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Navigating the Customer Experience

Join host Yanique Grant as she takes you on a journey with global entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that can help you to navigate your customer experience. Learn what customers really want and how businesses can understand the psychology of each customer or business that they engage with. We will be looking at technology, leadership, customer service charters and strategies, training and development, complaint management, service recovery and so much more!
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Now displaying: November, 2022
Nov 29, 2022

Andrew Wolgemuth founded Wove to recreate the way couples buy engagement rings in a highly traditional and outdated industry. Andrew grew up in an entrepreneurial environment working at his parents jewellery company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After attending West Point and serving as a Platoon Leader in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, he attended Stanford's GSB’s Ignite Entrepreneurship Programme where the idea for Wove was born.

 

Questions

 

  • Could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, at least your journey into entrepreneurship, how did you get to where you are today? And what kind of propelled you into that space?
  • Could you tell us a little bit about your ecommerce company? What's the name of the company?
  • As a business owner, you're operating in the ecommerce space and I'm sure a lot has changed since COVID. What have been some of your key learning opportunities that you've been able to capitalize on? As you know, we went through a pandemic, and now we're emerging out of a pandemic, how have you been able to still satisfy clients, meet their demands despite all of what was happening globally?
  • What are maybe one or two key things that as a designer communicates with the client, they try to focus on to ensure that those things are manifested into the product to make people feel like they're a part of what you're purchasing.
  • How hard is it to kind of lead a remote base team and leverage their expertise seeing that you're not all in the same space?
  • And do you find that the customer experience is better because you're able to kind of navigate that journey, control that journey as much as possible, you have more control over the things that may impact your customer in a positive or a negative way.
  • Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Could you share with us maybe one or two books that you've read, either recently or in the past that have had a great impact on you.
  • Could you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
  • Where can listeners find you online?
  • Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed?

 

Highlights

 

Andrew’s Journey

 

Andrew shared that entrepreneurship actually started for him in his childhood. Both of his parents were young entrepreneurs, they started a family jewellery company when he was just a baby. And so, much of his childhood was spent watching his parents start a business. And he thinks many of the lessons that he learned from watching his parents, both himself and his siblings took with them as they entered into the real world.

 

About Andrew’s Ecommerce Company Wove

 

Andrew shared that their company is called Wove. They’re www.wovemade.com/. And what they specialize in is custom engagement rings and wedding bands. So, essentially, the way that their process works, they match their clients with one of their in house jewellery designers, after they submit a short quiz on their website, that design consultation allows the client to work with a designer to discover their preferences, design an engagement ring or wedding band. And once they're satisfied with the design, they send them an exact replica of that ring that they can try on at home.

 

And really what this allows the client to do is try on a realistic version of their ring, test drive it at home, show friends and family and ensure that when you go to buy the final ring that you're getting exactly what you're looking for. So, it kind of acts as a way of allowing the client to buy with full confidence that what they're getting is actually the ring that they want to wear for the rest of their life.

 

Me: That's very cool. So, your niche is specifically in the marriage line.

 

Andrew shared that right now, they are focused specifically on bridal jewellery, yes. But they are excited to be launching their own jewellery lines, things other than engagement rings and wedding bands here before the end of this year. So, they’re in the process of designing those pieces right now, they're going through the prototyping phase, and very soon they’ll also have jewellery on their site.

 

Satisfying and Meeting Clients Demands Despite What is Happening Globally

 

Me: Now, could you share with our listeners, Andrew, as a business owner, you're operating in the eCommerce space and I'm sure a lot has changed since COVID.

 

What have been some of your key learning opportunities that you've been able to capitalize on? As you know, we went through a pandemic, and now we're emerging out of a pandemic, how have you been able to still satisfy clients, meet their demands despite all of what was happening globally?

 

Andrew stated that it's interesting, their business was very much grown out of the pandemic. Neither Brian, his co-founder nor himself really anticipated on having a career in the jewellery industry, this kind of happened by accident.

