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Navigating the Customer Experience

Join host Yanique Grant as she takes you on a journey with global entrepreneurs and subject matter experts that can help you to navigate your customer experience. Learn what customers really want and how businesses can understand the psychology of each customer or business that they engage with. We will be looking at technology, leadership, customer service charters and strategies, training and development, complaint management, service recovery and so much more!
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Now displaying: December, 2019
Dec 24, 2019

Christopher Wallace is the Co-Founder and President of InnerView, which is a marketing consulting firm that helps companies effectively transfer their brand strategy to their customer-facing employees and partners. Chris builds upon previous success as an entrepreneur in the sales consulting and coaching space, as well as his more than 15 years of sales, marketing and corporate leadership. Chris’ primary professional focus is to help companies better align the strategies of the board room with the daily execution at the front lines. Beyond his work with clients, Chris is able to apply his passions as a teacher and author. He has taught as an adjunct MBA professor at Temple’s Fox School of Business and has been published in outlets such as Harvard Business Review and Chief Marketer and is a contributor to publications including Inc.com and Forbes.com. Chris received a B.A. in Public Relations from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School and his MBA from Temple University. He lives in Villanova, PA with his family.

Questions

  • Could you share with us how you ended up in this particular field? Marketing and brand recognition and brand consulting.
  • What are some of the key indicators are facets that business owner would need to consider in order to pretty much pioneer, hold or navigate how the shaping of their brand is going to be perceived by others.
  • What is brand dilution?
  • Could you explain to us why is it that you believe that many companies fall into the dilution and are they disillusioned or are they diluted in thinking that there's a communication breakdown or is it that a team members who are actually serving the customers are not clear on what it is that they're supposed to be delivering?
  • Could you give us one or two metrics that organizations could look at even if they're a small business with just say two or three people employed to them versus an organization with two or 300 people and employed to them?
  • Could you share with us how you stay motivated every day as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, as a teacher?
  • Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
  • Could you share with us what books have had the biggest impact on you?
  • We have a lot of listeners who are business owners and managers who feel they have great products and services, but they lack the constantly motivated human capital. If you were sitting across the table from that person, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
  • What's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about - either something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you online?
  • What's one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, they like to kind of revert to this quote or saying it kind of helps them to refocus to re-strategize and just remember what they're working towards. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

  • Christopher shared that just like anybody's story, it's a long and winding path, but he’s a salesperson by DNA, not by career, by DNA. It sort of runs in the family and after a career in sales or having a career in sales with a number of big, recognizable brands, he found himself at a crossroads and had the opportunity to essentially work with one of the companies that he had been employed by for a number of years and sort of flipped over into a contract and consulting role. And was sort of an overnight entrepreneur, an accidental entrepreneur as he likes to call it. But what he was asked to do was to take some new products and new services that the company he used to work for was launching to their frontline teams, launching into the market, bringing to market to their customers and really help get their frontline sales teams, their customer service representatives, in a number of different teams really up to speed on what these things were. But it was a lot less training and a lot more just dialogue, how to talk about it, how to position it, how to relay the value and sort of that opportunity being at that crossroads led to this career in really helping organizations to understand how to align the things that they want to bring to market their products and their services with the people who have to talk about them.

 

  • Christopher stated that it doesn't matter if an organization is big or small; your brand is your promise. What is your promise? That's really what it comes down to. What is the promise that you're making to your customers? What value do you bring to them? What makes you stand out? That's the brand story that we're talking about. Occasionally, the word brand can scare people, it sounds like a big concept, and it sounds like something for the Nike's of the world or the Coca-Cola's of the world. But the reality is people have personal brands, smaller organizations have brands and that brand simply comes back down to the what your promise is to the customer regardless of who your customer is and any organization needs to take the time to really sit down and figure out what that promise is before you go out and start advertising it or whatever the case may be. You have to understand really what it is and internalize it first.

 

  • Christopher shared that brand dilution is and thinking about the topic of the show and customer experience, brand dilution is the difference between what you tell your customers you're going to do and what the customer actually experiences. It's really the breakdown in that promise, the breakdown in that message and they did a research study earlier this year with 250 marketing and customer experience executives and what they found was, he would say astonishingly, but it's not really that astonishing. Two thirds of marketers believe that their brands’ messaged, through their key brand story is breaking down between their office and the people to front lines. So, they believe that there's a misaligned message inside their company. People are telling, however, many different versions of that story, of that brand promise. And if the organization promises one thing through their advertising and their marketing and they experienced something different when they show up, that's a big problem for most brands. So, that's really what we talk about with the dilution, it's that gap between what is promised through external marketing and what the customer actually experiences.

