding great information that is in alignment with what the user is looking for. And because of the precision, like he said, and he'll repeat because of the precision of Google's tool now, we can use Google search tool to reverse engineer the user intent of their clients. And they just look at their competitors site that are ranking on those keywords already because the tool’s good enough where it's showing what the best user content is, what links come into play through. But that's in a nutshell SEO.
Me: I like the example you gave in terms of looking at what Google is searching for, what people are searching for, and then repurposing your content to ensure that it's fulfilling that particular need. Because then the ranking will definitely come further up because some people are extremely granular when they're searching for something. So, if you're granular when you're searching for something and the tool that can actually populate the specific information within the first three options that come up, it makes the experience that much better. You don’t have to be digging through three, four or five pages, sixteen different articles, or videos, or images, trying to find the information that you’re looking for.
Absolutely. And you can build a bridge that way too. For instance, let's say you are a pool supply company and you sell tablets. So you drop the big tablets in the pool and it makes the green algae go away and it's fast and so it happens in 24 hours.
Now most business owners, they're going to try to rank that product page for the keyword, because that's the page they want everybody landing on. Well, most of the people that searching the green algae in my pool may not understand that there's a tablet ready for them that can help them. And they're not looking for that solution; at that point, they’re still further up in the funnel. They're still looking for information. So, if we search that keyword and if we own that pool company, we noticed that there's no other product pages ranking for the keyword.
There's a good chance at their product page won't work for it either. Why? Because the user for that keyword that's searching it isn't looking for a tablet at that point. They're just saying, “How do I fix my pool?” They don't want to end up on a product page. Instead, they want to know that we understand their problem. We break their problem down. “This is why you have algae in your pool. We're not just trying to sell you a scam or snake oil. You have your algae in your pool because of this. And there's a test you can do. And this is why you get rid of it.”
And once we demonstrate that we understand all that, we could have a little banner on the bottom of that article that says, “You want a checklist on how to get your pool taken care of me by the time you're party.” like he says, they download the checklist, they're going to get the checklists list, it's the next logical step in their solution to fixing their problem with the pool. So what happens after they get the checklist and they go through all that and they start trying to treat it right.
They change the filter; they put in extra chlorine and they’re still having a little problem. And then they get hit with an e-mail from you saying, “Hey, are you still having trouble with your pool?” It could be three days after they download the checklist or two days. “Yeah, I am.” “Well, check out our product here. Just drop a couple of tablets in and it'll be ready in 24 hours.” Now, that's a real solution.
Now, had they just been sent straight to our product page and we asked them to buy the tablets, now we're in a situation where we're trying to rush the sale. And in SEO, we can't rush the sale. And that's the way it used to be, we would only rank product pages because they were easy to rank. But that made Google less effective as a tool. So they made algorithms that made it so those pages wouldn't rank.
And so that's the good news is if you see a competitor that isn't going further in the funnel, but they're taking in consideration of the user intent, but they're not adding any teeth to it, like banner ads to go deeper into the funnel for a lead magnet. And usually, if you just offer a checklist, “Hey, you want all this information in a checklist in a PDF, just give us your e-mail.” Usually that goes really well and as far as lead generators.
So, it's having the opportunity of knowing the user intent and taking care of the user allows them to not only rank better take care of Google's users better, but also funnel prospects that they do get deeper into the funnel and into their own funnel. They go into the funnel, hey, I got to fix his pool, by the time they get out of the funnel, they want to clean pool, they want a good barbecue, they want to have a good thing.
So they're looking for it, tablets are not in their mind at that point. They will be but first, they have to let them know that they understand their problem and they understand why it happened and that they are the authorities on this problem. They're not just some people that bought some tablets from overseas and now they're trying to sell it for $99.99.
And they're saying it fixes, cures cancer and cleans your pool up. They just want to make sure we're not that person. And that has to be done at the speed of human interaction. We would never go on a first date and ask somebody to marry us unless it was an arranged marriage and other cultures that happens. But here in the United States, no, but it's just isn't heard of. Anybody that asked to marry you on your first date, you would probably think something was strange with that person and not have a second date.
But marketers, we don't mind at all trying to get people to buy our tablets right away. We'd like to get people to our product page, but that's where the user intent comes in. That's where the laws of human interaction is, you have to build the relationship. And once they see your name a few times and you've answered their question, they spent some time with you on your post. They got your guide, they got your check list, they got your email, and they’re going to buy from you.
Who else are they going to buy from, a vendor down the street who sends people straight to the sales page and didn't take the time to do all that? And guess what? Those are the pages that rank in Google. And those are the pages that convert. So really, SEO is just a matter of solid business development.
Matt shared that he’s a big, big fan of Grammarly and he also uses the Hemingway Editor too. And because when you're writing, you have to write in a way that people can scan. He tries to write everything in fifth grade or below reading level, and he sells to attorneys, too. And they like to write and they send him stuff and he'll put it in the grader and it'll be like grade 24. Don't write your copy, it needs to be fifth grade. Why does it need to be so low?
He gets the grammar taken care of using word and then once Grammarly gives him all the good suggestions he needs, then he moves it to the Hemingway Editor and if he can get that down to a fifth or fourth grade reading level, that just guarantees that all his sentences are short, that his paragraphs are short, and that he’s not using a lot of adverbs.
And why is that important? Because his readers are going to be able to scan through it really fast. It's going to be like a hot knife through butter. And whenever we slow a brain down, when they're reading, it just invites distraction and that's why. So, that's his app.
Matt shared that he and his partner, they just went through a book study of The Power of Positive Thinking with Norman Vincent Peale, just having a positive mindset. And it's funny, right when they finish the book, the crisis started with the virus. It was like, “Oh, man, when didn’t want to have to test this so soon, we just finished the book.” But it worked and it helped them and as business owners, any business owners, as any kid in school, just kind of a positive mindset.
If he had had a positive mindset in school, he would've had a lot better time. But he didn't have a positive mindset, it took him till he was in his forties to figure out he needed a positive mindset. But that's a great book, he highly recommends that one.
Matt shared that he’s a highly motivated person. His first 20 years in business, he had a hard time with people who weren't motivated. He felt like they were in his way. And if they were in his way, they're going to get pushed out of his way. He had momentum and then once you get momentum going, you never want to lose it. Now, I'm not telling people to start pushing people your way.
But what he wouldn't say is starting establishing some momentum. The very thing that makes us get upset when somebody trips us up is that they are slowing our momentum down. So we're reversing that and looking at it from the other way, if we establish momentum, which will give us enough will power to get through to where we're trying to get to. And most of the people that work for us and the human condition is they are unmotivated, they don't have a desire to accomplish anything big in their life.
So it makes it hard for them and they kind of stray. So, he tries to get momentum going with their staff, he tries to get them training, he tries to get them excited for themselves. So they're learning things that it has nothing to do with our business. But if they can learn a skill set, it helps them when they do the work. But even if they quit later, they still have the skill set with them that they can use with their competitor even or start their own business.
And sometimes that happens. And it used to hurt him and make me angry and it doesn't anymore because you want people having maximal momentum in your life, because we want it in our own life and the more momentum that your workers have, the more momentum that they'll have to give us. So when they bump into it, it actually propels us forward and rather than to be stalled out in front of us.
So that's the beauty of having acceleration, accelerated momentum. And to get that momentum going is a lot of different things you can do. But usually it's personal development for the workers taking care of them and he doesn't mean just paying them more, just treat them like a member of the team and help them strengthen how they feel about themselves and give them something to work towards and celebrate the wins with them. And they get the momentum and sometimes they get so much momentum, they go out the door, they go somewhere else for more money but you know what, he did his job in those cases.
So he would just say to anybody in that position just get some momentum going, get your employees excited. There's a lot of different things you can do for them, get some training going, usually online training and it usually is a good momentum builder too for staff especially if there's certification involved, because that skill set, they're padding and their own resume. Now they're doing something not just for you because they're getting paid, but now they're doing something for themselves.
So that's what he would say, if he got asked that question again, he would give you the crib's note would be the short version would be. Get your employees excited about themselves. Do some personal training, help them always be padding their resumé with whether it's certifications or experience or even help them with case studies.
So they have their own case studies, helped on this and this and this with this company. So, give them personal case studies, so they're padding their own resumé as they're going along. And so they make one case study for us, this is what our agency did for this client. But then on the same time, they have the writer.
They can easily just say also write one for one of our employees, who was very instrumental in this, that they can put in their CV or their resume or upload to LinkedIn. And lets people know that you care about them. But more importantly, it gets them excited about their job. And now they want to do that again, they want some more padding on their resume.
Matt shared that they’re doing a lot of different things because of the crisis and it's forced them to do a lot of things, something that they're really excited and is getting buy in from their employees and the work they're doing, they're getting scorecards so it's not they they're going to be checking on that, but they're going to be giving them scorecards at the end of every week of what they've accomplished and what they haven't accomplished. And it keeps them from having to look over their shoulders.
And so, they're treating them as little mini business owners and they're giving them a lot of leeway with it, too. So, he’s excited about that, that they're having a lot more autonomy with the staff rather than everybody knocking on his door and saying, “Matt, you got a minute?” because you’re die a little inside every time you hear that especially if you got your own momentum going. So they're getting buy in and it's working and that has him excited because that's momentum.
Facebook – Matthew LaClear
When asked about if he has a quote or saying that he reverts to during times of adversity or challenge, Matt shared that he has it pinned right in front of him, Psalm 16 vs 5-6, “Lord, you have assigned me my portion in my cup. You have made my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” That makes it very easy for him to do business deals when he has that mindset.
Me: Wow, that's so beautiful. We need it now especially in the climate and the environment of what's going on in the world generally speaking.
Temporary, not forever. And our inheritance and while faith comes into play but even without faith, you could get through this. This is just temporary.
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Naomi Garrick is an author, International Speaker and Personal Branding Coach that helps individuals, entrepreneurs, corporate executives and CEO’s to discover and develop their unique personal brand in order to effectively communicate their expertise and standout in their craft or industry.
She is also the founder of Garrick Communications – a boutique PR agency and a Certified Reputation Champion by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) with over 16 years of experience in Public Relations & Marketing, working with over 100 brands and individuals and Co-Founder of EMERGE personal development summit and workshops.
Naomi is passionate about helping people to see the greatness that sometimes they cannot see within themselves by helping individuals to identify or re-invent their unique personal brand in order to stand out in a noisy world.
Questions
Highlights
You are the P.R. chief, personal branding coach, so many different titles and themes that go according to your name. Can you share with us a little bit about that? And then we'll dive right into how we can dovetail locked into customer experience.
Naomi shared that it's funny because a lot of people now know her as the PR chick, but she wasn't always known as the PR chick, she actually studied Hotel and Tourism Management because she thought at the time that that's what she really wanted to do.
And that's also because at that age where you're deciding what you want to do in University, she wasn't quite sure. But her best friend was studying Tourism, she was going to study Tourism Management and people said that she (Naomi) had the personality for the hospitality industry, and that's why she jumped into that space. But even after completing for year 3, she always ended up working in the marketing or sales side of the hospitality industry, but after being in that space for about two and a half years, she realized a couple of things about herself. One, she really missed being around her family. Two, working in the hospitality industry is really a 24-hour industry, especially if you live on property at the hotel, which she did in Negril.
And so, she came back to Kingston not really quite sure what she wanted to do next. And luckily, she had the opportunity to meet with a gentleman in Jamaica Kimani Robinson, who had just launched RETV, which was Reggae Entertainment Television, which was really like the B.E.T. of the Caribbean, she would say, or MTV.
And after speaking with her, he offered her an opportunity to be a Sales and Marketing Coordinator, which then led to Sales and Marketing Manager for almost 5 years. And it was during that stint with the company, someone else had approached her about doing some publicity work for an upcoming dancehall artist. And she was a little bit confused at the fact that he would ask her to do that because she really didn't do a lot of PR for RETV, it was more of the marketing and sales side.
But he was so convinced that she was the person for this role. And so she said, “Okay, I'll try.” And she remembered walking to the nearest bookstore and getting all the books that she could find about being a publicist, and public relations, because she knew some of the basics but she really didn't know that much about the space.
And she realized when she started and she did her first press release, that because relationships is such a big driving force for her, she had really built these amazing relationships with the people behind the scenes, like the key decision makers in the media, the editors, the directors, the producers, the writers, the people that actually determine what we see, hear and read in the media.
And they saw her as a very credible source of information, and she had really good writing skills. She actually thinks that if she didn't study hospitality, she would have become a literature teacher.
And so, that's where she started doing PR work really for entertainers, the artists, upcoming artists, established artists. And she did that for a period of maybe about a year and a half while she was still at RETV. And then she became pregnant with her son in 2005. And at that point, it's like her brain does this shift. And she was just like, “I actually don't think this is the right space for me right now,” because being in the entertainment space, it required being out a lot at different types of events, at different types of hours, in the morning and in the night.