 

And so, it’s a great question to ask, they started working actually with deployed service members back in 2020 when the pandemic was just starting. And those service members wanted a way to design and buy an engagement ring from overseas. And that way when they got back, they could propose but no one really wanted to take the chances of buying an engagement ring online and shipping it to a deployment address in the Middle East.

 

And so, they started sending replicas to service members while they were deployed. And so, it was interesting as they got home, and the pandemic was still going on and many of the jewellery stores were closed, many of their friends and family started asking for the same bespoke custom design and replica service. And really, that's how they got started, they recognized that there was a need for what they were building and people enjoyed buying an engagement ring the Wove way, better than the next best alternative.

 

So, the pandemic really is what allowed them to gain the early traction that enabled them to raise the funding that they raised and grow their team. But he thinks if there's one fundamental lesson that they continue to lean on is, test early and often and do it as inexpensively as possible. They’ve changed our product and process so many times over the last two years, and really allowing them doing those things early on, allow you to build the shiny, expensive product later after you have full proof that it's exactly what you need to be building.

 

Key Things As a Designer Communicates with the Client to Ensure They are a Part of What They are Purchasing

 

Me: So, your organization also focuses heavily on personalization. And we found, just through, of course, research and data that we get from like Forrester and some of top leading market research entities, that personalization is one of the things that helps to differentiate you in this world, regardless of the industry that you're in. Because clearly if the service is personalized, then it's almost like you're getting something that's not generic, and it's specific to you.

 

And I heard that in when you're explaining how it is that your business operates, the fact that the designer does custom made designs, sends you a replica of it, you can literally walk with a replication of it before you actually purchase the final product.

 

What are some of the things that you focus on in the personalization process? What are maybe one or two key things that as the designer communicates with the client, they try to focus on to ensure that those things are manifested into the product to make people feel like they're a part of what you're purchasing?

 

Andrew stated that at the most fundamental level, he would just say listening, and if that sounds very, very simple. One of the first clients that they ever worked with, he remembers very distinctly getting on the follow up design consultation after the couple had received their replica ring. And immediately one of the partners started to tear up and his initial thought was, “Oh, no, what happened, we must have messed up the replica ring.” And what she said was so poignant to him, she said, “I feel so heard, you incorporated everything that I wanted into the ring, into this design.”

 

And so, that was really moving for them and it's the way that they train their designers today is that listening to the client is one of the most important things that you can do. And not just listening, but actively listening, taking notes and ensuring that the design preferences they have are incorporated into the design.

 

But even taking that a step further, one of the things that they do is before a client ever gets on a design consultation is that they have them fill out a style quiz, which allows them to be matched based on their style preferences with one of their in-house designers. So, before they ever get on a call, they are doing what they can to match them with someone that they think they'll be compatible with from a style and design perspective. And that has made their process run incredibly smoothly. And allowed them to really meet the client where they're at.

 

Me: Brilliant, I love that. Absolutely love that. All right, so you're leading, how many designers would you say your organization has?

 

Andrew shared that a few of them are full time and a few are contract but at any one given moment in time right now they have about 8 different designers that they’ve worked with. So, not a ton, but that's enough to really cover the span of different styles for engagement rings, and so that's about the number that they’re utilizing today.

 

Me: Okay. And these persons are pretty much remote based.

 

Andrew agreed, they are. And one of the things that's great about their model is that jewellery designers are surprisingly underpaid in the industry. And so, what they’ve been able to do is essentially create a job description that is exactly what any jewellery designer would want to be doing, which is designing jewellery, working with clients and ultimately seeing their pieces come to life.

 

A lot of jewellery designers that work for top brands will work in a tiny design office in a crammed New York City office building, they never get to meet the client, and oftentimes their piece is never built. And so, what they able to do is pay their designers more than their competitors in the industry and give them a job that's much more satisfying.

 

And so, because of that, they’ve been able to attract some of the top designers from across the industry, from major brands that you would recognize. And so, that's been really exciting for them to be able to attract some of the top talent for what they’re building.

