Jonathan Byrnes is a founding partner and chairman of Profit Isle, a highly successful MIT spin-off SaaS software company that helps organizations increase profits by 10 – 30 percent using its profitability analytics and management process. A widely followed thought leader on profitable growth and innovative customer supplier relationships, Byrnes is a frequent speaker and writer who has advised over 100 companies and institutions. He earned a doctorate from Harvard and has been a Senior Lecturer at MIT for 30 years. In addition to his popular HBS column, “The Bottom Line,” he is the author of Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink, an Inc. Best Book for Business Owners.
Questions
Highlights
Jonathan’s Journey
Jonathan shared that he went to business school and he actually enjoyed academic business quite a lot. He was at Columbia in New York. Instead of taken a typical job on Wall Street or in a consulting company, he decided to get a doctorate. So he got up to Boston, he’s from New England. So he was happy to get back to Boston. And he went to Harvard, spent 6 years there and got a doctorate from Harvard Business School. And after that, he developed a consulting business where he helped a number of companies do very, very innovative things, which he found very satisfying.
After he had achieved a degree of success in consulting, he got very re-interested in academics, so he connected with MIT and they asked him to teach a course there and he has been doing that for 31 years now.
In addition, he continued his consulting business, but he shifted it over. When he was doing consulting, he was very unhappy with the way that profitability was measured in companies, the typical way is to sort of pile up all the revenues and pile up all the costs, and see which one is bigger.
And if revenues are bigger than then costs, you have the profit. And if the opposite, you have a loss. The problem is it tells you whether your profitability, whether you're profitable, but not where you're profitable.
And so, he couldn't really take a part a company and understand where it was making money. So he developed back in the 1980s, a new way to do this, he thought and thought about it and it seemed to him that this is a transaction.
So if he goes into a store and he buys 3 pencils, eraser and a ruler, that's three transactions. And if he could understand the profit and loss on each of those and he could characterize each one, then he had sort of a good starting point.
And so, they figured out a way to do a profit and loss statement on each of them with probably over 95% accuracy and then each one could be characterized, he knew the customer, he knew the product, he knew the store and so on. So he could put it into the database and figure out exactly where the company was making money and where it wasn't.
So when he did the first one of these back in around 1987, using very rudimentary computer and database programme, nowhere near what we have now and what he saw was about 10% of the company, this was a very successful company, making 150% of the reported profit. He couldn't believe it. And then he looked at where the losses were and about 20% of the company, the customers and the products were taking away at least half of that. He was really astonished and then the other half of the company was making no money. And he just couldn't believe it.
So he brought it back to his colleagues at MIT and said, “This is unbelievable and he doesn't believe it. But the numbers, he thinks are correct.” And so everybody said, they don't believe it either and they went through the numbers, and they said, but the numbers are right. And since then, he has done that with over a 100 Billion dollars in client revenues and it always shows the same pattern. So with that understanding, I did two things.
Number one, they took that rudimentary software and over the years made it better and better, so that they're now running on the Google Cloud with 10s of Billions of Dollars of client revenues every month under analysis and they always see the same thing.
And number two, he recently wrote a book called Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive, which will come out next week (May 11. 2021), where he talks to companies about how to focus on where they're making money, and how to integrate in the changes coming up in the environment from competitors like Amazon and others so that they know where they should head, and how to choose the right customers, align their resources and structure and manage the company, so that they can win in this new environment. Because if they go on with what used to be the success factor, which was having a lot of revenues that were a mishmash of everything to everybody, when highly focused competitors like Amazon are coming in, they're going to lose their shirts.
And in fact, that's the reason why so many companies have gone bankrupt, frankly in the past, 3, 4 or 5 years, because they couldn't adapt, they kept trying to be what they used to be 20, 30 years ago in the face of these much more focused competitors.
And he’s really here to say that by doing the right thing, even in the presence of Amazon, especially in the presence of Amazon, you can make a fortune but you have to figure out where you want to be and how you're going to get there. And you have to decide what you want to do and what you don't want to do. So that's basically, the long and short and uninteresting story of his life and how he got to where he is.
Tips for Navigating Customer Experience
Me: I'm so happy that you mentioned in your introduction that you wrote a book that's going to be released next week (May 11. 2021), Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive.
So of course, that was one of the things that piqued my interest why I was so intrigued to have you on our show, because as you can tell, we focus on how can we help managers, leaders, business owners in all different types of businesses across the world, navigate through their customer experience.
And so I wanted you to share with us maybe one or two things that you may have touched on in your book, I know it's not released yet, but you could probably give us a teaser of what are some things that based on your research and your experience that potential readers could look forward to if they should purchase this book that will help them to be able to navigate best through their customer experience, especially during this time that world is going through a global pandemic?
Jonathan stated that he’s going to separate out for the first bit about the pandemic, because that too will pass although he thinks with more difficulty than people think. But over the longer term, a lot of people ask him, “How can I compete with Amazon?”
And his answer is, don't. And if you try to be like Amazon, Amazon will run you over.
However, what's really important, and this is really the most important thing is that you can be like Amazon, you can't compete with Amazon where they are, but you can do what they did.
And what they did is very interesting. In the old days, say in the 1980s or so, you had companies that had a broad range of customers. So the example he would give is that in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, they had a big department store called G Fox and everybody went there for everything from shoes, to jackets, to skis, on and on and on. They had everything and they served everybody. The problem is that they focused on the big customers and their expensive products.
So it was easy to recognize and deal with big customers. But they had 1000’s of small customers, especially an industrial distributor, for example and they just didn't know how to get to them.
When the internet came along, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Wilkie, who's a former student of theirs (MIT), figured out that using the internet, they could get to customers all over the country. And they could do it actually from one central location in Seattle. And so they started doing this with books and then moved into some other products. And they figured out that they could look at the order patterns of customers and figure out who they are and then serve them the sort of products that they thought they'd like. So when he goes on to Amazon, it says, “Hi, Jonathan, here's what you ordered. And if you like that sort of thing, here are 5 books you might like.” And they're usually right.
So they were able to use the customer information to target the market and to break up this sort of monolithic, homogeneous market that G Fox used to serve. But Amazon only does one thing well, same thing with Google, Apple and all the rest of them. And that is they have arm's length services to small customers in a very smart, information rich, highly automated way.
So they took the customers that nobody wanted back in 20 years ago and they figured out how to make a science out of making them happy. And that's what Amazon did.
And he thinks anybody who tries to do that in competition with Amazon, unless they're Walmart, they're going to have a real problem.
However, that leaves a wide open playing field for other companies to do things that are more specialized and customized, typically somewhat higher service, he’ll give you two examples.
Number one, imagine that you're a small shoe store in his hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. They have Michaelson shoes, they would have trouble competing generally, but they became expert at working with marathon athletes, they have a lot of athletes in that area, fitting the shoes and giving them just what they needed and those people will never go to Amazon because they need some special attention. So that's a little local in town corner store that's competing as Amazon did, it figured out three things.
Number one, who are my customers, they chose the customers. Number two, they align their resources, all their information, all their advertising, to go after those customers and not be distracted by everybody else. And number three, they manage actually, at this point, a chain of stores where they're able to go after individual markets, in some markets it's swimmers and others it's runners. And they're experts and doing incredibly well.
A second area is a great big, enormous area in healthcare that's just really developing called Telemedicine. And that is that when you're in your home, you can have sensors on your body and your iPhone can be transmitting information to a doctor saying, What's your pulse? What's your this? What's your that. And it's sensitive to the point where they can actually diagnose schizophrenia from a distance in your home, and they can treat you in your home. So if you have let's say kidney stones, there's a small ultrasonic because this ultrasound unit that you can put in your home and press against your stomach, it'll break up your kidney stones.
And so more and more medicine is being transferred from the hospital to the home. And the other companion thing is called wellness management on something like what weight watchers does, but as an example, he did a session in Florida, this may hit close to home for you in Jamaica. So he did a session in Fort Myers, Florida for hospital CEOs and the head of the Mayo Clinic in Naples, Florida that's down in the south west port gave the companion talk and he said that they're biggest health problem in South Florida is little kids drowning, because everybody has a backyard pool. And number one thing they can do for community health, is to teach the little kids drown proofing, not swimming, but get to the side and get out. And that's more important than all the heart attacks and strokes in South Florida combined in terms of health outcomes.
So moving into that, he has a former student who just became president of a company that makes what are called infusion pumps. So if you need chemotherapy or pain medication, it'll drip the right amount into your body. And they are very software dependent because the amount that you drip is a function of how sick you are and how your body is responding, it's very complicated, but they have units that can be run to the home, and in the home.
