Navigating the Customer Experience

Greg Kihlström Show Notes

Greg Kihlström is a best-selling author, speaker and entrepreneur. He is currently CEO and Co-Founder at CarrierGig, after selling his award-winning digital experience agency Carousel30 in 2017. He has worked with some of the world's top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott International, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond's Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation's National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board.

Greg's newest book, The Agile Workforce (2021) explores the current and future state of the workforce and envisions a world where individuals thrive in a new world of work opportunities enabled by technology, decentralization and a shift in the power dynamics between employers and employees. His previous book, The Center of Experience (2020) talks about how customers and employee experiences can be operationalized into a cohesive brand experience.

Questions

• Could you share with us a little bit about your journey. And just tell us how it is that you got to where you are today?
• So your book, agility is one of those words that we've been hearing bouncing around for quite a few years now. But I definitely have heard it way more since the pandemic. Could you tell us a little bit about what the book is about? Who is it for? How will it help organizations? Is it geared towards a particular industry? and How can any company or is it specific to an industry in terms of benefiting from an agile workforce?
• Could you maybe share with us based on your experience and your exposure on this topic maybe two or three principles that businesses must be guided by in order to be really agile? Or if they're just starting on this agile journey, what are two or three things that they need to really consider?
• As it relates to digital experience, people definitely have moved their businesses or some parts of their business to online, how do you think we're going to adjust after hopefully, things go back to what we used to think was normal in terms of that digital space, will that trend continue? Or do you think people would want to return back to more face to face kind of experiences?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• Can 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 maybe a book that you read a very long time ago, but it still has had a great impact on you.
• Could you share with us maybe something that you're working on 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 that quote or saying, it kind of helps to get you refocused and just get you back on track? Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Greg’s Journey

Greg shared that he has played a few different roles over his career and depending on how you look at it, he has been a freelancer and employee, entrepreneur, executive, so on and so forth. Also, he has played roles in creative marketing technology and what he has tried to do throughout his career, some of that is he likes to learn new things and so he constantly tries to challenge himself to learn them. But some of it also is he thrive when he’s able to find connections between whether it's different disciplines or industries or things like that. And so, he has always just tried, at first it wasn't so intentional, he'll confess but towards getting a few years down in his career, it started to become more intentional that he always wanted to kind of push himself and be a little bit uncomfortable. If he was too comfortable, it meant that he wasn't learning enough, and he wasn't pushing himself to do more than he was currently doing.

So, he started a marketing agency, his first job was working at a start-up, he became head of product design there back in the early 2000s, started a marketing agency that he grew and eventually sold about 3 years ago, did a lot in the digital experience space and for a number of those brands that was mentioned, and also quite focused in the financial services industry towards the end before I sold it. And then after that really got more and more involved in the employee experience, leadership’s role in the employee experience, and HR technology and where he currently is, Careergig really flowed pretty naturally through that where he just kept seeing more and more emphasis being placed on the freelance economy, the gig economy, but there was a lot of things that weren't really being solved for. And so, he just found a new challenge to try to solve.

About the Book – The Agile Workforce and Who Can Benefit From An Agile Workforce

Me: So your book, agility is one of those words that we've been hearing bouncing around for quite a few years now. But I definitely have heard it way more since the pandemic. Could you tell us a little bit about what the book is about? Who is it for? How will it help organizations? Is it geared towards a particular industry? and How can any company or is it specific to an industry in terms of benefiting from an agile workforce?

Greg shared that it's quite broad in scope as far as industry goes. So, The Agile Workforce: Automation, Decentralization, and Their Role in the Future Workforce, it's part of a series of books that he has written on the topic of agility in business. And so, he started out focused more on the branding and marketing aspect and how to be more agile in those types of approaches and it's over time he also started a podcast called The Agile World, you can see a theme developing here. He is four books in for this series and have a podcast all talking about how do we position ourselves to be adaptive and resilient in a constantly changing world, and there's recent events with the pandemic, certainly draw attention to the need for that. But it's always been the case that we need that, we need to be agile.

So, the latest book, The Agile Workforce is really talking about this growing independent workforce where 10 years ago was really the birth of what we know as the gig economy, things like Uber and Lyft, drivers, and delivery doordash, all of those types of things really kind of grew out of the 2009 financial crisis where there were a lot of jobs kind of went away, full time jobs, there's a lot of disenchantment with getting another full time job when you could easily be laid off again at the signs of the next crisis, we're seeing that now 10 years later.

We're seeing that now in different spaces of lots of individuals needing to rely on companies to employ them, certainly the companies are the ones hiring them, but not necessarily, a lot of individuals are not necessarily keen to go back to a full time job when we've all been kind of sold on full time jobs are the source of stability, and you get your benefits and your retirement and all this stuff. And yet, we've seen it slowly go away over the years and now, he thinks some of those things are more myth than reality. And so you have this growing independent workforce that wants the freedom and flexibility to work when they want, how they want, earn as much or as little as they want.

But they need help as far as some of that, some of that the learning that they get from a company or some of the benefits like he mentioned, like health, everything from health insurance to life, disability, all of that stuff. So there's a challenge right now and there's a number of ways to solve it. His company Careergig is solving it in one way but there's some growing needs and opportunities.

Principles To Be Guided By In Order To Be Really Agile

Me: Based on your experience, because as you said, it's a theme and you've definitely found a way to position yourself as a subject matter expert in the area, ensuring that you have a podcast and then these different books that support the whole agile mindset. Could you maybe share with us based on your experience and your exposure around this topic maybe two or three principles that businesses must be guided by in order to be really agile? Or if they're just starting on this agile journey, what are two or three things that they need to really consider?

Greg shared that he thinks a big one is that agility is something that needs to be embraced company wide.

So we've seen agile really has its roots in manufacturing and software development, so we see a lot of most software development teams are using agile, you might hear things about Sprint's and Scrum masters and things like that.

There's a very formal agile methodology that teams like that are using, he uses agile in a broader sense of the term really, because some of those things apply a little bit less directly to other areas.

But in order for a company to be agile, everybody's got to be bought into it. And that's top down, that's leaders embracing new ways of doing things, that's areas of companies that traditionally have not been as agile, whether that's formal agile, or big ‘A’ agile or small ‘a’ agile as some people say.

HR departments, for instance, not traditionally the most agile and for good reason, they're taught to be very compliance focused and there's certain things that they need to always keep an eye on, but it's got to be company wide. So, that's definitely the first thing is just leaders need to embrace it and make sure that the entire company is adopting it.

He thinks the other part of this, and he goes into more depth in his book and it's kind of a theme of most of his books and writing is there needs to be more focus on individuals and individual needs.

And when you do that, it might sound counterproductive because the companies and the shareholders need to get their value but he believes there's a win-win when companies focus on making sure that individuals are happy, motivated, taking care of, that the companies reap huge benefits.

When an employee's more motivated, they are more open to change, they're more open to add activity, all of those types of things. So, it's sort of the inverse of the first point is like it's got to start top down from leaders really driving the change, but the change has to be driven almost thinking from the bottom up of what is it going to take for each individual to be more empowered and have more of what they need? And then they're going to be loyal, they're going to do what they can to support the company, if you think like that.

Digital Experience the New Normal or Face to Face Experience

Me: As it relates to digital experience, basically, we're in this space now, where everybody is pretty much online. If you're not online, I suppose you're missing out. People definitely have moved their businesses or some parts of their business to online, how do you think we're going to adjust after hopefully, things go back to what we used to think was normal in terms of that digital space, will that trend continue? Or do you think people would want to return back to more face to face kind of experiences?

Greg stated that there's always a desire, there's nostalgia. Everyone he thinks wants to return to some kind of things that they got used to, and everything like that. And in many cases, there are certain kinds of businesses, restaurants, hotels, all those things where you really can't recreate some of those experiences online, much as delivery as had a lot of support from restaurants for instance. But he does think that there has been enough time gone by just with the pandemic and things are not quite over yet. There's positive signs of progress and everything like that, but there's enough time has passed where real habits have been formed. So, if this was a 30-day thing, then people tend to go back to some sort of status or whatever. But months and months have gone by in which habits have been formed, new ways, brains have been rewired, let's just say for neuro scientist or whatever, but it's like new patterns in our brains have been created, let's just put it that way where Zoom is like a normal thing, as opposed to kind of an awkward like, “Oh, we can't get everybody in the conference room,” like Zoom meetings are now normal and stuff like that.

So, he thinks where possible, there is going to be a return to that. But he thinks the positive side of all of this, we've learned to do things a lot more efficiently in many ways. He personally spent hours and hours driving to meetings and doing all sorts of things when he had local things at least, spending all that time travelling where now, he gets on a Zoom call and it's easier and you learn how to connect with people in a different way, it's certainly different. But he thinks that we can embrace some of the efficiencies that we've learned how to do and he thinks it's forced technology to become better.

And it was inevitable that it was going to happen but all these tools that we use, it's forced some other things, some innovation in other areas that we're just kind of lagging. So, to answer the question, it's a mix and some things will go back, but he thinks some things may not and maybe that's for the better.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Greg shared that he thinks it comes down to from a business standpoint, he thinks it just comes down to analytics and having a good way to measure and get feedback.

So, if he were to choose one, that might be a little bit tough, but his company, it's an online platform. And so, using tools like Google Analytics and their CRM and stuff like that, they just couldn't, they are completely dependent on the feedback that they get from their customers. And because part of their customer base is really a volume base, they can't simply talk to a statistically significant sample on a regular basis. So, really relying on those analytics helps them make a better product and a better company.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Greg

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Greg shared that one that immediately comes to mind is, it's called The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers and by Ben Horowitz. And Careergig is not his first company that he started, but it's his first start-up, so product based company. And just some of the stories, he thinks the idea that there isn't a prescriptive set of guidance for every single problem that a leader is going to face.

And so, just kind of embracing that kind of like what he was saying earlier of like, you've got to just embrace being uncomfortable and it doesn't mean you have to love it, he doesn't think anyone loves being uncomfortable, but you have to be comfortable with that idea that if you're not uncomfortable, then there might be other problems going on, it's not just a relief. So, he thought that was a refreshing take.

What Greg is Really Excited About Now!

Greg shared that he has always got another book in the works. So, The Agile Workforce is actually his seventh book. And so, he just kind of set a personal goal to finish one a year, it keeps him learning.

It's actually one of the biggest ways that he himself learn is just doing research for his own writing and it forces him to talk to people in targeted conversations and stuff like that.

So, he just released another book, but he’s already on to the next one, which is going to focus a lot more on leadership's role and agility and things like that. So, he has talked with a number of leaders of large organizations already, interviewed them for his podcast, other things like that, and going to be compiling things into another book. And hopefully, maybe in a year's time he can join the show again and share. 

Where Can We Find Greg Online

LinkedIn – Greg Kihlström

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Greg Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Greg shared that he does and he doesn’t know who it can be attributed to, but it's probably gotten him out of trouble. And it's a hypothetical, because you never know what the other side of the decision is. But it's, “Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.”

And so, he often refers to that and tell his employees or partners or whatever to think on that. And sometimes you still go out and do it and sometimes you don't, but it's something to consider.

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Links

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• The Agile Workforce: Automation, Decentralization, and Their Role in the Future Workforce by Greg Kihlström
• The Agile World Podcast with Greg Kihlström

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!

Kris Rudeegraap is the co-founder and CEO of Sendoso, the leading Sending Platform. Kris has more than a decade of sales experience and has spent time at Talkdesk, Yapstone, and Piqora. During that time, he discovered that creating meaningful engagement through direct mail and gifting was an effective way to drive demand and increase sales - which helped inspire the idea for Sendoso. Kris is a California native and CSU-Chico alum currently residing in the Bay Area.

Questions

• Could you share with us a little bit about your journey, a little bit about who you are, tell us what a leading Sending Platform is? What's that all about? And just how you got to where you are today?
• Could you share with us just based on your experience, and also your business as an entrepreneur and a leader, what are maybe one, two or three things that you think salespeople need to do to retain their customers?
• What are maybe one or two things you think that somebody could do to enhance or build on that skill? How can you build on being more empathetic as a human?
• Could you give us maybe some recommendations as how companies can leverage more collaboration software and use it to their advantage? And how can employees be open to adapt to this and be able to succeed, especially with something that they are not very comfortable with?
• How as a leader in all of these that's happening, can you ensure that your team is thinking creatively? They're thinking outside of the box? How do you get to inspire them, especially when you're not in the same physical space with them? How can you really get them motivated and pumped up that they are excited to come up with new ideas and innovative solutions to make the business move forward?
• Could you share with us maybe what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Can 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 maybe something you read a very long time ago, but it still has an impact on you today?
• Can you share with us maybe what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now - either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Could you tell our listeners where they can 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 keep you focused, or kind of gets you back on track. If you get derailed at any point in time. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Kris’ Journey

Kris shared that before starting Sendoso, he spent about 10 years in software sales in San Francisco. And so, he was really trying to break into new accounts, send emails to prospects, and really saw that there was a lot of digital noise and email was a hard channel to be super personalized.

And so, that's really where he decided to start sending out handwritten notes and he'd send little gifts, he'd send little packages with like company swag and all that stuff was really great, it was just super hard to do and very manual and very time consuming.

And so, he dreamed up this idea of a sending platform where you can click and send a button inside of tools like Salesforce or HubSpot or other tools. And then behind the scenes, it would do all the fulfillment and all the hard work for him.

And so that was the original idea and that's what inspired him to start Sendoso about 5 years ago, and really a sending platform is a couple components. One is it allows you to send out really anything and everything, corporate gifts, their direct mail, their company swag, there could be flowers, cookies, ice cream, gift cards, digital experiences, you name it, they can send it. There's also team management and budgets, there's integrations, there's fulfillment all under one platform.

Me: Sounds good. So a big part of what Sendoso does are, what you do is sales? 

Kris shared that sales, that's how he got started and a lot of their customers are using them for sales. But they also have a good amount of companies using them for post sales. So customer service, customer success, marketing, and even HR too.

Tips on How Salespeople Can Retain Their Customers

Me: So what I like to find out from you is could you share with us just based on your experience, and also your business as an entrepreneur and a leader. What are maybe one, two or three things that you think salespeople need to do to retain their customers? So I know sales is about getting new customers, but how do you ensure that you retain your existing customers? How do you have that relationship, the customer relationship management component? Maybe what are two or three things that you think is critical based on your experience?

Kris shared that he'd say one is really being human and building rapport and think about it as not a business to business, but a business to a human and how do you build that relationship.

Two is really just getting creative with how you engage folks. So not just using email, but using other means to build that relationship.

And he thinks the third is really leading with empathy and putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes, and really encouraging authenticity and really understanding what the buyer really needs.

How to Build on Being More Empathetic as a Human

Me: Okay, so those are three really good points. Now, let's say for example, you're dealing with sales reps that don't know how to exercise empathy. So as a Customer Service Trainer, I have found based on research and experience that empathy is not one of those skills that you learn when you're growing up, it's really a skill that you develop as you get older, as you get to understand yourself, as you get to understand emotions in other people. But some people just still are not able to exercise empathy to its fullest extent. What are maybe one or two things you think that somebody could do to enhance or build on that skill? How can you build on being more empathetic as a human?

Kris shared that he would say one is finding training and learning courses, so going out of your way to find ways that you can really learn about how to be more empathetic and kind of study and learn and kind of take what you've learned and start practicing that. He'd say that's the first thing is really going out of your way to learn more.

And then he thinks the second is, people might not be as empathetic in business, he thinks a lot of people are naturally maybe empathetic in their home life and maybe understanding what are those key things you're doing in kind of your home, non-work life that could be empathetic, and how could you translate that into more business like environments.

Me: That's a good one. Because it's the same skill, same behaviour, you're exercising in a personal environment so you need to just transfer that into a professional environment so that you can really understand where the other person is coming from.

How Companies Can Leverage and Adapt Collaboration Software And Use it to Their Advantage

Me: So a big part of customer experience also is understanding that we're in this space now where we have to be pivoting, I think that was a big word for 2020 and it's definitely come over into 2021. And just being able to be flexible using the different technologies that exist out there to serve our customers.

Agility is also something that a lot of organizations are looking to do with their teams. So could you give us maybe some recommendations as how companies can leverage more collaboration software and use it to their advantage?

And how can employees be open to adapt to this and be able to succeed, especially with something that they are not very comfortable with?

Kris stated that he thinks that to Yanique’s point, one is taking the time to really time block on your calendar to learn more.

We live in a world where people work, and maybe don't do enough in terms of like education or re-education, so he'd say purposefully putting time on your calendar for learning and development is key.

And being cognizant of that, say, “Hey, next week, I'm going to block two hours, and I'm going to learn this or I'm going to practice using this software,” which might sound like how do you have enough time to do that, but he thinks it's taking that time, it's almost like taking a step sideways to take 10 steps forward, versus kind of always being in an environment where you feel behind. So, he would say that is one scenario.

