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Marc Gordon – Customer Service | Expert Interview
Episode 22 - Good Customer Service: Interview With 'Canada’s Marketing Superstar', Marc Gordon
Marc Gordon is an internationally recognised thought leader in the field of customer experience. With over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries, he has built a reputation for providing insightful concepts that are both innovative and effective.
As an award-winning keynote speaker, Marc has spoken for some of the world’s most respected companies, including Bausch & Lomb, Hilton Hotels, and Mondelez International. Marc is the only speaker in his field to have keynoted at the World Management Forum in Tehran, Iran.
Regularly featured on television and radio for his opinions, Marc has shared his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry, and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as 'Canada’s marketing superstar' by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Today, we discuss good customer service in more detail.
You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Today I have the pleasure of introducing Marc Gordon. His bio here, again, I'm overwhelmed, I'm staggered at the wonderful people that I get to have a conversation with, their resumes, what they've achieved, what they've accomplished and the areas of expertise they have. Marc Gordon is no exception to this. He is an internationally recognized thought leader and the field of customer experience, with over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries. He also has a reputation for providing insight or concepts both innovative and effective.
He's an award winning as a keynote speaker. He's spoken with some of the world's most respected companies including Hilton Hotels, Bausch + Lomb, Mondelez International. He's also the only person to have spoken in his area of expertise at the World Management Forum in Tehran in Iran, which itself is pretty staggering. His regularly featured on TV and radio for his opinions. He shares his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as Canada's marketing superstar by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Mic drop right there.
Nathan Simmonds:
Marc, thanks very much for being here, they really appreciate it.
Marc Gordon:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Marc Gordon
Nathan Simmonds:
I got introduced to you a few months ago, it feels like forever ago, just to talk to you about the different ways that you look at customer service, what a good customer experience is, customer expectation and how you manage these as a provider of product or service and as that dialogue opened up there was just so much good stuff in here to share from your ways of thinking and your approaches to these things that can help so many people out, and so many businesses, small, medium enterprises and leaders in their space, it would have been remiss of me not to get you on here and have this conversation that's for certain.
Marc Gordon:
Well thank you.
Nathan Simmonds:
The first question from me is always why do you do what you do?
Marc Gordon:
Wow. Boy, you start off with the serious questions right away don't you? All right. Give me a sec. If I can just open up about this I guess a little bit. So why, that's a great question.
Marc Gordon:
I guess it starts with the fact that going back as a kid in elementary school I was one of these kids that didn't quite fit in. I wasn't one of the cool kids, I wasn't one of the smart kids, I wasn't one of the athletic kids. I didn't seem to fit into any group and back then when you didn't fit in you became a target for bullying, and through much of school I was bullied relentlessly. It was a time when, unlike today, where it's taken seriously, back then parents, teachers, everyone just shrugged and said, "Kids will be kids."
Marc Gordon:
When you are growing up in that kind of environment in school you don't really fit in, you find yourself a target for aggression a lot, you spend a fair amount of time on your own, and in doing so you tend to observe other people. You're kind of on the outside looking in and this was the case for me because I found myself just watching other people. I would spend my lunch hours or recess or whatever, free time, when the other kids were playing, I would just be walking around.
Marc Gordon:
Without even realizing it I was observing what relationships were and the dynamics between them and the impact of aggression and passiveness and just the different dynamics of relationships and how people became friends and enemies and everything else. I didn't realize it at the time, but it ingrained in me certain values and certain beliefs. Then as I grew up in my teens and 20s when I started to get involved in owning businesses and starting businesses I realized that this behaviour carries through into the outer world as well and even today, whether you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s or beyond, the fact is there is still bullying going on. It's still happening.
Marc Gordon:
So, it's happening by customers who are demanding or making unreasonable demands on businesses. It's happening with suppliers that are making unreasonable demands on their customers. It's happening with competitors who are trying to put you out of business. They may be using some form of bully tactic and it may not be open aggression towards you, but at its very core all of this is a form of aggression.
Marc Gordon:
I see it so often now and I'm sure you do as well in the marketplace, there doesn't seem to be that attitude of abundance. It seems to be a view of scarcity, that for every client you have or that you attain that means that's a client that I have to lose. So that means for me to succeed you have to fail. A lot of businesses seem to have that attitude.
Marc Gordon:
My belief has always been there's enough to go around. It might be a bit of a cliché, but the fact is my belief is if the customer isn't buying from me or doesn't want to buy from me they were never mine to begin with or if I have a customer and they choose to leave for whatever reason they were never mine. We can't control people, but a lot of businesses would like to do that.
Marc Gordon:
So over the last 10 years or so as I moved away from really being a service provider or a business owner in the way of products, I was in the auto industry for the better part of a decade, I started to get in the consulting, I really found myself focusing on the whole relationship aspect of business and how all the things that we see as human beings and the way we communicate with each other, how that translates into how we communicate with each other on a business level, on a professional level.