And they've grown to about $100 Million Dollars self-funded in about 5 or 6 years. So there are tremendous opportunities if number one, you know your market and it's defensible. And number two, align your resource not to get distracted. And number three, manage the business so that you have what he’s called pounds per square inch of market power.
And it really means doing what Amazon did, which is figuring out a good place to be and sticking to your knitting. Think about great companies of our era.
Think about Walmart, think about Federal Express, Southwest Airlines think about JetBlue, they all did the same thing. They figured out who they were and they stuck with it and they just made it better and better and better.
Of course, you have to be a little bit careful because you're aiming in 5 years may not be as lucrative as it once was, there may be product developments and other sorts of things but you can factor that into your decision. So for him, that's the most important key to success. And companies that have tried to be everything to everybody and they can't turn down the $1 in revenues that doesn't fit, they're the ones who are going to have trouble.
App, Website or Tool that Jonathan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Jonathan stated that that's a little hard because they write all their own software. He'd say modestly, go to www.chooseyourcustomer.com and that's their book website and you have an introduction and a sample chapter that explain how to do what he just described. So that's the number one, he thinks beyond that, he reads the New York Times, the Washington Posts and the Boston Globe for sports about eight times a day. That's about it.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jonathan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jonathan stated that that one is easy. Probably the most important one he has read is called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, he’s a Professor of Social Psychology at Harvard.
And when his younger son was at Harvard, he took his course that the students called Happiness 101. And he actually does a study of all the studies of what makes people happy. And that sounds like a crazy thing to do but it's really, really fascinating.
So, he has spoken in front of a variety of groups, and one group he speaks in front of nearly about once every year or two cancer patients, for family reasons. And what he says to them is that in this book, one of the studies that he's really cites is a study that says that if something really bad happens to you, you have a terrible car accident, you lose a relative, just imagine the worst things that you could imagine, you become quadriplegic, then you think the world's coming to an end.
Within three or four months, you're back to your base level of happiness. And that really is powerful, because it sort of says that everybody goes through episodes and they get all down about it as they should. But then, you basically can say one foot in front of the other, and I'm going through the valley of the shadow of death, but I will climb out of it. And I will be as happy as I ever have been.
And he thinks that for him, that's a very, very important and affirming thing to think about. And everybody, especially in this pandemic, has things that are very difficult and consuming and concerning but you will get over it.
The other one that he always goes back to and reread at least once a year, he’s done this since he was in graduate school, is a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, who was an Institute Professor at MIT, it’s the Historian of Science and he looked at the scientific method, basically, which says, you do an experiment, you get a result, you do an experiment, you get a result and that's how you develop knowledge.
And when he looked at some really important leaps forward in science, he said, “That's not the way it works at all.”In fact, what happens is what he called a paradigm, which is an explanatory model of how a particular part of science works, whether the sun rotates around the Earth or the Earth rotates around the sun or any scientific area. And there's a way that people think about it and if you come up with evidence that says that that's wrong, you don't throw it out, you ignore the evidence and you keep going as if it never happened. And what counts as good science is stuff that moves that basic idea forward.
And then every once in a while you have so much evidence, people still don't change but somebody will come up with a new theory that explains all the old results and explains all of these so called anomalies and then the paradigm flips but it doesn't happen all at once. People who are older embedded in the paradigm won't change, it's like wondering in the desert for 40 years and sooner or later it changes, and then you get the same progression.
So it's almost like step by step climbing a ladder and what's really important about that is that that's the way the businesses change, that's the way that people think about things.
So if you have a business that's operating in a certain way, as he described before, you have a company that's selling everything to everybody, especially if they've been successful, you can't just show them evidence that they're losing money here and there, they're going to keep trying to do it.
And that's why in a lot of industries, like retail, up to half of all the retailers in the country went bankrupt, because they just couldn't change. And then you have Amazon, a brand new company coming in and eating their lunch. He thinks that those are the two books that meant the most to me.
What Jonathan is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about asked about something that he’s really excited about, Jonathan shared that bringing the book out. The difficulty of this book is that it’s paradigm changing. In the Kuhn sense, is basically saying, if you try to do business in the old way and that's the way the business is taught in most business schools to this day, in marketing, you want to maximize revenues. Well, wrong.
Half of those revenues are probably unprofitable. You want to maximize profits, but you need a different way to measure it and a different way to go after customers and a different way to satisfy them.
And the challenge is getting the word out through the teaching and the book, they try to change the way the business is done, so that it's much more effective and better. As a professional business educator, with a lot of decades of experience, having business work right is the best way to do it.
And by the way for our country and for society at large, if half of all of businesses losing money, that's an unbelievable waste of resources and we have too many people who are underserved and poor and needy who need those resources. So it's not only a question of making more money, it's really a question of getting more good products to more people who really need it.
Where Can We Find Jonathan Online
Website – www.chooseyourcustomer.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jonathan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jonathan shared, “One foot in front of the other.” And sooner or later, you'll go back to your base level of happiness. If you are a happy person, you will get back there, if you're not a happy person, then you need to work on your happiness. One foot in front of the other until you get there.
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David Friedman is an award-winning CEO, entrepreneur, author and renowned public speaker. In 2011, he published his first book, Fundamentally Different, which is based on the insights he learned and taught throughout his leadership career. And in 2018, he published his second book, Culture by Design, the definitive “how to” manual for building a high-performance culture.
His current company, High Performing Culture has helped hundreds of companies throughout North America to implement its culture operating system, CultureWiseä.
Questions
Highlights
David’s Journey
David shared that he lives in the Philadelphia area, he spent 27 years as the CEO of an employee benefits consulting company. And he grew that company from a couple of people to a little bit over 100 people and during the years that he was growing that company, they were very, very successful in almost every dimension you can look at, but the foundation of all of their success. Everything that made them successful was the culture that they had created in that company. And as the CEO of that company, he did a lot of things in a very intentional way to make that culture happen. He eventually sold the company to a large multi-billion-dollar company, ended up retiring from that industry. And he wrote his first book, which was called Fundamentally Different which was referred to before. And it was a book about the things he had done in his career that made them so successful, specifically around culture. And what ended up happening is people started reading that book and getting a lot of value from it and they started asking him if he would come to speak to their organizations about the things about which he had written. And so, next thing he knew he was travelling around the country giving talks to CEOs and people started hiring him to help them and next thing he knew he was in a new career. And so, over the last seven or eight years, he has given more than 500 workshops on this material, typically to CEOs and other leaders, worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies helping them do it. And has written three books on the topic. And so, it all comes from the experience that he had leading a company himself, and what he learned and what he now teaches people.
Other Core Fundamental Practices
Me: So your first book that you wrote Fundamentals, I know at the beginning of the conversation, you had mentioned that one of your fundamentals is quick response time, which was music to my ears. Could you share with our listeners what are some of the other things that is the core of your fundamental practices?
David stated that what he teaches people is that in any organization, he doesn't care of organization it is, the culture in that organization has an enormous influence over everything that happens from customer service to everything else that takes place.
And so, as leaders, we should be intentional about creating the culture that we want to have. One of the important elements and probably the most important element in creating a really great culture or any culture for that matter, is being clear about what are the behaviours that you say, “Boy, if we could get all of our people living to these behaviours, this is the kind of organization I want to have.” And he gives those behaviours a name, it's just his nomenclature, he calls them fundamentals because he thinks they're fundamental to success.
So they help organizations define their culture in terms of a set of very specific behaviours. In his particular company, and this is his company, it doesn't have to be the same for a different company. But in his company, some of their fundamentals, the one you're asking about a moment ago, is one that we called Be a Fanatic About Response Time.
Some of the others that he teaches in his own company are things like Honour commitments, Practice Blameless Problem Solving, Get Clear on Expectations, Be a Generous Listener, these are actions, they're things that people do, and you get people doing these kinds of things, you create a very different kind of organization. So those are just some samples of the fundamentals he teaches in his own company.
Me: Great. So, those are also in the book, right? Could you share with us why you think those things are critical to creating a culture where customer experience, of course, is at its utmost best because clearly, a lot of organizations have many challenges in trying to get their customer experience to be consistent.
How is it that you go into these organizations, I'm sure a lot of their issues is everybody's not doing what they're supposed to be doing, how do we get people to be passionate? How do we get them to operate like how we do? I wish I could clone myself and have 100 of me, but the reality is you can't. So how do we get everybody on the same page?
David shared that the foundation of the system that he teaches is, there eight steps to it, but let's just boil it down to its essence.
