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

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

Questions

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

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

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

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

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

• Where can listeners find you online?

Highlights

Rich’s Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening and Adding Value to Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Data to Propel Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: Awesome, that was an excellent example.

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

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

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

What Rich is Really Excited About Now!

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

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

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

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

Where Can We Find Rich Online

Website – www.mindspaninc.com

LinkedIn - Rich Edwards

Twitter – Rich Edwards

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

Links

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

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

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

Questions 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Where can listeners find you online?

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

Highlights 

John’s Journey

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

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

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

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

Best Story-Telling Techniques to Get the Sale!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John shared that he uses something called schedule OnceHub.

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on John

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

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

AI Replacing Human Interaction and Storytelling

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

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

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

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

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

Skills that a Sales Professional Needs in Order to be Successful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John affirmed Yes!

What John is Really Excited About Now!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips as it Relates to Sales and Customer Service for 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Can We Find John Online

LinkedIn – John Livesay

Instagram - @thepitchwhisperer

Website – www.johnlivesay.com

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity John Uses

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

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

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

Links

·  The Sale is in the Tale by John Livesay

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

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

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.

This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!

This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.

Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

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

Register Here

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

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

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

Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Where can listeners find you online?

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

Highlights 

Saira’s Journey 

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

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

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

About Cover Whale – What Does the Company Do?

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

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

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

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

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

Creating an Omni Channel Experience 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pain Points Cover Whale is Solving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Saira

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Saira is Really Excited About Now!

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

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

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

Saira stated yes, she totally agrees with that.

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

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

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

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

Where Can We Find Saira Online

LinkedIn – Saira Taneja        

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Saira Uses

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

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

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

Links

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

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

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.

This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!

This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.

Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

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

Register Here

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

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

Questions 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Where can listeners find you online?

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

Highlights  

Zack’s Journey

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

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

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

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

About Zack’s Company – Treasure Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How ChatGPT Can Help Organizations with the Overall Service Experience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Zack

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

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

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

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

What Zack is Really Excited About Now!

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

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

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

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

Where Can We Find Zack Online

Website – www.treasuredata.com

LinkedIn – Zack Wenthe

Twitter – Zack Wenthe

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Zack Uses 

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

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

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Links

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

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