He'd say two is just maybe, depending on your level of leadership, really just the culture of the company, or the executives can be really driving this agility and so, he thinks it starts at the top. And really, if you can demonstrate agility at the top and really make that a key part of your company culture, it can really benefit everybody.

How To Inspire Your Team to Think Creatively

Me: Leadership is very important, I'm glad you touched on that just now in terms of getting people to really step up to the plate. So you have these teams and even though they're working from home, I've heard so many complaints where people complain that they're just exhausted, they're burnt out, literally, just between family, depending on what age the kids are, and then just keeping the home in order, and then being on all of these Zooms and Microsoft Team meetings constantly at your computer.

But then outside of those meetings, you have the actual work to get done and it's just a lot.

How as a leader in all of these that's happening, can you ensure that your team is thinking creatively?

They're thinking outside of the box?

How do you get to inspire them, especially when you're not in the same physical space with them?

How can you really get them motivated and pumped up that they are excited to come up with new ideas and innovative solutions to make the business move forward?

Kris shared that one thing that comes to mind is making sure that you are upfront about a flexible work life balance and right now it's harder than ever to be flexible, because you kind of live and work in the same room, so to speak.

And so, he thinks it's purposefully making sure people are stepping away, even if it's just a staycation and you're staying home, you just put your laptop away.

So, they really try to inspire that, they even have a twice a year employee bonus that if you take a vacation or a staycation, they'll give a $500 bonus each time to spend on that and so they're kind of paying their employees to take breaks and keep that flexible work life balance.

And so, he thinks that's one area, making sure you keep your work life balance strong so that it really keeps your mental state in a really good place.

Two, he'd say is like, how do you get creative or have more fun with some of your Zoom meetings and so, they've incorporate things like Zoom wine tasting events, or they've done like dinner making class over zoom and so they bring in special guests to some of these Zooms, and maybe change it up a little bit so it feels a little bit more unique, and adds a little bit of flair. So he thinks that's an interesting way.

And then there's other ways as it relates to just helping getting people out of their comfort zone, and maybe connecting people with other teams. So they've tried to institute more of like cross team collaboration or getting people involved in kind of mini, what they call tiger teams, or project teams, they kind of are taken away from maybe their normal day to day and exposed to new parts of the business where maybe they can bring their new level of creativity.

Me: That's really amazing. So I like the idea of dinner, what was the suggestion, you bring in a special guest and that person would prepare dinner and everybody kind of follows along?

Kris confirmed and stated that they've done like a special checked guest that comes in. They did one where was like a cheese making class, there's a wine tasting event where you could wine taste virtually. So it makes some of these Zoom meetings just a bit more exciting.

Me: So do you do that in the middle of the day? Or is that an additional Zoom meeting that is tacked on to the end of their day?

Kris stated that it could be both, he thinks for the wine tasting one, they typically would want that to be more like a 3:00 pm or 4:00 pm or 5:00 pm.

And so, it's typically still during business hours, but it just says, “Hey, have some fun with this and kind of meet more of your team and have a have some fun.”

But some other ones could happen during the day too as well. And it's more of a way to kind of think creatively versus just be in the same exact kind of Zoom fatigue.

Me: Yeah, I agreed. That's really cool, very creative, very innovative, and it does stimulate a different parts of the brain, which will definitely help them to not feel like they're doing the same thing over and over and it gets mundane. And just as you said don't feel motivated.

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

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Kris shared that from a collaboration perspective, Slack, it just like keeps them all collaborating, that is probably the one they couldn't live without.

One that he really loves is an app called Feedly, and it basically brings together hundreds of different blogs into one app that he enjoys reading.

And it's a great way for him to stay creative and really be immersed in a lot of different contexts of ideas. And he typically wakes up and do some reading in that app and then he'll typically go to bed and do some reading in it. And it just gives him new perspectives across a myriad of different topics.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Kris

Kris shared that he’s a huge podcast listener and actually give him the biggest inspiration and impact. And so, he’s all in on podcasts and a couple podcasts that he’s just obsessed with.

So he'd probably say he listens to podcasts, maybe daily, he would read books maybe a few times a year, so he’s much more engaged with podcasts and a couple that he loves, one's called Dare to Lead with Brene¢ Brown and another is called Acquired, another is called Follow Your Different and then a classic, another one, How I Built This.

Me: Oh, nice. May I ask what kind of topics they discuss predominantly on those podcasts? Are they more like self development podcasts? Or are they business podcasts?

Kris stated that he would say a bit of both, part of them are business related, but also, they also include talking to founders at times too, which gives you kind of personal inspiration as well. So he thinks it's part personal inspiration, part business, and then part just kind of interesting topics.

What Kris is Really Excited About Now!

Kris shared that one thing that he’s doing that is, now that they have close to 400 employees now. One of the things he’s doing is just random meetings with employees, and he created this new Slack channel called Ask Kris Anything and then he meets with 3 to 5 random employees each week.

And so, that's something that he’s doing just so that he can really understand how they're scaling the business and learn from everybody. And so, that's been something that he has been doing recently that he’s really excited to continue.

Where Can We Find Kris Online

LinkedIn – Kris Rudeegraap

Website – www.sendoso.com

Email – [email protected]

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Kris Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that helps him get back track, Kris shared that he would say that the one that comes to mind that he remember the end that he thinks about often is, “Entrepreneurs spend a few years of their life like most people won't, so they can spend the rest of their life like most people can't.”

And so, he thinks it kind of hints on that like there's tough times for an entrepreneur, but if you make it, your life will be changed forever.

And so, that's one of his favourite quotes. The other one he thinks is a popular quote by Wayne Gretzky is, “You miss every shot you don't take.”

And he lives by that too, you got to take risks, you got to challenge yourself, you got to do stuff and get out there. And so, that's also an inspiring quote for him too.

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

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!

Mark Smith is the President of Kitewheel. With over 20 years of global experience in Marketing Applications and Analytical CRM, Mark is a leader in building, growing and managing successful companies. Currently in “innovation mode” as the President of Kitewheel, Mark is focused on helping marketing agencies deliver better customer engagement through solutions that unify the “logic” layer of today’s customer-facing technology for their large brand clients.

Mark’s journey into customer behaviour and experience started early in his career. Shortly after achieving his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Edinburgh, Mark founded Quadstone – the first data mining company to focus explicitly on the analytics of customer behaviour. In the years that followed, Mark moved to Boston to build the US business and oversaw revolutionary analytic progress at clients including T-Mobile, Dell, Merrill Lynch and Fidelity. His leadership role expanded to global sale, marketing and product teams that led to a series of 3 successful M&A transactions over the last 10 years.

Questions

• Mark can you share a little bit about your journey? How you got to where you are today, what is Kitewheel and what do they do?
• What are some key performance indicators that you would need to watch in the business as it relates to the data analytics in order to ensure that you can predict behaviour or at least nudge them as you had suggested on what they would need to do next or what they would need to be reminded of.
• We hear a lot also about an Omni-channel experience. An Omni-channel means that everything is connected, as you were suggesting just now. Could you give us an example of a company that you know, whether maybe you've worked with as a service provider, or a company that you are a customer of theirs? And maybe they haven't mastered it, they've come very close to mastering an Omni-channel experience?
• Who should own customer experience in a company?
• Could you share with us if you have a website, app, tool, anything that you absolutely can't live without in your business? What's the one thing that you use in your business that you can't live without? It could be a tool, it could be a website, it could be an app.
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or maybe even one you read recently, but it still has had a great impact on you.
• Could you share with us maybe one thing that you're working on in your life right now, something that you're really excited about? It could be something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can listeners find you online if they wanted to connect with you even more?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you'll tend to revert to this quote or saying, it kind of helps to refocus you or just get you back on that path to whatever goal you are working on originally.

Highlights

Mark’s Journey

Mark shared that he’s the President of Kitewheel, they are a company that helps deliver great experiences to the customers of typically large organizations, by helping them manage the journeys that their customers are on. He has been doing this for a long time now, over 20 years he has been helping organizations understand the behaviour of customers from a kind of an analytic perspective. And at Kitewheel, they've kind of tuned that and moved more into the orchestration area, as they call it, which is helping businesses actually make a difference to the customer by changing the process, and helping the customer along their journey, so that they have the best possible experience.

Me: So customer journey mapping and customer orchestration. Those are kind of big terminologies in the customer experience space, for those members of our audience that may not necessarily know what that entails, could you break down for us what that is in the simplest possible terms, maybe give us an example of what it means to a business to understand that process?

Mark shared that journey mapping is certainly something that's been around for quite some time in the customer experience area, that the whole process of designing out the steps that a customer goes through on their journey, journey has become very popular, particularly the last few years, because organizations see it as a way managing that journey, is a way of kind of being somewhat in control of the experience and try and allows the business to do the best possible job of delivering a great experience.

And so organizations are trying to understand so what is the journey?

And what ways do customers interact with my business?

Which channels do they use?

What things do they look for on different channels?

And when do they use them?

And what order did they do things?

Too many businesses are very kind of focused on things from their perspective. And they would like customers to do things in a certain order, but it's all really about the customer, and they do things their way. And different customers do things in different ways and so they're often on different journeys, and organizations trying to map those out.

What Kitewheel is focused on is actually using the data inside organizations to do what they call journey analytics.

So not just theoretically, what do we think the customer journey is, but actually using the data from all these digital tools that we now have, and all these channels systems that record everything that happens, let's take those and start to analyze what's the real journey that the customers are on and let's visualize that so that the business can really understand not just what they think the customers doing or not just what the customers say they're doing through feedback surveys. But actually, what are they doing in terms of real behaviour.

Let's look at that. And that's journey analytics. And that journey analytics then gives you a frame, once you can see what the customers are really doing and you understand what makes them happy and or unhappy, then you can start to orchestrate, which is the process of actually changing things for the customer, helping them along their journey, nudging them this way, nudging them that way, reminding them of something they need to do. And that all helps them get to their end goal of getting a question answered, getting a customer service issue dealt with, buying a product, whatever it may be. If we can help get them there more smoothly, quickly, easily, the customer is going to regard that as a great experience and be very happy.

Key Performance Indicators in the Business to Predict Behaviour on What to Do Next

Me: What are some key performance indicators that you would need to watch the business as it relates to the data analytics in order to ensure that you can predict behaviour or at least nudge them as you had suggested on what they would need to do next or what they would need to be reminded of.

Mark shared that that's a great point. And what the organizations often have to do here is develop a small number of new performance indicators that are connected to journeys.

Lots of businesses today, they track things by channel or by product or by business unit and they know how many people visit the website, they know how many people open emails, they know how many people call the call centre, they know how many people say they're a net promoter and how many people complain.

But few organizations have tied all of that together to understand it as a connected experience and understand it as a journey.

And the key new metrics that need to be developed are how many customers are going down different journeys and what is the overall satisfaction of customers who go down these different experiences.

And the data is all there, it's just a matter of connecting it together so you could see it as a connected journey. And then say, customers would go down this journey, they're much happier than customers who go down this different journey, let's align the right customers with the right journey.

Today, most companies can only control those things, channel by channel, or activity by activity, interaction by interaction. And the best results come from moving on to a connected experience of lots of interactions or across lots of channels.

Mastering the Omni-Channel Experience

Me: We hear a lot also about an Omni-Channel experience. An Omni-Channel means that everything is connected, as you were suggesting just now. Could you give us an example of a company that you know, whether maybe you've worked with as a service provider, or a company that you are a customer of theirs? And maybe they haven't mastered it, they've come very close to mastering an Omni-Channel experience?

Mark shared that the Omni-Channel concept, it's supposed to mean, all channels, all possible channels. The idea being that we as customers can make any choice we want, we as customers can one day go online to get a product, another day walk into a store, another day phone up, shouldn't really matter, we should get the same level of experience, have access to the same products regardless of where we choose, or how we choose to do business.

And the great companies are able to connect those channels together so that it's seamless. And no matter what the customer chooses, as they move from potentially one channel to another, it's a seamless experience for them, that's what we all would regard as a great experience that if he’s on the website looking at something, can't find an answer to his question, so he calls for help, it's always great when your call goes through the customer service person talking to you knows why you're there.

And you can say, you’re calling because of a problem with your bill, because those channels have been connected and they know that he was just on the website with a billing problem, and therefore can help him instantly with that problem.

And so, that ability to connect those channels is where the kind of leading organizations are going, he had a great expert, you asked me for a specific example.

And he had a great experience just recently, he and his wife bought some new furniture from a company called Floyd who are an American manufacturer based in Detroit. And like everybody these days, like most people these days, they bought their furniture online, sitting at home, because they can't go anywhere. And they've done a fantastic job of making that a super kind of connected, highly branded experience. So, they half did the order on a mobile phone and then moved to a laptop.

But that went through, they instantly got confirmation and they got handed to a shipping company and actually there was something that had to be made and then handed to a shipping company.

But that was completely seamless, they had communications coming from both the shippers as well as the manufacturer.

But they were totally connected, each one knew what the other one was doing.

And they gave them advance notice of when the delivery was going to be arrived exactly on time.

They then phoned to check it was all correct, send them a survey following it.

Just everything works so smoothly, despite the fact that they were two different companies involved and like four different channels.

And when those things work well like that, what happens?

You tell everybody about it, and that's what we're all looking for. We all want businesses promoted by advocates who think we do a great job. And here he is, doing exactly that because it was a great experience.

Who Should Own Customer Experience in a Company

Me: So we are in that era now, as you said, people are way more aware of customer experience, there's clearly a lot more attention given to it. A lot of organizations maybe 10, 15 years ago that never used to allocate a budget towards customer experience definitely by force, the customer has forced them to realize the direct correlation between having customers and their bottom line, they certainly realize that they need to give some emphasis to customer experience. But who should own customer experience in a company?

Mark stated that this is a great question. And it really has changed dramatically, just in the last one or two years.

Because he thinks it's raised up significantly who owns customer experience, certainly, in the forward thinking businesses, the ones that are approaching customer experience the right way, they have realized that it's suddenly become this huge differentiator for the business from the competition.

In the old days, customer experience was seen as more a lower level thing in the business, it was a problem solving issue resolution thing, it was like the customer complaints department.

And now, the real forward thinking organization see it, “No, customer experience is actually about the whole business, in a way, it's what our brand is, this is the core message we give out to the market is the kind of experience we deliver.” And it's the number one thing people look for to differentiate one company from another. So it has to span the whole business.

And so, we see a lot of big CX initiatives now lead from the board level, real C level executives, and more and more companies are hiring Chief Experience Officers or Chief Customer Officers, who are going to take this customer centric view and drive experience as a connected thing across the typical three big divisions of sales, marketing, and service.

And oftentimes, customer experience was just in the service department but he thinks the real thinkers are bringing it up to be across all of them because every one of those communications, whether it comes from marketing, or customer service, or loyalty, or wherever, they're all part of the experience that the business delivers. So connecting them requires a top level very senior person to really lead this new generation of CX initiative.

Me: Amazing, thank you so much for sharing Mark. I did a training session earlier today with a financial organization. I'm here in Jamaica, actually. Are you in the States or in the UK?

Mark shared that he is in the States. He lives just outside Boston but his accent does come from the UK originally.

Me: Yes, it's still very strong. So one of the things that came up in the training session earlier today, and it's actually a great pet peeve of mine is sales and customer service, I strongly believe work hand in hand. And I find that a lot of companies that have sales representatives, they're extremely eager and enthusiastic and just on it to get the business, that first sale, but then to get me to buy again, or to follow up to ensure that I'm okay with the product or the service, whatever it may be, whether it's tangible or intangible, that's where they fail.

Is it something that needs to be psychological from a sales perspective for it to be merged with customer experience that they don't just look on it as a one-time sale.

I get it, you have a target, you need to earn X amount of dollars per month. But those customers that you signed on in November 2020, have you even reached out to them since the year started? Where do we close that gap? Or how do we close that gap?

Mark stated that that's a great example of that sort of systematic systemic problems that organizations have to do this kind of customer experience delivery right and that's the sort of silos, the organizational silos that exist in so many businesses, driven by management structures, team structures, and sadly, often incentive structures that really govern what people do, what your teams do, the lifeblood of the company, the people, what they actually do, if those are not connected and everybody from the top down is focused on the experience goal, then you'll get this kind of situation.

And that's why you need a top level leader around these initiatives to make sure that the organization lines up.

It's funny he often thinks that the real challenge these days of getting these stuff right is not technology anymore, it's not data, it's the organization actually doing the right things and behaving the right way.

And so, if your sales team is totally incented, and motivated around just getting the deal in and then they hand it on to somebody else to look after that customer, then they're only going to care about it up to that point. And if their incentives and their commission is purely based on that, then that's where it stops, and they move on to the next thing.

Now, that can work if you've got a good customer success group who picks up the customer and their job is making sure that customer’s happy and they pick up.

