Navigating the Customer Experience

David Durham is a mindset and self-mastery business coach, speaker, author and trainer. Before coaching David had the opportunity to build a six-figure business his first year in real estate at the very young age of 20, he is also the author of his first book, “You Must: World-Class Principles for Success” which he is so excited to launch in March. David now helps other self-employed entrepreneurs between the ages of 30 and 50 who have been in business for less than five years to build a thriving business by helping them step out of self-sabotage and step into their success.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What are some of the top three suggestions or tools that you provide to your business owners or entrepreneurs to ensure that they maintain that level of self-mastery and emotional intelligence so they can lead a team that is all so positive minded?
• We have a lot of small to medium sized business owners that listen to this show across the world in different countries and many of them have to do their own sales. You know they have to pick up the phone and they have to make sales calls. And as you said when they get rejected sometimes they do attach it to their identity. How do you get rid of that fear before you actually take the telephone up and call someone to tell them about a product or service that you have to offer to them? And of course, to pitch it in a way that it comes up as being authentic in terms of your product or service adding value to their life and providing them with useful benefits. But also in a way that you are able to utilize the skills that you are best suited for, to marry what you are offering with what their business has to offer to their customers.
• Apart from taking a different perspective, are there external stimuli that you could probably expose yourself to that will help you to change your mindset or at least maintain somewhat of a positive mindset throughout the course of your day?
• What are some of the books that you’ve read recently or maybe in the past that has really helped to grow and develop you as an individual and make you a better person?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What is the one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• David stated that emotional intelligence and a business is huge, especially for entrepreneurs, self-employed entrepreneurs that have been in business for less than five years. One day you're on top of the world you're ready to conquer everything and then like three days later you're questioning all the moves you've made in the past six months and is this the right choice. It's going through the ups and downs that are extremely hard and emotional intelligence which essentially boils down to your mindset and how self-mastered you are is how resilient can you be when you're facing adversity. People are doubting you and telling you, “You can't do it.” Which he has so many stories around that and just struggling. How are you to persevere through that. Because he believes everyone typically knows what they need to do to get the business where they want to go. Yet many times they're just in their own head and they're in their own way and if they could get out of their own way and out of their head then they could have the success. So, when it comes to mindset and self-mastery, it's about being resilient and being able to face anything with a positive perspective that empowering rather than a perspective in their business that's disempowering and has actually holding them back.

• David stated that this is an amazing question because it's like being a leader in how you lead by example for anyone that works for you which then directly correlates to customer service and the one of the first things he teaches and a certified coach almost finishing the certification of what they teach is seven levels of perspective and when you understand these levels of perspective then you can actually decide how you want to show up each moment, every day you can understand which perspective helps you and how, some of them help you in this situation and other perspectives on the seven levels help you in something else and so one of the tools that he teaches which is going to be hard to get in just on this call. But it's the seven levels of perspective so no matter what happens to you, you can adopt a perspective that's actually going to empower you and help you move forward. So, what that looks like as a leader is when you're implementing the seven levels of perspective, naturally everyone following you, everyone that's looking up to you and you are leading by example sees that and they respect that and then they can grow from that themselves. When it comes to mind and self-mastery, when it comes to the way you think number one's perspective, that's what's going to keep you going and two is how do you overcome fear that’s huge, just fear in general, fear of rejection, fear of failure, feel fear of the unknown and so how do you overcome that. And that's a huge step getting in your business. So, self-employed entrepreneurs that have been in business for less than five years and many times fear rejection, they fear failure and here's where it boils down to. The reason why these fears are there is because they're attaching their identities to results. And so, whether they do great then that means they're great and if they don't that means they don't, so when they fail they take it to mean that their failure. And so, when you feel like a failure then naturally and the thoughts going through your head is “I'm not good enough” when I'm not good enough shows up for you then you're naturally going to feel disempowered, you're going to feel bad about yourself and when you have the thoughts of I'm not good enough. You don't feel good enough then who in their right mind is going to want to take action. Then they let fear overrun them, they let fear overrun their business and now they wonder why it's so hard to take massive action, they wonder why they are procrastinating so much but it's because of that. So, when you can start shifting that perspective it all ties together because you shift the perspective then you start having different thoughts, thoughts that are empowering with those thoughts that you have, you have different emotions. So, now you have a different perspective, different thoughts, different emotions, naturally you are going to take different action because thoughts and emotions equal action. That's a really encompassing of like coaching because many times like his clients would come to him and it's with these stories but all they really need to do is shift the way they're thinking ask themselves better questions and quit identifying with their results as to who they are. Being able to stand in their own skin and say, “I am enough as I am no matter what happens in my organization, no matter what happens my identity isn't attached to this outcome, my identity isn't attached to the failures and it's also not attached to the winds. It just is and I'm enough as I am.” which really allows one to adopt the right perspective an empowering perspective to move forward.

• David stated that everyone listening right now, wants to be able to make those sales calls and prospect and come from a place that's genuine and not feel salesy, like they can make the calls and know that “I'm only here to help, I don't want to feel salesy.” A lot of people don't want to make those calls because they have that fear of rejection and the fear of “What are they going to think about me and if I call people that know me, what are they going to think, they going to think I'm selling them.” how do you overcome that. First thing first, you've got to be 100 percent confident in what you do, your product or your service. Reason being if you are 100 percent for example as a coach, “I knows I can help transform businesses. I know I can help them get out of the way double or triple their income. I have created the results multiple times.” So, when you are 100 percent confident in that then when you reach out in prospect to these people you know, people you don't, whatever it might be, you come from a place of contribution, you come from a place of, “This is what it can do for you. I want to help you because I'm so confident in what I have and I'm so confident that it would help you. It would actually be more an ethical for me to not reach out.” When you can get to a point like that in your business where you can genuinely come from contribution things will start changing because now you're making the calls when you're on the call. Another huge obstacle business owners have is overcoming objections when they say I want to think about it so many business owners say, “Great, when would you like me to call you back?” Rather than digging in, “Well, what is it you want to think about, its financials. Great, tell me more about the financials. Is there anything else other than the financials?” X Y and Z digging into it. Because if you are to come from a place of contribution and you do truly believe in your product and service then you should have no problem overcoming any objection in realizing that an objection is just a request for more information. So, when you're hunting that you're actually coming from a place of, “I just want to help you understand more of how this product or service can best suit you.” And from a customer service standpoint they go hand in hand because you're doing what's best for them. Now on the flip side how do you overcome the fear of making the calls. How do you actually do it? And the first thing first is realize you attach your identities to your outcomes, realize wow OK now I see that when I get hung up on told no hundreds of times, I'm attaching that to me, no one wants to talk to me. When you can just start making that distinction then you can start changing it. Here's a fun story, when he hopped into real estate his first year, he was 19 years old in the business, he got told by everybody that there's thousands of other agents, “What makes you any different, you're not old enough, who's going to trust you with the sale of their house and so much more.” And so, he would literally call over 700 people every single day. He would talk to over 100 people every single day. He got told no, he got told you’re a low life, you're a bottom feeder. Go get a real job and get cussed at. He’d get hung up on every single day and then he would go on the appointments that he did create for the first few months, he lost the client so he felt terrible about myself. All he’s getting is rejected, all he’s getting told is no. “Oh my gosh, what in the world.” So, he kept pursuing that to overcome the fear of calling and the fear of reaching out as realizing one, they're getting hung up on, what are three perspectives that he could adopt that mean nothing about him, 1) They could have just gotten into a car crash, 2) Their dog just died. 3) They're going through a divorce. 4) He interrupted them during dinner. 5) They are sick. Great, he just created five reasons of why they hung up on him, didn't answer whatever that meant nothing to do with him. So, if you can do that in business rather than saying they didn't answer so they clearly don't want to talk, they didn't call me back, so they clearly don't want to talk. They hung up on me. They clearly are not interested. I've called them four times they haven't responded. Rather than taking it to mean they don't want to talk to me, they don't want my product, they don't want my service, maybe I'm not good enough, thinking “Wow, well they could be really busy in their business, they could be going through some really tough times and haven't had a chance to come around.” You have a choice to adopt other perspectives.

Yanique then stated that's a very good perspective to look at. So, it's kind of like you're projecting that clearly just as how your life has challenges and obstacles and hurdles that you have to overcome every day, they're are human too and they probably have their own obstacles, hurdles and challenges and maybe their obstacles and hurdles are way surpassing what you are actually going through. So that's why you weren't able to get in touch, so then you don't take it personally and absorb all of the negative energy that you're getting from the nos.

David also mention that in realizing that you're making assumptions and you’re making interpretations, you're assuming that it's about you in your interpreting them not calling to mean something about you. That assumption, interpretation has just as much validity as saying they got in a car accident has nothing to do with you. It has just as much validity of saying I might have caught them in between work or when they were at dinner. You don't know the real answer, so which perspective are you willing to adopt that's actually going to help you move forward in a positive light. And to add to that really quick, David mentioned that he called one of these prospects, he called her over 26 times in less than 3 months, that's a lot of phone calls and she never called him back, she never texted him back, she never got back to him via e-mail and one day she called him, “Hey David, I need you to come list my property. I'm so sorry I haven't gotten back to you, things have been crazy on my end. I've been going through so much but I appreciate your follow up.” That goes to show we can't assume and interpret it to mean things about us.

Yanique mentioned how puts a nice spin on it. In all the years that she has been doing customer service training on workshops with customers, one of the challenges or one of the comments that she has gotten from participants in workshops is when the customers come at them so angrily, they're disrespectful. As David mentioned a lot of it. They told you you're a bottom feeder, you were worth less, you should go find a different job. So, in a customer facing environment the customers are going to tell you a lot of things if their product or service isn't working and if you are not responding to them in a way that they expect you to respond, they're going to actually start attacking you. And a lot of the employees take that attack as a personal attack. Her approach with them is don't take it personally because a lot of times these customers don't know you personally and they're really hurting because of the issue they're having, maybe before they came to your business place they had a bad argument with their kid or are with their boss or maybe someone bad drove them on the road. So, they're frustrated, they're angry, so they come into your business place already with a negative mindset.

Yanique then asked why is it that as human beings when people start to say things to us that we don't want to hear we assumed the negative and not the positive.

David stated he’s not a scientist to say well this is why according to X, Y, and Z. He stated that there are studies to show how strong, it's easier to be negative than it is positive. We are human beings, we jumped to the worst-case scenario many times we may make it to believe something about us we take it personally. Everyone listening that is facing that struggle, it's not your fault. It's being human, it's not your fault. And now it's your responsibility to choose to not take it personally, it's your responsibility to realize, “Wow, the assumption is that I'm making is that it's about me when in reality well why could they be acting this way. Maybe they got cut off when they were driving to work and then the coffee spilled on them when they got their car. They stub to their toe on the curb, they rolled into the office five minutes late, got yelled at then called you, maybe that happened.” So, it comes back to what interpretation, what assumption, what story in perspective are you going to decide to roll but realize it's totally human nature to get upset to take it personally. And now it's your responsibility to change that.

• In order to change or maintain your mindset positive throughout the course of the day, David mention that you have to take note of the conversations that you're participating in. It's the people that are around. So, even if you're at work, if you're a business owner typically you can kind of choose who you're around and if you're employee maybe you don't. But you can choose the conversations that you engage with. There's that quote that he finds very interesting is that “Small minded people talk about other people; average minds talk about events and brilliant minds talk about ideas.” And it just comes down to like what kind of conversations are you having. Because most people are talking about other people and they're talking about events and they're complaining and they're being negative. If you're around those conversations then you can't adopt that different perspective. You can, it's going to be really difficult too. Yet if you just start controlling who you put yourself around and what conversations you're engaging in then things can really shift for you, the conversations that you are having could really change your life, they can become much more empowering, you’re going to start putting yourself around more positive people. So, every time you're engaged in a conversation ask yourself, “Is this a conversation worth having, is this moving me forward in any kind of way or is this gossip, is this negativity, is this complaining?” And that little awareness that you have can significantly make a difference.

Yanique then reiterate, so matters not where you are in the organization whether you are the employee or you're the boss. Think about who you're speaking to and what kind of conversations you're having. There's a quote that says, “You are a combination of the five people that you spend the most time with.”

David agreed 120% and said that elevating your peer group is huge, it's consistently have to edit it if you want to take your business to the next level. Look who you are around, you’re the average of the five people you’re on the most. Yanique mention if you're going to move forward you clearly need to look at who your circle of influence is and try to position yourself where people who can actually help you move forward mentally, spiritually, and emotionall

• David mention that there's so many different types of books and so many different kinds of genres. So, he actually got three that he’s going to share that he thinks made a really significant impact for him. One of them is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. It's huge, it has played a big role in his life and he kind of knows it like the back of his head and it's implemented now in his life and in his business. The second book is something that's really going to help someone show up emotionally in a great way every single day. This correlates to customer service because it's a sense of controlling how you feel and how you think so and so when someone's yelling at you, how are you going to give them the best customer experience. So, this book's Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny by Tony Robbins huge book. It is a long book but it is a powerful, powerful book. It's something you definitely want to read. And then the third book is The 10x Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone. He stands by that book because things really do take ten times the amount of work that we expect. You want to raise your level of customer service to a high level, it's going to take more work than you think, you might need a 10 x action plan that you have. You want to build that business so you can have more business and still give them the same experience, you're typically going after 10x your efforts and so he goes into depth about that in that book.

• David stated that the beauty of his business, he keeps it very simplistic. Like all these crazy apps, all these crazy tools, he doesn’t use that. So, to answer the question, there isn't one. What he would say that helps him deliver the highest level of customer service, to be able to engage with his clients and his tribe and things like that to give them a great experience would be their customer relationship management system that I use which is Ontraport, it’s one of his favorite ones just from marketing being able to engage with them. That's my favorite but as far as like a tool, website, app, I keep his Google Docs everything centralized in one place.

• David shared that something that he’s pumped about is his first book. You Must: World-Class Principles for Success. It will launch in March and he’s just thrilled to get this out to the world. Got his final round of editing complete, getting his author copy and it's going to be released to the world in just a couple of short weeks.

• David shared listeners can find him at –

www.davidwdurham.com

Facebook – david.durham

Instagram - davidwdurham

www.therocketentrepreneur.com

• David shared that he has many quotes and he can give a couple. One of them is, “I am enough as I am.” in all transparency he thinks no matter what level of business you get to talk to millionaires that sometimes they wake up and they feel like they're not good enough and so no matter what happens in life, no matter what happens in your business, you are enough as you are. And the second one is, he really looks how far he has come and never how far he has to go. Being an entrepreneur we're also hungry, we are business owners, we have these huge visions and as we grow the vision just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And sometimes we forget how far we've come. And we only look at how far we have to go. One of those reminders is he always look how far he has come and never how far he has to go.

