Navigating the Customer Experience

Ryan Beachum has sought to apply his knowledge of the hospitality industry to provide desperately needed solutions. Having previously worked with some of the largest developers in the industry, Beachum saw an opportunity to serve timeshare owners beyond what was offered and so he began building his business idea, ResortShare - from the ground up. In 2016, Ryan created HelloVacay and has consistently led the industry in independent resort marketing and resales. Now, in 2021 he is set to launch a subscription-based, wholesale-priced travel membership in partnership with the Priceline Group.

Questions

• We just want to get an idea of how it is that you got to where you are today, if you could share with us a little bit about that journey and the opportunities that presented themselves to get you to where you are today.
• For those of our listeners who will be tuning into this episode who don't know what timeshare is and have no idea what subscription-base, wholesale-price travel is, what does that mean to the average person?
• So, you're a small organization. How have you found just motivating your team during this period, especially as we are trying to emerge out of a pandemic?
• In looking to engage in HelloVacay, what are some of the benefits or opportunities that you think exists in this particular platform versus if they were to do another channel of hospitality, for example, like just book their own hotel or go through a travel agency, what are some of the opportunities that they get from utilizing your platform and doing the wholesale travel option?
• So that's all about vacation wholesale travel. Can you indicate over the time that you've been in business what demographic do you think gravitates most towards your packages? Would you say you appeal more to everybody? Or do you think you appeal more to, let's say, persons who are more mature?
• Could you share with us where you see your business evolving to within the next, let's say, 3 to 5 years? How do you see the business growing even more, and expanding and offering even greater value to your existing and even new customers that you may acquire over the next 3 to 5 years?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, a website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Can you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could have been a book that you read a very long time ago, but it still resonates with you to this day, or maybe even a book that you've read recently, but it has just really impacted you greatly.
• Could you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now? Something that you're really excited about - either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track or keep you refocused? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Ryan’s Journey

Ryan shared that he did quite well, all the way up until 2008. And most people know what happened in the real estate industry in 2008. The second worst economy that the USA has certainly ever had. And he knows it was bad everywhere at that time, but the interesting thing was, he ran into a friend that he hadn't seen in years, actually, that he had grown up with that was working for the largest timeshare developer. And for those of you that don't know, timeshare is really interesting, in that it's kind of the combination of real estate and the hospitality industry.

So, although traditional real estate was not selling whatsoever in 2008, he found that people were still purchasing timeshare in spite of such a bad economy. So, it provided this interesting opportunity for him to at least look and learn about what is this timeshare product and as a by-product of that he ended up getting hired from that large developer and learning more about it. And it started this transition from real estate over to what is now fully in the hospitality industry.

What Does Timeshare, Subscription-Base, Wholesale-Price Travel Mean to the Average Person?

Ryan shared that his original transition was into the timeshare industry, which kind of got him into the hospitality industry. Their new platform is much broader for the hospitality industry as a whole. And so, they're not really focused so much specifically on one kind of sector of the hospitality industry, which is it timeshare, although in case you don't know, timeshare is really a deeded ownership, and it's an interest in a timeshare resort. So, that's really the first thing they started out in providing solutions for that industry. And then what's happened over the last year or so is they've pivoted to actually come up with a platform with Priceline that is really for everyone, not just for the timeshare industry.

Me: In building your business, approximately how many employees do you have in your company?

Ryan shared that there are inside the office and outside, there's roughly 10.

How to Motivate Your Team During a Pandemic

Ryan shared that that's a great question and a lot of that has been interesting because there's been a lot more time where people haven't been working inside the office so that's presented something different.

In terms of the technology they use, it's really easy, of course for what they do for it all to be web based and to communicate through the technology and all of that. But when people are working from home, he thinks it's really important that you have regular meetings, regular conversations with everyone, deliberate meetings that maybe you would not have if you were all in the office together just to at least connect every single day and discuss what's going on and discuss what you want to accomplish for that day, that week, that month. So, really, over the last year or so it's presented certain challenges but communication is key and he thinks as long as you're engaging with everyone on a daily basis, it makes a lot of difference.

Benefits and Opportunities in Using HelloVacay Platform

Me: So, as a customer who is looking for an opportunity to engage in HelloVacay, what are some of the benefits or opportunities that you think exists in this particular platform versus if they were to do another channel of hospitality, for example, like just book their own hotel or go through a travel agency, what are some of the opportunities that they get from utilizing your platform and doing the wholesale travel option?

Ryan shared that that's a great question. So, what they aim to do is to provide everyone with access to private travel rates that previously have not been publicly accessible. So, one of the things a lot of people don't know, if they haven't been in the industry, when they're going through to all these various online travel agencies that exists, some people may have noticed that if they're looking for a hotel or resort for certain dates, and they go and they hunt around to different online travel agencies, they may notice that all the rates for the same resort for the same dates are pretty close to being the same. And the reason for that is resorts and hotels have agreements with online travel agencies that they will not undercut any one given public online travel agency with lower rates on a competitive site. So, what happens is you have kind of a flattening across the board where all the prices are basically the same on the public online travel agencies and for people that have hunted around and looked, they likely have noticed that, and that's really, because the prices are the same that it’s felt that way. So those are public rates.

And then on the other hand, the other extreme is you've got the travel clubs, there's a lot of travel clubs out there where they may be expensive to get involved with the travel club and there's a long-term obligation, and they're paying maintenance fees, or membership fees every single year that are expensive. So, they're spending a lot of money to be a part of that travel club, they may have access to some kind of private rates through that travel club, but there's so much expense and so much long-term obligation.

So, what they want to do is they want to sit in the middle between the public online travel agencies, and then between the expensive travel clubs, and offer access, affordable subscription based, flexible access to private travel rates on the resorts and hotels unsold rooms, combining ultimately some of the benefits that you see with the travel clubs, but without the significant expense and long-term obligation of the travel clubs. So, their prices are legitimately up to 70% off all the public booking rates. So, it's kind of like Netflix style pricing, flexible, affordable, and then they can access all these private wholesale rates.

Me: Amazing. And this is for any type of hotel and does this apply to all aspects of hospitality? So, airlines, hotels, and car rentals, or is it just specific to different aspects of the hospitality industry?

Ryan stated yes, they provide all three through the membership, but he'll throw out a small disclaimer. Their hotels and resort deals are really unbelievable for people that are getting registered and getting on and looking at the rate comparisons and as they look at their rates when it says it's 47% off a hotel, you will see as you look at the other public sites, it's legitimately 47% off.

So, for the hotels and rental cars, the deals are phenomenal, on the airfare, he never tells any members or people that may want to be members that their airfare deals are so amazing, they're not. There’s a convenience for people, they are looking at ways that they can include big discounts on the airfare but the margins are very different on airfare and it's very tough to get those deals, they're going to work on it. But he doesn't want to tell the world that they have amazing deals on airfare when they do not, they're there for convenience for any members.

What Demographic Gravitates to the HelloVacay Package?

Ryan shared that their platform really can be a benefit to anybody that wants or needs to travel, including consumers, and businesses. With that said, they have a subscription-based model.

So, although anybody can benefit from huge discounts that they have on their platform, they believe that all the folks may be skewing a bit younger that are used to paying for a lot of different subscriptions. These days, that's really broadening to everyone, if you think about the streaming services Netflix and Hulu, and Disney Plus, and all these different things and everybody's really getting used to paying these subscriptions monthly but maybe even more so the younger generations, the Millennials, Generation Z are really in the habit of paying for subscriptions for a lot of various things. And so, they do think that they are a very good target audience for them.

Where do you see the Business Evolving to Within the Next 3-5 years?

Ryan shared that what they want to be, ultimately, is the world's most affordable, flexible travel club, with giving people access to private rates that they've never had before, that's what they want to be the most affordable, flexible subscription-based travel club.

And so, when he thinks about the long-term vision for HelloVacay, they really are looking at 3 different areas of what they can offer in terms of first, the inventory, they mentioned timeshare inventory, which is these multi room properties, for anybody that stayed at a timeshare, they're kind of like little apartment a lot of times, little kitchens, separate bedrooms, washer and dryer. So, for people that are traveling longer term, more than just a weekend, it's great to have separate bedrooms, and to have that privacy and all that. So, they worked in the timeshare industry, they have those relationships, they can start to include some of that inventory beyond just the hotels and all of that, that they get from their partner Priceline.

But also, in terms of the inventory, retreats, last minute deals, they are going to work on the flights on getting better deals on the flights, so that's the inventory. But also, they want to add in as many benefits as they can in terms of discounts on attractions, sightseeing, they want to look and see how affordably they can offer people concierge service, perhaps VIP lounge access, these are all things that they're working on to ultimately provide their members. He doesn't have a date for all of these benefits yet, these are all things that they're exploring right now beyond just the access to the private rates.

And then finally, beyond the different sources of discounted inventory and besides the benefits that they're working on providing, they really want to focus on building some interesting technology that they think is going to be really useful to consumers. Some people have heard of a kind of new emerging term they used called Conversational Commerce.

So, a lot of us are now seeing not only on sites, but sometimes on Facebook Messenger and things like that where companies are using more and more improved chatbot technology and those kinds of things, some of that technology is getting really good through using artificial intelligence and those kinds of things is able to really make a good customer service accessible using the technology.

Now, he would never in this day and age just rely on chatbots and that kind of thing for customer service, you got to have real humans backing that. He thinks you can provide a lot of easy access on multiple social media platforms, WhatsApp, all these different things where the Conversational Commerce, the chatbots have gotten very good. And they want to offer decentralized rewards for people and so there's a lot of interesting technology that they'd like to build as well. So, there's really 3 things for them, it's being an aggregate for various different sources of highly discounted inventory for people's membership, it's adding in benefits for people, and it's building world class technology for consumers.

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

When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Ryan shared that there's really a couple, but there's one that stands out to him as a business owner more than any other that organizes his brain and it's called Trello. He mentioned that he doesn't own any interest in Trello, he doesn't own any shares in their parent company or anything like that. But honestly, in recent years, for him, the style of service which is actually derived from Japan, it's a Kanban board. And for him in the way he thinks, it's huge in organizing his ideas and thoughts. And so, for people that haven't been exposed to Trello, and you have any kind of project or your business or even just for personal use, he highly recommends it, it's a series of columns where you move cards around. And so, for him, it's like putting his brain into a digital format, it's like he’s just moving around, all different thoughts he has and he doesn't know what he’ll do without it.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Ryan

When asked about books that have the biggest impact, Ryan shared that if he had to say that the one book that has had the biggest impact on his life, that to him is just a profound book and a lot of people know it and he's read it is a book called The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle. So, a lot of people are familiar with Eckhart Tolle now, he's. When he first read that a long time ago, not as many people knew who he was, or what that book was, but for him, the way that that book is delivered, he thinks is beautiful.

And of course, when you read it, it's really based around a lot of Buddhist philosophies and that kind of thing. But he believes, without getting too philosophical, he believes that the ability to have a high quality of consciousness and staying present, whether it's in your personal life, or whether you're working and having that presence is very important, because no matter what you do or how successful you are, if you're not present as Eckhart Tolle always puts it. Instead of us using our minds, we have gotten into a kind of disease of our minds using us.

So, it was meant to be that we use our mind as a tool, but our minds have kind of went on overdrive where we're overthinking everything and it's just kind of on autopilot. And what that does, he believes, is it reduces our quality of consciousness and of course, with that is people that are depressed and anxious because they're always either living in the past or they're living in the future. So, he loves that book, it's he'd have to say his favorite of all time.

What Ryan is Really Excited About Now!

Ryan shared that one of the things he wants to do and having this conversation is, of course, he wants to plug his business. But truly, that aside, yes, of course he wants to tell people about his business. But truly, he’s really excited about it, he doesn't know why this is, but he’s never seen another travel platform offer this product in this way in such an affordable way. So, as an entrepreneur that's had different products and services over the years, never has he been able to offer more value so affordably. People that have signed up for their service will pay $8.95 a month, or they're paying $79 per a year. Well, if someone pays $79 a year, they can save more than that booking just a weekend through their platform. So, to him, he’s really jazzed about that, he’s really excited about that right now because he’s never had a product offer to the world that had such tremendous value over what the price is, it's just very exciting to him.

Where Can We Find Ryan Online

Me: So, our listeners would have plugged into this episode and they are quite intrigued with HelloVacay, they want to learn more about it, they want to maybe connect with you, follow you on your journey. Where can they find you online? And how can they find HelloVacay online?

Website – www.hellovacay.com

LinkedIn – HelloVacay

Facebook - @HelloVacayWholesaleTravel

Ryan shared that the thing he wanted to do, he’s going to be on a few podcasts and only for the podcast he wanted to give anybody, any of the listeners, he wanted to offer them a free year, not a free week, not a free month, he wants everyone to just try this for a year over just using the public online travel agencies. So, what they've done here is they've set up a promotional page, and it's www.hellovacay.com/freeyear.

And so, all he’s asking people to do please is it'll give you some steps on there, this page is set up just for these podcasts, you will see a link to a post on there that you can share to either Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and if you just take a screenshot of it, it's got a little section on that page where you can upload a screenshot and once you upload the screenshot, it will redirect you and give you a free year. People are paying $79 every day for a year's access and he wants to just give it to everyone for free, he just asked that people just share, kind of spread the gospel. It’s a new platform so people are willing to do that for the promotional page. He thinks you'll really enjoy using it and if you plan on doing any traveling at all, it's going to save you a boatload of money.

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Ryan Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Ryan shared that there's a lot of quotes that he really likes but one that he’s reflected on a number of times, especially when we think about the pandemic, and all that, and all the adversity that people go through is Winston Churchill, once said, “If you're going through hell, keep going.”

And he thinks that is a beautiful quote, because we all have trials and tribulations in life. And so, there are some people, unfortunately, that give up, and they're kind of stuck in that one place. And so, he thinks that's kind of a simple but profound way of saying, if you're going through hell, keep going and you'll come out the other side, and things will improve through your persistence.

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

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

Links

• The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Jason Ten-Pow's passion for customer experience was sparked as a teenager working behind the meat counter of a carnival-themed grocery store in Toronto. Today, Jason is the CEO and President of ONR, the CX consulting firm he founded in 2009. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from York University. Jason lives in Toronto with his son Ronin.

Questions

• Could you just tell us how it is that you ended up in the whole realm of customer experience? How did you get where you are today?
• Could you share with our listeners a little bit about the book Unbreakable? What are maybe the key themes that are in the book? And how do you think this book can help a manager or a leader in an organization?
• Could you share with us based on your research what are some of the things that influences customer’s expectations? And then maybe also just touch on why do you think emotions plays such an integral role in somebody making a decision? And are there other factors that come into play? And if other factors come into play, do emotions out-weigh those other factors? Or do emotions always take the greater portion of the decision-making process?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you also share with us what is maybe one or two books that you've read, it could be that you read maybe a very long time ago or one that you read recently, that has had the biggest impact on you?
• Could you also share with us maybe one thing that's going on in your life right now, either something that you're working on to develop yourself, or you're working on to develop your people, but you're really excited about it.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track, or just get you refocus if you feel derailed for any reason. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Jason’s Journey

Jason shared that it's interesting, it's been a long and sort of winding road to get here but it's been fascinating nonetheless and he’s learned a lot. It started out just being in customer experience and working customer experience in retail positions at a number of different companies early in my career, even in High School, he'd be looking and as he'd worked at these retail locations, he'd be seeing how different customers were treated and look at how customers responded to different treatment.

And you'd see certain customers that come in every week, and you wanted to know, what was it that got them there? Was it just force of habit? Was it all these other sort of things about their actual experience in the store that brought them back again, and again. And when he went into University, started to study public opinion, voting and decision-making theory and looking at how people made decisions. And it was really interesting to see, you'd always think that people are rational decision makers, that they would think, look at all the options and then choose the best option.

But as he went through a lot of these studies, what stood out for him was that there are just too many options out there and too many options available for individuals when making a decision. So many times, shoppers, or people who are making decisions are forced to take shortcuts. And what he found, what was fascinating is the shortcuts that most people take are ones that are steeped in emotion and it's these emotions that drive through decision making.

And as he did more and more research around that, he just found that that seemed to provide the key explanation as to how people make choices and how they make decisions, especially in today's very fast-moving world. And so, as he started working, he started working after graduate school, he did his graduate work in quantitative methods, which is a really cool name for math basically, and he tried to measure how people make decisions and trying to actually create an algorithm around how to measure the influence of decision making.

And so, his natural progression into the workplace was to actually follow in those footsteps. At first, he worked for a company that did a lot of market research, digital market research, and over time that evolved into really focusing on “Okay, what are the influences of this decision making that customers are making?” And then that naturally came back around 360 degrees and started looking at people's emotions, and what drives people emotions, and what drives them to make the decisions that they do.

And so, founded the company that really was focused on understanding the emotional underpinnings and how to establish and grow and deepen these relationships by delivering on the expectations of these customers. And a lot of these expectations were not sort of just the delivery of a product or service, but actually to make a connection and to deepen a relationship with them was through understanding their wants, needs and desires, and what are the emotional triggers that are associated with these things. And then how to capture their emotion and how to capture their attention, not just their awareness and to be able to build a relationship and to strengthen relationship and how to grow a brand and increase revenue and profits because most people think, falsely so that having good customer experience is just a feel-good movement, it doesn't actually have any sort of impact on the business, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

Great customer experience, actually, is what builds deeper relationships that drive revenue and profit. So, these are the things that they think about, and they talk about, and they help brands as they drive their strategy to deepen relationships with their customers.

The Book Unbreakable – What are the Key Themes and How Can the Book Help a Manager or a Leader in an Organization  

Me: Amazing. So, I was lucky enough to get a copy of your book Unbreakable. I am in the process of reading it but I love it, it's been so intriguing since I started reading it last week, it's really, really got some great nuggets in there. So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about the book? What are maybe the key themes that are in the book? And how do you think this book can help a manager or a leader in an organization?

Jason shared that he'll talk a little bit about why he wrote the book and it's really interesting. There's this misconception as he just mentioned that customer experience is a feel-good investment, it has and it's not just a field, but what this book sort of walks through is the fact that it's not a feel-good investment, it's more than that. Only 6% of brands have actually reached the highest level of CX transformation, which means they're building unbreakable relationships with their customers.

So, he really wrote this book for the other 94% of organizations out there that are really looking to build these unbreakable relationships with their customers, and aspiring to crack the code of how to link these relationships with increase revenue, profits, efficiency, and employee satisfaction.

And finally, how to create a playbook to transform your organization from one that has in its interest, the prioritization of the customer to one that actually lives and breeds prioritization of the customer, and actually is able to see real dividends from deepening their relationships with customers.

Factors that Play an Integral Role in Making Decisions

Me: So, you spoke earlier when you were talking about your journey and how you got to where you are today, that emotions play a very integral role in customers making decisions. And you also mentioned expectations, which I think is so important. Could you share with us based on your research what are some of the things that influences customer’s expectations?

And then maybe also just touch on why do you think emotions plays such an integral role in somebody making a decision?

And are there other factors that come into play? And if other factors come into play, do emotions out-weigh those other factors? Or do emotions always take the greater portion of the decision-making process?

Jason shared that that's a really complex question. And he can give you a very logical and very easy to follow example. We go to the store every weekend to buy groceries and we make decisions all the time when we look at the shelf, about things that we want to purchase, things that we need to purchase and things we would like to purchase. What makes us take that extra step of actually going and picking up a product and putting it in the cart.

When we think about that entire process, a lot of it is steeped in emotion, it's like, “Oh, wow, this package looks a little bit more appealing than the next package.” Or “This is something I need today because I need to pick me up.” It's all about our state, we're human creatures, and human creatures, we have wants, needs and desires, but these wants, needs and desires are governed by our emotional state.

So yes, there are real practical implications around the decisions we make, “Hey, I need to buy mustard today but what brand of mustard I will purchase or what type I will purchase?” It's going to be influenced by something above and beyond that. So what is it? Is it I'm looking at all the different options on the shelf, there may be an entire shelf or row of different brands of mustards. Does my past experience play into it? Absolutely. But there's also that immediacy of, “Hey, this looks like an interesting product, this looks more visually appealing.” Those are all aspects of our motion.

Now, when we take that one step further, and think about when we go into a store to shop, if we're greeted at the front by a friendly face, now all of a sudden, you as an individual respond to that, you may be more open to buying. When you're at the checkout, and somebody asks you, how's your day going? How do you feel? Why do companies insist on doing that? Because they know that it plays into our emotional state. And if we're in a happy place, if we're in a good mood, we're more likely to make a splurge purchase. And so also, if we're hitting the right tone, our tonality, if we're talking to people in a certain way, if we're reassuring them, if we're making them feel wanted, needed and desired, then people respond positively to that.

Can you imagine someone makes you feel wanted, needed and desired? How many times will you dismiss them without even having a conversation with them or being thankful about it, it's very seldom that that happens. So as emotional creatures, we are bound, and influenced subconsciously by these sorts of feelings and emotions.

And we try to wrestle against sort of this rational state of being where we want to sort of look at all our options on the table and making sure we're making the right choice. But inherently, in today's day and age, with so many options available to us, we have to have shortcuts, or we could be spending hours, days, weeks, months, before we can actually do the research necessary to make the decision. And as with the way how fast the world is moving, we just don't have that time, time is our enemy.

So, we're always trying to figure out faster ways to do things, better ways to do things, more efficient ways to doing. And you know what, at the end of the day, because we're emotional creatures, those are the things that bubble up to the surface and help us create those shortcuts for decision making.