And she still went back to that original thought of wanting stability and flexibility to spend real quality time with her family and being in that position, she wouldn't be able to do that. And so, again, she started trying to figure out what's next for her.
And even doing the PR work was great, but working with entertainers would put her in that space of entertainment, which wasn't very stable for her at the time. And so another opportunity came up where a new hotel was opening in Kingston, a boutique hotel.
And as much as she thought she didn't want to go back into hospitality, there was an opportunity for the role of Corporate Communications Manager. And she didn't have corporate communications experience, but she had hospitality experience and she had PR and media experience. And so, she went ahead and she did the interview and she got the interview on the spot. But very quickly, after about three months, again, she realized that hospitality really is not for her.
She actually really loves this PR thing, especially because now, she had the opportunity to work in the lifestyle side of PR, which she really, really loves.
And so, she made a very hard decision to just start her own company, Garrick Communications and to just go headfirst into entrepreneurship without the savings, without a plan, really. But she knew that she didn't want to work for anyone ever again. And so, she started her company really with just her, her BlackBerry, a camera and a laptop, no office.
And luckily, again, because of relationships, one of the media houses in Jamaica heard that she had started this journey on her own and offered to do a feature or story about her, which ended up being the cover story for that publication and that's what led to her first client. They celebrated their 10th anniversary last year and they've never advertised their business. It has really just been through referrals, recommendations. And of course, their results as well and relationships, which is as she said before, is a massive driving force.
Three years ago, she started this new journey into personal branding and personal brand coaching, and that came out of being a part of an accelerator program for entrepreneurs. And one of the things that their coach had suggested was finding a way to make this nocturnal revenue or revenue in your sleep by putting in the effort one time. And the example she gave was a book.
She first start writing about PR and PR storytelling, but it just wasn't grabbing her and she couldn't get past chapter one, and then literally, she remembers watching something about using your experience and your skills to offer value and to serve others.
And she woke up the following morning like at about 3:00 am and she just had this idea that she had to write about personal branding, which is her personal journey to this point, because even without the degree, it was the other skill set or the other not so tangible things that really helped to propel her career over the last 15 to17 years.
And so, she just started thinking about some of the steps that she took and she created a workbook. And now 3 years after that, she has 3 books, she’s a speaker, she’s a coach, she does workshops. She just launched an online course and she’s really stepping into this role of personal branding coach because as much as she loves PR and she loves her agents and she loves her clients, she gets so much fulfillment from what she does right now by really helping individuals to see the greatness within themselves that sometimes they just don't see and then how best to communicate it to their ideal audience.
Me: Awesome. Brilliant. So really, really an amazing, a fantastic journey. And you touched on something that basically dovetails into what we're all about in this program. And it was actually highlighted in a webinar that I did this morning with some customer service experts globally. One of the things one of the speakers said was people who are hired for social channels must have certain skill sets that may not have existed before. And you touched them both.
They must be good writers and they must have public relation training. They are the voice of the company. So writing and PR training and I mean, you said it. You said it not in the template of a training that you would have gone to or something you learned in school. But basically because these are skills that you would have had naturally, as well as develop through the different experiences that you had that now materialize into a way that you can give back and help others.
Me: Branding is a great buzzword. I see it on the internet all the time. And you can look at branding from different aspects. You have a corporate brand and you have personal brand. Now, a client’s experience with a brand is very, very important. And it can make or break your business. We've seen a lot of negative news floating around recently, both locally and internationally when companies are not responsive, when they delete comments off of their social media pages, when they don't try to do things in a way that helps to enhance the customer's experience.
So could you give us maybe two or three things that companies need to be doing if they're not doing it already?
Naomi shared that the first thing she would say is that every single member or employee of a company is actually the brand manager for that company.
Every single person plays a role because every contact point that we have with a member of an organization or a company or a brand, can actually make or break our relationship or our experience or our views about that company or brand.
so, she would tell her clients that even the first person that you meet which sometimes is the security guard at an establishment, especially here in Jamaica. Sometimes just the way they greet you can throw off your entire mood as you are getting prepared for a meeting with someone in that organization, or it can completely lift your spirits.
And you end up having a super successful meeting just because your energy levels have changed just because of a very short one to two minute interaction and engagement, your employees actually become the spokespeople for your company, because when there is a crisis, a lot of times they are going to say, “Hey, let me pick up the phone and speak to my friend or this person that I know works at this organization.” And so, communication to her would be also extremely key.
And you start as a company first with your internal customers, which are your employees, because a lot of times when there's a crisis, sometimes your employees are hearing about it for the first time in the news or on Twitter.
that should not be the case, because if someone asks them, they should be able to have some kind of response that has been discussed with the company. So, they also know what to say if they are approached by just a friend, by an individual or by a client or by the media, because we all become these media/brand managers for that company as well.
Another thing that she would say, because you said two to three, is transparency because now we live in this digital world where we can find information about everybody and information is shared so quickly. So, you want to ensure that if there is some kind of crisis, that one, you are ahead of that story, even if you don't have a complete response yet, it's important to just acknowledge, use the same channels that the story came out.
So, if something came out about your brand or our company on Twitter, that's where you need to respond first and then you can use your other channels to respond. And that's why so many companies now post press releases through their social media channels first before even sharing with the media so that individuals know that this is what we had to say about this particular incident, this is our stance and we will continue to update you as we get more information. So it's very important to lead the story instead of you trying to play catch up now.
And to address things that may not even have been real or related but it's just because you've allowed the media or you've allowed individuals to create the story because you're not being a part of the storytelling process.
And so, timeliness, she thinks would be the last thing. Have to respond in a timely manner, we can't be taking 24 hours or two days or a week to respond to something, even if it's not a crisis. And as she said, if you don't have the full answer yet, say that, say…..
“This is a situation; this is what we know right now, we are addressing this and we will have an update for you within 24 hours or in the next two hours or continue to follow us on our social media platforms for the latest updates on this situation.”
And she thinks that's where we go wrong a lot of the times is we don't respond immediately. And then we end up with that “No comment” thing, which she thinks is like the worst thing ever. So when you say no comment, it's kind of like people feel that you're hiding something or like you are actually in the wrong. And then they create their own stories, which is not what you want.
Me: So your first was communication. Second was transparency and third was timeliness.
Naomi reiterates that the first one is really just acknowledging that we're all managers for whatever company or brand that we work for. We all have a responsibility to carry the correct message, which would lead then to communication.
Me: So it's very important for us to focus on all these areas to ensure that our customer experience is one in which is positive. Everybody's looking for the same thing, customer loyalty, customer retention, positive word of mouth advertising, testimonials. And unfortunately, even though there are opportunities for you to pay for some of these things, if it's done organically and it's being done from a place of authenticity, your customers are really your best marketing tool.
Naomi shared that one; she would say that personal branding is really your reputation. But they use this new buzzword. But it's not. It is your reputation. And as you said your reputation matters so much more so even now. She likes to quote Warren Buffett where he says, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and only 5 minutes to ruin it.” And if we think about that, we do things differently.
But in this digital world, you can ruin a reputation in seconds with a tweet, a screenshot, a voice note, a video, it can go viral. But the great thing is that that viral-ness can also help us to correct a situation. So, we have a great opportunity with social media platforms to really get our message out there in a very quick way.
So, yes, maybe we missed the original mark and we were behind with responding to a crisis or there really was something that we were involved with that left a not such a pleasant taste with our loyal fans or our customers.
And that's why it goes back to those tips that she had recommended earlier, that timeliness of response and being authentic and genuine with your audience and your customers. And so, she would recommend, and even not just doing a static press release, but doing a video, letting them see you, feel your emotions to show that you care and you actually took the time to sit down and do this, you the CEO and owner of the company, not your corporate communications manager, not your director of public relations, but you the person, because she honestly believe with leadership, when things go right for the company, it's the leader of the company, when things go wrong with the company, it’s the leader of the company.
And so, that's a time when a leader really needs to step up to the plate and get in front of those cameras and really share what is really happening. Show empathy and show that you care especially if you are in the wrong and you know you are in the wrong. Apologize, acknowledge the situation. Apologize for it; these are the steps we're taking to make sure this never happens again. And this is what we're doing with our team to ensure that we have things in place to mitigate a situation like this in the future.
So it's almost like you let them in to become a part of the process and you can even open it up to say, “If you have any ideas that you believe would be helpful to us during this time, please don't hesitate to email me directly.”
And you give them your personal email address so that they can contact, they can reach out to you and you respond to them.
That’s how you retain that loyalty from those customers, those raving fans that you had that were your ideal audience, because they are the ones now that will speak to this new experience you know, “I'm starting to have second thoughts about this company because this happened. But then when I got this email with this letter from the owner of the company and he asked for our opinion and our help. It made me feel good and it felt like this was a brand that I still want to support.”
Me: Agreed. Brilliant. Excellent answer, Naomi. And I think many of our listeners that listen to the podcast have small businesses. Some of them are part of large entities as well, play very significant roles. And so reputation is very important, especially during this time. As you said, empathy is so, so critical. And I like the fact that you said that they put themselves out there and put their own e-mail or contact number so that the client can actually reach in touch with them.
It shows that they're making themselves a part of the solution. So it's not them trying to fix it, the team trying to fix it. But I am a part of the solution as well, and I'm committed to it. And I'm here to hold your hand and walk you through it to make sure that we both come out on the positive end of this. So I really, really love that response.
Naomi shared that at the end of the day, we just want to connect. We're all human beings and we crave connection, significance. And she speaks about this all the time that, Tony Robbins says that, “People are not in the business of buying goods and services, they're in the business of feeling and connection and emotion.”
And so that's what draws us to our brand or company more than the actual product or the cost of the product or even the service that you provide.
But it's the experience that you create with different people when they meet with you or they engage with your product or they engage with your team.
Me: And they buy you before they buy a product or service. So it's important for you to ensure that you are being very genuine about whatever you're doing because people can pick up if you're being fake. It comes over in a tone of voice, your body language, how you respond, as you said, you send somebody a message and you say to yourself, “But I know they got the message. I know they saw the message. They've been in this application for quite a few times after I've sent a message and they haven't even acknowledged that they got the message to give a response.” People pay attention to those things.
Naomi shared that of course, because she celebrated Brand Day last week on her birthday. She has gotten so many emails, messages, everything. And so like she’s just using this week to start going through. And she noticed that a colleague of hers had sent her an email probably on Saturday, today's Friday. She had not responded yet because she’s still going through but what she did was let me (Naomi) send her a quick WhatsApp just to let her know that she sees her email, and she will respond by end of day to day. And she responded right away saying, “I was starting to wonder what was happening. So I really appreciate the fact that you sent me this message.” So sometimes it's as simple as that.
And people don't know what you're going through, so they just can't assume that, it's because she’s trying to respond to everybody's email. They may think that she just doesn’t have the time to respond to them or you don't care. And she cares about everybody because everybody that she interacts with, she wants to create a positive experience with them, even if it's not to buy a product or service because it's her.
And so when she responded, she knew she was doing the right thing, your gut tells you something. She flags things in her email that she hasn’t read yet. And she saw the purple flag, and she’s like, she’s going to message her right now so that she knows that she didn’t just see her email and not respond.
Me: It really goes a very far way and it's always the little things. It's always the little thing that goes a far way.
Naomi shared that she doesn’t stay motivated every day that would absolutely be the most honest answer, especially during right, right now. There are some days where she still doesn't have the energy to do anything. She thanks God that she has a child and that's what actually gets her out of bed some mornings.
So, he is a big motivator for her. But also she leans into a couple of things when she needs motivation. So, her morning routine, it helps a lot with that because she starts off using intention cards to just set her intention for the morning.
She gets up early every morning and she just needs the quiet time to really sit down and not really do any work. But she’ll listen to a podcast like maybe this (Navigating the Customer Experience) podcast. She listens to a podcast or listens to a positive meditation or something just to start the day right with a great cup of coffee. That's very important to her to set the tone but also her tribe is very, very important to her.
And she has different types of tribes. She has tribe of girlfriends where it’s just her close friends from high school. But she also has a tribe of entrepreneurial women. Women in business who she would lean to during a time like this, because we are going through a similar experience together and just sitting down and talking to each other. We get to share ideas, share experiences, you know it's not you alone and we're always motivating and encouraging each other.
So that is very, very important to her. And her colleagues and her, Rochelle and Catherine, they talk about your circle of genius all the time. Who do you let into that space? One of the things that she also do for her motivation is, she’s not on social media very often, so she’s on it very purposefully because she don't want to come across maybe a post or something that's shared that maybe gives her a sense of anxiety, because sometimes she’ll go online and she’ll see other people in her field of knowledge sharing and doing the most.
They're doing all these amazing things every single day. And for her, she gets a little bit anxious because then she starts thinking, “Am I not doing enough? Why am I not doing all these things?”
And so, actually, one of the purposeful things she started doing was actually muting some of her friends, some of the people that she follows so that she’s not bombarded with that as she gets up in the morning. And so, she really goes online when she’s ready to share or to respond to queries or questions that are on her pages.