Yanique mention that it's like you're reviewing all of your accomplishments so you can be proud of yourself and give yourself a pat on the back and some level of recognition versus, I have so far to go and you're beating yourself up for not maybe meeting a deadline or doing something within a specific period of time but rather focusing on the things that you have done well and that you have accomplished so that it can propel you to move forward.

Links

Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue Online Course

• The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
• Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! By Tony Robbins
• The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone

Highlights

This episode Yanique Grant is going to talk about how do you strengthen a business that is struggling and how does customer service play the role in that business. You have a business and whether it’s an online or a brick and mortar business where you have customers physically coming into your location, at the end of the day you have customers. Let’s say your business is one in which it was really doing well, there was a time when every month sales was booming, there was not enough hands to cover the amount of business that was coming in and for some reason, things start to struggle, there are many different reasons why your business will start to struggle, however, Yanique thinks that before you decide how you’re going to approach fixing this challenge or moving forward as it relates to getting your business from struggling to getting things right, one of the main things as a business owner that you really should do is review what worked well when things were good, so it’s always a great place to start. Look at your sales and marketing initiatives when your business was good, how are you retaining and servicing your existing customers, how are you attracting new customers, was your product adding value at a time when it was needed most, has the market needs changed since then, if it has, what have you done to adapt and adjust your own product offerings? Look at your team, did you have key team players that are no longer there, have you been working with your team to ensure that they are fully equipped with product knowledge, so we know in the sales cycle product knowledge is the first step but there are many other things that create that or build that relationship with the customer and because it’s so expensive to acquire a new customer and it’s much cheaper a customer that has done business with you already, it’s important to recognize, “What did we do well, what were the key indicators that would have identified that this relationship went well, the customer got value out of the experience, how can I repeat that so that the customer will come back again?” If a once successful business is struggling, it’s almost always a people related issue, not financing, not capital, it’s always an employee issue, a management issue or even the owners, somewhere along the way something broke, now there’s a disconnect between the owner’s concept and what people did that with that concept, the problem maybe entitlement, complacency, laziness or even ego, eventually between the reality of the market place and the company’s ability to act within that reality something fractured until it was too late, so always start with the people because it’s always about the people. As the business owner, you should always be reviewing what works well and what does not, auditing your best practices and making sure that they are aligned with your goals and of course ensuring your clients are satisfied and will return again, it’s just so important.

Customer service is so important in a business, whether you’re a small business, a medium business or a large business, your customer can make or break your business. From the owner to the employee that is the first point of contact, everyone should be operating with the customer first in mind. The customer service landscape is constantly changing and now a day’s customers are very informed because of this age of information, right now whether you have tablet or a phone or you have a computer, the information is right at the tip of your fingers. Everyone in the business needs to have clear understanding of the customer lifetime value, the CLV and what it means to lose one customer, how much money are you throwing away when the customer never returns and tells 50 or more people which will influence their decisions for future purchases. The reality is if there is no customer, there’s simply no business, even if it’s an online business or a face to face business, you need the customer for the business to operate, you need somebody to buy your product, you need somebody to buy your service. The experience that the customer has is critical for the revival of any business, so if you’re struggling and you’re not focusing on customer service, you’re not focusing on the experience, you’re just focus on collecting the money and you’re not focusing on whether or not what the customer is getting is actually what they want then you’re actually creating more problems for the business. Customers want to be business with companies that make it easy, they all desire an effortless experience, so as a struggling business, one of your most important matrix should be customer service and some simple reasons why you should pay keen attention this includes: 1) Customer retention is far less expensive than customer acquisition, on average it cost approximately 5 times more to attract a new customer to your business than it cost to retain an existing customer. 2) Existing customers are more likely to buy from you than new customers, the probability of selling to new customer hovers in the range 5% to 20%, whereas selling to an existing customer resides in the range of 60% to 70%. 3) Excellent customer service improves public persona and strengthens your brand; the reputation and strength of your brand is highly dependent on a high level of customer service. 4) Word of mouth advertising is the best kind of advertising that money can’t buy. So, you want your customers to be selling your business, the reality is to get a 30 second advertisement during primetime is extremely expensive, to put a full-page advertisement in your local newspaper is as expensive as TV if not more and so if your customers can leave and they can tell 5 people about the great experience they’ve had and how your product is amazing, if it’s a hotel, “Oh my goodness, I would go back again.” If it’s a phone, “It’s amazing, it’s really good, the battery last long, the service is good when I call the manufacturer, they’re very receptive, they answer my questions, they are able to fix my issue in short frame of time.” If it’s your web developer or your web hosting provider, if your website goes down or if there is any issue you can call them, they answer the phone, you get live person, it’s not a situation where you can only speak on web chat which is so frustrating because you have to be typing out everything that you’re experiencing and you’re not actually physically speaking with a live person in a voice call, all of these things contribute to the customer’s experience. So, you cannot buy word of mouth advertising, the kind that can have a monumental effect on a business because it’s priceless, people are considerably more likely to listen to advise of a friend than they are to heed the guidance from some online reviewer and advertisement that you paid for. 5) Great customer service will open doors for new partnerships and other opportunities, treating your customers like gold is infectious it opens the door for new partnerships especially when other businesses see just how well you take care of your existing customers, you’re setting the mark, you’re being the innovator and people are going to want to emulate you and follow what you’re doing. It says a lot about a company and what they value when they care deeply about their customers and not just their external customers but also their internal customers, their employees. It’s something that you rarely find in businesses these days but it most certainly paves the way for powerful partnerships, collaborations and other opportunities. So, these are some basic things that you can do if you’re a struggling business and you’re really trying to revamp and re-engage and come back out into the market place and bring your business to a level where it can survive. Customer service is not for the faint of heart, it requires a lot of energy, it requires a lot of engagement and it requires you to be authentic and genuine. The customer can sense if you’re just there to collect money or if you’re really there to be there partner so that you can help them grow and you can look for opportunities to give them suggestions, you look for opportunities to save them money, you look for opportunities to make them money, it’s a partnership, they help you, you help them, it’s not a one way giving activity, it’s a 2-way street where people give and people receive equally and we just have to be focused on that. Your business can be revived and customer service plays and integral role in strengthening your business if it is struggling. One of the things that Yanique wants to challenge you from this episode is, we’re just moving into the end of the first quarter of 2018, think about the customers you’ve serviced since the year as started, have you added value to that experience? will they come back and buy again? why will they come back and buy again? and would you consider yourself to be a market leader in your industry, one that innovates, one that creates an effortless experience, ask yourself these questions, really think about when you were doing well, what you were doing well, is that you had a team member on board that was there that’s no longer there, can you invest more in the teams members that exist in your organization currently, what can you do differently to create that experience that will cause your customers to leave and say good things about you and come back again because service is the back bone for the survival of any business, especially a business that is struggling.          

Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue Online Course

Highlights

This episode was inspired by a recent TV interview that Yanique Grant completed. Yanique will be speaking about the growing power of the consumer which important in customer service. In the interview, one of the main things that the interviewer asked her was, “The conscious customer, why is the customer so conscious and how is that the consumer holds the power in this whole buying process of customer service?” The customer holds the power in the market place probably for the first time and it’s all because of the internet, consumers are very well informed before they do business or they buy from you, they engage in extensive research from your website, to your social media pages where products and services are available for them to get a temperature of what it’s like to be your customer and how the product may or may not work. They’re going to ask questions from their friends, their family members and of course the feedback they get from those persons will determine whether or not they will continue to do business with you or if they’ll even become a customer for you. It is so important to ensure that the experience that the customer has with you is one which is positive and that the reputation that your brand has in the market place is one that is positive. Consumers are so aware and conscious of trends, for example in the health care industry, many businesses such as restaurants and even fast foods chains have had to modify their menus and have an option that has less calories or is gluten free or promote eco friendliness and protecting the environment because consumers are looking for businesses that are aligned with the things that they value the most. It’s also important for the brands and the companies to ensure that they are very transparent in their interactions and their activities, according to a Deloitte study, “The way how the shift has occurred is consumers prefer to pull information rather than have business push it to them.” so consumers and very conscious these days, they’re aware of what’s happening and as the business you have to be aware of this and be very knowledgeable. One of the challenges business face, is how are they going to close the gap when they are dealing with millions of individual expectations, so the business needs to invest in developing capabilities to integrate and track every individual journey and offer a targeted response in real time if they want to continue to grow revenues and profits while also improving customer satisfaction. Consumers have always had the ability to vote with their feet and their wallets, they can walk in to your business and spend lots of money and they can walk out of your business and spend money elsewhere. While the digital revolution has handed the additional power to the consumer, including more information and more choices, we are now in the information age, you can basically google, research anything on your own, there’s no need for you to try to figure out, “How am I going to know about this organization or this individual?” because the information is right there at your fingertips and it’s also a very good point or indication if you’re researching someone and you’re not able to find any information on them because that also gives you clues as to how recognized they are and what is their credibility in this particular field, the consumer has way more choice but consumers have found ways of dealing with this choice issue and many now use tools such as social media or price comparison websites to perfect their choice and exert their power, so the ability of consumers to distribute information using a variety of networks, digital media devices and platforms not only lets them connect with their peers, it also helps to enrich the information shared.

There are so many ways that you can share the information for the consumer to know what’s going on in your business, there are the social media pages, there’s Twitter, there is Facebook, there is Instagram, there is your website, you can have a blog, there is a lot of ways you can get information out there so that you can be more accessible to the consumer. Customers are very concerned about what their family and friends say, and according to Deloitte study, it shows that for the majority of consumers, families and friends consumer reviews and independent experts are the most trusted sources of information, only around 1 in 10 customers find product and manufacturers or service providers to be their most trusted source, so there is no doubt that the consumer has become a professional shopper, their confidence has grown along with a better awareness of their rights. The consumer’s ability to exercise this power has also reduced their perceived level of risk and with consumers increasingly knowing where to get the information they need, more preferred to pull information rather than have the business push that information to them. This is just to broaden your mind and open your scope in terms of how you think about your business, why the consumer has so much power and really think about how you can empower your employees so that they can handle situations, they can provide good, quality information to your customers, they can create value in the life of your customers, because the more value you create, is the more loyal customers you’ll have. People like to know when they’re doing business with you, it’s an effortless experience but in addition to it being an effortless experience, it is also one that is adding value to their business or life depending on whatever service or product you provide for them. Yanique wanted to take the time and share some of the highlights that we really got out of the whole experience and overview of the conscious consumer and consumer’s power and if you’d like to learn more about this particular study that Deloitte did and also gain some understanding of why the consumer has so much power and why you need to equip your team members with has much knowledge and power so that they can serve your customers better and that you can have more business and create greater loyalty and have a better brand image in your market and just dominate.  

Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue Online Course 

Deloitte Study – The Growing Power of Consumers

Joshua March is the founder and CEO of Conversocial a cloud solution that enables businesses to deliver customer service over Social Media at a large-scale. Conversocial is used in the contact centers of hundreds of major retailers, banks, telcos and other brands to enable them to manage the high volumes of complaints and questions they're receiving through social networks like Facebook and Twitter, including Google, Hertz, Tesco, Barclaycard, Hyatt hotels and many more. 

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Your company caters more to organizations that are serving customers on a large scale, can the service also be provided to persons who are not serving customers on a large scale?
• What are some of the things based on the line of business that you are in that you see coming into play in the near future in terms of customer service and what do you see coming as things that we need to prepare ourselves for more as businesses?
• Is there a formula that exits out there to measure effort?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is the one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Joshua stated that he has been working in the social media space for many years. His previous company was called iPlatform and they were one of the first ever companies building applications on top of Facebook for brands back in 2007/2008, the early days and while he was really excited about the use of the app platforms which you may remember back then like Farmville and stuff like that. He was really excited about how those platforms could be used by brands to engage with their customers. What he pretty quickly realized was that the really, really big change that was happening wasn’t in just how people were communicating and that there was this big shift going on which pretty much happened now but it's continuing to happen away from other types of digital communication and into Social Media and mobile messaging primarily on And the he included mobile messaging within the Social Media, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM, now What’s App, coming up We Chat, so it's not just the public, it's the private side as well. He really saw that as the future of how everyone individually would be communicating with each other and he really believed that as these channels became the dominant communication channels then that would change how businesses had to communicate with their customers too and it would be really important to customer service and that suddenly happened. The start of that was really people turning to the public side of Social Media to kind of escalate complaints about a business and get a response. And while that still goes on it's actually transitioned now to be much more about businesses just investing into the private side, private messaging with these channels. The preferred customer service channels and that's all the reasons for that. A - It's much better from a consumer side, it's so effortless and easy for someone to pull out their phone and message your brand, it means that you get really high customer satisfaction if you promote it as a service channel and from a business perspective it's great to get that customer satisfaction but it's also a great efficient channel, you can manage these digital messaging channels and in an asynchronous way that’s highly efficient from an agent workflow perspective. And with the launch of the bot platform is much easier to automate and so it's just become this channel that is really much better than anything else out there from a cost perspective and customer satisfaction perspective.

• Joshua stated that the background to that was that they’ve been going 5/6 years now and their (Conversocial) software is from real customer service software, they spend a lot of time building a real case management system into the ability to have automated routing and workflows dashboards where you can see exactly what your agents are doing. Now all of those kinds of functionality become really useful as soon as you have a team of agents. Now if you go back 3, 4, 5 years ago, the volume of people who were coming through and complaining through Social Media and mobile messaging was only really a couple of percent of all of your inbound volume. And what that meant was that for a small, medium sized businesses, it was it really wasn't a lot of volume and it was something that probably just some agents or have a couple of agents maybe they're just doing that on the side. But if you're a big business even 2% it's still a lot. And so, the big businesses even in those early days were still setting up 10, 20, 30 full time agents to do customer service through Social Media and mobile messaging. And they are really kind of catering to that audience. Now today it's actually starting to shift a bit because as you start really promoting, if you stop promoting like message us as your main customer service channel or if you're using the new Facebook Messenger customer champ plugin which allows you to actually paddle Web chat on your site using Facebook Messenger. They have customers who are doing that and Facebook Messenger is now responsible for 44% of all of that service volume including phone Nino and so once the volume start getting that high which they do if you're promoting it, even if you have a much smaller team of agents you're still going to need multiple agents just handling social messaging. And then a platform like Conversocial becomes extremely valuable. So, you still need to have a team but the companies that need a team of that size for social messaging becoming smaller and smaller as the volumes keep getting bigger and bigger.

