Tom Martin is the CEO at Glance, a CX and contact center strategist, product lifecycle expert, and partnership builder. Tom has led Glance through a successful “pivot,” transitioning from a small business screen share tool to a provider of omnichannel visual engagement solutions for some of the largest enterprises in the world. 

Since that pivot, Glance has experienced multiple years of 70% year on year growth. Prior to joining Glance in 2013, Tom spent over a decade at Verizon building and managing strategic partnerships. Outside of the office, Tom is an avid backcountry skier, mountaineer and competitive cyclist.

Questions 

•  We always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about their journey, how you got to where you are today.

•     Now, could you tell our audience a little bit about Glance and what it is that your company does?

•  Can you share with our listeners a little bit about how it is that you can still integrate personal experiences or personal connection with emotion even though we have so much of our connectivity being done in a digital space.

•  What is your view on empathy? And do you believe everyone has the ability to exercise it? And if not, what are some tools that you believe can help to strengthen that particular competence in a team member?

•  Can you also 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 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.

•  Could you also share with our listeners, 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?

•  Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you got derailed or demotivated, this quote will help to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Tom’s Journey

Tom shared that he’s always been fascinated with people which drew him down the path of really understanding what people like, how people buy, he cuts deep into sales and marketing early in his day. And no matter what he was doing, he was always interested to understand how to connect with other people. And the part of like connecting with other people, as you realize that as we have moved from business where we were always together, like you walked into a store you connected with people, you learned a lot of information when someone walks through the door. If you're in a clothing store, you could size them up and be like that person's this size jacket. And you could also recognize all the other cues. 

It could be like Valentine's day or the day before, and a gentleman walking in and he's in the women's section. There's all that context that you get. So, you understand, like the challenges that businesses today have when you start to move, sometimes completely into the digital realm. 

And so, it's sort of been an area of focus of his, throughout his career, just understanding people. And in today's landscape of customer experiences, where the battleground is no longer a product, it's really the experience that people have.

About Glance and What Your Company Does?

Tom shared that they are a in-brand collaboration platform that brings real human beings into a digital space, to be able to provide that personal connection at just the right moment. And that translates into thinking about any type of a journey that a customer is doing, where it could be better served by bringing a human being in, so many people have become more digital native and of course, the familiarity of digital tools has skyrocketed with the pandemic because people, that was the only modality that they had. 

But now you realize that, instead of thinking about how do I actually do something, it now comes down to what advice do I need to complete something. And can I reach out to get advice, guidance from someone who can help me understand the inner workings of something, demystified fees, whatever it might be. And that's what they focused on doing is really bringing the digital and the human elements together.

Integrating Personal Experiences or Personal Connection with Emotion Even Though Our Connectivity is Being Done in a Digital Space

Me: So, that's what Glance is all about. Now, at the beginning when you were explaining about your personal journey, how you got to where you are today, you mentioned something that piqued my interest, which was the connection that you make with someone, really getting to know that individual and connecting on a personal level. 

Now, a big part of customer experience, I believe is an emotional connection that you have with someone and I do believe people buy from organizations that they like and love, and there's some emotion that's there that's driving them to want to do business with that organization. 

Can you share with our listeners a little bit about how it is that you can still integrate personal experiences or personal connection with emotion even though we have so much of our connectivity being done in a digital space? 

Tom shared that the things that we talk about today and also where things are headed, that are going to be supported by technology is recognizing that today….customers are forced to really be in the driver's seat to go down in many of the different channels. 

And many times, if you ask someone, have you had a good experience with a chatbot?

If it's outside of something that's very simple, like, what are your hours of operation, oftentimes leads them to switching channels to get somewhere else. And when you think about the emotional component and realizing that if we're able to meet the customer where they are versus forcing the customer to go through many different channels to find out that they can't get what they need done, either abandoned, or they come up with another channel, like making a phone call that maybe goes into a centre, or into a store. 

And the part about like emotion is realizing that, what if we want to insert the human being into the journey at a certain spot, or maybe in a couple different spots, where you can provide that level of connection or empathy really demonstrating genuine care and understanding towards the customers’ needs and concerns. 

And the part of what we've experienced over the past number of years is this idea of we need to deflect away from those channels because they're inefficient. But we also recognise that while digital is becoming better at getting information, at helping people through certain workflows, there are moments in a journey where, “If I could just talk with you to be able to understand something to help me make a decision.”

Because oftentimes, you think about what a bot can do, it's going to be doing things based on information it knows. And many people don't necessarily want to share everything about their personal life, they're going to hold it guarded until they actually speak with someone to say, “Hey, this is what my situation is, is this going to meet my needs? Is this going to help me live my best life? Should I go and get this mortgage.” 

And so, emotion has a bunch of different components and he thinks of how Forrester thinks about these things, empathy being the most important part, but also having bankers or agents or specialists, be able to not just combine the empathy, but also be given the empowerment to actually solve a problem. 

And today, there's a lot of focus on things like personalization, really tailoring interactions to meet a specific customer's preferences and expectations. And also realizing that people take the shortest path, like water, they take the path of least resistance. 

And so, finding ways that we can delight a customer, how we can simplify the process and oftentimes, once you get so far, being able to connect with someone, you realize that wow, I am interacting with a real business, with real people, and he likes to say that people want to do business with people that they know, like, and trust, it's an important aspect. 

And when he’s connecting with you, and he goes, “Gosh, I can have a personal connection with you, I can now have a better relationship with the business because you're now representing the business, you might be better representing the product or service that I'm buying.” And so, it becomes multi-dimensional when you're able to connect with a human being not just personal one on one, but it just changes your view of the business.

Me: Agreed. And so, the human connection is even more important now I believe as you were mentioning just now, different interactions that customers have with a business, because then they feel more connected to that business, they feel like somebody's actually listening to them and they're being heard. 

Tom agreed and stated that he thinks one of the challenges that businesses today are facing is really going forward is how to infuse that human element into the digital experience and realizing that it's not a oh, digital failed, now we're going to go to a human being. It's how do we bring these things together so that while we're in that immersive experience, while we're in the digital channel, you suddenly have multiple modalities. 

And as we start to think about data, and when businesses start to go, oh, yeah, we have a lot of data, but then it becomes, wow, the data lives in so many different places, how do we organize it? And how do we actually take information and insights that suddenly become actionable?  

For many businesses, they realise, “Wow, we have some work to do, there's some homework, there some clean-up, there's things that we need to do.” But when you start to think about understanding what your customers are doing, and you can design an action, a journey, an experience for a customer that's informed by data that suddenly says, “You know what, we're going to create that the high speed lane on the highway, we're going to clear all the clutter.” 

Because many times when you interface with a business, it's almost like a labyrinth, someone designed these things, you have to go left or right, straight, backwards, it feels like and you realize that they were designed for a variety of different things that require clicks and navigating through different things. But what if that data and some of the design informs a better journey that streamline saves you time, that gets you just what you need, and brings the human being into it? He thinks that's really the future of where we're headed, there's a lot of work to be done to get there.

What is Empathy? And Tools That Can Help Strengthen Empathy in a Team Member 

Me: Agreed. So, you also mentioned in your explanation of personal connection, empathy and it's definitely something I believe that is critical for customer experience, especially for organizations, you have some industries that need empathy more than others, I do believe every industry needs it. But I think some needed even more, for example, like the healthcare industry, but what I wanted was your insight as a CEO, you sit at the top, I'm sure you integrate with your team members at all different levels, but it's important to kind of hear from the leader of an organization, what is your view on empathy? And do you believe everyone has the ability to exercise it? And if not, what are some tools that you believe can help to strengthen that particular competence in a team member?

Tom stated that it's a really important piece. And he does think empathy is something that you can lead with, it's almost similar to like a value that they have there in the company, which is like assuming positive intent. But having empathy, which is, can you walk a few steps in the other person's shoes, the customer’s shoes or a colleague, and he thinks there are people that are higher on the they'll call it the EA spectrum that they just have a higher sort of emotional quotient, EQ is the phrase. 

And he thinks the part that we're starting to see is, what if there are things that can fall into the category of having information that based on the conversation that is being had, you can have tips and tricks, you can have information that's being done. And this is where technology, imagine natural language translation is working to listen to the conversation and is helping coach the specialist to have a better conversation. It can listen for tone, it's doing the translation on the actual words, and can bring information in to the conversation to recommend to the specialist how to have a better conversation.  

And part of empathy is demonstrating that genuine care, but also, it falls short, if you're not empowering the people that are delivering the empathy. Because empathy without empowerment can work in the opposite direction, it can actually be kind of like a falsehood. You say you're sorry, but you're not willing to actually do anything to help me out and so you really need to couple those things together, and be able to solve problems, to be able to get the customer where they need to go as efficiently as possible.

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

When asked about online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Tom shared that the thing that he finds with modern day smartphones, is probably he can't live without his smartphone more than anything because he suddenly have access to all the different systems personally at his fingertips. His business phone can ring, he has access into things that need to be HR or finance for approvals. But he feels like we're now in this world where mobility has created this opportunity to be connected wherever you need to be connected. He knows that's a bit of an overarching statement, but he feels like the mobile device has really become a game changer for so many people in business because it gives you access and information at your fingertips.

Me: All right, so your mobile phone is your tool. All right, love it.

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Tom

When asked about books that have a great impact, Tom shared that one that he read a long time ago that he still thinks today is amazing. An author who we see in the New Yorker, Atul Gawande, he wrote a book called The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. And it really went through a process of just understanding what are the things that need to be done, and he speaks from the voice of a surgeon and thinking about performing surgery on someone, and to have the right outcomes, there's a checklist, and there's so many things within a business that can be assisted and aided and improved by doing things around a checklist. 

Another book that he just finished that he really liked is 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan, and the concept of that is pretty simple, in that 2x is very easy to see, you and I can say, “Oh gosh, we need to do 2x more.” It's just a matter of like working harder, a few things that you streamline, but it's something that you can see how to achieve 2x. To achieve 10x, oftentimes, you have to say, “Gosh, we're going to have to do a lot of things differently. And first and foremost, we're going to have to stop doing a lot of things.” 