Me: Now, as it relates to us being emotional creatures, do you think gender plays our role, or better yet, even our culture? So, for example, Caribbean people versus people who are from North America versus people who live in the Middle East? Do you think those things contribute to people's decision making?

Jasons stated absolutely. Your tribe you belong to has a huge influence on not only what decisions you make, but what emotion govern your decision making. So, he thinks Yanique’s hitting on a conversation they can spend hours discussing how Caribbean people are different. They have different emotional triggers versus someone that's North America, South American, European, absolutely, those things absolutely are vitally important, that's what makes us special, that's what makes us unique. If you want to build a relationship with a customer, you have to understand what culture they belong to, what tribe they belong to, because today, more and more, those are the things that are having important impact on our decision making.

Me: Well, I've definitely seen it. As you know, as we were talking pre to the actual recording, you mentioned that you're from Guyana, and of course, I'm from Jamaica. But I've definitely seen that in Jamaica specifically, how we make our decisions is based on how we’re cultured and how we're socialized. And I find that it's different when I travel to other parts of the world. So, I can imagine how hard it can be for a business, who has customers that are multicultural, because it would mean then that their approaches have to be multifaceted, it can't be one size fits all, because everybody's going to have their unique approach and their unique preferences and set of wanting how something is done, versus just having one thing that's rolled out to everybody.

Jason agreed that Yanique is right. And that's why the approach to customer experience is so important. Many brands see customer experience as a problem that needs to be solved, again, very, very wrong approach.

Relationships are not a problem that needs to be solved, they're organic, they need to be nurtured and deepened by understanding the complexity of your customers, understanding who they are, where they come from, what their wants, needs and desires and then using that understanding to actually shape the way what you do and how you do it in order to better bring these folks into the fold, and that's a fundamental mistake that brands make today, because soon as you start with customer experience is a problem that needs to be solved, it takes you down a completely different road, around what matters and what's important and what you need to do to build relationships that are strong, unbreakable relationships with your customer.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Jason stated that he’s a little bit biased with this because their company has this product, the solution called Bespoke, and it's absolutely imperative in today's day and age, that you have a product like this, a solution like this, and what it does, it amalgamate, brings together all your different customer experience data into one location, helps you analyze it, and then helps you internally as an organization to build activities and things you can do to train your organization to be more a team to your customers wants, needs and desires. There are so many different tools, there's Eloqua, there's Adobe, you have your voice of customer over here data, but all of these things are in silos.

What Bespoke does, it brings pieces, or elements of all this data together to tell a complete story about the entire customer experience so that you can understand very quickly, and on an ongoing basis how your customer relationships are developing, what are the problems they're experiencing, and how for example, you can train certain types of behaviours amongst your customer service representatives, or how you need to change the journey the customer is taking through the website to make a purchase. All these things are encapsulated into one place so your team doesn't have to go and hunt for all this information around their organization, it's all in one place and it provides not only the data, but it provides recommendations about the actions you need to take in order to build these deeper customer relationships.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jason

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jason stated that there's been so many. Paul Snyderman, he's a UCLA, Berkeley, he's written a number of books on decision making, and how people take shortcuts from a sociological and psychological perspective to their decision making. And those have been obviously very influential.

We look around today, and we look at how culture plays such an important role and some of the people he spoke to are such great influencers for him in terms of this area as well, he doesn't want to start rattling off names of people. But those writers out there right now that are sort of talking about culture, and the influence of culture and how important it is not only to help us self-identify, but how to help us find our place in the world.

Those are really some of the great writings he thinks that are coming out today that are really sort of helping us to move away from this concept that one size fits all solution, as Yanique mentioned earlier, is not the way forward, it's actually a deeper understanding of that complexity that helps you to make better decision making.

What Jason is Really Excited About Now!

Jason shared that the thing that really excites him is helping people understand how important every word they say, every action they make has a greater cascading influence on the overall assessment of a brand than ever before. And one of the things as their company is doing right now is really spending a lot of time training and helping people to understand how important it is to develop deep relationships with their clients that they have in order to not only build firmer relationships, but to understand how unique each individual is, and understanding how each individual is, and taking the time to understand each person not as a sale, or as an opportunity to grow your business but as a human being, how important that is, you'll get to the end, you'll get to the end of that sale, but it's not the sale that you're really after, you're after that relationship.

And the more time you take to understand the other person before you start to talk about what you have, what solutions you bring to the table, you need to start spending time listening and understanding what the other party, what their wants, needs and desires are. Too many times today because we're inundated with so many advertisements that's pushing, you need this, you need this, you need this, nobody is stopping to take the time to actually listen to what people are saying about their wants and needs and desires and just the fact that you take the time to listen, immediately as a brand starts to set you apart.

And these are the things that are really going to allow you to be successful, to build those relationships and even internally, their organization is constantly working to nurture that type of learning, and to share that type of learning across their organization.

Me: All right, that sounds like an adventurous journey. And it can be super challenging because people are such complex characters for sure.

Jason agreed, it is very complex. They're not saying it's easy, but they're saying the ROI for your investment does pay off.

Where Can We Find Jason Online

Me: Our listeners would have tapped into this episode, and they're quite intrigued with you, they're going to buy your book Unbreakable: A proven process for building unbreakable relationships with customers, guy's head on over to Amazon, make sure you get a copy of this book. But more importantly, they want to follow you on your journey, they'd like to connect with you further, where can they find you online?

LinkedIn – Jason Ten-Pow

Twitter – @JasonTenPow

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jason Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jason shared that in the book he mentioned CSA (Collect, Share and Act). When you are unsure about the right decision you need to make, what you need to do is, first of all, make sure especially around customer experience, “Make sure you're collecting the right data, you're sharing that data across your organisation, and ensuring that you're taking actions that align with the knowledge you've gained from the data that you've collected.”

If you do those three things, you will guaranteed be better at building deep customer relationships. Why? Because this is the code that the top 6% of brands that lead the way in building unbreakable relationships, this is the code that they have cracked, it comes down to how well they do at collecting customer data, sharing that across their organisation not keeping it in one little silo but sharing it so everyone has this knowledge about who their customers are and what their wants, needs and desires are and make sure that when they're making important decisions and taking actions, they're actually using that knowledge to influence the decisions and the actions they take.

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

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

Links

• UNBREAKABLE: A proven process for building unbreakable relationships with customers by Jason Ten-Pow

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Mahesh Ram is a serial founder and entrepreneur and he's currently the founding CEO of Solvvy, a leading SaaS provider of conversational self-service and automation solutions to leading global companies with over 550 million end users. Prior to Solvvy, he was the CEO of GlobalEnglish which pioneered online business English education for learners in over 120 countries. GlobalEnglish was later acquired by the Pearson PLC. He previously held CTO roles at Thomson Reuters.

Questions

• Could you just tell us a little bit about your journey? How it is that you ended up in this world of customer experience automation?
• Can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy?
• So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business?
• A business is really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board?
• Could you share with us what is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had really great impact on you, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it still has a great impact on you.
• Could you share also share with us what's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? It could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, because it kind of helps to get you back on track, or just get you going if you get derailed for any reason? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Mahesh’s Journey

Mahesh shared that he thinks the whole area of customer experience is one that always fascinated him, his entire career has been about automating complexity. And by taking very complex things and turning them into easier, better, more frictionless experiences and that's been true for whether that's online education or legal and tax compliance. But when he thinks about customer experience, it's the thing that impacts every single one of us, all of us have great experiences we can talk about with brands and we have those very poor experiences we talk about with brands and we make decisions based on those things. And he’s no different than everybody else, than their customers.

And so, when he saw the potential for the technology to truly deliver a better experience at scale, he was hooked. When he saw that the incredibly powerful PhD work that his co-founders had done that enabled the ability to deliver this incredible customer experience at scale, he just couldn't resist because as a CEO, he has often seen that they're just not good enough at this. So that's what motivated him and that's what excites him about what they're doing.

What is Solvvy About?  

Me: All right. So can you tell us a little bit about Solvvy? I know you mentioned in your bio that you are currently at Solvvy and Solvvy is about CX automated platforms and basically powering customer experiences. Just in in real word terms so our listeners that are listening, whether they are managers, or business owners of small or medium businesses, they can get a better understanding of what you do could possibly influence what they do to enhance frictionless experiences for their customers.

Mahesh shared that there's a famous book called The Effortless Experience that he thinks described very nicely what they're trying to do, but at Solvvy, they built a powerful SaaS platform, it's a solution that takes machine learning and natural language processing, natural language understanding at its core, but delivers an end user or consumer experience that allows every one of us as consumers to interact with the brand in a way to get self-service automation sometimes, other times get the right journey, be able to get to the right agent at the right time. But the way they like to think about it is allowing any brand in the world at scale to deliver what they think of is like concierge level journey. Imagine if the system understood you, it knows what you want, you just talked to it and it tells you where you need to go. Sometimes it provides you an immediate answer, other times it has to ask you some follow up questions because it needs a little more information from you in order to pinpoint either the right answer or get you to the right agent.

And you can imagine how this can be scaled across a global footprint, across the world. Their customers are B2B and B2C companies that have hundreds and millions of end users. But they’re serving two customers, if you will, they're serving the companies that buy and implement them but ultimately, their end customer is their consumer, their end user and can they (Solvvy) deliver an intelligent solution like sometimes it's in the form of a chatbot, other times it's in the form of taking them on a journey and taking them to the right agent. But that's what they do. They made it really simple to implement something that's very complex under the hood, but it's very simple for companies to implement and it delivers an immediate ROI to the business and better experience for the user.

Me: Does your company primarily work with a particular type of industry like retail? Or is it more service based kind of organizations? Could you give an example of maybe one of your clients that has seen success as a result of this approach?

Mahesh shared that first of all they work across a wide number of verticals, both B2B and B2C. But he would say some of their strongest verticals are things like ecommerce, not so much pure physical retail, but oftentimes the ecommerce arm of a retail business, FinTech. So consumer FinTech and banking, a good example would be a consumer finance banking application stash, which many people have used, millions of users use them. They work with brands like Ring - the home doorbell, home alarm, home security company, which is now part of Amazon. These are some of the companies. So it's a wide spectrum of companies but typically it's a situation where he as an end user of a product or service, have adopted that product or service, but have questions about how to get the most out of it. And sometimes that can be simple, that can be he’s an ecommerce customer and he has ordered something and he wants to cancel something or he wants to see where it is, he’s wondering why there's a delay.

Other times, it might be something like he bought a device and he doesn't know how to make it work with his iPhone, we've all had that experience. And in both those situations, Solvvy can understand the issue as expressed by the user in everyday natural language, and then be able to connect the user to the right solution that could be a stepwise guide an answer, it could be in some cases, collecting more information and giving it to the agent who can then help you 3 to 10 times faster than they could. So that those are some examples of companies they work with, that it's a pretty broad spectrum. They even work in healthcare, they work with Calm, which is one of the leading meditation apps, many of your users, entrepreneurs may be using that to do meditation and peace of mind. Wonderful application, they support their end users. So it ranges across a wide range of industries.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Me: So a big part of artificial intelligence is natural language processing. And I know for the average person, that may sound like really high level, could you just break down what that really is to our listeners so that they can understand and maybe even get a better connection with maybe how this could work in their business?

Mahesh shared that the way to simplify the complex, obviously, natural language processing is a deep science and there's 10s of 1000s of research papers and PhD thesis on this, but he'll simplify it because he thinks at the end of the day, as consumers, it boils down to one thing is the ability to understand, in the customer experience space, it's the ability to understand when a user expresses an issue or what we think of as an intent.

So, you might say, “I bought the jeans last week, they don't fit me, please help.” And if you have enough data about prior examples of that, you can quickly learn, the machine learning can actually learn that the natural language expression in that case is likely a call to say, “Hey, can I return or exchange this?” Nowhere is the word return or exchange used. So he thinks natural language understanding in context of customer experience is about understanding how people in that business or in that problem area express issues, they often don't use the words that the companies use, they may not use the word return or exchange, they say, “I want to give this back.”

So NLU (Natural Language Understanding) is the technology that allows you to move away from that kind of keyword dependency and understand the core intent of what the user is doing.

And the way you do that is you actually train on the prior data, because chances are most businesses have had 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people asking similar questions before. And the machine learning can actually learn how real users express real issues and start to get better at detecting that as soon as they finish typing something in or speaking something.

And we're all familiar with Alexa, and it has a specific set of natural language understanding where you can ask what's the weather and it's been trained to understand those words, is it going to rain today? And it knows to answer you with an answer and tell you to take an umbrella. So that's an example of NLU that most people would understand but in the context of customer experience, it's very much about understanding that businesses specific natural language.

Tips for Implementing Automation in Your Business

Me: So let's say we have some listeners who their business, let me give you an example. Let's say for example, it is a pastry business and she or he may have an outlet where customers can come and pick up little pastries like cupcakes or a slice of bread pudding or whatever the case is. And they're really looking to try and find a way to have more automation in their business. What's maybe one or two things that you think they could start off doing if they're at ground zero, they have no automation. Where can they start to try to get their business on level one of trying to get automated and have their customers come on board?

Mahesh stated that he thinks the first thing he thinks if you think about foundational principles, it's first of all, let's make sure that we collect all that information in a place where you make sure that you answer it, that you keep track of it, that you have some history of what's happened with that user.

And so typically, you would use some sort of a simple support CRM business. They partner with companies like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and others. And those are pretty simple to implement, they don't really require a lot of deep technology to implement a simple implementation.

And that allows you to then say, “Okay, Yanique called me on Tuesday asking about the status of her pastry order. And I need to get back to her.” It keeps track of it and if you come back a week later, he might know that you asked about this last week. And so, he might start his conversation with you by saying, “Is this about the pastry order you placed last week?”, So he has some context.

So he thinks first thing is to put a simple system in place, there's lightweight systems, there's inexpensive systems, they don't cost a lot of money. And typically, you can scale up or down depending on how many resources you have. So that, he thinks is first things first.

Second thing is, he thinks a lot of businesses would just benefit from writing some simple content, and other things on their websites to be able to answer the most frequently asked questions. So pay attention, once you're starting to track what people are asking, you should then be able to go back and say, let me write an article about how do I customize a cake. Or if I order a bulk order of pastries, do I get a discount? These might be common questions that you see in the data that you see, after you see this is coming up over and over. So that would be like a starting point, you'd start with some sort of a knowledge base so people can find the answer for themselves because most people don't want to wait for your team, especially if you have a small team, it might take 24 hours for you to answer that question about a bulk order, well, you might have lost the order by that time.

So you're better off letting the customer get the help they need. And that goes to the third thing, which is then the third thing is they work with OpenTable. You're familiar with OpenTable, people make reservations at any restaurant, hundreds of 1000s of restaurants around the world. And they serve two audiences, as a consumer if you want to book a table at a fancy restaurant, perhaps in San Francisco, but also the restaurant owner who has to then control some of those back end tools. And they provide a whole range of tools.

But imagine an experience where that restaurant owner can interact with technology to be able to change their hours or modify frequently asked questions. So, that's where they often come in is that they end up giving brands a way to automate even more complex things.

So if you say, “Hey, I want to customize my cake.” the Natural Language Understanding can actually understand that or maybe you don't say customized, “I want to order a special cake for my niece. And I want it to say something very unique.” Something like that and nowhere would he use the word customized. I could come up to you and say, “Great, looks like you want to customize the cake. We have these options for you, which one do you want.”

And take you down the path and actually collect all that information and say, “I've got everything I need, somebody will get back to you within an hour with an ETA on when this cake will be ready for you. Does that make sense?”

And imagine that experience in 35-40 seconds, he might have actually gotten your order right. And he’ll still handed off to a human being because somebody still has to bake the cake. But at that point, he’s such a delighted consumer that maybe he’ll order a little extra. Maybe at that point, you present him with an offer and say, “If you want to order a dozen cookies for the other guests, there's a special offer 10% off right now.” So he thinks if you think about automation, it's not about putting a blocker in front of the user, it's about automating things that otherwise they'd have to wait too long for.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Mahesh stated that that's a great question. He thinks for them, because they've gone completely virtual right due to the pandemic, so everybody's virtual. So he thinks it would be tempting to say an online meeting tool like Zoom. But he actually thinks that the most indispensable tool is probably something like Slack because it's a communication vehicle for everyone to share information and ideas.

And what they've done which is nice with Slack is they've used some of the third party bots and applications inside Slack to do things like give praise to someone. It makes it easy to give praise and it shows up in Slack, everyone can read it, it also then writes it automatically to the performance management system. So it's a great way to motivate your employees or help people motivate one another for great work, “Hey, Yanique did a great job today on this, she made it possible for me to help this customer.”

It makes it easy to just go into Slack and give her praise. That's one example. You can share documents; you can even do video calls in Slack. So, it's a pretty powerful tool, he’s sure other people use other things like it. But that's one that he would say it's been very, very crucial for them.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Mahesh

When asked about books that had a great impact, Mahesh shared that one book is very personal. His grandfather lived in India, grew up in India, he had spent most of his career in the public service. But he's very interested in music and after the age of about 60, he decided to become a music and dance critic. And he started writing and then actually became a well-known critic and musicologist in one of the major newspapers of India.

And at the age of 88, his grandfather decided to write a book. He wrote a book on music and musicians and just his recollections and opinions. And it turned out to be a really, really well received book and got a lot of critical praise at the age of 88. He thinks that to him, it was less about the book and more about the fact that his lifelong passion for learning had never stopped. And so, it's as much the book as the writing of the book as the book itself, it's both. So that was one.

The second one, which he thinks has become more and more relevant as a book he has probably read three times. It's a three volume, very heavy, long trilogy called Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, written by a man named Taylor Branch, and it's kind of the entire lifespan of Martin Luther King and it's probably about 2000 pages total.

So it's not light reading. But it talks about all of the ups and downs of the civil rights movement, the great triumphs, and then of course, later in his life some of his regrets and so on, and so on. And he thinks it really comes home when you think about the events of the last couple of years and what's going on in the world, you realize that these struggles, the great struggles don't have easy answers and solutions don't just emerge and everything is great.

Things have a way of taking far longer and being much more difficult than you ever imagined when you started. Ideals are what carry you through but even, there's a lot of frustration you have to overcome whether that through in business or in social life. So those are two. And then for fun, he thinks one that he always like reading, it’s light reading is Calvin and Hobbes a cartoon strip, because he just thinks it reminds him that at the end of the day, we all take ourselves way too seriously.

Me: That's so true. And life is so short, we really have to enjoy laughter.

What Mahesh is Really Excited About Now!

Mahesh shared that they're working on so many incredibly exciting things in the business. He'll choose one or two that he thinks excites him the most. The first thing is what he calls the Omni-Channel experience. Take the example of the pastry shop, he thinks they're just now entering in the United States, the notion of a truly omni-channel experience where businesses have to meet consumers where they live.

It's no longer reasonable to expect customers to come to your website. They live in Instagram, they live in Snapchat, they live in WhatsApp and this has already happened in other markets like in China, you have WeChat and India WhatsApp is very, very strong. And if he wants to order a pizza from Domino's in India, he’s just as likely to use WhatsApp as I am to go to www.dominos.com.

But in North America, that's just now happening, it's just happening where brands have to be creating really strong presence but the problem is there isn't one thing. It isn't like he can just build for WhatsApp, on a Monday, he might choose to interact with the pastry shop mentioned on Facebook Messenger. On Tuesday, he might want to go into WhatsApp and place an order for a cake. On Wednesday, he might go to the store brand to the website and try to order it. And it could change if two users might have two different things.

So brands have to be in all these places. But he can't have different things going on in those sites. If he asked you what's the price to customize the cake, and you give him three different answers on three different channels, that's a real problem, consumers get really annoyed.

So he thinks what they're doing at Solvvy, which is really exciting, is they're making it possible for businesses to build the intelligent layer once in the platform, and then deliver on any of these channels they choose with the same consistency. So if you come in on a Monday and say, “I want to return the shoes that I bought on Facebook Messenger.” They’ll take you through that entire experience and get to get it returned and connect you to an agent. But on Wednesday, you come back and ask “Where's my order on the company's website?” They'll be able to answer that question just as accurately on that thing. So the consistency across platforms.

So it's consistent and personalized so it knows enough to ask Yanique for her email address and look it up and tell you exactly where your order is, that kind of personalization automated is critical.

And then he thinks that goes to the second piece, which is what excites him more than anything is the ability to deliver a truly personalized experience. Think about yourself or anybody in the audience, when you buy a product or service, the experience you have in the first week, maybe the first 10 days, maybe the first 30 days, if it's a piece of software is so crucial. How well you use it, how well you get acclimated to it, determines how happy you are with it. So they think at Solvvy, how do they enable brands to be able to deliver that kind of support and on boarding and guidance to say a first 30-day user, it's different than for a user who has been with the brand for 6 to 12 months and do that at scale, do that for millions of people.

So a good example would be they work with a very large meal kit delivery service, they deliver meals to your home. And he can deliver a different experience for someone who's ordering their very first meal, that's a little bit more hand holding, a little bit more like, “Hey, did everything come as you expected?” Because they're not used to some of the things about unpacking the ice and doing these things. But if somebody who ordered 12 meals in the last 2 months, he probably don't want to waste their time asking them if they know how to unpack the ice, he wants to ask them if they're looking for new recipes.

So the ability to do that at a massive scale, because you can't do that one by one, but technology allows you to say, I'm going to do that for everybody who's a first 30-day user is going to get this experience. So those are the kinds of things, so personalization and omni-channel are the two things that he thinks really, really excites him about the business.