There are two things that are critical for success. And this is true, whether we're talking about customer experience, or we're talking about innovation, or we’re talking about anything, even a sports team, a family, you want to get a group of people to be consistent so that you can clone yourself, there are two things that are critical.
The first is what we were just talking about, we have to be crystal clear about the expectations. So frequently, he hears leaders frustrated that people aren't being the way they want them to be but they haven't been clear enough about what they expect, they're just annoyed that people haven't somehow, miraculously by osmosis figured it out themselves.
So the first step is absolute clarity about what is it that we expect of people. And when we talk about that clarity, one of the ways that companies try to do that and fail, is that the typical way of doing that is they create a list of core values and they look wonderful on the website, except most of the time, they're so broad, and so nebulous that they don't really bring enough clarity.
He makes a big deal about the difference between what he calls values and what he calls behaviours.
So a value is an abstract idea, quality, integrity, loyalty, service, teamwork, those are wonderful words, but they mean so many different things to different people, that they're very difficult to operationalize.
Behaviours are actions, they're things people do and because they're action oriented, they're a lot easier to be coaching people about, it's very difficult to coach somebody about their values, it's a lot easier to coach them about their behaviours.
So the first step is this defining with way more clarity, exactly what we expect, in terms of a set of behaviours or as he noted a moment ago, he calls fundamentals.
Now, once we have that, it's great to have them listed and have more clarity. But here's the real key step. And this is so simple. He calls it creating rituals.
So a ritual is a routine, a habit, something that we do all the time and the reason that rituals are so important, is that most people and you've seen this, most people aren't very good at sticking with things. We come up with all kinds of wonderful ideas. And then we get busy and life gets in the way and they fall by the wayside, so the company comes up with the big new programme and for three months or even three weeks, everybody's all excited about the new programme and then they fall by the wayside.
When something becomes a ritual or routine, it's not difficult to continue, it's just part of our routine. So he’ll give a simple example in another area and then take us back to this topic of service and business.
You wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, before a ballgame in the States the do the national anthem, there are just routines about how you operate. Some people before a meal, they say a prayer. When something is a routine like that, it's not hard to do. So the way we use that simple concept is we take these fundamentals as he calls them and they begin to focus on one fundamental every week through a series of rituals.
So week number one, everybody in the company all week long is thinking about working on focusing on fundamental number one, the week after that everybody in the company is on number two, and the week after that three, and they keep cycling through them.
So giving one simple example of a ritual to illustrate it for the listeners. So one of the rituals that he practices in his company, and all of their clients do this as well, is that every time they have a meeting in their company, whether it's a project team meeting, a department meeting, a virtual meeting, if they have a meeting in their company this week, every single one of those meetings, the first agenda item of the meeting is the fundamental of the week. And they spend the first few minutes of the meeting talking about this week's fundamental and what it means.
So his company's fundamental this week, he mentioned it before actually is called Practice Blameless Problem Solving. So every time they have a meeting anywhere in their company this week, the first agenda item is going to be a three or four-minute discussion about practicing blameless problem solving.
That gets them lots of chances to teach and teach and teach and teach. So if they start by defining really clearly the behaviours that are important in their organization, and then they have a structured systematic way to teach those behaviours over and over and over and over again, sooner or later, those behaviours are going to become internalized in their people and that's how you get yourself cloned. What most people do is they again, either aren't clear enough, or they put stuff out there and then they figure, “Okay, I talked about it once or it's on the wall, or it's on the website, how come everybody doesn't do it?” You need repetition, without repetition, we don't learn anything.
Me: That is so true. I say it in training so many times. When you're teaching children ABC, you don't just go to school one day and the teacher says, okay, this is the alphabet, ABCDEFG to Z and then they never say it again. It's like constantly being reinforced with the kids; they sing to it. They sing ABC songs to them, they read to them about ABC, they talk to them about ABC, they have pictures. So it's constantly being reinforced and as you mentioned, repetition and adults learn just like children.
David agreed that we do, it's how humans work. And yet somehow in most organizations, we think that people are just going to magically figure it out without that repetition. He’ll give a very good example of actually where he learned all of this originally, and it relates very directly to customer service.
So, one of the organizations that is world renowned for incredible customer service experiences is the Ritz Carlton Hotel chain. If there ever was an icon for extraordinary customer experiences, it would probably be Ritz Carlton. And many years ago, he had an experience at where he brought his company to a Ritz Carlton for a day of brainstorming about great service and knowing how great they were, he asked them if they could share during their lunch with them some of the things that they do, and they do a very specific thing that really became the foundation for the concept behind what he teaches.
At Ritz Carlton, they have 20 behaviours that they have articulated about delivering great customer experiences. And these behaviours are called their basics. The Ritz Carlton basics, and there are 20 of these.
And every day they have a ritual that's called the daily lineup and a daily lineup, what happens is in every Ritz Carlton property in the world, in every department and in every shift, the team members get together at the beginning of the shift, and they gather around for a 10 or 12-minute meeting known as the daily lineup. And the first thing they do in their daily lineup is they talk about the basic of the day.
So if today were day number one in every department, every shift people would be getting together and kicking off their shift with a brief meeting and they start the meeting talking about basic number one. Tomorrow, everybody would be on number two and the next day number three, and so on.
And at the end of 20 days, they go back to the beginning and they do it over and over and over again, every day of their entire career. And that's how they get people to absorb and internalize the things that lead to extraordinary experience. They don't do it by just hoping they're going to get really nice people and it will all work out, they teach these things every single day with repetition. Makes sense.
Me: And you're right. Ritz Carlton, that's the gold standard that everybody's aiming to achieve and sometimes people think, is it that they got really amazing people, but they probably have the same level or standard of people in terms of their recruitment. But as you said, their technique and their strategy in terms of what they're doing, it makes sense because it's being repeated, it's being reinforced, people are being held accountable and now it becomes almost a part of your DNA. Because if you're doing something over and over again, it becomes so a part of you. I remember when I went to high school, I went to a Catholic High School, we were not allowed to walk on the grass, it was completely forbidden. And I recently went on vacation with my daughter to Airbnb in Ocho Rios and she just walked across the grass and I had to walk on the path and go around. And the little light bulb went off in my head, and I said, “Yanique, why don't you walk on the grass?” And I said, “Because it's not allowed.” But it's something that I had to do for 7 years. And so, it actually became a part of me, I think it was like an unconscious behaviour because it was after I thought about what I did, that I was able to dissect and say, “Okay, that's the reason why I did it.”
David agreed and stated that to take that same thought and now let's apply that same exact thinking to customer service or any kind of thing that we're trying to get in our culture. If we want our people to be so unconscious, so automatic about how they deliver fantastic service, well, we have to tell them.
What are the behaviours, that if you were doing these things every day that would create amazing service experiences?
We have to be crystal clear about them.
And then just like the way you learn not to walk on the grass, we have to teach those things over and over and over and over again, with enough repetition so that they become internalized by our people.
And once they become internalized by our people, well, that's just the way we do things around here. It starts to happen and it's such a simple idea.
Me: Simple, yet profound, yet many people are not doing it.
Trends Organizations Need to Focus On
Me: You're in this industry teaching about culture, you’re teaching about behaviours. Can you share with us maybe one or two things, trends that you see emerging? We’re coming out of a pandemic, not sure if you've noticed anything in the States where you are from in your neighbourhood, if you've noticed anything that's different in terms of people's behaviours, have you found that customers have become more heightened to the quality of experience that they're expecting especially seeing that safety is now the new buzzword in terms of how safe you make your customers feel? Do you see any emerging trends in relation to things that leaders in organizations need to focus on more, even more now than before the pandemic probably for the next two or three years?
David stated that the first thing he would say that's very related to the pandemic is obviously, we have gone to people working remotely in a way that didn't exist before. And even as vaccines become more prevalent and the pandemic gets behind us. Certainly, almost everybody recognizes that we will continue to have a high number of people, never more than ever before that will continue to work remotely.
So some people will be back at the office, but there will be many, many people who will forever work remotely or in some hybrid kind of environment where some are in person and some are working remotely.
And that has enormous impacts, specifically as it relates to culture. That if your culture was mostly a function of people being together everyday, and somehow by example, your were people were figuring out, I guess this is how things happen around here. But there was no overt methodology for teaching, it was just leadership by example. “Well, if I'm not seeing you anymore because we're not physically together. Well, then you're going to have some real struggles if there's no other structured way to convey culture.”
And so, it's become more important than it ever used to be to be systematic about how we create our culture, because we can't rely on people being together anymore and he thinks that's a significant shift.