 

Yanique shared - It's interesting that you say that it's a breakdown because marketing and advertising costs a whole lot of money and organizations have extensive budgets dedicated to marketing and advertising their businesses every single year. Whether as you said, they're large, medium or even small organizations, you will allocate quite a percentage of your income or reserves or capital to ensure that the business marketed and advertised.

 

  • Christopher shared that he thinks it's both. And the research that they did, the study they published earlier this year with a market research firm called Focus Vision at a consumer insights company called Focus Vision. What they found was it’s really twofold. The organization is attempting to sort of spread this story via the main methods they use are email and product training, those were the top two things that rose to the top of the list each time and how they asked them, they were really communicating and engaging their people. And ultimately when they looked at the data, that wasn't driving results, that wasn't driving alignment, it was a set of other tactics that were really driving the companies who were good at this to be successful and just sending things out via email or doing a product training that's not going to drive the customer experience that you want, it's not getting through, it's not cutting through the noise. So, he thinks that on one hand you have the organization who's probably not doing as much as they should to get it downstream and get the message out to their front lines and then you have the people, the front line to use the phrase disillusion, he doesn’t think they're disillusioned. He just thinks that their organizations have failed to equip them in an interesting and compelling way. And he thinks that people at the front lines, whether you're on the phone, in the retail store, whatever that looks like, you need to be engaged in a new way, you've got a lot of things being thrown at you and if the organization is not treating you as a consumer of the information and just treating you like kind of a link in the chain, then that dilution is bound to be there.

 

Yanique stated that basically you're kind of reinforcing the fact that customer experience starts from within.

 

Christopher agreed and mentioned that their slogan is, “Win From Within.” So, they're big believers that the customer experience needs tremendous attention, it needs tremendous investment and it's an investment that pays off in a big way.

 

Yanique asked - Do you have any statistics, I know you said you used Focus Vision was the name of the company that does insight intelligence. Do you have any research that pretty much supports the ratio of how much companies invest to market and advertise per year versus how much they invest in training and development and customer experience training?

 

Christopher shared that they don't specifically on that, but he can tell you this, when they asked the executives in their study, what they thought the value of a consistent brand message was. So, they asked specifically for those people that thought that their organization was pretty well aligned in their brand message throughout their company, what was that worth to their organization? 62% of those people valued it at more $10 Million Dollars annually. So, nearly two thirds put an actual revenue tag, a revenue price tag on an align brand story at more than $10 Million Dollars a year. So, they look at that and say, “Organizations don't realize necessarily how much money is slipping through the cracks.” One interaction here, one interaction there but when we asked these folks point blank, they said, “Well yeah, actually the success of our marketing plan, the success of our brand really does depend on winning one conversation at a time.” And when you start to add up with the losses, it was more than $10 Million Dollars, that was the category they selected, was more than $10 Million Dollars annually. Who knows how much it could actually be for the organizations they studied, it could be 10 to 20, it could be $50 Million Dollars or more depending on the size of the organization.

 

Yanique stated that not because they're not measuring it doesn't mean that there isn't something slipping through the cracks.

 

Christopher agreed and shared that he thinks that it's one of those things where he’s sure Yanique knows and from the guests that she’s had on measuring it. Measuring it he thinks is perceived to be hard, measuring the impact of customer experiences perceived to be hard. He doesn't think it's that hard, every engagement that they do, they focus on very tangible revenue based metrics around just improving the quality of the interaction between the frontline team member that what they call a brand representative and the customer. If you improve their ability to tell your brand story, you are going to earn more business and if you just measure it the right way and you look at the right metrics, it's not that hard to quantify.

 

  • Christopher shared that metrics; it really depends on the type of business. Conversion is sort of the mother of all metrics that we work with. So, when you think about even as a small business, small business owner or an entrepreneur, looking at your pipeline, regardless of what you sell and really determining what percentage of those deals, what percentage of those opportunities you're able to convert into a sale, and really getting that to be a metric that you track over time. This is all about, like he said, winning one conversation at a time. If you win one more deal here, one more deal there, he knows for him as an entrepreneur that matters but if you think about these larger organizations, and that's really who they work with mostly is these larger organizations. One conversation here, one conversation across, in some cases tens of thousands of representatives or retail employees, that adds up really quickly and it adds up to a lot of money. So, he would say conversion is really the number one metric to be tracking.