 

Leading a Remote Based Team and Leverage Their Expertise

 

Me: Amazing. So, how hard is it to kind of lead a remote based team and leverage their expertise seeing that you're not all in the same space? I know you still have a lot of leaders globally who believe that because we basically emerged out of the pandemic, they want everybody to come back face to face. But I gather that based on your business model, this has been how you've operated from inception.

 

Andrew shared that it is about 50% of their company is remote and 50% is in person. So, they do have an office in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that office contains all of their manufacturers, a lot of their content creators and the operations people in the company. But our remote team consists of all of our designers, marketers, web developers, really anyone that doesn't have to be in person.

 

And so, it's fascinating. He and Brian, his co-founder both came from the Army, which is obviously very much an in-person organization. But he thinks a lot of the leadership lessons and management principles are the same. They do the best that they can to care for their employees, whether you're remote or in person have contact daily, ensure that people's professional and personal needs are being satisfied. So, they love the model that they have, they make an effort to see even their remote employees in person at least once every two months, whether it's going and visiting them or doing an off-site. But for them, that model has worked really well, and it's given them a lot of flexibility.

 

Me: Brilliant. Now, just to also confirm you handle everything for the consumer from start to finish. So, is there any third party like vendor that you would engage to, let's say, do the delivery of the product, or does your company handle from start to finish so that way you're controlling all of the touch points that your client will have with you.

 

Andrew shared that they handle just about everything start to finish. And so, the things that they handle are the design of the ring, they do all the manufacturing, all of their jewellery is made from start to finish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And because of that, they’re able to produce a really high-end product and they’re able to produce it very quickly. They produce rings in about 5 to 7 days, which for custom is about 6 times the national average for custom jewellery.

 

And so, they’re really proud of that, the only vendors that they work with are diamond suppliers. They don't carry any of their own diamond inventory, they work with different diamond suppliers from top diamond sources in the US, all of their diamonds are ethically sourced, they pass the Kimberley Process, which ensures they're conflict free. And they also do a lot of work with lab grown diamonds as well. But really the diamond sourcing is done in house, but they purchase diamonds from outside vendors. And that's really the only thing that they do with a third party.

 

Navigating the Journey – Having Control Over Things That May Impact Customers in a Positive or a Negative Way

 

Me: Amazing. And do you find that the customer experience is better because you're able to kind of navigate that journey, control that journey as much as possible, you have more control over the things that may impact your customer in a positive or a negative way.

 

Andrew stated absolutely. And custom is hard, it's a hard thing to do at scale. He thinks the reason that they’ve been able to do it so successfully, is because they spent a lot of time investing in systems that allow the customization to occur in a way that's organized, they don't lose track of details and they have a method to how they produce.

 

But ultimately, he thinks it gives the consumer a one of a kind experiences that allows them to build something completely custom, they're not going to see their friend wearing the same ring that they have on. Everything is one of a kind, they only build their rings once for the customer experience. And as far as diamonds go, if you bought a diamond online through Blue Nile or Brilliant Earth, you're going to get to a diamond page and there are literally 10s of 1000s of diamonds on the page. If you don't have an education in diamonds, it can be extremely daunting trying to figure out which one is the right one.

 

And so, their geologists and designers walk their clients through every step of the process, will help you pick a diamond. So, yes, it is absolutely a heavy investment, but he thinks the customer experience is truly one of a kind and it gives their clients tremendous confidence that what they're getting is the ring that they want to be wearing the rest of their life. So, they’re really proud of what they’ve built. But obviously he’s a little bit biased, but he thinks their experience is certainly the best when it comes to customer engagement rings.

 

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

 

When asked about online resources that he cannot live without in his business, Andrew shared that they use HubSpot in a lot of different ways. HubSpot is their primary CRM, they use it for tracking their sales funnel, where their rings are out in production. They use it for automated emails and text and that engine has been tremendously powerful for their business and also gives them a ton of customization.