And so she has had to create those social media boundaries for herself to keep her own motivation up. And the last thing is that she reads a lot. So, she’s always reading and learning from other people's experiences. So that really helps to keep her motivation up for sure.
When asked about an online resource that she cannot live without in her business, Naomi shared that that's Canva. So she doesn't have graphic design skills. She comes from a very creative family but that gene skipped her. Canva allows her to be a graphic designer. So she uses Canva for everything, for her social media posts, for her e-books, for her on boarding emails to her coaching clients, for her proposals, for her backdrops.
She just saw today that you can customize your Zoom backdrops using Canva, they have a template for that now. So, it is what she uses to do all of her branding. So, she usually has someone create a really great piece of branding for her in the form of a logo and then she just utilizes the brand colours to now use Canva to create her own content, that she can use on all her digital media pages, her website, YouTube channels. And just for promotional material for her business or just basic information and creating content. Canva is her go to, it’s free and if you pay for the pro version, she believes it's like US $12.00 a month, it's worth it.
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Naomi shared that there's so many. But her two favorite, favorite, favorite books are The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. And that's really just about tapping into your purpose and really just understanding that your journey makes you who you are. And that's how you develop your personal legend by just starting with you. So, she loves that and she listens to Audibles as well. And she read the physical book, but she also listen to the audible sometimes when she needs just a little bit of motivation.
And then the second one is the Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes, because that book literally changed her life in 2017 and that's really a book about starting to say yes to everything. The things that scare you the most because they lead to so many opportunities for your life. And so Shonda shares her story about how one Thanksgiving her sister was saying that she doesn't say yes to anything.
And for example, at that time she hired a publicist and his job was to tell people that she can't attend an event or she can't speak at an event because she just would not do those things. And then, so her first real big speaking event was a graduation ceremony, that clip is still on YouTube because it's her most powerful thing to date. And speaking engagement and that just led her to so many opportunities to speak, to lose weight, to do all the things she was scared to do really.
And it has transformed her life. And so for her (Naomi), 2017 became her year of yes and that's when her life also changed in a very positive way. And then she would also say any book by Tim Ferriss, if you're a business person, is great. The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich is amazing, now is a great time actually to be reading that book because we're all kind of living in this four hour workweek life right now with this pandemic. And he shows you how to do it the right way.
But he also has these two big books, Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss, that’s amazing and he has another one – Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. They are two massive books and what it is, is a collection of tips, tools, books, all kinds of information from hundreds of people, whether it’s authors, celebrities, cooks, athletes, all kinds of individuals just sharing tips on their morning routine, lessons learnt, favourite book to give away and it’s just like this massive book of awesomeness.
Me: Great resources, some parts of it must resonate with you and helped to advance you in some ways.
Naomi stated that somethings you never thought about until you read it, so it’s really great.
Naomi stated that she will share two things, one, during this time she has discovered that she is an expert banana bread baker. She started baking banana bread literally on a weekly basis and she just bakes them to give away to people actually. So, she has been on Amazon a little bit too much during this time but she bought these little mini baking tins so now when she does a batch, she can actually do 5 small mini banana breads and she keeps 1 for her house and then give away the rest to her friends or her neighbours.
And it just makes her feel good, her son is annoyed with her because he thinks she should sell them but that’s not why she bakes them. It’s actually one of her coping mechanisms during this time, it just puts her in a different place and she just loves when people calls her back to say how delicious the banana bread was. Banana bread chronicles.
And then also, she finally launched her online course on Building a Personal Brand and it’s something she should have done 2 years ago but she never had the time. And so, she has taken this time to finally sit down and build the courses, it’s 18 modules with coaching videos and work sheets and she’s really excited about it and the feedback she has been getting from individuals that signed up for the course last week has been so great.
And she loves that she can actually see their progress in the course and the respond to them in real time if they have any challenges. So, she really proud of that, it’s 2 years in the making and COVID forced her to buckle down and launch it and she is really excited about it.
LinkedIn – Naomi Garrick
Instagram - @naomigarrick
Naomi shared that her favourite quote and she speaks about it all the time is, “The journey is the reward.” It’s a Chinese proverb and really it just reminds us that everything that has happened in our lives, the good things and the bad things, the things that we don’t like, the things that we don’t want to acknowledge and accept, are actually the things that makes us this person that we are today.
And without those experiences, we wouldn’t be who we are in this moment. And so, a lot of times, we get very flustered thinking about the future and we get anxiety and we don’t know what’s next or we haven’t achieved the goals that we wanted in our lives right now without remembering to look back at all the things that got us to this point.
And yes, COVID-19 is one big challenge and we’re in a pandemic, but you can think back, every individual must have had something in their life that happened, some kind of challenge that they were able to overcome.
And so, it just reminds you that we will get over this, when, she’s not sure but there are lessons to be learned during this time, find the lessons in the journey and then accept that this is just making you the person you are meant to become.
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Gessie Schechinger is the laziest salesman in America as well as Vice President of Sales for OnCourse Sales Engagement Platform. Gessie is passionate about leveraging technology and automation to surpass revenue targets so he can help protect golf and bar time for the salespeople of the world.
Gessie won annual sales awards at 2 different Fortune 500 companies. His 20+ years of sales experience began in an outbound call center where he averaged 450 calls per week and blew out his quota by 297%. Unsurprisingly, he moved to field sales where he travelled 300 days a year convincing the biggest companies in the United States to open their wallet. He now spends his time educating sales leaders to utilize the most effective sales tool in the world and co-hosts the mediocre podcast, TechTales.
Questions
Highlights
Gessie shared that it's really interesting in the sense that what really drove everything for him was this constant yearning to try to cut corners, which typically isn't great. But when he was a kid, he lived down the street from a golf course and he would go find golf balls. And then he would sit at this hole that had a big lake on it and he would sell his “experienced golf balls” to the golfers that were coming by.
And as soon as he started making money doing that, he was like, “Oh, this seems pretty unique.” And then as things progressed in his career, he just didn't love listening to bosses, he wouldn’t say he was crazy rebellious but he just hated people telling him what to do. And so he was really just looking for like, “Okay, so how can I not be told what to do and still, you know, pay my bills?”
So, how is he going to figure this out and sales seems like one of those things where you're up against a number. They give you a number that you have to hit and then you go out and you hit that number, as long as you hit that number, then you're going to be good. It's like the one hand you have; you want some independence and stuff.
But the one thing you do learn very quickly on is that you always have a boss and that boss is the customer. And they're going to be the ones that really dictate your level of success or not. And so, being able to kind of cater to customers and keep people generally happy it kind of saved him and giving him some independence as his career went on.
Me: Amazing, amazing. So, sales is where the game's at. And you're right, as a salesperson, you are pretty much your own boss, because at the end of the day, as you said, you had a target. And once you met that target or exceeded it, then you are levelled up and given a new target. So to some extent, you managed your own schedule.
Gessie shared that OnCourse is a sales engagement platform. And it's a CRM, but it's a CRM with a couple added functionalities baked into it. So, they were at ZIB Tech, which is the company that owns OnCourse, as it started was not a very large company, very much a small business. And they were paying for Salesforce, they were paying for Outreach they had tons of these independent tools.
And one, the spending was just getting kind of crazy because everyone's adding users and there's a cost and everything just got kind of out of hand. And they also didn't really talk very well to each other. And so they wanted to create a platform that gave you all the basic functionality you would need to really take advantage of automation and sales without having to sign up for several different companies. And so, where they are really strong is everywhere, from entrepreneurs to businesses that are doing that 20, 30 million in revenue or maybe have like 10 man teams or less.
Their tool is very good because it gives you a lot of flexibility. And so, inside the tool, you're going to have the CRM functions, so that's your client record information, that's your opportunity management, pipeline management. And then also, the tool has a dialler software in it. So, you have your phone system, it can do SMS text messaging, it will also do LinkedIn automation. So, if you're selling via LinkedIn, they have a lot of great automation around how you can get that LinkedIn outreach going very effectively, as well as doing bulk e-mail, kind of that MailChimp Constant Contact type functionality.
Me: So, it's extremely robust and it definitely can serve a great purpose for anybody who is trying to level up their sales game.
Gessie shared that the funniest thing is in sales, especially his team. So, he is having the exact same challenges that everybody else is at and so they have the traditional channels which are face to face meetings, phone and email. And those three channels have been worked. But then all of a sudden you start feeling like, “Okay, well, I'm getting a lot of noise and email.” They’re always like, “What's that new channel, what are the things that are going to help?”
Now, LinkedIn is really good because where your email outreach but he gets all these emails every morning he wakes up and there's a part of him that just gets happy deleting them all. He has this big number and he can delete all his easy ones first. And it just makes him kind of happy, it makes him feel productive. And so, you're hoping that your sales outreach doesn't become one of those emails.
And so, the first thing is really trying to focus in. He thinks what a lot of people get caught up on is that they think they need to be good at every single channel. And that's not necessarily true. He will always believe that the phone will win. He thinks that the phone is the only way that you actually close business. And so the phone is something that you always have to have an outreach is something going when it comes to cold calling or your phone game.
Your phone game's got to be good, but then you just need to pick one other channel and be really good at it. Now, as per your point, they don't really have that face to face option, they don't really have the trade shows like all of that stuff is done. And what he would say is, figure out how you can stand out above the noise and get that LinkedIn game.
And he thinks the good news about LinkedIn is that you actually know that you're reaching the person that you're looking for. And the funny thing is that he over the course of his career, he has been hung up on, he has been cussed at, he has had people send horrendous emails back to him. Very, very rude is, anybody in customer service, we've all been there.
Something about LinkedIn, it makes people polite. He doesn't know what it is, he thinks maybe it's because you're like two clicks from their boss, not really sure how exactly it works, but everyone's super polite. He’s like, “Oh, no, thank you.” “Oh, appreciate you reaching out.”
And so, that has been very, very good for them. They've got to double down their efforts there and that's really helped. And the problem is, is that he kind of thinks of sales in a lot of people do, is like fishing. And so, you find like this new little spot at the lake that you think's got a lot of fish at it.
And so you go and that's LinkedIn. And so you're kind of coming in but now all sudden, we see like lots other boats showing up. So now tons of people are showing up like, “Oh, boy, it's starting to get noisy.” And one of the things that their company pivoted to and their sales outreach was, first of all, if you're a person out there listening; don't ever just write somebody a three to four paragraph message.
Nobody's going to read it and they just know that you're trying to sell something right away. And then you have like everybody, all of a sudden, everybody's concerned with his business and wants to learn how things are. He’s like, “I kind of don't think you are concerned. I think you're trying to sell me something from the start.” And so he thinks that you need to be very authentic. And then what they ended up doing was, they ended up starting doing embedded video in their LinkedIn because you might have something to say and it might be a complex value proposition, there might be a product or a service that you're representing that does take some explanation in order to convey those thoughts. And he just knows himself; he’s like one of the worst people ever, he only reads the news headlines, like only the bold, even in college, it was just the bold words.
It's got to be super interesting for him to get the details. So, what he found was but almost everybody will watch your video. So, if you can give it to them, get your message under two minutes, put it in a video, put it on LinkedIn, and you're going to stand out way past everybody else. And it's going to really help you cut through a lot of the noise that we're experiencing today.
Me: I agree with you. Actually, when you spoke about video a while ago, I was thinking to myself, I hope he says the video is going to be short because typically, if I look on it and I tap and I see 9 minutes, 15 minutes, I'm like, “Whoa, that's just too long.” So 2 minutes is good and whatever you're going to say, if you can capture it in 2 minutes and capture the attention of the person then you definitely have a winning tool right there.
So you said video helps to cut through the noise. And we have to definitely take a different approach as it relates to sales and we have to try and be more authentic. I like the fact that you mention that we shouldn’t be sending 3, 4 paragraphs to somebody who we don't know on LinkedIn. And as we know, LinkedIn has what, the first connection, second connection and third, some of the connections if they're not connected to somebody you know, sending a note is definitely a good thing, a good place to start. But as you said, I think maybe one really powerful statement is good enough.
Gessie thinks you can just have one little statement. He also thinks that you got to make sure it's personal. So, here's the thing, you can send out a message to somebody and say, “I'm trying to expand my network, love to have you connect.” It’s like, “Awesome, let me help you sell to more people.” which you know is fine but if you can lead with, “Hey, I saw that we have Bill Smith in common, love to get to know you as well. Are you familiar with Bill? Do you know Bill?” Whatever, it's this much more organic and natural because if you and him (Gessie) were at a conference and Bill knew you, he wouldn't just come up and say, “Hi, Yanique, I'm trying to expand my network, want to be friends?”