Because to 10x isn't to say we're going to 10x everything, it's one of the most important things we're going to 10x and it means that all the other things don't matter as much. In fact, some of those things can be eliminated, stopped, it can be deferred, you can hand it off to someone else to do but it's really about how to think about 10xing anything, your personal life, your business. 

And if you think about the 80/20 principle, it can be applied in so many different ways. You really think about saying, “Gosh, to 10x, I've got to put 100% of my energy on the 20% of my life or my business, which means I've got to figure out how to deal with removing that 80% that gives me that 10x leap.” 

And then the last one, this is a fun one. He bought this for his daughters, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, it came out in the beginning of May. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. He loves this book, it's something that you can open up every day and get a little seed that can grow an idea in your head, it's a fun little book to have on the side of his desk.

What Tom is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s excited about, Tom shared that probably the thing that's the most exciting is something that, you think about the parts of any type of business, they've spent so much time really thinking about how do they build great experiences, but what people want to know more than anything else, is when and where should we have those great experiences. And the part of that is to understand where people need help. And there's a piece of this, which is realizing that oftentimes people and human beings want to be able to do things and they don't necessarily rely on or can understand all the information, all the cues. 

And so, if they as a company can figure out how to help businesses know when and where to have experiences that can transform how they compete, and how they deliver an exceptional experience that really puts them at the forefront of where they're going as a business. 

And in doing that, a lot of this work that they're doing is really informed by taking a more data centric approach. And so, they're spending a fair amount of time really rethinking how we look at things. They've always looked at them through a few sets of lenses and now they're really taking a step back and saying, “You know what, we're going to look at the same thing. But we're going to look at it through a different set of lenses to really rethink how we approach those things.” 

Because oftentimes, inexperience happens because a lot of other things have informed that experience as to like when and where it happens, didn't just happen. It happened because of a lot of other things. And if they can understand what the best things are, then they can inform more frequently and consistently how to have them to deliver the right outcomes.

Where Can We Find Peter Online

LinkedIn – Thos Martin

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Tom Uses

When asked about quote that he tends to revert to, Tom shared that there's a quote from Scott Peck. And he’s also thinking about one other one, but the one from Scott Peck is pretty simple, and it rings true. But when you talk about adversity, the quote is, “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. And it's a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand it and accept it, then it no longer becomes difficult.” 

And so, as you realize that there's another part of this about optimism, optimists view challenges and hardship as temporary things that can be overcome. And so, he’s a big believer in optimism because to get anywhere, you must first imagine it, you must first dream it and then you can work towards that dream. And then that dream can become a reality. And it doesn't mean that there aren't going to be challenges or pitfalls along the way, but you recognize that if you believe that those things are only temporary, you can continue to thrive.

So, we want to thank you so much, Tom, for taking time out of your very busy schedule and coming on this podcast, sharing all of this great information, what your company does Glance, your views as it relates to creating that personal connection, ensuring that the digital is interceding in a very great way with the human connection, because both need to work together in order to deliver that fantastic, exceptional experience that we want our customers to have. And of course, to be very intentional about designing that experience in a way that our customers actually value the efforts and the experience that we've created for them.

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 Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

•     10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan

•     Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdon I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly

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! 

Joey Coleman helps companies keep their customers and employees. As an award-winning speaker, he shares his first 100 Days® methodology for improving customer and employee retention with organizations around the world, for example, Whirlpool, Volkswagen Australia and Zappos.  

His Wall Street Journal #2 best-selling book, Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days, shows how to turn any sale into a lifelong customer. And his upcoming book, Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Rention, details a framework companies around the world can use to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement.

Questions

•  Could you tell us a little bit about that book – (Never Lose a Customer Again)? And then we can go into the new one that you recently launched.

•  And your book (Never Lose an Employee Again) focuses on the phases that you should use to try and retain these employees. And those phases are Assess, Accept, Affirm, Activate, Acclimate, Accomplish, Adopt and Advocate. So, can you just give us maybe a brief summary on each of those and why it's relevant? 

•  Could you share with us what are some of your favourite things you've seen brands do to create the kind of culture that you're talking about where employees are advocates?

•  What is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

•  Can you also share with us maybe one or two books that you have read, could be books that you read like a long time ago, or even ones that you've read recently, but they have had a great impact on you.

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

•  Where can listeners find you online?

•  Now, Joey, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, 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 reason you got derailed or demotivated, it kind of helps to get you back on track.

Highlights  

About Joey’s Books – Never Lose a Customer Again & Never Lose an Employee Again 

Me: So, let's start off with a little bit about your first book, Never Lose a Customer Again, for those of our listeners that may have just recently started listening to our podcasts and unfortunately weren't able to tap into that awesome episode. Could you tell us a little bit about that book? And then we can go into the new one that you recently launched.

Joey shared that so about 5 years ago, he wrote a book called Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days. And the premise of this book is that we spend so much time trying to find new customers that we forget to pay attention to the customers that we've already acquired, people who have already raised their hand and said, “I want to do business with you.” The premise of that book is based on some staggering research that they both did, and came across that showed that somewhere between 20% and 70% of new customers will decide to stop doing business with you before the 100 day anniversary of becoming a customer. 

So, as quickly as you're bringing customers in the front door, they're running out the back door. And the book outlines a framework that's based on 20 plus years of his experience as a consultant and speaker and agency owner. And it outlines a framework for how do we navigate our customer through eight phases of a journey, where we're creating the kind of remarkable experiences that will keep them coming back for more.

Me: Alright, so before we actually started the official recording, you and I were kind of having an informal discussion as it relates to employee experience and your new book, Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Rention, really focuses on what are some strategies, what are some tools, you've provided us with a great framework as to how it is that organizations can keep talent that is really impactful to the organization and they won't leave, because at the end of the day, the employees grow, the company grows. So, can you tell us a little bit about this book? And then I have some more specific questions I want to ask you based on my own reading as well.

Joey shared that he often thinks of customer experience and employee experience as being two sides of the same coin. We can't expect to have a remarkable experience for our customers if our employees aren't delivering that remarkable experience. 

And the way our employees deliver remarkable experience is they have a context for what that is and they have a framework for how to continue to deliver that to the people they serve. Interestingly enough, when he set out to write this book, he had that first 100 days research from his first book in mind, and when he went and looked at the parallels in the world of employee experience, he found that they were shockingly similar, that same significant percentage of people who leave as a new customer in the first 100 days was mirrored in the world of employees who start a new job, and then quit that job before the 100 day anniversary. 

In fact, depending on which research you looked at, it was again somewhere between 20% and 70%. And these numbers he found to be absolutely staggering. He thinks many organizations have felt the pain of an employee leaving, but very few organizations are paying attention to the speed at which employees are leaving, and the myriad reasons why employees are leaving so that we can hopefully develop frameworks and structures and philosophies and methodologies that will keep our employees engaged and retained for the long term.

Never Lose an Employee Again – Phases You Should Use to Try and Retain Employees

Me: Yes, and your book (Never Lose an Employee Again) focuses on the phases that you should use to try and retain these employees. And those phases are Assess, Accept, Affirm, Activate, Acclimate, Accomplish, Adopt and Advocate. So, can you just give us maybe a brief summary on each of those and why it's relevant?

Joey stated absolutely. And he'll try to go through these quickly because there are 8 of them, we could spend an entire podcast talking about any one of these phases. But for context before he describes them, the reason they all start with the letter A is he wanted folks to kind of have this thought that if your employees felt you were succeeding in each of these 8 phases, it's like getting straight A's on your report card in school, you're doing a great job, and you're worthy of continuing to be advanced, because you're delivering a great experience. 

So, the first phase is the Assess Phase. This is when a prospective employee is trying to decide whether or not they want to come work with you. They're looking at your job descriptions, your want ads, the about us page on your website, the careers page on your website. They're submitting an application, they're going through your interview process, they're sharing their resume, you're doing reference checks, all the things that lead up for an employer to decide whether or not they want to hire this specific person. And the time period where the potential employee is also assessing whether or not they want to join your enterprise. 

We then come to phase two the Accept Phase. In this phase, the employer extends an offer, and if we're lucky, that desired candidate accepts our offer. 

We then move to the Affirm Phase. Now, this phase occurs immediately after the new employee has decided to accept the job offer. And he’s sure all of Yanique’s amazing customer experience experts are very familiar with the concept of buyer's remorse. What they may not be as familiar with is the concept of new hires remorse. It's the same thing as buyer's remorse, it's scientifically proven that this happens anytime someone accepts a job offer, they begin to doubt the decision they just made. And in the affirm stage, we need to reaffirm their choice to counterbalance that fear and doubt and uncertainty they're naturally feeling and in their new hires remorse stage. 

We then come to phase four, the Activate Phase. Now, of all the 8 phases, this is the only phase that is limited in its duration, first day, and that day is the first official day on the job. 

What is it like you come to work for that first day? 

And in the immortal words of country music legend Bonnie Raitt, “Have you given us something to talk about?” Because every employee is going to go home that night to their spouse, their significant other, their children, their parents, their roommate, whoever it is in their life, and that loved one, the first question they're going to ask when they come through the door is, how was your first day at work?  

How are your employees going to answer that question? Have you created such a remarkable experience on that first day that they have something to talk about? 

We then come to the Acclimate Phase, phase 5. Now, the acclimate phase starts on the second day on the job and can last for weeks or even months as the new employee gets used to your way of doing business. They learn the various roles and responsibilities they're going to have, they understand better the requirements of what they're supposed to do, they understand the relationships with their co-workers and colleagues, and how all those pieces fit together for them to be great at their job. They're also learning your tools and your cadence of communication, and the chain of command and the various things of how your business operates. We need to hold our employees hands while they acclimate to the job and too many employers just kind of push the employee into the deep end of the swimming pool and say, “Well, just go ahead and swim.” Instead of taking care of them and making sure they understand what's happening. 