Yanique mentioned that his business caters to the type of customer that needs the information now. Gone are the days when you'd write a letter and submit it to the organization through the mail and a couple of weeks or months later you get back our response plans. The clients that we're dealing with nowadays there’re in the now age.

Joshua agreed and stated that we live in an in the moment world where people are expecting almost real-time response to everything. And if you're going to take days to respond, they're probably just going to phone you at that point, people need an answer or they'll just go to a competitor, that's the reality. But on the flip side, one of the great things about digital messaging and asynchronous messaging as opposed to traditional web chat is that it's more like texting a friend and texting a friend it's pretty much real time that they're responding in 5 minutes. And if there is occasionally a message it takes a little bit longer and some are shorter and that's fine. And the traditional web chat world that doesn't work because the web chat world is like sitting there with the chat box open when waiting for a response and so you have to have current agents online responding within seconds. But with an asynchronous messaging you can even out those bums most a lot more easily and you can have a smaller number of agents handling a much larger number of customers as a result. Because as soon as you respond that pops up as a notification on their phone, they don't have to be sitting there paying attention all the time. So, it's very convenient for both the customers and for customer service agents. 

• Joshua stated that messaging is really what's growing, it’s going to dominate the industry and depending where you are, there are different messaging platforms. Now the one that's very exciting from people in many areas of the world especially Europe, U.K, South America is WhatsApp. WhatsApp is just such a dominant messaging platform that has completely replaced SMS in many parts of the world via internet. They're just starting to experiment with business accounts and the word on the street is that some point this year probably early this year. They're going to be releasing business tools and releasing an API which allows platforms like theirs to help their customers manage them. And he thinks that as soon as that happens it's going to become a huge, huge business to consumer channel. He thinks a lot of businesses are desperate for it, a lot of clients, customers would love it, it’s super convenient. People are using all the time already, so, he thinks that's going to release load this year. There is one which is very interesting, probably not going to explode in the same way because they're going to be much more careful and constrained about how they release it is Apple Business Chat, so this is Apple's business chat solution built on top of IMessages. Apple's nesting system is completely integrated with text messaging, so it’s used on iPhone and it goes blue and that's with IMessaging and getting more capabilities so that they're enabling brands to have business accounts. And what's exciting about this, there are two main exciting things. One is security, they're very well-known for privacy and security similar to WhatsApp in that regard. The other thing is discoverability and this is where they're going to really have a very interesting advantage over other messaging platforms. And there are two parts to it, one is in maps. So, if you are in apple maps looking at a local restaurant or a coffee shop there will be a button that says message them and you'll be able to just message them straight away and be like, “Hey, I want to order this or I want to order that” tightly integrated with Apple Pay, you could pay seamlessly and then go pick it up or they deliver it. And that could actually act as a kind of intermediary problem like the kind of post mates and stuff like, where at the moment of sitting in between and potentially this can make it super easy to go straight to a restaurant. And that's one area of discoverability and the maps the other area is with Siri the voice system. And this is where it gets really cool especially for big brands. We will acquire hotels, if you want to like message them saying you want to extend your stay for the night, how do you do that today, you have to look them up. You could message them on Facebook if you know about that and you have the app, you could DM them on Twitter there is always things that they're promoting in interesting ways but with business chat you’ll just be able to say, “Hey Siri, message Hyatt tell them I want to stay another night.” It's done, no app needed. Nothing else. It just like sends that message and Hyatt can respond over text, you can even pay using Apple Pay on your phone if you wanted. That's a pretty cool and like seamlessly integrated experience and will potentially bring voice assistance into like how people are into engaging with businesses for the first time. Apple is going to be very careful in how they roll that out and the brands they work with, they want to make sure they create really nice experiences. He thinks there's some really exciting stuff with that and could be pretty meaningful.

Yanique mentioned that a big part of what she heard in a lot of what Joshua said was convenience. She thinks convenience is definitely one of the key differentiators that businesses who are disrupting the whole customer experience platform, they're really killing it in that area and making life more convenient for their customers because that to her is just a very convenient.

Joshua stated that there is a huge amount of data which talks about the benefits for this, his favorite book on this subject is The Effortless Experience : Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nicholas Toman and Rick Delisi of CEB, who is now part of Gartner and it's a book that’s given to lot of a lot of his clients and Effortless Experience costly had a huge amount of data from years like large studies and it shows that the most important thing that affects customer loyalty after a service interaction is the effort that they have to put in to getting their true result. When someone has a problem or a complaint or an issue, they just want that issue to be solved as soon as possible, as easily as possible and it's very hard to increase their loyalty following any service interaction even if you really go crazy go above and beyond. They had an issue and you solved it great, they're not going to be ecstatic, maybe they'll be a little bit happier, what happens in the majority of cases, is that their loyalty is reduced and the data shows that if you do anything that makes it harder for them to get their issue solved; it has a massive negative impact on loyalty. If you make them jump through any hoops to speaks with an agent that they have to repeat themselves, they have to tell one person one thing and then they have to speak to someone else and tell them the same thing again. Anything like that which is just annoying and hassle or puts a delay, puts them on hold has a really, really negative impact. And so, if you can just reduce that effort, then you could have a massive impact on Customer Loyalty. He thinks this is the core of what makes social messaging so powerful is that it’s just so effortless. He spent the last year writing a book as well which is going to be coming out this quarter which he’s excited about and it's going to be called “Message Me”, it's all about the future of customer service and looks at the impact of messaging and he talks a lot about effortless experience in that book because he thinks that in many ways they kind of figured out the foundation and they could have asked this question, “How do you make it effortless?” And he doesn’t think that technology was really there at the time when they wrote book to actually implement it. But he thinks that with messaging, we finally do have the technology to implement a service channel which really can be completely effortless for consumers and that's super exciting.

Yanique stated that one of the things that she’s most amazed about as it relates to customer experience as well is regardless of where you are from in the world or however you are socialized, whether you're from Europe, North America, South America or the Caribbean, at the end of the day because we're all human beings, we're all yearning for that connection we're all yearning for some basic needs to be met. As Joshua said, she agreed that if you have to put in less effort you are more likely to go along with that particular service provider because they make life much easier for you. You have so many hurdles to jump over on a daily basis, whereas, if you're running a business, you're a family maker, you have a husband to take care of or a wife, kids up and down, just so many things pulling in all different directions. So, if you can do business with an organization that is looking out for you in that aspect and they're pulling you in less directions and they make it super easy kind of like Amazon, you can sit down in the convenience of your own home and basically order whatever you'd like to order and it's delivered to you, you don't have to go into the store and stress yourself out walking up and do figuring out which aisle it is in. Everything can be purchased with the click of a button, it really does definitely drive you to be loyal to that organization because you look back on those experiences and that's what would make you continue doing business with them.

Joshua agreed and stated that it’s important and he thinks not enough businesses really pay attention to it today. People are used to the point of looking at measuring customer satisfaction and empty apps. I actually love to see more and more businesses measuring customer satisfaction and NPS but he would actually love to see more and more businesses people measuring effort and measure how convenient, how effortless was it for them to get help, he thinks that would be really impactful for a lot of businesses.

• Joshua stated that in measuring effort, there isn't a standard kind of well-known way in the same way that you have NPS for example. There's a great case study from one of their customers British Telecom, telecoms company in the UK where they took this pretty seriously and they created what they call a Net Easy Score and very simple, they just asked people after service interaction, “How do you find that experience? How hard or easy was it to resolve the experience?” and it was just three answers. It was easy to resolve, it was it was difficult or it was kind of mutual. So, super simple question and they rolled that out across all of their service channels and they started tracking customer retention and the retention of the customers who'd reported that they had an easy service experience versus the customers that said they had a hard service experience and they found a huge difference. They found the customers who'd had a hard service experience were difficult to resolve their issue was 40% more likely to churn over the next three months, 40% more likely which is a huge number. So, they made a massive impact on whether those customers would stay as customers or not and when they actually looked at the different kind of Net Easy Score as they call it for different channels they found that social media and messaging and webchat that were the easiest channels by a long way, they were easier than phone by 4 to 1 and they were easier than email and cell service by 2 to 1. So, a huge impact for online business from understanding that and these are pretty simple way of asking a question.

Yanique asked if this question is asked after every interaction with their business or is it a question that they ask maybe on a yearly basis based on the customers who are their clients. 

Joshua stated that they did the actual, so, before they started working with them so he doesn’t know exactly how they do it. The way that they help their clients do surveys today through social and messaging is that your after-service interaction has been closed and resolved, then they send out an automatic survey inside the messaging thread from the Facebook Messenger or Twitter that ask them whatever question they want to have set up. So, it's after every service interaction, he thinks that's the best way to get that kind of data.

Yanique agreed and mentioned that people do remember the experience that they have had within the first 24 hours and then after that if it's not super great or really bad, they really don't remember the details. So, that question should be asked after each interaction.

Joshua mention that they see that the faster you get out after the issue has been resolved, the higher the response rate.

• Joshua stated that he is a pretty highly motivated person in general. His overall motivation is really about the stuff that they want to achieve as a business. And when he set out starting the business, he had this kind of very clear vision, he was like, “There's a reason that everyone is switching to these channels from a consumer perspective.” That's because it's a better channel, it's more efficient, it's easier, it's more convenient, it’s on everyone's phone, the way the messaging organizes communication which is by people instead of subjects is more natural, this is just a better way of communicating. And he really believed and still believe that if companies switch to these forms of communication then it's better for them and better for the customers. And they kind of set out their vision and they set out this clear mission of saying, “Yes, we want to really build the next generation of customer service software.” It's all focused around these new channels which they really believe are better. He gets a huge amount of motivation from seeing them and make that vision become a reality. Every company that they sign up has a customer who then starts more actively promoting these channels and increasing the volume of service issues that’s dealing with messaging instead of phone and email. All of that really gets him excited. He loves to see that continuing success and performance and the things that they’re achieving as a business. He’s kind of prepared to do whatever it takes to help them make that vision become a reality, he doesn’t really think too much about specifically what he enjoys doing during the day or not, it's really just about what he needs to do in order to help them be successful and that's what really gets him excited.

• Joshua stated that the app that we cannot live without would have to be Twitter. They have to use lots of different technology in the business, they love of using different technology. Twitter has this incredible network and he uses it a lot personally, tied to it for the news these days. But they use it huge amount for business as well, they connect with a lot of their customers on there, we connect to a lot of influences, a lot of thought leaders, they do a lot of thought leadership and share a lot of thought leadership through it. So, it's just added such value to his life and to the business.

• Joshua mentioned that The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nicholas Toman and Rick Delisi certainly from an approach to customer service perspective. From a management perspective, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz is one of his favorite and has been the most impactful book from a management perspective, kind of entrepreneur’s journey, how to really scale a business and manage a management team and very raw and very real, a lot of really valuable insight. So, that has been one of his favorite books. The other than that, he loves reading Sci-Fi, he’s a huge fan of Sci-Fi which he thinks actually gives him tons of business ideas and ideas about the future. So, he thinks it’s actually super valuable for anyone especially entrepreneurs working in technology should absolutely read a lot of Sci-Fi.

Yanique mentioned that reading Sci-Fi is a very unusual genre of books to read but she can see where Joshua is coming from with it because it kind of opens your mind to the impossible and that's where we're heading.

Joshua agreed and stated that if you're interested in customer service, the future of customer service, you should read his book “Message Me” which is going to be coming out pretty soon which he mentioned earlier as well.

• Joshua stated that something that he’s excited about right now, the book Message Me was the kind of his main passion project over the last year. He really wanted to kind of get down on paper two things, both his thoughts as to what businesses need to be doing today to really benefit from messaging, benefit from automation, how they really need to structure customer service teams, how to train agents how to promote these things in the right way. But then also, his vision for how messaging and automation intelligence are really going to change customer service in the years ahead. So that's been a big labor of love actually he just went to the printers a few days ago. So, he’s pretty excited about that, so that's a really big one. Outside of that, he’s also a big fan of personal development, he’s been getting more and more into meditation over the last year and in a few weeks, he’s actually about to go do his first Meditation Retreat where he’ll be on a silent meditation retreat for 10 days. So, he’s excited about that and slightly nervous.

• Joshua shared listeners can find him at –

Twitter - @joshuamarch

www.conversocial.com

Twitter - @conversocial

LinkedIn - Joshua March

• Joshua shared that a quote that comes to mind is the quote from Winston Churchill, “When going through hell, keep going” he really loves that quote, the key for any entrepreneur but is really true for anyone trying to achieve anything big in life is really persistence and grit, whatever you do and whatever you try to do and the bigger the thing you trying to do, the more ambitious it is, the harder it’s going to be. The more road blocks you’re going to face, the more mistakes you’re going to make and failures you’re going to have, every single person no matter how successful has those failures, in fact, the more successful you are, the more failures you’ve had and the key throughout all of it is to never give up and to keep going, pick yourself up, learn from your mistakes, keep evolving and that’s really the only thing that will get you anywhere in life.