He’s never going to do that, that's a weird thing to do. So, he’s definitely going to come up to you and say, “Hey, Bill told me about you, you've got an awesome podcast. I'd really like to talk to you about it.” That's a much more organic way of cultivating relationships. And he thinks if more people just thought about it, if you are in a bar and you had to approach somebody, lead with that line, don't lead with this, “I'm expanding my network.” If somebody came up to him off the streets and say, “Hey, I'm very worried about your business and think I can help.” Like, “Well, what are you worried about, is there a problem? I didn't know that I had a problem. You're telling me I have a problem? Oh, my goodness. Tell me about it.” It just got to be real.
Gessie joked that he thinks the robots are going to take over everything. But the interesting thing and again, take it for what it's worth. He’s a software guy; he’s into all of this kind of stuff. But what he sees is there's some really cool stuff about pipeline management, sentiment analysis. And so, sentiment analysis, basically, people these days use the term A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) pretty fast and loose.
Really what we're talking about is robust algorithms that weight certain pieces of data heavier than others. And as they see success, it just learns to focus on weight on those things differently. And so, one of those things that we're going to start seeing in sales tools is because you have a tool like OnCourse, for example, shameless plug in. So, you have a tool that's going to capture all of your action. So it's going to see that you had these meetings with them.
Then it's going to see the notes of how you responded, of your summaries of those meetings. It's going to see how many calls that you made with them. It's going to see how many emails it took before it goes. And then anyone who's ever used a CRM tool knows that, when you get an opportunity, you have like a percentage of closes. You're like, “I'm 80% confident that this deal is going to win.” Well, they're going to stop doing that.
And the computer's going to start telling us, “Hey, this guy is 70% of the way there. You need to focus on him.” And they're going to start being able to collectively look at what they're doing and use it as a guide. And that guide's going to be like, “Okay, this is what has been working for this type of customer.” And he doesn't want to get crazy because there's nothing that's ever going to be better than the personal connection of a sale.
There's a couple of things that happen when you talk to a salesperson. And the first thing is,
“Can I trust this guy?” You've got to be trustworthy and you've got to be relatively friendly. It's like,
“Can I trust this guy? And do I want to talk to him for the next year of this business?”
And so, there's going to be a lot of credibility about your reputation and how you hold yourself. And all of that is extremely important but we can use it as an assist to that to be like, there's a certain amount of work that he’s going to do in every single prospect in order to get them to a place that they're going to buy. And the challenging thing for salespeople right now, he comes from a whole family, they're just all people who just talk and sell stuff all day.
So, his father was a sales rep/entrepreneur. His father was a sales rep for Dupont back in the day. So, when he tells them that computers would be taking over sales, like, “How dare you? You don't know what it was like.” Yeah. Because when his father and grandfather sold, most consumers were getting their information from the sales rep, they didn't really know about this stuff.
Now, he’s got customers telling him about new competitors he has. And so, the buyers are extremely smart and so we have to kind of pivot our game to make sure that, like, okay, well, they're smarter than ever before. They're getting way further into the buying process than ever before by the time we're interacting with them.
And so, being able to track and just know some of the necessary things, the boxes we're going to have to check in order to get this person to actually buy is going to be critically helpful and he thinks technology is going to help a lot with that.
Me: I agree that the average consumer now is way more informed than they were before. And traditional marketing, at least for me personally, I don't think it's as effective as word of mouth. Like hearing feedback from somebody who had the experience and it was really good for them. I'm more likely to consider buying from that company or that person if somebody I trust and somebody I know and somebody I value their opinion gives me feedback on their experience versus an ad that I saw on TV or some YouTube thing that popped up while I was watching a video. Because at the end of the day, I just find that it's just annoying.
Gessie shared that first of all, it's certainly annoying. But secondly, they have a rule, and that is if 30% of their leads are not coming from referrals, then they have a service quality problem. So, that's what they kind of use as their measuring stick to make sure quality in service is good. Because to your point, you have to be having people refer your service and business to people. And if you're not seeing at least 30% of that new inbound leads coming from them, then there's work to do, there's improvement to be had there.
Gessie jokes that he doesn't even know if he is. Mentioning that we have a pandemic, he wasn't doing a great job go into the gym when the gym was open and now they’re closed and they're starting to get back. And things aren't even going great there now either.
But in all seriousness, it is one of those things where you have to be doing something that you can see yourself gaining ground. So, the fun thing for them in software is when you launch a new product, he thinks this goes for any service. So, you start your service and then you realize you have all of these problems with your service that you didn't even know about, you have all this stuff to solve and then you just start solving for them and then it starts getting a little bit better.
And then that part gets a little bit better and then, “Oh, big oopsie. Yeah, we'll fix that.” and then we fix that, then that gets a little bit better. And you're seeing that progress and being able to see how things are coming along. That's probably the most exciting thing that kind of gets you going in the morning, that and fairly highly caffeinated coffee.
Gessie shared that in the spirit of being generous, he would say that, yes, OnCourse Sales Engagement Platform is necessary to all of your businesses and you should sign up right away. But also that he actually love Calendly. Calendly is very effective and it just cuts through a lot of the stuff when it comes to scheduling meeting and stuff. So, that's a really cool thing to have but then again, he thinks it is important to have all your communication tools in one place, and that's why they created the tool.
Me: I use Calendly as well when I started this podcast, it was four years ago. I can't believe it's been all that time. And it really makes it easier for scheduling, especially for people who are in different time zones across the world. So, it sinks their calendars to the time on dates and everything and then it sinks mine and it's just brilliant and it just works really, really wonderfully. The automation makes your life so much easier with that one little link that you sent to them and they choose their time on date.
Gessie shared that he’s not going to say that he’s the biggest reader on Earth. He tends to start lots of books, finishing them is a different challenge altogether. But one of the ones that he actually had to because he had took a business class in college and they made them read it, but it ended up being like really practical advice was, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey.
And so, they actually had to do that and by chapter level and then maybe it was like osmosis, but some of it just kind of got grained in his system. And so, especially like one of the fundamental things and this is something that has served him really well throughout his entire career. It's such a little tiny thing, but it's, it says, “If the task is less than two minutes, just do it right away.”
And just taking that is good; if it's more than that, plan it. Because time management for him has always just been a disaster, because he tries to schedule things and then like he has great hopes and desires to the schedule, he’s going to keep and then 3 things happen and the entire thing falls apart. And so, it is a constant struggle for him to figure out, like, he can plan a schedule like a champion.
Living to a schedule is a whole other burden. And his approach, if you have something instantly get it taken care of, it's going to take less than 2 minutes, more than that, plan it. You’ll have these windows of times you could do things made him much more productive than he probably would have been without that advice.
Gessie shared that they are working on a brand new social media management tool, that's really cool. Basically allows you to just kind of look for articles that will post amongst all of your social media. It's not coming up for a while. So, probably like the next two months or so. But that's something really fun that they're working on that he’s pretty excited about just because again and all roads go to laziness, he can't be just focusing on every single social media, he needs one place and then just let it take care of the rest.
That and then, they do have a pretty robust product roadmap at OnCourse and so in addition to the functionality, like they're baking in that sentiment analysis type stuff, branching and sequencing and a lot more that they're doing around automation, that he thinks is going to be pretty cool. And they're taking a couple of, not very traditional views about gauging productivity in sales. And so, he thinks it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
Me: So our listeners listened to this podcast. They said to themselves, this guy is really cool, he's awesome, he's fun, I really enjoyed the conversation. And I'm thinking of connecting with him because I want to learn more about CRM and sales engagement and how to leverage sales through automation. I want to really be connected with what he's doing and how that can help my business and my own personal growth as a sales person or even as a business person in my business or a business I work for or for someone.
Twitter - @TheRealGessie
When asked if there’s a quote or saying that helps him refocus, Gessie shared that every single morning, he had two parents, his mom and his dad. His mom would come in, wake him up for school the morning. She would turn on the little light, the little light next to your bed, “Gessie, it's time to wake up,” trying to get going. His dad, a different approach, came in every morning, turned on the big light, which was very jarring, not a comfortable way to wake up. And then he would say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Don't waste it.” And then he'd go out. That is the signature quote for him by far.
Me: Okay. I'm sure it's fully ingrained in the deepest part of your long term memory to never, ever forget.
Gessie mentioned, and if you’re a parent, turn on the little light, the big light’s very abrasive.
Me: When you said that I thought of my daughter when I go in her room and I turn on a big light and she's like, “Mom!” I know exactly what you mean.
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Links
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!
Eric Prugh oversees product, design and solutions engineering at PactSafe. PactSafe is a SaaS company that securely powers clickwrap agreements & eSignatures for businesses like Dell, Wayfair, Door Dash, Extra Space Storage, Upwork, HomeAdvisor, and more. Prior to his current rule, Eric spent 7 years at ExactTarget and Salesforce in enterprise pre-sales as well as the product organization. He is a proud Purdue grad and lives in Meridian-Kessler with his wife Liz, their 2 daughters and 2 dogs.
Questions
Highlights
Eric shared that he has been writing code and working and design since he was 13 years old. So, it's really kind of a nerd early on and he has always been fascinated with the power of technology and the power of the internet.
And so, at a pretty early age when he was 16, 17 years old, he decided it was something he was really passionate about pursuing both in his college degree and his career and so he went to school for that type of stuff, web development, graphic design, became a developer out of school and just realized he’s not a very good developer and didn't have the level of detail, the attention span for it.
He certainly has a massive respect for software engineers and engineers of all types because it requires a ton of hard work and got into consulting. And that's when he moved into software as a service and found a really interesting consulting job at a company called ExactTarget based in Indianapolis. And that took him on an amazing journey around the world and a big acquisition by Salesforce and got to join the product team from there.
And the reason he joined the product team is that he became fascinated with the problems that a single cloud based product could solve for such a myriad of people and how a lot of different companies can make products their own and solve their own specific problems that ultimately become broadly applicable problems for many companies, whether it's within the same vertical or within the same size of organization.
And so, he really just became enamoured with building products that solve problems for people. When he was in sales engineering, it was all about being the catalysts to solve the problem, being the person that was helping customers realize the value of the product.
And then he really got excited about how can he build products that are going to enable people to solve problems at a little bit higher level. So, that's how he moved into it. And then obviously the opportunity impacts that came along. One of his really good friends of a very long time had this amazing idea. He was a lawyer and he (Eric) had a lot of experience in SaaS. And so it's really a very good combination of skills, complimentary set of skills that they were able to come together and start the business and certainly been a roller coaster since.
Eric shared that PactSafe has a little bit of a unique perspective and when we talk about contracts and accepting contracts, generally, you're thinking about a very arduous, multi-step approval workflow, trying to get a contract signed or a contract logged or you're managing contracts for vendors. They've really created a very disruptive product that is designed from the very beginning to serve all the companies that have to do contracts at a massive scale. So, if you think about Wayfair, who is an amazing customer of theirs, doing amazing things in the market, they've completely disrupted the way people buy furniture.
They don't talk to their customers and have each of them go through a contract workflow to sign something. You're going through an e-commerce flow, you're buying furniture, you're buying a really nice light fixture or whatever for your home.
The contract is just a seamless part of the experience of checking out and Amazon, Facebook, early tech companies really pioneered that as a legally enforceable way to enter into a contract with customers. But legal teams at these big companies that were doing business in this way didn't have a way to manage the terms that were being presented to ultimately present those contracts as part of the customer experience.
And there were technology teams that were designing these experiences without really knowing what's the right, legal, best practice for doing so. And so, it creates all sorts of issues in the process and the bigger the company, the bigger the problem.
And so, that's really where the business came from in the initial problem that they solved. But what they found is that they became consultants for how a lot of larger, more don't want to say old school, but businesses that had done business in a more traditional way. They had salespeople going door to door, calling on businesses. They were doing larger contracts. Now that everything is moving online, software as a service has really kind of pioneered the way people expect to buy; e-commerce has changed the way people expect to buy.
And so, you have companies like Dell that are trying to figure out how best to implement the right customer experiences for doing more business, doing it faster, helping to recognize revenue for their business faster.
But then they have an army of lawyers that are concerned about doing business in this way because there still needs to be contracts as part of a workflow where customer engages. So, they really bring those two people together, the product person that's designing the experience and the legal person that's ensuring the right level of compliance is there. And they allow them to work in harmony and design the best experience and not worry about all the legal controls or compliance measures because they offer that out of the box.
And so, the product is great, it does amazing things. But, it's their people, it's their team that's helping working with these big companies to navigate how best to do these experiences in a way that everybody benefits, the customer, the end user, and the business.
Me: So basically, your integrated platform with a lot of these large organizations that require these contracts from a legal perspective makes the process that much easier for the end user.
Eric shared that you see in the largest businesses in quarterly earnings calls and annual reports in the last 3 or 5 years, you've started to see this transition of what CEOs are talking about.
Customer experience has always been important, but now it's talking about introducing new ways of doing business, new business models, companies are talking about. You've got Cisco, who's a huge business that's traditionally been selling hardware for networking and routers and all that sort of stuff.