That's what actually what they do at Kitewheel is a nice handoff between the sales team who bring the customer up to the point of becoming one of their customers and then their customer success group picks them up and they're responsible for every week, every month, making sure that customer’s happy and successful.

And ultimately, in two years-time, three years-time would renew and stay with them. And as long as there's a connection and the handoff happens, and you've got people caring about both sides, that can work.

The problem is when there isn't anybody to hand it to, they’re just sales are being done and immature businesses can often be like this, they've just bring sales in, but no one picks them up.

And it seems like no one cares about you. We've all experienced that, you buy a product and then it feels like no one's interested in you anymore, they've got your money, and you're on your own kind of thing.

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

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without, Marks shared that for his business today, it would almost certainly be Zoom. They have suddenly moved a year ago now almost, to be in a virtual business, no one goes in the office anymore, everybody works from home, he used to travel almost every week to visit customers. And now he has been sitting in the same room for the last 12 months doing everything virtual. So if they didn't have these tools, it's not always Zoom, many customers use Microsoft Teams or WebEx. But those online collaboration environments is undoubtedly the most important tool in his life right now to keep the contact going. Keep connected with the customer, make sure they're happy.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Mark

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Mark shared that an interesting question. The best recent book he read actually just literally a few weeks ago, he read Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, which is a great business book. It's like he's gone through all the things that he (Mark) has gone through running a company over the last 20 years. And just full of great kind of down to earth advice on how to handle difficult situations and lots of stories about how this sort of thing happens all the time, it's always difficult, there's always completely unknown things that come around the corner that you need to be able to adapt and handle.

So, he really enjoyed that read a few weeks ago.  And then the other classic business book that he read a long time ago was Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, which is all about how you go from early kind of inventive ideas to more mainstream business. And he feels like that's where the customer experience world is at the moment, it's gone from early stage stuff to suddenly, it’s like every company out there is suddenly interested in customer experience. And we're definitely going through that kind of transition right now.

Me: I think COVID has actually brought it to the forefront even more, that has been my experience here in Jamaica for sure. They're more sensitive, and they pay more attention to the quality of the experience that they've gotten and I don't know if it's because safety has been like the new buzzword, how safe do you make me feel if I have to come into your environment and that a lot of times falls on how to services delivered. Something as simple, which has nothing to do with the product or service that you deliver but something as simple as when you actually arrive at a client's location and they are taking your temperature and spraying you, sometimes they're spraying it with things that you're not aware of. And nobody is actually saying to you, may I please sanitize your hands, and the liquid that we're using for the sanitation is alcohol mixed with lemongrass oil, or whatever concoction they've put in a bottle, but I think it is courteous, you should exercise courtesy and tell the customer what you are sanitizing their hand with.

Mark agreed and shared that Yanique made a really interesting point. And one of the things that worries him about the whole pandemic is we're being moved all this digital sort of human less contact mechanisms and people are going to forget about how to actually interact with each other, those kind of situations where people don't talk to you anymore, maybe because they're a bit scared because this situation is scary.

But he knows exactly what you mean about that kind of personal interaction thing. But he also thinks this COVID, it has totally changed the business world as well and it is driving this interesting customer experience, because for so many businesses, their customers have totally changed how they experienced that business.

All of a sudden all of our customers are also at home, like we are, and also having to do things on new channels, on more digital channels and that's a whole different experience for a lot of people. And so, the smart companies are suddenly focusing on, “We better investigate this area and do the best we can to make this experience for the customers a good experience.”

What Mark is Really Excited About Now!

Mark shared that Kitewheel has been around about 8 years and their business has been very focused on very large organizations who have been the sort of real leaders in this customer experience space and the first ones to move into, try and manage journeys better, and connect their channels and use all their data and so on.

And the thing they’re working on and kind of launching in just a few weeks time, is how they bring those same things, the things that the big guys have been pioneering?

How do they bring that to everyone?

How can they package that up, and make this sort of a journey approach, accessible to a lot more companies, a lot more businesses by essentially simplifying it and packaging it up so that everyone can kind of benefit from those, the early work of the kind of pioneers.

And that's very exciting. And it's a sort of reaction to get so many people asking them for that. They don't necessarily have a big army of internal developers to do things themselves but they'd still like to start taking this more customer experience centric approach to things. So, that's their big initiative that they're working on this year, and in fact, launching in a couple of weeks.

Where Can We Find Mark Online

Website – www.kitewheel.com

Email – [email protected]

LinkedIn – Mark Smith

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Mark Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Mark shared that he has a lots of those, he’s well known for having lots of quotes for different things. One of the mottos of the business, actually, they have a motto which is, “Work hard and be nice to people.” They have a poster that hangs in the office. No one sees it anymore but it does hang in the office. But he grew up in Scotland and there's a great there's matching quote from Scotland which is that, “Hard work never killed anybody.” And that would be his quote for when times are tough, you should remember that hard work never killed anybody, which is an old Scottish expression.

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Links

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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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!

JP Clement is the CEO of boomtime. He has over 30 years of experience in marketing, digital strategy and product management for companies ranging from startups to global brands such as Madison Square Garden, General Mills, DFS Group Ltd, Johnson & Johnson and National Geographic. JP has worked for and helped companies in both B2C and B2B sectors, and founded three digital strategy and marketing agencies after working for many years on the corporate side of marketing. JP’s passions are analytics, digital products and creating the right strategy at the right time for the right audience.

Questions

• Could you share with us just a little bit about your journey, your history, how it is that you got to where you are today?
• A lot of people are looking at new and creative ways to target new customers or to retarget existing customers, and you're in that marketing sphere, or in that marketing space? So could you maybe share a one or two things that has led to your success, or maybe just trends that you observed regarding marketing, based on what's happening globally? And what would you recommend persons should be doing if they're not doing it already?
• How can they use LinkedIn to drive new business?
• Could you share with us what tool, website or app that you use in your business that you absolutely cannot live without?
• Do you have maybe one or two books that you have read, either currently, or in the past that has had a very, very big impact on you?
• Could you share with us if you have something that's going on in your life right now, it could be something that you're really excited about? But is it 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 refocused or rechannell you into what it is that you're trying to accomplish.

Highlights

JP’s Journey

JP shared that he has always thought that marketing was kind of his calling just because the other choices were too boring and didn't really fit his personality. So he has been doing marketing, as mentioned, for a very long time. He went to college in Paris, France, as you can tell by his accent, and ended up in business school in the US specializing marketing, and then started his journey in marketing a long time ago in the US and he has stayed in the US since. And his marketing journey has taken him many, many different places, he thinks, without bragging, he has probably done every type of marketing by various to do, he started obviously, in traditional marketing, doing couple of things that you could do back in the days with traditional marketing.

He did consumer packaged goods marketing at the beginning of his career, then he moved into direct marketing, database marketing and catalogue marketing. And then he went to the internet side of things in 1998, so quite a while ago when people were still trying to figure out how to do marketing on the internet in a digital space. And he has been doing within digital marketing, probably every type of marketing, by various tools that you can think about. So, anywhere from influencer marketing to word of mouth marketing, to email marketing, and he can go on and on and on and on.

But in the past 10 years, he has basically worked on the agency side, actually, more than 10 years ago, about 14 years now. And before that, he worked on what we would call the client side, and employed a lot of marketing agencies. And when he was moved to the agency side of things, he was always kind of fascinated and curious about how he could make this marketing agency model work better for agencies. He’s very curious by nature, and he always like to figure out how to make things a little bit better, or significantly better. And he thought that marketing agencies were very inefficient, and very hard to scale. And so for about 10 years, he thought about really hard about how to do that. And he came up with some ideas but he started putting in place in 2018, so a couple years ago, and then he came across boomtime and really liked the way they were thinking about the scaling of marketing and it so ended up that the CEO of boomtime was moving on to another venture and needed to replace himself and hired him. So that's kind of where he is, why he is where he is today.

Me: Okay, awesome. That sounds really good, exciting journey. Thank you for sharing that JP. So we're pretty much still going through a pandemic. Where are you located exactly? You said you're in the US.

JP shared that they are in a beautiful and very empty New Mexico. He asked if Yanique was in Jamaica, to which she confirmed. He stated that the US is a big place, it basically touches Arizona, and it’s southwest. They have a border with Mexico but they're in New Mexico. And it's a very empty state. And they've been very impacted by the crisis, but their business was remote before the pandemic hits. And so, they've been actually as a business doing very well and they're very grateful for that.

Trends That Led to Your Success Regarding Marketing and Recommendations

JP stated that just to give a little bit of context, boomtime, they specialize in B2B businesses, so they're helping businesses that sell to other businesses, that's kind of their sweet spot, if you want to call it that. So, those businesses were especially hard hit by the pandemic, because the way they used to market themselves or sell was either on a one to one basis, by visiting offices, or companies or things like that, or by going to trade shows and conferences.

And when the pandemic shut down all these conferences, all of these trade shows, all these places where they would typically do their marketing as a business, their sales, these businesses which tend to be a little bit more conservative in terms of their marketing approaches, were really caught unaware.

And so, they (boomtime) have been doing really well as a business, because they have been able to reach out to all these businesses and show them the value of digital marketing in an age where face to face, in person meetings and trade shows, and conferences, as he mentioned, could not have happened any longer. So they've been doing really well that way.

So you're asking for pointers, but and this is one of them, you can do a lot of your marketing in a digital space without having to go into conferences and trade shows and those gigantic centres where people could aggregate and share germs and viruses.

And so, the digital marketing space is amazing for that, there's all kinds of tools and techniques that you can use that basically create the same amount of leads that you would generate at a trade show at a very reduced price, without the risk of getting infected by COVID-19 on top of it. And also, the beauty of digital marketing is that you can measure pretty much every single thing that that you do, which is not something that you can say of trade shows for instance, or conferences. They typically ask their clients, or prospective clients, what was your ROI on your trade shows? And they don't have an answer, because they never they say, “Okay, this is a place we have to be so we're going to buy our booth, we're going to send people there, and we're going to pay for all of that.” And then that's it, that was always seen as a cost centre and not really as an investment. When they look at digital marketing, they think of it as an investment, and they can prove to them that the return on investment on what they're going to be doing for them is much higher than they could ever expect from more traditional ways of doing marketing.

So, he’s throwing a lot of things at audience. But, they do a lot of education and they talk about how digital marketing can work for B2B businesses, how it can work actually better in this strange world that we live in today, and how they can achieve their sales and marketing goals through digital marketing in a very efficient and high return way.

How To Use LinkedIn to Drive New Business

Me: How can they use LinkedIn? They've heard a little bit about what you've stated as it relates to using digital marketing, there are lots of tools out there that can get your message across to your customers, especially in this space. But how do you use LinkedIn to get new business?

I have people sliding into my DMs sending me random messages about things that I'm not interested in, like, do I want to buy a cryptocurrency? And if I'm interested in stocks and trading, and that's not really my area of interest, so you know, just delete them every time I see them, and they're clearly looking sales.

But you really want to get people who are for your business, people who actually have the same interests, have a need for whatever service or product you're trying to solicit. But not just trying to slide into everyone anyone's DM and just become annoying.

So how can they use LinkedIn to drive new business?

JP shared that that question actually falls squarely into what they do a lot of and what they do the most of probably as an Agency. So they have a tool called Sales Connector that they use at boomtime that basically transforms LinkedIn into pretty much like a what they call it a virtual trade show. And so first, because of the people they're working with, those clients of theirs who are B2B companies, LinkedIn is obviously the prime social network for them and an amazing place to actually network and create those connections that can then turn into leads. But they use a semi-automated system to be more efficient, they create really advanced searches, they call them Boolean searches because they use and or not terms to create a very complex search. But that search identifies the exact targets that you're after as a business. And then they automate the connection messages, they have a way of crafting very interesting connection messages that get you about a 40% to 50% connection rate, which is really high.

But again, the fact that they were very careful about creating searches, but create a pool of targets that is very targeted but very specific to your business. And it's not going to be coming across as spam helps, of course, as well in terms of the connection rate. But they create those messages, and they have a style of messaging, but in a way it creates a more personal rapport.

Although you're trying to do business and you're a business talking to another business, in the sense you also are a person talking to another person. So they make their communications and their messaging very conversational, not salesy at all, and very human and very personal. And so, they created this and then they have all kinds of tools that helps them sort through those connections to decide whether a good lead or a bad lead and then send those connections to a business (CRM) Customer Relationship Management System. And so, create those integrations so those leads can be nurtured and followed up on and, and so on. So they have a whole system in place that helps people basically create those leads and generate those connections on LinkedIn.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, JP shared that it's probably a very standard answer, and she has probably have heard that one quite a bit. But because they are remote, and they've had that new office for about a year and a half now, they are incredibly dependent on Slack. But he highly recommends it, it's a very well done product. If and when slack goes down, which doesn't happen very often but it happened about two months ago, or a month ago, it literally shuts down their business, it's their virtual office. This is where they communicate internally, this is also how they communicated with some of their clients and their partners via the guest feature. This is where they post all bunch of very important things for the running of their business, and how they keep in touch with one another.

So Slack, supercritical for them. Zoom, obviously, they wouldn't be able to live and work without Zoom both internally and externally. And they're big fan of Zoom, and more specific to what he does and what his sales team does is Pipedrive. So Pipe Drive is a CRM Customer Relations Management System and it's similar to things like HubSpot and, and salesforce.com, and things like that pardot. But it's way more visual and way easier to use and quite a bit cheaper to some of it. And so they wouldn't be able to survive as a company without PipeDrive. So highly recommended it as well.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on JP

When asked about books that have had a big impact, JP shared that he doesn't read a lot of business books. He doesn't necessarily believe in them that much, or trust in them, but it's just when he reads, he tends to read fiction. But there is a book that has had a big impact on him, especially because as in his career, he has helped a lot of startups. He has worked with several startups, he has run several startups himself, he has started several companies himself. So there is a book, he can't remember the exact title, but it's about the business model canvas, or BMC. And there are several books about it, but the seminal book, and he can visualize it, but he honestly can't remember the actual title, because there is a subtitle to it but it was published probably 10 years ago, or maybe 7 years ago.

It's an amazing book that kind of gives you a way to think about your business, it doesn't necessarily apply just to startup, especially interesting for startups, but also for existing businesses that are launching by reinventing themselves or rethinking their whole strategy. And it's an amazing book that kind of simplifies the whole operation and strategy around the business to literally a one page summary, very visual, very simple, but incredibly powerful tool, and especially because the process that they take you to get to that one page is amazingly helpful he thinks for companies, and he has used it many times. But if anybody does a search in amazon.com, or on Google for business model, Canvas, they'll find the book. And it's very highly recommended for businesses. Applying The Business Model Canvas: A Practical Guide For Small Business by Steven Imke

What JP is Really Excited About Now!

JP shared that there's a lot of things going on right now. He took over boomtime not too long ago, and made a lot of changes and they are evolving very rapidly and growing very rapidly as a company, as an agency. So he constantly has projects in place to try to help his people be better at what they do, give them the tools that they need to improve their performance. They educate also, as he mentioned, also, their clients a lot. So he has many, many of these from a professional standpoint, like things in place to help and actually one of the core values that he tried to sneak into their company, into boomtime, which didn't exist before is this idea of the fact that educating businesses and people within these businesses is the best way to unlock potential. And this is kind of the mantra that they've been repeating to their clients, to themselves, but they really pay a lot of attention to. They see themselves not just as a vendor that provides you digital marketing services, they see themselves as a company, as a group of people that not only help each other learn and get better what they do by do the same thing for the people that they are in contact with their customers and become more of a partner and an educator for these businesses.

So their core value says, “We are curious, we learned, we educate.” and it goes internally and externally. And this is something they've been working on constantly, it's a daily thing for them which has been a huge dividend. And he’s very proud of what his team as reacted to that very, very well and they're all putting in the same way and unearthing a lot of improvements to how they do business, how they deal with one another from an interpersonal standpoint at work and how they impact their clients.

Where Can We Find JP Clement Online

LinkedIn – JP Clement

Website – www.boomtime.com

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity JP Uses

JP shared that here is a quote, actually a little personal note, he’s a big fan of watches, and mechanical watches, and he tends to collect them until his wife tells him it's too many watches and he needs to sell some of them. But that's another story. But one of the watchmakers that he really like is Oris, it's a Swiss watchmaker.

And they have a watch, a special edition watch they release once in a while, and it has a quote in the bag that is amazing. And it's from the first African American diver in the Navy that rose to the rank of major or like a very high rank, one of the highest ranks. He was like a Navy deep diver; his name was Carl Brashear. And he has a quote that they engraved on the back of these special edition watches, which he thinks is amazing. He said, “It's not a sin to fall down. It's a sin not to try to get up.”

Me: Don't get discouraged by falling down, just make sure you get back up.

JP agreed and stated that make sure you try as hard as you can to get back up. And that's the sin to him was, you will get down at some point, you will fall down and the sin is not to try to get up by any means possible.