Links

• The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon

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

Dan's 20-year career has consistently focused on delighting customers, spanning multiple disciplines including Social Media, Customer Service, Marketing, and Digital Customer Experience. Dan is the author of the new book, Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media, which is available on Amazon. He also co-hosts the Experience This! podcast, a weekly look at what’s working – and not working! – in the world of customer experience. Previously, Dan hosted the Focus on Customer Service Podcast, where he interviewed nearly four dozen brands which are renowned for outstanding customer service in Social Media, garnering tips and best practices. The podcast was named one of "The 50 Best Customer Retention Podcasts to Help You Attract, Engage and Retain Customers" by NGDATA. A frequent conference speaker, at conferences such as: Social Media Marketing World, Social Shake-Up, Corporate Social Media Summit, The Customer Service Summit, The Secret Service Summit, and more, Dan has also been named to several notable industry lists, including:

• "The 30 Most Influential People in Social Customer Service" by Conversocial
• "The Top 15 NPS & Customer Service Thought Leaders to Follow in 2017" by CustomerGauge

Dan has also been responsible for Social Media, digital marketing, and customer experience at several Fortune 300 brands, including being the Senior Director of Global Social Media at McDonald’s Corporation, Head of Digital Marketing at Humana and Head of Digital Customer Experience and Social Media at Discover. He played a key role in Discover winning its first J.D. Power Award for “Highest in Customer Satisfaction.” Dan also holds a B.A. in Psychology and Communications from the University of Pennsylvania, and he has an M.B.A. in Marketing and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He resides in Chicago with his family and is an avid Cubs fan.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What are some tips for an organization who is now embarking on using social media as a part of their marketing tool or their marketing strategy?
• What are some of the main things you have noticed over the years as being in customer care on social media? Why do you think people tend to flock to social media?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is the one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Dan Gingiss has been a marketer for more than 20 years and the role that really pushed him into customer experience was at Discover Card. He was recruited into a role in the digital team and asked to lead Digital Customer Experience and it was interesting to him because the guy that recruited him there who is the Chief Digital Officer noticed something about him or was able to verbalize something about him that he had not actually figured out about himself yet and he said that the reason why he wanted him to lead this with very little digital experience on his resume was that he had a unique ability to always be wearing the customer hat in almost every meeting he was in. And so, as he thought about that he was like, “Yeah, that actually is me.” He loves to put myself into the customer's shoes and try to be the customer so that he knows what it is that he’d like to see or what he’d like to experience and that helps him to design better experiences so that was a really fun role for him because his team was leading the website and eventually the mobile app. And just to give an idea, Discover which is not even one of the biggest Credit Cards in the U.S. gets almost 50 million logins a month on their website. So, it is the key way that customers engage with their Credit Card company. And so, there's so many opportunities to improve and develop new experiences as they do that. So that was his role. It also got him into Social Media and in Social Media as a marketer, the thing that interested him the most was that it's the first and only Marketing Channel where people can actually talk back to you. So, every other Marketing Channel the brand gets to have a megaphone and kind of shout its message at people and people either have to listen or perhaps they can turn off or change the channel. But this is the first channel where people can talk back to and that was immediately fascinating to him because he knew that companies that engage with their customers were going to be differentiated and that in itself was a way to improve the customer experience. So, that's kind of how he got into this and from there it's just been something that he has been fascinated by. He has written about it, he has been podcasting about it, and it continues to be a topic that he thinks is absolutely critical for virtually every business out there.

Yanique mentioned that the whole platform of customer experience over the years clearly has changed as indicated in the introduction where Dan said before traditionally marketers would be using a megaphone and kind of shouting their messages to the customer. A big part of customer experience now especially with Social Media is that the customer now has a platform by which they can express their voice and so testimonials have become such an integral role in terms of customers making decisions. It's no longer what you say the brand is but it's not what your customers say the experience and the brand experience is like.

Dan agreed and stated that we all expect that when we go to a business's website, that website is going to tell us great things about the business because it's speaking, so we're used to that. And that's a good first step to figure out what it is we're getting ourselves into but with almost any product or service the very next step is to figure out what other people are saying and whether that's a ratings and reviews site or it's looking up the company on Facebook or on Twitter. These are really important steps in the buying journey. And so, the extent to which companies can ensure that as prospects go through that buying journey they're hearing good things about their company or if they're hearing complaints that they're seeing a company that cares enough to listen to those complaints and respond to them. That's becoming really critical and he thinks the companies that are figuring it out are the ones that are getting more business because people are taking into consideration besides price and product, they're taking into consideration the willingness of the company to engage with me if I have a problem as a as a big part of the decision.

• Dan stated that when social started that's exactly what brands did is they said, “Hey, this is another way for us to shout our message at the masses.” It's a cheap way for us to do that especially back in the day before it became mostly a paid channel. And he thinks that they quickly figured out that this was a different kind of channel and that customers were not going to stand around for just hearing marketing messages. If you think about it, what's amazing about Social Media is that all the power has shifted from the company to the customer, the customer at any time can unfollow a company or just not pay attention to it anymore. And as we all know when we look at our streams and Facebook and Twitter we're seeing a lot of content. So, it's very easy for us to just scroll past it if it's something we're not interested in but he does think that more and more customers as they're evaluating companies they want to do business with are looking at their social presence to make sure that it isn't just marketing and to make sure that when people do bring questions or complaints to their attention that that company is engaging back. It is a new world in which consumers want to have a relationship with companies and that relationship is two way and it involves being able to have a conversation with the brand. When I want to and where I want to. And so, looking on the Twitter feed or the Facebook feed to make sure that a company is willing to do that as he said he believe is becoming more and more part of the decision-making process.

Yanique mentioned that one of the things that her customers sometimes ask her and as an expert in Social Media Customer Care, she would love to hear his feedback on it. Typically, what do you think is the global standard or do you think it should be a standard based on the industry that you are in if you post complained or comment on someone's social media page. What is a standard time within which they should get back in touch with you. Is it immediately? And when we say immediately, what do we define that as, 24 hours, an hour, 30 minutes?

Dan stated that the time to get in touch with a customer after a complaint or comment was posted does differ slightly by industry. He would say that best in class is 15 minutes or less. He doesn’t think that people expect instant yet unless they're on a channel like a live chat. But he thinks 15 minutes or less is considered best in class. Now there are some caveats to that. If you are an international airline that operates 24 hours a day you know the expectation is that you are available 24 hours and that you're responding quickly because your customers might be stranded in an airport having just missed a flight and they cannot wait for a response. If you are a mom and pop retail store that has one location that's open from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm every day, there's probably not as much expectation that you are responding 24/7. And into that kind of a company he would advise that as long as you are upfront with your customers about when you're available and you set expectations properly it's absolutely fine for you not to be available all the time. The challenge is that more and more consumers are evaluating every company they do business with in comparison to every other company they do business with. If you are a restaurant, you're not necessarily being compared to another restaurant, you're being compared to Amazon or Sprint or Comcast or whatever company. I just had a really great experience with on social media and who answered my question in 15 minutes or less. So that's the challenge is that you don't get to say, “Well. I'm just a small restaurant.” And so, my customers’ expectations aren't as high because unfortunately you're being compared to all those other companies. Now the good news is those other companies are also being compared to you. So, when he goes into a restaurant and he has a really nice waiter or waitress and the food is delicious and the overall atmosphere and experience are fantastic, the next day when he walks into the Sprint store or some other place, he is comparing that experience to what he just had at the restaurant. So, he thinks that the short answer to the question is, he has always tried it at the companies he has been at to aim for 15 minutes or less, that is best in class across all industries but certainly depending on the size of your company, the size of your customer base and your hours of operation. There's flexibility there.

• Dan stated he has an easy equation that he has in his book and for those of who don't like math don't worry you're not going to be overwhelmed. The equation is that expectations plus emotions equals a willingness to share. When companies exceed customer expectations we make them happy. And unfortunately, today they're still surprised at that because companies don't exceed expectations very often and when we have a great experience we are more than willing as customers to share that publicly because it is still a unique thing to have a great experience. When companies only meet expectations or barely meet expectations, you created a motion that's really blahhh, nothing and an okay experience, there's no reason to share that. Why would anybody want to tell their friends about an OK experience. But when companies miss expectations we make customers sad or worse angry. And unfortunately, there's a very high willingness to share there as well. So, his advice to companies is to make sure that your positive experiences outweigh your negative experiences and you will have more positive sentiment on Social Media than negative because your fans will be louder, your lovers will be louder than your haters. And that's hard to do because especially as your business gets bigger you are going to make mistakes, you are going to miss customer expectations. But even then, you have such an opportunity in a public space like Social Media to show that you care, to show that you have empathy and to make it right. There's countless occasions where he has seen companies turn negative detractors into positive advocates just because they are responsive and willing to help.

Yanique stated that Dan mentioned one very important word that she thinks is critical to achieving customer experience and building loyalty. And that's empathy. And asked if he could just share with us what are his views on empathy and why is it even necessary in our customer service environment regardless of the industry that you're in?

Dan stated that it goes back to what he was describing before is the ability to step into the customer's shoes. He thinks that very often companies create products and services and even worse processes that they haven't actually as consumers gone through themselves. So, they make a lot of sense to the company but as a consumer you're stuck going through a process that is difficult or time consuming or doesn't make sense. And when you have a complaint, what you want is somebody to listen to you and to believe your complaint and to be willing to help and all of that kind of gets wrapped up into empathy and the best customer service agents are the ones that are able to step into a customer's shoes, understand that they're frustrated and be willing to try to help them. When people ask him what kind of people you look for in Social Customer Care. He always says you want to look for the customer service qualities first among which empathy is one of the top things to look for because you can teach almost anybody how to do Social Media. It's very difficult to teach empathy and it's very difficult to teach someone to be great at customer service, to want to solve customer problems, to be willing to listen, to be willing to remain objective and not get emotional when a customer is upset. These are things that are really tough to teach and they're kind of innate in people. But when you find those people that are good at that you can teach them Twitter and Facebook, that's pretty easy. He believes that empathy is one of those things that customers are looking for when they're frustrated and when they find it, it eases their frustration and again can make them actually turn the negative experience into a positive one.

Yanique reiterated by saying you take the same approach that you would take to employ someone that you are putting face to face in front of your customer with the right attitude. And then you can teach them the technical skills but that same characteristic that you're looking for in that individual that's who you're going to put in front of your Social Media as well.

Dan agreed stated that when you've got people answering in Social Media they are the face of your brand. The other thing he advise for social agents in particular is to make sure that they're good writers which is something that you don't need necessarily in a phone agent but when you see companies responding to customers and there are spelling and grammar errors that's a reflection on the company and so the people that you select for this really important role, they've got to be good writers, they have to be able to show empathy and patience and caring and a willingness to solve problems because all of that is reflective of your brand.

Yanique stated that the book actually covers a lot of the areas that Dan speaks to. She is encouraging listeners that are going to have the opportunity to listen to this podcast. This book was actually written by Dan and Jay Baer wrote the foreword to the book. Jay Baer was a past guest on our podcast couple months back so you can always archive one of those podcast episodes and listen to Jay. But it's important and just wanted to emphasize to our listeners that this is an awesome book. It focuses on a lot of areas and questions that Dan may not be able to fully answer in this podcast, he's only touching on little areas but he goes deeper in the actual book Winning at Social Customer Care. So, she would encourage all of you and have the opportunity to listen to this episode to head on over to Amazon and purchase this book because this could be your winning tool for 2018.

• Dan stated that he stays motivated because he thinks that customer experience is still in its infancy. He thinks we've been talking about it now for a couple of years as being important and you see all the surveys that say that CEOs and CMOs know that it's a key thing to focus on. But he still thinks we're not quite at the point where customer experience is going and thinks that it will be the last true differentiator among brands. Think that the industries that compete on price find out very quickly that that's a very tough way to make money. And we know that most products and services can be copied in some way. And so, the real distinction that companies have is the way they treat their customers and that is very difficult to copy because it is made up usually of human interactions. And so, he has talked before about hiring the right people and having the right front line, that's very difficult to copy and that's what motivates him because he looks around and his podcast is all about great experiences that he and his co-host have had with different companies or that their listeners have had with different companies but it is amazing just waking up every day and living your life and interacting with brands. It is amazing how few of those there still are, as often as we've been talking about customer experience and Yanique has this great podcast and other people are talking about it, it is amazing still how many companies don't get it or aren't executing on it. So, to him that just means opportunity and he thinks that a day is coming where all companies are going to have to prioritize it and that will be exciting because as customers, that is going to make our lives a lot easier.

Yanique mentioned that it's interesting that Dan said that because we are all customers regardless of the businesses that we interface with or the lives that we lead but a lot of the challenges that we face in life that contribute to our stress level being high which leads to chronic illnesses. It really boils down to the interactions and the relationships that we have with people and a lot of it boils down to the services experiences that we have, how we treat each other, how we respond to each other. If more organizations could make an effort to understand how important this is to their business it would actually improve the quality of life not just in the business but generally how we relate to each other in the world, it would improve the world overall.

Dan agreed and said that Jay Baer was on a previous podcast and Jay wrote a terrific book called Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer and one of the key takeaways there that he loves is that people who complain about your company, complain because they care. The ones we need to be worried about are the ones that have already picked up and moved to our competition. But the ones that are complaining actually care about our brand and want us to be better. And again, there's a sort of a human nature to that that if we're just willing to listen and hear out a customer that has a complaint more often than not we're going to realize that that complaints are valid and that that customer might actually be suggesting ways for our experience to be even better. And as long as we're open minded about that we shouldn't be afraid of complaints, in fact we should welcome them because it's feedback and feedbacks a gift whether you are a company or an individual, getting honest feedback is a real gift. It's what we do with it that matters and he totally agrees, if we had fewer bad experiences with companies we'd probably all be happier as a population.

• Dan shared a tool that he cannot live without and stated that he’s going to probably choose the obvious one and go with Twitter and the reason is as much as Twitter has struggled as a public company, he thinks that Twitter is still the place to listen to what your customers are saying about both you and your competition and companies that are not paying attention on Twitter to the conversation about your industry, about your company or your competitors are just missing so much rich data that can help you improve your business. He thinks he’s two angles and both of which he talks about in the book. One is identifying the pain points that your customers are having with you and fixing them. It's one thing to respond within 15 minutes and help that individual customer but you need to take it to the next level and actually fix the underlying problem so that you don't have repeat complaints that actually will end up saving you money because your customer service expenses will go down. The other thing though is that there's so much opportunity to grow your business with new products and new innovations that are suggested by your customers. One of his favorite examples is the company Otterbox which makes cases for mobile phones and just from listening on Twitter they figured out that a lot of their customers were bringing their phones into the shower of all places in order to listen to music and this was a use case that they had not considered previously. So, they took this information and the data and they brought it back to their R and D (Research and Development) team and they ended up creating their first ever waterproof case which turned out to be one of their best sellers. And that doesn't happen if they're not listening to the conversation on Twitter so to him that is the absolute must have. If you're not paying attention get onto Twitter, you don't even have to tweet if you don't want to. You just have to create some lists, follow some people and listen to what's going on to what the conversation is about and you will learn a ton.

Yanique mentioned that she is an Otterbox user, she didn't know they had a water proof case, that's awesome. Listening as Dan said is so important and it's not just about going on Twitter and hearing information or looking at what's there but actually using that information, providing it to the people in the business that can actually do something with that information. So, it's good that they listened, they took it back and the team actually did something by creating a product that customers actually wanted because a lot of times in a business your customers are telling you what they want, it's just if you're really listening to what they want or are you just giving them what you think they want.