Marc Gordon:
It's all those things that I think I absorbed over the years of what I went through in school, but also dealing with people now much like you and I deal with, where we see the different dynamics and different personalities and different traits and how they impact each other and people's desire to want to connect with you or to step away and have nothing to do with you.
Marc Gordon:
I guess at the end of the day my why is really about wanting people to understand that in business, much like outside of business, in your personal life, it's really about relationships. That's it at the very, very core and whether you want to call it customer experience or customer service or anything else, it's about making people feel valued and appreciated and that's the core of it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Great. That's interesting. I experienced bullying as well when I was at school. Again, you and I are similar ages in that kind of development, it wasn't discussed, it wasn't talked about and as you were saying that reminded me how I spent time doing the people watching, learning how conflicts played out and watching how different conflicts played out and how certain behaviors took the lead on and controlled different elements of that.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it's interesting that you bring that to the forefront in this and looking at these things from a customer experience point of view. Again, how my thinking shifting is, is looking at those people in some sense, those people that are interacting with you on a daily basis, they are your customers in some way, shape or form and they're coming to you because they want something and whether it's schoolyard bullying, they're coming to you because they want something. Okay, well how do you deal with that?
Nathan Simmonds:
How do you manage that experience so that it's a win-win for everybody, not at the detriment because of that bullying that you end up in that feeling of lack where if you get one client that means I lose one, when actually how do you become worthy rivals? How do share the competitiveness to drive each other to be better than you were yesterday, rather than diminishing or depreciating yourself or somebody else through conflict and through that aggression.
Nathan Simmonds:
That stuff just expands and grows and evolves up into adult life, so you see these wounded leaders walking around hurting other people. Why? Because they were probably bullied or they were bullies at school and as a result of that they just carve it into their professional life, they then cascade that down to their staff, who then cascades that back out to your customers. So it's being conscious about the knock on effect of how we are managing our experience for everybody, internally and externally.
Marc Gordan:
Exactly, and it's interesting what you were saying that... I find when people grow up they obviously bring with them whatever they organically absorbed and experienced when they were kids and it's interesting, I find those who were bullied tend to take one of two routes.
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By Darren A. SmithEpisode 22 - Good Customer Service: Interview With 'Canada’s Marketing Superstar', Marc Gordon
Marc Gordon is an internationally recognised thought leader in the field of customer experience. With over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries, he has built a reputation for providing insightful concepts that are both innovative and effective.
As an award-winning keynote speaker, Marc has spoken for some of the world’s most respected companies, including Bausch & Lomb, Hilton Hotels, and Mondelez International. Marc is the only speaker in his field to have keynoted at the World Management Forum in Tehran, Iran.
Regularly featured on television and radio for his opinions, Marc has shared his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry, and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as 'Canada’s marketing superstar' by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Today, we discuss good customer service in more detail.
You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Today I have the pleasure of introducing Marc Gordon. His bio here, again, I'm overwhelmed, I'm staggered at the wonderful people that I get to have a conversation with, their resumes, what they've achieved, what they've accomplished and the areas of expertise they have. Marc Gordon is no exception to this. He is an internationally recognized thought leader and the field of customer experience, with over 25 years of marketing and sales experience in a number of diverse industries. He also has a reputation for providing insight or concepts both innovative and effective.
He's an award winning as a keynote speaker. He's spoken with some of the world's most respected companies including Hilton Hotels, Bausch + Lomb, Mondelez International. He's also the only person to have spoken in his area of expertise at the World Management Forum in Tehran in Iran, which itself is pretty staggering. His regularly featured on TV and radio for his opinions. He shares his thoughts on topics that include the boycotting of brands, customer service in the airline industry and companies such as Facebook and Starbucks. Marc has been referred to as Canada's marketing superstar by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Mic drop right there.
Nathan Simmonds:
Marc, thanks very much for being here, they really appreciate it.
Marc Gordon:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Marc Gordon
Nathan Simmonds:
I got introduced to you a few months ago, it feels like forever ago, just to talk to you about the different ways that you look at customer service, what a good customer experience is, customer expectation and how you manage these as a provider of product or service and as that dialogue opened up there was just so much good stuff in here to share from your ways of thinking and your approaches to these things that can help so many people out, and so many businesses, small, medium enterprises and leaders in their space, it would have been remiss of me not to get you on here and have this conversation that's for certain.
Marc Gordon:
Well thank you.
Nathan Simmonds:
The first question from me is always why do you do what you do?
Marc Gordon:
Wow. Boy, you start off with the serious questions right away don't you? All right. Give me a sec. If I can just open up about this I guess a little bit. So why, that's a great question.