 

Yanique asked - Do you think there's one question that you think all companies should ask their customers about their experience?

 

Christopher stated that that's a tough question. He knows the one that they pay a lot of money to ask, “How how likely are you to recommend this product or service to a friend or family?”That’s the NPS. They worked closely with some NPS customers as Fred Reichheld would call it, “The Ultimate Question” that's the title of his book. But in terms of asking, it's so hard to say that one question can actually capture it. He’s going to answer a question with a question. He’s going to say that when they talk to organizations, there's a question that they ask their executives. They asked the question, “How confident are you that the people who represent your brand can tell this story the way that you built it?”And that's sort of their measure of trying to figure out if they have alignment issues with their brand internally. How confident are you that the people who represent your brand can tell this story the way that you built it? And if you're talking to a product owner or a brand owner or somebody in consumer marketing, the answer to that is it's kind of a moment of truth question for them and they rarely hear that there's a lot of confidence. So, he would say to any business owner, if you have other people out representing you, other than just yourself, ask yourself that question. How confident are you that the people representing you can do it the way that you want it done every single time?

 

Yanique shared that that's a very good question, bills a lot of introspect for you to really think about the individual or the company or the set of people that are representing you and the platform that they are representing you on and are they really telling the story that how you built it to be told.

 

  • When asked how he stays motivated, Christopher shared that he’s thought about this a lot so he feels like he has a good answer to this question, at least he knows the answer. The motivation for him and he'll tell a quick story. When he was getting his MBA, he had a project that was being done toward the end of the program that was all about; you had to do a map out, a strategy for your career. You had to treat yourself as the client and you had to map out a strategy for your career and the leader of that class, the professor asked him what he wanted to do what, what his strategy was and he said he wanted to manage people and he said, well, where or how or how many? And I said, he doesn't know, just as many as he can. And so, his answer is he thinks about the team that he’s constructed, the team that he’s built, and what motivates him is the chance to add somebody else to their team, it's really that simple. He’s offering somebody the opportunity to come and work with them, bringing them into the fold for the family that they're building here is really, really motivating to him. That's what he works for every day and when he sell, he look at it as an opportunity to develop a new client and work with a prospect, any new client that he can bring on is a potential chance for him to add more people to his team, so, that's what motivates him every day.

 

  • Christopher shared that he’s going to give his CRM a plug. They have Zoho, Zoho CRM Plus, is their CRM and it's a wide ranging platform for those aren't familiar with Zoho. It’s a great software package, you can do a lot with it beyond CRM things like some sales automation, some marketing automation, but they use that tool and not being a process oriented person himself, he’s really become attached to going in, updating the CRM, working the pipeline, running the reports, things like that. So, adding some discipline around that has made it a pretty indispensable tool.

 

  • When asked about books that has had the biggest impact, Christopher stated that he would say the one that he thinks really motivated him the most to really build around what they're doing as a career and really commit to it was when he read To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel Pink. For the listeners who aren't familiar, Daniel Pink is part of the new age authors that's really, really talking about a lot of similar things to like the Malcolm Gladwell's of the world does, Simon Sinek's sort of a new age management thinker and his premise and to sell is human, is everybody is selling in some way, shape or form. And whether it's as an entrepreneur or in your personal life, you're selling all day long and just about every role and really embracing that and figuring out how to tap into the ability that everybody has, to the need that everybody has to be able to influence and reach those around them. He thought it was a very straightforward, easy to digest concept, but one that many, many people in our line of work resist the idea that they're in sales and they try to help, make them a little bit more comfortable with it. That book is a great way to do it.

 

  • Christopher shared that he would say the number one thing and the number one piece of advice that they give to prospects, to listeners, they have their own podcast as well is the best thing you can do if you want to get somebody to do something, the best thing you can do is start by listening to them and you think about sales for those of you who are good salespeople and have gotten some training and consultative selling, everything's about learning, it's about asking questions, it's about identifying needs, it's not about talking. So, he would say it's a simple answer, but the best thing you can do if you want to motivate somebody is start by asking them questions, ask them what they think, ask them what they care about, ask them their viewpoint because if you can understand them, you can find the ways to connect with that individual and get them to really line up behind your mission, behind the tasks that you want them to do.