• Dan shared a few of the books that have had a big impact on him and stated he would go with two of them. And one of them is going to bring back his friend Jay Baer, Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer was a book that he thinks was a real turning point because Jay for most of his career had been a marketing expert. In fact, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype by Jay Baer his earlier book is also one of his favorite books and he shifted over to the customer service realm and Dan looked at Hug Your Haters as and Jay actually sort of wrote this in the foreword to his book is that Hug Your Haters really outlines the why of why it is that we have to engage with customers in Social Media and in all other channels and then his book tried to be a follow on to kind of say here's the how into the social media space specifically but he thinks Hug Your Haters is an absolute must read. He's got great examples from lots of different companies in there. And then another book that he’s a huge fan of is called They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan who is a wonderful guy. Marcus is the single best speaker he has ever seen in public at a conference and his book really talks to making sure that your company is the source of the best information about your product, service, industry anywhere on the planet. And he tells a wonderful story about his own company which was a swimming pool installation company and how he turned his website into the number one swimming pool website in the world in terms of people asking questions about installing swimming pools into their backyards and his company is just this little company on the East Coast of the U.S. It doesn't even service the world but it has become the go to resource and that book is really important because it shows the overlap between marketing and customer service and he thinks that there is a huge overlap there. He talks a lot about the sales process and how having all of this information will draw in prospects but it also can be used for servicing perspective because the more we can get our customers to self-serve with great content the less they have to call us and frankly create expense in a call center. And so, he thinks that book is a terrific one as well that he would highly recommend.

Yanique mentioned that she liked the fact that he linked marketing and customer experience because she thinks there is a lot of organizations that have these departments and the departments aren’t even speaking to each other so they’re collecting, doing their own thing but they are operating in silos and she’s not sure if marketing has recognized that what they’re doing connects directly to what the customer is experiencing and of course whatever it is that the customer is experiencing needs to filter back into what marketing is doing on their end to ensure that they’re actually meeting the customers’ needs, that’s powerful and that’s like a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) that a lot of organizations that light bulb has not gone off in their business as yet for them to recognize that those departments really should be working in tandem with each other.

Dan agreed and stated that how many of us has gone on to a website and have been greeted with an obnoxious pop up ad from the marketing department, the problem is those ads tends to work which is why companies do it but they work at the expense of annoying the 90% of customers that don’t click on it and that’s frustrating and marketers have to be way more aware of the overall customer experience and their contribution to the customer experience than they are today and he believes that silo busting is going to continue to be a theme in 2018 with companies, the ones that are figuring out to get silos integrated with each other instead of separate are going make great strides towards improving the entire customer journey.

• Dan stated that right now he is thinking about what’s next for him and his career and looking at whether he wants to continue speaking and writing and kind of making a go at it independently or whether he wants to continue working at big companies. He sort of had this rare combination over the last few years because most of the folks that are speaking in podcasting and writing books are doing it independently or they run their own consultancies versus working for big brands. He has been trying to do both for a while and he’s really trying to think inward now and figure out what makes him happiest and what he wants to do next, that’s probably what’s on his mind right now and as we turn into 2018 and he’s excited for whatever lies in the future.

• Dan shared listeners can find him at –

Twitter – @dgingiss

LinkedIn - @dangingiss

    www.winningatsocial.com

• Dan shared that a quote he leans one that he talks about in the book. When he was introduced it was mentioned that he is an avid Cubs fan and the manager of the Chicago Cubs name’s Joe Madden and Joe has all of these great sayings and great quotes that are meant to be about baseball but Dan actually thinks that when Joe retires from baseball, he’s going to become a business consultant because almost everything he teaches his players is very applicable to business. His favorite one of his is, “Do simple better.” He loves that because it in itself is very simple, it’s three words. When he’s talking about baseball, he’s talking about making sure that you always run out a play or the simple ground battle or the short stop that those are not the ones you make errors on. But in real life and business it’s such a good mantra to live by because so many companies make things overly complicated for customers and if you can figure out how to do simple better, generally you’re going to get to a much better outcome for both the customer and the business. When he struggles at work with some sort of complexity or the legal department wants this or government regulation wants this or the PR department is asking for something, again, it’s about putting that customer hat on and saying, “What’s the simplest route for our customer? How do we make it as simple as possible and do simple better?” There are some great examples in the book and elsewhere about this. One quick one that he gives which is one of his favorites and talks about in the book about this company that does conference calls servicing and we’ve all been on conference calls where we’re waiting on hold and we listen to this awful music and this one particular company hired a guy who actually now works for Facebook to record a song with his guitar called “I’m on hold” and he would encourage listeners to go to YouTube and look it up by Alex Cornell, this song is absolutely amazing and as you’re listening this song, it’s just this nice guy strumming a guitar, and you find yourself realizing you don’t want the person on the other line to actually join the call because you want to listen to the music instead and that is doing simple better, that’s taking a very simple experience of waiting on hold and making it memorable and remarkable instead of either annoying or unremarkable. He thinks that when companies can find opportunities to do that at every step of the journey, you really make things much better for your customers and you can really change the whole perception of dealing with you as a company.

Yanique agreed and stated that even though it’s just three basic words, it’s not so much the words but it’s the meaning and the purpose that’s in the depth of those words that you really should extrapolate and try to inject into the DNA of your employees so that they can really function from that mindset because you’re right, sometimes things are very simple and we find the most complicated and complex routes to frustrate the poor customers who kind of want to get in and out in the shortest possible time whether it be online, face to face, over the phone, “It’s just a simple question I want answered” and somehow it’s just a very discombobulate way that the organization has put in place for this. If we could really start with that in mind, do simple better, it will definitely improve the quality of all of our lives.   

Links

• Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media by Dan Gingiss
• Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer
• Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype by Jay Baer
• They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan
• Otterbox

Catherine M. Mattice is President of consulting and training firm, Civility Partners, and she has been successfully providing programs in workplace bullying and building positive workplaces since 2007. Her clients include Chevron, the American Red Cross, the military, several universities and hospitals, government agencies, small businesses and non-profits. She has been published in a variety of trade magazines and has appeared as an expert in major news outlets including NPR, FOX, NBC, ABC, USA Today, Inc Magazine, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur Magazine, Washington Times, Psychology Today and Bloomberg. Catherine is Past-President of the Association for Talent Development (ATD), San Diego Chapter, and one of the founders (and current president of) the National Workplace Bullying Coalition. In his foreword to her book, Back Off! Your Kick-Ass Guide to Ending Bullying @ Work, Ken Blanchard said it was “The most comprehensive and valuable handbook” on workplace bullying. BACK OFF, and her second book, “Seeking Civility : How Leaders, Managers and HR Can Create a Workplace Free of Bullying”, are both available on Amazon.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you talk with us about some of the things that help to create that positive work environment and is it only up to the employees or does leadership play a big role as well?
• How do you feel about customer experience on a global level?
• What are some of the things you encourage organizations to do to create that kind of culture where people are feeling positive, where the energies are consistently up?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you were sitting across the table from another business owner and they said to you that they feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Catherine Mattice shared that she was the director of Human Resources for a non-profit organization and found herself working with a bully and this guy and herself were both directors. They both reported directly to the President of the organization, he was not her manager. He was her peer but he was definitely a bully. He was an uber excessive micromanager, he yelled, he made it very clear if he didn't like you, he was very difficult to work with. She personally felt bullied by this person and that was very exhausting, it was like every interaction with him was frustrating. It took a lot of courage to interact with them because you figured you're going to be yelled at, it was just a very emotional experience. And then also as the director of HR she dealt with all of the organizational problems that he created as well so his particular department had a crazy turnover. She spent a lot of time counseling his employees in her office and also spent a lot of time talking to the President about this person's behavior and sort of begging the president to solve it. And the president would always just say, “That's just how he is. I don't know why it bothers you. Be the bigger person.” Which was of course frustrating to hear her pleas for help to just sort of be ignored. And then during all that time she started getting her Master's Degree at San Diego State University and she decided to write a paper for one of her classes on this topic of sort of toxic work environments. And during that paper she came across that phrase, “Workplace Bullying” and she has been obsessed ever since and have continued to scramble to learn everything she possibly can about workplace bullying and she created a business around helping organizations solve that problem.

Yanique shared that the issue of bullying seems like something that's not affected by a lot of organizations but it really is a widespread issue.

Catherine agreed and stated that they call it the silent epidemic in the U.S.A lot of other countries actually have laws around workplace bullying but America does not. So, it's just as pervasive if not more so than harassment and discrimination because it's really equal opportunity harassment and so there is a lot of it. A lot of people feel bullied at work, in fact research puts that number at around 30 to 50 percent of people have been bullied at some point in their working life.

Yanique stated that it's interesting that Catherine mentioned that it's such a high percentage and asked if she believe that it filtrates out of the education system because a lot of kids are bullied in schools as well.

Catherine stated that she thinks that we are all mean, the society at large is mean, look at TV, it's all full of mean drama. Reality TV is mean, politics they’re mean, we're mean when we’re on the road, we can be uncivil if someone's going too slow or cut us off. We tend to have this propensity to sort of lash out and we live in a high stress environment because we're always on our phones, we always have someplace to be and so she thinks it's harder to be kind and to take a step back and be nice and take a breath and focus on civility. It's easier to let your frustrations get the best of you. And in school certainly bullying happens and there is some research that's found that if you bully as a child you probably bully as an adult. And also, if you're a target as a child you may be a target as an adult.

• Catherine Mattice stated that leadership absolutely is the biggest player in the culture so leadership has to decide, “This is the kind of culture we want” and then putting things in motion to create that kind of a culture. Bullying is an organizational problem and culture is an organizational problem and it has to be solved by the leaders so leaders really have to say, “We want a positive work environment because we know it impacts internal and external customer service. We know it impacts innovation and decision making and people's ability to learn.” so when you have a savvy leader who knows that positive relationships and positive feelings about your organization impact the bottom line then you're lucky and you get a positive work environment. But bullying is absolutely an organizational problem not an employee problem.

Yanique asked what if the leader is a bully himself?

Catherine shared that she gets that question a lot. She stated that she honestly hates to give this advice but you have to leave. If the CEO or the leader is a bully, there probably isn't anyway that leaders going to hear anyone out if the leader is told people perceive you as too abrasive. Sometimes an HR professional or maybe someone close to the leader in the C-Suite depending on their relationship can have a conversation with the leader and maybe able to be heard. But in her experience, leaders believe that sort of abrasive aggressive leadership style has worked for them and so they're not going to be interested in changing unless you can really show them the damage they're causing. People can change, she coaches people who are bullies all the time but the CEO or the leader, unless somebody is close enough to that person to have that conversation she would say you may want to consider leaving because the culture is not going to get any better.

Yanique mentioned if the leader is a bully as Catherine said and she recommend that they leave. Do you feel that even though you said you believe people can change but a big part of change means that they have to become self-aware that something needs to change because many of them would be like, “Well the problem isn't me, it’s them.” She has heard that so many times in organizations when employees make complaints and a lot of times that the complaints are being made, they're not willing to accept that sometimes the issue is not necessarily with the other person but sometimes we need to look internally and look at how we could be doing things differently because maybe if we take a different approach you will get a different result.

• Catherine stated that she recognizes that because of Social Media and the Internet that company is there maybe more focused on customers than they used to be but it's more about the branding than really caring about customers and you see that with all of the negative things that go on. United Airlines being an example, they had this big media problem when they had the police come and remove a customer but that was a culture problem, that's the reason that happened, that the people who worked for United actually thought to themselves, “We are going to call the police and have this customer forcibly removed.” That's a culture problem with United Airlines. She thinks that customer experience and customer service boils down to culture as well and having a positive work environment as they've talked about.

• Catherine stated that she thinks a big thing that she sees with her clients is that when companies call her because their culture is negative, one of the things they're not doing is living their core values. So, she has really come to see the value in core values and she has seen it firsthand that if you can live your core values and make your core values part of everything you're doing day in and day out then that would really affect the culture because then everyone is very clear on how they're supposed to act. Going back to the United Airlines example, United versus Southwest Airlines which always wins customer service awards. Their three core values are servants heart, warrior spirit and something about having fun. If an employee is making decisions in the context of those three core values, they would never ask Police to forcibly remove a customer's not doing anything wrong. So, United Airlines wasn't living their core values and that's how things like that happen. A lot of companies don't see the value in core values until something awful happens and then they realize, “Oh, we've got to get back to our core values.” 

Yanique mentioned that some companies have core values that their employees don't even believe in.

Catherine agreed and stated that that goes back to it though, she sees this all the time, companies have core values and they're on their website and maybe they're on a sign somewhere in the lunchroom and that's the extent of it, so how can employees believe in those core values when they're not part of their day in and day out life. It's up to the organization to say, “Here are our core values. This is how we want everyone to behave.” And then the organization has to find ways to advertise those core values regularly and ensure that employees know them and live them regularly.

Yanique mentioned that it's like you're basically trying to find new and innovative ways to reinforce and basically have lots of repetition. So, now it becomes a part of their DNA. So, if courtesy is one of your core values, in everything you do you try to effect courtesy that way when you're dealing with external customer it's not something that you're trying to put on, it comes so naturally because it's something that you practice every day anyway.

• Catherine shared that she thinks it's all of the negative stuff that she sees really fuels her fire and makes her work even harder to make a dent in all of the negativity. It really pains her to see employees unhappy and what you do for a living is such a big part of your self-esteem and your self-concept. It's a huge part of who we are as people, what we do for a living and to have that torn down and have somebody like a bully clawing at your identity and your self-esteem and yourself concept day in and day out. It pains me to know that there's people out there who experience that and that's what motivates her. She is driven to touch the lives of as many employees out there in the world as she possibly can. And also, she has been through some things that have made her angry at the right amount of angry where she has submitted proposals to work with a client and the stories they told her were absolutely awful and then she’ll submit a proposal, she work with a charter to try to solve it and then the leader comes back and says, “I don't think this is important enough to spend that money.” That makes her angry and that anger fuels her too. It makes her want to work harder.

Yanique stated that she knows exactly what she means in terms of them not seeing the value in it. And as Catherine said, it really boils down to the value system of the individuals that you're dealing with and what they deem of importance.

• Catherine mentioned that one of the app is LinkedIn that she uses regularly to make connections. She uses HubSpot to manage her customers and interactions. MailChimp that she’s using for email management. She stated that there's definitely a lot of tools out there that she feels like she couldn't live without that help to keep her basically organized and having everything just flow.

• Catherine mentioned some of the books that have had a big impact on her. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, that was her very first personal development book so that one has had a big impact on her. She has read a lot of books on workplace bullying, one book she mentioned a lot that had an impact on her is a book called Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance by Kim Cameron. He is in the positive psychology space and he talks a lot about essentially how to create a positive work environment too and he has very specific action items in that book that she actually offers up as advice quite a lot and it's a short read, she highly recommend that book. That's probably one of my favorite sort of business books.