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

• Applying The Business Model Canvas: A Practical Guide For Small Business by Steven Imke

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!

Ronan Walsh has been working in Digital Marketing, specifically SEO for close to 10 years and is a lecturer in Web Design and Digital Marketing in Ireland. He's the owner and founder of Digital Trawler a SaaS Marketing Agency based in Ireland. Digital Trawler helps companies with their marketing strategy and messaging and having experts in SEO, paid adverts, social media and conversion rate optimization.

Questions

• Could you share with us a little bit about your journey? How did you get to where you are today?
• You are big into digital marketing and search engine optimization, affectionately known as SEO. Can you share with us how you think SEO has changed over the past 10 years and as a business, especially in light of COVID and the pandemic globally, what do companies need to do to get to the top of their industry or their area where their SEO is concerned?
• What are some of the things they need to look for when they're hiring a Digital Marketing Consultant? Because you have a lot of people out there who market themselves in this capacity, but do they have that requisite knowledge and experience and exposure like what you just explained here to us to ensure that you're picking the right person.
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot 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 recently or about that you it many years ago, but it still has a great impact on you.
• 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 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 help to keep you focused and get you back on track, if for any reason you get derailed or you're de-motivated, do you have one of those?

Highlights

Ronan’s Journey

When asked about his journey, Ronan shared that he actually think it's kind of similar to Yanique’s journey where he started off, kind of in tourism, he didn't really know what he wanted to do. So, he did a lot of kind of backpacking and he was a Surf and Kayak Instructor and he was primarily focused on the kind of tourism and travel industry. And that was kind of, he supposes, where his passion was, but he realized that it wasn't a long-term plan, like there's nobody on the beach who's a surf instructor who's 40 plus. They might be wealthy in terms of spirit and how they're feeling, but there's nobody, he supposes with a family of three kids or something like that, or that they have a house and kind of security and a pension and things like that.

So that was kind of eating away and in the back of his head, maybe in his young twenties and he was wondering how exactly he could try and kind of progress in his career. So, he finally was backpacking, he met a few people in the industry, in the kind of linen and clothing industry in India. And he started importing clothes into Ireland and he set up three stalls or kind of shops around the country. And he was running those in his early twenties, which was a fantastic experience.

What he wanted to do was try and push those as far as he could. And that's really where Digital Marketing came into play because he realized that he was getting up at three or four in the morning to drive stock across countries and keep shops up to date. And he was trying to manage staff and make sure that there was a little bit of profit left for him at the end of the day.

And he built a website to try and expand that and to not rely on the brick and mortar kind of model as much, it came to realize soon after that, that it wasn't actually going really be sustainable, but during the time building the website, he learned how to code, he learned how to do SEO, he learned how to do Google ads. And there was a local agency that took him in underneath their wings, and then showed him a lot of what he could do. And then that's when he realized he had a real talent for Digital Marketing and that there was a real sense of passion to trying to help other people achieve their dreams, whether it's getting their website ranking or helping them with a Google ad strategy.

And then there's also helping the customer at the end of the journey. So for example, one of his first clients was a bridal boutique. And then if you're able to match the person to the right dress, the customer at the end also wins, so not only does the business win, but the customer is getting exactly what they want. So there was loads of reasons for him to kind of get into Digital Marketing. And eventually that company that took him underneath their wing was bought out and they started passing leads onto him and he kind of fell into a freelance role. And from there then it's just grown into what Digital Trawler is today. There's five other people working in there, working on web design, Google ads, search engine optimization, social media, they have a project manager and then there's himself as well. So, it's a nice little business that is kind of running and their aim is to really kind of help others fulfill their dreams with business development.

How Has SEO Changed Over the Past 10 Years

Ronan stated that that's a really good question because it's changed a lot over the past 10 years. So, originally when he would have started off his digital marketing journey and doing SEO for other companies, it would have been a lot of what's known as on-page optimization, which is, for anybody who has a WordPress website, that's kind of Yoast, filling in titles, descriptions, keyword placement in your paragraphs and in your text, on your blogs and on your pages and making sure that all of that is correct, but that's only a very small part of it today, whether it's completely blown into what he would describe as marketing, like SEO is kind of a term he'll use now to describe marketing in general, because you have to have a content plan, which means your branding has to be on point.

You have to really understand your customers, issues that they're having in order to find the content that you need to write about. You need to have a PR strategy that gets you exposure out there and links back to your website. Your website needs to be in tip-top order, there can't be any security, or technical issues with it.

And then, like he was saying, there is obviously the element of on page where you need your titles and descriptions and things working for you as well. It needs to be visually appealing. And of course, there's a little bit of Social Media involved in it as well. That kind of falls underneath the PR element as well, that you're kind of getting your own brand out there a bit more, and you're developing your business in the traditional sense, but Google picks up on that a lot more these days than they would have back in the day.

And that's really what kind of SEO is today in his eyes. That all-encompassing view as to “How can we really drive our business online, where are our audience, what forums are they on? Can I get my business there? Can I get a link back to my website? Can I get my local press or my national press or my industry press to write an article about me and push my brand out there that little bit more again, so that people know me?”

And Google's constantly picking up on all of these and they're looking for how frequently you're doing it. They're looking for what sort of authority do the other websites have, and they're tying this all together and they're giving your website a score, and then that score is how you're competing for that number one position on Google.

Me: And the competition on Google is global as in, when you're ranked on Google, is your company being ranked across the globe or is the company being ranked as the best in your country?

Ronan stated that that's a really good question. So, search engine optimization, so there's a tool called search console. And in search console, you can choose whether you're global or whether you're country specific. So, when you are global, you're competing across the world.

So you're telling Google you're more open to having people come to your site from anywhere in the world but you're competing across the world so it becomes a little bit more difficult and there's a number of elements that you have to bear in mind, such as like where your website's hosted.

So for example, he’s in Ireland at the minute but he has a niece in Australia and they were searching for a birthday present for her and they were on all of these toy shops and the toy shop image on the product page loaded so slow that they had to leave the site, they were waiting maybe 10 minutes.

But that's an issue and it's kind of slowly being eradicated, but it's an issue to do with that in Australia, that website probably loads perfectly, in Ireland it's to come the whole way across the other side of the world so it can actually take quite a while for that image to be processed.

And so, you would kind of combat that by using something called a CDN, not to go too complicated on it, but basically it’s a Content Delivery Network. So, basically your website isn't just hosted in Australia, it's hosted on multiple servers throughout the world. So, it's things like that become more complicated as you expand your targeting area, where if you say, “Look Google, I just want to target Ireland.”

Google would give you a preference, so you'll kind of be given a higher priority to rank there. And of course then there’s your country-specific domain names as well. Like in Ireland, they have .ie in the UK there is .co.uk

And if you buy a domain name with that, or you're using that domain name, well then your specifically tied to that country. So, there are a number of factors to take into consideration. And then on top of that, then you have languages, so languages, or even another more complicated element where you have to have specific bits of code on each page to tell Google what language unlocked browser should be prioritized for this particular page. And if there's alternative versions of it, what are those alternative versions and do they all link correctly together.

So there's quite a few moving parts. So to answer the question, it's entirely up to the person who is developing the site, or who's running the business. Personally, he targets across the world and that's what he’s focused on. That's why he’s here on a podcast with Yanique and trying to push the Digital Trawler brand, he’s trying to push the Ronan Walsh brand a little bit more across the sea and trying to attract people and get people interested in his brand.

And then this, even what he’s doing now is considered SEO, if you were to leave a link or even on the page where you're writing the podcast, that's giving Google a sign that, “Okay, Ronan's out there, he's doing podcasts and he's talking about Digital Trawler and I can see that comes from Yanique's website, which is very iterative in the podcast area. So just that ranking maybe Ronan for more podcast keywords.” and then that's kind of the way Google works.

So it's really about getting out there and getting your name out there as much as you can and being as creative as possible. Because when he first came to SEO, it was a little bit boring in the sense that you'd go in, you would optimize a keyword, your page would rank a little bit more and you'd be focused on ranking.

Now it's about creativity that you're going out and you're wondering, “How can I get more links back to my site? How can I get people to pick up on this content so I'm beating the competition and I'm getting higher score than them?” And that he supposes really helping them kind of develop really good campaigns and things like that, because it's creativity really is getting back to marketing basics, which is fantastic.

Hiring the Right Digital Marketing Consultant with the Requisite Knowledge, Experience and Exposure

Me: So a lot of our listeners are small to medium size business owners and they've listened to a lot of what you've said about how SEO has changed over the last few years and especially as you went into the details a while ago, positioning yourself either country-specific or global in terms of being seen across different platforms. But let's say for example, they don't have the experience in-house in their businesses to do this on their own and they're going to hire a digital marketing consultant. What are some of the things they need to look for when they're hiring somebody? Because you have a lot of people out there who market themselves in this capacity, but do they have that requisite knowledge and experience and exposure like what you just explained here to us to ensure that you're picking the right person.

Ronan stated that it's a minefield out there, you are 100% right. There are hundreds of consultants and the biggest thing for him, and he thinks this doesn't just go for SEO or digital marketing, but it's communication. They see it the whole time they're working with web developers, they're working with other digital marketing agencies and PR agencies and things like that and you can see projects kind of snowball and next thing the client's saying, “Well, you didn't deliver this.” And the client saying, “Yeah, but I asked for this.” And it becomes a back and forth and those engagements can get really sour. So for him, it comes down to making sure that the owner understands what they're signing up for.

So expectations from the outright and you're agreeing on, this is the end goal. This is how many users I want signed up, this is how many email addresses I have to or leads I have to generate from this or this is how much revenue or return on advertising spend that I need to get back. So there are very clear goals for an agency to go, “Okay, I can do that for you.” And it becomes very clear then as well that if you have that set out at the start, it becomes a lot easier to have a conversation if your agency isn't hitting their targets, if you have not defined at the start, you can go back to them and say, “Look, this is what we set out to achieve. We're not doing it. We need to wrap this up or you need to change what you're doing.” So that is kind of one area to look out.

The other thing that he sees is a lot of SMEs, maybe if there's 5 or 6 employees, they might look at maybe taking on a marketing staff. He often finds that those marketing staff aren't able to deliver on what the owner wants. They're quite good at agreeing to saying, “Yes, I'll be able to deliver that at the start.” And they don't really know what they are able to deliver and you can't expect one person to be able to do SEO, Google ads, social media, like update your website and expect them to be able to do all of that and do it to the level that Coca-Cola or Nike or any of those sites are doing.

And he thinks that that's kind of the expectation that a lot of SMEs have. So you need to support that person in their role or else, maybe perhaps get an agency in to define what their role is going to be, and maybe give them some freelancers to support them in that role as well.

So you might have an agency come in, design the strategy, set up the processes, train your marketing admin person in what they should be doing and looking out for, and then have some freelancers behind that person to support them in the SEO role or the Google Ads or social media or something like that.

Like, you know it yourself, you're running a podcast like editing this takes time, then there's the promotion on social media and just straightaway there, you're onto podcast editing, you're on social media, scheduling and admin in terms of replying and things like that. And you've got graphic designs, there's three different skills there that are needed in order to produce a podcast.

And then you stick it up onto your website as well. So now you need kind of the technical knowledge there. So like really you should have four people there that you were able to go, okay, podcast is done. It gets sent to John, who's going to edit it. There's another person there who's going to schedule all the social media posts.

There's Emma who's going to put together the images using Canva. And then there's Joseph who's going to upload it to WordPress and you need that team behind you in order to actually really deliver. And there's a whole load of freelancers out there who are looking for that work and they're quite happy to take on that work as long as it's kind of consistent. He thinks that's kind of the trick to keeping those freelancers happy.

They want freedom that they're able to maybe spend time with their kids or collect them and drop them to school. And they still want a life outside of us, but they're quite happy to kind of go on maybe an hourly contract per month or something like that that will allow you to produce quality content that will get your name out there. And you can come to an agreement, fair enough. Their price per hour might be a little bit more than what it would cost an employee, but it's going take them half the time and it's going to be twice as good.

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

When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Ronan stated that there's so many. He mentioned they're entirely remote. They rely on a lot of apps for our communication in particularly. There’s many there that might be irrelevant like Gmail is priceless to us and just being able to communicate by email and Slack is another one. But he thinks one in particular actually is Teamwork. So, it’s actually an Irish based company, www.teamwork.com and it's a project management software. And once a week, they go through all of that, they upload all of the tasks, they make sure that himself and the project manager sit down and they go, this needs to be done for such and such a client and so on. And they make a big list out and then they upload that to Teamwork and everybody by Friday evening will know all of their jobs that they have to do the following week so that they're able to plan. And every Monday morning, then they have a team meeting with everybody.

They run through all of the tasks and then they communicate over Slack in the week to make sure everything's running okay. Without Teamwork, they'd be lost because they're able to share files for certain clients and it's really been a great lifesaver. So if there's any agencies, whether they're digital or whether they're accountants or whatever it is, he'd recommend looking into that. It's kind of similar to like Asana or Trello or something like that, but Teamwork just kind of seems to have a little bit more functionality than all of those, a little bit of a learning curve at the start, but definitely worth it.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Ronan

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Ronan shared that the two books that he read recently, one is Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself by Mike Michalowicz. And then there's Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by him as well.

In fact, actually he read Clockwork and he liked the book so much that he went out and bought all of his books that he'd ever written. So yeah, it's pretty good. So, he has another book by him, The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz and Fix This Next: Make the Vital Change That Will Level Up Your Business that are next to read on his list. But Clockwork is basically talking about how your business should be able to kind of run basically by itself. So it's kind of similar to like The Four Hour Work Week, which he’s sure Yanique is familiar with, but, it's maybe a little bit more practical than that.

So it's talking about being able to give yourself a month off and the idea isn't that you need a month and you deserve a month off and all of that.

It's more that if your business can last a month without you, like within a month, you're going to have your invoicing, you're going to have new sales come on and you're going to basically like every cycle runs at least once in a month.

And basically, it kind of takes you out of your comfort zone to let go of loads of tasks as owners of businesses. So like particularly SMEs where we're terrible for jumping in and trying to fix issues that our employees and maybe there was a communication issue or maybe they didn't do it exactly how you like. If you can leave those things, you need to be able to move on and look for new clients and set up processes and then move on again and focus on growing the business, that’s what Clockwork is about.

And then Profit First is all about kind of cashflow management. So, there's a law of which is Parkinson's law, that if there's kind of a void to fill, you will fill it. So basically, if you're given a task and used to do it within a week, you'll get it done within that week. But if you're given a month, it'll take you the month as well.

And it's the same with Profit First, which is when your bank account is full of money, you're very likely to spend it on kind of new ways without a huge amount of strategy going behind it. He talks about setting up these kinds of different bank accounts and that you're basically using kind of like an envelope system through your bank accounts to run your business. So you have a certain amount for expenses, you have a certain amount for profits, certain amount for tax, certain amount for paying yourself. And they've only just set that up and it's going to be exciting to see how well it works, but it's going to force him to maybe cut some expenses that he probably doesn't really need.

What Ronan is Really Excited About Now!

Ronan shared that something they're doing themselves actually at Digital Trawler that he’s quite excited about is they're going to start bringing out new courses pretty soon and they're going to be free. So like Yanique, they want to help business owners, so they're going to have, and he might be a bit overenthusiastic with this, but he thinks by the end of February, they should have a Google Analytics course out.

They noticed that a lot of marketing managers really struggled with analytics and trying to extract data and understand what's going on in it. So they're going to have a course coming out, it's going to be free. And similarity with SEO, Google ads, there's going to be free courses there for that as well. So get onto their mailing list and as soon as they're available, you’ll be getting the first invite to it.

Where Can We Find Ronan Online

Me: So that dovetails very nicely into my next question. So they listened to this podcast, they're really intrigued about what your company is doing, Digital Trawler, especially the whole concept of how SEO has changed. And of course, how to hire that right person to assist you in building and developing and getting that presence that you need across the globe, depending on the platform that you operate on. And then you drop this great nugget to say, you guys are going to be releasing free courses in relation to helping people understand the data better. Where can they find you online?

LinkedIn – Ronan Walsh

Website – www.digitaltrawler.com

You'll be able to find all the resources in there as well. They have a free Google, their free audit as well, just from an SEO perspective so they will give you feedback on your site at no charge. They have some plugins there as well that help you identify where your users are coming from. So, that's www.digitaltrawler.com and you'll be able to sign up for those courses there as well.

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Ronan Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Ronan shared that there's one that he finds himself going back to year after year, which is, “Actions make money.” And basically the more actions you take, the closer you are to getting to what you want to do and it's just really simple and it's really easy to action. So just break down your tasks and just get out there and get them done. And that would be for any entrepreneur, that's kind of it, of course, having a clear plan behind it really helps you identify which actions to take. But if you're taking the wrong action, you're better off learning about it sooner. So the sooner you take that action, the sooner you learn that that was the wrong one time and the sooner you're going to find the right one.