Me: Two things came to mind when you were speaking just now. So the first thing you mentioned was omni-channel and I personally as a customer, I'm trying to wonder if there's no technology out there that let's say, for example, utilities is something we all have to pay every month, let's say our electricity bills, and you may talk to your electricity company, you may not talk to them very often, but there are times when you do have to interface with them. So let's say for example, you reach out to them on Twitter messenger because there was a power outage in your area and they communicated and said, okay, they've sent their engineers to sort it out and we should get service restored within X amount of time. And then four months later, you may need to contact them because you're trying to pay a bill, you're trying to use their platform to pay the bill, but you're having some challenges and when you call them on the phone, you can't get them, it would be good to know that they're able to connect those experiences. So they would say to you, “Oh, hi, Miss Grant, we haven't heard from you in four months, how have things been?” Because then it shows that they're paying attention to the last time someone was in contact with you, even if it wasn't the same agent that you dealt with four months ago. Is that possible?

Mahesh shared that it's not only possible, they're doing that all the time. There's kind of a divide in the middle, which is whether I know who you are, I don't right. Oftentimes, if you're going to an ecommerce site, you go to www.nike.com, you're probably not identifying yourself, and you may not want to identify yourself, you may not want them to know that it's Yanique.

But if you have an existing relationship with the brand, you still might come to the website of the utility company and not identify yourself but based on the type of question you're asking, they might say, “In order to help you, you'll have to identify yourself.” But he doesn't want to give that to you until he realizes you need that.

So, then he might say, “Can you please tell me the email address or can you log in?” And then based on the login, now he can come back and say, “Looks like you came in last week and asked this question. Are you asking about the same thing?”

And if you say no, then he can pop up and give you the more generic menus and say, “Hey, would you like to be able to do it?” So not only is it possible, they're doing it all the time with brands where they're personalizing the experience, this goes back to his notion of personalization is that sure it can understand prior interaction data and ask you if that's the case. Sometimes that can be intrusive, you may not care about something four months ago, it's not that.

But if you've called three times in the last week, chances are it’s about the same issue.

And so at that point, what he needs to do is two things. One is he needs to make sure that every single thing that you told him on the first call or the first technology interaction with Solvvy, for example, it's been recorded properly to the agent, so that the next agent picks who it up, your second call a week later has everything in front of them and that's the key.

The key is not to make you repeat yourself, not make you repeat yourself and that's what technology enables. He'll give you one example. In the example with the meal kit is if you come in and say “Hey, help my mind steak is spoiled. I'm really angry.” Well, first of all, you're probably pretty upset because your dinner just got ruined, that's not a good experience, you might stop using the brand. But if he immediately pop-up and say, “I'm sorry to hear you have a missing or spoiled ingredient, can you just give me the information, this and it pops up your meal and it says which of the ingredients is missing or spoil, tell me what's wrong with it.” And immediately, he'd say he could shoot a credit back to your account. And then you can still talk to the agent if you want and complain more. That's a really good experience.

Unfortunately, it doesn't feed you your meal that night, but it does make you feel like the brand is there for you and really cares about doing something right, they can make an offer and give you two free meals or whatever it might be. But again, even if he passed you to an agent in that case, the agent knows that you called because your steak was spoiled, the ice had melted, that you were expecting to get it with two side dishes and you only got one and they start the conversation with you knowing all this, they’re not asking you to repeat any of this. That's what they do.

Me: Brilliant. It's funny you mentioned the meal delivery service for home because I started using one recently and I find the young lady service to be so poor. When you call her she doesn't return your phone calls, when you send her a message on WhatsApp she takes forever to respond. She sends out her menus the week before like on a Friday and then you indicate to her how many days per week you wanted meals and which items you were interested in. And I think for last week I told her I was interested in the meal for Thursday. The meal wasn't delivered, I tried to call her on Thursday afternoon to ask her, “Weren't you supposed to deliver the meal today?” She hasn't responded to my WhatsApp. I called her twice, she hasn't responded to my call, frankly, I don't think I'm going to order from her again because either she's taken on more than she can chew or she's clearly not ready for this level of business because if you're dealing with people, and you're delivering meals to them and they've indicated to you what they want and when they want it, if you can’t manage the communication portion, then maybe you need to outsource that for the business.

Mahesh stated that he thinks that's a brilliant point. He thinks that oftentimes people take on more than they can handle but they lose sight of the customer. He thinks it goes back to the customer like how often does she talk to you and ascertain how well you like the service, did she check in with you? Does she have a survey?

Because if she loses you, the thing she probably doesn't grasp yet and he thinks some small business owners don't always grasp this is how expensive it is to acquire a customer, to get Yanique to try it for the first time is a really hard thing. And so losing you is much worse than acquiring two new people, because they already gone through the effort of convincing you and you've already done it.

So this does speak to something that he thinks a lot of entrepreneurs can do better, which is to survey and get feedback from customers, because you may well be sympathetic to her if she was talking to you. If she told you honestly, “Hey, look, I'm really struggling with this but I'm really trying to make it work. I'm an entrepreneur and I want to make this work. I'm so sorry about your meal. Let me see what I can do.” You were probably willing to give her the sun, the moon and the stars to get it right. But if you don't hear from her, you just assume that she doesn't care.

Me: I'm actually thinking of deleting her number out of my phone because I don't think I want to do business with her anymore. Her communication is extremely poor and her food, it's not amazing but it's good and it's healthy and it's a better choice than me having to go and have fast food for sure. But the challenge, as I said, is she needs to work out that aspect of it or she's going to lose more than one customer.

Mahesh agreed and stated that he thinks the other thing that he would say that technology allows us to do with a lot of the brands is to be predictive. So, if for example, Yanique is coming in frequently with questions about certain kinds of issue, they do something that they call category analytics for businesses, where they look at every single question that has ever been asked for that brand and they grouped them into big categories and so they can tell the brand, the food kit company that you're missing ingredient issues have spiked 23% in the last two weeks, something's up, they don't know what it is because they're not in their factory watching.

But they can drill in and they can tap into that, they can double click on it and they can see all the actual expressions by the user and they can do keyword searches, they can say show me everything with the word ice in it. So if the ice is melting, maybe they go back to the warehouse people and say, you need to package the ice better. So those are the kinds of insights that businesses often lack and it's very difficult to do because technology allows you to do it without having to have a human being looked at every single issue, it automatically categorizes all the questions.

Where Can We Find Mahesh Online

Website – www.solvvy.com

LinkedIn – Mahesh Ram

Twitter - @solvvyinc

Twitter - @rammahesh

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Mahesh Uses

When asked about a quote that he tends to revert to, Mahesh shared that he actually has a bunch of them. But the one that recently came up as he was reading the book by the very, very famous Roman Emperor, Philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, he had written a book 2000 years ago, so it's a long time. But everything in there so timeless because he's really does a lot of reflection on his life.

The quote that he said, which he thoughts was really great was, “Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you.” And he thought that was just such a nice sort of simple way of saying, we're all given something and it's up to us to make the most of it, we keep looking around for something better, chances are you're never going to find it and the people too. So he thought that was a really nice quote.

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

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

Links

• The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon
• Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch
• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Brad Dude has over 40 years and he has been in more than 30 territories and countries around the world. He has provided leadership training, organizational development, program evaluation, workforce training, coaching and project management services to US Government agencies, public and non-profit organizations and private sector enterprises. He specializes in training, group facilitation, process improvement, team building and strategic planning, especially for newly promoted team leaders, supervisors, managers and executives.

Brad brings a leadership and management background to his consulting having served as a senior staff member for the Peace Corps in Micronesia and Samoa. He has also worked in similar positions for other organizations in the Washington, DC area as well as New Orleans, where he now makes his home with his wife Sue. He has one son and three grandsons.

Questions

• Could you tell us a little bit about your journey? It's a long journey, because your bio said over 40 years. Maybe you could condense it a little bit for us. But just tell us how it is that you got to where you are today in your own words.
• Your most recent book that you have published called Quick!, could you share with our listeners a little bit about that book and what is it all about?
• How as a leader, as a manager, as a business owner over the past couple of decades have you been able to get those leaders on board to recognize that customer experience is so important?
• 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?
• Do you have maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could have been a book that you read a very long time ago, or even a book that you read recently, but it really has resonated with 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're sitting across the table from that person, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them to have a successful business?
• Could you share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? It could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, they will tend to revert to it kind of helps to refocus them or get them back on track? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Brad’s Journey

Brad shared that it is kind of a long journey, it gets longer every day, it seems like. He started out doing a management planning for the Peace Corps overseas in a variety of countries, mostly in the Pacific and then in the Middle East. And that got him into working for Westinghouse that brought him more into the middle East doing some project management for USAID projects and West Bank and Gaza. And that got him into the training more in the project management and coaching and counselling and they were doing a lot of executive coaching on management and leadership kinds of issues. Some colleagues of his started their own consulting firm in the DC area and that's where he got to go to Jamaica for the first time in kind of the middle to late 80s doing a management analyst course.

Ministry of Planning and they met that time and it was great. And so he got four different trips down to Jamaica and participants were some of the best he’s ever had all over the world. So as he got older and wanted to jot down some of the things that he would do that seem to be fairly successful with his participants and clients, he started to write books. And so he has now got six books, they're up on Amazon, mostly dealing with leadership and temperament and how new leaders view their world and try to help them out that way.

Brad’s Book “Quick!” What is it About?  

Brad shared that his book, it's called Quick!: I Need to Be a Leader in 30 Days!. And it's a title that is focused on newly promoted or newly hired managers, supervisors and leaders. What he found, for example, the last 9 years, he has been teaching a leadership class for NASA, just outside of Washington, DC.

And he found that although when you're in the classroom, face to face, it's great and people seem to get things. But with training, training with organizations, even in government is often the first thing that's cut.

And so, participants might go through one 12-day course or something, and then don't hear from them again, and they maybe come back or write or ask for coaching and they felt there was a need to encapsulate in a handy guide of what somebody can do every day, because a lot of the questions are, “I have the title of leader or manager or supervisor, but what do I do?”

And so, he focused on what to do over a 30-day period and the idea was to help newly promoted folks hit the ground running so they can have some success. And I had Scott Blanchard, who is the now the President of the Ken Blanchard company. He wrote the foreword to their book, and he mentioned that over 50 million millennials are working in North America alone with 10 million in management, he estimates about 2 million new managers every year.

But the first year is very important and people usually don't get trained during their first year. So there's a lot of failure, failure by not meeting their own goals, expectations of their company aren't met. And they thought that's the time to really help them and have a guide to help them be successful. So they put together this book and basically said, how do you be a leader in 30 days?

Well, he has got four steps. First was to understand some of the basic principles of leadership and he subjectively picked the ones that he felt have been most successful for new managers and leaders. And then step two was to look at their followers, learn about who are those folks that are looking to you for guidance. Third step practical applications, you can't just read a book, put it on a shelf and say, “I'm a leader”, you got to go out and do something, and practice. So in his book, he has practical readings and exercises, and especially the fourth step, which is have some reflection and support time. And that means identifying a coach, whether it be your supervisor, or mentor, or a friend, or a colleague, or your minister, whoever that is that you can bounce some ideas off of. And ultimately, they can give you some feedback as well on how you're doing.

Me: Now, as it relates to who are your followers, if this is an employee in an organization, is it persons that look up to that person who now is the manager or leader? Is that what you mean?

Brad agreed. But it's more than that. Ken Blanchard says it the best, he says, “Lead from wherever you are in the organization.” So you don't necessarily have to have a title of manager, supervisor, leader to exhibit leadership behaviours. And so, whoever that is, and so, in the book, they are considering clients, people that report to you, people that you report to as well are all potential followers.

Me: Okay, so those are some really, really good strategies that you can employ for persons, as you mentioned, who are transitioning into that management/leadership role.

The Importance of Customer Experience

Me: Now, leadership is so critical to customer experience and there's a saying that I have “That mud flows from the top of the stream.” When you find something that's going awry in an organization, a lot of times, it's not at the tip of where you're looking at that the problem probably evolved from, but more so, you need to look at the leader and the structure of the organization and what's happening at the top.

And so I wanted to speak a little bit about that for us, what if we have an organization where the leader doesn't see the importance of customer experience, they're not able to connect the two, they're not able to connect the financial, because a lot of leaders, I think, still believe to this day that customer experience is just about making the customer feel good and they're just not able to see that translate into a very tangible and financial way. How as a leader, as a manager, as a business owner over the past couple of decades have you been able to get those leaders on board to recognize that customer experience is so important?

Brad shared that it's a challenge and there are many, many examples where leaders just don't get it, because they are trapped into the idea that their position power is what's important, and not so much their customers or their followers.

So they've done a lot of different ways, it depends on the openness of the leader. He worked with Department of Energy, their nuclear division for a while and they had a leader and oftentimes, these are political types who get in for whatever reason, not necessarily their leadership abilities. And they just don't see it, it's checking the box, “Oh, well, I've had a training. Check. I've had a meeting with a customer. Check.”

And things don't go the way they should. What he typically does is do a series of interviews with the direct reports of such a leader to start to identify what are the true challenges in the organization. He really likes the idea about modelling the way and trying to talk to the leader about trying to be more of an exemplary leader. But also he likes the idea about challenging the process.

They have in the book, this is the Kouzes and Posner five practices of exemplary leadership - Modelling the way, Inspiring a shared vision, Challenging the process, Enabling others to Act and Courage the heart.

He likes to do a lot of process improvement with folks and they get a whiteboard and actually start to draw a schematic of the customer service process and who's supposed to do what to whom. And he doesn't do it as a group, he usually brings in parts because people, oftentimes in such a process are doing it, if they say it's a five-part process, he brings in the folks who are doing part three, and let them do some drawings and say, “Oh, this is supposed to happen, that's supposed to happen.”

And they go away and they bring in people from the first group, for example. So they end up with kind of this gigantic map done by different groups. And what they find is they're in consistencies, expectations are off, somebody expects this group to be able to give them this kind of information, and it's not happening. So then you kind of try to bring that leader in to show him or her what kind of mess they're in and have some ideas, some strategies for helping them improve that process.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Brad shared that the website he likes the most it's called www.life-changingworkshops.com. And this is out of Chapala Institute. It's based on a new book come out by Ken Nelson and some others, a variety of authors on it called Designing and Leading Transformational Workshops. He thinks for a new leader, outside of his own books, he thinks that's a really good one and that's a great website that they have as well. Another one is called www.ascenddevelopmentgroup.com. And this is run by a friend of his, Jeff Whitehead, they both did training at NASA together. He does outdoor experiential leadership workshops and it's a very interesting website to show videos of how he interjects leadership into rope climbing and things like that.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Brad

When asked about books that have the biggest impact, Brad shared that there are several, one was called Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love by Dr. Helen Fisher. Brad is the co-author of a new model on looking at temperament called The Basic Elements of Temperament.

And a lot of their work, his late partner, Jim harden, they did that together. And Dr. Fisher kind of did similar kind of research, but on a larger scale dealing with some of the dating websites to look at how temperament influences the way we look at other people, the behaviours of others. Now, he and Jim, they’re not looking at dating, they're looking at how leaders look at their employees and their managers and their customers.

So that book, Why Him? Why Her? is a really good one by Dr. Fisher to kind of give some basics as well. He also likes John Kotter's work out of Harvard, “What Leaders Really Do.” He's written a number of books on leadership and he just loves those books that really gets him thinking about leadership more.

Advice for Business Owner to Have a Successful Business

Brad stated that the one piece of advice, it's hard to have one, but trust is a big issue and in his leadership courses that he has done in the past, trust is a big issue and that gets into a variety of things, including how to model the way and not making promises that you can't keep and being consistent and things like that.

But he probably would spend time with a leader talking about temperament. His experience has been the difficulties that folks have with being professional, being productive, has a lot to do with their experience with their manager or their supervisor when they're not getting along, when they feel they're not being listened to, that is a de-motivator.

And people leave organizations, they don't leave them because of the job or the work, it's usually because of the relationship with their manager or supervisor. But he would spend some time trying to talk about how they are viewing the world, how they look at their position power. There's three kinds of power, they have it in the book as well.

The lowest level of leadership is the position power; it's having that title. And it seems that's where everybody wants to be, “If I was only the boss, then I would solve all the problems.”

And then they get to be the boss and they realize, “Oh, it's not as easy as I thought.” But they'd say, now I'm there, now they’ve got to do what I'm telling them to do. So that means your followers are following you because of the negative consequences if they don't, that they could be fired, they could be assigned to lousy jobs, what have you. So it's the lowest level, and that's a power that doesn't stay with you, when that manager leaves the organization, that power doesn't go with him or her, it stays for the next person that's coming. So it's not even a power that you take with you.

So that's the lowest level. The second one is that power of competence. That's where followers follow you because of what you've done for the organization, because of what you've done for them. So that gets you into a mindset of “Gee, if I want to be competent, I need to be really sharp and look for opportunities to help my employees.”

And the third, the best kind of power that a leader can get is the power of positive reputation. And that's why no matter what your title is, people follow you because of who you are. They'll do whatever needs to be done if you ask them because of who you are, and what you stand for, and the values that you bring to the organization.

What Brad is Really Excited About Now!

Brad shared that during this pandemic, not a lot of training was going on, especially not a lot of leadership training, he has done a few zoom workshops over Zoom with 50/60 people. And there's just not as many as there used to be. So he has had a lot of time and so he’s writing a novel called “Finding Eden.” And it's based on kind of his travels throughout the Middle East and the issue about asylum seekers trying to find a better life. So he’s writing a novel, just about done. So he’s very excited about that right now.

Where Can We Find Brad Online

Website – www.braddude.com

LinkedIn – Brad Dude

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Brad Uses

Brad stated that he does have a quote, the one he kind of refers to now and then, not every day, but sometimes. It's says, “Don't let yesterday take up too much of today.” And that was written by Will Rogers. So the idea is, don't get bogged down with what you've done in the past. Today's a new day and we need to go head on into the future.

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

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

Links

• Quick! I Need to Be a Leader in 30 Days! by Brad Dude
• Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love by Dr. Helen Fisher

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Dave Sherwin is a certified fitness nutrition coach, entrepreneur and practitioner of mindfulness and meditation. His passion is helping grownups navigate real world business and live challenges to achieve their best health and wellness at any age.

He is also the creator and host of The Dirobi Health Show which covers everything to do with health and wellness, including the latest in nutrition, exercise, supplements, and clinical studies.

Questions

• Could you share with us a little bit about your journey, how it is that you got to where you are today as a fitness and nutrition coach?
• Could you share with us maybe some things that you think are integral for you to be really impactful as an employee in an organization or even as a manager and a leader? What are some of the things that you need to do on the nutrition side or the exercise side that will help you to be able to really be your best self so that you can be able to have better relationships?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What books have had the biggest impact on you? Do you have any other books that has impacted you greatly?
• Could you share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? It could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track or get you refocused. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Dave’s Journey

Dave shared that he’s always had a passion for fitness ever since he was young. He was very awkward and shy as a kid, he didn't make many friends and he didn't feel very talented. And one day in elementary school some kids were trying to dunk a small ball on a hoop, maybe it was a golf ball or some small size ball, he doesn't remember but they couldn't do it. And he was a little bit taller than the others and he was able to dunk this ball and they were so impressed.

And at the time, it was his first memory of doing something that other people thought was impressive and it started a passion for basketball. And through that he was able to build more confidence and finally work hard and make the high school team. He was never a great player but it gave him a lot more confidence. It really helped him in those early years and ever since then, he has just loved health and fitness. He continued to play basketball until he was 40, he played basketball three times a week, and he lifted weights three times a week. And that got him through to his 40th birthday in a very healthy way.

After that, he couldn't jump as high, couldn't run as fast or play as well as he wanted to after he turned 40, so he started doing endurance sports. He did a lot of triathalons and running races and bike races and swimming and that kept him going for eight years and then he moved into cross fit and just into general health and keeping up his strength and endurance through cross fit. And so, that was kind of his journey, kind of his fitness journey. And along the way he was a real student, he’s always loved learning about nutrition and fitness and everything to do with the human body fascinates him.

Health and Wellness Tips that will Impact the Quality of the Experience as an Employee and a Leader  

Me: So this was your destiny, you've always had a dream and a passion for this. So that's good to know. So our show is Navigating the Customer Experience and I think one of the reasons why I was intrigued to have you on the show. Even though nutrition and exercise is not really directly related to customer experience, I do believe that your health and wellness will definitely impact the quality of the experience that you deliver to persons in any service industry, whether your industry is hospitality, or telecommunication or the financial industry. If you are not well physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, then clearly it's definitely going to impact your interactions with others, whether it be internally or externally.

I have a sister who is a dietician, she lives in Canada now and I've always thought that marrying nutrition and just being healthy and wealthy was a good way to really have an all-around wellness approach to customer experience. So you don't just talk about his soft skills, but you talk about all the things that will help you to deliver better soft skills. So I'm not sure if you have any corporate experience, but could you share with us maybe some things that you think are integral for you to be really impactful as an employee in an organization or even as a manager and a leader? What are some of the things that you need to do on the nutrition side or the exercise side that will help you to be able to really be your best self so that you can be able to have better relationships?

Dave stated that that’s a great question and to give a little bit of context here business wise. He has been an entrepreneur since 1993 and he has built and sold multiple businesses and have ran teams of salespeople and customer support and currently own three businesses.

And so, these are things that are near and dear to his heart. So he loves what Yanique mentioned about marrying the physical side with the business side, that's something that he does in his own life and he has had to navigate. And so, he does have a fair amount of experience in business and to this day, like he said, he has his own companies. And for him, I didn't get into the health space as a business person until 2009 when he finally had the epiphany that just kind of alluded to that what he really loves is health and fitness.