• Catherine stated that one piece of advice that she would give business owners and managers is that they should help their employees find meaning in their work. Help them find a profound connection to everything that they’re doing and that the company is trying to accomplish and your company will flourish if you do that.

Yanique reiterate, help them find meaning in what they're doing. Therefore, there must be a direct link between what the company's goals are and what the personal goals of the employee is because if those two things actually have some congruence then both entities actually have a win-win situation. 

Catherine agreed and gave an example of that, she was doing some training for a company that kills mosquitoes, that's their business. She was doing some training and on a break, she just sort of asked the trainee sitting next to her, “Tell me more about your business, what you do?” and she said, “Well, we killed mosquitoes. That's about it.” That's all she got. And this other person sitting next to her says, “Is that all you think we're doing here? We are saving this community from West Nile Virus.” He was offended that she thought all they did was kill mosquitoes and so he believes he's saving the community from this horrible disease by killing mosquitoes and killing mosquitoes was a means to the end goal of saving that community. So that's what she’s talking about, help reminding your employees that there's a bigger picture beyond their tasks.

• Catherine shared that they just finished up all the quality issues today. She just released an online course that is essentially her consulting methodology. It's a way to help organizations that can't afford expensive consultants but they need to change their culture. This online course takes them through that process and it has a whole bunch of videos and worksheets and checklists and job aides and literally somebody could take her course and change their organizations culture using the tools in the course, so that is the thing she is super-duper excited about right now. She mentioned that the course can be found at civilitypartners.com/makeover 

• Catherine shared listeners can find her at –

LinkedIn - Catherine Mattice Zundel

    Twitter - @CatMattice

    Facebook – Catherine Mattice Zundel

    Facebook – Civility Partners

    Website – www.civilitypartners.com

• Catherine shared that there is a quote that she always reverts to and it's by Viktor Frankl who was in the Holocaust and suffered some horrible things and one of his famous quotes is, “The last of any human freedom is the freedom of choice.” We get to choose our attitude in our circumstances and it's really important to keep that in mind. We can't be victims of circumstance, we have to take charge of how we react to the circumstances and only then can you overcome adversity.

Yanique reiterated, basically freedom of choice is something that we all have regardless of the situation that we're in. And that's a great privilege. So, we should definitely try to exercise it as much as possible. 

Links

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance by Kim Cameron
• Back Off! Your Kick-Ass Guide to End Bullying @ Work by Catherine Mattice
• Seeking Civility : How leaders, managers and HR can create a workplace free of bullying by Catherine Mattice

Alexander Genov but will be affectionately refer to him as Alex for the purpose of this interview. Alex is an experienced Customer Research Professional who applies his Experimental Social Psychology background and his passion for research, design and innovation to solving important customer and business problems. His professional goal is to help teams create remarkable products and services which make people's lives easier and more enjoyable. Currently, Alex is Leading Customer Research for the Zappos Family of Companies. In previous positions, he was responsible for research and usability of the products and services for companies like Turbo Tax also known as Intuit, State Farm Insurance and the Active Network, he has over 15 years of relevant experience, 5 years of academic research and over 10 years of customer research in the software industry. Alex received his Ph.D. in Experimental Social Psychology from Clark University and his areas of research include defining and measuring emotions, individual differences, usability and consumer segmentation.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• What is does Social Psychology mean and how does that connect to customer experience?
• Talk a little about your research that you have found, what works, what doesn’t as you pointed out individual differences and that customers are the same.
• Why do you think it’s important to invest in research to help you grow your business and become more customer centric?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is the one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Alex Genov pointed as it says in his bio that his background is in psychology, that his passion is understanding people. And more specifically his specialization is understanding emotions and how we define emotions, how we measure emotions, how people experience emotions, the area of emotions is not as simple as it sounds. On the face of it we all experience emotions, we all talk about it but what I found through many years of deep research and study of emotions is that it differs not only how we talk about emotions but how we experience them and measuring them is a tricky thing. That's his specialty and also another area of expertise he brought from said psychology was individual differences and that's something he believe deeply in which is that not everybody not all people are different. And by the same token not all customers are different. In his career, he has been trying to help companies understand customers as people and understand the individual differences that are important for each specific industry and in each specific product. He was initially headed to be a Professor but soon gave up the idea because he didn't want to be poor for many many years. He kind of sold out to the software industry but he has no regrets. It's been an interesting challenge and a lot of fun experiences trying to bring rigor to research in the industry but also to make it practical. So, that's been the biggest challenge for him all along is to make it to kind of walk that fine line, keeping that balance and keeping the organization honest in terms of research but also being practical and not being too academic and kind of obstructionist in that way.

• Alex Genov stated that there are many areas of psychology when you start specializing in it. So, one area for example is, Social Psychology and other area is Personality Psychology which is a bit more focused on the individual and other area is Clinical Psychology so these are people who help people with mental problems and so on. He picked Social Psychology because it was the most interesting to him and when he was studying it all the really fun experiments from the 50’s and 60’s that really kind of make jaws drop nowadays but they were all designed to understand people in the sense that how is our behavior determined and motivated by the real or imagined presence of others. That's the definition of social psychology. The methods that he brought with him to the industry or essentially the methods of scientific psychology which are based on the empirical method of research. And the most kind of defining feature of that is the question “How do you know?” When we talk about something and we say, “I believe this and that to be true” some people may be fine by saying, “I feel it in my gut and that's what I believe” or they say. “I know from experience and I know it to be true” but an empiricist will say, “Well how do you know?” “Do you have the data to look at and to measure?” An empiricism is basically this belief that we all have to have some kind of shared experience to be able to determine that something is the case. So, for example, if he asked you what the temperature is and you tell him 72 degrees then you can both look at the thermometer and agree that that's the case. When it comes to emotions you can see how becomes tricky to say ok how do you feel and then you feel happy but many times we don't have direct access to our emotions or we cannot articulate them or we don't want to share them. So that's where it gets tricky how do you measure, how you define emotions. For example, you can define them by the facial expressions which is a behavioral indicator, you can define it by overt behavior, are people jumping with joy literally right or are they running away? Also, you can always ask them how do you feel but again one of the principles of research that brought that led him to the industry was to measure the same thing using different methods and to triangulate the results so that we have a higher degree of confidence that what we're saying when measuring is exactly what we intended to measure. He doesn’t want to get too technical but that's basically the background.

Yanique mentioned that we talk about Zappos all the time in workshops and people think about Zappos as the Customer Experience guru in the Retail Market especially in the online space. They basically came in and they transformed how retail business is done online. The fact that they have a 365 day return policy, if you call them somebody is going to answer the phone even when you go on their website, unlike other websites, every single page on their website has their telephone number at the top. So, at the end of the day when somebody has an issue or when a customer has an issue whether it is to make a request or it is to query a product or service that they have already engaged you for a lot of times they want to speak with a live human being and sometimes it's so hard navigating on these organizations websites some of them don’t have a phone number, they have this contact us page where you have to type out your entire request or issue and then wait for somebody from their company to respond to you. So, the fact that Zappos actually makes themselves available by providing a telephone number on all their pages really sets them apart.

• Alex Genov agreed and stated that he joined Zappos about 4 years ago and he can take absolutely no credit in it's incredible success over the years. He has contributed something in the past 4 years but indeed the company was formed early on based on the belief that it will be successful only if they make their customers happy, employees happy and the vendors happy. That was the focus. When Tony Tsheish started investing in the company, basically he was intensely focused on the customer experience and on making this very new behaviour which is buying shoes online as easy as possible. We're talking about 15 - 16 years ago. They realized that in that kind of business things usually will sometimes go wrong and you cannot prevent that but what you can do is to do everything to make it right by the customer. So, one of the initial defining moments was one day something went wrong with an order and a customer was not happy but then they went out of their way to make it right and then that person wrote an e-mail and in the subject matter, she started by using the word, “WOW.” Bear in mind, this is 15 - 16 years ago. Now everybody's talking about wowing customers. But that was so long ago and then at that point they realized this is going to be our defining characteristic, is going to be customer service and at a time when everybody is considering service a cost to be cut. Zappos said, “That's who we are and we're going to invest in that.” That's really counter-intuitive in a way thinking has let it success because the whole belief is that we're selling shoes that are also available in other stores or in other places. And if we do all the same things that other retailers do and if we compete on price and we can be done on cutting costs then we're just going to be another retailer. And you know what's happening with retail nowadays, this was decided so many years ago. Sometimes it's really because he’s a proponent of the online experience. Sometimes there's intense focus on customer service is going to be a point of frustration because he’s thinking can we focus a bit more on the website. But then you'll realize what the roots are and also, we have a saying at Zappos that “Zappos is a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes right now.”

Yanique mentioned that if businesses looked at their companies like that, “I'm just an airline” or “I'm a customer service company that just happens to be in the airline business transporting people from one location to the next for all different reasons, weddings, business, vacation.” And they realize that their focus is on service because without these customers we have no business. I think it would really change the mindset and propel, it would be like a paradigm shift in how we as customers experience business.

Alex agreed and stated that it will help to have some competition, some industries are more much more like monopolies right. And they have less choice than there is much less pressure to not be customer centric in general. One question in the outline about what business owners can think of and what's going to make them successful - it's very simple, it's just focus on the customer and of course you have to have your business plan and you have to have your operations to be excellent. You cannot be focusing on the customer and giving away free product and you know you're going to be in business for maybe 3 days, you will have very happy customers but very short-lived success. You need to have your financials work but beyond, he loves Zappos because it's a company that's focused on purpose before profit. And it’s a very subtle but very important difference, if you say that you’re in there for the profit then you’ll be making all those decisions that ultimately end up hurting customers. If you are saying that you’re here for that purpose then but also make sure that you are making profit. Ultimately, if you're making customers happy they will be loyal customers and they will be telling others about your business. Alex stated that another thing that sets them apart is that they don't do a traditional advertising. They don't pour billions into TV ads for example, but people know about Zappos from word of mouth, from things that they do that benefit the community. And they have a very strong Social Media Presence. So that's another lesson for entrepreneurs and for business folks. Focus on the customer, focus on the community, do good things for the community and for the customer and then you're going to have those customers that are not only customers but they're going to be your ambassadors they are going to spread the word about you. So, it's going to be saving a lot of money on advertising essentially and marketing.

• Alex stated that if you're a small company you cannot really afford PHD’s and specialist to do this for you but you can do it yourself to a large degree and then why is it important? If you want to make some customers happy, now we talk a lot about personalization, a lot about meeting the customer needs or the jobs supposed to be done then you don't know your customers. You're probably going to be basing decisions on your own experience and if you are lucky to have a lot of customers just like yourself, so be it then you have to do any research. If you want to differentiate yourself you need to understand a little bit of the competition but mostly the customer. There are different types of businesses, for example, we are a corner coffee shop, then you're going to be providing the staples, you may walk around the neighborhood see what the other coffee shops charge and you're going to price your offering accordingly and then there's not much to research about, what people need is coffee, pastries. Alex stated that one of the books he read recently that influence him is one from Harvard professor called Clayton Christiansen and he's been talking about jobs to be done for a long time, customer jobs to be done and it's a variation of user needs or wants but it's much more specific in the sense that he's saying customers are hiring you and your product to do specific jobs and if you do the jobs, they'll continue hiring you, if not they are going to fire you and your product. So, the example he gives is a big breakfast chain here that they wanted to grow their milkshake business. They were getting a hard time selling more milkshakes so they hired this company to really observe people and how they buy milkshakes and then they talk to people and all they found was that the same person stopping by in the morning and stopping by in the afternoon had different needs when it comes to milkshakes. So, in the morning they were on their way to work, pretty long commute and they needed a little bit of nourishment like breakfast but also, they needed something to keep them occupied in the car sitting there bored. And so, they designed these milkshakes with something to do with nutritional value but also with some chunks of stuff in the milkshake so that you know people would just drink the milkshake and have something like some more sensation in their mouth. In the afternoon, when the people stopped by after picking up their kids from daycare and so we had kids in the backseat making noise and shouting, angry and so So, they are buying milkshakes for them and the job to be done was to give them some nutrition but also to keep them quiet back there. They were designed not only the milkshakes but also the straws so that they're thinner so the milkshake last longer. And you understand the whole point of this is that if you didn't observe people in action and didn't talk to them about why are you buying this and what are you trying to achieve with that milkshake, then you will be in the dark. Some things are pretty straightforward like opening a coffee shop with the staples but even then, if you're really customer focused then you'll know your customers and when they come in you know that this person, they have their usual and you offer them that. Or maybe they're upset, talk to them about what’s bothering them, bartenders are great at that. They solve these emotional jobs to be done like a friend for somebody who is a little bit down maybe or doesn't get anybody to talk to at the moment. The point is all of this is based on knowing people understanding people and if you're just focused on your business and your numbers and you don't see your customers as people but just as walking wallets then ultimately, they'll find another place that treats them better. So, you have those basic needs and wants. When he was talking about individual differences is when it gets to be bigger businesses that now start serving millions of people or different types of customers for example, if you are a B2B business and you're selling something to a company, you have different interactions, for example the CEO who is going to be signing the cheque ultimately. And interacting with some procurement person who is responsible for implementing the system. And then you may or may not interact with the end user but they're all different user groups and they all have different mindsets and they're going to have different interactions with the system. So that's a very simple form of segmentation based on role in a company. For Zappos for example, to some extent gender plays a role of course because all men's shoes are different from women's shoes, clothing. They dress somewhat differently. When he was working for Turbo Tax for example and it's a financial, Do-It-Yourself financial product. Gender made no difference in terms of how finances are kept, if anything women are much better at keeping finances than men but when it came to how we understand the product you think about finances there was no different so for each business it's going to be a bit different. Just to finish the coffee shop example and maybe some of the audience have some customers that are vegan now so you have the vegan customers and you have the ones that are not. So that will be kind of a surprise and delight for your customers to say, “Do you want regular milk? or you want soy milk?” But that's another example of maybe your segment based on taste and health preferences and so on.