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

• Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself by Mike Michalowicz
• Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz
• The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz
• Fix This Next: Make the Vital Change That Will Level Up Your Business by Mike Michalowicz

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!

Jim Freeze is the Chief Marketing Officer, and he focuses on brand strategy and awareness, thought leadership, product marketing, demand generation, creative services and public and analyst relations. Jim brings more than 25 years of experience leading marketing teams at Fortune 1000 and other enterprise technology companies, a history which includes proven success in all aspects of marketing, sales and business development.

Most recently, Jim served as a Chief Marketing Officer at Aspect Software, where he was responsible for all aspects of global marketing, including product management, product marketing, branding, advertising, customer experience and demand generation programs.

Questions

• Could you just take a little time and share with us how it is that you got into what you are doing today, brand strategy, thought leadership, just tell us a little bit about that journey to where you are now.
• You were talking a little bit about Conversational A.I and this has been a very unconventional year no matter which country you’re living in the world, everybody's impacted by this pandemic. How do you see, just almost like a kind of prediction for 2021, if you could maybe share some insight with us, maybe based on data or just insights you've garnered from conversations that you've had with other people, Conversational A.I really flourishing in 2021 and do you see changing just the landscape of how customers interact with different businesses?
• Customers focus a lot more on the quality of service that they're getting than before. Would you agree? Do you find that as a result of the pandemic, there's just more emphasis on how people are being served, are they exercising empathy, are they exercising care, customers are just more aware of those softer skills in the interactions that they have, especially since this year.
• So we spoke a little bit about Artificial Intelligence. What are some other insights in terms of, like customer service trends that you've seen for 2020 that you think will definitely accelerate in 2021? And let's say a lot of our listeners are small business owners. They may not necessarily have the big budgets like some of the bigger organizations. Are there any trends that came on board that you think they could possibly take on a small scale that would make a difference in their customer experience?
• 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 share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago that still has a great impact on you or maybe a book that you read recently that still resonates with you.
• What's the one thing that's going on in your life right now? It can be something that you're really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• Do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge you’ll tend to revert to this quote – it can help to refocus you or get you back on track in terms of any form of backtracking to you may have been experiencing.

Highlights

Jim’s Journey

Jim shared that he had a little bit of a kind of an unusual journey to be honest. He finished his undergraduate and graduate work and graduated back in the late 80s with a Master’s Degree in Mathematics. And his first job out of college was actually as a computer programmer. It's kind of an interesting background. And he wasn't actually in marketing, but through a number of things that happened in his first position within the first 6 months, he was actually put in front of some customers for a number of reasons and the sales and marketing team thought he was quite good in front of customers. So they said, “You're wasting your time programming, come over and join us on the marketing side.” And that started the marketing journey. Along the way he picked up his Law Degree as well. So he actually practiced law for 2 years and 2 years was enough practicing law to convince him that he wanted to go back into to marketing.

So he came back to after his stint in law, came back to high tech marketing and has been doing it ever since. And it's been fascinating. The first company her worked for was a company that some listeners may have heard of called CompuServe, it was kind of a pioneering company that was one of the first companies to allow people to use their home computers to go online, a proprietary online service and then eventually became an internet service. And he has watched the advances in technology from 9.6 dial up modems to where we are today.

So it's been quite a journey, but one he has really enjoyed. And in particular, the last almost 9 years of his career have been spent in the customer service/customer experience base. As mentioned, the previous company he worked at, Aspect Software, was kind of traditional software company that focused on delivering ACDs and IVRs and workforce management software to enterprise.

As he was there for 6 years as the Chief Marketing Officer, loved the company and loved the space. And for the past 2 ½ years, he has been the Chief Marketing Officer of Interactions, and his attraction to interactions was understanding the customer experience space and understanding kind of legacy technology that is primarily still used today for delivering customer service and customer experience. He was really attracted to new contemporary solutions that were based on Artificial Intelligence that had the potential to dramatically change the customer experience in a very positive way and at the same time helping companies drive cost out of their businesses.

So, that's what really drew him to Interactions, Interactions as a leader and conversational A.I, a very unique solution that combines their Artificial Intelligence stack that is once again called Conversational A.I. with real time human understanding. So, it's humans and Artificial Intelligence working together and as a result of that, they deliver extraordinary human like conversations for their customers to their customers and help them dramatically improve customer experience and drive cost out of the business. So, it's a fun company where they're truly transforming the contact center and they're excited about it. They're a late stage startup, well over one hundred million dollars in revenue and growing, so it's a fun time to be in the customer service/customer experience space.

Conversational A.I Flourishing in 2021 and How Customer Interactions will be Impacted Across Different Businesses

Jim stated that this year has been profound in terms of changes that we're seeing. And across the tech landscape, what we've experienced because of the pandemic has really accelerated a lot of initiatives, specifically those that relate to Artificial Intelligence, that relate to automation.

And part of the reason for that and this is based on actual conversations they've had with customers of theirs, it's pretty clear that business continuity plans that companies had in place didn't envision what ended up happening as a result of the pandemic. And he'll give a couple of very specific examples.

So, they certainly have had customers who in the March timeframe of this year had to basically send employees to work from home and in some cases, their contact centers, that meant sending contact center agents at home. And they thought a lot of companies that were not prepared for that, their business continuity plan didn't envision something like that happening. Now, the assumption is, well, that we can just transition to home and set something up so they can work from home over their Internet connection. And in many cases, that worked but if you think about many companies rely on offshore agents, a lot of agents who are in Southeast Asia, and the assumption that agents in Southeast Asia have high speed internet access at home is a bad assumption.

And so, they saw a lot of companies struggle. They worked overtime, 24 hours a day, really trying to help some of their customers address some of the challenges that he thinks that they hadn't necessarily anticipated. And as a result of that, they think there's a new set of priorities that are coming out for enterprises that they think about customer experience and certainly one of those is increased use of technology to enable automation, but enable automation in a way that's not robotic but truly human and delivers a good customer experience. So there's no doubt in their mind, based on what they've seen with their customers, that there is a significant acceleration of Artificial Intelligence initiatives and there's very much a mandate now.

Emphasis and Importance of Quality of Service as a Result of the Pandemic

Me: Amazing. So, customer experience has definitely forced us to transform. And I personally think that as a customer myself since the pandemic, that customers focus a lot more on the quality of service that they're getting than before. Would you agree? How has it been where you are, where you live? Do you find that as a result of the pandemic, there's just more emphasis on how people are being served, are they exercising empathy, are they exercising care, customers are just more aware of those softer skills in the interactions that they have, especially since this year.

Jim shared that he thinks the emphasis and the importance of that has come to the forefront. And part of the reason for that is once again, when the pandemic hit, a lot of companies were not necessarily prepared for how they had to change. And as a result, many of these companies, their service levels relative to how they deliver customer service, really started to drop off. And, he saw that personally and in the companies he as a consumer do business with where in the past, if he had an issue, he could maybe get it resolved after waiting in a queue for 5 minutes. And, there were companies he was doing business with where he was in a queue for an hour waiting to talk to somebody to resolve an issue.

And he thinks those companies had good intentions to try to be able to resolve that. But they didn't have the infrastructure, the technology, and certainly not the people in place to address it. So this pandemic has demonstrated how fragile some of that infrastructure is. And so, there's a heavy emphasis on trying to fix that. And there's no doubt, especially in this environment that customer care, customer service, customer experience is becoming a huge differentiator for businesses. If you think about it, if you pick your favorite cell phone carrier, they use the same 5G, 4G technology, it's the same, iPhone or pick your favorite Android phone and there's not a lot of differentiation in terms of the actual service and the devices that are used. And you got to try to find a way to differentiate some other way and customer experience is a great way to do that.

Same thing with airlines, they all fly the same Boeing planes, they all say the same Airbus planes, the same seats, the same routes in many cases, they've got to find a way to differentiate. And you can do that with price but nobody wants to do a race to the bottom on price. So customer experience, delivering a terrific customer experience is a great way to differentiate. And it's more important now than ever.

Me: I totally, totally agree with you, Jim. And as you said, we're all competing. I think I was talking to an entrepreneur recently who said she was a little discouraged and she was saying to me, “Oh, but other people do the same thing I do.”And I said, “Well, yes, I think every industry has competition. There's no industry that you are in, whether public or private sector, that you don't have somebody else that's doing the exact same thing that you are doing.” I think the only thing that differentiates you is how it is that you deliver that service. Are you flexible? Are you available? Are you giving great value, depending on what value is to the customer that you're serving. And so, that to many people is different things, depending on what is important to me or to you. And, of course, convenience, people will pay for convenience. Over the weekend in Jamaica where I live, we have almost the equivalent of Costco that you guys have in the States. It's called Pricemart here in Jamaica.

And Jim, the line it took me almost an hour just to get from the main road just to get into the company's parking lot. I'm not talking in the building where the actual products are. Just to get parked on their compound, it took over an hour and this was on Sunday morning. And I had a brilliant idea. Okay, if I get up at 7:00 am in the morning and to get there by 7:30, I'm sure I can get in and out before 8:30 am. I didn't end up believing that to close to 10:00 am. And it was after I left, I was told by a few friends that they often deliver services now, they don't go there anymore because they just delivered to them, and it’s so much easier. Now that I'm thinking of it in hindsight I'm saying, “Boy, that would have been a much better experience than me sitting in traffic for over an hour, then going inside and joining these elongated lines that was just so frustrating.” So, convenience is something I know customers will pay for because time is money.

Jim agreed and stated that there's plenty of research from many different companies and research firms that suggest that consumers will absolutely pay a premium for good or great customer service because of the point you're making, which is, time is money and people don't want their time wasted. They want companies that they do business with to respect them and one of the ways you can respect them is to respect their time. He'll share a story that happened to him recently.

He was calling a company he does business with and it was on a Saturday and the service he was getting wasn't working. So he went through their frustrating menu tree and finally got into after about 5 minutes into it, into what he thought was going to be a queue to wait for somebody to come onto the phone and after basically 5 to 6 minutes of finally getting to the point where he thought he was going to go into a queue and wait longer, they come back with a message, “We value you as a customer. Please call us back on Monday at 9:00 am. He’s like, “No, you don't value me as a customer; you just wasted 6 minutes of my time. You could have told me that from the beginning.” And as a consumer, he’s like; “Do I really want to do business with this company?” So it's he couldn't agree with Yanique more.

Insight In Terms of Customer Service Trends to Accelerate in 2021

Jim stated that one certainly they just hit on, which is that differentiation; customer service is a great way to differentiate. Second, the enabling self-service for customers. And there are lots of different kinds of technologies that can help with that. He thinks the assumption that some companies have certainly a lot of some larger companies have this assumption, but smaller ones as well, is that when there is a contact from a consumer that consumer necessarily wants to speak to a human.

And that's actually not true, at least from his experience, it's not true. What consumers really want is to be able to resolve their issue; they want quick and effortless answers to questions. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go through a human to do that. So if you can enable self-service in a way that's effortless and quick, that will lead to really satisfied customers, if you make it available 24 by 7 on a channel of choice, that also will really help, having it not be robotic but truly conversational and just having it personalized.

A lot of companies, if you call in with your mobile phone and they have that number or your landline, if they know who you are, why go through an authentication if you can say, yeah, we know who it is and personalize the experience of that. So, he thinks that one of the trends we're seeing is that companies are starting large and small alike questioning really what their customers want and not necessarily just assuming they know, but questioning it and having a good understanding.

He'll give a great example based on their experience, it's very common for them to go in and displace at their customers legacy technology. A legacy technology would be something like an IVR, when you call in, it says press 1 for this, press 2 for that or you can say things like billing. It tells you how you're allowed to behave. And it's a terrible customer experience and customers don't like it, it's very frustrating but one of the things they've seen with a number of customers they've dealt with is that they assume that they know the 4 or 5 reasons that customer are calling them.

So, they'll present those 4 or 5 options in a menu, 1 for billing, 2 for technical support, or whatever it is. So, they assume they know. And one of the things that they've found is that and they counsel their clients to do this is take a step back and say, what are your customers really trying to solve here?

And sometimes they'll do something where they call an intent study where they'll inject themselves. And instead of saying you can press 1 or 2; they’ll do this brief, intense study where they say instead of all that, they just say, “How may I help you?”

 And the consumer tells you and they do that over the course of about a short period of time, you come back and you realize actually your customers are calling 4 different reasons than you thought they were. So he thinks it's really important that companies focus on understanding why their customers are calling them. And as a consequence of that, you can enable much better automation and self-service that ultimately delivers a much better customer experience.

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

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Jim that that's a tough one. He doesn't necessarily know that there's just one single site, but he thinks it's a combination of news sites, research, financial and analysis tools that kind of allow him to gain customer insight, competitive analysis and keep himself current on technology. So, he has some go to sites.

They as a business, they subscribe to some research from analyst firms, he finds that very helpful. Find some on his own and there are certain news sites that he also finds really helpful. So it's tough for him to say one site because he thinks there's a combination and that's the beauty of the web, you don't actually have to rely on a single site, but he has some go to sites that and research and analysis that he finds really helpful in keeping him current and helping him better understand kind of what's happening in the market.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Jim

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Jim shared that a year ago, he might have answered this differently, but he'll tell you what which kind of resonated with him recently and he did read this probably, 8, 9, 10 years ago. There's a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, who's a presidential historian, and she wrote a book called No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. And it was about kind of the 1930s through the 1940s through basically the Roosevelt administration in the United States. And it was an extraordinary time that the country was going through, a depression, trying to come out of that depression and then rolling into World War II.

And the reason he thinks that book was so impactful for him was thinking about this notion, he put together this idea of Roosevelt, of a team of rivals, where he realized that he needed people who had a different perspective than he did to navigate through an extraordinary time. And part of the reason that book really is resonating with him so much today is because of what they've all been through since March with this pandemic. The world is so different than it was in February, just 8, 9, 10 months ago; it is a very different world. And he thinks of how we could all benefit from that notion of coming together and focusing on tackling very large issues, not in a partisan way, but in a kind of a way that brings us together. So that book has been on his mind recently. And he thought the current circumstances remind me of that.

What Jim is Really Excited About Now!

 Jim shared that it relates to their company, but it's another result of the pandemic. He'll tell a little story, which is kind of interesting. They at Interactions, they were in February, March, about to sign a new 11 year lease on a brand new corporate headquarters, it was like 55,000, 56000 square feet.

They were going to spend millions of dollars in renovating and it was a dedicated building. Early March hit and the pandemic came and they started working from home and they were literally within a week of signing the agreements and the lease for that towards the end of March. And they took a step back and they said, “What are we doing? We've been working at home for 3 weeks now and everything's working great. Maybe we can learn something from the current circumstances.”

So they went from in the course of about 6 weeks from about to sign a new lease, 11 year lease and spend millions, millions of dollars on a renovation to making a decision to become a full time work from home company. And when they've seen other companies do that as well and talk about lots of companies are doing that and very profound in for them as employees, for him personally, that meant that he had flexibility to work from wherever he wanted.

They were headquartered in the Boston area and he lived in Boston and but he has a second home in South Florida. And so right after Thanksgiving, he has moved to South Florida and he’s talking to Yanique from South Florida right now.

And this is his new home and it's exciting for him because he has tremendous personal flexibility now that he didn't necessarily have before. They've seen that with a number of their employees, it's impacted their business in that they were recruiting for new employees and they're hiring right now. So, it's another example of how the pandemic has accelerated decision making and thinking among companies and how it impacts individuals personally, he’s super excited about that. He’s really excited about the fact that he can live in a place where he didn't think he'd be living for another 5 or 6, 7 years. So, there are some benefits that are coming out of what we've all been through.

Me: Definitely. It's so interesting that that's what you shared, because I recorded a solo podcast last night, Christmas Edition that we want to release hopefully for tomorrow. And in doing my research, it said that according to a PWC report, it said 82% of office workers would prefer to continue working remotely, at least part of the time, even after COVID-19 has subsided. And a whopping 73% of executives say working remotely has been a success. Here in Jamaica, there's a client I have and one of their business lines is pensions and their entire pensions department has moved to work from home and manager for that department has said that she doesn't think they're actually going to go back to in office because she's actually seen the team be more productive since they've been working from home and they've saved so much.

Jim stated that well, it's interesting, they obviously spent a lot of money on a facility and they do still have a facility that they'll meet occasionally face to face, but it's been scaled back dramatically. So, if somebody is in town on business, they can go work in the office if they want or if they want to have a department meeting, they can do that. But to the point about productivity, he used to drive to the office in Boston; it was an hour drive from, to work. And then based on what traffic was coming home, another hour, typically an hour and 15 minutes, that's over two hours of his day that now he can dedicate to work as opposed to being behind the wheel of a car. There are so many more productive things to be doing than sitting behind the wheel of a car.