They're trying to move towards more of a digital model where they're buying companies like Duo Security that are primarily SaaS and they're trying to bake that into their overall go to market strategy. So you're seeing a lot of big companies trying to lean into the subscription model. And companies like Zuora have been evangelizing that transition for quite some time but you're really starting to see it from even the world's biggest companies. And he thinks a lot of that centers around the way people expect to access the products that they buy, whether it's B2B or B2C.
They wrote a big e-book on how a lot of these big companies are trying to transition to self-service and one of the interesting stats from a future commerce report was that “72% of buyers now want self-service access to their accounts, to their orders, to their transaction history and even the ability to buy products online and that's at the enterprise or B2B level.”
And he thinks it's a big thing that's driving that is, as a consumer, you can do so much from your phone. Even in the last 3 to 5 months, like, wow, he really doesn't need to go to a grocery store, he doesn't need to go anywhere, really. He doesn't have to go anywhere because there's so much at his fingertips on his phone to be able to get delivered to his door, whether it's alcohol, groceries, you name it.
And so, that shift is like the second a B2B buyer wants to engage, a B2B brand, usually there's a gated form where they have to talk to somebody and it feels so heavy. And he thinks in the next 3 to 5 years, you're going to see a lot of companies and it's already starting. A lot of SaaS companies are moving towards self service, enabling their customers to find what they need to buy online.
They're being more transparent in how they're pricing going to market. You're seeing a lot of B2C companies that have traditionally done business through grocery stores, through Wal-Mart. Even PepsiCo, for example, is a great example. They just recently announced they're launching all these direct consumer sites for all their brands where people can go and order products online. And Pepsi is able this to start a direct relationship with their customer as opposed to having to work through the grocery stores of a Wal-Mart or Costco or whoever.
So, the whole business model is shifting, whether it's offering more subscription based products, if you've been a traditional, more on premise or hardware type company. And then you've got these direct consumer brands or these big B2C brands moving into a direct consumer model.
And you've seen a lot of companies like Warby Parker and you got like Casper, you got Harry's Razors. There are all sorts of companies that have established that that's a great way to do business. And primarily serving the customer directly online, being great, easy to do business with and even offering a subscription type model is a great way to go to market and people love buying in that way, reducing his upfront cost, make it something that's recurring and then add recurring value over time through a great customer experience.
Me: Your phone is definitely a very powerful device. I totally agree. I mean, I've seen so many changes, as you indicated, just from this pandemic. It's actually forced a lot of businesses to do things that maybe they may have had on their radar before, but they've definitely bumped it up as priority because of the time that we're going through.
When asked how he stays motivated, Eric shared that it depends on the day; it's definitely had its challenges. He has 2 very young kids and which has been so amazing in some aspects and so challenging in others. He thinks what has helped him to stay motivated is laser focus on priority and ultimately trying to keep his own sanity by starting his week, he just started a process where on Sunday he’s making his to do list for the week. He’s not doing it on Monday morning, that way on Monday morning he’s just going through and starting to execute on what he needs to get done for the week.
He hasn't hit a week yet where he’s actually gotten everything done, he’s always too ambitious, so, a good way to stay motivated, you knock out your to do list and you check everything off the list, that feels awesome. But he also thinks for him, it's about being realistic and honest with himself and okay with the fact that he’s not going to get everything done, there are going to be some things that don't move quite as fast as he'd like.
But ultimately, it's about managing, trying to manage what he can control and ultimately holding everybody on the team accountable and in a very similar way and understand that we all need time to go and hang out with our kids and know that ultimately there are people in our lives that we're doing this for. Whether it's a spouse, partner, family, friends, what have you, that's helped kind of bring him back to normal when things do get a little out of control.
But really, one thing he’s most excited about is the speed at which things are happening in all markets right now, it's a pretty inspiring kind of action, amount of action being driven in healthcare, in manufacturing, in all sorts of fields and industries that have needed that, whether it's digital transformation, whether it's innovation, whether it's collaboration around the world on a cure, on a vaccine, it's really been amazing to watch and he tries to balance the news that he intake with that sort of mentality and information and news stories, as well as like trying to stay up to date on the data on what's happening. What a long winded answer to your question.
Me: That's okay, it would be of great influence as a representation because people deal with things in different ways. And it's a question that we ask all our guests. It's interesting to see how different people stay motivated because what may work for you may not work for someone else, so at some point, I'm sure that maybe a blended approach or a little bit of this or a little bit of that will work for some of our audience that is listening to the different episodes. So, we are grateful for all that you shared.
Eric shared that they have a couple online resources. One thing that has helped him stay sane is he uses an email app called Superhuman, which he knows is an up and coming solution or product. It basically just helps people maintain their inbox and state inbox zero, it's amazing. It has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that that helps you pound through email, which is super important to him because obviously it's more important than ever to stay on top of things, but not letting email be a huge distraction.
They also use Quip to help collaborate and not the toothbrush. It is actually a product by Salesforce. It's a great collaboration tool that their whole team has access to and you can build spreadsheets and kind of manage projects and collaborate really well and all that sort of stuff. So, that's been really great.
And then other tools that have been immensely helpful to him, they also use a project management tool for both their product design and development and his entire product and design teams use it. It's called Clubhouse and it's great for just managing, knocking out reporting on tasks across the team, so he’s not having to constantly hammer people with questions about what they're doing, it just gives me really good visibility and gives the whole team visibility into what people are working on, how we're tracking towards goals and all that sort of stuff.
Me: So, the clubhouse is very much like a productivity app as well for you to ensure that people are actually doing work.
Eric shared that he tries not to read too many startup kind of books, but there's a book he read right as they're starting the business, there are two books he read that he really liked.
One, for those considering starting a business, there's a book by a guy named Peter Thiel. If you've seen Silicon Valley, he's represented as Peter Gregory on the show. And he wrote a book called Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, which is an amazing book. A lot of people probably talked about this, but it talks a lot about how to build a big business when you're considering starting a company, how to think about the market, how best to carve out your niche in the space, how to expand all that sort of stuff. It's really good. Peter Thiel, he's a little bit controversial, the character but it's good.
And then he also read The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz, which is a really good one and definitely in times like this has been very good to go back to and really kind of think about how to work through tough times, which we've been very fortunate right now.
But certainly it hasn’t been easy. He’s reading a book right now called Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner. It's about the guys who created IDSoftware, which is the firm that actually created the game Doom. So it's about their story and it's super interesting and kind of a nice, crazy story, but lots of cautionary tales about building a business the right and wrong way. That's for sure.
Me: Storytelling and experiences is so important because a lot of us learn from other people's stories and their own experiences.
Eric shared that one thing they're really excited about at PactSafe that they're working on as a team is one of the things that has been not a challenge, but really trying to carve out a space is the combination of building a new product and having to explain and educate people on it, as well as really quantifying what the market is? How big is it? What types of customers can they serve? What's the story? That's challenging when you're really building something new.
There's no competitive set for what they do, which is a good and bad thing at times because you're not coming up against people that have bought this type of product before. So, they need help understanding how to buy it, what the value is, all that sort of stuff. They've recently partnered with a third party research firm that's going to help them kind of understand and carve out what the space looks like for them and engaging analysts or research firms like this is a big bet.
It's a long, expensive endeavor to kind of help understand how best to build the company and product that's going to be unique and build a new market and help establish where they fit and all that sort of stuff. But overall, the prospects have been really good and he thinks for them, it's giving them a good perspective at a high level on how to think about their role in the customer experience, which is a huge part of what they do.
But they haven't done the best job of capturing the highest level of value for what they do. And then secondly, what the space really looks like. So, they've been working in startup world, you kind of work hyper focus at a very low level for what your product can do, because they don't have 5 or 10 years of research and development of a bunch of engineers building this thing out. They've got a limited set of engineers that have been hard at work for 5 years.
They have been very in the weeds on the problems that they solve and what these analyst firms help with. And for those that don't know Aragon Research, Forrester,Gartner. These types of firms, you're trying to look at high level macro trends and understand what's happening and what markets exist and what people are trying to do. They're really helpful in shaping what's really happening and articulating it in a clear way that speaks to the real trends in the market.
And so, he doesn’t advise it for everybody, but he thinks for people that have similar problems as them, they believe it's going to be transformational. So, super excited about the opportunity and it's something that his whole team is helping them sort out all the way from the CEO down to some of the product marketing folks on his team who are hard at work trying to cast the vision, if you will.
Me: Data is king, so the more capitalized you can get on your data to understand specifically what the pain points of your customer avatar is then I'm sure you'll be able to add value to those people if you get extremely granular about it, so the research approach is definitely an excellent technique to get specific on it.
Twitter – @eprugh
LinkedIn –Eric Prugh
When asked about a quote or saying that helps him refocus, Eric shared that as product person, he has always subscribed to Henry Ford's quote of, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Because you take customer feedback on how you're building your product or your experience as a very key, important input and data point as you build out your company and product. But ultimately, as the business owner, entrepreneur, you've got all this experience and tribal knowledge and vision for where things could go. And you've been thinking about it every day, 10 times more than any of your customers really would. So ultimately, he has learned a lot by relying on that quote over the years.
Links
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!
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Matt DiMaria is the president and CEO of VHT, vendors of the callback software category, serving 280 of the largest brands in the world. Last year, VHT served over 225 million callbacks to consumers from brands such as Bank of America, AT&T, United Healthcare, Comcast and many others. Matt specializes in developing high performance teams in consumer and enterprise software - having contributed to creation of over $2 billion in value to shareholders, employees and investors.
Questions
Highlights
Matt shared that the journey to be VHT for me started in 2017, partnered with a wonderful group of investors in the San Francisco Bay Area, a firm called Alpina Investors and they partnered with the goal of looking for businesses that really capitalized on two trends that they thought were important. One is the increasingly critical role that artificial intelligence automation would play for delivering customer success information.
So, whether that would be for, let's say, product level requests, people are gathering information and making a purchase decision or break fix type of requests where individuals are calling in because they're having difficulty working with a product or service and need the help from a brand to accomplish that. And our sort of underlying assumption was in this increasingly complex, multi-device world, consumers will have greater need for services but there's a finite capacity of skills and knowledge to service that demand.
And it turned out VHT really capitalized on both of those trends. What callback software ultimately is all about, particularly for these very, very large brands like Bank of America, or a big airline or consumer brand is they deal with a tremendously high volume of calls that are coming into a contact centre, but they have finite agent capacity to serve those requests.
And anytime there's a gap or a breakdown in that, we all experience that as hold time and probably one of the very few universal negative experiences that we have when we're trying to get help from a brand is more waiting on hold.
So what VHT does is takes that time and transfers it to when the consumer is available and an agent is ready to talk to that customer and because they do that at such a large scale, it ends up being something that creates a lot of brand loyalty. So, it drives up net promoter scores and customer engagement, but it also saves the brand an awful lot of money, because instead of having staff for situations where they have peak demand at all times, what they can do is staff to a more sustained level and then make that capacity available to meet the customers when they're available to serve them.
So, they saw that as a wonderful opportunity. And about a year and a half ago, about 18 months ago, they acquired a virtual hold and since that time, they've been investing to advance that into a similarity that he’s I'm happy to talk about.
I asked what does VHT stand for? As it wasn’t on the website. Is it Virtual Hold Technology?
Matt stated that that's exactly right. The company was founded 25 years ago by a brilliant entrepreneur named Mark Williams, the original name of the company was Virtual Hold Technology and as the name implies, it's really all about callback.
Me:Great, so this software, I think, is brilliant. I don't know if you service organizations in Jamaica but if you don't, I think there is a great opportunity here. So, I host my website with GoDaddy and I've been having a lot of challenges upgrading my website in the last few weeks in relation to my developer and having it migrated and there's just a lot of issues and so I have to be calling GoDaddy quite often, of course, with Coronavirus, they've had an exceedingly large volume of calls and they have the option.
First of all, they advise you of how long the wait time will be and they’ll say like 20 or 25 minutes. And then they say, “If you'd like for us to call you back in 20 or 25 minutes, we can give you back a call.”
And of course, because they have my number in their system already, it's just a matter of me stating my name after they've put on a beep and it's been brilliant, it works wonderfully, I don't need to sit on hold and they call me back and when they do call me back, I'm not waiting for more than about maybe 20 seconds before the call actually is transferred to a live human being. So, I must commend you. I think it's a brilliant software, and I think every business should implement it, especially if they're experiencing, as you said, a large volume of calls.
Matt agreed and stated that there's no question and the experience that you're having, of course, is something that's familiar to us all at the moment because of the COVID-19 virus and they've (VHT) been very active in adjusting their business model and their offerings to support companies that are experiencing a lot of strain as a result of COVID-19.
They launched a program several weeks ago now, about a little over a month ago called the Virtual Hold COVID Assistance Program and the goal is to make not just their callback capabilities, but their automation capabilities, their messaging capabilities that are newer, coming from the company available to businesses or even local government organizations that are suddenly finding themselves, for example, not being able to be in their office and consumers or tax holders or people seeking information about the virus and so forth, calling into their local offices trying to get answers to questions and they're just not equipped to operate.