 

Yanique reiterated – So, listen to the person that you're speaking to whether it's your team member or your employee and after listening, you need to ask really good questions to understand what they want and where they're coming from because those things will help you to be more developed in figuring out what is motivating them, which nine out of 10 times is not only financial.

 

Christopher 100% agreed and stated that there is such a huge misconception that people are, as they say, coin operated. You put in another quarter and people will do what you want them to do. But the reality is, the intrinsic motivation is much higher. When people talk about engagement and engaging employees and things like that, he doesn't think most people know what that actually means. Engagement is that people feel part of something, it's that they feel like they're part of the process, they're part of the mission, they just want to feel like the work that they're doing is impacting something bigger and they want to feel like it's happening with them, not to them. And the best way to build that relationship and that trust is start by asking them things and asking their point of view and genuinely being curious to hear the answer. It can't be, it can't be an outcome in mind, and it has to be with true curiosity.

 

  • Christopher shared that he gets excited about a lot of things that they are doing. He would say that probably the thing that gets him most excited day to day is they are really trying to define the experience. You talk about customer experience, they're a boutique consulting company but they have spent a lot of time as a team talking about what experience they want to deliver for their clients and he and his partner have challenged their team to really look at that and internalize what it is that they want them to say, how they want them to feel and really find ways to deliver that experience and really think outside of the norm. Really think of new ways to do that. And they're developing a new set of sort of criteria for how they interact with their clients. That is probably, he would say that as an entrepreneur the most energizing conversation he has ever had was when they sat down. They had a team offsite earlier this year and they asked the team to think through how they wanted the customer to feel, what they wanted them to say. And then the ideas that came out of that for showing their clients how much they appreciate them, that's going to really take shape toward the end of this year and into next year. And he just can't wait to see that come together because it's all about them being genuine and treating their clients in a way that feels like them and he can't wait to see that come together.

 

  • Christopher shared listeners can find him at –

www.innerviewgroup.com

         LinkedIn @christopherewallace

 

  • Christopher shared that there's a quote that motivates him. So, he’s a big music lover and there's a band that a little bit obscure, probably not the most mainstream band in the world, but there's a quote in one of their songs that says, “It's all been luck until now.”And he really internalized that quote, anytime he looks at successes or challenges that he face as an entrepreneur, as an individual, he really goes back to that idea of treat everything as if you just got lucky to this point because it motivates him to keep working hard. So, it's all been luck until now, maybe the luck will run out and you'll have to rely on your hard work and your skills, so he sort of treat every day as if every day previous to that was luck and now it's time for him to focus on continuing to work hard, so, that motivates him every day.

Links

 

 

 

Dec 17, 2019

If you have ever wondered how there are so many brands that customers can’t live without? And if you’ve ever wondered how it’s possible to make price irrelevant? John DiJulius will show you how to do both. He is the authority on World-Class customer experience. He is an international consultant, keynote speaker, and bet-selling author of five customer service books. His newest book, The Relationship Economy – Building Stronger Customer Connections in The Digital Age (Greenleaf Books October 2019) could not be timelier in the world we are living in. John has worked with companies such as The Ritz-Carlton, Lexus, Starbucks, Nordstrom, Nestlé, Marriott Hotels, PwC, Celebrity Cruises, Anytime Fitness, Progressive Insurance, Harley-Davidson, Chick-fil-A, and so many more.

 

John isn’t just talking about it, he lives it, as a very successful entrepreneur. He is the founder of three businesses: The DiJulius Group, an international customer service consulting firm, John Robert’s Spa, a chain of upscale salons in Northeast Ohio which has repeatedly been named one of the top 20 salons in America, and Believe in Dreams, a non profit that helps make dreams come true for deserving children.

 

John will demonstrate how you can make customer service your single biggest competitive advantage, become the brand customers cannot live without and make price irrelevant!

 

Questions

 

  • Your newest book, The Relationship Economy, focusing on building stronger connections. With so much things happening digitally, how are we really going to be able to tap into that connectivity with our clients?
  • Could maybe just tell us two things that have really stood out to you over the years that really makes that connection human, that you don't feel like you're another transaction or just another button that's being pressed to have something completed.
  • You touched on empathy and compassion; how do you teach someone empathy?
  • Share with us maybe three actionable takeaways that our business owners and listeners of this podcast could take away from the book or even just your years of experience in the different businesses that you have formulated and been successful in that if they went ahead and employed those three tactics tomorrow, they would start to see some results.
  • You've done a lot of research; you've written a lot of customer experience books. I want us to talk a little bit about the future. We are now at 20 years into the 21st century. So, next year we're going into 2020, where do you see customer service in another five years?
  • What’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you’re really excited about – either something you’re working on to develop yourself or your people?
  • Where can our listeners find you online?
  • During times of adversity or challenge, is there a quote or saying that you like to draw on that kind of helps to keep you refocus or gets you back centered to be on that journey to accomplish your goal?