The impacts of this are pretty profound. And it's not just obviously in the U.S., it's everywhere, the impacts are profound. What does this mean for the commercial real estate market? Office space? He thinks a lot of large towers or office spaces now are having to rethink, what are we going to do with this space? There may not be that much demand for it. We're all using less gas because we're not going as many places; we're changing everything about our lives. And it has impacts all the way down the supply chain. It creates opportunity for many and in some it’s forcing businesses to change and adapt. So, it's a scary and exciting time.

Me: Yeah, it is so true, because even as you mentioned, in terms of traveling, you're spending less on gas, as you said, one person maybe benefiting in one area, but then the persons who benefit from certain amount of gas sales, they are definitely not benefiting as much because people's cars are clearly parked more than they would be driving on the road back and forth. So, yeah, there are definitely advantages and disadvantages.

Jim stated that hopefully when we get back to 6 months from now, hopefully, people across the world have been vaccinated and this thing by virtue of herd immunity goes away. But he thinks we're never going back to life the way it was, it's different, it's going to stay that way.

Me: I was listening to a podcast yesterday, funny enough, and the lady said something. I thought it was so hilarious. She said we're never going to go to a birthday party again and you're going to see a bowl full of MnM’s, as in, for kids to dip their hands in, for parents dip their hands in, so everybody's not going to start buying the packaged Eminem’s or anything that you would have shared communally, you're now going to ensure that each person has their own individual packet and all of that was born out of COVID. I just think certain things will change for the long term. People are going to be so much more conscious of just touching and sharing in terms of different things. And they won't be as open to just doing things that we would have taken for granted before.

Jim stated that he was thinking about this the other day. He hasn't shaken somebody's hand since mid-March. He stated he is a business executive and he meets people and nobody does that anymore. And he kind of wonder if we're going to go back to that or if we're going to adopt much of what's done in Asian cultures, which is bowing, which is kind of interesting, maybe that's what we all do. So, everything is changing. And some people hate change, he loves change. He thinks change is exciting and so he tries to embrace it when it happens. But the world is going to change.

Where Can We Find Jim Online

LinkedIn – James Freeze

Website – www.interactions.com

 Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Jim Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that helps him to refocus, Jim share that he does and talk about it being very pertinent to the current days. It’s from Maya Angelou; she is a wonderful writer and poet. And she has an expression that he has used a number of times over the course of the past few months and it is kind of instructive to him personally and she said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And it’s a constant reminder to him especially in times of adversity for the people he deals with, he kind of want to leave them with an impression about he makes them feel. It’s so instructive and he thinks it’s a very powerful statement.

Me: That’s actually one of our favorite quotes for Navigating the Customer Experience and one of my personal favourites as well. And it’s so true Jim, you being in the technology and data side of customer experience in terms of Artificial Intelligence, I am sure at the end of the day, even though technology is there to assist us in delivering or solving our problems for our customers, at the end of the day, people still want to be treated well, they want to feel good after they have done business with your company. And that feeling can’t come if you’re not being responsive, if you’re not fixing the problem, if you’re not giving them what it is that they are seeking in that moment, they are not going to want to spread good news about you and your company. And so, it’s really about how you make people feel, their emotional needs.

Jim agreed and shared that just being honest with people and being understanding and being transparent and just being cognizant of how somebody feels when they walk away. They may not even get the answer that they want but if you’ve treated them respectfully and you’ve been honest, people will remember that even though they didn’t get the answers. He just thinks especially in our current times, it’s really important and it’s something he thinks about a lot in terms of the way he interact with others as well.

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Links

• No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience

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Claire Boscq Scott is a wonderful entrepreneur and she is a mystery shopping and Customer Service specialist. Claire lives to inspire global businesses to thrive by delivering exceptional customer experiences in measuring and improving employees’ performances.

No. 5 Top 30 Global Customer Service Guru, UK Top 10 CX Influencer and CX Thought Leader 2020, with three decades of expertise in mystery shopping and customer service, Claire, AKA The Busy Queen Bee, is an authority in the Customer Experience industry. She brings a more holistic and comprehensive approach to employee and customer experience.

She is a Keynote Speaker, Consultant & trainer specializing in retail and hospitality. Author of 3 books, Thrive with the Hive, Thriving by Caring and launched in September 2020, No 1 Amazon Best Seller and Hot New Release in customer service; The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper. Her online Learning and Development platform BQB CX Institute offers a wide range of online and onsite training and has developed her Caring Service Culture Leadership Programme a game changer for many organizations who want to become truly customer centric.

Questions

• Could you share a little bit about your journey for us? I know that I read your bio and it was just amazingly fantastic. We like to hear from our guests, a little bit about their journey, how it is that you got into what you're doing today, into mystery shopping, into being a customer experience thought leader, a little about how you got to where you are today.
• You have quite a few books as it relates to customer experience and mystery shopping as we read when we're reading your bio. But your most recent book that you published earlier this year right at the onset of COVID is The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper. So could you tell us a little bit about that book? Who is it for? And also, I think it's important to also if you could share with us, persons think mystery shopping is only for companies that are big, large organizations. What is your idea on that? Do you think everybody needs to do mystery shopping? And can it be done on a small scale versus a large scale? And how do you approach it?
• How have you seen customer experience evolve or not evolve? I've seen that and I think it's gotten worse as a result of the pandemic. I think customers are paying more attention to how they're being served, especially how they're being treated when they enter your establishment, and the pandemic has brought that more to the forefront. Of course, I know it can be more cultural in some countries or in some regions. What has it been like in your areas?
• Could you share with us maybe 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?
• Could you share with us 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 something you're working on to develop 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 keep you focused or just get you back on track if you feel like you are getting derailed.

Highlights

Claire’s Journey

Claire mentioned that the similar background as Yanique. Her dad had a restaurant, so she kind of grew up in that environment and when you're in that environment, you either love it or hate it, so she loves that. She loves the interaction with customers. She loves seeing people having fun. And so she did her catering school, hotel and service management hospitality in Nice, down the south of France. And so she’s French originally.

And then she knew she had to speak English. She had to be able to speak better English if she wanted to do something with her life. So, she made it a mission to try to find a job somewhere she could speak English. And she found this little tiny island right across the Somalo between France and England, which is called Jersey. And that was her very first time in Jersey when she was just 18 years old, young girl, just coming out of catering school. And so, she did a few seasons. She was doing the ski resort seasons in France and then Jersey in the summer. And then she went and work at Disney World in Florida.

So that was 25 years ago, that was her very first serious approach on customer experience and what truly the word means about customer experience and employee experience. And anybody who's worked out there, 25 years ago seems like it was a couple of months ago. They had such an incredible time in terms of the training and terms of the environment, in terms of everything that is done in the organization, it really is to put the customers in the middle of everything that they do. So when she came back from America after a year working there, she knew she wanted to continue in that path. And so she continued in hotels and started managing hotels. And she moved back to Jersey on this little island when she first came when she was 18 to actually run the hotel, she went there to be a little receptionist a few years before, which was interesting.

So very much in the receiving end of the service industry, very much in the receiving end in trying to help their customers and really kind of delivering those great service. And about 11 years ago, she used to work in a hotel which was a UK group, and they had mystery guest and those guests had to be flown over from the UK to actually be able to perform mystery guests.

And she was thinking, “Well, surely we should be able to do that locally.” and she realized that at the time there was no one on their little island which was doing the mystery shopping, so the measurement of customer experience. And that's all it all started really, a little idea thinking, “Well, perhaps I could do that.” And so, she handed her notice in, she sold her house, she got divorced and she started her own business and that was it. Well, if you're going to do it, you may as well do everything at once.

The core of the business was measuring the customer satisfaction and the employee performances, of course. And as you do the measurement and as you help the companies, your clients to analyze results, you realize there's a lot of gaps in the businesses. So you realize that really they haven't got some great standard, they don't really understand what the customer experience is about or the customer journey. They have no employee experience mapping in their toolbox. They’re training the staff, but they're not really training them regularly or consistently or with the right materials. So, there's a lot of work needed to be done before you could actually measure. And so, over the years, from really doing the mystery shopping, which is almost the last part of it, she started helping the businesses throughout the whole employee and customer strategy. 

Who is Mystery Shopping Really For?

Can It Be Done on a Small Scale vs. Large Scale?

Claire agreed and stated that she thinks that's mystery shopping is probably one of the easiest way and quickest way to really realize where you are at this moment in time is in terms of your performances in your business.

You could pull CX strategy, it could take four months, six months before you start embedding things and implementing trainings and new strategies and you start seeing some changes. With mystery shopping, it's a measurement, so you're creating a questionnaire where you want to really see what the objectives of these are about, were you're trying to achieve. And then you're sending out mystery shoppers, they're answering the questions and there you go. 

Within 48 hours, really, you can have some results and you can start being able to improve areas, celebrating success of course, you always want to celebrate success, but improving areas which are potentially being identified as needed a little bit of TLC.

So, mystery shopping, yes, very much. For a very long time, it's been seen as a large organization and possibly also bricks and mortar, so retail industry rather than anyone else. Potentially, yes, hospitality as well, you got the hotel inspectors kind of things, but it has very, very much grew, and especially with this year a huge boom into different communications, because suddenly we were not face to face.

Suddenly we were all online, suddenly we were using WhatsApp, suddenly we were using some new communications channels that we never had before or very, very small amount of people were.

So it really started to think, “Well, actually, well, if we are communicating with our customers this way, we also need to measure this way. So, your website needs to be looked at, when is the last time you've actually read your website? When is the last time you've actually pressed on the buttons of your website to see what is working, what isn't working? And how long does it take for an inquiry to come to you? How do you answer to the customers? What are the words you are using?

And so, all those things which are the journey mapping and when we talk about journey mapping, whether it's online, on the phone or face to face, it's exactly the same. And whether you’re soloproneur or a large organization, you need to know what is happening in your business and how you're delivering the services or the promise of your services. How is it fulfilled?

So there are a lot of new areas, which is a reason why she has published a book as well. Claire stated that she guess Yanique has got quite a few stories as well in her little handbag of good service, bad service, those kinds of things.

So, she has had this book, she has been keeping stories of mystery shoppers been incredible over the years, so she thought, isn't it just a perfect opportunity that we have the pandemic and businesses are looking at what they're doing and how they're doing it, to give some ideas on what is good, what doesn't look good, what you should be doing and what you shouldn't be doing.

So, The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper kind of says it all on the title. They are true stories from mystery shoppers, some stories were from people who had given her some stories of good service and some stories are the bad stories and also the exceptional stories, because she believes positive breeds positive.

So, it show things are going well, you can show things where they've done an amazing job here, give people the ideas and thinking, “Oh, well, if they can do it, I can do it, too.” So, that's why The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper was published and very, very quickly it was in her head. She’s seen, she’s written, she’s seen herself on stage doing that keynote and talking about it and doing that. She even thinks it should be a great series.

So, you learn by stories better because people can relate and use that as well on your website, we connect on an emotional level. And so, if you're connecting with customers, whether it's a good emotions or whether it's bad emotions, your customers will remember you for sure.

Me: So, basically, to sum up what you've said, you're basically saying that mystery shopping is something that all organizations should do. And even if you do it on a small scale, just to get an idea of what is happening, because I find a lot of executives are totally disconnected from what's happening on the ground with their actual customers, especially if they don't make it an intentional act of theirs to interface as a customer themselves, whether to call the business as you said, or visit the website and click on a few buttons or even shop with the business, go in as a regular customer to a branch that you probably would have never visited before to have that experience yourself, because then you'll understand why your customers complain, what are some of the pain points they're having and where are the opportunities that exist that could be improved? Maybe some are low hanging fruit things that you could change effective immediately and so may require a little bit more investment and thought.

Claire agreed and shared that one thing that she has done as well during the pandemic, obviously with no face to face, she has created an online course on how to set up a mystery shopping program because she has seen a lot of clients locally, smaller businesses who they had conversation with and said, “Clair, I'd love to do it, but I can't afford your pricing. I can't afford to get an organization to do it for me.”

And so they go off and then they put a little questionnaire together, they’ll ask their friend and family to do it. And then it comes back with not very good responses, they come back with moans rather than objective responses. And so they think, “Oh, well, that thing doesn't work.” And then they let it go and they're not getting the right information.

So, she put that program together to actually help the smaller organization, so they can do it right and they can follow the steps. She gave templates of a mystery shopping questionnaire, she shows them how they should train their friends and family if they're going to use friend and family, there's a little video on how to be a mystery shopper. And so those kinds of things are important, you need to know what is going on in your organization otherwise, how do you manage it? It's an important part of that customer experience strategy. Absolutely.

How Has Customer Experience Evolved or Not Evolved as a Result of the Pandemic?

Claire shared that she thinks the first thing that it has brought to the company; they straight away got into a fire fighting mode where everything gets dropped off. So, for her, she lost all her clients in three days and it was quite remarkable and quite a shock in thinking, actually. Is it really what you should be doing?

When there's something where people are going to need more help and support, should you be letting go all the training, should you be letting go all the exercises and the help, the support you're giving so you can actually give even better customer service during a pandemic? But, you can understand people, and she thinks that's the biggest problem in a kind of a bigger challenge is really, it's that CX or EX employee experience and customer experience isn't seen as a benefit, but as a cost.

So, a company will stop that because they see it as a cost rather than seeing it, wow, our employees are going to need more support, they need more training on how to handle those customers who are scared, how to handle customers who are going to be shouting, how can we give them some emotional intelligence training? How can we teach them a bit of resilience? How can we teach them a bit of mindfulness so they can actually feel better in themselves?

So, there are a lot of things that really could be done and should have been done and some companies have been absolutely incredible by the way they've turned things up and certainly have moved from the customer experience being in the forefront to the employee experience coming at the forefront. And that for her is an important part of it, because if we have no employees, if the employees aren’t feeling well, if they're not happy, if they're not content, if they don't feel valued and cared for, they won't care for your customers.

So businesses need to bring more care into what they do, they really do need to bring more care into the organization. And she always talked about the Yin and Yang so she always has a bit of a holistic approach to CX. And the Yang energy, it's not, “Let's do it. Let's go, let's go, let's go. More figures, more sales, more this, more that.” Whereas, we need to bring a little bit of that Yang energy where we actually pause and we actually ask our employee how they feeling today, we go and see our customers and we shake their hands and we remember their names and we connect with them on an emotional level. And that's really the difference between the Yin energy and not caring energy and that Yang energy, which is all that pandemic scarcity and anxiety, then everybody's trying to fire fight against.

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

When asked about an online resource that she can’t live without, Claire shared that her personal business, she uses OneNote, which is part of Microsoft's 365. And she has been using it for quite a few years now. And she walks a lot in the morning, she goes for almost 45 minutes, 50 minutes walk in the morning so she can make some notes, she can copy paste, and she can write a speech. OneNote has been something really, really incredible. She uses it absolutely every day. And the last few months, obviously with a pandemic as well, she has been doing a lot of videos and a lot of video recording and she has been using a software called Camtasia.

So, she’s going to send Yanique The Queen Bee Christmas message that she just recorded and then you'll see how she actually have done with that on Camtasia. And she’s really getting the hang of it and thinks videos are very, very powerful way to get ourselves more visible, more credible, more likeable, people relate to you when they see you and you're able to share message. And it's that visual and you can also add a bit of music and all that kind of thing. So, there's a real something about video that makes it quite powerful.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Claire

When asked about books that have had the biggest impact, Claire shared that the obviously The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper, pull that one in. Claire shared that she is a Feng Shui practitioner. So for her, just the same for her, but she brings Feng Shui into the environment of their clients. So, again, the environment will affect where people perform, if you feel good in your environment, you will deliver great, amazing service. If it's dark, if there are no colours, if it's cluttered everywhere, no one's going to perform the way they should be.

So, she discovered Feng Shui probably about 10 years ago now. And one of the books that really got her going was Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life: How to Use Feng Shui to Get Love, Money, Respect, and Happiness by Karen Rauch Carter. And it was very simple, so it was more of a European Weil Feng Shui. And then she went on, she had got trained with Davina McKale, who is Feng Shui Master. And so she has developed quite a lot of the Feng Shui in her leadership program. When she does a big program with organization, they will look at the culture, they will look at the environment, they will look at people and they will look at a customer. So those are the four areas where she really, really focuses when they do a big program on CX. So it's a great book to read. So, started with the Feng Shui, that's a really simple and really easy way to get started.

What Claire is Really Excited About Now!

Claire shared that the idea that The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper was kind of a catalyst to start for her, a repositioning in terms of her keynote speaking, in terms of her consultancy, because there's quite a lot of CX experts out there and everybody seems to be doing CX at the moment, which is great. It's really good because you kind of bring a whole new forces and a whole new energy in terms of people wanting to help.

But she really wanted to reposition the mystery shopping as the key part of what she does. So her new keynote is can you afford to be clueless about your customer service? So, she’s doing a new keynote with the book, she’s preparing next year, possibly doing a audible book with a new story, more stories. And the idea is also to share the book, translate it in different countries and actually add more stories with the different countries that they talk to. So, there are a few things that are in the pipeline that she’s got for next year.