And so, why isn't he doing that for a living and he started his first supplement company in 2009. And it went crazy. And one of the reasons he thinks it went crazy is because he loved it. They were doing over US $100,000 a month in sales within 6 months. And it was the easiest business he has ever built and it was because he finally married the passions that he had.

Me: I think that's brilliant. I think it's good that you are able to see the correlation between both of them and you were able to now create that opportunity for others to tap into. And so I think a big part of what our listeners want to hear. We're going through a pandemic globally and I've had these thoughts about nutrition and exercise for a very long time. But I think it's even more important now that people, they're burnt out mentally, they're overwhelmed, they're working from home, they have to be balancing their family life as well as their business lives. And some of them are not adjusting very well to the new normal, for a better way of saying it.

And so, what has your experience been? What are some of the recommendations that you give them?

Sleep is important, how much hours of sleep should we be getting?

How much exercise should we putting in?

What's the best type of exercise?

As human beings working from home, especially for me, for example, you spend so much time seated, and as human beings, we weren't meant to be sedentary.

What's your recommendation in terms of just standing and moving around, should that be done every hour?

Should that be done once or twice per day?

We want your expert advice on how we can just be better overall.

Dave shared that his first answer is one that he'd love for people to get more information of and they give out some information on their website for free, you don't even need to enter your email address, just simple click on it, it’s a PDF, download it.

And he'd recommend two and he’s going to say them and then he’s going to talk about them. So for those of you who want to dive deeper and really get like a guide that you can sink your teeth into, go to dirobi.com and download the 10 page Un-Diet PDF and that's the best answer he has.

Now he’s going to go over the seven points of that here quickly. But he does want people to know there's a resource that they can get so they could just read it, again, you don't even have to enter your email, just grab it, download it and read that.

And the Virtuous Cycle is how to live a healthy 24-hour period. And it's very integrative of our physical, mental, spiritual, social emotional sides of how we live 24 hours in a very healthy way in between those two, those are some more in depth resources.

Now, he’s going to go through the seven health tips that they teach their customers and that he’s a huge fan of and that he currently lives by.

And that is number one, Focus on Water as your Primary Source of Food. Our bodies are made up primarily of water, we all know this but getting dehydrated is quite easy to do, it doesn't take very long without water to get dehydrated and too many people are drinking calorie rich and sugary drinks. So cut down or cut out on unhealthy drinks, even juices, a lot of people think fruit juice is healthy, it's really not, it's quite acidic and usually full of sugar. So, focus on water, drink plenty of water. And there are seven of these and so he wonder would you like him to list one and then give a chance to comment or do you want to just give you the whole list?

Me: I'm sure we can discuss on each level, so after you finish the first one if I have any comments I'll definitely jump in.

Dave stated so that is number one is water and especially for those of you wanting to lose weight.

Now, for some people in the pandemic, activity level has gone up because they're outside more often and they've taken to outdoor exercise as part of the whole social distancing thing and it's one of the things they can do to not go stir crazy.

Others unfortunately, their activity has gone down and so weight loss is currently a challenge.

So getting rid of drinking calories would be hugely helpful if you're wanting to lose some weight.

Number two, Eat All Your Food Slowly and Mindfully. This may not sound like a big and important health tip, but it's number two for a reason. According to multiple PhD scientists and nutritionists who study the human digestive system, we eat too quickly, our stomach is not like a hole in the bottom of our throat that we just dump food into and it just somehow magically gets processed, rather, it has folds and the food has to work its way through the folds.

And not only that, before it even gets to the stomach, we have to chew our food thoroughly working the enzymes to that food. And then it comes to our stomach and slowly works its way through.

When we eat too quickly, we don't give our digestive system a chance to operate correctly, we don't get all of the nutrients out of our food.

And not only that, but the hunger signals and the hormones like ghrelin that trigger fullness are not 100% accurate, they don't trigger our mind that we're full the second that we have enough food, rather, it can be delayed as much as 20 minutes.

And so, if you eat very slowly and mindfully, studies have shown that you also eat less and are less likely to put on weight. So that's number two.

Me: So stick a pin in there, Dave. So eat all foods slowly and mindfully, as you're talking, I actually went to your website and I'm on this document that you have. And so when I was growing up, I don't know if this is applicable to all persons but my mom used to say I'm to chew, I think it was 32 times. And I've tried that, I think by the time you're probably at chew number 16, the food in your mouth is completely liquid.

Just explain that whole concept to me and you're not really thinking about the food when you're chewing it because you're just thinking about, okay, I need to kind of just get eating and complete this activity really quickly, especially if you're on the go like you're driving and eating or maybe you're trying to eat in between meetings because you need to jump back onto a Microsoft Teams call with a client or you're doing a training session.

So how do you suggest persons to overcome this and train their mind because I guess it starts in the mind to be able to eat food slowly and mindfully as you've suggested?

Dave shared that Yanique made a great comment about what not to do, no one's going to do that long term, it's kind of a pain in the neck.

And the fact is that chewing until the food is about the consistency of applesauce is what we're shooting for and for some people, that happens quickly, others take a little more work but it's the whole experience.

Food is a pleasure of life. Now, we may not be able to do it always, there's always a time we have to rush to eat between meetings, as Yanique mentioned, but there are seven days in a week.

And all of us have many meals that we could slow down and be more mindful.

And so by mindful he means, the phone is away, if you're with other people, you're with other people, let's make eating a social experience as it has been for millennia with human beings.

And make it a time with your loved ones, whatever that is.

If you're alone, like he mentioned, try to avoid distracting yourself from the food rather than looking at your phone, or your computer, or a newspaper or whatever.

Instead, just take those few minutes to really enjoy the food, to eat it carefully, mindfully savour it, enjoy the smells, enjoy the taste. Too many people worry about what food is going to do to them, instead of thinking about how enjoyable food is and enjoying what they eat.

So it's a human experience that we've kind of lost. We've kind of let our busy lifestyles turn food into like putting gasoline in a car.

And it just is better, our life is better when we enjoy nutritious healthy food slowly and mindfully. So it's a matter of understanding this is not an all or nothing thing, we can’t always do it. But many meals a week we can if we’re just a little bit more thoughtful.

Dave shared that number three is Intermittent Fasting. We do really well when we eat in a certain window of time during the day. And a very practical one for a lot of people is about like nine o'clock in the morning to have their first meal and five o'clock in the afternoon to have their last or maybe it's 10 o'clock and six o'clock or 11 o'clock at seven o'clock, that's about a 10 hour window.

You can experiment with different lengths of window, everyone's different, everyone's at a different stage of life, everyone has a different activity level. But generally speaking, there's a magic that happens when you stop eating any food after dinner for one thing.

For example, once we quit eating, our body gets to digest that food fully before we go to sleep so our digestive system is now done and our body is able to focus on getting rid of pathogens, carcinogens, and getting rid of that food and developing up the hormones and replenishing the brain and doing all those healthy things that need to be done at night.

The hormones work correctly, when we stopped eating at dinnertime, the melatonin starts rising making us drowsy helping us get a better night's sleep. While we're sleeping, the HGH is rising, the oestrogen is rising, the testosterone is rising, and the blood sugar is dropping.

And we wake up in the morning and that's an ideal state for some of our best work. And so, he gives an example of this morning. As he mentioned, he’s an entrepreneur, he gets where you're coming from with the podcast.

And he was asked specifically how things changed with the pandemic?

Well, here's how one thing has changed and this goes also back to the comment Yanique made about standing and about making these adjustments.

So this morning, his workout consisted of four things. So today's a strength day for him and he has a pull up bar out his garage for pull ups, he has a dip bar in his office which is also half gymnasium, he’s got a rowing machine, he’s got some kettlebells and he’s got a dip bar.

And then he did step ups, that's where you have a box, and you just put your leg up on the box, and one leg at a time you very carefully and in a controlled manner, just lift yourself up and it's kind of like a squat, excepted, rather go down, you put one foot up on a box and lift yourself up, which you can also do in a chair.

And then his last one was some core exercises, lying on the floor, stomach work. So each of those he had to do six rounds of each one with a two-minute rest and so, what he did is he went out to the garage and he did the pull ups then he came back to his computer and he checked email.

He has his clock going and he has a little notepad checking off how many sets he’s done he has a terrible time keeping track of that he’s got to check it off, once the blood gets flowing and you got all this stuff going on, it's easy to forget where you're at.

So he’s got a little pad of paper for check marks on his desk, set of pull ups, do some email, set of dips, check email, set of pull ups, check his calendar and his daily MO.

He has what he calls it his daily MO sheet, which is his daily method of operation which has all his to do’s and everything on it.

And so he’s going back and forth, by the time he finishes this workout and this is kind of a long one, it took him an hour and a half. But there was a two-minute break between everything and by the time he gets done his workout, he'd been moving every two minutes for an hour and a half and he had gotten rid of every important email, he had his plan all laid out for the day and had accomplished two or three of his most important tasks.

Some people call those trigger workouts and these are things that you can do, either the way that he described it or on a set schedule.

Here's another one, for example. Many fitness experts do recommend that we get up out of our chair at least once an hour and that was part of the question asked earlier. Once an hour is a good standard.

Guess what if you're not exercising that much, and you want to incorporate exercise into a very busy entrepreneurial lifestyle, there are three workouts that are surprisingly beneficial that you can do during your work day.

One of them is squats, there's nothing like a good controlled, good postured deep squat. And if you had a timer, and after hour one, you simply stepped away from your computer, and did say two sets of 20 squats, the heart rate is going to go up, it feels pretty good, your brain gets kind of cleared after sitting for an hour and focusing on whatever you were doing.

And then you set the timer for another hour. And the next time you do push-ups. Push-ups are great exercise for the chest and strength of the arms, the triceps, the shoulders, and you do some push-ups.

And the third one is any type of core exercise that you like, it doesn't matter, it could be bicycles, it could be some crunches, it could be any type of leg lift, or mountain climbers, it doesn't matter, there's a lot of them.

But if you combine some push-ups and some squats and some core work into your day, by the time you're done and imagine you did some form of that or some little bit of exercise or maybe after you're kind of done enough squats and push-ups and core, after the next hour, you could go for a brief walk, maybe five minutes at a good pace.

If you work in a building, you could walk the stairs kind of aggressively, put something into it, put a little work into it to get the heart rate up a little bit. And so that is a wonderful way to get out of the chair, to get your workout in, even if you didn't get it done, you don't have to get up, you don't have to get dressed in your fancy yoga outfit to go to this, just whatever you're wearing, you just go ahead and do it. And so that's a great tip right there for keeping your fitness going.

Number four is Eat Healthy Macros - carbs, protein and fat are the three macros. And in addition, as part of those, we need to make sure to get five to nine servings of vegetables per day. Now too many people eat too many carbs, and not enough protein. And often the fats that we get are unhealthy. So tip number four is to make sure that you're getting a healthy form of macro - protein, carbs and fat with a serving of vegetables with every single meal as often as possible, breakfast, lunch, dinner, try to work in those all three at the same time to every meal. And if you can do that and by the end of the day, have eaten five to nine servings of vegetables, that's a really great routine. And you'll have phenomenal health if you do that. For most people, that will mean they'll eat less unhealthy carbs, more quality proteins, and higher quality fat.

Number five is Observe a Simple Supplements Strategy. The fact is that even if you eat really, really well, you're going to be deficient on some things, we know this from science, we know this from all the blood work that's being done on people right now.

76% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D. Similar percentages are deficient in things like chromium, many women are deficient in iron, and so on. And so we need to take a good quality multivitamin, a good quality mineral and trace mineral, supplement and those are the very basics. Ideally, you want to get a nutritional blood panel done once a year, he does one once a year, he has for about the last 5 years, they're getting less expensive. The first time he did it he thinks it was $500 for him to get a blood test done to find out his vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Now that $500 a year to him is well worth it but happily, it now costs about $200. By the way, these are available easily and quickly at Amazon, if you go to Amazon and just search for nutritional deficiency test or something like that and there's a variety, some of them you send hair samples, some of them are saliva, some of them are urine and they all have a different way of doing it, some of them is to prick your finger and get a little bit of blood.

And so depending on if you get the “heebie jeebies” about some of those, you pick the one that works best for you. So you just kind of determine how they do their sample and what you want to do and how accurate you want to do it and pay a little bit of money, send it in, and they'll tell you exactly what you're deficient in.

If you're taking the good quality multivitamin and mineral though, hopefully it won't be very much. They have a phenomenal one Mimi's Miracle Multi is specifically designed for what most adults are deficient in, that's why they designed it. And they have Mimi's Miracle Minerals that has over 70 trace minerals and so that's how they answered that for their clients, but those are the basics, a really good multi and a good mineral.

Number six is Exercise Everyday, seven days a week. Now again, this doesn't mean you have to get dressed in your fancy clothes and make a big deal of it and go out to the gym and spend a lot of time, you don't have to become a gym rat.

But what we're talking about as our society has become too sedentary, when he mentioned taking a break and going for a walk, that counts. This does not have to be difficult, our body though is not designed to sit not even for 24 hours, if we don't exercise in a 24-hour period, we're not doing ourselves a favour, we have multiple systems that we need to look after.

We need to look after our strength, our endurance, our general longevity, our balance, our speed, our accuracy, all of these things are part of how our body functions at its best. He’s 55 years old, he’s got grandchildren and he wants to have great grandchildren but he doesn't want to have them if he’s decrepit and unable to get out of the bed, that's not the vision he has.

And so, he knows that the way he takes care of himself now is going to affect how well he is if he’s going to be a healthy great grandfather. And that's true for all of us. What we're doing today is setting the groundwork for how healthy we are in the next decade, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Me: So in relation to move your body everyday, seven days a week, your sheet says make sure even your rest days involve light activity. Can you quantify that for me? Let's say, for example, I normally go to the gym four days a week, that's been my routine for the last maybe three months. So, I go to the gym four days a week, and on the days that I go, that I don't have any pressing meetings in the morning, I’ll also do a three mile walk at a field that's pretty close to my home, just as additional cardio and because I have a back injury, I don't typically do any form of what would you call now heavy impact, like jogging or running or anything like that. I just tried to brisk walk for the three miles as much as possible. That's four days but then there are other three days, now maybe two of those days, I'll do brisk walking alone, because obviously I wouldn't go to the gym. But then on that seventh day, are you suggesting that I do additional activities? And if so, for how long?

Dave stated that this is a great question and the answer is yes. Even if it's yoga, another walk, mobility of some sort, there's all kinds of great videos on YouTube.

Now, for example, if you go to YouTube, you have a back injury, he does as well, he has a condition in his back, actually, that gives him chronic pain and he has to deal with it and so he understands that.

However, he’s dealt with it much better than many other people have been able to do because of this routine. When his back is active and flexible, he has very little pain, it's when he’s not exercising, when he’s not taking care of himself that it flares up.

So if you go to YouTube and you search for exercises for back pain, that is a wonderful search, if you ever heard of foundation training, there's a really good 10-minute foundation training on YouTube for any of you that have back pain, it's fantastic, he highly recommends it.

And there's many others as we know, there's many, many workouts that are available for free on YouTube. So yes, we're talking about light exercise, whether it's working on a pre-existing injury that we have, whether it's just working on general flexibility and mobility to improve our quality of life over time because as we know, if we don't work on our flexibility, it gets worse and worse as we get older.

And as it gets worse, this is why people end up in a wheelchair often, that are otherwise healthy and that's what we're trying to avoid.

So, mobility, flexibility, yoga, very light, low impact exercise, find something that you can do on your non gym days that's very easy but you're still getting your heart rate up a little bit, you're still keeping yourself limber.

Me: And the length of time you recommend for that 20 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour.

Dave stated that he really doesn't recommend by time, it's really a personal thing. For example, Sunday is a very easy day for him. And he takes his dog, they are lucky to live near a lot of farmland and dirt roads and they'll just walk for an hour and he loves it and she (the dog) loves it. And there's nothing magical about the hour. And so, he would say make anything minimum 20 minutes, under 20 minutes, they know that it's not doing our heart near as much good as it could the American Heart Association encourage us to make sure our exercise is at least 20 minutes. So I'd say 20 minutes is a minimum and of course, there's not really a maximum as well. So, let's just say minimum 20 minutes makes a lot of sense.

And then the final one, Get Seven to Nine Hours of Sleep Per Night. This is what entrepreneurs don't like, a lot of people want to burn the candle at both ends. He’s been self-employed since 1993 and you got to ask yourself this question, “Is your lifestyle for your business or is your business to support your lifestyle?” This is a critical question. To him, when someone says, “Hey family, I'm going to work super hard for 10 years so that we can have a really great life.” To him, that is a terrible thing to ever say to a child or to think. Those 10 years are going to go and you're going to miss piano recitals and football games, and dances and the stuff. And his motto, when it comes to family, his family comes first, his family comes before his business, his health comes before his business. So without his health, he doesn't have a family or a business, he can't serve anybody else.

And the seven to nine hours sleep is foundational to our mind functioning at its best, our body functioning at its best. And so those temptations, when you're thinking, “Oh, if I just get this project done, then I can go to bed.” That's just a lie. As entrepreneurs, we are a personality go getting hustlers.

And we could work all the way up to the day of our divorce. No problem. Because we're wired for work but we got to just step back and understand.

Dave shared a principle that has absolutely changed his life. In your business, there's probably only one and maximum two mission critical things you have to do today.

If you ask this question, what is the one mission critical thing I have to do today, that if I got it done, and then I had a family emergency and had to go to a hospital for the rest of the day, my business would still survive?

That's extreme thinking but you get the idea.

Now, in his business, they use Basecamp, each of their employees, they have this principle baked in. Basecamp pings everyone at 9:00 am in the morning, it says, “What is your one thing?” Every single one of them has to plan their day around the one thing and do the one thing first. And they all have to tell each other what that one thing is.

So that someone else might say, “Oh, hey, did you forget about this? Because I kind of think that in our meeting, we talked about this project. And you're saying this is your one thing, I kind of feel like you ought to do this thing.”

So by having some accountability and having other people do that, it makes sure that each person or business knows what their mission critical, most important thing is, and they get it done first. Once you've done that, it's amazing how much pressure comes off. And then from there, you realize that come 4:00 pm, 5:00 pm, you really don't need to work anymore.

You're never going to get it all done, that's just not reality. There will always be something on your mind that you think is so important that you have to get done. The fact is, most of these things that feel so important, they're just not that important. There's usually just one or two.

Me: I think of all the ones that you've given so far, I talk the most about sleep. I'm a big, big, big supporter of sleep. I believe in the seven to nine hours of sleep. And I can't tell you how many customer service training sessions I've been on for leaders, for supervisors, for frontline staff, and people telling me they're surviving on three hours sleep or four hours sleep and their body doesn't need that much sleep, you only sleep that much when you're a baby.

And I'm like, No, no, like, there's scientific data out there that proves that sleep, your body needs sleep. The reality is, there is no cure for sleep, but sleep. There is no tablet for you to take to replace getting sleep, you have to sleep.

When your body says it's time to sleep, it's time to sleep. And so, I'm so happy that it's on your list and I'm so happy that it matches back with what I've been saying for years. And I just want you to reinforce it again for me, Dave, because I just think people just don't recognize the importance of getting sleep. And as you said, the seven to nine hours of sleep, so important.

Dave agreed and stated that one of the reasons why is because nutritional and fitness science has come so far in the last few years and sleep and intermittent fasting are two of the newest to hit the radar and because of that, many of us were raised to believe that to be successful, we had to burn the candle at both ends, that it was like some badge of honor to not get very much sleep.

There's these groups that were everyone gets on Twitter, like 3:45 am or 4:45 am in the morning or something like that and they feel so terrific because they're getting up earlier than everyone else and getting stuff done. And that's really great short term.

Long term, he doesn't want to be that person and he doesn't need to be that person. No one needs to be that person to be successful, whether with their health or with their business or in their relationships. As a matter of fact, as you mentioned, all the scientific data supports that we need seven to nine hours of sleep, that might be seven for you, it might be seven and a half, it might be eight, might be eight and a half, it might be nine, but don't think you're always the exception to the rule. There are very, very few exceptions to the rule.

So this is the other problem is everyone thinks that they're the exception and in health and fitness, it's usually a lie we tell ourselves, we all want to feel exceptional, that's wonderful.

At the same time, we should have some level of humility and accept scientific research that people do. As mentioned, I have the Dirobi Health Show and one of his favourite interviews was with Molly McLaughlin and her tagline is, sleep is a skill. And he had her on his show and she's just excellent.

And so, for those of you that want more on this, he'd recommend that interviewer that you just look her up, she's got some of the greatest cutting edge information on sleep and really up on all the studies. But the fact is, the other question that he'd ask people is why do you think that you don't need to spend that much time in bed?

What is it you're trying to accomplish exactly?

If you have to work 16 hours a day, the answers why, what are you working for?

What's your goal?

Again, business is supposed to support us, we aren't supposed to support our business. So you're doing something wrong.

In 2015, he took his family to Europe for 90 days. For 90 days, they spent time in Scotland, in England, in Wales and then they spent time in Paris and Brussels, and it was wonderful. And his business grew.

Some people may not believe that but from September to December 2015, his business grew while they were travelling for 90 days in Europe, because they'd created the systems, they had the staff, they had the ideas, they had this one thing concept.

And so, his whole business is designed to support his lifestyle.

He takes every Friday off, he loves to golf and every single Friday, he’s got his little golf group, and they go out and they golf.

And there's literally not been a Friday in the last three years that he can remember where his business took over that golf outing, it just doesn't happen because he doesn't let it happen.