 

Highlights

 

  • John stated that he doesn’t think we have a choice, there's a seismic shift happening in the world today. And for all the benefits and conveniences technology has brought us, it's come at a significant cost and that cost is human relationships, human interactions, which is so vital to customer loyalty, employee satisfaction, and just overall happiness. Today's illiterate are those who have an inability to make a meaningful connection with others. The pendulum has swung so far over to high tech, low touch that all of us are starving to be someone, a person with goals and pain points and all those things. And it's the companies that are creating the emotional connections that are reaping the rewards.

 

Yanique stated - I'm glad you touched on emotional connections because I personally, all the research that we've done for customer service in our business, we found that customers have two needs and those two needs are their emotional needs and their intellectual needs. And so, emotions speak to their heart and how you make them feel and intellectual speaks to their mind, what did they understand from that experience with you?

 

  • John stated that first, technology is not the enemy, it's not the devil. He loves technology and using technology to eliminate the human experience is the enemy, he'll give you an example. There's a wireless company in Canada that is forcing its customers to use their self-service channels to the point that if you need to call in and speak to someone for support or a billing question, they charge your account CAD $10.00. So, that's the opposite and that's not going over too well with their customer base. So, that's where you're using technology to eliminate the human experience. What we have to do is, the leaders need to understand the lack of social skills our society has today is the problem of businesses to solve and we need to marry the digital with the human experience and there's ways to do that. First off, we got to use technology for repetitive tasks, the basic tasks to enable employees to focus on what is most important and that's building that relationship, that's the result in higher customer loyalty, retention, lifetime value, and honestly job satisfaction. So, he'll give you one example, Apple is a brand he can't live without, he loves the product and he loves going into the brick and mortar still. He needed some repair work done on his laptop and it was great, he went online and in probably less than 45 seconds, scheduled an appointment at a time that was convenient for him with a genius, that was the technological advantage and quick and easy. He didn't have to call up and wait on hold and go through that maze and then he showed up and they took him right away and they're great to work with. So, the human interaction, which was vital, and he got to ask critical questions about what's wrong, what he needs to do, what he needs to do differently? Most of us, you take our computers away and we could be out of business.

 

Yanique mentioned - in your book, I'm just going to quote one of your sentences. It says, “Chick-fil-A is the most polite chain in the restaurant business of the chain surveyed that company's employees were most likely to say, please and thank you and to smile at customers.” And I know it's very, very simple saying please and thank you and in Jamaica we call it, “You must have manners, because manners will take you a very far away.” Can you just share with us how is it that we're going to get that social shift? Because I find the generation coming up now, they’re may be not as polite and as courteous as maybe our parents and our grandparents gone by.

 

John stated that he doesn’t think at any fault to their own, today we are relationship disadvantaged and it is trickled to all generations. But yes, millennials and Z have it the worst and there's five reasons why we're relationship disadvantage. We're in the midst of the digital age which has caused a rapid decline in people skills. We have high tech, no touch experiences, 40% of employees are working for someone younger than them, they have a boss that's younger than them and very few companies have relationship building training which is needed. It's a critical piece today, we can't skip this generation, the next one will be worst. And again, at no fault of their own, he truly believes the greatest skill any of us could work at every day and teach our family, our kids, our employees, ourselves is the ability to build an instant rapport with others, whether that be an acquaintance, stranger, customer, coworker, friend or someone you've never met in the elevator before. So, there's the art of relationship building and there's five keys, pieces to that and of the five, four of them can be taught and improved. Now obviously, if you can find any of these four or five living in an employee candidate, great, you’ll only move quicker. There is one though that you can't teach. So, the art of building relationships, the first one must be authentic, people have great BS detectors today, must have insatiable curiosity that can be taught and that's something that he has been taught for the last 30 years, must have incredible empathy, compassion and empathy and seeing it from the other person's point of view, must love people and then finally must be a great listener. And some of these may sound obvious but they're not obvious to the new generation and even us, people from the previous generations, we don't do it as well as we used to because we're all have been sucked into the device age and our people skills are eroding. So, of those five, the only one he'd say that can't be taught, that you have to find in your interview processes is must love people. He doesn't think you can train someone to love people, he thinks that has to be a genuine and all the training in world probably isn't going to move the needle too much.