 

They knew that when they built out their CRM that they weren't going to be able to use a plug and play CRM template. And so, HubSpot gave them the flexibility to essentially build exactly what they needed on their platform.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Andrew

 

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Andrew shared that the most recent book that he’s read is Amazon's Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar. He loves this book, what the book talks about is how Amazon goes about proposing products and how they go about designing products that they believe their customers will one, be excited about and two, that will be functional for them. And so, that's been a book that's really been useful for him when he thinks about how they’re designing user experiences or providing tools to their clients that allow them to solve the problems that they face when buying an engagement ring. That is a great book.

 

The other book that he really liked, it's not really as much business related, but it's very team related is Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal. Now, that takes him back to his Army days, but it's a book that he continuously goes back to because it talks about how teams function successfully. And he thinks it has a lot of good lessons that are good reminders for any type of organization.

 

What Andrew is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about something that’s going on that he’s really excited about, Andrew shared that one thing that they’re very excited about that they are launching next week on their Wove website is they are launching the ability for clients to order replicas of Wove pre-designed rings. And so really, the difference of what that is compared to what they offer today is, there are certain clients that may not need the full custom experience, but still want to be able to try the ring on before they buy it.

 

And so, their designers from across their company put together what they believe are the top rings that represent both Wove as well as what consumers are looking for. And clients can either buy that ring right off the site, or they can order for free, an exact and realistic replica of that design that they can try on at home before making the big decision. And so, he’s really excited to get that product live, it’s going live next week, it'll be on www.wovemade.com. So yeah, check it out.

 

Where Can We Find Andrew Online

 

Website – www.wovemade.com

Instagram - @wove_made

Facebook - @wovemade

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Andrew Uses

 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to during times of adversity or challenge, Andrew stated yes, absolutely. A quote that he heard recently from one of his mentors that he really likes is that, “Failure is rarely fatal, and success is never permanent or lasting.”

 

And that's a quote that her refers back to constantly. As a founder, there are often times where you can feel defeated, things won't be going the way that you anticipate. And so, being able to take a step back and look at the big picture and rely on a quote like that is reassuring. So, that's one of his favorites.

 

Me: Amazing. Well, thank you so much Andrew for taking time out of your day, to hop on our podcast Navigating the Customer Experience. And just share some of these great insights as it relates to the journey of your business, your own personal journey, the importance of customization, the importance of leading a team that is even though remote based, that you're able to leverage their expertise in the highest possible way. And of course, controlling that journey of your customers by ensuring that you're giving and meeting those needs, those needs that are so specific to each individual in a way that will have them remember you for the rest of their lives. So, thank you so much for that.

 

Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest

 

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!

Nov 22, 2022

Justin Zalewski is the Director of Product Design and Strategy at Studio Science. He leads a team of talented product designers and works with clients to solve business problems through design. He and his team are experts in rapid prototyping and running experiments to more quickly learn from and deliver value to customers.

He has led projects with clients ranging from market-leading tech companies to Fortune 500 brands. Some of his clients include Angi, Genesys, Simon, Stack Overflow, and Cummins.

 

Questions

 

  • Now, could you share with us, in your own words, just a little bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today?
  • So, customer and product design. Now, tell us a little bit about Studio Science. What is Studio Science and what does Studio Science do?
  • So, maybe could you share with me one or two trends that you've seen in the customer experience space that you think is critical for a business to constantly be looking at to ensure that they are keeping current with the needs of their customer?
  • Why do you think it's important for not only the customer experience, but the employee experience to ensure that your alignment in terms of needs is not just on the CX end but it's also on the EX end and what does that look like in terms of it being beneficial to both?
  • Now, could you also share with us what is the one online resource, tool, website, or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Could you also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
  • We do have a lot of persons that listen to this podcast, who are business owners, as well as managers and they believe that their companies have great products and services, but from time to time, they do lack constantly motivated human capital, so the people are not as motivated. If you're sitting across the table from one of those persons today, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give them to increase or improve their motivation and have a successful business?
  • Could you also share with us Justin, our listeners would have tapped into this episode, they would like to connect with you. And so, they would like to know where can they find you online?
  • So, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track or get you refocused if for any reason you got derailed.