We then come to phase 6, the Accomplish Phase. This is when the new employee achieves the goal they had when they originally decided to accept your job offer. See, every employee has a vision of what this new career will be like. Whether that will be more responsibility, more autonomy, more opportunities to develop new skills, they have a vision of what they're hoping to accomplish. The challenge is most employers not only don't know what that vision is, but they're not paying attention to the employees progress as they track towards achieving those goals. If we don't do that as organizations, we can't celebrate with our team members when they accomplish their goals. 

We then come to phase 7, the Adopt Phase, this is when the employee becomes loyal to you and only you, they're committed, they're not going to look for jobs elsewhere, they're not listening to those calls from head-hunters or recruiters that want to hire them away. Almost every business on the planet desires adopters. But what's fascinating is very few businesses do anything to acknowledge when an employee becomes an adopter. We have a tendency to take those employees for granted, even though they are the lifeblood of our enterprise. And if and only if, we've helped to hold our employees hands through those first 7 phases do we have the right, the privilege, the honour of having them transition to the eighth and final phase. 

The Advocate Phase, where our employee becomes a raving fan for us, singing our praises far and wide. They're going on glass door and writing reviews. Anytime we have a new position open, they're recruiting their best colleagues, the people they've worked with in the past, the smartest humans they know to come apply for this job because they know it's a great place to work and they want amazing people to work there with them. 

The way he always test with business owners who say to him, “Oh, Joey, a lot of our teammates are advocates. And so many of our people are advocates.” He'll say, “Great. Here's a little test to see if that's true or not. The last time you had an open position in your organisation, what percentage of the candidates you interviewed were direct referrals from your existing team members?”  

What's interesting is those people who were previously saying, oh, everyone's an advocate….kind of go, well, actually, no one. So, he’s like, well, then you really don't have as many advocates as you think you do. 

So, those are the 8 phases and the last thing he'll say on this is that when an employee is promoted, they go back to the beginning, they go back to that assess phase, trying to decide, “Is this a promotion I want? What am I going to do? Okay, I'll accept the promotion. Oh, should I have accepted the promotion, I liked my old job. But this new job even though it maybe comes with more money or a better title, it also comes with a lot more responsibility and a new learning curve.” And then we've got to hold their hand and acclimate them. And what happens is the longer an employee is with the organization, the more they cycle through these phases, yet, most organizations aren't paying attention to the fact that the employee is going back to the beginning. And we have an opportunity to reengage and reconnect with them as they navigate through the 8 phases the next time.

Me: I love those phases and I love that question that you asked, like that really puts them on the spot and makes them practically say, “Okay, do we really have advocates in this organization?”

What Brands Joey Has Observed Creating a Culture Where Employees are Advocates 

Me: Now, Joey, could you share with us what are some of your favourite things you've seen brands do to create the kind of culture that you're talking about where employees are advocates, especially in this remote driven world that we have, I mean, the pandemic and COVID has definitely changed how organizations are approaching their business models, many of them are taking on a more hybrid approach. I know, for example, in Kingston, Jamaica here, you do have some forward thinking organizations who genuinely recognize that their employees can still be just as productive or even more working from home but then you find you have some dinosaurs who still believe people need to physically sit in traffic and go to work from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, and they just need to see the people in the office to know that they're doing the work. But what are your thoughts on that?

Joey stated that Yanique is correct. There's still a lot of dinosaur era thinking going on in many organizations today, despite the fact that we have proven both statistically and across almost every industry on the planet, that remote work is just as effective, if not more effective than in person work. In fact, most of the research and the studies show that when employees work from home, they are more productive, they are more engaged, they are happier, and they feel a stronger connection to the fact that they are able to balance their work with their life. 

So, if your organization isn't actively pursuing, at the very least hybrid, if not pure, remote work, he can set a stopwatch for how much longer you're going to be in business. It’s just the reality that the landscape has changed. If we were to roll the clock back, and he was to say to you, “Yanique, you can still run your business, but you're not allowed to use the internet.” Most businesses would be like, “Oh, my God, how am I supposed to function?” This is a fundamental aspect of business, remote work, work from home, non-centralized, come to an office work. When we get about, he thinks 10 years down the road, it's going to feel like saying to someone, you can't use the internet, saying to someone you have to come to the office is going to be the equivalent of a shock to the system and a foolish statement as saying, you have to run your business without using electricity, or the internet or a phone. The ship has sailed, this is over. 

Now, when you asked him about his favourites, it's kind of a tough question because there are over 50 case studies in the new book from all 7 continents. And so, asking him to pick a favourite is kind of tough, but here's what he will tell you is a common thread, especially amongst the organizations that are recognizing the benefits of hybrid and or remote work. And that is that in an increasingly digital era, the smartest companies in the planet are making sure to invest in analogue interactions to attach to and be compatible with their digital interactions. What does he mean by that?  

Well, if you've got everyone working remotely, and you're not having that office water cooler time, and you're not having everybody come to the same office, while it is beneficial for your productivity and your engagement and your employee happiness, they're still humans. So we need to find ways to build additional connection with them, that transcends the digital sphere. So, that could be sending gifts to their house, it could be hosting in person events every once in a while maybe, a group gathering twice a year, most of the research shows that if you have a fully remote team, you should strive to get together in person at least twice per year with the whole team. 

But here's the secret on that, it's not about getting together in person to have meetings and to do work, it's about getting together to create connection. So, one of the companies that he profiled in the book is LEGO Corporation. Most folks listening are familiar with LEGO the children's toy, or the adult toy in his case, he loves building, he was building LEGO sets this weekend. And his 2 boys who are younger came up and they were like, “Daddy, can we help build too?” To show you, he was building on his own and then they wanted to play and he included them, and it was great fun. 

But LEGO does something where every year they have a play day. Now, LEGO is a company that makes toys. So, of course they believe strongly in the concept of play. And every year they shut down all of their offices globally, for a full day, all their stores, all their corporate headquarters, all of their factories, and everyone comes together and what do they do that day? 

They play, that's all they do. 

They don't have team meetings, they don't talk about the vision of the future, they just play. And in interviews with LEGO employees globally, when you ask them what one of their favourite kind of traditions or rituals within the organization, they say that the LEGO Play Day is something they think about all year leading up to it. Humans are not that complicated, we like the idea of social interaction, we like the idea of play, we like the idea of getting to know people personally so we can have a personal and emotional connection with them, not just a work connection.

Me: I agree. That kind of dovetails nicely into my next question, Joey because with your new book, Never Lose an Employee Again and I find a lot of times when I talk to some of my clients, especially not necessarily those who are in a HR function, but even the business owners themselves. They will grapple or struggle with the fact that if they're losing employees, they believe it's a lot of times monetary. And I have found that a lot of times when an employee has reached a point where they're resolute in their decision to say I want to leave this company and go somewhere else, even if they're offered more money, they still wouldn't stay, they'd still leave. So, I believe that a lot of them would look forward to more non-monetary benefits, like simple to the example you gave about LEGO, a simple play day something that people look forward to, it's our sense of community, you get to meet and connect with people. And to me, there is no dollar value that you can put on those types of experiences. So, I guess my question is do you agree with me?

Joey stated that only 100% does he agree with everything Yanique just said. It's really fascinating, if we look at the research that has been done on why employees leave, the typical study on why employees leave is based on a sample set of somewhere between 200 and 500 respondents. Now, if you know anything about statistics or anybody listening has experience with statistics, a sample set of 200 to 500 results is not nearly as robust, as if that number were larger, and arguably significantly larger. 

In doing the research for the book, they came across some studies that had been done by the Work Institute, where they interviewed 234,000 employees who were quitting their jobs and asked them, “Why are you quitting?”  

Now, many business owners around the world will say, “Well, my employee quit because they got more money somewhere else are someone's going to pay more money somewhere else.” They make it all about the dollars, all about the money. But the research doesn't show that to be true. Only 9% of employees globally, quit for more money. 

So, then that led him to wonder what about the other 91%? 

Why are those people quitting? 

And what this research found from the Work Institute was that the number one reason, the greatest reason given 23% of the respondents, so almost two and a half times the number of people quit for this other reason. And that reason was, they didn't see a clear path forward for their career at that organization. They didn't know what their next job was going to be. So, when we as employers, an employee comes in, and they're like, “Oh, I'm going to leave” and we're like, “Oh, we'll pay you more, we'll give you more benefits, we'll give you a better title.” These are not the things they're looking for. So, it's kind of like we're offering them things that at this point in the game really don't matter as much. And it almost feels insulting, because we're not listening to why they're leaving. 

Instead, we need to move the conversation forward. We need to have the conversation before they come to us saying, “I want to quit” and have a conversation around….

“What are your goals as an employee?

We have goals for you as your employer, things we'd like you to do.

But what are you hoping to accomplish in your life?

Are you trying to get out of debt?

Are you trying to be more fit?

Are you trying to start a family?

Are you trying to buy a house?

Are you trying to take care of ageing parents?

Are you trying to go on vacation?

What are the things that are goal?

Are you trying to run a marathon?

What are your goals?

What are the things you're hoping to achieve?" 

And then as employers, we need to look for opportunities to support our people in those goals as well. See, for all too long, he thinks we've had this belief, “we” meaning most organizations globally, that well, there's business and there's personal. And when you're at work, we've just want you to focus on the business, don't bring your personal life to work. But what's interesting is almost every employer on the planet expects you to think about work when you're not at work. They expect you to answer emails, to have your phone on you, we need you to work a couple hours late or if you're going on vacation, we might need you to do one or two calls. 

The business has no problem asking the employee to chip into their personal time to do business related work. But God forbid we ask the business to allow the employee to chip into their business time to do personal things. For some reason we think that's offensive or improper.  

Humans are humans, he would posit this, the employer of choice in the future is going to be the employer who pays as much attention to what happens in their employee’s life between 5:00 pm and 9:00 am as they do compared to what happens in that employee's life between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm.

Me: Agreed 100% Joey, I am there with you.