 

  • John stated that there's a reason for a lack of empathy and again, he doesn't think any of this is the employee's fault, but you think about customer facing employees, first off, they don't know what world-class is. Most of us didn't grow up staying at five-star resorts, flying first class, getting a Mercedes Benz when we turned 16, yet the moment we got our first jobs, we were expected to give world-class experience and it's just not practical. If you don't know what it is, how can you deliver it? Most customer facing employees are not the customer, a lot of times they could be young, they could be 18 to 26 serving customers, clients, patients, tenants, whatever you may call them between 40 and 55 and at 25, don't understand what it's like to be a 48 year old female or male professional and work 24 hours isn’t enough time in a day, 36 hours isn’t enough time of the day, it doesn't mean we change who we hire, but we have to make sure we train them to understand what it's like. Employees aren't looking at it from the customer's perspective because the companies aren’t, the companies too often are thinking about what's easiest for us and not thinking about in that training their employees to think about from the customer's perspective. And then the last two reasons why we have a lack of empathy is we compare ourselves too often to the rest of our industry and that's a huge mistake, we'll say, “Oh my God, we're the best salon or travel company or whatever it may be in our industry.” And let's pretend for a moment that's true, he doubts it is but let's pretend, let's go to his salons. The fantasy island right now, let's say we were the best salons, head and shoulders above anyone in Cleveland and we're not, but let's say we are, well, if you're our client and you come in today, you then don't go down the street to compare us to our nearest competitor, you don't need a salon for a few weeks or a few months, so how good we are relative to our competition's really irrelevant to you. Now from here, you're going to the doctor's office, you're going to meet a girlfriend for lunch, you might go shopping, whatever that may be. And that's what you're comparing, saying, your next five experiences that day or that week saying, “God, I wish they treated me as well as my salon.” or you're saying the opposite. And then the final thing that causes a lack of empathy is, we all become numb, you're my 1 o'clock podcast or he has a keynote in Vegas tomorrow, or his 5:30 appointment, or hospitals might refer to their customers as 201B, which is a room and a bed. And we're all guilty of that and we’ve got be careful, we’ve got remember who we're dealing with and how important that is to them and their success and their ease of pain. So, teaching employees, ourselves what it's like to be the customer, what pain they're going through, how we can come to the rescue and make their day by being present and showing genuine hospitality, making an emotional connection and bringing our brilliance.

 

Yanique agreed and to add to that, with all of that trying to understand or trying to display or show someone how to exercise empathy. Then there's a flip side of the social media part of it with the generation that we're dealing with now and generally speaking, I think it affects everyone, even myself. So, a part of your book says, “There is social isolation due to a lack of real contact on connectedness with other people and this is strongest among younger people who use technology the most. So, people are craving human connection, but nonetheless find it easier and simpler to turn to a device than to have a normal conversation.” And I have a 13-year-old and I've actually taken her off of social media. She no longer has an Instagram or a Snapchat account because I find it's too distracting and I don't think they are emotionally intelligent to manage their conversations on this platform and this is my personal view as a parent. And so, when you have employees in an organization that they don't get it, “Why are you asking me to put my phone down? Like, I can't function without my phone if I'm working.” How do you get them to that point where they recognize that work is work and unless the device is being used as a tool to aid you in completing your job, it needs to be put down.

 

John shared that there's some really valuable information in his book, obviously for businesses, but also, he has had his three boys read parts of it and as long as the parts of their reading aren't coming from me and they're from studies that they'll believe it. Some of the things he'll share, so we're all in the midst of the touchscreen age and that is not a generational specific, we've got grandparents on social media and we’ve got five-year-old’s given an iPad and that's kind of their babysitter to keep them occupied for the next few hours. And as a result, we have less face to face interactions and a rapid decline in social skills and they say a lack of social relationships, which we're all suffering from today is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, it's the same cause and effect. And a result of heavy users of digital devices of any age and he’s guilty of it too, it's called digital dementia and they do brain scans, people who overuse digital devices and these brain scans look similar to patients who've sustained brain injury. Those are the things he wants his kids to read. Social isolation is not a millennial problem only, yes, why millennials say they have significantly less friends, 30% say they have no best friends, very scary things, but all generations are feeling it and the happiest people are the ones with the most meaningful relationships and they live longer. And so, we’ve got to train our employees, both personally and professionally, how as a customer they hate this, “I want you to know my name, I want you to know that I've been here before. I want you to know my order. I placed the same order three times a week, don't make me tell you what credit card I want to use.” He has no loyalty to an app, you don't build that loyalty to an app, but he does to people, it's hard to fire people that you know, and you’ve got to teach them the benefits personally and professionally and it's also the benefits, the companies that build the best relationships, build it internally with their employees and have less turnover.