 

Highlights

 

Justin’s Journey

 

Justin shared that he started in the world of design and the way he started was a little more in the world of graphic design. And that led him into just kind of a natural curiosity into the more technical side of things. And so, he started to kind of branching out from just the visual design of things in visual communication into building things and figuring out how things work. So, getting into code, building websites, building apps. And that led him into product design.

 

So, figuring out what is the UX, the user experience of making sure that these kinds of things are intuitive, easy to use, fun to use, and really meeting customer needs. And that caused him to broaden his lens, especially the last 10 years and his time at Studio Science to broaden his lens, and especially adapt a service design mindset. So, looking across the whole customer journey from everything they're doing, with a digital product, outside of a digital product, their in-person interactions, the way that the organization delivers a service to a customer.

 

And one of the things that he’s been really passionate about lately and getting really excited about is how they use their design skill set and looking through the business world with that lens, to bring people together, bring siloed disparate departments together in pursuit of that common goal. Because really, everybody wants to serve the customer, we're all just coming at it from different angles. And so, where he’s at today, is being able to use that design skill set, not just for improving visual design or UX, but actually to bring people together to create a better service and a better experience for customers.

 

What is Studio Science and What Does Studio Science Do?

 

Justin shared that Studio Science is a design and innovation firm. And their purpose is to help businesses designed with people as opposed to for people. So, they saw this in a variety of ways but if he could sum it up, it comes down to this, customer experience depends on meeting people's needs and people's needs are constantly changing. So, businesses have to constantly change too. And they know that this is hard. So, where they come in is they help businesses, 1) Understand what their customers need. And then 2) Deliver solutions to meet those needs. Obviously, that's super vague.

 

So, to get more specific, they do a lot of work with large enterprise companies. And they're in a lot of cases in a place where they've enjoyed long term success but what got them here won't get them to that next stage.

 

So, more often than not, the way these large companies are set up, doesn't allow them to innovate well, because they're not built to move quickly. There’re all kinds of bureaucratic structure that's in place, a lot of times for understandable reasons, but it ends up hindering this kind of evolution that's needed to meet customer needs.

 

So, when they speak with people that are responsible for advancing customer experience in organization like this, a lot of times they're frustrated, sometimes even feeling hopeless, because they've been banging their head against the wall trying to make progress in their organization.

 

But that's where they can come in, they can act as their modern design team from the outside, when it's not possible to operate that way from the inside. So, they can build an understanding of customer needs, match that up with business goals and then mentioned, they are big fans of rapid prototyping, they prototype those solutions so you can learn really quickly without having to build and roll out a full solution. They're building to learn rather than building just to launch things and that's the best way to align what a business is offering to what customers actually need.

 

Me: So, Studio Science is on to some great stuff there.

 

Trends in the Customer Experience Space for Businesses to Look at to Keep Up with the Needs of Their Customers

 

Me: Now, what has been your experience? I noticed you mentioned in ensuring that you deliver a great experience to your customers, because businesses are continually changing, you need to continually change or customers are continually changing, rather, you need to continually change. So, maybe could you share with me one or two trends that you've seen in the customer experience space that you think is critical for a business to constantly be looking at to ensure that they are keeping current with the needs of their customers?

Justin stated that he thinks it all comes down to measuring the right kinds of things. And what is challenging and what we see a lot of organizations struggling with, is that the things that are easiest to measure, those quantitative kinds of things where if you've got a digital product or website, you can throw up Google Analytics or your platform of choice super quickly and you can measure all kinds of all kinds of the what's, how many people are visiting, how many people are doing this kind of thing within their app, and that's all valuable. But to really get to the deeper levels of evaluating customer experience and figuring out are we headed in the right direction? Are we actually solving a need for our customers?