And so, they've been delighted to work with some local governments, some healthcare providers and others to provide their capabilities at no cost for 30 days, which, as we all know in the early stages of the virus outbreak, was quite critical. And now what they're finding with their customer base businesses that they've been doing business with for quite a long time, they're also helping them make longer term plans because, thankfully, the virus will not last forever and as they begin to normalize their businesses, they're able to help them deliver consistent service levels even as the staffing is a little bit uncertain, unfortunately.
Matt shared that their vision for their company is to enable people to get the help they need for brands they love on terms that they choose. And callback is, of course, very illustrative of that. But as they thought about that vision, they also looked at not just where the market has been, but where the future is. And they arrived at a focus on the mobile device as the primary device in which almost all of us now are using to make inquiries to brands, to make phone calls, but also, of course, it's our primary communication tool to interact with each other.
And in the context of a person to person interaction, we're messaging with friends or communicating with friends, that's not just a voice experience anymore. In fact, overwhelmingly, people are preferring even for the initial contact with a friend to be through an SMS perhaps interaction or through a mobile messaging application of some sort.
And then, maybe you ask, “Hey, are you available to talk on the phone right now or would you be available later?” So, the ability to move from a messaging interaction to a voice interaction is something that we all just take for granted because we're all equipped with a smartphone.
So, what they see going forward is that's how every major brand is going to have to interact with their customers.
So, they developed a new platform that they call Mindful and what Mindful does is delivers as a SAAS offering, a way for large brands to interact with their customers in the manner in which they prefer so they could start, for example, with a SMS interaction asking for information about a product or service or how particular solution needs to be implemented or checking on a reservation, checking in on a bank balance, could be anything. And to enable that to be initiated in either a voice call or through a messaging interaction and then for the brand to interact with them as though they were a friend, so be able to maintain the session information over time, because as we all know, you bring up your friends messaging session and you can see the whole conversation history, the consumer can see the whole conversation history.
So, they want to do the exact same thing for large brands to enable them to interact with their customers and preserve all that conversation history so there's always context on the history of the relationship, perhaps the evolution of a problem and things of that sort. And that's what they're delivering on the Mindful platform, is a complete toolset, if you will, to make interacting with a large brand, just like interacting with your best friend.
Me: So it's almost like the WhatsApp version of a company experience?
Matt agreed. He shared what’s difficult of course, is to do that at scale. So, as he mentioned, if you're a large airline or a large bank where you have bag of millions and millions of consumers that you're interacting with, you end up with a very unique set of challenges, hopefully, as he mentioned, we're back to more normal situations where maybe there's a power outage in a particular area or perhaps, a hurricane if you're in Jamaica, you're familiar with the weather being very disruptive. And the airlines need to be able to adjust to changing conditions, but yet deliver consistent service and if you're operating multiple contact centers or things of that sort.
Sometimes the contact center is going off line and you need to shift some of that demand to a contact center that's currently available. So, that's where they feel like they can bring just a lot of value is when these problems are really on a large scale, spanning millions of consumers and make sure it's a great experience for the company and also a very significant financial benefit, because, as he mentioned earlier, they're able to maintain a more steady staffing level, even though demand might be very dynamic.
Me: Mindful platform and we can access that through your website, www.vhtcx.com allows for this seamless transition across talk and text. Does it provide analytics as well?
Matt shared that the other real key pieces, there's really two other real key elements. First is automation's, because as you move between different channels and different sessions and so forth, there's an opportunity to gain efficiencies by applying bots and artificial intelligence and automation really weaves together the transitions between a voice interaction that could be with a live agent to a bot, to an A.I. service.
And so, automation is one piece of it but as you mentioned, all of this needs to make sense from a business standpoint in terms of ensuring that service levels are being monitored and maintained, being able to look at what the different queue conditions are and the relative performance of how the cues are responding to what customer demand is. Obviously, there's cost associated with that. So, the analytics gives them the ability to work with their customers to ensure that they're not just delivering a great consumer experience, but that also it's making financial sense and business sense as well.
Matt shared that he thinks that we are all being conditioned into a new set of expectations as a result of mobile devices. And we take it now as second nature that we have this very powerful supercomputer we carry with us. And it's connected up to a global network that is able to provide services and data on demand.
And what we believe is that the sort of traditional contact center that was really designed around when telephones were something that were attached to a wall with a cable and that the customer's experience expectations are dramatically different.
And the technology to service them, therefore, must also reflect that evolution. So, first and foremost is authentication and really that speaks to in order for a brand to be able to meet the customer's needs, they need to know who you are and so there's tremendous work going on to dramatically simplify authentication, whether that's an app or through a messaging interaction or voice interaction. And the challenge there, of course, is it needs to be as frictionless as possible but at the same time, protect the private information, enable sensitive information such as, if it's health care data or financial data to be exchanged in it as frictionless a manner as possible.
The second piece is, as he mentioned, how the customer wishes to be served. So, once he knows who you are, then he can start understanding how best to serve you. So, for a younger demographic, let's say they may never want to talk on the phone at all, they may want to conduct all their business through a digital interaction, whether that's an SMS, an in app experience or a digital experience on the company's website. So, being able to have that preference understood as early in the experience with the customer as possible so that it can be delivered appropriately.
And then, of course, it extends out into multiple devices and especially as we look at Alexa and other smart devices that are increasingly capable of native voice interactions with no human involvement. That's going to be a very important area of evolution and how we expect to be served. We want to be able to ask questions and get answers pretty instantaneously and so that is going to involve the voice assistant technology, again, complemented with A.I. and automation to really make that a seamless and delightful experience for their consumers.
But in the end, they also believe that agents will continue to play a vital role because just the nature of complex interactions with customers or particular, it may be that the customer prefers ultimately to talk to a human being, if that involves, let's say, retirement planning or vacation plan and things of that sort where you might need human expertise or human judgment on how to resolve a particular issue or answer a particular question. So, they see that the agent continuing to play a vitally important role or maybe more a general is a subject matter expert to continue to play a very vital role in delivering great customer experiences for the foreseeable future.
I agreed and stated, I think technology is awesome, it really has made things simpler and I love that word that you use frictionless or effortless. Less effort we customers have to invest in anything that we're doing makes our life that much easier. But I still do believe that people still crave at some point some human interaction because the reality is, when you call a company or you're trying to reach out to them, you're really only reaching out for two reasons, to make a request or to make a complaint.
And so, if it's a complaining issue or even if it's a request, I'm thinking you want some form of immediate feedback. I mean, one of my pain points, since Coronavirus is, a lot of local organizations in Jamaica have taken up WhatsApp as a method of communication with their channels but they're not responsive. You’ll send a WhatsApp message at 9:00 am in the morning and nobody responds to you until 3:00 pm in the afternoon, had I wanted to wait 6 hours for response, I probably wouldn't have contacted you.
Matt mentioned that that's wonderful example of when we think about customer experience. Ultimately, we are emotional beings. And so, something that makes him happy and feel good when he interact with a brand is really what the brands need to aspire to deliver to their customers. And so, if he’s disappointing the customer and the callback world, if they say that your phone is going to ring in 20 minutes and there's going to be an agent on the phone, you expect as a consumer for your phone to ring in 20 minutes and there to be an agent on the phone. And so, that's an example in the callback domain.
In the WhatsApp example or other digital examples, he thinks we all have experienced automations that fall well short of what his expectations are, because they're very task specific, they're perhaps very repetitive or the information that he’s providing them never makes it to a human agent that by the time he’s talking to an agent, he has to reintroduce himself, re-explain the problem and all these sorts of things. So, the ability to apply the appropriate amount of automation to make it very easy to onboard, very easy to initiate contact with the brand but ultimately, as you experienced it, you need to think it all the way through to, “Why did this individual contact me and am I resolving that in a timely and delightful manner?”
And so that's not easy for brands to do because you're experiencing it right now. Obviously, those organizations would love to deliver a great experience but it does involve really thinking through completely what the end to end experience is going to be that you serve to the customer and that's really where they focus a lot of their energy is delivering a great customer outcome. So, that's the key to the whole thing, it’s not the technology, it's that ultimately that emotional, you smile at the end of the interaction and all too often we don't experience that very often in interacting with brands.
When asked how does he stay motivated, Matt shared that in a very direct sense, he thinks every day is a gift and he heard a quote a long time ago that really stayed with him, which is that, “Each moment and each breath is a new beginning.” And he thinks it's very easy for people to get distracted by maybe what happened yesterday or what might happen in the future but he's certainly really taken a lot of motivation from just looking at the opportunities that you have. Even solving problems today is delivering a lot of value and one of the real things they're privileged with at VHT is they get to do their job still, even though their company is remote, unlike so many people that are suffering and being dislocated and so forth. So, getting motivated is not a challenge at all. They're getting up every day and they know they're helping millions of people get answers to questions and he finds that personally to be very motivating.
Matt shared that for operating their business right now, they're heavy users of the Zoom platform for video and collaboration but a close second behind that is Slack. And so, those are the two tools they've been leveraging very heavily internally for their internal communications and for the customer communications, because most of their customers are large companies, those tend to be whatever the tools are that the customer prefers for them to use to interact with them and their brands. But within their business, they're leaning very heavily these days on both Zoom and Slack.
When asked about books that have has the biggest impact, Matt shared that the one that was from a long time ago that made a big impression on him is called The Executive in Action : Three Drucker Management Books on What To Do and How To Do It by Peter Drucker. It's actually three books in one. If you study management thinking for any period of time, ultimately, whether it's somebody that just published a book last week or somebody published a book 10 years ago, they all go back to Peter Drucker and it's a common point of origin. He's a very forward thinking man and did an incredible volume of work so that is the first one from long ago. More recently, his wife gave him as a present at Christmas time, turned out to be very timely that's Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was one of the Roman emperors, first part of the new millennium and he was a philosopher and stoic philosophy and that really focuses on being in the moment. And that's the short version of he’s new to stoic philosophy so he will not attempt to over explain what it is, but it really is all about making sure that you're staying in the moment and trying to serve good always. If you're in the moment and you're trying to serve a good purpose, then generally speaking, you’re on the right track.
I mentioned that it's funny you said that because it dovetails nicely into this new principle that many organizations and their leaders are embracing, which is mindfulness. And it also matches back with the name of your new platform, mindful. So, what I'm getting is it's being present in all of those moments that you are sharing with each and every one of those customers in order to build stronger relationships.
Matt agreed and stated that it is coincidental that the Marcus Aurelius practice and stoicism really is about mindfulness. And he thinks their brand, they thought very deeply about it that wasn't something that they came up with because they thought it was a catchy name.
They wanted to convey what their intent is, and they felt that mindful really conveyed their intent; the reason why they get up every day is, as he mentioned earlier, to service that vision of enabling people to get the help they need from brands they love on terms they choose. And for them, that really meant that you approach people in a thoughtful way, in a sensitive way as to what their preferences are. And, of course, there's the connotation around artificial intelligence and some of the other things that ultimately can be brought to bear on delivering great customer experience.
And so, when they first came upon the idea of branding their new offering, Mindful, they got really excited about it very quickly. So, it's Mindful by VHT.
Matt shared that one of the things they adopted after the Coronavirus hit is they do a call every single day, they call it coffee tea time and it's completely voluntary for their employees to come to that. And it was intended to be, as the name implies, just a place to come and relax. When people are working from home, it's easy to get lonely. We're all human beings and social animals.
So they thought it’s a nice place to gather but what's sort of come out of that for them is they also saw that as a place to bring motivation and light and encouragement to people. And one of the things that they hold as one of their core values is that they are pursuing things with a sense of passion and purpose, that's an individual expression. And so, what they're doing now is something he has gotten directly involved with is they are reaching out to people to join them during their coffee time that they'd be motivating to hear from. That would bring light and sort of insight, of course, things that are relevant in the world that we work in, but also relevant in terms of people that have really lived their passion in life.
So they're actively inviting people to come in. It's similar to what they're doing right now, have a 10 or 15 minute conversation and then invite the employees to ask questions and just have a discussion. So, they're bringing people from across the industry and people that they've met over the years that they think would be of interest to the team, to commence on. He’s very excited about that and he doesn't think they'll do it five days a week, but he thinks they will do it one or two days a week. They'll have an outside guest come in and join them. So he’s very excited about that.
I asked, so have you started as yet or is it something that's ongoing?
Matt shared that he just confirmed his first 2 guests. So, now they're getting more nominations from some employees on people that would be fun to have come. And so he’s excited about inviting them.
Facebook – @vhtcx
LinkedIn – VHT
Twitter - @vhtcx
YouTube - VHT
Website – www.vhtcx.com
Matt mentioned that first and foremost, he would love you to follow their company, he monitors that quite closely. So, if you have questions or areas of interest, please like them on those platforms or join them on those forums. And he'd love to talk with you there.
Links
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!