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

When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Joey shared that since the last time they had a podcast was about 5 years ago, he must confess he’s not 100% sure of all the specific answers he gave then. But the one online tool that he’s using right now that he finds increases efficiency and productivity, but also makes for he thinks a pretty great experience is the online scheduling tool Calendly. 

And the reason why he loves it, because often, as he’s sure you do, he has folks saying to him, “Joey, we'd like to arrange a time to connect, we want to have a call, we want to talk about a project, we want to talk about a future speech.” Because he spends most of his days giving speeches. “We want to interview you for a podcast.” Whatever it may be, when he can send them a link that allows them to see the days he’s available and it syncs up beautifully with his calendar, it makes everybody's life faster, and more efficient, and more seamless. There isn't the back and forth of, “Well, what about next Tuesday at three?” “Oh, I can't do that.” “What about Thursday at nine?” “Nope, I can't do that.” “What about the following Tuesday?” And it makes things work better, so he’s a big fan of Calendly.

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Joey

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Joey jokingly stated that this is a completely unfair question only because he loves reading books. He tries to read a book a week, there are so many wonderful, wonderful books out in the world that he absolutely loves. So, he’ll give an example of a book that is in the customer experience space, because he knows a lot of listeners spend most of their time in the CX space. And then he'll give one that's in the employee experience space since that's what they've been talking about. 

So, in terms of the customer experience, he absolutely loved the book Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates by Brittany Hodak. An amazing book, it's been out not even a year yet, it came out earlier this year in January of 2023. Fantastic book, incredibly well written, Brittney Hodak is very much an emerging but also a well-established voice in the CX space. She's smart as a whip, she's got an amazing story. She's incredibly talented. If you're not paying attention to Brittney Hodak and if you haven't read her book, Creating Superfans, go check it out, you will not be disappointed. 

Now, on the employee experience side, he would look to the book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships by Michael Bungay Stanier. Now, what he loves about Michael's book is it helps us with very practical tools for creating better connection, and better relationships with the people we work with. It's a fast read, but it's a powerful read, how to work with almost anyone. 

Michael is smart as a whip, he's an amazing human being, he's been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. And he just has a really tactical, yet powerfully thoughtful premise in this book, that we need to be spending more time investing relationships we create with our colleagues and our co-workers and really diving into the relationship side instead of just, “Oh, well they work at the same place as I do. And so, we have to interact with each other.” He's about building the relationships. So, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone by Michael Bungay Stanier is absolutely fantastic.

What Joey is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Joey shared that there's so many. He’s an excitable guy, you probably pick up on that and anybody who's listening to the conversation. There's so many things he’s excited about, right now he would say the thing that he’s most focused on is getting the word out about this new book. He’s so excited about the response, the book debuted at number 5 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list. There is clearly a need for employee experience enhancement globally. And just the chance that he gets to speak at events, to do workshops for individual companies to help them get better at both engaging and retaining their people has him incredibly excited. 

They're delving into exploring creating some customized workbooks that folks will be able to avail themselves of and purchase that are going to really bring the ideas in the book. He likes to think the book stands alone by itself and that it gives you as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, it gives a high picture strategy, but it’s also tactical on the ground thing you can do.

One of the challenges of writing the book is that you can't fit everything you want into the book because otherwise the book would be 10,000 pages long. So, he’s excited to create more tactical tools that people can use on an almost weekly basis. Like what is the thing we're going to focus on making our employee experience better this week and give people those kinds of ideas and suggestions so that we can make it more fun to go to work. We can create more play, we can have more excitement with the things we do. 

Yeah, you mentioned something about Gary Vaynerchuk just now, but you chipped out for a bit. So, could you repeat that part for me, please?

Joey stated that he was going to say, Gary Vaynerchuk has this really interesting concept of dirt and clouds. This idea that we want things that are very tactical and practical that we can do down in the dirt, but we also want big picture strategy. We want things that are kind of in the clouds, kind of the 35,000 foot view and it's something that he really tried to create in the book, which is there is strategy in the book, but there are also really tactical things you can do.

One of the things he’s excited about is adding even more examples on the tactical side

available as workbooks and downloads and things like that that people can access to continue to work at enhancing their employee experiences on an ongoing basis.

Where Can Listeners Find Joey Online?

Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention – Hardcover – e-book – Audiobook

Website – www.joeycoleman.com

LinkedIn – Joey Coleman

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Joey Uses

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Joey stated that he doesn't necessarily have a quote that he comes to, but in those scenarios, he likes to try to get very clear on what the situation is they're dealing with. Let him explain that a little bit. He used to be a Criminal Defense Lawyer, and so his job used to be to keep the wrongfully accused out of prison. And if he misspoke, now he’s a full time professional speaker, but in those days, speaking in the courtroom, if he misspoke, someone went to prison. And that usually meant they went to prison for a long time.

So, whenever he’s faced with a challenging situation, he asked himself two questions. Number one, “Did anyone die in this scenario we're dealing with? Is there a death that has happened?” And thankfully it's very rare that he would ever answer that question yes, usually no one has died.

The second question that he ask is, “Did anyone go to prison without the possibility of parole in the future?” Because if you go to prison without the possibility of parole, you've got a really big problem. If someone has died, you've got a really big problem. But if no one died and no one went to prison without the possibility for parole, you actually don't have that big of a problem. You've got a situation, you've got a circumstance, you've got something you maybe need to focus on or address. 

But he finds that that criteria of evaluating the situation allows him to keep some perspective on how much he should be getting worked up or frustrated or angry about a scenario. And instead say, “This could be a lot worse. This is a challenging time to move through. But the consequences aren't that terrible and irrevocable that we're not going to be okay on the other side.”

Me: I like it. I've asked this question to over 150 guests because we're approaching close to 200 episodes for this podcast. And it's amazing that most guests would give maybe a motivational quote, not necessarily ask themselves a question. So, it's interesting the perspective that you take because then you're able as you identified to really recognize is this really an issue that we need to be raising our blood pressure and losing our mind, or can we just adjust our approach and decide, okay, we're going to tackle it this way, these are steps we're going to take and this is how we're going to approach it. 

Joey stated that's definitely what he tries to do because he agrees with Yanique. There are very few things that we should be raising our blood pressure in a negative way. If your heart's beating faster because you're inspired, you're eager, you're in love, you're feeling those things, great. But if your heart rate is raising because of stress, because of worry, because of fear, he thinks there's an opportunity to approach the situation from a different perspective to kind of keep things a little more calm.

Me: Thank you so much for coming back on our podcast. I just want to express my greatest gratitude to you. And of course, congratulations again on your new book, Never Lose an Employee Again. I think it really will be a great complement to your original book, Never Lose a Customer Again. You brought up some excellent points, really practical stuff that employees and employers across different parts of the world in different industries can definitely think about, hope everyone that listens to this episode will go and grab a copy of your book as you mentioned in whatever version they like to listen to it in, whether it be audio or e-book or the physical book where they read. But it was really, really insightful. I love these types of conversations that get me excited, it doesn't even feel like I'm doing a podcast, it feels like I'm sitting down with a friend having a cup of coffee or a nice glass of lemonade and just having a great conversation. And these types of conversations really fulfil my soul, makes me feel good inside. So, I hope it was as fun for me as it was for you.

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

·  Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sales inot Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days by Joey Coleman

·  Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention by Joey Coleman

·  Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates by Brittany Hodak

·  How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships by Michael Bungay Stanier

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!

Randy Mercer is an omnichannel product content expert with over 15 years of industry experience. He leads 1WorldSync’s global product management and solution architecture teams, aligning the company's portfolio with current customer needs and emerging market trends.

A frequent commentator for national and trade media outlets covering retail and e-commerce news, Randy leverages his extensive background in item and data content alignment, e-commerce application development and solution designed to guide 1WorldSync’s strategic product roadmap and vision. 

Questions

•  Now, could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey? How it is that you got from where you're coming from, to where you are today?

•  Could you tell our audience a little bit about 1WorldSync, what it is that your organisation does?

•  What are some key things that if we had a listener, tapping into this podcast, who was in that similar space looking to strengthen the architecture of their user experience, whether it be the digital web, or even the face to face or even through the contact centre that you believe they should be focused on primarily at this time?

•  What have been some maybe one or two emerging market trends that you've seen in the whole customer experience space, not just necessarily from a face to face interaction, but even digital?

•  Could you share with our listeners based on your experience especially from a design perspective, what are some key things that you need to consider in order to ensure or at least to get as close to being consistent?

•  Could you share with our listeners as well, 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 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?

•  Now, could you also share with our listeners 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.

•  Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed? It kind of helps to get you back on track.

Highlights

Randy’s Journey 

Me: Now, could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey? How it is that you got from where you're coming from, to where you are today?

Randy shared that he started out as an application developer about 20 years ago, and through that, doing some customer development for a few customers, he found himself developing applications for the space that he’s in today, which is product content and sharing and distribution of that content. And fast forward, about two decades, he’s now been with 1WorldSync for about 10 years, and had been leading the product organization for about the last 5 years or so of that.

What is 1WorldSync and What Your Company Does?

Me: Could you tell our audience a little bit about 1WorldSync, what it is that your organisation does?

Randy shared that they're a SaaS platform that sits predominantly in the retail space and they sit between large manufacturers, CPG manufacturers primarily, and large retail organizations, many of which you would know, and they allow those organizations to share master data and e-com content back and forth between the two organizations to power pretty much any channel.

Strengthening the Architecture of the User Experience Whether by Digital Web, Face-to-Face or Contact Centre

Me: So, you're in that digital space, I was reading something that Shep Hyken sent out recently about the different acronyms that you have now, you have EX, CX, WX, UX and he was kind of giving a breakdown in his newsletter as to the different user experiences that exist on what the acronyms represent. Just thinking about the different experiences that the customer has, based on your experience and your area, what I picked up from your bio was you focus a lot on the landscape and the architecture of the experience. What are some key things that if we had a listener, tapping into this podcast, who was in that similar space looking to strengthen the architecture of their user experience, whether it be the digital web, or even the face to face or even through the contact centre that you believe they should be focused on primarily at this time?