You got to dig into the qualitative side of it as well, the why behind it all to figure out like alright, we can see that this thing is happening, our customers are downloading our product or they're signing up for this offering, they're buying these things on our ecommerce store. But why are they or aren't they doing this, this thing we thought would be a big hit.

 

And so, that's where he thinks digging into just making sure that you're tied in with your customers, via any variety of methods for qualitative research can be that interviews, workshops, developing relationships like having a customer advisory board, where you've got those close relationships with customers, where you can just go and talk to people really quickly where there's not a chance for that barrier and that space to develop between a business and their customers, because that's what leads to misalignment and shipping things that don't actually fit what the customer needs.

 

The Alignment of Needs for Both Customer Experience and Employee Experience

 

Me: Brilliant. Now, in addition to what you've shared, could you also share with us why do you think it's important for not only the customer experience, but the employee experience to ensure that your alignment in terms of needs is not just on the CX end but it's also on the EX end and what does that look like in terms of it being beneficial to both?

 

Justin stated that they are great questions, because there's no way to separate the customer experience from the employee experience, the employees are what makes it possible to actually deliver a customer experience, and especially a good customer experience. And there's also, and he’s sure we've all seen these kinds of things happening or read about it in the news with Amazon or otherwise, it's also very possible for an organization to deliver a great customer experience at the expense of the employee experience, and how that's not sustainable and it allows all these problems to grow and fester.

 

And so, it's really impossible to separate the two. And so, what he advocates for and what Studio Science advocates for is actually bringing the two together and there's a variety of different ways to do this.

 

But they found the best way is through a service design approach. And so, there's a lot of different aspects to that but one example and one really helpful tool that's part of a service design approach is to develop a service blueprint.

 

So, you might be familiar with a customer journey map or you're mapping out here's what a customer is experiencing at different stages of their journey with us. Think of a service blueprint as adding on another layer to that of not just what is the customer experiencing, but what is the business doing to enable that experience. What are our people, what is our staff doing? What kinds of technology do we have in place that is enabling that experience?

 

And especially mapping it out of that high level allows them to pinpoint like what are the points of friction and why?

Like what's happening. But also, it's a great tool to bring people together and figure out, like we can see there's an issue here, is that a technology problem? Is that something where a department is just totally overwhelmed and overloaded, and we haven't really developed an understanding about that today. And then how can we solve that together rather than just trying to brute force a better experience in a way that's just not going to be feasible because people can only do so much.

 

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

 

When asked about online resources that he cannot live without in his business, Justin shared that for him, it is Slack. And so, especially in this remote collaborative world, they’ve been on Slack for several years, even before the pandemic where they really leaned into remote work, and he knows other folks are on different systems. Microsoft Teams has gained a lot of ground, he’s a big Slack fan. He thinks it's a way to cut down on email, really emphasize the quick kind of asynchronous collaboration that just helps a business run and helps bring people together.

 

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Justin

 

When asked about books that have had an impact, Justin stated that it's so hard to narrow down to a couple but the ones that come to mind most readily are one he read a while back is a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, his name is Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economics that wrote about basically like two systems of thinking like our fast thinking brains and our slow thinking brains and all kinds of like the biases that develop because of how we're built to think. And it just has all these implications that has really changed the way he thinks about a lot of his own interactions in his own life. But also, when he tries to empathize and understand like how other partners and colleagues in business are looking at things or how their customers are perceiving a solution or their experience, it's been really eye opening.

 

The other he would say is Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan. It's a book really all about product management but it's, he'd say it opens up some lines of thinking even outside of product management, really just about how to rapidly iterate, really learn quickly from customers, and all the different ways you can test solutions in a really lean, cheap way without needing to invest a lot of money into it.

 

What Justin is Really Excited About Now!

 

When asked about what’s something that is going in right now that he’s really excited about, Justin stated that it’s a great question. So, he’s really excited for himself and then also to share this with his team and try to foster this kind of mindset of making space. And it seems like it's only snowballing and getting more common these days that the people are just very scattered, torn in a lot of different directions.