Marc Gordon:
I guess it starts with the fact that going back as a kid in elementary school I was one of these kids that didn't quite fit in. I wasn't one of the cool kids, I wasn't one of the smart kids, I wasn't one of the athletic kids. I didn't seem to fit into any group and back then when you didn't fit in you became a target for bullying, and through much of school I was bullied relentlessly. It was a time when, unlike today, where it's taken seriously, back then parents, teachers, everyone just shrugged and said, "Kids will be kids."
Marc Gordon:
When you are growing up in that kind of environment in school you don't really fit in, you find yourself a target for aggression a lot, you spend a fair amount of time on your own, and in doing so you tend to observe other people. You're kind of on the outside looking in and this was the case for me because I found myself just watching other people. I would spend my lunch hours or recess or whatever, free time, when the other kids were playing, I would just be walking around.
Marc Gordon:
Without even realizing it I was observing what relationships were and the dynamics between them and the impact of aggression and passiveness and just the different dynamics of relationships and how people became friends and enemies and everything else. I didn't realize it at the time, but it ingrained in me certain values and certain beliefs. Then as I grew up in my teens and 20s when I started to get involved in owning businesses and starting businesses I realized that this behaviour carries through into the outer world as well and even today, whether you're in your 20s, your 30s, your 40s or beyond, the fact is there is still bullying going on. It's still happening.
Marc Gordon:
So, it's happening by customers who are demanding or making unreasonable demands on businesses. It's happening with suppliers that are making unreasonable demands on their customers. It's happening with competitors who are trying to put you out of business. They may be using some form of bully tactic and it may not be open aggression towards you, but at its very core all of this is a form of aggression.
Marc Gordon:
I see it so often now and I'm sure you do as well in the marketplace, there doesn't seem to be that attitude of abundance. It seems to be a view of scarcity, that for every client you have or that you attain that means that's a client that I have to lose. So that means for me to succeed you have to fail. A lot of businesses seem to have that attitude.
Marc Gordon:
My belief has always been there's enough to go around. It might be a bit of a cliché, but the fact is my belief is if the customer isn't buying from me or doesn't want to buy from me they were never mine to begin with or if I have a customer and they choose to leave for whatever reason they were never mine. We can't control people, but a lot of businesses would like to do that.
Marc Gordon:
So over the last 10 years or so as I moved away from really being a service provider or a business owner in the way of products, I was in the auto industry for the better part of a decade, I started to get in the consulting, I really found myself focusing on the whole relationship aspect of business and how all the things that we see as human beings and the way we communicate with each other, how that translates into how we communicate with each other on a business level, on a professional level.
Marc Gordon:
It's all those things that I think I absorbed over the years of what I went through in school, but also dealing with people now much like you and I deal with, where we see the different dynamics and different personalities and different traits and how they impact each other and people's desire to want to connect with you or to step away and have nothing to do with you.
Marc Gordon:
I guess at the end of the day my why is really about wanting people to understand that in business, much like outside of business, in your personal life, it's really about relationships. That's it at the very, very core and whether you want to call it customer experience or customer service or anything else, it's about making people feel valued and appreciated and that's the core of it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Great. That's interesting. I experienced bullying as well when I was at school. Again, you and I are similar ages in that kind of development, it wasn't discussed, it wasn't talked about and as you were saying that reminded me how I spent time doing the people watching, learning how conflicts played out and watching how different conflicts played out and how certain behaviors took the lead on and controlled different elements of that.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it's interesting that you bring that to the forefront in this and looking at these things from a customer experience point of view. Again, how my thinking shifting is, is looking at those people in some sense, those people that are interacting with you on a daily basis, they are your customers in some way, shape or form and they're coming to you because they want something and whether it's schoolyard bullying, they're coming to you because they want something. Okay, well how do you deal with that?
Nathan Simmonds:
How do you manage that experience so that it's a win-win for everybody, not at the detriment because of that bullying that you end up in that feeling of lack where if you get one client that means I lose one, when actually how do you become worthy rivals? How do share the competitiveness to drive each other to be better than you were yesterday, rather than diminishing or depreciating yourself or somebody else through conflict and through that aggression.
Nathan Simmonds:
That stuff just expands and grows and evolves up into adult life, so you see these wounded leaders walking around hurting other people. Why? Because they were probably bullied or they were bullies at school and as a result of that they just carve it into their professional life, they then cascade that down to their staff, who then cascades that back out to your customers. So it's being conscious about the knock on effect of how we are managing our experience for everybody, internally and externally.
Marc Gordan:
Exactly, and it's interesting what you were saying that... I find when people grow up they obviously bring with them whatever they organically absorbed and experienced when they were kids and it's interesting, I find those who were bullied tend to take one of two routes.