Randy stated that when they look at their customer base, and their target market, what they're primarily helping them with is to the consumer experience associated with e-com primarily. But they also extend that into the in store experience as well. So, they're often very focused on for them, that consistency between the in store experience and the e-com experience, in terms of the content that they're using to power all of that. So, a very consistent product representation across all of the channels to include the imagery, the search engine optimized copy, rich media, in the terms of videos - AR, VR, all of those things. 

But aside from all of that, when you think of just how all of that comes to be something that they help their customers with a lot is what they describe as orchestrating the content or the consumer experience. How do you get from creating content, managing it, distributing it into the marketplace, and then monitoring how it's selling for you. All the things that go into orchestrating those behaviours and those activities is just secondarily something that they help their customers with a lot.

Market Trends in the Customer Experience Space

Me: Now, in your space, your business and what you're doing. What have been some maybe one or two emerging market trends that you've seen in the whole customer experience space, not just necessarily from a face to face interaction, but even digital seeing that many customers, that's where they hang out, it's easier for them, the convenience is better, and it's less hassle for them.

Randy shared that the biggest thing that they recognize today is just the expectations of the consumer that’s shopping online, in terms of the types of information and the types of content that they're expecting to see when they're doing their shopping on any e-commerce site. Beyond that, he just mentioned the consistency related to that, what they know in the consumer surveys that they do is that consumers today are not just shopping on one site, they're often looking at items across a number of different digital properties before they finally make a buying decision. And they're looking for more and more content. 

So, one of the expectations that they see evolving is just this expectation of consistency across these digital channels, if they don't see that, it damages the trust they might have in the information they're seeing. If it's not the same, like which one of them is correct. And then sometimes they just move on to other products, and things like that. 

So, the other thing that they see evolving around the online consumer experience, is the fact that consumers don't like to read, they like to look at pictures. So, when they help their customers with the imagery that they use to depict their products, more and more, they're starting to create imagery that contains some of the verbiage that is actually in the SEO copy. But again, consumers don't often read that, they're just looking at the picture so annotated images becoming more and more frequent, hotspot images where they've got spots on the images, where you can click and pull up some specific details. 

And then hero imagery, where they take a front facing product image and they call out a few very key details about that product as a way of just informing the consumer without them having to read some of the text.

Me: Right, so you kind of have to find a way to make the information pop, making it less frustrating for them to try and dig through your website to try and find what they're looking for, but it's there.

Key Things to Consider in Order to Ensure Consistency

Me: You mentioned expectations and consistency and I quite agree with you as it relates to both. I find a lot of organizations, it's not that they don't deliver a great experience or maybe that's their intention is to give a great experience. But the challenge is that they don't do it consistently. Could you share with our listeners based on your experience especially from a design perspective, what are some key things that you need to consider in order to ensure or at least to get as close to ensuring because I know nothing in life is guaranteed, to get closer to being consistent?

Randy stated that it is just attention to detail. So, within their platform that allows the manufacturers to manage and prepare their data to be sharing that with the marketplace, they just provide a lot of tools that help them with the finer points of the content. A really good example of that is, a significant percentage of their customers are in the food CPG space, so selling food products into retail channel. And today in the area of transparency and an intense interest in nutritionals, allergens, those kinds of things is related to food, the key to all of that is the nutrition fact panel that you often see represented on the back of food packaging, being represented digitally online, if that is not absolutely consistent with the package itself and then maybe other digital representations of that, you're very quickly going to damage the consumers trust in that particular product is related to what they're putting in their body or feeding to their family. 

So, they provide a lot of things, a lot of tools to help ensure that consistency all the way down to the point that they'll assemble that information on behalf of the brand, driven by imagery of the packaging and they use OCR, so optical scanning and some AI to digitize that information. So, just an example, that's just a really key one in their space. 

Beyond that, just always goes back to the imagery, that's the first thing that consumers are looking at when they look at a product online on any digital channel is that imagery. So, the degree to which you can distribute that all from one point of origination, which in for their customers oftentimes is their platform, the better chance you stand of having it consistent across the digital channels that you're trying to sell that product on.

Me: And of course the consistency leads to trust because if you're consistent then you become a brand that they trust and if the trust factor is there, then they're more likely to continue purchasing from you. You also mentioned at the beginning, the expectations and I find a lot of times that there is a big disconnect between what is advertised and marketed, and of course, that's what sets up the expectations of the client. And then what the client actually receives, what has been your experience in trying to ensure that there is as close an alignment as possible between customer expectations and what is actually communicated by the brand?

Randy stated that that is a really good question. And it's something that they talk about a lot on the retailer or the e-tail side. They talked to those customers about making sure they're not manufacturing returns, right. And you can manufacture return by doing exactly what you just described, misrepresenting the product online, somebody buys it, they think they're getting one thing, they get it, and it's not exactly what they thought they were buying, and so they return it. And then as the e-tailer, you're in a worse position than if you had not even sold the thing in the first place, because you're dealing with the expense of that return. 

So, again, when they work with their brands, relative to how they can provide the best content out into the marketplace to represent their products online, oftentimes, for some of them that they're encouraging them to just let them do it, ship the product to them, they'll take the imagery of the product, they'll drive the product information, and that way they know when it leaves their platform, out into whatever retailer or e-tailer is going to use that content, they're confident that it's absolutely representative of the product itself. 

That said, they never do that without the brand sign off on it, right, they give them the chance to say, “Yep, that accurately represents my product.” But as opposed to just letting the brand provide some content that they don't really have visibility for the origination of that. It's just easier often if they just do it on behalf of the brand, to just makes sure it's absolutely representative of the product.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Randy stated that they use a lot of tools that provide digital read only representations of product data that they assemble from a lot of different sources. And often they're using AI to do that to draw up a number of sources within their applications, create that representation as a way to visually represent the items that will be in in ecom. So, in their case, they use an application within their enterprise called Digital Catalog and it's literally what it says. And that's just the primary mechanism they have to cross check, what is the product going to look like when you actually do publish it online across any channel? So, that's a key one right there.

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Randy

When asked about books that have had a great impact, Randy shared that he tends to read a lot of books about product management. And so, most recently, can't remember the titles, but two of them are the most recent ones are just around the evolution of product Management. And how folks think about doing that today in ways different than they used to. And what he means by that is at one time, it was very driven around the expectations of specific customers and trying to drive your products based on maybe some expectations that may not be pervasive to your entire community. And today, we think about it a lot more from a pragmatic perspective. 

In fact, pragmatic marketing is one of those areas of materials that they leverage in their product management practice. And the net of all of that is, think very pragmatically about the solutions that you're developing or the products that you're managing, in a way that the solutions you're providing are pervasive to your customer community is something that they're willing to pay for because you're solving a valuable problem for them. So, he thinks pragmatic marketing is probably one of the most recent things that he can refer to.

What Randy is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Randy shared that for him, in their organization specifically, they've acquired a few technology platforms over the last to 2 or 3 years, that the fun part of that is not only having access to some additional technology to add to your solution portfolio, but just the opportunity that you have to work with just brand new sets of people that come along with whatever platform you might acquire. 

And what they always find is, in addition to the value of the technology itself, it's the value of the people that comes along with it, right. So, just new skill sets, new personalities, new energy. So, for him, he’s literally on the road right now just visiting one of their recently acquired organizations. And it's just very exciting to him to just have that new experience and bring new people into the organization. And you get a lot of new perspectives and so for him, that's top of mind.

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Randy Uses 

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Randy stated yes, he just used it earlier today. And it might sound kind of negative when I says it but he always say, “Don't come with problems, come with solutions.” And it's just so often that folks want to expose or draw attention to an issue without much forethought to what you can do about it and just the approach that he just tries to encourage is, if you see an issue or some friction within either the organization or maybe something that you're trying to do, think through it first, how can you solve that problem and then that's what you bring forward. And that's what you shed light on, versus just the issue itself. 

So, he always tend to draw back on that, even with himself because the knee jerk reaction is to just moan and groan about something that isn't working quite the way you want it to. And he just has to remind himself, think about it first and find the solution and then that makes the rest of it much easier to deal with.

Me: Thank you so much for coming on our podcast today and sharing all of these great insights as it relates to your organization and your expertise. And also some of the things that organizations can consider as it relates to consistency and expectations when they're trying to design a landscape for customers across the different channels that they're serving them to ensure that they have a delightful and a fantastic experience. I'm sure our listeners gained great insights from the information you shared with us today. Thank you so much.

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

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!

Peter Mullen brings more than two decades of marketing leadership to his role as Interactions’ CMO. Previously, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing at Payactiv, where he led customer success marketing, lead-gen programming, customer acquisition, product marketing and more. 

Prior, he held prominent marketing and communications roles at VXI Global Solutions, Comcast and Netflix.

Questions

•  We always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about your journey, how it is that you got to where you are today.

•  So, you are currently the CMO of Conversational AI at Interactions, correct?

• Seeing that you work at an organisation that you're dealing with troubleshooting of customers challenges on a daily basis, could you share with us maybe one or two success stories that you've had with clients? And you know what the impact has been for their business as a result of your approach and methodology?

•  How do you maintain the human touch even though you're using AI and how impactful has that been for your clients?

•  What would be two to three things that you would recommend that they need to focus on for the latter part of 2023, preparing for 2024, in order to ensure that they stay relevant, and they're able to hopefully do a better job than their competition?

•  Could you also share with our listeners 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 have had the biggest impact on you, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but still has had a great impact on you.

•  Could you also share with our listeners 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?

• Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests in times of adversity or challenge, do you have a quote that you would use or revert back to, to kind of help you to get you back on track if for any reason you got derailed or you felt demotivated or you just got off the course of what you were doing? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Peter’s Journey

Peter shared that he lives in Silicon Valley. He’s been doing marketing for more than 20 years, which means he had the opportunity to arrive in Silicon Valley just as the internet was becoming massively adopted across the world and began to change everything. His background is as a journalist, and more on the liberal arts side of things. So, for him, his journey was one of spending several years moving into the tech world, and really focusing on narratives, how do we tell the stories about the great things that we're building?