Listen to past episodes of Navigating the Customer Experience | Join Our Mailing List for future articles, podcasts and videos on Customer Experience
Dr. Nima Rahmany, DC, CCWP is both a Chiropractor and an educator, specializing in helping individuals and professionals get to the ROOT CAUSE of their physical and emotional challenges, from stressed, depressed, and anxious to living powerfully aligned and on purpose.
After building a successful Chiropractic practice in Maple Ridge, BC, Dr. Nima sold his clinic in June 2016 to pursue his passion for teaching and coaching professionals who are stressed, depressed, and anxious to transform and have their best year ever – in both a private and corporate setting.
Questions
Highlights
He knew he wanted to be a doctor helping people. He thought that by adjusting the spine, getting to the root cause of the problem rather than just masking the problem with pills was the way to go.
And what he didn't realize was that 10 years, 15 years into the process of being in practice, realizing that people were coming in really with stress related disorders, and if you really get to know them, they're usually on the wake of some sort of a identity crisis, relationship crisis. Those are real stress related issues, are crises, these spiritual work-related relationship crises, limbo, infidelity, breakdowns, divorce, old traumas that we've been holding on to based on relationship crises.
When he started to understand that these were the patterns that were bringing people in to see him, his ego was not satisfied. He wanted to go deeper.
So he started creating these three hour workshops called Life Skills for a Stressful World for his patients, they are on Saturday mornings and he would notice that the patients that would come in to those events would have better outcomes because they took responsibility, they understood how to listen to the messages of their body.
And slowly but surely, it became more fun for him to teach those classes than it was to come and deal with the end stages of stress. So, fast forward 10 years, now he leads a global community of self healers, teaching them tools and skills to heal themselves from their old conditioning patterns and heal their attachment wounds.
Yanique asked, can you tell me how you think that connects on an individual level, if it is that you are healed and you are functioning at your fullest capacity,if it is that you're feeling pain or discomfort and you're not healed, how does that translate into someone's customer experience?
Dr. Nima shared that creating an amazing customer experience is all about Empathy. It's all about being able to get yourself out of your own victim's story and empathize 100% with the customer.
And so, if you have chronically self abandoned, if you have a pattern in your life where you've had trauma and when you have trauma, you self abandon.
What happens when you have a customer experience that's not a fulfilling one and you have someone that's really having a difficult time and you are working with somebody who's triggered in front of you.
You will go into the pattern of self abandonment again and create an exorbitant amount of stress rather than being able to contain your own emotions and hold your own ground internally, set your own boundaries internally, you'll become enmeshed with that other person.
Their emotions will become your emotions if you haven't done the inner work, that's it a very subtle but key component of creating a great customer experience is not enmeshing yourself with the other person's emotions.
Yanique mentioned emotional management, managing your emotions. It's funny you mentioned emotions, because in our customer service training, our definition of a quality experience is meeting and exceeding the emotional and intellectual needs of the customer. And over the years, we found that the emotional is actually even greater than the intellectual.
Dr. Nima agreed. The thing is that the rarest experience for a human being is to feel seen and heard. The rarest experience. So if he’s talking with Yanique, and he’s able to see and hear and empathize with himself first, he knows exactly who he is and he’s grounded in his roots.
Then he’s able to then come from a place of overflow and now meet what your needs are. Because he’s already so firmly grounded in himself that he can then empathize with you. He can see you and hear you. He can see the commitment behind the words you're using. He’s paying attention. He’s present with you.
He’s listening to the non-verbal cues that you're giving him, the tone of your voice. He can listen from a place of genuine curiosity rather than from a place of I hope this person likes me. So there's a difference. It's a felt sense difference. If he’s speaking to you and he’s genuinely looking after you versus, “Okay, so I hope I don't get into trouble. I hope you don't report me.” There's a completely different feel that he’s on a call with you, it's a presence, that's different, that's palpable.
Number two is to listen to them through their wounding, see a child inside of them that doesn't feel seen and heard. If you look at them through the lens of a wound, then it's not as threatening.
You’re looking at them as a child having a tantrum instead of a real threat to you. So if you see through them, see through whatever, if it's a difficult conversation, see through their challenge, see through their words as a wounded child that doesn't feel seen and heard.
You can help them tremendously, feel, seen and heard, repeating back, empathizing with them, repeating the sensations, repeating like it's tactical empathy. “Well, it sounds to me like you're feeling so-and-so. It seems like you're feeling so-and-so.”Seeing them through the lens of their wound is the assure fire way to drop the whole personal-ness of the interaction and feel like it's a lot more, it's less personal and you can actually be of service to that person.
First, you have resourced yourself, you put the oxygen mask on yourself first and you take care of you and once you've done that and you acknowledge yourself and you've done that you then turn in and acknowledge them and realize the rarest experience for a human is to feel seen and heard. So, if you're able to just see them and hear them and empathize with them that is the greatest regulation for your nervous system that you can do.
Number three basically is after you've done that, you then approach it with curiosity. The third step is with curiosity. “So I'm curious, what would work out best for you? Let's see how we can make this work.” Once you've empathize with them, you've now helped regulate their nervous system, you turn to curiosity. I wonder what would happen if, I wonder if, just approaching it with a playful curiosity, guaranteed you'll come up with a solution.
So there you have it, folks. If you are struggling and you want these three tips, these you can implement with immediate effect heard and live on direct here on Navigating the Customer Experience from Dr. Nima, getting into breath and body, feeling the sensations. Listening to the other person through their woundings, seeing their words, tactical empathy, and then approaching with playful curiosity. What would work best for you?
Dr. Nima shared that his biggest Why really is he stands for healed families. The work that he does help breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. We grow up in environments with families where our parents didn't really have understanding of the nervous system and the importance of emotional attunement.
So, often our primary caregivers didn't really know how to meet our emotional needs for feeling seen and heard. So we then start to replay these attachment wounds from our primary caregivers in our relationships, and we get married with these unhealed attachment wounds, replaying all of the same kind of cycles and complexes that we lived in childhood, you marry your mother, you marry your father, and you don't really realize it.
And that creates this toxic environment which then creates intergenerational trauma that children experience the exact same thing. And it just gets passed down from one generation to another. And families get divided and broken down and then that destroys people's health and well-being. And then we have a health care system that's in crisis but if we just go upstream and start to do our healing work of healing our attachment wounds and then healing those open loops in family dynamics, huge shifts can happen. So, he stands for healed families.
When asked about an online tool that he can’t live without in his business, Dr. Nima shared that in his business, it would be Audible. He listens to audio books every single day. Your business is going to only grow to the degree that you grow, it's a personal development benchmark and so the more you develop yourself, the more your business will develop.
Nima shared that the biggest impact for sure has been the book The Miracle Morning: The 6 Habits That Will Transform Your Life Before 8 AM by Hal Elrod and it just how to really structure your day and make sure that you do all of your morning and evening rituals to structure your day, it's been a hugely impactful book.
Nima shared that it’s both; it's kind of going through him. He just got married a month ago and they're about to have a baby in October. And so, making sure that there's that feeling of safety and connection and secure attachment at home so that the baby feels safe in an environment where there's love and presence and attunement. And he’s just really delighted to be able to share that and start helping others create secure attachments at home as well.
Nima shared that that one thing would be to heal your attachment wounds. Just go and take whatever that you have been resenting, your greatest resentment that you feel wounded by and find a completion with it, get complete with that. That's really the greatest gift that you can give. The greatest gift that you can give your child is a fully healed parent. Imagine growing up in an environment where if your parents did the healing work themselves, their inner work. How would that have changed your experience if your parents had that opportunity to heal their attachment wounds?
Yanique agreed that they would definitely make a great improvement because we are parents and unfortunately, there is no book that you're given when you become a parent that pretty much gives you a play by play of what to do and when to do it. And of course, yes, every child is different. And I'm sure you’ll come to realize that when you become a parent yourself. I struggle daily. I have a 14 year old and Lord knows there are times when I have to myself find a book that kind of helps me to navigate as to what do I do when she's at this troublesome teenage time in her life when she's clearly trying to find herself. But then maybe I'm not the one that she really wants to talk to. How do I make myself more accessible to that?
Dr. Nima mentioned that he has an answer for that one. What you do in those situations, is whatever's coming up for you instead of trying to help her, what you do is you go inside. You’ve got to understand, is she's here to teach you just as much as you're here to teach her. So, whatever she's bringing up for you, a disconnection that she's experiencing is a mirror for your own disconnection. And if you go back, there's a tool that he has come up with called the overview method, which helps you go back to your wounding that her issue is bringing up in you and you get complete with that. He puts that in his workshop, it's called How to Connect to a Disconnected Child or Teen and it helps you connect with the 14 year old inside of you and empathize with that part of you and once you've done that, the answer basically takes care of itself, it's pretty magical.
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Website –www.drnima.com
Dr. Nima is offering his virtual workshop for FREE to all listeners of this podcast –www.drnima.com/vw1 PROMO CODE: triggerproof (all one word lower case no spaces) Complimentary 90 minute workshop on how to become trigger proof
Links
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!
Join Our Mailing List for future articles, podcasts and videos on Customer Experience
Welcome to Navigating the Customer Experience Podcast, in today’s episode I will share some great thoughts that I have been having. It’s so unfortunate that all across the globe, we are all having to deal with this pandemic but what is interesting is I have been doing a lot of reading and doing a lot of research and I have really been seeing a lot of organizations pivoting their business in the whole thrust of trying to survive and thrive during this pandemic. I would like to share some thoughts I have put together regarding how it is that you can navigate your online customer experience.
With the advent of COVID-19, the online customer experience is fast becoming the new benchmark for which customers measure the level of service a company offers. In a practical way, the online customer experience may in some instances replace the face to face customer interaction especially for those business places that officially had to be closed. Companies, entrepreneurs or solopreneurs must revisit their avenues of customer interactions including their website, social media pages and other platforms and ensure the user experience isone which creates a favourable response for their customers.
The customer online engagement has skyrocketed in every part of the world as we continue to experience quarantine and restrictions in our movement. This means ensuring that every channel available for customer engagement must be functional. Now is a great time for businesses to do an audit of all of their service channels including online solutions and make sure everything is working well. The audit process may reveal functional or integration issues on your website. Websites along with social media platforms that are not optimized will require the necessary adjustments to be made.
Your customers want to receive fast, reliable, efficient service even though they are under quarantine. I have seen a few local companies here in Jamaica adding WhatsApp as a channel for placing orders, however, the most important step to apply is to ensure the channel is monitored. I sent a WhatsApp a few weeks ago for a prescription to be filled at around 10:35 am for a close friend of mine and the message was received and read, however, no one responded to the message to confirm receipt or even to advise if we’ll be able to pick up until 2:30 pm! Ensuring that you assign a dedicated person to monitor these channels if they are to be included as part of the online sales channel and customer experience is critical. The best category of WhatsApp that you should be using as a business is WhatsApp for Business and there are some features that this particular platform facilitates:
WhatsApp for Business is a great tool to employ in your business if that’s something you’re not currently using but most importantly, you must have a designated person who is going to monitor that channel.
Another big thing that you should think about is, Is your website customer friendly and easy to use? If not, now is the time to revisit and review the content being shown. Think about your website as your physical store. The customer must have the ability to not only window shop, but should also be able to make a purchase through your website. The information and content provided must be clear about what you offer and how they can access it. A customer will visit your site and see many things happening all at once. Your website page layouts, font choice, images, the content, and the purchase power (where applicable) influences whether customers will decide to make a purchase.
Recently, I had to insure my motor vehicle because the insurance expired and I visited the website of my insurance company. It seemed that they allowed third party bank transfers, however, the participating banks were only three (3). Their option for credit card payment was only available via a third party payment agency which would mean that I would have to sign up for an account with them. After exhausting all research online for my options for payment, I decided to visit the location in person. After completing the payment, I asked the Customer Service Representative why their company wasn't listed on the platform for all banks and of course she was unable to answer. You need to be aware of how accessible your services are to your customers especially during this time when we all have to reduce our face to face interactions with each other.
Another not so great example I had was with my bank. I visited their website to see what options they had available for credit card payments during this time. I wanted to get immediate feedback and so I opted to click on their button for Live Chat. However, after sending my question and being assigned a representative and their name was even provided, no one responded after thirteen (13) minutes of waiting. So, I’ve signed on onto this Live Chat, I’ve seen that Colleen is the representative that’s assigned to the conversation, sitting, waiting, waiting, waiting, 13 minutes elapsed and I’m just like this is clearly not working. Businesses must ensure that features including Live Chat are being actively managed by someone to respond quickly to any customers’ query or concern. An automated estimated response time should also be given to customers who are using your Live Chat communication. This ensures that expectation in terms of wait time is provided up front. Additionally, functionality in the form of clickable buttons on your website should be tested to ensure that they are actually working.