 

And so, bringing focus and creating space to be focused on the highest priority things he thinks is a really valuable thing, he won't say it's undervalued, because there are a lot of people that are beginning to emphasize that more and more. But it's increasingly challenging in the world, just because there are so many distractions, so many things calling for our attention. And so, finding ways to focus, to prioritize and to really be mindful about what we're spending time on, is something he’s been really focusing on lately for himself, but also trying to bring that to those around him and his team.

 

Advice for Business Owners and Managers who Lack Constantly Motivated Human Capital

 

Me: Now, we do have a lot of persons that listen to this podcast, who are business owners, as well as managers and they believe that their companies have great products and services, but from time to time, they do lack constantly motivated human capital, so the people are not as motivated. If you were sitting across the table from one of those persons today, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give them to increase or improve their motivation and have a successful business?

 

When asked about one piece of advice he would give to business owners and managers to increase or improve motivation and have a successful business, Justin stated that he’s sure these folks have heard a lot of things about making sure people have the motivation from a strong mission and vision for a company and that is all really critical and it's hard to do much without that. But if he can add something new that they might not have heard as much about before, it's the concept of involving the employees and even partners, anybody that you're working with, to deliver value to your customers. Involving them in the process of co-creating solutions, rather than dictating solutions and process to them.

 

And so, when you're thinking about, “Hey, like, we're going to develop this new product, we're going to sell it this way, we're going to deliver it to customers this way.” Rather than it being entirely a top down approach, this is strongly urge but forced upon the employees. He thinks you'd be surprised how powerful it is to actually involve the employees and the team in coming up with the solution.

 

And so, some of the ways that they do that are actually just starting by talking with employees, but also getting their input, running workshops like, “Here's the problem that we're trying to solve. We know that you live in this world every day, like what do you see, what's your perspective?

 

And how can we actually like make this kind of outcome for the business?”

 

And he thinks bringing those perspectives together, one it is proven to actually generate better solutions and more feasible solutions because it comes from the people that actually be carrying out work. But two, it gets people involved and gets their buy in on the solution and helps them feel more involved rather than a cog in the machine.

 

Me: Okay. Awesome. So, a high level of inclusivity so they feel like they're a part of where the company is going, the decisions that are made and of course, you get greater buy in, which means you get, hopefully increased motivation, and people feel like they're a part of something bigger than just the operational stuff that they do every day.

 

Where Can We Find Justin Online

 

LinkedIn – Justin Zalewski

Website – www.justinzalewski.com

Website – www.studioscience.com

 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Justin Uses

 

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Justin shared that he’s bad at quotes, but he’ll give kind of the sentiment behind the idea. And he’s sure there are folks that have said it better.

 

But it comes down to like, there's only so much you can do at one time. He will attempt to quote something he read from recently where someone that took a very sensible approach to life of not chasing after, always the next thing always bigger and better.

 

But realizing that all you can do is worry about like, “What am I going to do today to make the most out of today, rather than worry so much about the next week, next month, next year, which I really have little control over.”

 

So, he thinks taking a reasonable perspective of here are the things that I can control and influence today and here's the things that I can't, and I can just do my best to be prepared for when those kinds of things do come up, really helps him to just take a little bit of the pressure off in moments of stress and refocus himself to what's really important.

 

Me: So, just wanted to tell you, thank you so much for hopping on to our podcast, Navigating the Customer Experience and sharing some of these great insights as it relates to customer experience design, as well as ensuring that as an organisation, you look to not just satisfy the needs of your customers, but you also your employee needs. And the value that you brought to both myself and our listeners, I think is really great at a time that people are really looking at, how are they going to position themselves for 2023 as we exit one calendar year and jump into the next? And what are some areas that really need to be given that high level, super focus to ensure that they can stay on top of their game in their industry and really give their customers what they're looking for both on an internal and an external level. So, thank you so much.

 

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Links

 

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