How do we make it understandable, digestible?

And ultimately, what type of impact can we bring to people in many cases who are seeing things for the first time?

And Netflix was a defining moment where they reinvented how the world gains its entertainment, with all the beautiful personalization and customization. 

Throughout the career, his journey has been sitting in that intersection of new ideas, new technology, making it explainable to people, and how the CX element has come in in the last decade is really simple. 

What he discovered was that we could build the greatest things in the world, we could communicate in the best way. But if it was not embraced by CX, if CX was not leading how we presented that to the rest of the world, we would stall. So, for the past decade, his focus has been in the CX world, working in all elements from BPO’s, from contact centres, and right now with a wonderful technology company that helps provide better digital experiences for customers around the world.

What is Interactions?

Me: So, you are currently the CMO of Conversational AI at Interactions, correct?

Peter confirmed, correct. It's a really simple explanation of who they are and what they do. They are the digital front door for the brands around the world that care the most about that first front door experience. They lead with voice and what that means is that when millions of people call into any of these brands, they start their conversations with, “How may I help you today?”

They have AI, plus human in the loop, it's unique, they're the only ones who do that. And it enables the customers to speak in their natural language, ask natural questions and all of their technology processes that really efficiently. The outcome and what that means for millions of call centre agents and businesses alike, is that they have customers that are more satisfied, they're having better experiences without the friction and when they ultimately have to talk to an agent in a human experience when that's necessary, they are further along the customer journey and it's a quicker resolution, so that adds to operational efficient in a significant way.

What Has Been the Impact for a Business as a Result of Your Approach and Methodology?

Me: So, seeing that you work at an organization that you're dealing with troubleshooting of customers challenges on a daily basis, could you share with us maybe one or two success stories that you've had with clients? And what the impact has been for their business as a result of your approach and methodology?

Peter stated that it's a great question, he’ll give two answers of examples. So, they work with one of the top five financial institutions in America, and a customer of that financial institution will call in with a lost credit card, they're able to process that fluidly and effectively without having to have a human agent engage on that. 

And in this sequence, this customer journey, they can actually with their digital technology and their AI cover over 40 different requests that the customer may have just on that simple one call in. They can do it all in one call, leading to an overall better customer experience. 

Another example, they work with one of the largest consumer technology companies in the world, they have outlets around the world, you can schedule an appointment at any one of them around the world, call up, talk to their automated assistant, reschedule it for any time, any date with different products that you want to come in and discuss and any different location in the world. Again, without ever having to talk to a human being that can be handled in mere minutes, with their solution, there's no hold time, no waiting in any way. And the processing is just effective and fluid for everybody.

Me: Wow, no wait time, goodness me. Sounds like we need your company here in Kingston, Jamaica.

Peter shared that they did a customer survey in the spring of US base consumers, what their biggest concerns and complaints were, this is no surprise, there are 77% of us who complain that wait times are the number one problem in customer service. If we could eliminate that one thing, let's even reduce it by half, the entire CX experience is transformational for the rest of the journey.

Maintaining the Human Touch While Using AI and How Impactful Has That Been for Clients

Me: Could you also share with us that as an organization, I know you mentioned that you're heavily into AI, but you're one of the few companies that also has a human touch that's integrated with the AI in your methodology and approach. How do you maintain the human touch even though you're using AI and how impactful has that been for your clients?

Peter stated that first, he will just acknowledge this remarkable moment in time in the second half of 2023. We are all trying to figure out what to do with generative AI, the world truly changed in November of 2022 last year, when open AI debuted and everyone could see how powerful it was and it's only scratching the surface. So, he’s had more than 100 customer conversations this year, he’s been to more than a dozen events, walking the floors, talking to everybody. And AI is the number one word being spoken in all of those corridors. 

Number two word, however, is human, and this is really important because as all as these businesses around the world and all these people around the world are trying to figure out what the New World Order is going to be. The aspect of having the human touch, the human empathy, the human brain is absolutely essential. 

And we all have to acknowledge that the greatest computer for the foreseeable future is going to be the human brain, it is today, it will be over the next coming years. Let's see where it is in the next decade. But for now, let's use that as our baseline. 

Now his company is a company that was one of the OG’s, the original gangsters of Conversational AI with an emphasis on the artificial part of it, the AI. They started 18 years ago, when they started 18 years ago, AI was not that good. So, from day one, they had put a human in the loop. What that means very functionally is if the technology cannot understand what the customer or the client is looking for, they've always had a human in the background ready to nudge the conversation forward. That agent he or she is not engaged in the whole conversation, but rather, will catch a snippet of the voice conversation or the text or the chat and be able to say, “Aha, this is what Yanique is trying to do, this is where she wants to go next in her journey flow.” 

And the agent will, as he said, nudge it forward. That's unique for what they do. So, they focus AI first, and about 90 plus percent of the time AI is all that's needed. But for that last 10,% it's essential that the human helps move it onward. And other companies today don't do it that way, other companies are typically starting with the human first and then augmenting AI on the back end for automation. Does that make sense?

Me: Right? So, basically, you're saying because the human comes in at the tail end of the experience, you're able to have the resolution done quicker. Because now it's moved up, it's escalated, especially if it's something that can't be fixed that first point of contact.

Peter stated that that's exactly right. If you think about the IVR, and the prompts that typically exist in many frontline solutions, the moment that we run into trouble, we get into a loop, or we can't move forward in a way we want, we start pressing zero, we start yelling for the agent, 33% of us swore at a robot last year, that just let you know just how peaked, he thinks that percentage is low, but it shows how peaked people are with their customer experience. And for what typically happens, as you know, as the first one or two engagements are okay, then it starts getting more complex, more layered, more nuanced, that's where a human can play this essential role of coming in and understanding what you want to do and then pushing it forward.

Recommendations Companies Need to Focus on to Ensure They Stay Relevant and Do a Better Job Than Their Competition

Me: Now, you mentioned that we're like halfway through 2023 and it's so true, a lot of us are looking to what's next, what's the next innovative, creative, exciting thing that my organization can do that would set me apart from my competition?

So, if you were to give advice to our listeners that are tapping into this episode that are in the customer experience space, what would be two to three things that you would recommend that they need to focus on for the latter part of 2023, preparing for 2024, in order to ensure that they stay relevant, and they're able to hopefully do a better job than their competition? 

Peter stated so first, he wants to use the word he used earlier, which is baseline. He thinks it's really important to have a baseline understanding of what AI is doing, and what it's going to be doing over the next several years. His perspective and opinion is that it is much more significant than even any of us understand that this is truly a game changer that is going to impact every aspect of the customer contact centre world, customer experience itself, that's his baseline. 

Now, on top of that, here's another trend that is not just for the rest of this year, but essential to understand how fast it has changed the world. Personalization, and customization is transformational. You and I have had all of our behaviours changed by that incredible computer that we hold in our hand, we expect instant resolution, we expect customed and tailored experiences, AI then offers the solution for that expectation. 

Over time in the next several years, we're going to be able to automate, we're going to be able to speed up resolutions or experiences. And we're going to be able to customize and personalize those experiences, these are essential to understand as macro themes. And they're secular, which means they are long standing, it's not just going be a blip on our radar. 

So, if he’s a young person in a contact centre, moving his way up, ambitious, he leans forward, he’s thinking about how rapidly this can potentially impact and change the ecosystem that he works in today. So, as an individual, he’s thinking to himself, how am I going to evolve and ride the wave in a way that will be beneficial for me, for my family, and for those around, there's tremendous opportunities. But it's absolutely essential to understand how big this is.  

If he’s a business, so, now moving up the food chain a bit, he needs to be thinking about how AI can bring operational efficiency, improvement in Op X - operational expenses, and how we can truly automate and streamline my overall operations. And if he’s that person, which many days he’s talking to those people by the way, he’s thinking to himself every day, how do I take the incredible human capital and the talent I have, and build solutions around them so that talent can be unlocked? 

You and I both know how much processing takes place, how much wrote automation occurs right now with human beings. Think about what it's going to mean as we can start to unlock all of that talent, because AI can put in the automation, freeing us up to do a lot more important and essential things which ultimately reinforces at that whole personalization opportunity back to the clients.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Peter stated that this will probably not surprise many people, he believes that Slack is absolutely a game changer for businesses today. So, the challenge that we have is that in the past three years, our worlds have turned upside down and we've gone hybrid, we've gone remote, we've gone back to the office, typically kicking and screaming in that case. It is a true challenge for business leaders to understand how do you effectively communicate with your teams in this new disrupted world. 

He'll give you one example. If you are a business that has veterans who have worked there for multiple years, they have a tonne of tribal knowledge, they also have positive relationships that they've formed over the years with each other, then you have now new people coming in who don't have any of those connections, they don't know where things even are. A tool like Slack has one beautiful element that he doesn't think is talked about enough. It enables you to process both business in real time, but it also enables you to process personality and more of the informality that used to take place in offices all the time, even a smiley face or a thumbs up is a different type of communication then you would have on email, you have on the phone. This type of connecting of the fabric is absolutely essential to be doing right now for business success.

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Peter

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Peter shared that there's a book that is called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. He's a Stanford Professor and this came out about a decade ago, Hooked is a very friendly, easy to read, B to C book, describing how to capture the curiosity of people online, typically using apps. It's simply how you build their confidence, which leads to trust, trust leads to engagement, engagement leads to loyalty and sales. And the reason that he’s calling that out is because it is so darn simple. He keeps it on his bookshelf and reread it at least once a year simply to reinforce how important it is to build confidence and trust with a buyer no matter B2B, B2C, client, customer, anyone. Trust is the absolute currency of the next 20 years.

What Peter is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s excited about, Peter stated what a great question. So, he’s going to speak about people and team for a second. It's been a rough 18 months for many of us, it's been a rough 3 or 4 years for many of us. He’s really excited about how to think structurally about teams, think about this hybrid environment all of us are in and think about how to motivate groups of people to lift their heads above all of the different conflicting confusions and excitements and pressures that are hitting us to deliver good results. So, very specifically, he’s using this year to think about how on a one to one and a one to few and a one to many, he can help the teams and the people around him optimize their own success.