He realizes not everyone loves golf, but you get the idea. If your business isn't supporting the lifestyle you want, change it, do it differently so that you can have the health you want, so you can have the relationships that you want, so you can have a wonderful life where you see the world and do all these exciting things that that life has to offer. And sitting at your desk is not it.

App, Website or Tool that Dave Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Dave shared that he would say the one kind of philosophy or book that has changed his life more than anything else is The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss. That book, it's a little bit dated now so don't use techniques when he talks about advertising, that type of thing. But the underlying principles of what he (Dave) just said about life and lifestyle and travel, that book teaches you how to create a business that can support a wonderful lifestyle. And he read it years ago, he read it in 2008. And as an entrepreneur, he'd say that book changed his life more than any other business book.

Me: So that would be a resource that definitely helped you to get to where you are today.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Dave

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Dave shared Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, he thinks is a basic self-development book that everyone should read. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, he believes is one of the best personal development and professional development books ever written. So if he backs up and talk about a resource, one of them would be the one he mentioned earlier, Basecamp. Basecamp is a very inexpensive tool, but he runs his whole business using Basecamp. And so that to him is an absolutely essential tool.

What Dave is Really Excited About Now!

Dave shared that the one thing he’s most excited about at the moment is a transformation programme that he’s doing for their customers. He’s been developing it for a while, it's where he’s getting to take all his years of experience and his health certification and put it into an app that he’s developed.

And they did their first run, it's called the Dirobi Transformation Programme, earlier this year. And it was his first chance to really kind of put together a programme that people took that involved all these principles they've been talking about where every single day they get a ping about a training and then accountability, did you follow the principles.

And for 90 days, they follow this health journey. So that's been something he envisioned years ago but the technology, he’s sure it was there, but he didn't know how to do it. And so finally, this year he was able to develop out a programme to really take his whole business and his customer base to the next level.

And the reason he’s so excited about it is because while he loves making a living in the dietary supplement industry, which is what he does, it's not about him selling bottles to people to make a living, it's about health transformation, it's about the success that they have, it's about filling in those deficiencies, it’s about them. So, for him, he’s never just wanted to be a guy who sells stuff in the health space, he wants to be a guy who helps people raise their quality of life in the health space and he’s been doing it since 2009.

But he feels like just this year, he’s actually getting to where his vision really has been leading him to where he’s able to create something that's more than just buy the bottles, but actually take the bottles, understand how to use them in the context of these principles that we're talking about and develop out the habits so people can go beyond weight loss, beyond yo-yo dieting, beyond thinking of health in terms of such simple measures as that and instead achieve their ideal body weight, great energy, feel their best, look their best in a way that makes sense and that they can do long term. So, that's it, he’s excited about it, it's still a work in progress like he said, he had one group go through it, from that he learned a lot and he’s improving it. And from here on out, he sees that being a real core part of their business.

Where Can We Find Dave Online

Website – www.dirobi.com

Instagram - @dirobihealth

YouTube – Dirobi Health Show

Facebook – @Dirobihealth

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Dave Uses

When asked about a quote he tends to revert to, Dave stated that he’s going to change the question a little bit. He has a practice, rather, it's not a quote or anything. But he’s a meditation practitioner, he goes to retreats, he meditates every single day in the morning.

And one of the things he does is walking meditation and there is a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh that he recites as he walks slowly. So, if he really needs to get centred, he goes for a walk and he recite the poem. And now that he’s under pressure, he hopes he can get it right but it's very simple.

It goes, “I have arrived. I'm home. In the here. In the now. I am solid. I am free, in the ultimate I dwell.”

And you simply breathe and walk slowly while you recite those words in your head.

And he’s been doing that for years. I did it just this morning and it's a unique kind of a practice, was very grounding. He talks about kissing the earth with your feet as you walk and recite this little poem or couplet. You just recite those words though as you walk very slowly and ideally outside. And it's incredibly grounding, that experience.

He’s walked for as much as 2 hours reciting that, probably sounds like the most boring thing ever to people listening. But keep in mind though, he started his meditation practice a long time ago and he was terrible. He couldn't sit still for like more than two minutes. His first meditations, literally didn't last more than two minutes, it took him two years to work up to 10 minutes of meditation. And then after going through his first retreat, he really broke through to where he was able to meditate for longer periods of time and generally be more meditative and more mindful in his general living. So, that's his best answer is walking meditation.

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

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

Links

• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Wayne McCulloch is one of the world's leading customer success experts and a Top 100 Customer Success Strategist, Wayne works with Google Cloud’s entire SaaS portfolio as the Customer Success Leader. He's a keynote speaker and the recipient of multiple industry awards with more than 25 years of experience in customer-focused roles.

Wayne began his software career at PeopleSoft and Vignette before becoming an SVP at Salesforce, the Chief Customer Officer at Kony, Inc., and the VP of the Customer Success Group at Looker.

Questions

• Could you tell us 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.
• Could you share with us what those pillars are and maybe if you were to pick maybe one or two of those pillars that a business owner or a manager in charge of customer experience or customer success in their business would need to focus on what would be maybe one or two of those things that you'd recommend they focus on, especially in the climate that businesses are currently operating in, just trying to emerge out of a pandemic.
• So you started off by talking about on-boarding. Does on-boarding include the recruitment process? Or based on how you wrote the book, is the recruitment step before or do you have it all summed up as one with on-boarding?
• How do you ensure that in the recruiting process, getting the right people for the organization, it matches back with what you're trying to achieve on an organizational level. How do you know that the people you're hiring can actually love the company they work for so much that they literally walk and speak good things about the company all the time, even when things may not be going so well?
• What's the one online tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read very long ago, but it still has had a great impact on you. Or it could even be something that you've read recently that you found to be really insightful or impactful?
• Could you share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get your refocused or get you back on track? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Wayne’s Journey

Wayne shared that it’s interesting when he looks back, because there's no possible way he could have created a plan to get to where he is today, which made him totally rethink how he thought when he was in the early 20s trying to think about what’s his career going to be? What is he going to do? Where is he going to be?

And it really, really is a journey that hasn't been planned in any way shape or form from a long term perspective, but just made up of a collection of opportunities that have presented itself. But he got into the world of software for a strange reason, it's because he was working in a sort of more traditional space and one of his friends got a job in software, and they said, it's amazing, they have Pop Tarts in the fridge and you can cook up and it's casual clothes, and it's like flexible work from home.

And this is back in the 90s when that was just so foreign to him working in a more traditional business environment. And so he joined a software company for reasons nothing to do with software, and yet it to become part of his life for the last 25 years.

And for him, he started off in the world of education, enablement, adoption of software in the B2B space and really love that for 15 years of his career and then realize that this whole customer experience, customer success movement, especially in the world of software with cloud and the way we can easily download apps and use any product very quickly, which is very unlike software in the 80s and 90s, he realized that that was a space he was very interested in is how to enable people to get success with these investments, with these software applications, and so moved into the world of customer success and that's where he’s been ever since.

Pillars That Business Owners or Managers Need to Focus On Emerging Out of a Pandemic  

Me: So Wayne, you have this new book that was released recently. It's called “The Seven Pillars of Customer Success” so could you share with us what those pillars are and maybe if you were to pick maybe one or two of those pillars that a business owner or a manager in charge of customer experience or customer success in their business would need to focus on what would be maybe one or two of those things that you'd recommend they focus on, especially in the climate that businesses are currently operating in, just trying to emerge out of a pandemic.

Wayne stated that it’s a very unique time right now. As an author like Yanique, he has much more respect for people that write books than he did before he embarked on this journey 3 years ago. He was very motivated. It's similar to when you join a gym, you get really excited, you start working out and getting up early, and then you start missing a couple and then eventually you just stop going and writing a book for him was like that, he was so excited.

And then he’s like, “Wow, this is really hard. And it's not what I thought it would be.” But ultimately, they got the book done and launched as The Seven Pillars and it really was a collection of a lot of experiences.

But for him, The Seven Pillars wasn't anything ground-breaking, it was more how do we create or construct a framework by which we can base our business on how we service our customers, because there's lots of great books on why customer service and the customer experience is so critical for a customer's success.

And there's lots of great books on how to execute that as far as like sort of activities, things you need to be thinking about. But for him, he was missing a framework to pull it all together. He knows it's important. He knows there's really cool things about creating customer delight and all these other sort of tactical engagement type things but what he was missing for him to make customers successful was what's a framework that he can build that conflicts with his business as it grows or shrinks but can also accommodate a consistent sort of value proposition, a consistent theme, a consistent what he calls narrative when he’s speaking to his customers.

And so, the book for him was about constructing these seven pillars which really focused in on three main areas. The first one is your company. The second one is your customer. And the third one is sort of the people delivering that experience. And it's funny, he’s talked to people and like, “Why do you start with your company? If this is about customer experience and the customer success and servicing that customer, why do you start with your company?” and he said he has a saying it's, “Customer success equals employee success, and employee success equals customer success.” And it really starts with the employee or employees, and it starts with your organization, you need to build a foundation as a company or as a business that can sustain and deliver a great experience for your customers.

So it actually starts with your own organization. And so, he developed sort of 10 tools, very specific to the B2B world in software, but certainly applicable as a framework in other contexts, which is, how are you going to run your business at scale, having a consistent voice, having a consistent value proposition into the market and that's what the first pillar is all about.

The next 5 pillars are all about the customer’s journey with you as a company. And for him, it starts off with on-boarding.

On-boarding a new customer, a new consumer into your business, and how to go do that right. And he actually has a story in the book, it's about a hurdler in the 2016 Olympics and he was representing Haiti. And he was in the semi-finals so he’s super pumped because such a small sort of population of people can have someone at the Olympics at the highest level, potentially getting into the gold medal race and he was watching with great enthusiasm. And unfortunately, he tripped over the first hurdle fell down and didn't qualify. And he feels like that's kind of like customer service, it's kind of like running a business, if you trip over the first hurdle, it's really difficult to recover, really difficult to come back. And it doesn't mean you can't finish and it doesn't mean you can't have some success but it's really difficult to win. And so, for him, on-boarding was the first pillar.

And then there was the second pillar of the customer journey, which really focused in on the adoption of your product or service, like how do we get true adoption and by adoption they don't mean just using it, but they mean getting full value from it. How do we do that?

The third sort of pillar on the customer journey was really focused in on how do we cement that value proposition in that person's mind? So they've on-boarded well, they're using or leveraging the product in some way and now they're getting maximum value that it can provide because that leads you to the fourth stage, what he calls the fifth pillar, which is around the value expansion. How do we now give that consumer, that customer more value?

How do we create an experience for them even better than what we have done, whether it's through more of the same product or additional products and services?

And then finally, a really important one, which he hopes they talked about later is when Yanique mentioned what the most critical one would be around advocacy. How do we create advocates of our brand, of our products, of our services into the market because that is, in this day and age, one of the easiest, fastest and most scalable ways, certainly the most affordable in order to attract new business.

The final pillar, the seventh pillar is all about the people delivering on that promise, that value proposition, that great experience, and how do we invest in those people.

And he co-created a model with a friend of his, Shane Anastasi who also has written a book on the consulting side, and it's called The KSE Model, which is knowledge, skills and experience and if we think of our people at the frontline delivering service, we think of what knowledge do we give them? What skills can we have them acquire and then how do we give them the experience and the feedback in order for them to improve and be better? And so, that kind of rounds out the whole book, he jokes that no one needs to buy the book now, they almost have it all in a podcast.

Does On-Boarding Includes the Recruitment Process? 

Me: So you started off by talking about on-boarding. Does on-boarding include the recruitment process? Or based on how you wrote the book, is the recruitment step before or do you have it all summed up as one with on-boarding?

Wayne stated that it's a great question. And it's funny, because to answer the question, it's after they've acquired the customer. But in the book, he actually has a secret eighth pillar. And it's funny because when he was writing the book and he was at 345 pages long, which is pretty big for a business book, and the publisher is like just get the book published, how much more can you put in there? And he’s like, another 345 pages, there's so much content.

And he said, he actually thinks there's an eighth pillar, potentially, he’s not sold on it yet, but he does believe it exists. And the publisher is like, you can't make it eight pillars of the books called The Seven Pillars and all the graphics and all that, all this work had been done around The Seven Pillars. But in actual fact, he talked about the fact that the eighth pillar is pre boarding, he calls it pre boarding, it’s like getting on a plane, it's called pre boarding which is, how do we set up the customer for success before they're a customer.

And even in this day and age defining what a customer is, is different because you might have a service that you give a free trial, well, they're not paying for the service, so they really not a customer of your business from a financial standpoint, but they're consuming the service, so they are a customer. But it's a trial, so this notion of pre boarding customers, getting them ready to engage with you is something that he definitely added into the book at the end.

Recruiting the Right People for the Right Organization

Me: So one of the things I think is so critical sometimes when we're dealing with customer experience, you definitely need to get the right customers, but you also need to get the right people internally. So, there's an internal customer service.

How do you ensure that in the recruiting process, getting the right people for the organization, it matches back with what you're trying to achieve on an organizational level, at the end because one of the things you spoke about was you want your internal and external customers to become your advocates, your evangelists, your word of mouth advertisers, but how do you know that the people you're hiring can actually love the company they work for so much that they literally walk and speak good things about the company all the time, even when things may not be going so well?

Wayne stated that this is a challenge facing every industry that has service professionals. And he calls them service professionals deliberately, he feels like when people talk about service industry, it's not referred to in a way that he thinks really highlights the importance that the role that service people play, it is so incredibly important to service professionals. The one thing that have been his experience where he’s had successes when he hires people, he doesn't hire for skills, he doesn't care if you're finished high school, he doesn't care if you have a Master's, it doesn't matter to him, in service that's relevant, it does not matter.

What matters is empathy, to him, that is all that matters. If he can find people that can demonstrate the capability of being empathetic, can show examples of how they're empathetic, then you have a winning service person.

And it doesn't matter if you're in a very technical field, if you're in the retail field or whatever, the person has to have that empathy. You can't really teach empathy, it's something that you have, you can amplify it and you can certainly improve through learning and experience.

But ultimately finding people with empathy because they don't just have empathy for the customer, which is so critical to delivering a great experience, but have empathy for your business.

They get it's difficult, they get there are tough times, they get the challenges are going to come that make it necessary to make tough decisions as a company, as a business.

And so empathetic people can work through that in a way that allows them to be comfortable and allows them to also be more appreciative of the environment they're in. And then other things like communication, sharing, listening, collaborate, all those things that we would want to make sure that we provide as an environment from our people are all important, he’s not saying they're not but to him, the critical skill is empathy.

He worked in a software company called Looker, one of the best companies he’s ever worked for, for culture. And there's probably one other company in his whole life called PeopleSoft in the 90s, they had just amazing culture.

And the founder of Looker has this phrase that he uses when he started the company. He said, “Great software is an act of empathy.”

In other words, if you're using software and you can't use it, it's frustrating, you get stuck at breaks, you are ruining that person's day potentially impacting their career. It goes beyond creating a great, in this case - application, it's about people being able to do their jobs and be successful. And so, great software is an act of empathy.

But they sort of built on that and said, “Great service is an act of empathy.” That's really what it's about, it's about putting yourself in the other person's shoes. And it's great when things are good, I want to buy something, I've got great experiences and that's great. And we should celebrate and service people with empathy that they lead with can enjoy that and can celebrate and make that a really unique, fun, positive experience for both the consumer and for the service person. But it's also when things are bad is when empathy shines through and that comes through in a genuine way.

We've all been there, he doesn't want to say that the cable company because they always get used. But let's just say we call someone and we get frustrated, we get moved around. “Sorry, that's not the right department, I can't help you.” And we get that in big companies. And that just means they haven't worked out how to intake the questions appropriately or you get a chatbot that just keeps asking you 50 questions.

And you just get frustrated, you're not getting someone who's empathetic, who's saying, “Look, I get it, your time is more valuable than ours. Time is all you have, you can't buy more of it. So every minute you spend trying to solve a problem with us that we've created in your life, a hassle, an issue or problem or difficulty, that's on us not on you. And yet you pay the price as the consumer.”

And so, people who are empathetic can empathize with that. And for him, that creates a different dynamic between people in your company. And then inside your own company. As he said, empathetic people get that sometimes things get tough and they're going to rally, they're going to support because they genuinely know that you as a business owner, or as a company, you believe in that customer centricity, it's not just a moniker, it's not just a mission statement, it's not just something painted on the wall, it's demonstrated by a group of empathetic people trying to make the best experiences possible for their customers.

Me: It's funny that that whole characteristic that you have to have as an individual, empathy, it really as you said, it's something that it just cannot be taught, it has to be something that you have from within. And just on your experience, Wayne, do you feel that as you grow older, especially like as a parent, because I believe empathy is one of those social skills that you should have, just general things like being polite, being courteous, empathy is something that should be a part of your socialization. But what I have found is that because it requires that you tap into your emotional intelligence, at what age do you think persons start to really exercise empathy, maybe in their teenage years to just get a better understanding of connecting with other people, maybe you have a friend who is going through something and you empathize with her, that way when you actually get into the work environment, well, I don't think you'd have mastered this skill, but you definitely would have had some exposure to it. What are your thoughts on that?

Wayne stated that he can be really frank here and say his answer is now different than what it was 5 years ago. Because 5 years ago, he had kids. And so, he was raised by his grandparents and so he was brought up in a more traditional environment when it comes to manners, when it comes to morals, we're talking people born in 1920.

So, the environment he grew up as a child was very polite and actually, in many regards, was very empathetic and so it enabled him to understand the impact that we have on other people when we meet them.

And so, now that he’s had children, he’s like, well, he wasn't born in 1920 and he certainly doesn't have all the morals and manners his grandparents had. Hopefully, he has a lot, hopefully, his grandma would say he still has some. But really, when it comes down to it, he thinks about how does he instill values? And how does he practice empathy with his children when they're in an environment that was very different to his, where he was able to hone that for him.

And it's simple things at Christmas time, is, you know, sponsoring a family that might have financial difficulties in buying presents for their children and so going shopping with your 5 year old kid and saying, “Hey, what would you like for Christmas?” And they're like, “Oh, I'd love this Barbie Set.” And he’s like, you know there's people out there that actually don't have this opportunity to pick out a toy. They're not lucky like we are, they're unlucky.

Does that make you sad that they can't have the fun things you have? And while he gets the comprehension is limited, it's starting to have a conversation and a dialogue, not everyone is on the same playing field, not everyone has the same opportunities, and we can make a difference because we can. And so let's pick up a toy, what sort of toy do you think a girl of your age would enjoy. And she might say, it's a Tonka truck or it might be a tennis racket or something. And so we'll go buy it and wrap it and go give that to a family.

And so, over time we look for opportunities to broaden the thinking of our children, our life, our world, what we have is not the only thing that exists because in the world of customer service, you're dealing with people that have lots of different backgrounds and lots of different challenges.

And having an appreciation that we’re just one more problem they're having to deal with if they're frustrated or one more opportunity to create delight for someone who might not have that. Everyone has that in their life to varying degrees, some worse than others. So in his mind, he thinks you can start exploring and understanding things like empathy as early as 5 years old, because that's where he’s starting. He’s not sure if it has an impact, he'll tell you in 15 years’ time. But he does think it's something we can explore with our children so that as they grow, they can have a broader understanding of how other situations people find themselves in, which in customer service, we touch everybody, from all walks of life, good and challenging.

Me: And it does cement also that there is research out there that says you do form your personality by age five. So it's good that you've started that conversation, because it means then as your kids get older, and you may not be the centre of influence in terms of information that you give them, because now they're exposed to the school system, they have teachers, they have friends, by the time they turn teenagers, what their friend said to them is of greater value than what their parents said to them. And so it's good those core things are built in from early.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Wayne shared that for him, it's not really directly for his business, but he lives in LinkedIn. He’s noticed social media person, he’s not on Facebook, he doesn't have an Instagram account. He’s not a Twitter person, that's not for him. They're very private as a family and they'd like to keep it that way. But for him, from a professional and business sense, he finds that networking through tools like LinkedIn enables him to connect with people who have similar situations or been on similar journeys and that's super critical.

Because one thing he learned writing a book and talking to 50 Plus of his peers in the industry is none of us are as smart as all of us. Doesn't know who said that but he heard that one time when he was younger, and he really gets that. We've all faced different challenges and overcome them and have experiences and have had impacts and we can all learn from that. And then one thing that he’s learned on LinkedIn is by connecting with people and either mentoring or getting mentored by or just simply saying, “Hey, I really love your career, I love what you've done, I'd love to grab 30 minutes of your time just to talk about what you've learned, what I've learned.”

More often than not people like absolutely, like, this is great. I can learn from you; you can learn from me. And learning strategies and concepts and ideas and techniques from other people, for him is a powerful way to help the business. So, he would say something like that because it's such a unique way to find people with common backgrounds and explore experiences together which is cool.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Wayne

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Wayne stated that he read his book recently and he thought it was really good. He agrees with everything in the book. But there's a lot of great books out there. And in his book he actually referred to a book from the 80s that talked about moments of truth. And there was a more recent book from Chip Heath and Dan Heath, it was about the power of moments.

And one thing for him in understanding a customer journey, which is really all the touch points a customer will have with your brand, whether it's digital, physical, online, with you present or not like a website, the power of those moments are incredible. So there's a book called The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, which he thinks helps to highlight that when you're trying to create a great experience for a customer, you really have to understand what are the moments that really require that effort, because you could put a lot of effort into a moment that is not as impactful from an advocacy, a loyalty, a delight kind of experience. And so, understanding that he thinks is really cool. So, he felt like that book was pretty cool.