He would say the second shift that I see and he doesn't know that this is so much a function of the pandemic, as much as it is just a general societal business trend is certainly there's a trend toward more self-service, where there are many clients and many buyers who want to be able to access tools and resources on their own.
So the definition of what is great service means has changed, great service used to mean very high touch personal interaction and so in some cases, that's still true. But there are many other people, especially the younger generation, who their attitude about services, “Just give me the tools to do it myself, I don't want somebody pestering me, I don't want this intense personal relationship.”
And again, obviously, this varies with the person and the product. But in many things, especially the younger generation, “Just give me the tools to go online and do it myself and I'm a happy camper, I don't need anybody to be talking to me. In fact, I don't even want to talk to somebody, I just want to be able to do it.”
And so, he thinks that the implication of that trend is that businesses need to be able to provide multiple ways for people to get the service that they need. If I'm a customer that wants high touch, then I'm going to be frustrated if I can't find anybody to talk to. And so, you need to be able to provide that for me. But if I'm a customer who doesn't want to talk to somebody, you need to provide me with avenues to do self-service. So, he thinks responding to the variety of ways in which people want to receive service, companies need to have a number of different methods.
Me: Those are really, really good points. And you are right, self-service is definitely something that people want. I definitely have seen that as a higher emergence. As a matter of fact, locally, when I tried to reach out to my utility companies, I find I get through to them much quicker through the chatbots that they have on their websites than actually calling them on the telephone, you get through much quicker. You sit there on the phone for 56 minutes, 70 odd minutes, some ridiculous times, just listening to this awful music or recording that they have going on over and over again, but you go online and it's like there's more response, the response time is much faster and the person online is in a better position to assist you.
David shared that there's a great book called The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon. And that's a great book.
And one of the points they make in that book is that the challenge is mostly there are these different ways that people want to access service and the problem comes if the way that I want to do it doesn't work, if I have to switch methods.
So if I want to call somebody and I can't get through because I'm on hold for 45 minutes, I'm going to be really frustrated.
If I want to be able to go online and do it myself and I try it and it's too confusing and I have to give up and pick up the phone and call somebody, then I'm going to be frustrated too.
So I need to have different methods to respond to different customers’ desires and each of them has to work well.
If the way that I tried to get my service doesn't work and I have to switch to method number two, that's where you really frustrate your customers and they leave.
App, Website or Tool that David Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, David shared that he has found that in his whole career, that being well organized is an absolutely critical element of success, that if you don't have good systems for keeping on top of everything you need to do, things fall through the cracks and it's extraordinarily difficult to deliver great service to people.
It's hard to honour your commitments if you don't have a good way to track all your commitments.
It's hard to be a fanatic about response time if things slip through the cracks because you didn't keep track of at all.
So systems to keep track of everything you need to do are critical to him.
There's a system that he uses many years ago that was back then and then there's an updated version. But back then, he was a big Franklin planner user and a software version of the Franklin planner. A number of years ago switched to an Apple environment from a PC environment, Franklin planner never came out with an Apple version but there's a different company that created a product that is almost identical to what Franklin planner software was.
And it's called Opus One and it's basically a planning tool to allow you to keep track of task management, everything you need to accomplish in your life. And how does he keep track of it? How does he prioritize it? How does he make sure nothing is ever forgotten?
And he can't imagine how he would function without that, everything he needs to do in his life is there, he looks at it every day. And it's scary to think about what life would be like if he didn't have a tool like that.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on David
When asked about books that have had an impact, David shared that The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon was certainly one of them. He would say a book that he just finished rereading or actually more accurately listening to. He read it years ago and he just re-listened to it is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. He read that when it came out, it came out like 2002 and for some reason it just came across his attention recently and he listened to it on Audible.
And he really thinks it's a fascinating book and it gives him pause to think a lot about the things that they're doing. And for those listeners who may not have read or heard The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, the author looks at social epidemics, how does an idea all of a sudden take off and spread, whether it's a fashion, whether it's a product, whether it's a service, and all of a sudden something goes from nobody knows about this?
And then at a certain point, everywhere you look people are talking about that or reading about it or heard of it. And how does that actually take place? Where's the tipping point where all of a sudden, it goes viral? And why does that happen? What are the factors that contribute to something going viral? It's a fascinating book, highly recommend it.
What David is Really Excited About Now!
David stated that the biggest thing he’s excited about is the opportunity to scale what they're doing. And what he means by that is that the concepts that he teaches as you've heard, even just in a cursory way in this podcast, the idea that if we really want to drive the culture in an organization, it really comes down to two very simple things, define really clearly the behaviours that drive success and then create this structured systematic way to teach those over and over and over again.
And if you do that, you're going to be really successful and he calls that whole concept, he calls it the Power of Fundamentals, that when we have a set of fundamentals that driver our success and then we can have a way to teach it, it has an unbelievable impact.
So the Power of the Fundamentals is just such a powerful idea and such an impactful idea and he’s really excited and enthusiastic about the work that they're doing in their company to spread that idea so that not just hundreds or 1000s of people but ultimately millions of people can leverage those concepts and apply that to improve their families, their children, their companies, their sports teams, their churches, it applies in every walk of life.
And so, the opportunity to spread those ideas and give people tools that enable them to be more successful is just a very exciting and rewarding challenge.
Where Can We Find David Online
Website – www.culturewise.com
David shared that on the website are lots of simple videos that explain the concepts, really easy to understand material there. There's also links there to his books and you can also get them on Amazon or Audible. The most recent book, which was published this spring is an updated version of his original book called Culture by Design.
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity David Uses
When asked about quote or saying that he tends to revert to, David shared that he’s going to broaden that. And so yes, and it's a quote that is more related to organisations, but it's equally important individually. So for organizations as it relates to culture, the quote that he says often and really centres him is he says that, “Good companies have good cultures by chance. But world class companies have world class cultures by design.”
And what he means by that is that when he looks at those companies and those individuals who are most successful, they don't do anything that's so incredibly unusual, he sometimes says they do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency. They just are very purposeful about everything they do that reasonably moderately successful people naturally are gifted and they do a lot of things successful just almost by accident. But the most successful people, the most successful companies, it's by design, they're incredibly intentional about everything they do. So if he looks at his own work, it's about not just relying on instincts, but being really systematic and really intentional about practicing day after day after day, the things that lead to success.
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Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Jonathan de Potter is the founder and CEO of Behold Retreats, and advocates for self-improvement and elevating consciousness as the most meaningful way to better the world.
Jonathan's priority is to raise education and awareness about plant medicines like Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, and guide others to maximize the potential benefits - ultimately leading him to launch Behold Retreats.
Questions
Highlights
Jonathan’s Journey
Jonathan shared that it all started for him personally, about 5 years ago, when he was living in Hong Kong. He was working as a Strategy and Management Consultant for Accenture, one of the big, big giant consulting firms, there 5 years in Hong Kong and he was working really long hours, usually about 12 to 16 hours a day and chasing big deals and chasing new clients and he was on a bit of a treadmill, and chasing the next promotion.
And after about 5 years of that, he thought to himself, there must be more to life and he was an atheist at the time, and didn't really believe in anything spiritual.
And so, he decided to take a year off and as part of that year, he travelled through South America and wound his way to a Ayahuasca retreat with two friends of his in Peru.
And fundamentally, that just opened the door to spirituality, taught him so many humbling lessons and over the past 5 years he kind of been learning about plant medicine and preparing for launching Behold Retreats, which is really focused on guiding people towards really high quality, psychedelic or plant medicine experiences, so that they can really get the most out of them and improve the quality of everyday life.
What is Ayahuasca and Psilocybin and the Impacts They Have?
Me: So I pronounced two mouthful of plants in our introduction, Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, could you share with us, I'm sure like our listeners, I have no clue what I just said and what it does, and how it impacts your life. So could you just enlighten us on those two?
Jonathan shared that Ayahuasca is a combination of two plants that are often found in Central and South America and brought together they combine in a powerful Ayahuasca brew that is very highly hallucinogenic.
And it can facilitate very powerful healing on the level of the mind, on the level of emotions and on the level of the spirit. And so, what we're looking to achieve through this work is to harmonize the subconscious mind with the conscious mind.
And so, what these powerful medicines do, for example, Ayahuasca or Psilocybin, which is the active compound in magic mushrooms, or psilocybe mushrooms. So what these powerful medicines do is they amplify what's happening in our subconscious mind and they give us greater access to what's happening in our subconscious minds.
And so, through that we're able to come face to face with some of the skeletons that you may say might be lying around in our closet and to begin to process the associated emotions in the approach associated limiting beliefs and limiting thought patterns that we have hanging out there in our subconscious minds. And as we do so then we can really make significant improvements to ourselves.