• Alex shared that in his tools of the trade like analytics programme. He uses SPSS too because everybody at Zappos does hands on work. And there's no more managers there now and it's a different self-organization kind of environment. A lot of his work is hands on work. They have a really powerful survey tool, they do a lot of surveys with our customers and with prospects - general population, US shoppers. They collect information that way and then he uses an analytics tool called SPSS to do the analysis. They also collect a lot of text data and it's very challenging to analyze sentiment and he’s talking about large volume. Like 600,000 reviews on the website or even they do a survey when they get to 2,000/3,000 verbatim comments from customers in text form. It's very difficult to analyze, now they’re starting to explore a tool that is a very powerful text analytics tool developed on technology from the MIT media lab and so you have the best scientists there working to develop this kind of artificial intelligence to extract meaning for example from text. And it's not as simple as just counting the number of times a word appears. That’s extracting meaning what the word is connected to water. He mentioned that Google is amazing, Google is like this really powerful software company if you have to find anything you Google it and find it right away.

• Alex shared that one of the key influences for me is this Italian designer called Roberto Verganti. He wrote several books but one of his key books is called Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean and his main idea is that you need to understand customers as people and that's been his kind of mission in the past couple of years as don’t really just study customers as shoppers in the process of shopping or in the process of calling but understand them holistically as people. He has been advocating for this sort of radical innovation which is that a dual meaning of what things mean for people and that's very hard to do but it's going to guarantee the biggest success. One of his examples is this company that was the leader in candles, a few centuries ago. A couple of centuries ago they were there for a hundred years, they were the best, made candles and then electricity came along. And instead of them changing the meaning of what they were doing they continued to focus on the light, how long does the candle was lasting, how safe it is. And then of course they disappeared, they went out of business. Alex asked – “Can you guess one Candle company that is thriving right now?” Yanique replied – “I cannot…” A candle company that is thriving now is called the Yankee Candle Company, it's very big in the United States but the reason why they're so successful is that because they change the meaning of what a candle means, it's not used for light but it's used for mood and they made it smell good but you see how they changed the meaning because the other company was focused on safety and they didn't want the candle to smell right and then it lost its purpose. That’s all he talks about, understanding what things mean for people. Another example is this kettle for boiling water and they made this kettle that looks pretty cool but also was emitting the sound when it was ready, it kind of whistle and the meaning there was not only was it a tool for boiling water but it’s a signal for the family to gather around the table. You would think it’s a simple object and then people pay US $500.00 for this. It’s the shape, the meaning. A good question for all the listeners is the business they’re in, are they innovating on that level versus just making things better the way they are, keeping the same meaning but making it better. “Are you innovating or are you making things better the way they are?” [Question to ask yourself as a business owner]

• Alex stated that at work he is excited about a couple of big programs they are doing which is the Voice of the Customer, they are enabling their customers that go on their website and don’t call on the phones to give them feedback and for the organization to be able to consume that feedback, so they are working hard on that. Again, exploring text analytics, it’s going to open their eyes, it’s just a ton of data that has been left unexplored. In his personal life, he went back to a passion of his which is Martial Arts after many years of not doing much and in Las Vegas there are Shaolin Monks teaching and that’s super exciting for him. There is one authentic Shaolin Monk visiting to hold a seminar and he’ll be taking some time off work to do that.

• Alex shared listeners can find him at –

LinkedIn - @alexgenov

• Alex shared that what inspires him in times of adversity in his professional life is thinking about the customer and Zappos is a part of Amazon and Jeff Bezos is talking about customer obsession and then in his personal life, is this idea of no hacks, it’s just perseverance and hard work.

Links

• Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean by Roberto Verganti

Jeff Toister Show Notes

Jeff Toister helps customer service teams unlock their hidden potential. He is the best-selling author of The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide To Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service. More than 140,000 people on six (6) continents has taken his video base training courses on LinkedIn Learning aka Lynda.com. Jeff’s 15 training videos on LinkedIn Learning include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer Centric Culture.

Jeff was named one of the top 30 customer service professionals in the world by Global Gurus. He was also named one of the top 50 Thought Leaders to Follow on Twitter by the International Customer Management Institute. Feedspot has named his Inside Customer Service Blog one of the Top 50 customer service blogs on the planet.

Jeff holds a Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) certification from The Association for Talent Development.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you tell us about your journey in writing the book – The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service?
• What is culture? As entrepreneurs, what are some of the things they should be thinking about?
• What are some advice you would give to an employee or a business owner who is trying to sustain a service culture and with growth they have not been able to manage the culture with the massive growth that they have experienced? How do they scale but at the same time maintain that same service culture and experience?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Jeff Toister stated that what compelled him the spectrum of customer experience was the very first customer he served. He would love to say that it was a success story but it wasn’t, he didn’t do a good job and that changed things for him. He was 16 years old, he was working in a retail clothing store and he had gotten about 15 minutes of training and the person that was supposed to be training him said, “I’m going on break, good luck, here’s the key to the dressing room. Do the best you can, I’ll be back.” He was nervous as young kids often are and I didn’t know what he was supposed to do. A customer comes up to him and he’s just thinking, “Oh no, I don’t know anything” and that’s obviously the wrong mindset but that’s the mind set he had. The customer asked, “Do you carry Dockers?” it’s a brand of khakis and he knew what they were, he had no idea if they carried them or not and so he’s looking around the store and he’s hoping that there’s a big neon sign that says, “Dockers right here” but there was not. And being 16 years old and being inexperienced, the first words that came out of his mouth were, “I don’t know” and without getting a second chance to recover, he got angry and he said, “Wow, this is terrible service” and he stormed out of the store. He knows that that was the wrong answer, the challenge is when you’re employee in that situation how do you stop yourself from giving that wrong answer, that comes with experience, life experience and training knowledge and so in that moment he knew it wasn’t the right answer, he knew he didn’t do well and he never wanted to feel that way again, that was many years ago but throughout his entire career, he has always gravitated towards 2 things: customer service but in particular, What makes employees tick? How do we help our customer service employees perform their very best? And how do we remove these obstacles where we put them in a position where they are not as able to be successful? He has always been fascinated with customer service, he has always been fascinated with training and all of his jobs have focused on that and for the last 12 years he has been a consultant who helps organizations tackle these types of problems.

Yanique stated that she finds it interesting that it was a not so positive experience that propelled you into this because as a consultant that many times when a customer becomes loyal to business, if you track back the root cause, it’s usually a dissatisfied customer who dealt with an employee who was able to turn the situation around and just because of how it was handled, now every time they come back to that business they only want to deal with that particular employee, they’ll even wait sometimes if they’re on vacation to come back from vacation to transact business with that company and it all came out of a negative experience.

Jeff mentioned the “Peak-End Rule” (Psychology Term), he stated that it explains what Yanique said is true. It’s about customer perception or perception in general that we tend to not notice things that are normal. We tend to notice things that are different than normal and what really stands out is the thing that is most different and so the bad experience if you kind of think of that as the heartbeat of customer service, the bad experience is kind of like this really bad deviation from our normal experience and then a really good correction, really good fix is a huge difference. So, it stands out because it’s such a leap from a horrible experience to this great experience, it becomes imprinted in our memories and that’s the peak part, if it’s the last experience we had with that organization or that person, that really gets imprinted in our memories. So, the Peak End Rule kind of explains why that big gap, it’s so true when we recover from a bad experience, that’s what really sticks in our customers’ mind.

• Jeff Toister shared that he’s glad that Yanique’s impression of his book was that it’s a practical guide and he really appreciate that because that was the goal in writing it. He found a couple things and one was that he consistently had this theme with his client which was culture, “How do we get our employees obsess with service?” and the other thing he found quite frankly was that companies tend to have money to invest in technology, they often don’t have the budget to invest in people and he thought, “If I could put this into a book and make it a practical step by step guide, maybe they can’t afford to hire me or you to come in, we wish they would. If they don’t have the budget for that, this book will give them everything I’m already sharing with my clients.” That was the starting point to say he’s going to make these ideas available. So where did they come from, they came from work he was doing but then he wanted to profile companies that were successful, and one of his biggest challenges in writing the book was, he didn’t want to include some of the usual suspects - the Zappos, the Southwest Airlines, the Nordstrom, the Disney, the Ritz Carlton, not to take anything away from those organizations, it’s just that we’ve heard their stories so many times, there are other companies out there that are delivering amazing service. So, you ask where did those stories come from? He started researching what other organizations have a strong service culture where they’re known, they have the reputation, maybe it’s service ratings, maybe it’s stories written about them, they’re known for having employees who are obsessed with service and then he started researching, what do they do and it was amazing to him that there was a consistency across all of these companies, in terms of how they approach it and so he was able to pull his own work and in the research he did into these companies and put them into the step by step guide and say, “Hey, there is something here. There’s a process that all of these organizations are following and we can give this recipe to anybody who cares to follow it.”

Yanique agreed that he tries to look at a very practical, operational way that any business, even if it’s a small business with just 5 employees would be able to extract that information and run with it in their own company.

Jeff stated that even a team because one of the biggest questions he gets is that people say, “I read the book but I’m not the CEO and I don’t even think my CEO cares too much about service, she says it important but I know she really cares about the budget.” And that’s fine, you can still use the book. He has examples in there with specific teams or departments, so whatever the size, whether you’re the CEO or you’re just leading the small team within a bigger company, the goals and the ideas that you can use these tools to create a service culture in whatever you control.

• Jeff stated that he thinks sometimes culture is one of those words that we take for granted, we all say, “Culture is important” but maybe we mean different things. To him, culture when we’re talking about an organizational perspective, it’s a system of behaviors and beliefs, it’s how a group of people act or thinks and understand the world. Sometimes we think culture is a statement that says, “This is our motto or these are our values” and that’s not quite accurate. Culture is what people actually do, so if people are living those values each and every day then those values are accurate and they reflect your culture, if not, then they’re pretty empty. He gave an example, there was a bank in the United States about a year ago, there was this huge scandal because what they were doing was opening accounts for customers that didn’t request them. Millions of accounts were affected and the reason it was happening is because there were a lot of pressure for the individual employees to meet these very aggressive sales targets, so that’s what led to this huge scandal that the CEO resigned, there was a lot of fines, the Federal Government started to look into it. What was interesting though was that the CEO even in the moment when it was announce that the scandal broke and the CEO still had his job and he was announcing this scandal and this big settlement of a lawsuit, he still pointed to their culture as being customer focused and to him, that’s the perfect example of Your words doesn’t really matter if they’re not backed up by your deeds. How did people actually act? In that organization, the culture was about sales pressure and doing anything at all cost to sell a product. That was their actual culture. So, when you think about organizations and one of the organizations he wrote about in the book is a place call REI, if you love the outdoors, that’s the place to go for your camping equipment, your hiking equipment, bicycling, whatever. REI is an example of culture that really matches what they say. For example, if you go in and you’re looking for camping equipment, you’re not going to have somebody just kind of point you to the camping equipment aisle, the person who works there who’s going to help you is an avid camper, they love camping and they can’t wait to share with you what they know so that you can love camping too and that’s by design because they purposely stated that their goal as an organization is to help us all enjoy the outdoors. That to him is when culture matches what we’re saying, that’s pretty healthy but at the end of the day, culture is what we do, it’s how we perceive the world, it’s what we actually believe.

Yanique agreed and stated that in her process of dealing with some businesses this week, she called a company that deals with cooking gas and their office is not located in the city, it’s located on the outskirts of the city so it’s a 20-minute drive and she asked them if didn’t have any other mode of payment because she told the sales representative before they came that she will be paying by card and she specifically requested that the gentleman coming brings the card machine. He comes and he didn’t bring the card machine and of course he now informs her that she needs to drive all the way to the location to make the payment. So, she called them and said, “Can the payment be taken over the phone?” “Oh no, we just changed out our card machines and that’s not possible anymore.” Yanique called and ask them, “Do you expect me to drive 20 minutes outside the city just to get to you to make a payment for a service that you provided, I think you really need to talk to your finance department and think about a more customer friendly way to accept payments from your customers.” And it’s interesting because they were voted one of the best customer service organization in their industry and that left a bad experience. Even when the guys came, the service was good but then the payment part is a part of the service as well.

Jeff agreed and stated that whenever that happens, he always wonder why does it happen and is it that the person doesn’t want to do their job, sometimes but often it’s that they are put in that position or no one shared with that driver that Yanique had had that communication or that driver was specifically told, “We’re not doing cards so this is what you have to tell people.” Those employees are often put in a bad position where they almost can’t win.

• Jeff stated that maintaining the same service culture and experience is a big challenge for a couple of reasons. One is that keeping culture exactly the same is impossible because culture changes, every time you add a new person to the team, every time you add a new product or a new line of service or a new channel, it changes just a little bit. He doesn’t know if it’s possible to keep culture the same but maybe consistent and have it grow and evolve in the right way, that’s maybe the goal for those businesses. The other challenge is scale, as businesses grow it becomes necessary for the business owner or the business leader to trust more people to do the work and that business owner can’t be in all places at all times, they can’t talk to every single customer and so the process of building a service culture really is about that scale question, “How do I instill in my employees what I believe in my core?” and the way to do that is that you have to make it clear, you have to articulate it. Just like how he was asked, “Let’s define service culture.” In these organization you have to define, “What does our culture look like?” and the tool that he uses is something called The Customer Service Vision, it’s a very simple statement, it could be something that you already have like a Vission or vision statement for your company but it’s very simple statement that says, “This is what outstanding service looks like.” And every employee in the organization has to understand what that vision statement is, what does it mean and most importantly, how do they personally contribute in their role and once you achieve that, then you can scale using that vision as a guide and that’s the first step, you’ve got to have that vision. The second step is employees all have to understand it and the third step is that you have to use that as a way of doing business, one thing he sees that business owners/ business leaders do that really hurt that effort is that they treat culture as a separate project, so people will maybe take time out of their normal job to do some cultural things, maybe on a culture committee or we’re doing culture as the theme for this year strategic planning and then we go back to work and just do our jobs, that’s not how you evolve culture, culture is our behavior so we need to use culture as a guide for making all decisions, it’s how we create strategy, it how we invest in technology and processes, it’s how we hire, it’s how we train people, it’s how as a leader you’re deciding what to put in front of your employees and talk about every single day and if we are not talking about culture and how outstanding service should look like then your employees are not going to believe that it’s important, they’ll focus and what you talk about and that’s the biggest challenge for leaders. Jeff also hear a lot of companies say to him, “We’re just so busy, we’re too busy to deal with culture.” And he would say, “No, you’re not because what you’re really doing is you’re still creating a culture, it’s just not the culture you need.”

Yanique agreed that with the point that even though they’re not focusing on culture, every organization has a culture but is it the culture that they really want and so if you don’t have intentionally activities, whether it be meetings, conversations, group outings, strategies built around what you’re trying to achieve, then the culture will emerge on its own. And so, you’d have a culture you don’t want all because there was no intentional act but not because you didn’t put any attention there doesn’t mean it’s not formed.