The other one he really liked, which was a recent book is called Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer. So, for him, that was really difficult concept because in your business, especially if you own your business, you love that like you love your children and that makes you a little irrational sometimes.

And so, when people complain or get upset, you immediately become defensive and because you know that that's either not true or this is not fair, or because you're kind of bias. But learning to hug your haters is great. He remembers watching and it was an Apple plus TV show called Ted Lasso, which is an incredibly different show, but wonderful at the same time. And there's a scene where one of the players sort of talks to the coach and basically tells the coach that he doesn't like him and really upset. And the coach, when the player walks away, the coach says to the assistant coach, “Well, he thinks he hates me now wait until he loves me.” And that phrase for him and then later in the show, that player ends up loving him and actually says, “You make it so hard to love you.” Because he's sort of frustrated at something. And then he's like, “Did you hear that, he loves me like.” And that to him is exactly how we view our customers, is when they're upset, like, here's my chance to make them love me. And so, that books great too. There's plenty of others. He can't consume all the books he wants to read just for time purposes but they're the two that have had impacts on him recently.

What Wayne is Really Excited About Now!

Wayne shared that he just released a book, which is very scary, because you're putting out there, this is what I believe, this is what I think, this is what I'm suggesting or advising people to do and that's really scary. And as you write the book, you're often asking yourself saying, “Well, do I believe what I'm saying here? Am I saying it because I read it in a book? Am I saying it because I experienced it? Am I saying it because I truly believe it.”

And so, when you finally put it all down, you send it out in the world. And so, what he’s doing now is he’s talking to people who read the book and saying, “What's missing? What did I leave out? What did I get wrong?” And for him, that's amazing growth opportunity, like, “Oh, did I get that wrong? Actually, you're right. I didn't think of it from that point of view. I don't know everything. I know a lot. And I want to share that but I don't know everything.” And so, that's what he’s working on right now is really uncovering the gaps in the book, the gaps in his knowledge, the gaps in his skills, maybe who knows, one day he'll do a new edition of the book and add some chapters in or make some modifications. But really, that's primarily what he’s focused on.

And he’s just started writing a second book with two other authors. So he’s going to do this with two other people, hopefully, it will make it easier. There'll be more information coming out about that end of the year. But it's really about the fourth industrial revolution and how we're going to displace a lot of workers through AI, ML, robots, that's accelerating. And so, how can we re-skill hundreds of millions of humans on new opportunities in a very coordinated way, which he doesn't think we're doing as a society right now. So it's a little heavier than the book he just wrote, but equally important.

Where Can We Find Wayne Online

LinkedIn - @waynemcculloch

Website – http://www.cspillars.com/

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Wayne Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Wayne stated that he does but will give a quick background. He went on something called an Outward Bound Standard course which is basically 28 days in the bush in Australia.

And literally you've got a piece of plastic, you pull your shoelaces out of your shoes every night, put a bit of grass in the corner of the plastic and you tie your shoelace around and tie that to a log and that creates this kind of tent they call it a BV whack around Australia and you really live outside for a month with no phone and no electricity, nothing. You're not allowed anything of that. And while he was there, you got one mail drop that sort of day 20. And one of his friends wrote, just literally he opened the letter and it was one piece of paper with this one phrase on it, nothing else, didn't have his name, didn't have “I hope all is well, here's what's happening.” All it had was this phrase, which was “Tough times never last, tough people do.”

And for him, that helps him get through when he’s feeling down, when he’s feeling like things are going to be difficult. He’s like, it won't last, we’ll get through it. And as long as we get through it, we get stronger and we continue. So that's something he always think about and refer to in his professional career as well as his personal life.

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

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

Links

• The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath
• Hug Your Hater: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Jonathan Byrnes is a founding partner and chairman of Profit Isle, a highly successful MIT spin-off SaaS software company that helps organizations increase profits by 10 – 30 percent using its profitability analytics and management process. A widely followed thought leader on profitable growth and innovative customer supplier relationships, Byrnes is a frequent speaker and writer who has advised over 100 companies and institutions. He earned a doctorate from Harvard and has been a Senior Lecturer at MIT for 30 years. In addition to his popular HBS column, “The Bottom Line,” he is the author of Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink, an Inc. Best Book for Business Owners.

Questions

• Could you start off by telling us a little bit about your journey?
• Can you share with us maybe one or two things that you may have touched on in your book, what are some things that based on your research and your experience that potential readers could look forward to if they should purchase this book that will help them to be able to navigate best through their customer experience, especially during this time that world is going through a global pandemic?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could have been a book that you read many years ago, or even a book you read recently, but it really has had a great impact on you.
• What's one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? It could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this chord? It kind of helps to get you back on track or to get you refocused. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Jonathan’s Journey

Jonathan shared that he went to business school and he actually enjoyed academic business quite a lot. He was at Columbia in New York. Instead of taken a typical job on Wall Street or in a consulting company, he decided to get a doctorate. So he got up to Boston, he’s from New England. So he was happy to get back to Boston. And he went to Harvard, spent 6 years there and got a doctorate from Harvard Business School. And after that, he developed a consulting business where he helped a number of companies do very, very innovative things, which he found very satisfying.

After he had achieved a degree of success in consulting, he got very re-interested in academics, so he connected with MIT and they asked him to teach a course there and he has been doing that for 31 years now.

In addition, he continued his consulting business, but he shifted it over. When he was doing consulting, he was very unhappy with the way that profitability was measured in companies, the typical way is to sort of pile up all the revenues and pile up all the costs, and see which one is bigger.

And if revenues are bigger than then costs, you have the profit. And if the opposite, you have a loss. The problem is it tells you whether your profitability, whether you're profitable, but not where you're profitable.

And so, he couldn't really take a part a company and understand where it was making money. So he developed back in the 1980s, a new way to do this, he thought and thought about it and it seemed to him that this is a transaction.

So if he goes into a store and he buys 3 pencils, eraser and a ruler, that's three transactions. And if he could understand the profit and loss on each of those and he could characterize each one, then he had sort of a good starting point.

And so, they figured out a way to do a profit and loss statement on each of them with probably over 95% accuracy and then each one could be characterized, he knew the customer, he knew the product, he knew the store and so on. So he could put it into the database and figure out exactly where the company was making money and where it wasn't.

So when he did the first one of these back in around 1987, using very rudimentary computer and database programme, nowhere near what we have now and what he saw was about 10% of the company, this was a very successful company, making 150% of the reported profit. He couldn't believe it. And then he looked at where the losses were and about 20% of the company, the customers and the products were taking away at least half of that. He was really astonished and then the other half of the company was making no money. And he just couldn't believe it.

So he brought it back to his colleagues at MIT and said, “This is unbelievable and he doesn't believe it. But the numbers, he thinks are correct.” And so everybody said, they don't believe it either and they went through the numbers, and they said, but the numbers are right. And since then, he has done that with over a 100 Billion dollars in client revenues and it always shows the same pattern. So with that understanding, I did two things.

Number one, they took that rudimentary software and over the years made it better and better, so that they're now running on the Google Cloud with 10s of Billions of Dollars of client revenues every month under analysis and they always see the same thing.

And number two, he recently wrote a book called Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive, which will come out next week (May 11. 2021), where he talks to companies about how to focus on where they're making money, and how to integrate in the changes coming up in the environment from competitors like Amazon and others so that they know where they should head, and how to choose the right customers, align their resources and structure and manage the company, so that they can win in this new environment. Because if they go on with what used to be the success factor, which was having a lot of revenues that were a mishmash of everything to everybody, when highly focused competitors like Amazon are coming in, they're going to lose their shirts.

And in fact, that's the reason why so many companies have gone bankrupt, frankly in the past, 3, 4 or 5 years, because they couldn't adapt, they kept trying to be what they used to be 20, 30 years ago in the face of these much more focused competitors.

And he’s really here to say that by doing the right thing, even in the presence of Amazon, especially in the presence of Amazon, you can make a fortune but you have to figure out where you want to be and how you're going to get there. And you have to decide what you want to do and what you don't want to do. So that's basically, the long and short and uninteresting story of his life and how he got to where he is.

Tips for Navigating Customer Experience

Me: I'm so happy that you mentioned in your introduction that you wrote a book that's going to be released next week (May 11. 2021), Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive.

So of course, that was one of the things that piqued my interest why I was so intrigued to have you on our show, because as you can tell, we focus on how can we help managers, leaders, business owners in all different types of businesses across the world, navigate through their customer experience.

And so I wanted you to share with us maybe one or two things that you may have touched on in your book, I know it's not released yet, but you could probably give us a teaser of what are some things that based on your research and your experience that potential readers could look forward to if they should purchase this book that will help them to be able to navigate best through their customer experience, especially during this time that world is going through a global pandemic?

Jonathan stated that he’s going to separate out for the first bit about the pandemic, because that too will pass although he thinks with more difficulty than people think. But over the longer term, a lot of people ask him, “How can I compete with Amazon?”

And his answer is, don't. And if you try to be like Amazon, Amazon will run you over.

However, what's really important, and this is really the most important thing is that you can be like Amazon, you can't compete with Amazon where they are, but you can do what they did.

And what they did is very interesting. In the old days, say in the 1980s or so, you had companies that had a broad range of customers. So the example he would give is that in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, they had a big department store called G Fox and everybody went there for everything from shoes, to jackets, to skis, on and on and on. They had everything and they served everybody. The problem is that they focused on the big customers and their expensive products.

So it was easy to recognize and deal with big customers. But they had 1000’s of small customers, especially an industrial distributor, for example and they just didn't know how to get to them.

When the internet came along, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Wilkie, who's a former student of theirs (MIT), figured out that using the internet, they could get to customers all over the country. And they could do it actually from one central location in Seattle. And so they started doing this with books and then moved into some other products. And they figured out that they could look at the order patterns of customers and figure out who they are and then serve them the sort of products that they thought they'd like. So when he goes on to Amazon, it says, “Hi, Jonathan, here's what you ordered. And if you like that sort of thing, here are 5 books you might like.” And they're usually right.

So they were able to use the customer information to target the market and to break up this sort of monolithic, homogeneous market that G Fox used to serve. But Amazon only does one thing well, same thing with Google, Apple and all the rest of them. And that is they have arm's length services to small customers in a very smart, information rich, highly automated way.

So they took the customers that nobody wanted back in 20 years ago and they figured out how to make a science out of making them happy. And that's what Amazon did.

And he thinks anybody who tries to do that in competition with Amazon, unless they're Walmart, they're going to have a real problem.

However, that leaves a wide open playing field for other companies to do things that are more specialized and customized, typically somewhat higher service, he’ll give you two examples.

Number one, imagine that you're a small shoe store in his hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. They have Michaelson shoes, they would have trouble competing generally, but they became expert at working with marathon athletes, they have a lot of athletes in that area, fitting the shoes and giving them just what they needed and those people will never go to Amazon because they need some special attention. So that's a little local in town corner store that's competing as Amazon did, it figured out three things.

Number one, who are my customers, they chose the customers. Number two, they align their resources, all their information, all their advertising, to go after those customers and not be distracted by everybody else. And number three, they manage actually, at this point, a chain of stores where they're able to go after individual markets, in some markets it's swimmers and others it's runners. And they're experts and doing incredibly well.

A second area is a great big, enormous area in healthcare that's just really developing called Telemedicine. And that is that when you're in your home, you can have sensors on your body and your iPhone can be transmitting information to a doctor saying, What's your pulse? What's your this? What's your that. And it's sensitive to the point where they can actually diagnose schizophrenia from a distance in your home, and they can treat you in your home. So if you have let's say kidney stones, there's a small ultrasonic because this ultrasound unit that you can put in your home and press against your stomach, it'll break up your kidney stones.

And so more and more medicine is being transferred from the hospital to the home. And the other companion thing is called wellness management on something like what weight watchers does, but as an example, he did a session in Florida, this may hit close to home for you in Jamaica. So he did a session in Fort Myers, Florida for hospital CEOs and the head of the Mayo Clinic in Naples, Florida that's down in the south west port gave the companion talk and he said that they're biggest health problem in South Florida is little kids drowning, because everybody has a backyard pool. And number one thing they can do for community health, is to teach the little kids drown proofing, not swimming, but get to the side and get out. And that's more important than all the heart attacks and strokes in South Florida combined in terms of health outcomes.

So moving into that, he has a former student who just became president of a company that makes what are called infusion pumps. So if you need chemotherapy or pain medication, it'll drip the right amount into your body. And they are very software dependent because the amount that you drip is a function of how sick you are and how your body is responding, it's very complicated, but they have units that can be run to the home, and in the home.

And they've grown to about $100 Million Dollars self-funded in about 5 or 6 years. So there are tremendous opportunities if number one, you know your market and it's defensible. And number two, align your resource not to get distracted. And number three, manage the business so that you have what he’s called pounds per square inch of market power.

And it really means doing what Amazon did, which is figuring out a good place to be and sticking to your knitting. Think about great companies of our era.

Think about Walmart, think about Federal Express, Southwest Airlines think about JetBlue, they all did the same thing. They figured out who they were and they stuck with it and they just made it better and better and better.

Of course, you have to be a little bit careful because you're aiming in 5 years may not be as lucrative as it once was, there may be product developments and other sorts of things but you can factor that into your decision. So for him, that's the most important key to success. And companies that have tried to be everything to everybody and they can't turn down the $1 in revenues that doesn't fit, they're the ones who are going to have trouble.

App, Website or Tool that Jonathan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Him Business

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Jonathan stated that that's a little hard because they write all their own software. He'd say modestly, go to www.chooseyourcustomer.com and that's their book website and you have an introduction and a sample chapter that explain how to do what he just described. So that's the number one, he thinks beyond that, he reads the New York Times, the Washington Posts and the Boston Globe for sports about eight times a day. That's about it.

 Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jonathan

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jonathan stated that that one is easy. Probably the most important one he has read is called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, he’s a Professor of Social Psychology at Harvard.

And when his younger son was at Harvard, he took his course that the students called Happiness 101. And he actually does a study of all the studies of what makes people happy. And that sounds like a crazy thing to do but it's really, really fascinating.

So, he has spoken in front of a variety of groups, and one group he speaks in front of nearly about once every year or two cancer patients, for family reasons. And what he says to them is that in this book, one of the studies that he's really cites is a study that says that if something really bad happens to you, you have a terrible car accident, you lose a relative, just imagine the worst things that you could imagine, you become quadriplegic, then you think the world's coming to an end.

Within three or four months, you're back to your base level of happiness. And that really is powerful, because it sort of says that everybody goes through episodes and they get all down about it as they should. But then, you basically can say one foot in front of the other, and I'm going through the valley of the shadow of death, but I will climb out of it. And I will be as happy as I ever have been.

And he thinks that for him, that's a very, very important and affirming thing to think about. And everybody, especially in this pandemic, has things that are very difficult and consuming and concerning but you will get over it.

The other one that he always goes back to and reread at least once a year, he’s done this since he was in graduate school, is a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, who was an Institute Professor at MIT, it’s the Historian of Science and he looked at the scientific method, basically, which says, you do an experiment, you get a result, you do an experiment, you get a result and that's how you develop knowledge.

And when he looked at some really important leaps forward in science, he said, “That's not the way it works at all.”In fact, what happens is what he called a paradigm, which is an explanatory model of how a particular part of science works, whether the sun rotates around the Earth or the Earth rotates around the sun or any scientific area. And there's a way that people think about it and if you come up with evidence that says that that's wrong, you don't throw it out, you ignore the evidence and you keep going as if it never happened. And what counts as good science is stuff that moves that basic idea forward.

And then every once in a while you have so much evidence, people still don't change but somebody will come up with a new theory that explains all the old results and explains all of these so called anomalies and then the paradigm flips but it doesn't happen all at once. People who are older embedded in the paradigm won't change, it's like wondering in the desert for 40 years and sooner or later it changes, and then you get the same progression.

So it's almost like step by step climbing a ladder and what's really important about that is that that's the way the businesses change, that's the way that people think about things.

So if you have a business that's operating in a certain way, as he described before, you have a company that's selling everything to everybody, especially if they've been successful, you can't just show them evidence that they're losing money here and there, they're going to keep trying to do it.

And that's why in a lot of industries, like retail, up to half of all the retailers in the country went bankrupt, because they just couldn't change. And then you have Amazon, a brand new company coming in and eating their lunch. He thinks that those are the two books that meant the most to me.

What Jonathan is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about asked about something that he’s really excited about, Jonathan shared that bringing the book out. The difficulty of this book is that it’s paradigm changing. In the Kuhn sense, is basically saying, if you try to do business in the old way and that's the way the business is taught in most business schools to this day, in marketing, you want to maximize revenues. Well, wrong.

Half of those revenues are probably unprofitable. You want to maximize profits, but you need a different way to measure it and a different way to go after customers and a different way to satisfy them.

And the challenge is getting the word out through the teaching and the book, they try to change the way the business is done, so that it's much more effective and better. As a professional business educator, with a lot of decades of experience, having business work right is the best way to do it.

And by the way for our country and for society at large, if half of all of businesses losing money, that's an unbelievable waste of resources and we have too many people who are underserved and poor and needy who need those resources. So it's not only a question of making more money, it's really a question of getting more good products to more people who really need it.

Where Can We Find Jonathan Online

Website – www.chooseyourcustomer.com

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jonathan Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jonathan shared, “One foot in front of the other.” And sooner or later, you'll go back to your base level of happiness. If you are a happy person, you will get back there, if you're not a happy person, then you need to work on your happiness. One foot in front of the other until you get there.

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

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

Links

• Choose Your Customer: How to Compete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive by Jonathan Byrnes
• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

David Friedman is an award-winning CEO, entrepreneur, author and renowned public speaker. In 2011, he published his first book, Fundamentally Different, which is based on the insights he learned and taught throughout his leadership career. And in 2018, he published his second book, Culture by Design, the definitive “how to” manual for building a high-performance culture.

His current company, High Performing Culture has helped hundreds of companies throughout North America to implement its culture operating system, CultureWiseä.

Questions

• Can you share with us a little bit about your journey? How it is that you got to where you are today. We like to always ask our guests in their own words, if they can just share with us a little bit about who they are and how it is that they got to where they are today.
• So your first book that you wrote Fundamentals, you had mentioned that one of your fundamentals is quick response time. Could you share with our listeners what are some of the other things that is the core of your fundamental practices?
• Do you see any emerging trends in relation to things that leaders in organizations need to focus on more, even more now than before the pandemic probably for the next two or three years?
• Can you share with us if you have an app, a tool or a website that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Can you share with us one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? You mentioned one earlier The Effortless Experience, but maybe any others - it could have been a book that you read a very long time ago or even one that you read recently, but it really has impacted you.
• What is something that you are really excited about - one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about, it could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Can you share with us where listeners can find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you refocus, maybe because you got derailed or you just got off track? And so this quote kind of just brings you back to centre to focus on what's really important.

Highlights

David’s Journey

David shared that he lives in the Philadelphia area, he spent 27 years as the CEO of an employee benefits consulting company. And he grew that company from a couple of people to a little bit over 100 people and during the years that he was growing that company, they were very, very successful in almost every dimension you can look at, but the foundation of all of their success. Everything that made them successful was the culture that they had created in that company. And as the CEO of that company, he did a lot of things in a very intentional way to make that culture happen. He eventually sold the company to a large multi-billion-dollar company, ended up retiring from that industry. And he wrote his first book, which was called Fundamentally Different which was referred to before. And it was a book about the things he had done in his career that made them so successful, specifically around culture. And what ended up happening is people started reading that book and getting a lot of value from it and they started asking him if he would come to speak to their organizations about the things about which he had written. And so, next thing he knew he was travelling around the country giving talks to CEOs and people started hiring him to help them and next thing he knew he was in a new career. And so, over the last seven or eight years, he has given more than 500 workshops on this material, typically to CEOs and other leaders, worked with hundreds and hundreds of companies helping them do it. And has written three books on the topic. And so, it all comes from the experience that he had leading a company himself, and what he learned and what he now teaches people.

Other Core Fundamental Practices

Me: So your first book that you wrote Fundamentals, I know at the beginning of the conversation, you had mentioned that one of your fundamentals is quick response time, which was music to my ears. Could you share with our listeners what are some of the other things that is the core of your fundamental practices?

David stated that what he teaches people is that in any organization, he doesn't care of organization it is, the culture in that organization has an enormous influence over everything that happens from customer service to everything else that takes place.

And so, as leaders, we should be intentional about creating the culture that we want to have. One of the important elements and probably the most important element in creating a really great culture or any culture for that matter, is being clear about what are the behaviours that you say, “Boy, if we could get all of our people living to these behaviours, this is the kind of organization I want to have.” And he gives those behaviours a name, it's just his nomenclature, he calls them fundamentals because he thinks they're fundamental to success.

So they help organizations define their culture in terms of a set of very specific behaviours. In his particular company, and this is his company, it doesn't have to be the same for a different company. But in his company, some of their fundamentals, the one you're asking about a moment ago, is one that we called Be a Fanatic About Response Time.

Some of the others that he teaches in his own company are things like Honour commitments, Practice Blameless Problem Solving, Get Clear on Expectations, Be a Generous Listener, these are actions, they're things that people do, and you get people doing these kinds of things, you create a very different kind of organization. So those are just some samples of the fundamentals he teaches in his own company.

Me: Great. So, those are also in the book, right? Could you share with us why you think those things are critical to creating a culture where customer experience, of course, is at its utmost best because clearly, a lot of organizations have many challenges in trying to get their customer experience to be consistent.

How is it that you go into these organizations, I'm sure a lot of their issues is everybody's not doing what they're supposed to be doing, how do we get people to be passionate? How do we get them to operate like how we do? I wish I could clone myself and have 100 of me, but the reality is you can't. So how do we get everybody on the same page?