Approach or Strategy in Terms of Integrating Plant Medicine to Improve Customer Experience
Me: So as you know, this podcast is all about navigating your customer’s experience. So I would love to tie this into how is it that this particular approach or strategy in terms of integrating plant medicine into your life will allow individuals to improve on their customer experience? Could you maybe share one, two or three things that you've seen? Do you work with corporate entities; do you mostly work with individuals? How does this really tap back into the primary reason of our show?
Jonathan shared that there's probably a couple of layers to this that we could explore. So he'll share a few thoughts, and then you can guide the conversation and the direction that you think your audience will find most helpful.
He shared that the first is really in relation to our experience, so any customer experience that we might imagine, or design or develop, is a function of our own thinking. And so, these powerful medicines have highly creative potential to them because they really remove constraints from the way that we think, often we've been so programmed, or we've been so conditioned through our parents, through society, culture, etc. to think in a very particular way.
And so, when we think about and speak about things like customer experience, then those influences do find their way into the ways that we define design, any set of customer experiences. So he thinks as and when we peel away those layers of programming, then there's an opportunity there to enhance our creativity and be able to see significantly new ways to think about customer and think about design and think about the customer experience. So he thinks that's one.
And then the second that he would mention would be, he thinks honestly speaking, it's a little bit early for the B2B aspect of this work, he thinks it’s still rapidly gaining in popularity on the level of the individual. And so, they always say about their clients that the soul needs to be calling this is very deep and can be quite challenging work.
And so it's important that people individually feel ready to do the work. But there are certainly companies that are taking that next step and leadership teams coming together to try to re envisage their own strategy, their own vision for the company to really kind of set a very bold 10x or 100x vision for what the customer experience might be or what the outcomes that they're looking for, for the organization, and then using the plant medicine as a bit of an accelerator to just to removing the barriers to thinking, changing the paradigm to removing the ego, as often a limiter in terms of what's stopping a leadership team from working most efficiently together to achieve the vision that they're passionate about achieving together.
Using this Strategy or Approach to Manifest Better Things
Me: So, a few things popped in my mind just know when you were sharing those two points. One was, because I'm sure you have clients already that you've worked with, I'm sure there are some success stories out there. Maybe could you share with us maybe one or two things that from this type of strategy and approach on an individual level, the person was able to manifest better things in their lives, not just remove barriers, but there were results that were on a higher level, maybe with their business, whether it was a one man shop, or they were a manager in a business, or maybe even enhance the quality of their family life, maybe they had better relationships or just to see what are some of the results that an individual can really supremely achieve if they really commit to this process?
Jonathan stated that he should probably caveat his answer here by stating that plant medicine is a very powerful tool. So, a powerful tool can help you achieve the thing that you're trying to achieve but in of itself, it's not necessarily the answer, if that makes sense.
So, it's the person that builds the house, the hammer just helps us get it done is an analogy that comes to mind. And so, what he might share here, he believes that everything that's possible with plant medicine is otherwise possible say through meditation and through other means. So, he just wants to caveat that, he’s not saying this is some sort of a silver bullet in any way, shape, or form, it's a powerful tool. So yes, as Yanique alluded to, step one, he guesses, in relation to this work is often removing those limiting beliefs, kind of letting go of the past.
But step two, and kind of much more interesting and exciting than that is, “Okay, great, fantastic. But what are we bringing into our world?” And so, what is possible in relation to this is really up to the individual in terms of what they are? What is in alignment with what they can manifest it into the world?
There's is a very interesting paper that he came across about six months ago which is by the American CIA and what the paper describes is that the nature of the universe is a hologram of consciousness or a matrix of consciousness. And so, when we hear about books like The Secret, or when we hear about things like The Law of Attraction, the reason that that stuff works is that the nature of the universe is consciousness and so obviously, we are highly conscious beings. And so there's a relationship between the nature of the universe itself, and this very powerful tool that we have which is our consciousness and our imagination. And so, when you speak about what we're able to manifest, what we're able to attract into our lives, then virtually, he doesn't think that there's any limitation for anyone in terms of what they can manifest and attract into their lives.
Now, of course, there's a part of our brain, there's a part of our rational mind that immediately thinks, “Well, hang on. Well, that's not my experience of the world, I've got this 3D existence, and I've got taxes, and I've got people who depend upon me and a job and these other things. And so, I'd love to just be able to manifest whatever I want into my experience.” But it doesn't quite work like that.
But actually, it does and so what becomes very exciting is that as we begin to remove these limiting beliefs and negative thought patterns and dot, dot, dot, and I'm not good enough, and all of that, that we really can manifest whatever it is that we want in our life. So whether that means a new job, whether that means improvements of the quality of our health, whether that means great relationships, a loved one, more free time, whatever it is that we'd like to manifest into our experience, if we're very clear on that and we're very determined in the way that we approach that then his genuine, honest opinion is that we can manifest virtually anything into our experience.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jonathan
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jonathan stated that he'll share two books. The first is Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by Dr. David Hawkins. And that's a very simple book but it's such a powerful book and so what he teaches is the various levels of consciousness. So, from the lowest level emotions like shame, guilt, fear, apathy, grief, and then up to the higher level, but still negative emotions like desire, anger, pride, etc, up into the very higher states of consciousness, like peace, love, and joy. And so, he's mapped out these various stages of consciousness and also provides tools for people to, number one, understand where they are in relation to these levels of consciousness. But number two, also to begin to make steps towards letting go which is the key to being able to move to higher levels of consciousness. So, that's number one.
And then number two is very much in relation to what they were just talking about, which is manifestation. And it's a wonderful book by Kidest OM, she's a great author. She's got a bunch of books out there and as you might imagine, the book is about how to manifest Anything You Want.
What Jonathan is Really Excited About Now!
Jonathan shared that the first one that he’s excited about is they've just adopted two stray cats. And their existing cat is not particularly happy about that. So there's energetic dynamics in the house, as everything kind of evens out. But more broadly than that, there's two things that they’re involved in that he’s super excited about.
The first is bringing more spiritual knowledge into some of the psychedelic science. So they've got some really impressive science that's happening at Johns Hopkins University, at NYU, at Harvard, Yale, Imperial College in London, some of the leading academic institutions out there. But they're taking a very deterministic and science based approach to this work.
And so, some of the spiritual mentors that exists within Behold Retreats are bringing some more of this knowledge into the scientific world, which he thinks is very exciting and will prove its value and its ability to accelerate some of the scientific understanding. So, that's one piece that he’s very excited about besides the cats.
And then the second is, he’s just speaking to a couple of governments in the region, he’s based in Thailand. And they're trying to establish the first legal option for plant medicine in the region, because, as you may be aware that this work is illegal in the overwhelming majority of countries, which is why they do a lot of this work in Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Netherlands, and in soon Jamaica.
Me: Yes, I'm sure you'll get good support from Jamaica, because we do believe in natural approaches to dealing with our health in Jamaica, that’s part of our culture and our history. So, I think once you can provide justification as to how this will help you, if it's going to renew cells, cause rejuvenation, as I was mentioning earlier in the conversation, show results, people will definitely embrace it because it's a way better option than swallowing pills on a daily basis, which can’t be helpful for you.
Jonathan agreed and shared that what's interesting about this medicine compared to our Western paradigm, in our Western understanding of medicine, is that this medicine really requires a very highly capable practitioner alongside it, it's not that you can just take a couple of mushrooms or take some Ayahuasca and that your life improves, that's really not it, these, these plant medicines, or these psychedelics, in of themselves are not necessarily positive, it's how we use them and who were guided by that makes fundamentally the difference between a very high quality healing or growth experience and just, honestly, just taking some psychedelics, taking some drugs, if that makes sense.
Where Can We Find Jonathan Online
Instagram – @behold_retreats
Website – www.behold-retreats.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jonathan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jonathan stated that he does, a quote he really loves is “A ship is safe in harbour but that's not what ships are for.”
He applied to both the context of the individual as well as what a group of individuals may be achieved, trying to achieve together.
And so, in relation to that, we are all here individually to evolve ourselves and so it's very easy to stay at home and watch Netflix on a Friday night, but there's much more interesting and better things that we might be doing with our time and with our energy. And so, the way that he always interpreted that quote is, yeah, you can stay at home or you can limit yourself or there's many ways to be comfortable in life. But when you put yourself out there as a ship out of harbour then good things happen.
And yes, there are challenges but that's what this life is all about. It's about facing those challenges that we may encounter and seeing if we have it within ourselves to meet those challenges and potentially even to overcome those challenges.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Steven Van Belleghem Show Notes
Steven Van Belleghem is a global thought leader in the field of customer experience. His passion is spreading ideas about the future of customer experience.