 

Yanique agreed - It starts from within. So, as I was listening to a while ago a little light bulb went off in my head and I said, you know, I think one of the also serious characteristics that we're missing is people don't really listen and sometimes you're having a conversation with someone. So, you're talking to them and they're not listening to you and they're listening with the intention to respond, not with the intention of understanding where you're coming from. And I guess that ties also back into understanding and showing empathy because if you're not really listening to what the person is saying to you, paying attention to the emotion in what they're saying, paying attention to how this terrible situation impacted them. So, you can actually respond in a way that shows that you were listening and that you actually care, then you can potentially get them even more upset.

 

John agreed – He stated that one of his favorite parts of the book and it's a section about hving insatiable curiosity that you're dying to learn about others and not only about subjects that interest you, but subjects that you're unfamiliar with and it was very painful doing research on this book because of so many things that he was bad at and didn't realize how bad he was until he read this. John stated that 30 years ago there was only two subjects he wanted to talk about, business and sports. And if someone couldn't carry on a conversation about either one of those, he wanted nothing to do with them, he didn't want to go out socially for dinner with a couple if the husband couldn't carry on either of those which he’s embarrassed to say. Stephen Covey says, “People don't listen with the intent of understanding, they listen to with the intent of replying.” Scientists studied the human brain and said, they found that it takes the brain a minimum of 0.6 seconds to formulate a response to something said to it. And then they studied hundreds, thousands of conversations and found the average gap between people talking was 0.2 seconds. One third the time the brain will allow, we're responding and why? Because to your point, I have my answer ready minutes ago, I'm just waiting for the other person to come up for breath. So, what do we need to do? We need to realize that the greatest gift we can give anyone, an employee, a customer, our family when we get home is that gift of our attention. And so, he loves to ask people, “Who here is good at building rapport with a total stranger?” And most people raised their hands instantly and he said, “Well, you've got to prove it to me just because you spent 15 minutes, 30 minutes at a coffee shop, at a networking party, wherever talking to someone, doesn't mean you built a rapport. You might've been talking about yourself for that length of time.” And our biggest obstacle is we're all genetically coded to be preoccupied and, “It's my flight that was delayed. It's my son that got in trouble at school yesterday. It's my client that’s upset with us.” And so, to resist that urge, he always say, you have to be able to tell him two or more things after any length of conversation of their Ford “F O R D,” if you could tell him two or more things of the other person's Ford, you not only built a relationship, you own the relationship cause in each and every person, their Ford is their hot buttons. So, F stands for family, are they married? Do they have kids? How old are their kids? O stands for occupation, What do they do? How long they've been doing it? What's their title? R, Recreation, What does she like to do with her time off? She does hot yoga three days a week. She's a runner. He coaches little league. And then the D stands for Dreams, What's on their bucket list? What's their encore career? What's their dream vacation? When you focus suddenly on people's Ford, it gets you to not talk about yourself and you really, really build that emotional connection.

 

Yanique agreed that's a good point because as you said, not talk about yourself from Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It was book was published so many years ago, but in the book, it says, the number one thing that people love to do talk about the most is themselves. It's a powerful book and if you really want to become a better communicator, a better listener, it's definitely a great place to start, it's a good foundation, it really opens up your eyes and makes you aware of maybe some of the things that you were not aware of or were taking for granted for you to just be more conscious and intentional in your interactions so that you can become a better communicator.

 

  • John stated that let's go to how to be a great listener. This sounds so trivial, like everyone thinks you're a great listener but until he did the research, he realized he had a lot of work. They talk about fierce attention, giving someone your fierce attention and one of the comments is if you a question and then don't ask two to three follow up questions, odds aren't, you weren't listening. So, there should be a four to one ratio of questions asked versus the answered and some myths about listening is you should be a sponge where you're just listening and every so often you say, “Uh huh. Uh huh.” And they say that's not a good listener, a listener is more of a trampoline who's amplifying your energy and asking clarifying questions to get you to go deeper in your thought process. And so, it's just taking the soft skills that we think is common sense and isn’t and helping yourself and your existing and future generation employees, how to build better relationships that will benefit them in all areas of their life and that's what's key. His employees are so loyal because of what they teach them that's going to help them at home and in all areas of their life, it's not just about helping us make more money.