David shared that the foundation of the system that he teaches is, there eight steps to it, but let's just boil it down to its essence.

There are two things that are critical for success. And this is true, whether we're talking about customer experience, or we're talking about innovation, or we’re talking about anything, even a sports team, a family, you want to get a group of people to be consistent so that you can clone yourself, there are two things that are critical.

The first is what we were just talking about, we have to be crystal clear about the expectations. So frequently, he hears leaders frustrated that people aren't being the way they want them to be but they haven't been clear enough about what they expect, they're just annoyed that people haven't somehow, miraculously by osmosis figured it out themselves.

So the first step is absolute clarity about what is it that we expect of people. And when we talk about that clarity, one of the ways that companies try to do that and fail, is that the typical way of doing that is they create a list of core values and they look wonderful on the website, except most of the time, they're so broad, and so nebulous that they don't really bring enough clarity.

He makes a big deal about the difference between what he calls values and what he calls behaviours.

So a value is an abstract idea, quality, integrity, loyalty, service, teamwork, those are wonderful words, but they mean so many different things to different people, that they're very difficult to operationalize.

Behaviours are actions, they're things people do and because they're action oriented, they're a lot easier to be coaching people about, it's very difficult to coach somebody about their values, it's a lot easier to coach them about their behaviours.

So the first step is this defining with way more clarity, exactly what we expect, in terms of a set of behaviours or as he noted a moment ago, he calls fundamentals.

Now, once we have that, it's great to have them listed and have more clarity. But here's the real key step. And this is so simple. He calls it creating rituals.

So a ritual is a routine, a habit, something that we do all the time and the reason that rituals are so important, is that most people and you've seen this, most people aren't very good at sticking with things. We come up with all kinds of wonderful ideas. And then we get busy and life gets in the way and they fall by the wayside, so the company comes up with the big new programme and for three months or even three weeks, everybody's all excited about the new programme and then they fall by the wayside.

When something becomes a ritual or routine, it's not difficult to continue, it's just part of our routine. So he’ll give a simple example in another area and then take us back to this topic of service and business.

You wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth, before a ballgame in the States the do the national anthem, there are just routines about how you operate. Some people before a meal, they say a prayer. When something is a routine like that, it's not hard to do. So the way we use that simple concept is we take these fundamentals as he calls them and they begin to focus on one fundamental every week through a series of rituals.

So week number one, everybody in the company all week long is thinking about working on focusing on fundamental number one, the week after that everybody in the company is on number two, and the week after that three, and they keep cycling through them.

So giving one simple example of a ritual to illustrate it for the listeners. So one of the rituals that he practices in his company, and all of their clients do this as well, is that every time they have a meeting in their company, whether it's a project team meeting, a department meeting, a virtual meeting, if they have a meeting in their company this week, every single one of those meetings, the first agenda item of the meeting is the fundamental of the week. And they spend the first few minutes of the meeting talking about this week's fundamental and what it means.

So his company's fundamental this week, he mentioned it before actually is called Practice Blameless Problem Solving. So every time they have a meeting anywhere in their company this week, the first agenda item is going to be a three or four-minute discussion about practicing blameless problem solving.

That gets them lots of chances to teach and teach and teach and teach. So if they start by defining really clearly the behaviours that are important in their organization, and then they have a structured systematic way to teach those behaviours over and over and over and over again, sooner or later, those behaviours are going to become internalized in their people and that's how you get yourself cloned. What most people do is they again, either aren't clear enough, or they put stuff out there and then they figure, “Okay, I talked about it once or it's on the wall, or it's on the website, how come everybody doesn't do it?” You need repetition, without repetition, we don't learn anything.

Me: That is so true. I say it in training so many times. When you're teaching children ABC, you don't just go to school one day and the teacher says, okay, this is the alphabet, ABCDEFG to Z and then they never say it again. It's like constantly being reinforced with the kids; they sing to it. They sing ABC songs to them, they read to them about ABC, they talk to them about ABC, they have pictures. So it's constantly being reinforced and as you mentioned, repetition and adults learn just like children.

David agreed that we do, it's how humans work. And yet somehow in most organizations, we think that people are just going to magically figure it out without that repetition. He’ll give a very good example of actually where he learned all of this originally, and it relates very directly to customer service.

So, one of the organizations that is world renowned for incredible customer service experiences is the Ritz Carlton Hotel chain. If there ever was an icon for extraordinary customer experiences, it would probably be Ritz Carlton. And many years ago, he had an experience at where he brought his company to a Ritz Carlton for a day of brainstorming about great service and knowing how great they were, he asked them if they could share during their lunch with them some of the things that they do, and they do a very specific thing that really became the foundation for the concept behind what he teaches.

At Ritz Carlton, they have 20 behaviours that they have articulated about delivering great customer experiences. And these behaviours are called their basics. The Ritz Carlton basics, and there are 20 of these.

And every day they have a ritual that's called the daily lineup and a daily lineup, what happens is in every Ritz Carlton property in the world, in every department and in every shift, the team members get together at the beginning of the shift, and they gather around for a 10 or 12-minute meeting known as the daily lineup. And the first thing they do in their daily lineup is they talk about the basic of the day.

So if today were day number one in every department, every shift people would be getting together and kicking off their shift with a brief meeting and they start the meeting talking about basic number one. Tomorrow, everybody would be on number two and the next day number three, and so on.

And at the end of 20 days, they go back to the beginning and they do it over and over and over again, every day of their entire career. And that's how they get people to absorb and internalize the things that lead to extraordinary experience. They don't do it by just hoping they're going to get really nice people and it will all work out, they teach these things every single day with repetition. Makes sense.

Me: And you're right. Ritz Carlton, that's the gold standard that everybody's aiming to achieve and sometimes people think, is it that they got really amazing people, but they probably have the same level or standard of people in terms of their recruitment. But as you said, their technique and their strategy in terms of what they're doing, it makes sense because it's being repeated, it's being reinforced, people are being held accountable and now it becomes almost a part of your DNA. Because if you're doing something over and over again, it becomes so a part of you. I remember when I went to high school, I went to a Catholic High School, we were not allowed to walk on the grass, it was completely forbidden. And I recently went on vacation with my daughter to Airbnb in Ocho Rios and she just walked across the grass and I had to walk on the path and go around. And the little light bulb went off in my head, and I said, “Yanique, why don't you walk on the grass?” And I said, “Because it's not allowed.” But it's something that I had to do for 7 years. And so, it actually became a part of me, I think it was like an unconscious behaviour because it was after I thought about what I did, that I was able to dissect and say, “Okay, that's the reason why I did it.”

David agreed and stated that to take that same thought and now let's apply that same exact thinking to customer service or any kind of thing that we're trying to get in our culture. If we want our people to be so unconscious, so automatic about how they deliver fantastic service, well, we have to tell them.

What are the behaviours, that if you were doing these things every day that would create amazing service experiences?

We have to be crystal clear about them.

And then just like the way you learn not to walk on the grass, we have to teach those things over and over and over and over again, with enough repetition so that they become internalized by our people.

And once they become internalized by our people, well, that's just the way we do things around here. It starts to happen and it's such a simple idea.

Me: Simple, yet profound, yet many people are not doing it.

Trends Organizations Need to Focus On

Me: You're in this industry teaching about culture, you’re teaching about behaviours. Can you share with us maybe one or two things, trends that you see emerging? We’re coming out of a pandemic, not sure if you've noticed anything in the States where you are from in your neighbourhood, if you've noticed anything that's different in terms of people's behaviours, have you found that customers have become more heightened to the quality of experience that they're expecting especially seeing that safety is now the new buzzword in terms of how safe you make your customers feel? Do you see any emerging trends in relation to things that leaders in organizations need to focus on more, even more now than before the pandemic probably for the next two or three years?

David stated that the first thing he would say that's very related to the pandemic is obviously, we have gone to people working remotely in a way that didn't exist before. And even as vaccines become more prevalent and the pandemic gets behind us. Certainly, almost everybody recognizes that we will continue to have a high number of people, never more than ever before that will continue to work remotely.

So some people will be back at the office, but there will be many, many people who will forever work remotely or in some hybrid kind of environment where some are in person and some are working remotely.

And that has enormous impacts, specifically as it relates to culture. That if your culture was mostly a function of people being together everyday, and somehow by example, your were people were figuring out, I guess this is how things happen around here. But there was no overt methodology for teaching, it was just leadership by example. “Well, if I'm not seeing you anymore because we're not physically together. Well, then you're going to have some real struggles if there's no other structured way to convey culture.”

And so, it's become more important than it ever used to be to be systematic about how we create our culture, because we can't rely on people being together anymore and he thinks that's a significant shift.

He would say the second shift that I see and he doesn't know that this is so much a function of the pandemic, as much as it is just a general societal business trend is certainly there's a trend toward more self-service, where there are many clients and many buyers who want to be able to access tools and resources on their own.

So the definition of what is great service means has changed, great service used to mean very high touch personal interaction and so in some cases, that's still true. But there are many other people, especially the younger generation, who their attitude about services, “Just give me the tools to do it myself, I don't want somebody pestering me, I don't want this intense personal relationship.”

And again, obviously, this varies with the person and the product. But in many things, especially the younger generation, “Just give me the tools to go online and do it myself and I'm a happy camper, I don't need anybody to be talking to me. In fact, I don't even want to talk to somebody, I just want to be able to do it.”

And so, he thinks that the implication of that trend is that businesses need to be able to provide multiple ways for people to get the service that they need. If I'm a customer that wants high touch, then I'm going to be frustrated if I can't find anybody to talk to. And so, you need to be able to provide that for me. But if I'm a customer who doesn't want to talk to somebody, you need to provide me with avenues to do self-service. So, he thinks responding to the variety of ways in which people want to receive service, companies need to have a number of different methods.

Me: Those are really, really good points. And you are right, self-service is definitely something that people want. I definitely have seen that as a higher emergence. As a matter of fact, locally, when I tried to reach out to my utility companies, I find I get through to them much quicker through the chatbots that they have on their websites than actually calling them on the telephone, you get through much quicker. You sit there on the phone for 56 minutes, 70 odd minutes, some ridiculous times, just listening to this awful music or recording that they have going on over and over again, but you go online and it's like there's more response, the response time is much faster and the person online is in a better position to assist you.

David shared that there's a great book called The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon. And that's a great book.

And one of the points they make in that book is that the challenge is mostly there are these different ways that people want to access service and the problem comes if the way that I want to do it doesn't work, if I have to switch methods.

So if I want to call somebody and I can't get through because I'm on hold for 45 minutes, I'm going to be really frustrated.

If I want to be able to go online and do it myself and I try it and it's too confusing and I have to give up and pick up the phone and call somebody, then I'm going to be frustrated too.

So I need to have different methods to respond to different customers’ desires and each of them has to work well.

If the way that I tried to get my service doesn't work and I have to switch to method number two, that's where you really frustrate your customers and they leave.

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

When asked an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, David shared that he has found that in his whole career, that being well organized is an absolutely critical element of success, that if you don't have good systems for keeping on top of everything you need to do, things fall through the cracks and it's extraordinarily difficult to deliver great service to people.

It's hard to honour your commitments if you don't have a good way to track all your commitments.

It's hard to be a fanatic about response time if things slip through the cracks because you didn't keep track of at all.

So systems to keep track of everything you need to do are critical to him.

There's a system that he uses many years ago that was back then and then there's an updated version. But back then, he was a big Franklin planner user and a software version of the Franklin planner. A number of years ago switched to an Apple environment from a PC environment, Franklin planner never came out with an Apple version but there's a different company that created a product that is almost identical to what Franklin planner software was.

And it's called Opus One and it's basically a planning tool to allow you to keep track of task management, everything you need to accomplish in your life. And how does he keep track of it? How does he prioritize it? How does he make sure nothing is ever forgotten?

And he can't imagine how he would function without that, everything he needs to do in his life is there, he looks at it every day. And it's scary to think about what life would be like if he didn't have a tool like that.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on David

When asked about books that have had an impact, David shared that The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon was certainly one of them. He would say a book that he just finished rereading or actually more accurately listening to. He read it years ago and he just re-listened to it is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. He read that when it came out, it came out like 2002 and for some reason it just came across his attention recently and he listened to it on Audible.

And he really thinks it's a fascinating book and it gives him pause to think a lot about the things that they're doing. And for those listeners who may not have read or heard The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, the author looks at social epidemics, how does an idea all of a sudden take off and spread, whether it's a fashion, whether it's a product, whether it's a service, and all of a sudden something goes from nobody knows about this?

And then at a certain point, everywhere you look people are talking about that or reading about it or heard of it. And how does that actually take place? Where's the tipping point where all of a sudden, it goes viral? And why does that happen? What are the factors that contribute to something going viral? It's a fascinating book, highly recommend it.

What David is Really Excited About Now!

David stated that the biggest thing he’s excited about is the opportunity to scale what they're doing. And what he means by that is that the concepts that he teaches as you've heard, even just in a cursory way in this podcast, the idea that if we really want to drive the culture in an organization, it really comes down to two very simple things, define really clearly the behaviours that drive success and then create this structured systematic way to teach those over and over and over again.

And if you do that, you're going to be really successful and he calls that whole concept, he calls it the Power of Fundamentals, that when we have a set of fundamentals that driver our success and then we can have a way to teach it, it has an unbelievable impact.

So the Power of the Fundamentals is just such a powerful idea and such an impactful idea and he’s really excited and enthusiastic about the work that they're doing in their company to spread that idea so that not just hundreds or 1000s of people but ultimately millions of people can leverage those concepts and apply that to improve their families, their children, their companies, their sports teams, their churches, it applies in every walk of life.

And so, the opportunity to spread those ideas and give people tools that enable them to be more successful is just a very exciting and rewarding challenge.

Where Can We Find David Online

Website – www.culturewise.com

David shared that on the website are lots of simple videos that explain the concepts, really easy to understand material there. There's also links there to his books and you can also get them on Amazon or Audible. The most recent book, which was published this spring is an updated version of his original book called Culture by Design.

• Culture by Design: How to Build a High-Performing Culture, Even in the New Remote Work Environment (Fundamentals Series Book 2) by David Friedman

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity David Uses

When asked about quote or saying that he tends to revert to, David shared that he’s going to broaden that. And so yes, and it's a quote that is more related to organisations, but it's equally important individually. So for organizations as it relates to culture, the quote that he says often and really centres him is he says that, “Good companies have good cultures by chance. But world class companies have world class cultures by design.”

And what he means by that is that when he looks at those companies and those individuals who are most successful, they don't do anything that's so incredibly unusual, he sometimes says they do ordinary things with extraordinary consistency. They just are very purposeful about everything they do that reasonably moderately successful people naturally are gifted and they do a lot of things successful just almost by accident. But the most successful people, the most successful companies, it's by design, they're incredibly intentional about everything they do. So if he looks at his own work, it's about not just relying on instincts, but being really systematic and really intentional about practicing day after day after day, the things that lead to success.

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

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

Links

• Fundamentally Different by David J. Friedman
• The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Culture by Design by David Friedman
• Culture by Design: How to Build a High-Performing Culture, Even in the New Remote Work Environment (Fundamentals Series Book 2)

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Jonathan de Potter is the founder and CEO of Behold Retreats, and advocates for self-improvement and elevating consciousness as the most meaningful way to better the world.

Jonathan's priority is to raise education and awareness about plant medicines like Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, and guide others to maximize the potential benefits - ultimately leading him to launch Behold Retreats.

Questions

• Could you share with us a little bit about what your company does, Behold Retreats and just a little bit about your journey? How is it that you got to where you are today? What were some of the things that may be catalyst that led you into the path that you're currently on?
• Plants in our introduction, Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, I'm sure like our listeners, I have no clue what it does and how it impacts your life. So could you just enlighten us on those two?
• So as you know, this podcast is all about navigating your customers experience. So I would love to tie this into how is it that this particular approach or strategy in terms of integrating plant medicine into your life will allow individuals to improve on their customer experience? Could you maybe share one, two or three things that you've seen? Do you work with corporate entities; do you mostly work with individuals? How does this really tap back into the primary reason of our work show?
• Maybe could you share with us maybe one or two things that from this type of strategy and approach on an individual level, the person was able to manifest better things in their lives, not just remove barriers, but there were results that were on a higher level, maybe with their business, whether it was a one man shop, or they were a manager in a business, or maybe even enhance the quality of their family, maybe they had better relationships or just to see what are some of the results that an individual can really supremely achieve if they really commit to this process?
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read recently, or a book that you've read a very long time ago, but it still has had a great impact on?
• Could you share with us maybe one thing that's going on in your life right now, something that you're really excited about - it could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge you’ll tend to revert to this quote? It kind of helps to refocus you or get you back on track if for whatever reason you get derailed. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Jonathan’s Journey

Jonathan shared that it all started for him personally, about 5 years ago, when he was living in Hong Kong. He was working as a Strategy and Management Consultant for Accenture, one of the big, big giant consulting firms, there 5 years in Hong Kong and he was working really long hours, usually about 12 to 16 hours a day and chasing big deals and chasing new clients and he was on a bit of a treadmill, and chasing the next promotion.

And after about 5 years of that, he thought to himself, there must be more to life and he was an atheist at the time, and didn't really believe in anything spiritual.

And so, he decided to take a year off and as part of that year, he travelled through South America and wound his way to a Ayahuasca retreat with two friends of his in Peru.

And fundamentally, that just opened the door to spirituality, taught him so many humbling lessons and over the past 5 years he kind of been learning about plant medicine and preparing for launching Behold Retreats, which is really focused on guiding people towards really high quality, psychedelic or plant medicine experiences, so that they can really get the most out of them and improve the quality of everyday life.

What is Ayahuasca and Psilocybin and the Impacts They Have?

Me: So I pronounced two mouthful of plants in our introduction, Ayahuasca and Psilocybin, could you share with us, I'm sure like our listeners, I have no clue what I just said and what it does, and how it impacts your life. So could you just enlighten us on those two?

Jonathan shared that Ayahuasca is a combination of two plants that are often found in Central and South America and brought together they combine in a powerful Ayahuasca brew that is very highly hallucinogenic.

And it can facilitate very powerful healing on the level of the mind, on the level of emotions and on the level of the spirit. And so, what we're looking to achieve through this work is to harmonize the subconscious mind with the conscious mind.

And so, what these powerful medicines do, for example, Ayahuasca or Psilocybin, which is the active compound in magic mushrooms, or psilocybe mushrooms. So what these powerful medicines do is they amplify what's happening in our subconscious mind and they give us greater access to what's happening in our subconscious minds.

And so, through that we're able to come face to face with some of the skeletons that you may say might be lying around in our closet and to begin to process the associated emotions in the approach associated limiting beliefs and limiting thought patterns that we have hanging out there in our subconscious minds. And as we do so then we can really make significant improvements to ourselves.

Approach or Strategy in Terms of Integrating Plant Medicine to Improve Customer Experience

Me: So as you know, this podcast is all about navigating your customer’s experience. So I would love to tie this into how is it that this particular approach or strategy in terms of integrating plant medicine into your life will allow individuals to improve on their customer experience? Could you maybe share one, two or three things that you've seen? Do you work with corporate entities; do you mostly work with individuals? How does this really tap back into the primary reason of our show?

Jonathan shared that there's probably a couple of layers to this that we could explore. So he'll share a few thoughts, and then you can guide the conversation and the direction that you think your audience will find most helpful.

He shared that the first is really in relation to our experience, so any customer experience that we might imagine, or design or develop, is a function of our own thinking. And so, these powerful medicines have highly creative potential to them because they really remove constraints from the way that we think, often we've been so programmed, or we've been so conditioned through our parents, through society, culture, etc. to think in a very particular way.

And so, when we think about and speak about things like customer experience, then those influences do find their way into the ways that we define design, any set of customer experiences. So he thinks as and when we peel away those layers of programming, then there's an opportunity there to enhance our creativity and be able to see significantly new ways to think about customer and think about design and think about the customer experience. So he thinks that's one.

And then the second that he would mention would be, he thinks honestly speaking, it's a little bit early for the B2B aspect of this work, he thinks it’s still rapidly gaining in popularity on the level of the individual. And so, they always say about their clients that the soul needs to be calling this is very deep and can be quite challenging work.

And so it's important that people individually feel ready to do the work. But there are certainly companies that are taking that next step and leadership teams coming together to try to re envisage their own strategy, their own vision for the company to really kind of set a very bold 10x or 100x vision for what the customer experience might be or what the outcomes that they're looking for, for the organization, and then using the plant medicine as a bit of an accelerator to just to removing the barriers to thinking, changing the paradigm to removing the ego, as often a limiter in terms of what's stopping a leadership team from working most efficiently together to achieve the vision that they're passionate about achieving together.

Using this Strategy or Approach to Manifest Better Things

Me: So, a few things popped in my mind just know when you were sharing those two points. One was, because I'm sure you have clients already that you've worked with, I'm sure there are some success stories out there. Maybe could you share with us maybe one or two things that from this type of strategy and approach on an individual level, the person was able to manifest better things in their lives, not just remove barriers, but there were results that were on a higher level, maybe with their business, whether it was a one man shop, or they were a manager in a business, or maybe even enhance the quality of their family life, maybe they had better relationships or just to see what are some of the results that an individual can really supremely achieve if they really commit to this process?

Jonathan stated that he should probably caveat his answer here by stating that plant medicine is a very powerful tool. So, a powerful tool can help you achieve the thing that you're trying to achieve but in of itself, it's not necessarily the answer, if that makes sense.