Where Can We Find Claire Online

Instagram – @claireboscqscott

Twitter - @cbsbusyqueenbee

LinkedIn – Claire Boscq-Scott

Facebook - ClaireBoscqScott

Website – www.busyqueenbee.com

 Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Claire Uses

When asked about a quote or saying that helps her to keep focus, Claire shared her kind of strapline is bringing more care into what you do, bringing more care into your employees, your environment and your customers, and you will have a thriving business and she thinks that's an important part. We do get busy, on the busy, busy side of it but if that pandemic has showed us something is, if we don't care for our employees, well, they're never going to perform, they're going to be working remotely and not feeling any love from anybody. And so it’s really important that we really care for our environment, for our people, and then our customers.

Me: It’s funny you mentioned that because when I started this business, the vision for the company is “To Create a More Caring World” but the reason why I came up with that tagline is, when I was a little girl, I used to watch this cartoon on Disney Channel called the Care Bears and they all have these little different care symbols on their tummies and when they shine their light on everybody, it transforms them into being more kind or more generous. And that was my vision for when I started business that at the end of the day, whatever I’m doing with a business whether it’s through market research, mystery shopping, customer service training, leadership training, it all should be with the mindset that I’m trying “To Create a More Caring World” like a care bear. So, it’s really nice to know that we may not have thought of it from the same perspective, but we definitely have the same goal in mind.

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 Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper: True Customer Service Stories through the eyes of a Secret Shopper: The Good, The Bad and The Exceptional by Claire Boscq-Scott
• Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life: How to Use Feng Shui to Get Love, Money, Respect, and Happiness by Karen Rauch Carter

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!

Welcome to Navigating the Customer Experience Christmas Edition

Thank you so much for supporting our podcast over the past year. We have had so many fantastic guests even in this oh so unconventional year.

Even though the world has been overwhelmed with a pandemic and there have been a bunch of negative things occurring - there have also been lots of wonderful opportunities that many people have benefited from.

According to PWC, 82% of office workers would prefer to continue working remotely, at least part of the time, even after Covid-19 has subsided. And a whopping 73% of executives say working remotely has been a success. 

Every business small, medium and large has been forced to transform how they approach business. When I think about all the companies I have been interacting with since the pandemic I believe this new way of wearing a mask, sanitizing our hands and the installations of plexi glass will be something that will never go away.

Many companies have to be putting their employees and customers above profits in order to ensure the safety and protection of all stakeholders. If you have not yet started doubling down on your customer experience - focusing on convenience and how can you can make the life of your customers easier. Now is the time!

eCommerce and touchless customer experiences are what most customers have gotten used to since the pandemic and it is highly likely they will never go back to what it was before. It is also important to note that many trends that have been created since COVID will become standard expectations - such as delivery, curbside pick up, orders being placed by phone. 

While it is inevitable that commerce will partially shift back to brick and mortar once things go back to “normal,” there is now a massive new pool of consumers that are comfortable shopping online, and the volume of e-commerce and digital inquiries is expected to continue. Consumers that perhaps would walk into a store to ask a question, or  call a customer service number for assistance, now may find it more convenient to click on a chat widget or read an FAQ article while they browse your site online. In fact, according to recent consumer research, live chat continues to grow in popularity with consumers, now ranking as the second most popular channel to get customer service problems solved. Incorporating digital-first support strategies into the overall online customer experience will make a huge difference when it comes to brand equity and loyalty for 2021 and beyond. 

Many customers are getting smarter - they are learning about fantastic services from other great companies like the Amazons, Zappos and so many more. Our customers are willing to pay more for a convenient experience

I am sure many of our listeners can remember the comedy “Cheers” and their theme song “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” All customers want to do business with companies that remember them, remember their preferences and take time to understand them.

So as we close the chapter for 2020, let’s think about a few things that we should consider doing consistently for 2021 to ensure that we dominate our customer’s experience

1. Exercise Empathy with your employees and your customers - be mindful of the many challenges that your customers have been facing during this pandemic and exercise as much flexibility where possible. According to a Covid-19 research, CX teams reported that customers valued empathetic service above all other customer service attributes during the pandemic. Consumers want to be treated like a valued customer, with real thoughts, emotions, feedback and values
2. Have multiple platforms and outlets that your customers can reach you through and ensure these platforms are being monitored consistently. Organizations should look for technology that allows for collaboration between remote team members, providing agents with the freedom to move between channels, and brings all the data about a customer into one place to help deliver a more efficient and personalized experience
3. Practice gratitude and appreciation with all your stakeholders - managers, employees, customers and vendors. Always remember that as human beings we still have the ability to choose who we want to do business with. Your customers will remain loyal to companies that make them feel valued and appreciated. Your business will thrive and flourish abundantly in 2021 and beyond if you provide an experience for your customers that makes them feel like they are not just a transaction rather a key partner that you value and appreciate.

Think about all these great insights that I have shared and start 2021 ready to satisfy and exceed your customer’s emotional and intellectual needs.

My book the ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience is a great gift to give to a client, colleague, employee or even a friend. 

Here is a snippet of one of the reviews from Amazon

Just finished my second run through of The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience - It is really an Operational Manual more than just a guide for an employee, even the business owner. I appreciate the hands-on approach to enhancing the customer experience. Very useful and timely as we all seek to overcome this pandemic. Great resources!!! I recommend this jewel to all levels of management.

The book is available on Amazon in Paperback and eBook and if you reside in Jamaica, it is available at Fontana on Waterloo Road, Barbican and Montego Bay

Wishing all of you fantastic listeners of Navigating the Customer Experience - a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

As a quick reminder, please feel free to join our FB group Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @navigatingcx. Until next time, I’m your host Yanique Grant.

Dr. Jackie Noelke Show Notes

Dr. Jackie Noelke is an online entrepreneur and digital marketing strategist who helps entrepreneurs and naturopathic doctors start, grow, and scale their online courses, services, and memberships so they can have the freedom they crave. She's also the founder and CEO of Grateful Ads Co. who helps brands grow their influence, define their voice, and scale their offers through innovative digital ads and sales funnels.

Questions

• Could you share with us a little bit about your history, how you got into what you're doing today and just a little bit about your journey to where you are now?
• In light of COVID, a lot of businesses have had to pivot and go online whether they're let's say for example, they're selling physical items or maybe they're more of a service oriented type of business. How do you balance all of that? How do you know which new business lines you should take up? How do you know which platform is best for your audience, whether it be Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn? As a marketing strategy, how could you help our audience to get a clearer view of where they should go?
• Now, COVID has also caused people to be very anxious. And as a result of that, as an entrepreneur, there is no safety net, you're not working for company, although to some extent, when you work with an organization, you don't necessarily have a safety net, especially in this economic environment. So if you're suffering from anxiety, what are some things that you would suggest as an entrepreneur, if you're experiencing these kinds of emotions to help yourself really overcome it and just be focused on what is important?
• Can you share with us how do you stay motivated everyday?
• Can you share with us maybe 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 the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a long time ago, or maybe a book that you read recently that really has impacted 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'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to keep you focused and get you back on track?

Highlights

Dr. Jackie’s Journey

Dr. Jackie shared that she’s not an overnight success, she actually caught the entrepreneur bus about 11 years ago when she was getting her master's in education and she decided she wanted to start up a private school and that's when she first kind of dip her toes into entrepreneurship. She was just kind of toying with the idea and she put up a website, she actually got a lot of people interested in this school, people were wanting to give her money, all this kind of stuff, which is awesome. And then she pivoted a little bit, they wanted to make a move so that didn't work out. But that kind of is what got her started online because she was playing around with the website, all that kind of stuff, she loved it. And then, she was teaching at the time and then a few years later she started to get really bad anxiety.

And she actually was diagnosed with agoraphobia, which a lot of people think of agoraphobia as you won't leave your house. But actually what the doctor just told her was that it's when you're looking for exits all the time, you always have an escape route wherever you are.

And so, that led her because honestly, it was getting hard for her to even go to work as a teacher, that led her super into personal development. And so, she started her own personal development company at that time to help others go through the journey that she was going through simultaneously and she was very transparent about that. And through that she busted through, she’s now completely anxiety free, there's a lot, she was going to a doctor and stuff, there's a lot more involved in that. But she was also getting my doctorate in leadership and she really fell in love with the business side of what she was doing in the personal development space and also what she was learning in my doctorate.

So, she switched gears, did a pivot like a lot of entrepreneurs do. And since her husband was in naturopathic medical school, she decided to start a marketing membership for naturopathic doctors, and that went well, she still has that. And then through that, she fell in love with digital advertising, so she invested thousands and thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours at learning Facebook and Instagram ads and that's how she ended up co-founding an ad agency. And then just last week to add onto that, they also launched an e-commerce store called The SheEO Store for women entrepreneurs that has all kinds of swag for entrepreneurs, office decor, even some digital downloads, all that stuff. So it's a bit of lengthy road but with lots of different parts, but, thinks it's important for other people that are in the entrepreneur space to know that that happens a lot and a lot of times it's not just overnight success, there's a long journey to get there.

Knowing the Best Platform for Your Audience

Me: It says here that you are a marketing expert specifically with Facebook and Instagram ads and building sales funnels. Let's say especially in light of COVID, a lot of businesses have had to pivot and go online whether they're let's say for example, they're selling physical items or maybe they're more of a service oriented type of business. I know a lot of people are also looking into doing online courses and more people are doing webinars and then sometimes you have people who do paid webinars versus free webinars. How do you balance all of that? How do you know which new business lines you should take up? How do you know which platform is best for your audience, whether it be Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn? As a marketing strategist, how could you help our audience to get a clearer view of where they should go?

Dr. Jackie shared that what she loves about Facebook and Instagram is there's no other platform has the ability to target as specifically as they do on Facebook and Instagram. So, they're able to get very specific with the people they want to see the ads and now, since a lot of people have had to make that pivot, there's that missing face-to-face interaction a lot of times. So instead of that, in lieu of that, you can use Facebook marketing and paid advertising to nurture your customers. So, it doesn't always have to be something that's obviously a pushed to sale, you can use nurturing content and these types of ads, they're actually very cheap, to stay on the top of mind of your customers and build those relationships digitally because you could just simply do that, instead of having people walk into your physical store.

Me: So, when you say nurturing content, let me give you an example. Let's say for example, I am an event planner and let's say before COVID, my event planning business focused primarily on destination weddings. And so in light of COVID with people not traveling as much, how is it that I would be able to provide nurturing ads and stay top of mind to my ideal customer using Facebook and Instagram, What would a nurturing ad look like?

Dr. Jackie stated that she loves that question. So, video ads do really well. So this is something like you might use, kind of the same kind of content you might use in your organic marketing, where you're teaching something super quick, like in a three minute or less video, but that is very beneficial.

So, for your audience, this could be some part of the wedding planning process. This could be teaching them the things that they want to avoid when planning their wedding. This could be the questions that you get asked a lot and you see the issues that come up when you're planning weddings with these people, that's great content for this nurturing content. And yes, you're in a position where obviously, because of COVID people are doing their events, they're traveling less, all that kind of thing, but they're going to get back to that, it's not over. They're going to get back to that.

So, if they've been seeing your content as they're going through this engagement process and starting to think, “Okay, like, what am I going to do? What is this going to look like for me?” you're popping up.

And what's beautiful about this as well is we can start retargeting based on the amount of time they've watched your video. If they've watched your video, they normally do 25, 75 and 90%.

So, obviously they know people are engaged at different levels. If they don't watch up to 25, they normally don't use that as a retargeting and put them into a quote unquote, warm audience, meaning they're familiar with you.

If they've watched the 25%, they might send them another video, that's the next step or the another thing that is complimentary to what you are teaching on that first video and so on and so on.

So, it nurtures just like you might in a nurture sequence through email, you can do the same with paid advertising only with paid advertising, with email open rates you only get about 20%, with paid advertising, you're going to get much higher, much more people actually viewing that content.

Suggestions for Overcoming Anxiety as an Entrepreneur

Me: All right, sounds good. So, those are some practical examples that as I said, listeners would want to capture that kind of information so they know exactly how to navigate. Now, COVID has also caused people to be very anxious. And as a result of that, as an entrepreneur, there is no safety net, you're not working for a company, although to some extent, when you work with an organization, you don't necessarily have a safety net, especially in this economic environment.

But it's even more so fragile for you as an entrepreneur because you dictate your income, if you don't prospect, if you don't as you say, put out that content, if you don't try to find ways to get to the customer, then the customer won’t know about you and you won't get any business.

So if you're suffering from anxiety, you're like, “Well, other people are doing the same thing I'm doing. Why should I continue? I feel like I'm not getting the results I should be getting based on the effort I'm putting out.”

 What are some things that you would suggest as an entrepreneur, if you're experiencing these kinds of emotions to help yourself really overcome it and just be focused on what is important?

Dr. Jackie shared that this has been a wild year, obviously for everyone, brought out anxieties for everyone, so many people have had to pivot, and she gets that that can be extremely scary and uneasy. She thinks that one of the things of being a successful entrepreneur is the ability to pivot, the ability to seek opportunities within any kind of situation.

So what opportunities, she thinks if you switch and like flip the script on whatever is going on in your business, what opportunities are actually present right now that might not have been, for example, now we have way more people with their online, like we have way more people online and way more people on Facebook, Instagram, all the social everyday.

So can you use that opportunity to get the word out about your business to people that might not have seen it otherwise when you had your physical store, if that's the case.

She thinks that just knowing that you're not in this alone, like so many people are going through this, and it will pass, this too shall pass.

So it will pass, we're going to get through this as the human race. And she thinks just being really open to opportunities that you might not have considered before and getting creative with that will help. And then also just know entrepreneurship is a journey, she definitely tries to be as transparent as possible again and say, “I was not an overnight success. I'm pretty successful right now, but it took a while.”

So even if you are feeling that in your business, keep it up, keep doing it. And if you're passionate about what you're doing and you actually really love what you're doing, it's going to work out.

Me: I totally agree. I think whatever you’re doing you have to be passionate about it because on the days when you’re faced obstacles and challenges, I feel like it's that passion, it's that little spirit inside you that really loves what you're doing that pushes you to keep continuing, because then it's not just about the money, it's about the satisfaction, that internal emotion, that gratitude that you have within yourself. Because I believe that there has to be that self-satisfaction first, before any level of satisfaction on the outside can be provided from a customer or a prospect or a vendor can be fulfilled. Would you agree?

Dr. Jackie agreed and stated that your customers can feel if you're passionate about it or not. If it's something you're doing just to do to hopefully make money at it and you don't really like doing it, then it might not work out because people are going to be able to feel that, people can tell. So she 100% agreed on that.

How Dr. Jackie Stays Motivated

When asked how she stays motivated, Dr. Jackie shared that this kind of goes off what they were just talking about. She is super into digital marketing, so like anytime, her birthday, Christmas, she’s always asking for different digital marketing ask related things.

On her spare time, she’s reading business and, and doing things. So for her, it comes naturally because she’s so passionate about it. And so, it's okay to have certain days where you just don't feel like working as an entrepreneur, but if you're having more days of those than the other way around, maybe you're not in the right business, maybe you need to switch up what you're doing.

Because again, this is your life, you want to be doing something, why build a business around something you don't really want to do?

When you're building your business, it should be super aligned with who you are, how you want to live your life, the lifestyle you want, what you are passionate about, talking about and doing on a daily basis, that's the key.

So, for her, motivation comes very naturally when it comes to her businesses because it's not only what she does for a living, it's also what she does as like a hobby, it's her interest.

App, Website or Tool that Dr. Jackie Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business

When asked about an online resource that she cannot live without in her business, Dr. Jackie shared that she’s a Trello fanatic. She loves Trello because it's so easy for project management and you can share boards with other people. She uses it for everything as far as planning out social media, to planning out our project management for our team, to getting things to her members as far as all kinds of content. She just thinks it's a powerhouse for the price and everything. And she absolutely loves it.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Dr. Jackie

When asked about the books that have had the biggest impact, Dr. Jackie shared that she loves Jen Sincero and You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth. It's a great book, the way she writes, she has read several of her books, they're very easy read.

So even if you've had a long day, it's like one of those things that it's not super dense. And she knows this, this was what she went through at first too in the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey was a lot of money blocks, a lot of weight, a lot of things she was thinking about money that was getting in her way of success.

Like thinking that maybe she didn't deserve to have hundreds of thousands of dollars, that she wasn't qualified enough, all of these kinds of things that get in your head.

And also, her other book is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which everyone probably talks about, but it made such a big impact on her life. And again, she can have all the strategy, all the training, all the education in the world, but if she’s not willing to accept money into her life, she’s not going to have it. So really working on that money mindset and those two books have really helped her for sure.

What Dr. Jackie is Really Excited About Now!