Steven believes in the combination of common sense, new technologies, an empathic human touch, playing the long-term game and taking your social responsibility to win the hearts and business of customers over and over again.
Steven is the author of multiple international bestselling books including ‘The Conversation Manager’, ‘When Digital Becomes Human’, ‘Customers the Day After Tomorrow’, ‘The Offer You Can't Refuse’ and a technology thriller called Eternal.
Questions
Highlights
Steven’s Journey
Steven shared that he started his journey in his childhood, his parents had a small photography store in Belgium, that's where he lives in Europe. And looking back to how they've run the business, he came to the conclusion later on that they were obsessed with their customers, they were always talking about their customers, they were always trying to find solutions and they were also very innovative in the way how they reached out to customers and he’s talking about the 1980s, so it's a long time ago. But they were working with database marketing already back then, they were they were working with personalized marketing and they were really trying to give people a smile on their face when they left their store.
And for him, that was like the most natural thing in the world. It's only when he grew up and when he went to other places that he started to learn how exceptional that was to be in a place where the customer is your most important inspiration and the reason why you get up in the morning.
So that's how he got basically almost injected with an obsession for customers in his DNA and in the way he was educated by his parents and he still believes that today.
If you look to the success or failure of a company, it is just linked to the fact how excited and how happy customers are, how well you have managed to exceed their expectations, how excited they become of what you've done for them, that defines your success or your failure. And then everything else that you do is a result of that and everything that you achieve is a result of how you treat your customers.
And he’s convinced that he’s obsessed with that, this is what his research is about, that's what he tries to do in his own businesses and it's a part of who he is.
The Concepts of the New Generation of Customer Expectations
Me: So in one of your more recent books, The Offer You Can't Refuse, you focus a lot on the importance of what you should focus on as it relates to the new generation of customer expectations. Three of things you mentioned are ultimate convenience, partner in life and save the world. So could you share with us just explain to our listeners, what that really means, explain those concepts to us and why it is, as a business owner those are some things that you should really be paying attention to.
Steven shared that in his latest book, The Offer You Can't Refuse, he tried to build a model with different components and each of those components bring value to the modern customer.
And the whole bottom line is actually just having a good product service and a competitive price and that's still of course, extremely important, without that you cannot make customers happy but it's the minimum the amount, it's not how you positively differentiate yourself.
And then in today's world, especially after the big digital jump forward that we've seen in the last 14 months, digital convenience has also become the new normal, it has become a commodity, if you have it fine, if you don't have it, your organization is suffering.
So digital convenience is seen as the most natural thing in the world, so it's not a positive differentiator anymore, it becomes a negative one when you're not playing that game. So that's not how you win, that's your ticket to get on board of the train but that's not how you win.
And then the question is how do you win?
And then he plays with those two components that Yanique mentioned, partner in life, which is about bringing positive change in the life of the customer. This is not about how can we sell more to our customers; this is how we can bring more value in their life. This is not about optimizing your customer journey, it's about optimizing their life journey of customers, and being part of their life journey in a way that you proactively bring value to them, that's what a partner in life is all about.
And then that last element, change the world, save the world, he recently talked about changing your world because if you're a small company in Belgium or if you're a small company in Jamaica, probably those companies cannot change the world but they do have the possibility to change their world, change your world, every organization has strengths, doesn't matter the size that they have, this even goes for an individual.
Everyone, every business has strengths that they can leverage to contribute to a better world. And to add value to society in a way that goes beyond sustainability, he’s also talking about social value, he’s talking about the ethics that you apply in your own community. And if you work with that, you can actually make a difference.
And there are more and more people who expect that from organizations, there are more and more people that want organizations to take the responsibility.
And then you have like four components, good product service price, as the lowest part of it, the digital convenience, partner in life, changing your world. And those four components individually, they bring value to a customer but if you figure out a way, how to bring that story as one storyline, as one experience towards your customers, where you connect those four elements, that's when you create what he calls the offer you cannot refuse for your customers.
The Changing of Customers’ Expectations Since the Pandemic
Steven shared that he believes that on the elements that he just talked about, he feels that we made a big jump forward that it almost feels like we stepped into some sort of Time Machine.
If you take digital for instance, the latest study that he has seen from McKinsey actually mentioned that we made a jump of seven years into the future in terms of behaviour, without a pandemic, it would have taken seven years to bring us where we are today so that is changing expectations, that obviously this is changing how we look at things and what we expect.
But also look at the top of the model, changing your world. He thinks the pandemic was for many of us a wakeup call, that we suddenly valued much more the things we had and that we used to take for granted. And more and more people are worried about the future of our planet, not just in terms of sustainability and climate change but also the increase in poverty that we've seen because of COVID unfortunately. The higher demand for health care solutions to deal with the next pandemic and how we can avoid that and how we can be more ready for that. Those are all questions that are now on top of our mind that wasn't so 15 months ago.
And the way that people look to organizations has changed in that perspective that they also understand how companies can bring value in their life, how companies can bring joy into their life and they expect these companies to keep on doing that and they expect these companies to proactively try to become part of the solution of some of those global challenges that we're facing.
And all of that was already happening before 2020 but it all stepped into a time machine. And many of the trends that people like you and me have been talking about in the last couple of years are now suddenly a reality. It's like the day after tomorrow became today, that's the feeling that he has.
Tips for Emerging Expectations of Customers Within the Next 3-5 Years
Me: Could you give us maybe one two or three tips that you recommend to our listeners who are business owners of small, medium as well as managers in different organizations, across different industries. Maybe one, two or three things that you think they need to pay attention to, that would be an emerging innovation or an emerging expectation of customers within the next three to five years. Because I know you said we've advanced digitally about seven years ahead of our time. But what are maybe other things in the customer experience realm that don't tap into digital, there's that human aspect as well that you think the organizations need to focus on that you think will become as an emerging need within the next three to five years?
Steven agreed and shared that the human part of the customer relationship will become more premium than before the pandemic.
We always thought digital would replace humans and he thinks the conclusion is that that will never happen.
There's this old economic law of scarcity and it learns us if something becomes scarce, it actually increases in value, well, the human part in a customer relation has never been lower than today.
And because of that, we value it more than ever, and being helped by a human in real life is more premium than ever before. He doesn't know how it is in Jamaica right now, but in Belgium, the restaurants are closed, they have to live from takeaway food or have to take care of their own stuff, and that's fine.
But sometimes you miss the hospitality of a restaurant, that there's a friendly human there that actually tries to give you a memorable time, a good time that you can enjoy life without having to worry about anything else, that's what humans do, that's not what machines does.
Machines will take care of the convenience and the efficiency in our life and that's fine. And if companies don't have that they're in trouble, but most of them understand that and are building that convenience.
But the winners, in terms of customer experience will be the ones that have most empathy in their organization. Because understanding what people want, how people feel, and anticipating to that, that will be the crucial skill that will make a difference in the next couple of years.
Me: So you touched on a topic that I get asked all the time when I have different training sessions, doesn't even matter what level they fall in the organization, whether they're level one frontline staff, or they’re level four, let's say you're a C suite type of individual in the organization, empathy.
What is empathy? In your own words, based on your own research. And can empathy be taught? Or is it something that you have to learn? Does it come as a learnt experience kind of thing? Because people ask me that question all the time, “These people lack empathy, I don't know what else to do. I put them through all of these different certification and training programmes, they're just not doing what we want them to do with our customers.” How do you get your team members to that point?
Steven stated that this is a crucial question, he gets it quite a lot as well. And the question is, is this the responsibility of the team members? Or is this the responsibility of the senior leader?
And first of all, there are a number of people who don't have any empathy whatsoever and they don't know how to work with other humans. And they're really bad in delivering a good customer service and that percentage of people, which he believes is a very small percentage, but they do exist, that percentage of people cannot be trained, they will never be capable of helping customers in a fantastic way.
So probably, they will have to look for another job where they're not involved customers, because they don't have the capabilities for that.
And then you have a small group of people that has a natural talent of doing these things wonderfully no matter which context they're in. The majority of us humans, we have the potential to listen to customers, to anticipate, to proactively help them and show a positive intent and that's what people really like to see, a positive intent.
Steven shared that that large group of people mainly behaves based on the leadership style that they have in their organization. He’ll take it to a completely different market.
Take soccer players, isn't it strange that sometimes the soccer player is scoring goals like crazy and is the best player in the team in Team A, and then that player gets sold to Team B, and it's a total disaster.