So, it's the person that builds the house, the hammer just helps us get it done is an analogy that comes to mind. And so, what he might share here, he believes that everything that's possible with plant medicine is otherwise possible say through meditation and through other means. So, he just wants to caveat that, he’s not saying this is some sort of a silver bullet in any way, shape, or form, it's a powerful tool. So yes, as Yanique alluded to, step one, he guesses, in relation to this work is often removing those limiting beliefs, kind of letting go of the past.

But step two, and kind of much more interesting and exciting than that is, “Okay, great, fantastic. But what are we bringing into our world?” And so, what is possible in relation to this is really up to the individual in terms of what they are? What is in alignment with what they can manifest it into the world?

There's is a very interesting paper that he came across about six months ago which is by the American CIA and what the paper describes is that the nature of the universe is a hologram of consciousness or a matrix of consciousness. And so, when we hear about books like The Secret, or when we hear about things like The Law of Attraction, the reason that that stuff works is that the nature of the universe is consciousness and so obviously, we are highly conscious beings. And so there's a relationship between the nature of the universe itself, and this very powerful tool that we have which is our consciousness and our imagination. And so, when you speak about what we're able to manifest, what we're able to attract into our lives, then virtually, he doesn't think that there's any limitation for anyone in terms of what they can manifest and attract into their lives.

Now, of course, there's a part of our brain, there's a part of our rational mind that immediately thinks, “Well, hang on. Well, that's not my experience of the world, I've got this 3D existence, and I've got taxes, and I've got people who depend upon me and a job and these other things. And so, I'd love to just be able to manifest whatever I want into my experience.” But it doesn't quite work like that.

But actually, it does and so what becomes very exciting is that as we begin to remove these limiting beliefs and negative thought patterns and dot, dot, dot, and I'm not good enough, and all of that, that we really can manifest whatever it is that we want in our life. So whether that means a new job, whether that means improvements of the quality of our health, whether that means great relationships, a loved one, more free time, whatever it is that we'd like to manifest into our experience, if we're very clear on that and we're very determined in the way that we approach that then his genuine, honest opinion is that we can manifest virtually anything into our experience.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jonathan

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jonathan stated that he'll share two books. The first is Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by Dr. David Hawkins. And that's a very simple book but it's such a powerful book and so what he teaches is the various levels of consciousness. So, from the lowest level emotions like shame, guilt, fear, apathy, grief, and then up to the higher level, but still negative emotions like desire, anger, pride, etc, up into the very higher states of consciousness, like peace, love, and joy. And so, he's mapped out these various stages of consciousness and also provides tools for people to, number one, understand where they are in relation to these levels of consciousness. But number two, also to begin to make steps towards letting go which is the key to being able to move to higher levels of consciousness. So, that's number one.

And then number two is very much in relation to what they were just talking about, which is manifestation. And it's a wonderful book by Kidest OM, she's a great author. She's got a bunch of books out there and as you might imagine, the book is about how to manifest Anything You Want.

What Jonathan is Really Excited About Now!

Jonathan shared that the first one that he’s excited about is they've just adopted two stray cats. And their existing cat is not particularly happy about that. So there's energetic dynamics in the house, as everything kind of evens out. But more broadly than that, there's two things that they’re involved in that he’s super excited about.

The first is bringing more spiritual knowledge into some of the psychedelic science. So they've got some really impressive science that's happening at Johns Hopkins University, at NYU, at Harvard, Yale, Imperial College in London, some of the leading academic institutions out there. But they're taking a very deterministic and science based approach to this work.

And so, some of the spiritual mentors that exists within Behold Retreats are bringing some more of this knowledge into the scientific world, which he thinks is very exciting and will prove its value and its ability to accelerate some of the scientific understanding. So, that's one piece that he’s very excited about besides the cats.

And then the second is, he’s just speaking to a couple of governments in the region, he’s based in Thailand. And they're trying to establish the first legal option for plant medicine in the region, because, as you may be aware that this work is illegal in the overwhelming majority of countries, which is why they do a lot of this work in Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Netherlands, and in soon Jamaica.

Me: Yes, I'm sure you'll get good support from Jamaica, because we do believe in natural approaches to dealing with our health in Jamaica, that’s part of our culture and our history. So, I think once you can provide justification as to how this will help you, if it's going to renew cells, cause rejuvenation, as I was mentioning earlier in the conversation, show results, people will definitely embrace it because it's a way better option than swallowing pills on a daily basis, which can’t be helpful for you.

Jonathan agreed and shared that what's interesting about this medicine compared to our Western paradigm, in our Western understanding of medicine, is that this medicine really requires a very highly capable practitioner alongside it, it's not that you can just take a couple of mushrooms or take some Ayahuasca and that your life improves, that's really not it, these, these plant medicines, or these psychedelics, in of themselves are not necessarily positive, it's how we use them and who were guided by that makes fundamentally the difference between a very high quality healing or growth experience and just, honestly, just taking some psychedelics, taking some drugs, if that makes sense.

Where Can We Find Jonathan Online

Instagram – @behold_retreats

Website – www.behold-retreats.com

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jonathan Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Jonathan stated that he does, a quote he really loves is “A ship is safe in harbour but that's not what ships are for.”

He applied to both the context of the individual as well as what a group of individuals may be achieved, trying to achieve together.

And so, in relation to that, we are all here individually to evolve ourselves and so it's very easy to stay at home and watch Netflix on a Friday night, but there's much more interesting and better things that we might be doing with our time and with our energy. And so, the way that he always interpreted that quote is, yeah, you can stay at home or you can limit yourself or there's many ways to be comfortable in life. But when you put yourself out there as a ship out of harbour then good things happen.

And yes, there are challenges but that's what this life is all about. It's about facing those challenges that we may encounter and seeing if we have it within ourselves to meet those challenges and potentially even to overcome those challenges.

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

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

Links

• Anything You Want by Kidest OM
• Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by Dr. David Hawkins

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

Steven Van Belleghem Show Notes

Steven Van Belleghem is a global thought leader in the field of customer experience. His passion is spreading ideas about the future of customer experience.

Steven believes in the combination of common sense, new technologies, an empathic human touch, playing the long-term game and taking your social responsibility to win the hearts and business of customers over and over again.

Steven is the author of multiple international bestselling books including ‘The Conversation Manager’, ‘When Digital Becomes Human’, ‘Customers the Day After Tomorrow’, ‘The Offer You Can't Refuse’ and a technology thriller called Eternal.

Questions

• Could you share a little bit about your journey in your own words, share with us how you got into this whole field of customer experience. And just a little bit about why you think it's so important to the success of a business?
• So in one of your more recent books, The Offer You Can't Refuse, you focus a lot on the importance of what you should focus on as it relates to the new generation of customer expectations. Three of the things you mentioned are ultimate convenience, partner in life and save the world. So could you share with us just explain to our listeners, what that really means, explain those concepts to us and why it is, as a business owner? Those are some things that you should really be paying attention to.
• So we have to really, really focus on ensuring that we are able to manage the expectations of our customers, do you find that customers’ expectations have changed a lot since the pandemic?
• Could you give us maybe one two or three tips that you recommend to our listeners who are business owners of small, medium as well as managers in different organizations, across different industries. Maybe one, two or three things that you think they need to pay attention to, that would be an emerging innovation or an emerging expectation of customers within the next three to five years.
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• Can you share with us; do you have anything that's going on in your life right now? Or one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about, it could be something that you're working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you will tend to revert to this quote because it kind of gets you back on track and gets you refocused if it is that you feel derailed or off track in any way, do you have one of those?

Highlights

Steven’s Journey

Steven shared that he started his journey in his childhood, his parents had a small photography store in Belgium, that's where he lives in Europe. And looking back to how they've run the business, he came to the conclusion later on that they were obsessed with their customers, they were always talking about their customers, they were always trying to find solutions and they were also very innovative in the way how they reached out to customers and he’s talking about the 1980s, so it's a long time ago. But they were working with database marketing already back then, they were they were working with personalized marketing and they were really trying to give people a smile on their face when they left their store.

And for him, that was like the most natural thing in the world. It's only when he grew up and when he went to other places that he started to learn how exceptional that was to be in a place where the customer is your most important inspiration and the reason why you get up in the morning.

So that's how he got basically almost injected with an obsession for customers in his DNA and in the way he was educated by his parents and he still believes that today.

If you look to the success or failure of a company, it is just linked to the fact how excited and how happy customers are, how well you have managed to exceed their expectations, how excited they become of what you've done for them, that defines your success or your failure. And then everything else that you do is a result of that and everything that you achieve is a result of how you treat your customers.

And he’s convinced that he’s obsessed with that, this is what his research is about, that's what he tries to do in his own businesses and it's a part of who he is.

The Concepts of the New Generation of Customer Expectations

Me: So in one of your more recent books, The Offer You Can't Refuse, you focus a lot on the importance of what you should focus on as it relates to the new generation of customer expectations. Three of things you mentioned are ultimate convenience, partner in life and save the world. So could you share with us just explain to our listeners, what that really means, explain those concepts to us and why it is, as a business owner those are some things that you should really be paying attention to.

Steven shared that in his latest book, The Offer You Can't Refuse, he tried to build a model with different components and each of those components bring value to the modern customer.

And the whole bottom line is actually just having a good product service and a competitive price and that's still of course, extremely important, without that you cannot make customers happy but it's the minimum the amount, it's not how you positively differentiate yourself.

And then in today's world, especially after the big digital jump forward that we've seen in the last 14 months, digital convenience has also become the new normal, it has become a commodity, if you have it fine, if you don't have it, your organization is suffering.

So digital convenience is seen as the most natural thing in the world, so it's not a positive differentiator anymore, it becomes a negative one when you're not playing that game. So that's not how you win, that's your ticket to get on board of the train but that's not how you win.

And then the question is how do you win?

And then he plays with those two components that Yanique mentioned, partner in life, which is about bringing positive change in the life of the customer. This is not about how can we sell more to our customers; this is how we can bring more value in their life. This is not about optimizing your customer journey, it's about optimizing their life journey of customers, and being part of their life journey in a way that you proactively bring value to them, that's what a partner in life is all about.

And then that last element, change the world, save the world, he recently talked about changing your world because if you're a small company in Belgium or if you're a small company in Jamaica, probably those companies cannot change the world but they do have the possibility to change their world, change your world, every organization has strengths, doesn't matter the size that they have, this even goes for an individual.

Everyone, every business has strengths that they can leverage to contribute to a better world. And to add value to society in a way that goes beyond sustainability, he’s also talking about social value, he’s talking about the ethics that you apply in your own community. And if you work with that, you can actually make a difference.

And there are more and more people who expect that from organizations, there are more and more people that want organizations to take the responsibility.

And then you have like four components, good product service price, as the lowest part of it, the digital convenience, partner in life, changing your world. And those four components individually, they bring value to a customer but if you figure out a way, how to bring that story as one storyline, as one experience towards your customers, where you connect those four elements, that's when you create what he calls the offer you cannot refuse for your customers.

The Changing of Customers’ Expectations Since the Pandemic

Steven shared that he believes that on the elements that he just talked about, he feels that we made a big jump forward that it almost feels like we stepped into some sort of Time Machine.

If you take digital for instance, the latest study that he has seen from McKinsey actually mentioned that we made a jump of seven years into the future in terms of behaviour, without a pandemic, it would have taken seven years to bring us where we are today so that is changing expectations, that obviously this is changing how we look at things and what we expect.

But also look at the top of the model, changing your world. He thinks the pandemic was for many of us a wakeup call, that we suddenly valued much more the things we had and that we used to take for granted. And more and more people are worried about the future of our planet, not just in terms of sustainability and climate change but also the increase in poverty that we've seen because of COVID unfortunately. The higher demand for health care solutions to deal with the next pandemic and how we can avoid that and how we can be more ready for that. Those are all questions that are now on top of our mind that wasn't so 15 months ago.

And the way that people look to organizations has changed in that perspective that they also understand how companies can bring value in their life, how companies can bring joy into their life and they expect these companies to keep on doing that and they expect these companies to proactively try to become part of the solution of some of those global challenges that we're facing.

And all of that was already happening before 2020 but it all stepped into a time machine. And many of the trends that people like you and me have been talking about in the last couple of years are now suddenly a reality. It's like the day after tomorrow became today, that's the feeling that he has.

Tips for Emerging Expectations of Customers Within the Next 3-5 Years

Me: Could you give us maybe one two or three tips that you recommend to our listeners who are business owners of small, medium as well as managers in different organizations, across different industries. Maybe one, two or three things that you think they need to pay attention to, that would be an emerging innovation or an emerging expectation of customers within the next three to five years. Because I know you said we've advanced digitally about seven years ahead of our time. But what are maybe other things in the customer experience realm that don't tap into digital, there's that human aspect as well that you think the organizations need to focus on that you think will become as an emerging need within the next three to five years?

Steven agreed and shared that the human part of the customer relationship will become more premium than before the pandemic.

We always thought digital would replace humans and he thinks the conclusion is that that will never happen.

There's this old economic law of scarcity and it learns us if something becomes scarce, it actually increases in value, well, the human part in a customer relation has never been lower than today.

And because of that, we value it more than ever, and being helped by a human in real life is more premium than ever before. He doesn't know how it is in Jamaica right now, but in Belgium, the restaurants are closed, they have to live from takeaway food or have to take care of their own stuff, and that's fine.

But sometimes you miss the hospitality of a restaurant, that there's a friendly human there that actually tries to give you a memorable time, a good time that you can enjoy life without having to worry about anything else, that's what humans do, that's not what machines does.

Machines will take care of the convenience and the efficiency in our life and that's fine. And if companies don't have that they're in trouble, but most of them understand that and are building that convenience.

But the winners, in terms of customer experience will be the ones that have most empathy in their organization. Because understanding what people want, how people feel, and anticipating to that, that will be the crucial skill that will make a difference in the next couple of years.

Me: So you touched on a topic that I get asked all the time when I have different training sessions, doesn't even matter what level they fall in the organization, whether they're level one frontline staff, or they’re level four, let's say you're a C suite type of individual in the organization, empathy.

What is empathy? In your own words, based on your own research. And can empathy be taught? Or is it something that you have to learn? Does it come as a learnt experience kind of thing? Because people ask me that question all the time, “These people lack empathy, I don't know what else to do. I put them through all of these different certification and training programmes, they're just not doing what we want them to do with our customers.” How do you get your team members to that point?

Steven stated that this is a crucial question, he gets it quite a lot as well. And the question is, is this the responsibility of the team members? Or is this the responsibility of the senior leader?

And first of all, there are a number of people who don't have any empathy whatsoever and they don't know how to work with other humans. And they're really bad in delivering a good customer service and that percentage of people, which he believes is a very small percentage, but they do exist, that percentage of people cannot be trained, they will never be capable of helping customers in a fantastic way.

So probably, they will have to look for another job where they're not involved customers, because they don't have the capabilities for that.

And then you have a small group of people that has a natural talent of doing these things wonderfully no matter which context they're in. The majority of us humans, we have the potential to listen to customers, to anticipate, to proactively help them and show a positive intent and that's what people really like to see, a positive intent.

Steven shared that that large group of people mainly behaves based on the leadership style that they have in their organization. He’ll take it to a completely different market.

Take soccer players, isn't it strange that sometimes the soccer player is scoring goals like crazy and is the best player in the team in Team A, and then that player gets sold to Team B, and it's a total disaster.

It seems like he cannot score any goal anymore. Is that the fault of that player? Or did that player lose his trust and capabilities because he arrived in a different context?

And he thinks this is what is crucial. He’s an optimist and he believes that the large majority of all people that are working in an organization want to help customers in a positive way, because that gives you positive energy back.

So the question is, why don't they do it? And the answer usually can be found in the fact that they don't feel safe in their own environment where they are not sure what the management is expecting them to do, where they're not sure if they are allowed to help that customer. Because the day before the senior leader said, “Yeah, you help the customer but that was very expensive for us to help that person. And now we have to pay $50 extra. Hopefully we have more clients, otherwise we're going to lose money.”

If an employee hears that, they think, “Oh, my God, if you help a client, we're losing money and my leader becomes really angry. So I'm not going to do that next time.”

So they change their behaviour based on what they hear and feel from senior leaders and the fact that you feel safe or that you don't feel safe, determines if you will show the behaviour that customers expect. So for all your business owners that are listening, the first step before blaming your employees is just look in the mirror and ask yourself, “How can I change my behaviour to make sure that my employees feel safer to act in a positive way towards customers?”

Me: Wow, that is a very, very, very good answer. And I like the way you framed it in terms of taking responsibility for what are you contributing to how that person is feeling and how that person is behaving rather than saying it's their fault, it’s their responsibility. Really, really a great response!

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Steven shared that for him personally, that is probably WhatsApp. He uses WhatsApp all the time and he thinks it's so convenient to communicate. He uses it to communicate with his clients, of course his family and friends, but also with his clients.

He uses it to find jokes, but I use it to get inspiration and they have these inspiration groups that they share stuff with each other. So he thinks that's the one that he would miss most. He asked Yanique what’s the one app she cannot live without.

Me: The one app that I absolutely can't live without in my business? I asked that question all the time and I don't think I've ever had a guest ask me back that question. I guess for me, the one app that I probably couldn't live without is maybe the Notes app on my phone and my computer. I'm an Apple user, so all of my devices are synced across, my phone, my MacBook and my iPad, and you may go somewhere and you see something and you take a picture, or maybe it's just to reference maybe an article that I want to write or maybe a topic that I'm looking for a particular guest on this particular area. And it just allows me to consolidate all of my thoughts and all of the things that I want to jot down in one place and I don't need to go back to my computer after I'm on my phone at the supermarket, for example, or at the beach and then copy and paste that information because it already synced across all devices, so I can jump on to the next device and click on the note that I wrote there, and I'm able to reference it. So, it's made life more convenient and seamless for me. And I think that's one of the reasons why I am definitely a loyal Apple customer because I find that they're always finding ways to make people's lives easier.

Steven agreed and shared that that's what they do best. And he’s with her, he’s an Apple user as well and he also loves to use the Notes.

Me: And Notes has really evolved over the years, now you can like do scans in there and you can doodle with the Apple Pencil, or even a regular, one of those pens that has the tip that you can use on the phone. If you're an Apple user, let's say for the last five to seven years, and you see how they've evolved Notes, it's really has become a tool that is not just to jot things down, but you can, as I say, save pictures in there, PDF, signatures, write with your finger or with a pen, it has become so indispensable that you really value it very much. So I would say that's probably the one app that I absolutely couldn't live without in my personal or professional life.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Steven

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Steven shared that it's been a while but he thinks the book that has the biggest impact to really open up his point of view on how customers make decisions to buy something, at the decision making in their buying process. It was a book came out in the late 1990s from Geoffrey Moore it's called, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. And it's a book that speaks about the adoption cycle of customers. And one of the conclusions is that the marketing and the communication that you use to convince the innovators and early adopters in the market, and that creates the early success.

The communication that you use there should be completely different than the communication and the approach that you use to reach out to the early majority. Because this first group is excited about technology and new features and stuff like that. The early majority is the opposite, they're afraid of new things. So, they need to be convinced that everything is easy to use and safe, so they don't want to hear all the specs and everything like that, it's a different kind of communication.

And a lot of new products fail because the people who make them think that everyone is an innovator or an early adopter, and because of that, they just focus on that and they have an early success, they think, “Okay, we're on a roll,” and then they fail. And they fall into chiasm between this first and second group. And I read that in the late 90s and of course, if you would read the book today, the examples and stuff like that are completely outdated.

But he believes the theory, the model that is used in that story is still very relevant today. And that was like the first business book that he read that really had a big impact on him.

What Steven is Really Excited About Now!

When asked about something he’s doing to develop himself or his people, Steven shared that it actually started last year, he had a hobby, a dream project that got a little bit out of hand.

It was always his dream to write a fiction book, a novel thriller. And Yanique mentioned it in the introduction in the beginning of the podcast. He wrote a thriller, it's called Eternal.

Unfortunately, it's only available in Dutch so far, that's his native language. But he got really excited about it and he was really scared because he has been writing business books for years, he has written five of them and he’s very thankful for the success that he had with them.

And he’s getting a little bit used to that whole process and how it goes, but then when he launched this new book, this fiction novel, he was scared to see what the reactions would be, he was so nervous. And now when the first reactions came in and they were positive and people were actually reading it and buying the book for Christmas gifts, he was really, really happy with that.

And then the publisher got really excited as well. And then they asked him, “We know that this is a hobby that got a little bit out of hand. But what do you think about the idea of writing three books in the series instead of one?”

And he’s currently working, he’s finishing the manuscript of the second one, he does that in the evenings, early mornings, I does that in the weekend, I does that in between, but he really loves the writing process. And it's given him a lot of pressure on the one hand, but on the other hand, he’s also enjoying that he can do something completely new. So he’s excited and still nervous about this project.

Where Can We Find Steven Online

YouTube – Steven Van Belleghem

Instagram – Steven Van Belleghem

LinkedIn – Steven Van Belleghem

Twitter – @StevenVBe

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Steven Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Steven shared that he one of those, it's a quote from Churchill actually, he’s a fan of Sir Winston Churchill and his quotes. And one of his favourite quotes is, “Success is the consequence of failure after failure after failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Me: And that has definitely helped you over the years.

Steven said absolutely and he was very fortunate he had a good time so far, COVID was a challenge in the beginning but then he said they need to fight back and make sure that the business keeps on going. And that actually worked. And moments like that it really helps to be focused and to keep that mindset positive and motivated to keep on going even if you don't have short term results with that.

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

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

Links

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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

The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!