 

  • John shared Customer Service Growth and Development is not going to stop, the digital revolution is going to continue and there's a lot of benefits to that. What consumers are buying today….they're buying two things, the first one is they're buying time, the more our personal income goes up, typically it means the discretionary time we have goes down because that means we're working harder. And so, it used to be a do it yourself world, now it's do it for me. And so many businesses that can speed up and save him time. He gives a great example. John stated that he has a carwash that he has a membership to and it's a silly thing that when he goes there, they also sell gas and he never get gas from there. He always needs gas, but he never gets gas because the car wash is like 15 minutes, which seems like forever. And then he’s always late or close to, he needs to get to his next appointment. And then, later on that day, on his way home, he'll have to stop and get gas which is so unproductive that he stopped twice. So, what they're doing is they're adding gas tanks to where they wash the cars and now, they could do this at the same time, it doesn't take him more than 15 minutes to get out of there and he says yes, every time. So, they bought him some time, or they're given him, he bought himself time. So, it's very important to make things faster and easier for people and then the second thing consumers are buying more than ever today is experiences and they do not care what they spend on time and experiences and if you can give them exceptional experiences. So, let's look at some companies that are making price irrelevant. You have these movie theaters are opening up where you can recline and there's a tray and you can order a bottle of wine, it's a dining experience. So, he bought time, so now they don't have to go to movie and then later at dinner, they can go to movie and a dinner in a reclining chair and a bottle of wine. You don't care about how much that cost, that's a great experience. Have you seen the new Starbucks restaurants? the reserve roastery? So, you got to check them out? Look them up. It's called the Willy Wonka of a coffee and they're huge, they're mammoth and just the way they make the coffee and the beans are flying around over your head. The average cup of coffee there is $12.00 and if you’re so bold, they have a $50.00 cup of coffee that you can order. These are places that are bringing theatre and romance back to the brick and mortar and if you can do that, if you can do that, people are willing to spend, making price irrelevant and experiences and time.

 

Yanique reiterated – If you can capitalize on how the experience goes for the customer regardless of the business type and you can cut down on time and make things more flexible and convenient, it will make price irrelevant and it will make your brand an unforgettable brand in your customers mind.

 

John stated that the primary currency is the emotional connection that we create with our customers, employees and vendors and when you do that, you start becoming the brand customers can’t live without and you make price irrelevant.

 

 

  • John shared listeners can find him at –

www.thedijuliusgroup.com

Email: John@thedijuliusgroup.com

Facebook – John DiJulius

Twitter - @JohnDiJullis

LinkedIn @John DiJulius

 

  • John shared that the quote is all over his house and it’s all over his business and it is, “I want to live an extraordinary life, so countless others do.” And so, that’s just not a mantra. The reason he wants to live an extraordinary life is not so that he can have more money, more cars, more vacations, more houses, it’s because of the ripple effect it has on his family, his employees, his clients. And so, it really keeps him grounded when things go wrong or from how he takes care of himself, what he’s feeding his brain, what he’s feeding his body, who he’s hanging out with, who’s influencing him, what he’s listening to. He firmly believes it’s our responsibility and obligation to sow the seeds of our potential and the potential that we don’t reach not only cheats us, but it cheats all the people that are dependent. An easy example to relate to, let’s say he eats junk food at lunch and he didn’t get a work out in today, when he gets home and he gets home he’s tired and just want to collapse in the couch and maybe have a beer and one of his sons wants him to play catch or help him with his homework and he’s just too tired or he’s too crabby. What did that just do to that and you take that to a million different interactions and obligations to the point where you make a poor decision and it has a ripple effect and that’s okay.

 

Taking risks and making poor decisions will happen but what happens as a result is that you want to stick your head in the sand and say, “Whoo me” and feel sorry for yourself. And so, when you think, you have to live an extraordinary life, you can’t do that, you can’t feel sorry for yourself because there are so many people counting on you and you have to suck it up and you have to figure it out and you’re going to have to make it right. And people bought into his vision, your vision and they came to work for him and gave up opportunities elsewhere because of the vision he was telling them, and he can’t bail on them now just because it’s getting a little tough.

 

 

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