Me: And do you have some tools that you have in mind in getting that done? Are you kind of just still in the strategy phase?

Peter stated that he believes that there is a tremendous power in having slogans and using those slogans repeatedly to help build momentum, build a movement, almost like a sports team. So, this year in 2023, from a team approach, which is one of the things that's very important to him, he has 3 of them. 

One is a zero to one mentality. And what that means and what he share with the team is that there are massive things that they are trying to change but if they take a quote, unquote, one, zero to one mentality, what it means is that they constantly want to think about start-up and start-up innovation. Take small steps forward, look at everything you're doing as going from nothing to something. And what that does is it enables you to have small fast wins. It enables you to appreciate those wins. And when you have setbacks, and we all do, it puts those setbacks in a framework that says they're minor and the next day we can move forward, that’s zero to one. 

Second slogan is “Rungs on your ladder.” And he learned this by working at one of the top 20 largest BPO’s in the world. It's incredible to him to think about nearshore, onshore and offshore, millions of folks who are moving up every day with their careers. And so, we focus a lot on rungs on your ladder, what's the right thing for you, wherever you are in your career stage to take the next step up. And they're very explicit with that on his team, every person knows what the rung on the ladder is for their teammate. That type of transparency means that they are a team all working together. 

The third one, and the third slogan is lean forward, he has a very strong bias that people who are going to lean forward in their chair are going to be the ones who are going to move forward and be the most successful. But really importantly, because of those first two ideas, if he’s getting his team to lean forward, it's in a cooperative, supportive way and that radiates around and their teammates start leaning forward as well.

Where Can We Find Peter Online

LinkedIn – Peter Mullen

LinkedIn – Interactions

Website – www.interactions.com

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Peter Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tend to revert to, Peter stated that that is a surprise question that he will answer very authentically. He’s a cancer survivor. He has had setbacks at multiple times in his life in various ways and spaces. And he thinks many of us have, he thinks that there's a lot of hidden challenges but also triumphs that all of us have experienced. And so for him, a simple phrase that he often uses for himself is, “Always tomorrow.” And what that reflects and means for him is that no matter what setbacks we have, no matter what move forwards we have, there's always going to be the next day to do it again and do it a little better.

Me: Brilliant. Always tomorrow, I like it. Thank you so much, Peter, for taking time out of your very busy schedule and hopping on this podcast with us, sharing all these great insights as it relates to AI is wonderful, but the human touch is also very critical. I'm glad that you did reinforce that in your message and our conversation that the human element isn't going anywhere and it's still going to be the baseline of everything that we're doing, I think that was really critical to what you brought across. And also, some of the recommendations that you believe our listeners can focus on as we move towards closing off 2023 and tap into 2024, what are some of the areas that they need to really engage in. Whether from a as you mentioned, B2C approach, or B2B or even in just building your career. We really appreciate it and just want to say thank you so much.

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

·  Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

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! 

Eric Melchor is a mediocre tennis player, Texas, expat living in Romania and Partnerships & Evangelists for OptiMonk. With over 600 5-star review and powering more than 30,000 brands, our mission is to empower the average online business with Amazon-like personalization superpowers. How? 

By giving brands the power to use AI to create better headlines, product descriptions and run A/B tests to tailor the product page and shopping experience - on autopilot. Thus, saving you hundreds of manual hours while your conversions increase in the process.  

Questions

•  Could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, we always like to hear from our guests in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today.

•  You are the Partnerships & Evangelists for OptiMonk. Could you share with our listeners what is OptiMonk? And what does OptiMonk do?

•  Could you share with us why you think it's important to integrate AI? Do you think it will make the process a little bit more seamless? Is it giving the customer more steps to take? What have been some of your experiences with your customers? What has their feedback been?

•  What are some ways that the AI can help to personalise that experience, or the shopping experience for the customer?

•  So, in terms of an online shopping experience, what are some key things that you think is critical when you're trying to design that journey for the customer. What would be, let's say three or four things that you would say to them that needs to be critically engineered into that process to ensure the customer has a great experience?

•  Now, Eric, could you share with our listeners what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?

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

•  Can you share with our listeners 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?

•  Now, before we wrap our episodes up, could you share with us if you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason at all you get derailed.

Highlights

Eric’s Journey 

Me: So, Eric, could you share with our listeners a little bit about your journey, we always like to hear from our guests in their own words a little bit about how they got to where they are today.

Eric shared that prior to moving to Romania, about 3 years ago, he held director level marketing and CX customer experience positions for publicly traded companies in Houston, Texas. And he really loved what he was doing. And he got to manage large teams and large budgets, but then when he decided to move to Romania with his family, he wanted to start in a new industry, and so he got into tech and SAAS, and complete shifts of big corporate America, moving into the start-up world where he was working with companies that had maybe around a dozen employees and he was wearing multiple hats. 

So, completely different way of looking at marketing, and how you approach things from a customer experience perspective. So, he’s enjoyed it, it's been a fantastic journey so far. But he’s definitely a lot busier now than when he was working for the larger companies and he had bigger teams that can manage multiple things.

What is OptiMonk and What Your Company Does?

Me: So, your bio says that you are the Partnerships & Evangelists for OptiMonk. Could you share with our listeners what is OptiMonk? And what does OptiMonk do?

Eric shared that OptiMonk is like an all in one conversion optimization platform. So, anything that you need. Well, just to take a step back, they have over 30,000 brands that use the platform and many of the brands use them to increase their AOV, which is their Average Order Value, because there's some pretty neat things that you can do to make that very simple. And there's other things that you can do as well, like grow your email subscriber list and redo cart abandons. But increasing your AOV is something that a lot of brands use them for. 

Really excited that the past few months, they’ve been focused on AI and they've released a couple of features that allow sort of like a hands-off approach to doing conversion optimization. And so, they're really going that route after speaking with a lot of customers, it seems like the big hurdle to really trying to get the most out of conversion optimization is just time, time to learn how to use the platform, time to implement different campaigns. So, they're trying to automate this so that you don't really have to do much, and AI can do most of the work for you. 

But OptiMonk, again, they've been around for about 8 years. They're integrated with many different CRMs, and platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo, and Active Campaign and HubSpot, among many others. And check them out, they're on G2, and you can look at their ratings and reviews. They have over 600 5-star reviews on G2 and Shopify.

The Importance of AI – Will it Make the Process More Seamless?

Me: Now AI, that's a big thing that a lot of organizations are focused on now, especially with so many different options emerging, ChatGPT being probably the most recent in the last six to eight months. Could you share with us why you think it's important to integrate AI? Do you think it will make the process a little bit more seamless? Is it giving the customer more steps to take? What have been some of your experiences with your customers? What has their feedback been?

Eric stated that he thinks why they're implementing AI, first is because there's no human being that is smarter than a machine, than a computer, it's just not going to happen. He thinks even the greatest chess player in the world was beaten by the IBM supercomputer a few years ago and now pretty much any computer can beat any chess player in the world, it's just not going to happen, computers and AI are a lot smarter than then we humans. 

So, we're just trying to take advantage of that and there's certain things that you can do like A/B testing, like A/B testing headlines, landing pages or the homepage or product page. And then rather than having the user, the customer come up with different headlines to test, their feature will come up with headlines that you can test automatically. And it could run different experiments automatically and automatically pick the winner once one has been statistically significant, proven to be the winner. 

So, to answer your question, it's going to reduce the amount of time and the effort that is required to implement such conversion optimization campaigns. And then the second thing is that it's just a lot smarter than human beings, it's going to pick winners faster, and make those updates and changes on your website in real time faster than you could if you were doing it manually.

Ways that AI Can Help Personalize the Experience for the Customer

Me: Now, personalization is also so important. I feel even as a consumer, when I do business with organizations, I want to know that I'm not just another transaction, and they see me for who I am, what my personal interests, requests or needs are, and I'm not being compared or grouped into a set of people, because we're all different. What are some ways that the AI can help to personalize that experience, or the shopping experience for the customer?

Eric shared that they haven't started using AI for that specific use case. However, one of the things that their platform allows is being able to collect zero party data in a very easy and friendly way. So, for those who don't know, zero party data is basically data that you would get directly from the visitor that comes to your website and you can usually get that in the form of asking a question. 

So, here's a very simple use case, let's say you're shopping for Mother's Day, and Yanique, you go to a website, and you're looking for a gift for your mom, or maybe a godmother or maybe even a sister or something. And a simple question could appear that just says, “Hi, welcome to flowers.com. Are you shopping for yourself or for someone else?” 

Very simple question, and then based on your answer, let's say you choose shopping for somebody else, then a response can be, “Fantastic, let me take you to the part of the website that's most valuable for you and show you our most popular items, giftable items this season.” So, that's a very simple way of collecting zero party data. But once you have that, that information, that data, then you can basically change the experience in real time for that visitor. 

You're not really using any AI or anything, you're just basically doing different segmentation based on responses to the questions that you're answering. And that's what they recommend to a lot of their clients, a lot of clients who are able to collect more email subscribers, who are able to get a lot more repeat visitors, who are able to get a higher AOV, they're doing a lot of things, take into account collecting zero party data, in a very fun and engaging way. He likes to think of them as micro conversions. 

Another example could be a pure health and wellness website. And let's say you primarily sell three products. One is weight loss, one is to increase muscle mass and another one is to help you sleep better. 

Well, you can ask the person visiting, “Which of these three are you primarily interested in?” And then depending on their answer, let's say the person chose to increase muscle mass, then you could say, “Fantastic, here's our most popular blog posts that show you how to increase muscle mass. And by the way, here's our three most popular products for increasing muscle mass.” 

And so, that's done in the form of zero party data once again, another example. But it's done in such a way that it keeps the person engaged for much longer, spending time on your website much longer into conversions as a result, the conversions increase because of the zero party data that's being collected and the ability to change the journey in real time for that end user.