It seems like he cannot score any goal anymore. Is that the fault of that player? Or did that player lose his trust and capabilities because he arrived in a different context?
And he thinks this is what is crucial. He’s an optimist and he believes that the large majority of all people that are working in an organization want to help customers in a positive way, because that gives you positive energy back.
So the question is, why don't they do it? And the answer usually can be found in the fact that they don't feel safe in their own environment where they are not sure what the management is expecting them to do, where they're not sure if they are allowed to help that customer. Because the day before the senior leader said, “Yeah, you help the customer but that was very expensive for us to help that person. And now we have to pay $50 extra. Hopefully we have more clients, otherwise we're going to lose money.”
If an employee hears that, they think, “Oh, my God, if you help a client, we're losing money and my leader becomes really angry. So I'm not going to do that next time.”
So they change their behaviour based on what they hear and feel from senior leaders and the fact that you feel safe or that you don't feel safe, determines if you will show the behaviour that customers expect. So for all your business owners that are listening, the first step before blaming your employees is just look in the mirror and ask yourself, “How can I change my behaviour to make sure that my employees feel safer to act in a positive way towards customers?”
Me: Wow, that is a very, very, very good answer. And I like the way you framed it in terms of taking responsibility for what are you contributing to how that person is feeling and how that person is behaving rather than saying it's their fault, it’s their responsibility. Really, really a great response!
App, Website or Tool that Steven Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Steven shared that for him personally, that is probably WhatsApp. He uses WhatsApp all the time and he thinks it's so convenient to communicate. He uses it to communicate with his clients, of course his family and friends, but also with his clients.
He uses it to find jokes, but I use it to get inspiration and they have these inspiration groups that they share stuff with each other. So he thinks that's the one that he would miss most. He asked Yanique what’s the one app she cannot live without.
Me: The one app that I absolutely can't live without in my business? I asked that question all the time and I don't think I've ever had a guest ask me back that question. I guess for me, the one app that I probably couldn't live without is maybe the Notes app on my phone and my computer. I'm an Apple user, so all of my devices are synced across, my phone, my MacBook and my iPad, and you may go somewhere and you see something and you take a picture, or maybe it's just to reference maybe an article that I want to write or maybe a topic that I'm looking for a particular guest on this particular area. And it just allows me to consolidate all of my thoughts and all of the things that I want to jot down in one place and I don't need to go back to my computer after I'm on my phone at the supermarket, for example, or at the beach and then copy and paste that information because it already synced across all devices, so I can jump on to the next device and click on the note that I wrote there, and I'm able to reference it. So, it's made life more convenient and seamless for me. And I think that's one of the reasons why I am definitely a loyal Apple customer because I find that they're always finding ways to make people's lives easier.
Steven agreed and shared that that's what they do best. And he’s with her, he’s an Apple user as well and he also loves to use the Notes.
Me: And Notes has really evolved over the years, now you can like do scans in there and you can doodle with the Apple Pencil, or even a regular, one of those pens that has the tip that you can use on the phone. If you're an Apple user, let's say for the last five to seven years, and you see how they've evolved Notes, it's really has become a tool that is not just to jot things down, but you can, as I say, save pictures in there, PDF, signatures, write with your finger or with a pen, it has become so indispensable that you really value it very much. So I would say that's probably the one app that I absolutely couldn't live without in my personal or professional life.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Steven
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Steven shared that it's been a while but he thinks the book that has the biggest impact to really open up his point of view on how customers make decisions to buy something, at the decision making in their buying process. It was a book came out in the late 1990s from Geoffrey Moore it's called, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. And it's a book that speaks about the adoption cycle of customers. And one of the conclusions is that the marketing and the communication that you use to convince the innovators and early adopters in the market, and that creates the early success.
The communication that you use there should be completely different than the communication and the approach that you use to reach out to the early majority. Because this first group is excited about technology and new features and stuff like that. The early majority is the opposite, they're afraid of new things. So, they need to be convinced that everything is easy to use and safe, so they don't want to hear all the specs and everything like that, it's a different kind of communication.
And a lot of new products fail because the people who make them think that everyone is an innovator or an early adopter, and because of that, they just focus on that and they have an early success, they think, “Okay, we're on a roll,” and then they fail. And they fall into chiasm between this first and second group. And I read that in the late 90s and of course, if you would read the book today, the examples and stuff like that are completely outdated.
But he believes the theory, the model that is used in that story is still very relevant today. And that was like the first business book that he read that really had a big impact on him.
What Steven is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something he’s doing to develop himself or his people, Steven shared that it actually started last year, he had a hobby, a dream project that got a little bit out of hand.
It was always his dream to write a fiction book, a novel thriller. And Yanique mentioned it in the introduction in the beginning of the podcast. He wrote a thriller, it's called Eternal.
Unfortunately, it's only available in Dutch so far, that's his native language. But he got really excited about it and he was really scared because he has been writing business books for years, he has written five of them and he’s very thankful for the success that he had with them.
And he’s getting a little bit used to that whole process and how it goes, but then when he launched this new book, this fiction novel, he was scared to see what the reactions would be, he was so nervous. And now when the first reactions came in and they were positive and people were actually reading it and buying the book for Christmas gifts, he was really, really happy with that.
And then the publisher got really excited as well. And then they asked him, “We know that this is a hobby that got a little bit out of hand. But what do you think about the idea of writing three books in the series instead of one?”
And he’s currently working, he’s finishing the manuscript of the second one, he does that in the evenings, early mornings, I does that in the weekend, I does that in between, but he really loves the writing process. And it's given him a lot of pressure on the one hand, but on the other hand, he’s also enjoying that he can do something completely new. So he’s excited and still nervous about this project.
Where Can We Find Steven Online
YouTube – Steven Van Belleghem
Instagram – Steven Van Belleghem
LinkedIn – Steven Van Belleghem
Twitter – @StevenVBe
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Steven Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Steven shared that he one of those, it's a quote from Churchill actually, he’s a fan of Sir Winston Churchill and his quotes. And one of his favourite quotes is, “Success is the consequence of failure after failure after failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Me: And that has definitely helped you over the years.
Steven said absolutely and he was very fortunate he had a good time so far, COVID was a challenge in the beginning but then he said they need to fight back and make sure that the business keeps on going. And that actually worked. And moments like that it really helps to be focused and to keep that mindset positive and motivated to keep on going even if you don't have short term results with that.
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The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Will Laurenson is a customer value optimization consultant with 9 years experience optimising customer journeys to convert more traffic into customers, and retain those customers for longer helping companies achieve more profitable growth. He is also the host of the Customers Who Click Podcast, interviewing guests from across the marketing spectrum to give actionable insights into growth.
Questions
Highlights
Will’s Journey
Will shared that he actually started in a few start-ups. He started in one start-up, but his early career was start-ups, so he did a bit of everything, generally marketing but kind of covering a wide range of channels responsible for pretty much everything.
But what he found was, very often companies would kind of hand the marketing team a bunch of cash and say, “Go and acquire customers.” that was basically the job. And it doesn't work like that especially in the start-ups where the product is still a work in progress. So what he started to do was work more closely with product teams and development teams to actually take into account customer feedback and build out a better experience.
You're not going to convert people into customers or retain those customers for very long if your experience is rubbish. He has got quite a bit of experience in the subscription space, that tends to be where he works. And obviously, if it's a magazine, it's a bit different but if you're talking about a digital product, and actually one that he worked for was kind of like Netflix for magazines.
If the app experience is not very good, you're not going to keep people, they're not going to pay that monthly fee for something that they're not finding particularly convenient.
If they can't find the content they want to read, if it's not recommending them content, you're just not going to be able to keep people.
So, that's where he kind of went down this path of customer comes from value optimization. And it kind of stuck with him for the years, it's always something he was working on regardless of what his role was, and once or twice, he did specialize a little bit more in the marketing area in house, but it was always a focus on value. Like he said, if you can't retain those customers, you're not going to make much money off them.
And likewise, if you focus too much on the conversion side, you could raise the conversion rates really high, but you just damaged value, if you incentivize too much, give people loads of discounts and offers, you're obviously not making much money there. But you're convincing people to buy for the wrong reason. So, that's why his focus is customer value optimization. And I went solo basically, November 2019 to just work with direct to consumer businesses on this.
Brands Focusing on Customer Value Optimization
Me: Could you share with our listeners why you think brands need to focus on customer value optimization, not just necessarily from a subscription perspective, but just generally speaking, if you're a retail business, or if you're a service oriented versus product oriented, why is value optimization so important in delivering that great brand experience?
Will shared that at the end of the day, every business wants to make loads of money and wants to be profitable.