When asked what’s something that’s going on right to develop herself or her people, Dr. Jackie stated that she loves this question, it's so timely.

She and her business partner just launched a brand new e-commerce store called the SHEEO store, it's fabulous. But it has all kinds of swag, like brand photographer approved t-shirts, things like that for entrepreneurs. It also has office decor furniture, they have digital downloads for entrepreneurship on there, and right now they actually have 15% off store wide for their grand opening, but they have had over 200 customers in the last week. So they're kicking it off with a bang and super excited about that.

Where Can We Find Dr. Jackie Online

Instagram - @drjackienoelke

Facebook - @drjackienoelke

Website – www.thesheeostore.com

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Dr. Jackie Uses

Dr. Jackie shared that she loves, “Gratitude is the antidote to fear,” by Tony Robbins. And she uses that a lot.

But that helped her a lot as she was going through her anxiety and entrepreneurship.

And still, anytime she’s feeling fear or really any emotions that she doesn't necessarily want to feel, it's always okay to feel sad or feel fear if you want to be feeling that. But if you don't and you go into a space of gratitude, your feelings change automatically, you can't feel gratitude and fear at the same time.

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

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Links

• You Are a Badass at Marketing Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

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!

Mark Baldino is a design industry expert with over 20 years in UX and Human-Centered Design. He's a co-founder of Fuzzy Math, an award-winning UX design and innovation consultancy located in Chicago with clients worldwide. Along with building and sustaining a 20-person design studio, he's helped build and train UX teams for some of the largest companies in the world. Fuzzy Math’s call to action “Do good work. Be good people” is embedded in all of Mark's work as he advocates for “goodness” in design: producing work we are proud of as designers and that positively impacts the lives of those who use digital products and services every day. Mark has led projects across complex and regulated industries including Allstate, Hyatt Hotels, Microsoft and GE Healthcare.

Questions

• Your bio said that you're a UX and Human-Centered Design Organization, Fuzzy Math. But maybe give us some background behind why you decided to name the company that and just how you got into what you're doing today.
• Customer experience, user experience, user design, those words sometimes are used interchangeably in navigating different experiences for customers across different industries. Could you share with us what is so different about what you guys do that really helps to enhance the customer's experience?
• Let's say, for example, you're looking at your strategy for 2021 coming out of this year that we've all had, that has been extremely different from any other year we've all experienced. How would you demonstrate or justify the return on investment of focusing on UX? Why is it important? How is it really going to transform your business? Why should you give attention to it as you would give attention to any other budgeted item for your business plan?
• Could you share with us one or two things that a company should take into consideration in managing their digital spend in the age of COVID?
• Could you share with us how do you stay motivated every day?
• Can you share with our listeners what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Could you share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you, maybe a book that you've read recently or a book you read a very long time ago, but it definitely had a great impact on you.
• Can 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 something you're working on to develop 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, kind of helps to get you back on track or just keep you focused. Do you have one of those?

Highlights

Mark’s Journey

Mark stated that Fuzzy Math is a unique name, it served them well for the past 11 and a half years. The term Fuzzy Math, it does mean something in the real world, for them it speaks about the duality of the work that they do in the user experience and human centered design processes.

So kind of the fuzzy part is they're working with humans and they're trying to understand them and they are complicated and complex and sometimes they say one thing and do another. So it can be hard to design products and services to meet their needs. And the way they do that is kind of the math side, which is a little bit more of the robust process they follow sort of a thorough user center design process they lead their clients through.

It kind of makes sense of what humans are saying and doing and allows them to build products that better meet their needs. So it's kind of the analytics and process side, which is the math solving for the human psychology and fuzzy side, which is the humans.

What Fuzzy Math Does to Enhance the Customer’s Experience

Mark shared that their process is about putting customers or users at the center of everything they do. So, one of the reasons they use the term “User” is because it really focuses in on their use of a specific, in their case, they're designing a lot of web based applications or mobile applications.

Customer can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people and so you thinking about customers from the brand perspective, from a marketing perspective, business perspective, and they try to get a little bit more narrow and think about who is this human sitting in front of a computer and what are they doing every day?

And how do we make their experience more efficient and effective and satisfying for them?

And that doesn't always take into account the brand, for example, which again, brand and customer get aligned a lot. They try to break that out, they don't think in terms of brands, if they're working for a company that is a brand, they're really thinking about, what is this person's experience with your product and with your service and how can they architect it to better meet their needs?

And so, it's really about putting a user at the center of everything that they do and advocating for them and their needs. And that sometimes pushes against what might make the most sense from like a sales or a marketing perspective.

And that's okay, there can be a natural tension between those. But for their purposes, it's let's give users a voice at the table here and advocate for their needs, which might push against some other considerations of a business.

So it's a slightly narrow lens to focus it on and really say who is this human being that, again, is sitting in front of a computer, has to use this digital product and service and how can they make them happier people, while they're using these products.

The Importance of Using UX to Transform Your Business

Mark shared that he would think that the year that everyone's just had really, really gives them a sense of why they should be investing in digital.

So you can take healthcare, for example. But you could say the same for some retail, that’s brick and mortar, maybe a higher education.

So healthcare and higher education, they have two things in common, which is they have these large, vast physical spaces that they've invested billions of dollars in.

A hospital in 2020 looks nothing like a hospital did in 1980. They are gorgeous structures; they look more like hotels.

And so, the idea is when you step in, that experience that you get when you enter the atrium of a modern hospital is supposed to give you a sense of what's going to happen behind the scenes, behind the doors, is this amazing high tech, high touch.

Again, it almost feels like you're stepping into a luxury hotel and that's how you want to be treated. Well, guess how many people were using those front doors during COVID? No one.

Hospitals were busy, but they were not coming through the front doors and stepping in and getting a sense of this is where I want to spend money, it was much more from an emergency perspective.

But instead, the digital front door of hospitals became the center point, and hospitals that had invested in 2019 and previously in their digital front door were much better positioned to handle kind of customer service, user experience, patient services, provide those in a much more effective and meaningful manner. And so, if you invested in 2019 or before, let's say that that dollar you spend in 2019 was worth ten times as much in 2020 and nothing to say it's not going to be just as valuable moving forward.

So the idea is that people are experiencing brands and products or services overall, they're experiencing digital first or have experienced digital first and a lot of people are digital, they live digitally, they think that that's a normal thing. But you have to think of these industries where there was a physical component to it and they had invested in that physical component.

And now, you're not taking a college tour and deciding on a college based on how fancy the building is, you're probably making that based on what the digital experience you're going to get and whether you can tell that they've actually invested in that in that digital experience.

So, even though he thinks we saw a lot of budgets get tightened in 2020, given uncertainty, what we've seen in this quarter and what we're expecting to continue to see in Q1 is that those budgets are getting reoriented towards kind of the digital experience. And so, he actually thinks it's kind of an easy sell, it's not one that he has to make. But he thinks for people internally is to say…..

“If we haven't invested in our digital infrastructure, now is the time if we want this business to be sustainable, we can also have to shift maybe the organization overall towards spending more on these digital first experiences and not maybe spend as much in something like physical infrastructure.”

Me: Agreed. Great. So that definitely will allow people to have greater justification for why they need to make this type of investment and, of course, how it will impact their business in the long term.

Managing Your Digital Spend in the Age of COVID

Me: Now, let's say, for example, we have a business and they're looking to go into this. What are maybe one or two ways that you think you could probably suggest to them that they could be able to better manage their digital spend in the age of COVID. Because a lot of people feel like they're in contracting mode. I've listened to many podcast interviews and I know a lot of organizations that would have done a year in planning in terms of what they're going to invest into, they're now doing short term plans like three months, six months, because they just don't know what to expect.

So, with that in mind, maybe could you share with us one or two things that a company should take into consideration in managing their digital spend in the age of COVID?

When asked to share what a company should take into consideration in managing their digital spend in the age of COVID, Mark shared that he thinks they need to think short and long term, if you're too narrow in your focus of this few months, he has heard that as well, “Hey, we have two months to make impact.”

You can only do so much in in two months. And so, they're helping a lot of their clients with is put roadmaps in place which allow for a strategic view, which is three years out, even if there's a large amount of uncertainty in said industry. But that has a really tactical, they're doing two to three month chunks of work. So what can they accomplish in a short term that's going to move the needles and some KPIs. But what is their vision for the longer term. And inside of that, something that they don't do a lot of crisis management for their clients, but all of their clients and frankly, all human beings went through a crisis this past year.

And he doesn't mean to say that we're going to experience another one, but there's nothing to say that this couldn't happen again in two years down the road. So, while you're thinking strategically long term, while you're solving stuff in the short term, you need to invest in an infrastructure that's going to allow you to pivot quickly during a point of crisis.

Again, he hates to go back to the healthcare example, but it's an easy one these days. A lot of websites and customer service teams were very unprepared for the deluge of visitors.

In some cases, he heard 3000% increase in web traffic. So that's the technical architecture going to support that but can we respond to that many requests?

And so, this shouldn't be a poll that is a blip on the radar for 2020, people need to invest in crisis management and how they can respond and how their digital products and services respond during a crisis like this.

So, again, they're trying to map out what the long term improvements to customer experiences are over a 3-year period, they're trying to help their clients adjust and make some changes incrementally along the way that are going to move the needle in a two or three month time frame and start to think about what it looks like when a crisis hits again and how teams responds and how technology responds and how we can utilize technology to respond during those points of crisis.

How Mark Stays Motivated

Mark shared that fear is a big motivator, just to be quite honest, he thinks in 2020. It is this sense of fight or flight; you need to keep the business going. It's not a great long term motivator because it just wears you down a little bit.

So, he tries to spend time away from his computer and that keeps him motivated to get back to the computer. He works a lot with his hands, crafts, furniture building, light construction, it's a lot less cerebral and it's a lot more physical.

And he finds it when he’s able to step away from the computer and start to work on physical products or physical projects, he yearns to be back in front of the computer because there's something about the amount of change you can influence or impact through the work that they do as designers. And that's really, really powerful. And it's not just about him and a closet he’s building or a piece of furniture, that's personally rewarding for him. And he enjoys that.

But a lot of the products they work on are with bigger businesses and thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people are using these tools every day. And there's a lot of power in being able to make those tools more satisfactory and joyful for humans. And so, this kind of this exponential push that they can make in people's lives through the tools that they redesign but sometimes when you're so focused on what's the next sale they're going to make? He does primarily sales at Fuzzy Math these days, he doesn't do a lot of design himself. You sort of miss that larger picture. So, to stay motivated, he gets away from the computer, he works in the in the physical world, and then that really pulls him back to the computer because he can get just a different perspective on what it is they do it Fuzzy Math and how they're helping people.

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

When asked about an online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Mark shared that it's going to sound standard, but email. He'd love to say Slack, but his team loves Slack as a digital tool, he thinks it's enabled the business to function better specifically remotely. But as many times as people try to remake email and make that experience better, there's a reason we all use it, it's very easy, it's quick to communicate with people. And so, it's a boring answer but it's where he’s at almost every minute of every day is in his inbox and he uses it as a way to manage tasks and to do’s, kind of a zero inbox person. He has a number of ways and filters to clean his inbox and make it an efficient mechanism for me.

But he has been using it since AOL, so early 90s. He has been using email for a while. He is very comfortable with it and he can be a creature of habit sometimes and it takes a while for him to shift into something else. As boring as it sounds, he feels like email is consistent and for him it's something he can always rely on as a tool to know what's coming into his business, what's going on in his business and what does he need to do every day. So, maybe not the most inspiring answer, but it's an honest one. If you ask him what he can't live without at this point, it’s email.

Me: Definitely, don't feel bad about sharing email because it's important. And it's an excellent communication tool and it does definitely allow for some level of accountability, paper trail you can go back in. I've pulled up emails that I've sent to people from three, four or five years ago just to make reference to maybe a conversation that was had that maybe you just need to bring back to the forefront based on what you're moving on with currently. So it really, really is an excellent resource. So I'm not going to negate your application.

Books That Have Had the Greatest Impact on Mark

Mark shared that there are two books that have probably had the biggest impact on him. The first is Managing Professional Service Firm by David Maister. It's an old book, the 90’s. It has been updated a number of times. It basically gave him all of the tools to build a professional services firm and how to think about his team and himself and leadership structure and consulting in general. A lot of consultants started as practitioners, he did. And they built consultancies because there's work out there. But running a business is very different from doing design work and so, Managing Professional Services Firm, he calls it his Bible in terms of if he has a question, he goes there first.

He spent a few months in Argentina last year during the winter to escape awful Chicago winters and he read Let My People Go Surfing, which is by the founder of Patagonia. And that's just a fantastic book, it's part bio, which is just great to understand how and why Patagonia was founded. But also there's a business component to it and how you can run kind of an ethical business and what you can look out for and how you can guide your company and he’s a firm believer in the ethos and values that Patagonia sort of imbues in its products and services.

But there's a real honesty to the book in terms of, in a perfect world, no one needed more clothes and Patagonia would go out of business and they don't hide from that fact, they sort of explain it.

And so, he just found it a really refreshing read and he thinks people that like that book, he thinks are people that he would kind of enjoy in the real world to talk to.

So it's been kind of a book that he keeps an eye or an ear out for if people have read it, because he thinks that if they read it and enjoyed it and found value in it, they probably have a similar set of values to him and those can be some of the best of friends, first of all, but kind of professional relationships when there's a bit of a value overlap.

What Mark is Really Excited About Now!

Mark shared that internally and it's about developing their people. They've started a (DEI) Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity initiative at Fuzzy Math, it's about 18 months old and that's by far been the most rewarding part of 2020, because they made a lot of progress there. The initiative was not started because they had a crisis of diversity, equity and inclusivity on the team, it was because people thought that there was room that they could grow as a firm, even as a team of 20.

And so, two employees came to them and said, “Hey, we think we should invest time and energy into this, that there's some room for growth here.” And Ben, is his business partner and him, “Okay, what's kind of what's the plan? Help us along here.” They eventually brought in a third party consultant who's been a tremendous resource for them.

And it's really reoriented how he thinks about growth at the company and proper growth and their role potentially in equity and inequality in the design industry, how they hire people and retain them, how they can maybe train people who don't have a formal background in what they do, how they can create apprentice and mentorship internship programs.

And they've been doing all of this, but they haven't done it with the lens of DEI and obviously this past year there's been worldwide attention specifically through Black Lives Matter and they started the process ahead of that but it really it dovetailed well as it there was a specific focus on it globally and certainly in the United States. And for them to have a forum for their team to communicate about their concerns and then be able to plan for what the future looks like.

So, they have a two-year roadmap for how they're going to improve DEI at Fuzzy Math and it's not just a one stop shop, they didn't just write a DEI statement and put it on their website. In fact, it's not on the website yet because they are taking a very thorough, kind of methodical approach to this.

And it's a long term change of the composition of the people at Fuzzy Math and their backgrounds. How you can have a voice at Fuzzy Math, what hiring, retention, growth and career paths. A lot of things he didn't put in the DEI bucket; his team did because they felt that they were important in terms of communication from the founders down to the team.

So it's been a tremendous learning experience for him, it's been great to see because it's been team led, his team has driven this and that's super rewarding as a business owner to see people care so much about but the company and more specifically about each other, to want to invest time and energy into DEI.

Me: Sounds good. Okay, so we will definitely be following that journey eventually when it becomes public. And you may serve as a benchmark for other organizations that may want to take on that same kind of initiative.

Where Can We Find Mark Online

Website – www.fuzzymath.com

Mark shared that if you go to the resources section on their website, there's a newsletter, encourage people to sign up for the newsletter. They don't spam you. They send out one new sort of newsletter every month, which includes a topic of their interest. Sometimes it's is very specific to design and designers.

Recently it's been about kind of the business value of design and the ROI of design. And then they include some links and articles that they have read in the past month that they enjoy. They have the benefit of living and breathing UX every single day, and not everyone has that, so they try to pull some resources together for people.

If people want to reach out to him, his email is [email protected], he’s happy to answer emails, chat, schedule, some time to connect, whether it's about starting a career in design or whether you have a potential project.

Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Mark Uses

Mark shared that he doesn't really have a quote, there's just sort of saying, he doesn't know where it's attributed to, it's around, do you have a strategic plan?

Yes, it's called doing things. He thinks people sometimes worry too much about strategy and less about execution and has tried to make his career about kind of execution and doing and he considers himself a bit of a doer.

So, it helps him when he’s thinking about where Fuzzy Math’s going to be in 5 years or 10 years, people sometimes ask that question and he doesn't always have a clear picture, he just has to remind himself that they just have to continue doing what they've been doing for 11 ½ years, it's made them successful, bunch of happy clients and happy users along the way.

So, if you're ever concerned about what to do next, just do. Start creating, start building, don't spend too much time thinking or planning because execution is all that matters at the end of the day.

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

• Managing The Professional Service Firm by David H. Maister
• Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard 

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!