In Terms of Online Shopping Experience, Key Things that Needs to be Critically Engineered to Ensure the Customer Has a Great Experience

Me: Now what's interesting just listening to you speak just know, Eric, I was thinking about the whole journey of the customer, right? Because you're talking about how it is that they land on the page, what kind of experience do they have? What are some of the questions that you ask them in order to channel them down a particular road and that's kind of you orchestrating or engineering the journey you want them to have. So, in terms of an online shopping experience, what are some key things that you think is critical when you're trying to design that journey for the customer. If you had a client who came to you and they're looking to improve on their customer experience, improve on the journey that their customer is having through their online platforms, what would be, let's say three or four things that you would say to them that needs to be critically engineered into that process to ensure the customer has a great experience?

Eric stated that one example he would like to share is this brand called Obvi, have you ever heard of them Yanique? 

Me: I have not.

Eric stated that they competed in a heavily saturated market. They a protein powder and they've been around about 3 years. But here's the interesting thing about them, when they started out, they started out with a $10,000 investment, bootstrap investment. 

Three years later, they are a $3 Million Dollar brand and competing in a very saturated market among protein powders. What's so special is that when you see interviews of their CEO, Ronak Shah, he says they heavily focus on conversion optimization, particularly by the experience when somebody clicks on a Facebook Ad, that moment when they click on that ad, that's the moment that they are the most interested, and the most curious about a brand. Not two days later when they get the email in their inbox, not four days later when they get the SMS message. No, that time exactly when they click on that ad, that's when they're most curious and they want to learn more about the brand. 

So, what they did was, is that all the landing pages that they created, they just created one landing page. But what was different about each landing page or experience was that the headline mimicked what was on the Facebook Ads, so if they had a Facebook ad that talked about grow healthy hair faster, then the headline on the landing page, said something like, are you losing your hair and you want to regrow it or something like that, it aligned with the ad that was clicked on. 

Now, Obvi had a bunch of different value propositions, they had other ads that said something like the best tasting collagen protein, once that ad was clicked on, they went to the same landing page, but the website was able to recognize the Facebook ad because of the UTM parameters, he doesn't want to get too technical there. But because it recognized the ad, the headline on that landing page change to mimic what was the main copy on the Facebook Ad, even though it was the same landing page. 

So, they were able to do this very easily without having to create duplicate landing pages, something he used to do as a marketer back in the day. And they were able to scale Facebook ads, which is really unheard of the past couple of years because of the iOS 14 upgrades and updates and things like that. But they were able to do it very efficiently and scale that way through Facebook, because they're able to mimic the headline on the landing pages with their advertising campaigns on Facebook. 

So, that's one example he likes to share, something that all brands should be doing. Because when a person clicks on an ad, and they go to the page, the website, they want to make sure that what they clicked on is the thing that they're interested in and not some sort of bait and switch. Absolutely. So, he thinks that's one tactic. 

Another tactic is Average Order Value, he thinks that's something that every brand should really focus on, especially if you're seeing cost per requisitions anywhere around $20 to $20. If you're seeing a high cost per acquisition, then definitely you should have an average order value somewhere of at least $70, $80 plus. And within the platform, they make it super easy to be able to increase your AOV, you can do things very easily, like add shipping thresholds. So, depending on the value that's in the shopping cart, let's say you provide free shipping for orders that are more than $75 and somebody puts something in there that equals $50, then there could be a little message that appears in a horizontal bar on the website, like on every page, and it just says something like, spend $25 more and you get free shipping. And that's a very easy tactic that works for a lot of brands and they're able to utilize that and get increased their AOV that way. So, that's a second tactic. 

And then a third one he likes is around global visitors. So, the global visitors, he thinks Shopify released a study a few weeks ago, and the market was almost something outrageous. It was in a Billion Dollar market, it's going to continue to increase. And if you're a website that gets more than 20% of your visitors internationally, then you should be creating a personalized experience for those visitors. 

Here's one example. If he goes to a retailer in the US by the name of Woodhouse Clothing, and he’s based in Romania, and he goes to their website, there's a little message that will appear that says, “Hi, we ship to Romania, our prices include taxes, you can shop in your local currency, which is Romanian Leu. And our orders are free shipping if you spend more than like $200 Leu.” something like that. So, it's a very easy and a very fast way you given that international shopper assurance, and just kind of just made yourself more trustworthy by just letting them know, beforehand, before they even waste time looking around whether or not you shipped to them, just letting them know that hey, welcome we do ship to you and here's some of the other questions that you may be wondering around tax or the currency on our website. So, he thinks that's a pretty cool example.

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

Eric shared that the one online tool that he uses a lot is Notion, and he’s starting to use it more and more. First of all, it's free, or at least the one that he uses. And he’s starting to use it as a CRM. He used to use Trello a lot as a project management tool. Are you familiar with Trello, Yanique? 

Me: I am, yes.

So, Eric used to be a big fan of Trello. And somebody pointed out that, “Hey, you can do everything you're doing in Notion, but it's actually more streamlined and easier to navigate.” And so, he believed him, because he does use Notion for other things, but he’s just not too familiar with it. And he sent him a free template to use and he’s been using it ever since. And it is more streamlined, it's just quicker, it can do everything that Trello can do but it's just faster to navigate, less clicks. You can see more things on one screen. And so, he’s becoming a bigger, bigger fan of Notion, he would say.

Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Eric

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Eric shared that one book that he read recently is called Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland. Have you ever heard of the agency called Ogilvy? 

Me: I think so, yes.

Eric shared that he's (Rory Sutherland) the vice Chairman of Ogilvy, really smart guy. He saw him speak live and he got his book and it's so fascinating, because the whole premise of the book is that there's a lot of answers to solutions that are unorthodox, they are a bit crazy. But we don't spend enough time trying to think of what those crazy solutions are because we've been programmed to think logically. And also, when you're in big companies, you can't show up to a meeting and like pitch this outrageous idea, because you're afraid of the repercussions and maybe being let go, right? So, you're always trying to think of what the logical solution is to problems. 

But he has a number of good examples, for example, nobody was banging on the door asking for an expensive, sexy looking vacuum, but look at Dyson. There are a lot of examples like that that he gives. And it's just a really interesting book and it's helping him to think in different ways rather than trying to think of like what's the most logical solution.

What Eric is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something that he’s excited about, Eric shared that the one thing right now, obviously, for OptiMonk, they have the AI functionality features that are coming down the road, pretty excited about that, not just for their customers, but also future people who want to try their platform. 

Personally, the other thing he’s pretty excited about is on the side, he is launching a new service for companies that are based here in Europe, where they're having a tough time that are trying to reach their audience, especially if they're tech companies. And the past 3 years he’s been building, you would say, an audience with the podcast that he hosts, and he interviews European start-up founders. And because of that, he's been able to grow his network among people in the start-up scene. 

So, the service is basically combining sponsorship opportunities with his podcast, his newsletter, and then also in person events. And so, every now and then he likes to host in person cocktail party/networking events, and people that attend, they really enjoy them. They say that are a lot of fun, he likes to have a lot of fun with them, he has icebreakers, he likes to make sure that everybody has a great time. And so, in that in person event, the sponsor will have a chance to have a live short one to one interview with him in front of everybody there. So, it's another great way if their audience is also tech entrepreneurs, and tech start-ups, then it's a great way that they can get their brand in front of a live audience. So, that's what he’s pretty excited about and he’s been focused on he would say the past couple of weeks.

Where Can We Find Eric Online

LinkedIn – Eric Melchor

Innovators Can Laugh Podcast

Me: So, I did remember reading a little bit about your podcast before when I was reading the bio, and I didn't get a chance to ask you about that. Could you share a little bit about your podcast? What it's about? Where does the podcast live? Is it available on most podcasts, if all platforms? And who are some of the insightful people you interview? Like I'm having this awesome interview with you now. 

Eric shared that his podcast, it is available on all the major platforms like Spotify and Apple. He likes to think of the show as the Tonight Show, but for entrepreneurial related podcast, it's like a coffee, a casual coffee, like chat with the start-up founder, but the audience feels like they're just hanging out with the host and the guests. He tries to make just very light-hearted and witty. They share the ups and downs of the start-up founders, entrepreneurial journey, but they also like to have some laughs during the conversation. And so, he would say pretty recently, if he recorded an episode, and if he really listened to it and didn't think it was that funny, then he’s just not airing it. So, that's how focused he is in trying for the show to live up to its name.  

Some of the guests that have been so funny, a recent one not too long ago was Valentin Radu, it was episode 99. And that one almost had him crying because his story was just so funny. And all the crazy things he did just to hustle when he was younger and make $1. But there's a lot that anybody can learn from him. But he's just a good storyteller too, and quite funny.

Me: So, that's the Innovators Can Laugh Podcast, just want to reiterate that to our listeners. Feel free to tap into that as a free resource that Eric has been gracious like myself, to have a podcast and share all of these great insights with you as our listeners. 

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Eric Uses 

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Eric shared that the one quote that he always reverts to is, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.” by Anais Nin And whenever he’s on frits about something or unsure about something, he always kind of revert to that quote. But that's his favourite quote. Have you ever heard that one before? 

Me: I’ve never heard it, but I like it. It kind of reminds me of some of Brene Brown’s quotes.

Me: Now, I just want to thank you again, Eric for taking time out of your very busy schedule. What time is it there in Romania?  

Eric shared that it’s 7:30 pm. 

Me: Yeah, so, you're here with us at night, you could be with your family having dinner, playing cards, doing something way more fun, I'm sure and talking to me about customer experience. But we are truly grateful that you took the time out of your busy schedule to hop on this podcast and have this conversation with us. And we really learnt a lot about AI and of course your organization OptiMonk and different ways that we can look for opportunities to personalize the experience for the customers as well as engineering the customer journey in such a way that it makes it seamless and frictionless and just a better experience that at the end of it, the customer would want to do business with that organization again. So, thank you for sharing that, I'm sure listeners gained a great amount of knowledge and value from our conversation.

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

·  Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland 

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!