If you can only really do that, if you are optimizing the value of those customers and building up their value over time, as opposed to just acquiring new customers every day, every week, every month, you're going to have those acquisition costs associated with it.
A lot of the time businesses do give discounts to first time customers, so that drops the value of that customer. So if you focus purely on acquisition, you're just not very profitable with every customer. So you're going to have to spend more money and acquire more customers. Whereas, if you focus on retention and building up that value over time.
If Facebook or Google does something that affects your business, or as prices get more and more expensive to acquire customers, you're not going to be hurt by that so much because you're also focusing on the customers you've got and getting more and more value out of them. Plus, you tend to get better levels of loyalty. And kind of ambassadorship. If people really like your business and are happy to spend lots of money with it, they will probably also be happy to tell other people about it.
So you're not only getting that direct value from each individual customer, you're also getting them telling other people to come to you, which means you're getting a potentially better customer anyway, because it's someone who's been referred. So he generally sees it as a bit of an increase in value there. But also, you're not paying the acquisition cost for that customer as well.
Tips to Utilize to Get Better Customer Retention
Me: And I guess ideally, all companies aim to have a high customer retention. So maybe could you give our listeners maybe two or three tips that you think their companies could utilize to get better customer retention?
Will stated that the overall big tip, he would say is, give your customers value. So that's a term that's thrown around by marketers a lot, and it can be a bit meaningless.
But what he means is, always explain to them the value of that product or service to them, make sure you're not describing just the features and saying, “Yes, if you're looking for a bookshelf, this is a bookshelf, this is what it's made of, this is how many shelves it's got.”
You want to explain why that's going to be beneficial to someone and get them to really feel like this is actually the right product for them, it doesn't just meet those basic functional requirements, but it's actually going to kind of make them smile every time they see it or they're going to feel like their life's going to be better because they have that product.
And then that kind of that idea of giving value should be everywhere, really in the business. So whenever you send out email marketing, for example, you don't have to just sell, you don't have to be sending an email every week to customers, just saying, “Here are some new products.” You can give information, you can give tips, you can give advice.
He has got one client at the moment, and they're doing a series of emails which actually has no end points in mind. But basically, each email is just a research piece, it gets put into the form of maybe an infographic or some bullet points or something and it is just purely to explain what people need to be doing to feel better. It's kind of to do with how to sleep better, how to reduce pain.
So, it's just loads of tips and they get sales from those emails. So even though the email doesn't push products much, they're kind of there at the bottom, but the main focus on the of the email is that value and giving people information. And then people are happy with that, they see the value of it and then they go and buy the products.
So, kind of with that in mind, email marketing in mind, one thing that's so important is just is marketing automation. No matter what size the business is, marketing automation is just incredibly valuable, if you're a small business, you can get them set up and they will just drive revenue for you on autopilot and you don't have to be going in and manually building emails each week or every fortnight. So, it can really help with kind of resource issues as well, if you have a small team, you don't want to be wasting time doing that, when you could just set up a few email sequences and have that drive revenue for you forever, while you focus on other areas.
And if you combine that with that value piece, instead of just selling, they will just work really well for you. You can do abandoned cart emails, welcome series, post purchase, loads of different types of emails you can do.
And you can provide value at all of them. What most people tend to do with an abandoned cart is send you an email saying, “Here is the item you had in your cart, do you want to buy it?” Just a reminder, that's it.
But now, while some people will have abandoned the cart, because they got distracted or something came up and they had to deal with it, so they might come back. You've also got a huge number of people who are not fully convinced that that product is what they want to buy and that your business is the one they want to buy it from.
So, that abandoned cart email is a great way of dealing with those concerns depending on what your product is. If you're selling electrics like a washing machine or something, you could send out the manual or something or the manual for that product, something like that. So people can check all the details, all the specifications and be absolutely sure it's the right washing machine or dishwasher for them.
You can do some really simple things that don't really cost you anything to do, but could make that customer's life a lot easier, therefore more likely to convert. So, it's giving people value kind of all the time, email marketing, email automation, really, really important. And the final thing is make really, really good use of your customer service team.
So many businesses just see it as like a cost centre, it's a team that has to be there because people will contact the business so we need to pay some people to sit at a desk and just answer these emails all day.
But actually, there's so much that you can get from the customer service team, they can turn unhappy customers into happy ones, they can answer people's questions, and cause those people to actually then buy the product.
And even better, if you collect all that information and pass it on to the relevant teams, you can then make the website better, the emails better, your social media better, whatever, so that those questions actually disappear, they're no longer people coming into customer service for it, because you've actually fixed the problem and people no longer need to ask those questions.
So, he thinks there's so much value you can get out customer service and it's so easy, pretty much all you got to do is set some categories up, some tags in your customer service tool and tag each email that comes in.
And then on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on how big the business is, just review the queries that have come in. You'll pick an area once a month maybe and just pick one of the categories and just dig into what people have actually been asking, what's been going on, and then see where you can go fix that problem so that no one faces it.
App, Website or Tool that Will Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Will shared that he has quite a few. He’s got some like accounting things that are really useful. Dext is really handy, he just forward all his receipts onto it, takes care of all that.
And he thinks a really cool one is Otter.ai. So, Otter like the animal and ai. It's an AI transcription tool. So he actually uses it for his podcast, after the recording he loads the podcast episode into Otter.ai, it transcribes the podcast for him and then he can really easily pick out some quotes, pick out key points for the summary for social media posts and things like that.
He initially tried to use it to do an actual transcription of the podcast but he found that he had to do about an hour editing every single episode to tidy it up because it's not perfect, because AI is not there yet, so, he stopped doing that.
But he uses it to help him write the summary and things. It probably cuts a good 30 to 45 minutes out of the process each week. He guesses it doesn't sound much but he really likes it, he just finds it so useful.
Me: And of course, if you're cutting 30 to 45 minutes off of any activity, when you add that up, it makes a big difference.
Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Will
When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Will shared that Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin is really, really good. It's all about standing out but being different. Having something to actually say that is unique and makes people pay attention to your business and not just view you as another website.
He thinks honestly, a lot of fashion sites are really bad at that. You've got the top tier brands which are fantastic. By top tier, he doesn't mean the publicly listed completely, the massive ones. You've got those the handful of companies that do it really, really well and stand out. But the majority of them even look almost identical on the website, there's nothing that makes them stand out. Major clothing is a little bit different, but most of them are pretty basic. So Purple Cow he would definitely recommend reading.
And the one that he read fairly recently was last year actually, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters by Joseph Sugarman, which is just absolutely fantastic.
When you look at it and you kind of read the name, you think it's going to be like a textbook or something or a workbook, it's not, it's kind of more written like a first person, almost like a story really. It's a bit like a course but not sure how to describe it, it's really, really good.
It's partly about copywriting but it's something you can take into so many other kind of aspects and areas of the business. It's all around, for example, the first sentence should make the reader wants to read the second sentence, that's the job of it, is to make you read the next bit and on and on and on, things like that.
And then there's quite a bit about kind of consumer behaviour and psychology which is really, really interesting. So, he really enjoyed that, that's just sits on his coffee table actually, quite well broken out in chapters. So it's pretty easy to just open up, read a quick tip, it takes two to three minutes, read a few tips, and then put it down. It's obviously not like a novel, where you probably want to keep up with it, quite a lot in order to make sure you don't forget the story.
What Will is Really Excited About Now!
Will shared that the one big thing that he’s super excited about at the moment is he’s actually selling his flat and buying a new place. He stated that that's not quite work related but that's all going on which is really cool. So, he’s getting a house, just kind of outside London in the UK.
But otherwise, he’s quite excited about the new direction that he’s taking his business in. He is leaking down into that subscription space, so everything he does will be more focused around subscription businesses because he likes working with them, he likes the business model, he likes the fact that you have to place that focus on retention as well and build up the lifetime value.
So, at the moment, he’s redoing his website a little bit, he’s creating some new content and new eBooks and things which will be available on the website. That's probably the big thing that's going on with the business right now. Just that slight repositioning, so that he has that purple cow moment really, he wants to stand out a bit more.
Where Can We Find Will Online
Email – www.customerswhoclick.com
Twitter – @WillLaurenson
LinkedIn – Will Laurenson
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Will Uses
When asked if he has a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Will shared that probably not to be honest, he’s not really that sort of person. One thing he finds himself saying a lot is, “We'll make it work.” Just applies to anything really.
It happens a lot when he’s cooking, he tends to forget ingredients or something and just say, “I will make it work.” Applies to the business as well, if he’s struggling with something, just got to find a way to make it work.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Links
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!