Another great area for improvement that you should look to improve is doing an audit of your Social Media brand. Review the platforms that you are present on - Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest. According to Statista there are 2.4 Billion active users on Facebook as at December 2019, YouTube has 2 Billion active users, Instagram has 1 Billion active users, Twitter has 330 Million active users, LinkedIn has 303 Million active users. Your customers are hanging out now more than ever on these platforms either for recreation, entertainment, browsing or for their own businesses. If your opening hours have been adjusted or you now offer delivery or curbside pickup or you have a Sales Offer, this type of information needs to be updated on your social media platforms because this is where the customers are spending most of their time.
Recently, I noticed that it is easier to visit a business’ Instagram page to confirm whether their restaurant or business is open and their adjusted opening hours. Google shows their opening hours as normal as if there were no changes to the opening hours which is rather misleading. Let’s say for example the business is normally open from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm but because of COVID-19, their business hours have been adjusted to 8:30 am to 1:00 pm, because they haven’t updated their Google business account then Google is still demonstrating their regular opening hours as if business is still operating as usual. So basically you need to visit your Google Business account and ensure that whatever adjustments you’ve made base on information that you’ve put out to the public it is consistent across all platforms. So if I type in your name in Google and it comes up, your adjusted opening hours should be there clear and visible. There are applications that can also provide a seamless integration to make the update a one time process.
Since this pandemic, I have seen customers really being more expressive on social media platforms about their shortcomings, issues and challenges with various companies. I urge you to ensure that when your customer makes a negative post on any of your social profiles, please do not delete it. Deleting the comment does not remove their experience, it does not help the situation. Every device has the brilliant capability of taking a screenshot and yes you have deleted it but it does not mean it is gone. Please prepare acommunication response plan that you can use to respond to these comments, you must show some form of empathy in the form of an apology, kind words and of course some action as to what are the next steps the customers can actually take. You should also try to migrate the conversation off of the public platform and re-direct the customer to a direct message (DM) or telephone call them to have the issue resolved or explained. You can say something like “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this delay may have caused, we will be sending you a direct message to see how best we can resolve the matter.”“What does this show?”It shows your customers who view the comments that you are human and you are willing to fix an issue rather than just delete it.
Another grave mistake many companies make is remaining silent when negative comments are being hurled all over their page/profile. Please note that remaining silent does not help either because it sends a message that you don’t care. If the customer was standing directly in front of you, would you ignore them, would you remain silent while they’re complaining? So why would you choose that approach online? Be compassionate and show your customers that you value them and their business. When this pandemic is over, the companies that will thrive are the ones who showed compassion, empathy and care when their customers needed it the most.
Take Aways from this conversation:
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Please share any steps, practices or ways that you have pivoted and enhanced your customer experience since COVID-19
David Wachs is a serial entrepreneur and his latest venture, handwrytten, is bringing back the lost art of letter writing through scalable, robot-based solutions that write your notes in pen. Developed as a platform, Handwrytten lets you send notes from your CRM system such as Salesforce, the website, apps or through custom integration. Used by major meal boxes, e-Commerce giants, nonprofits and professionals, Handwrytten is changing the way brands are connecting with people
Prior to his current initiatives, David founded Cellit, a mobile marketing platform and mobile agency. Under his leadership Cellit became a leading player in the mobile marketing space and invented the concept of mobile customer relationship management (Mobile CRM). Cellit developed one of the most robust and widely-used mobile marketing platforms in the world, delivering millions of SMS and MMS messages to consumers on a daily basis. With a marquee client roster, including Abercrombie and Fitch, Toys R Us, Sam's Club, Chicago Tribune, For Rent Media Solutions, Pizza Hut and more, Cellit was recognized as one of the top 500 fastest growing companies in America, as #262 on the Inc. 500 in 2010, delivered many award-winning mobile campaigns, and built one of the best teams in the mobile industry. Cellit was sold to HelloWord in January of 2012.
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So, he thought, “Well, what matters?” And he was walking around his old Cellit and he realized that people saved and savored handwritten notes they received, not only did they read them, they kept them, they kept them on the back of their bookshelf, on their bookshelf in their office or they'd magnet them to their refrigerators at home and they were considered kind of a treasure. So, he thought being the lazy guy that he is, “How can I automate this?” Because every time he'd send a handwritten note or want to send a handwritten note, he'd go to the store and get a birthday card for a family member, he'd promised himself he'd send that birthday card and then he'd get caught up in things or not have a stamp or whatever and it just became this whole thing and then before you know it, there's a crumpled up birthday card sitting in his laptop bag, not being used and never would go out. So he thought, how can we automate this? And that's where Handwrytten came from. He wanted to create a company that made sending handwritten notes as easy as sending emails or SMS or Slack or everything else.
Yanique shared that it's very interesting, your search that you did in terms of people holding on to handwritten notes and not just reading them, but keeping them because here in Jamaica, even with my clients, I find out it means so much to people when they do receive, as you said, an actual handwritten note, it means that the person put intentional effort and thought into what they were doing and it wasn't just a generic thing that they sent out to the masses.
Yanique shared that she imagine it's applicable to any form off literature or mail that you would send out, say for example, it's applicable to maybe a bill versus let's say a promotion versus, let's say just an information pamphlet. Can it be applicable in all areas?
David shared that they tend to focus on thank you notes and follow ups after purchases. Sending out blanket notes to mass groups can get quite expensive with handwritten notes because, if you think about it, a junk mail piece, when you print that, that's it. You just print the junk mail piece and it gets a pre sorted stamp on there and it's quite cheap, with Handwrytten, they start with that printing, so, if you take a junk mail piece, often it's printed on cheap stationery, they're going to need something printed on nice stationery with your logo so it looks like a true piece of stationary. So, that's cost number one. Then they're going to write on it and they’re handwriting machines are a little bit on the slow side, they only write about as fast as a human, but they don't stop and take coffee breaks and their handwriting never gets worse over time, so that's going to be much more costly than junk mail and unfortunately, there's not much they could do it about it. And then finally, they're inserting that in a real envelope, they're not just like folding it over and gluing it and printing their address on the back like you'd get with junk mail. And then the last step is they put a real stamp on it, it's not a metered mail stamp that you'd see on a piece of junk mail, it's a, a real forever stamp. Like a sticker you'd get in the States, it's real; it's that little sticker that you place on a package. So, the whole thing looks real but the problem, he would say the downside of it is going to be more expensive than a junk mail piece. However, you got to figure out what the right tool for the job is and he thinks in saying thanks or asking for a referral or asking for a review on Amazon or Yelp or whatever, you're going to want to do something that's kind of a bit more premium. And especially if your client base is a bit more premium, you might want to consider this. So, he’s not going to say they're right for everybody. They did do a huge mailer for a jewelry brand that was opening up a new location and they wanted to send a handwritten note to everybody in the general area and while it worked great, it is going to be much more costly. So that is one thing to consider.
Yanique shared that you’ve really master the science of ensuring that the quality is not watered down in maintaining consistency of the experience in ensuring that your clients have quality handwritten notes. I listened when you gave mention to the fact that the robots don't get tired or what time they don't take coffee breaks and the quality of their handwriting doesn't deteriorate over time, which with human beings it will because in thinking of myself when I'm writing, if I'm writing an excess over a period of time, if you look at the first page of what I wrote versus the third page, the handwriting does start to look a little different, the letters are not probably formed as neatly and written as cautiously as you had started out before. So that's a really, really good that you're able to maintain that consistency.
David shared that a lot of people, a lot of brands would love to send handwritten notes to everybody, real handwritten notes written and as nice handwriting as you have but it's just impossible and that's why the robots come in and is it the most authentic? It's a little bit not, and you're right, it's not totally authentic, but it's closer and it shows an additional level of thoughtfulness than laser printing something and sending it out the door. But most of their notes are rather short; they're 500 characters or less and that's a couple of reasons. Number one, for cost consideration, that's important. And then number two, they find that people don't want to read novels, they want to read a very short thank you note from you, thanking you for your business or providing you a coupon code or whatever. But they don't want to have to sit down and read, people's attention spans are really on the low end these days, so they just want to get right to the point and that's what they help them do.
@DavidBWachs – Twitter
David Wachs – LinkedIn
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Allen T. Lamb believes he is fortunate to have developed a unique skill set and a differentiated perspective to-date within his role spanning media, tech, entertainment and sports as an operating executive, a growth-stage strategic investor, an M&A investment banker, a business intelligence researcher, and a multiple time-digital entrepreneur.
Allen has been a two-time entrepreneur, conceptualizing and launching two digital media platforms focused on enhancing engagement value for consumers and brands. His latest growth concept is Cheddah, a marketing intelligence and digital loyalty platform that delivers location-aware, cash-based incentives to users in exchange for responses to quick surveys from brands.
Allen earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he concentrated in Entrepreneurship & Innovation as well as a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University.
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When asked if it’s a mobile app – Allen shared that it is, it is a mobile first platform, although they exist across any window where a consumer might interface, which includes the web or even in person, via an iPad.
Yanique shared that it's a free mobile app that provides a fast way to earn real time cash based incentive by answering a quick set of survey questions, could take you up to 60 seconds from brands on your day to day thoughts and experiences. And so when this information is generated about the brand, who gets the information, does it come back to your organization and you push it to the brand? I mean, how does it work?
Allen shared that it does among a number of different ways. What happens is that as the consumer is presented with the survey, let's say for instance you were to walk into your local pizza shop, in fact, that's where Cheddah really began, it's a proof of concept. You would be presented with a survey that you can opt into, it's typically five to seven questions and in answering those questions which could be, are you male or female? So, a demographic information, do you enjoy these types of toppings on your pizza? So, very much brand-related in the moment. They capture those and then you were able to use your incentive on the spot. What happens to that data is that Cheddah collects that and feeds it back to the brands, so that's one stop. And what he'd like to highlight here is that Cheddah’s special sauce and they'll come to this in a few moments, is really around connecting answers as a consumer takes his or her journey along the way and in the case of the pizza shop, if you were to enjoy this particular pizza shop over and over again, no longer does Cheddah really need to engage you with the same questions, in fact, they'd be able to pick up from your prior sessions and continue the conversation.
Yanique mentioned that this a first of its kind, haven't heard of an app like this before. Do you have other persons that are in this space as well? Or are you pioneering this space currently?
Allen mentioned that he'd love to believe of them as being a pioneer in the space. What he has heard of are discrete platforms that either gathers information, believe that they are through this hot term today AI, connecting information to understanding the consumer. But his thesis in the space is a bit different and that is that the best way to understand what a consumer wants, what a person wants is to simply ask the question directly to that consumer or that person. He thinks we've lost our way at times in keeping it simple and that's what Cheddah represents.
Yanique mentioned – So, we have a ways to go for sure, I guess linking the human experience with the digital experience and having it have a more coordinated approach where, cause at the end of the day, technology is wonderful, but I do think human beings still want to interface with another human being. Cause sometimes from an emotional perspective the artificial intelligence cannot translate the emotions fully a lot of times based on what the customer is experiencing. And if we go back to NPS, the net promoter score and we think about that question that people ask, that was derived by Fred Reichheld, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a family member or a friend?” It's totally subjective, really based on what you feel you got from that experience with the company and if you had a bad experience and you really care about your friends and family, which most people do, you won't recommend them to go on and have a similarly bad experience.
Allen agreed and stated that that's one area as well. They believe they're pioneering in that there is a difference in one's memory if you think about the experience you last had on a flight, let's say, versus being able to communicate to that brand in a moment. Now many would say, well, I would hop onto social and began to tweet about my experience. Well, that's a one way narrative versus having a conversation with the brand and that conversation would employ having the brand being able to do something about it for you in a moment. Just by way of another example and vignette here, what if you were to have some form of experience with a brand, hopefully for better, not for worse, we all know that it's typically in a negative experience that where you want to scream and say something that the brand do something for you in a cash based level as you are departing your flight, which could be to walk to a partnered, Kiosk Company, it could be within the airport or as you're on your way home, it could even be the next day, but fact of the matter is they were able to learn in the moment and then to incentivize you to remain loyal and that's where Cheddah is headed.
Yanique agreed - because you can assume, and you may assume as you said, based on just basic information that you may have, but asking the question is where the real truth comes about.
Allen agreed and stated that he also thinks in addition to having the real truth come out, as stories go, remembering a story is important and that is typically called the conversation. Some conversations happen there in the moment, others happen over time but where brands are missing in today's environment, particularly in the offline space, is knowing when you come back, and this is typically the human element, let's say with a barista, you visit a coffee shop, they happen to know you come in at a certain time of the day, you enjoy your coffee in a certain way or tea, well if we were able to use technology to help enhance that for brands, imagine how much richer experiences are.
Yanique agreed. Even just remembering your name because I always use the Cheers theme song from the comedy, “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” And I think if I had more experiences like that, I would definitely visit those places because then they were paying attention, they know me, and I'm not just another transaction or another receipt, but I'm Yanique and they remember me.
LinkedIn @allentlamb
Twitter – @allentlamb
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