Jeff mentioned that often when you don’t put the intention there, it goes in the direction you really don’t want it to go.

Yanique mention that the take away from this interview is culture is not something that just doesn’t happen, it happens even without your intentional behavior behind it, it’s going to manifest and this is why you really have to intentionally work towards the culture you want. It’s like eating because we have to eat every day but if we don’t intentionally make an effort to eat healthy then we’ll eat anything and of course the body will just consume whatever you put inside of it and if you’re consuming negative thing then it will lead to disease and chronic illnesses versus taking an intentional approach towards eating, ensuring you do your meal preps, you exercise 3 to 4 times a week, you’re getting 8 to 9 hours of sleep per night, those are things that are intentional activities you schedule into your life to ensure it’s done every single day.

• Jeff stated that he really likes this question because motivation is a part of something he looks at all the time, not just his own motivation but employee motivation. He thinks we often look at it the wrong way, we look at how we get motivated versus how to not be demotivated and so for him, motivation is easy, he does what he loves. He finds the inner section of what he loves to do and what he can be successful doing and where he has a little bit of skill. Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Other’s Don’t’ Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, one of his landmark books. He talked about this head shock concept for companies, it’s an inner section of what you love, what can you do well, what can you get paid to do and he takes that personally. And so, he gets up every day excited because he loves this. The demotivation happens not just for him but for everybody where we perceive that there’s obstacles that stand in the way of doing what we love. In a service environment, referring to his story about his first service encounter, that happens to employees every single day where they want to provide great service, almost every employee wants to provide great service but there’s some obstacle that they perceive is standing in their way and that’s what’s demotivating them. Every day he works on himself but he helps organizations and employees work on finding what are those obstacles and they can remove those obstacles, motivation becomes really natural.

Yanique stated that it’s interesting because she does workshops for organizations and a lot of questions that she hears from employees is that sometimes you can’t do what you love because you have bills to pay but then, if you have that kind of mindset which goes back into your attitude. Is it your motivation that affects your attitude or your attitude that affects your motivation?

In reference to Yanique’s question if motivation affects attitude or attitude affects motivation. Jeff stated that he is a big sports fan, so the team that’s winning, are they because they are motivator or are they motivated because they are winning. He thinks success breathes that and those two go together. Doing well, we feel good, we’re motivated and if we’re not doing well we feel bad with a bad attitude, we feel demotivated. There’s a concept called, “Learned Helplessness” that a lot of employees’ experience. What it is that over time they feel like they failed trying so they just stop trying. It gets really bad is a lot of times they stay in the same job, not every job is right for every person and so they’ll stay in the job or maybe they have those bills to pay and they don’t feel like they have another good option and so they kind of give up but they keep coming to work everyday and that makes it so much worst because it’s defeating.

• Jeff stated that the tool that he uses every single day is a website called Highrise, it’s a way of keeping track of clients and projects all in one place. One of his core value is accountability and he believes if you say you’re going to do something, you do it. As an entrepreneur, you have a million things going on and trying to meet deadlines and maintain commitments and do what you say you’re going to do is extremely difficult. So, he uses that through every single day to keep track projects, initiatives, people and making sure he maintains all of his commitments but he also uses it to not just look at an individual commitment but how does that connect to all the other commitments he has made so that he’s not overloading his plate. He uses LinkedIn and Twitter every day as well and primarily to connect with other people and learn from other people and see what other people are doing as he thinks we are definitely in a relationship business. As someone whose passionate about training and adult learning, he’s always learning as well and that’s often where he finds “What are people doing that’s interesting?” So those would he his second and third picks.

• Jeff shared that he loves to read and is sometimes reading 2 to 3 books at a time. He thought about and said, “What are the books that stick with me?” and that’s the challenge with the book, that we read a book and say, “Oh it’s good” and then you ask, “What have you used from that book?” Jeff shared that these are some book that he uses a lot. One is called Street Smarts by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham and what he loves about it is that it’s an entrepreneurial perspective on the business side of running a business and he thinks in the world of customer service and customer experience, too many of us are unfamiliar or tentative around the business side, the number side. He had a discussion online with someone the other day where they were upset that executives only care about the budget and the point he tried to make and comes from this book is, the way to get executives to care about customer service is you have to translate customer service into numbers because that’s their language and if we’re not doing that or if we don’t know how, we’re only hurting ourselves. The next one is a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen, it’s a system for managing your time and commitments and it’s a principle based system rather than go out and buy this portfolio and you have to use this specific software, it’s more about principles to use whatever you feel comfortable using. He uses those principles to do things that allow him to keep on top of things. For example, at the end of everyday he has zero messages in his email inbox and for most people that’s unbelievable but it’s because he has these set of principles that David Allen shared with him in his book that he uses every day. The third book is a book that really made an impact on him, it’s called Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips and what he did was he studied the United States’ 16th president which some people would say would be one of their most amazing leaders in history and he looked at some of the things that Abraham Lincoln did as a leader that we can pull from today. One of his favorite examples that he uses as a consultant and trainer is Lincoln was really the first president to spend a lot of time going to people rather than expecting people to come to him for a meeting or a conversation and the reason he did that, it’s management by walking around which we know now but the idea was, if you approach people in an environment where they feel comfortable and make them feel like we’re on an even keel and you’re not trying to intimidate them then they’re much more likely to open up to you and have an honest and frank conversation and he learned when he’s working with a client and he meets with their front line staff and ask them about their job, they are always ready to tell him exactly what is working well and exactly what they think is going wrong and he thinks it’s because of that principle of coming to them and making them comfortable.

• Jeff stated he has this thing where he realizes that his audience doesn’t have a lot of budget to spend on customer service maybe technology but not on people. So, one of the things he has been trying to do is transform his own business where he can make resources, tool, concepts available to people at little to no cost and somehow still get paid. A few examples are his book, the investment on the book is USD $14.95 for the paperback or USD $9.99 for the kindle, that’s a pretty low investment yet he puts all the tools he uses as a consultant in that book so you don’t have to hire him because you probably have USD $14.95, you may not have his consultant fee. He has training videos on LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com and he has learned that a lot of his clients and companies that he works with already has a subscription to one of those platforms, so you can get his training without having to pay for him to come in, the video is right there, it’s available to you and if you don’t have a subscription, it’s fairly inexpensive and then things like this podcast, he loved this opportunity and really appreciate it because it’s a chance for them to have a dialogue about service but it doesn’t cost anything to subscribe to the podcast and learn from it and learn from not just himself but from some of the other amazing experts that Yanique interview. Those are free resources that anybody can take advantage of and he’s really excited about the opportunity to help people wherever they are in their journey.

• Jeff shared listeners can find him at –

Twitter - @toister (www.twitter.com/toister)

Customer Service Tip of the Week – www.toistersolutions.com/tips

Insider Customer Service Blog – www.toistersolutions.com/blog

• Jeff shared that he’s not a big quote person, the reason he’s not a quote person, the first reason is because he sees quotes and they sound great but then what do we do with them. He’s more of an action person and the second reason is he has done research on some quotes and he has been disappointed to find that that person never said that or that’s not what they meant. He gave an example, the quote, “The customer is always right” no one said that and it bothers him that we have accepted this as some mantra in customer service and he did some research on where did this come from, why do we believe this and there is not really an agreement but it came from a few places. One possible source says Ritz Carlton and he said, “The customer is never wrong” and the context was that even if the customer is wrong, of course they are sometimes, you don’t argue with them, you just find a way for them to help them become right. Marshall Fields who is a famous retailer, he said, “Right or wrong, the customer is always right” and his point was the same thing that the customers will of course make mistakes but we don’t argue with them, our role here is to help them become right, to help them succeed. He wished he had a great quote to share but when he finds those quotes and he found out no one ever said that but the story behind the quote often is much more interesting.

Yanique mentioned that in most of her workshops towards the end of the session, she always explains to the participants that the customer is always right literally is not a true statement because there are times when the customer is wrong but what we should be guided by is the principle that as employees, we are not here to prove the customer wrong, we are here to help them, they are wrong but we are not here say, “Hey Mr. Customer, you’re wrong and we are going to punish you.” But more like, “It’s okay, let’s work back to how we can undo what’s happened and find a solution so that you can leave here feeling good, let’s make this right.”

Links

• Highrise
• Street Smart by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips

The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service by Jeff Toister

Yanique Grant Show Notes

This episode with Yanique Grant will be speaking about customer experience and convenience as it relates to customer experience. Over the last few months I have been doing a lot of workshops locally and I have been advising the participants and the organizations that "CONVENIENCE" is the next big thing in Customer Experience and those organizations that really recognize it are definitely setting themselves apart and making themselves or creating that competitive advantage for themselves.

Highlights 

The most valuable commodity in the world is "Time" and if you are in business, competing on price is just not enough; you have to find a way to set yourself apart from the competition. Many will argue that convenience is apart of customer service or the customer experience and I will definitely agree with that but it is becoming so important that I am willing to tell you that it is definitely a sole competitive differentiator.

Let’s think about convenience and what it really means, convenience is the option that you give the customer to get more than one item or to have more than one channel by which they can communicate with you. Let’s take for example Amazon, Amazon has created a market place where you can basically lay in your bed, you can be in the airport using your phone, you can be sitting in a parking lot using your tablet and order anything you could possibly think of, you can place an order for a DVD you can place an order for a phone, you can place an order for a book, Amazon is right there at the tip of your fingers, you can even buy a part for your motor vehicle on Amazon, it’s just that simple, it’s just that easy. They’ve found a way to really set themselves apart as it relates to convenience, they broke out of the low price and big selection game with convenience and they‘ve even made it so much easier, they created the Amazon Prime programme that gets the merchandise shipped to you without shipping charges in 2 days or less and it works! I am an Amazon prime customer and it’s like magic!!! They’ve created the Dash Button that allows you to purchase merchandise with the simple push of a button, they wanted to eliminate steps, as many steps as possible from the time a customer is thinking about purchasing a product until that product is delivered. They are also setting up distributing centers throughout major cities that can get merchandise to you in 2 hours or less, speed and simplicity is exactly what it is about.

To take is a step further there is Uber, Uber managed to create a system where you can just have this app on your phone, you can pay for where you want to be transported to right there through the app and you can see that motor vehicle or driver coming from whatever point to come and pick you up. I was on vacation in Chicago in August of this year with my daughter and we were taking an Uber and my friend purchased the Uber for us from his office, which was maybe 5 or 10 minutes up the road from us and he was able see the car on the road and advise us exactly when to go downstairs to the front desk and the vehicle will be right there. We were able to know that it was a white vehicle, a Toyota Corolla and the guy’s name is Dennis, I was like, “Wow, this is amazing.” So convenience is the next big thing in customer experience, it makes things so much easier.

I was also visiting some friends for my daughter’s friends birthday over the weekend and of course there was no coffee and I am a big coffee drinking and when I went to the supermarket, which is located at the entrance of the complex, upon completing my purchase and leaving the store, the gentleman walked me outside with the cart and preceded to take the things and put them in my vehicle for her which I was very grateful for and I told him thanks. He went further to say, “The next time that time you would like to make a purchase, you could just go online or you could email us your items and we will just deliver it for you and you can pay for it when we come to deliver it, just so easy and convenient you don’t even have to come out of your bed.” Those were his exact words and I was like, “This is amazing.” It doesn’t matter how small your business is, it doesn’t matter how large your business is, look at Amazon, they are serving millions and probably billions of people globally, so you could be serving 10 people, you could be serving a 100 people, you could be serving a billion people, convenience is the next big thing in customer experience and if you con figure out a way in your business to make your services more convenient for your customers, you’re definitely creating a competitive advantage.

Another big organization that I would like to mention here in Jamaica is First Global Bank (FGB) and they have this amazing machine call the Video Teller Machine, it’s the first of its kind in Jamaica as far as I knows, it’s the only bank in Jamaica that offers this service. This Video Teller Machine opens way before the bank opens like at 7:00 am and they close pretty much after the bank closes, you can do a lot of transactions at the Video Teller Machine and it’s not like an ATM machine, you can do cash deposits, you can do can cash withdrawals, you can make cheque deposits, you can do cheque encashment for their (FGB) cheques, you can do denomination exchanges, you can do credit card payments, you can do fund transfers and it’s basically a machine and you’re speaking to the Teller, you pick the phone up, you have the option of seeing the Teller or you have the option of not seeing the Teller and you tell them what you need to do and you insert your payment or whatever transaction you need to do through that slip section and you get your receipt, it’s amazing and you don’t have to join the main line because many times you enter the bank the main line has a good amount of people and you kind of want to do a quick transaction, there’s no need for you to have an extensive interaction with someone and so the Video Teller Machine has really been an amazing convenient experience, so I have to big up First Global Bank for really being the innovator and the trend setter in that department in the banking industry in Jamaica. You have to think in terms of “How can I make life easier for my customers? What do my customers want?” If you start thinking in that frame of mind, she guarantee that you’re going to be at least 5 to 10 steps ahead of the game and in this global competitive marketplace that we’re all operating in, convenience is the one thing that is going to set you apart from your competition.

Thank you so much for joining me by just taking some time to listen on customer experience and innovative convenience. I also want to state basically and quote you some basic statistics just to let you know how important convenience is. There was a survey that was conducted by LPSOS and in that survey they found that 80% of the respondents stated that new payment methods such as prepaid cards, electronic transfers and even mobile devices have made the buying process easier, this is forcing businesses in the B2C (Business to Customer) market and B2B (Business to Business) market sectors to look at their point of sale technology for potential improvements to meet customer expectations especially as ecommerce continues to grow in popularity.

Again, Amazon is a great example of ecommerce, look at Netflix, Netflix is definitely another great innovation in terms of people used to rent DVDs and now with Netflix you just pay this very minimal fee per month and you have at the tip of your fingers....TV shows, you have different genres of movies and all of this you can access through your tablet, you can access through your phone, you can access through your smart TV or your computer. So convenience is really the driving force that customers are looking for, so my challenge to you is to go back into your organizations and maybe do a mini survey and find out what kind of convenience your customers are looking for, better yet you could even ask your customer facing employees to pay attention to things that customers ask for the most and try and find unique ways to embed or to introduce these things as a natural part of doing business with your organization, if you take this mind set and if you take this approach, you’re definitely going to see a difference in your sales because convenience will cause people to do business with you over another organization all because it’s so much easier, because time is the greatest commodity in this life that we are operating in and it’s the most valuable commodity.

If you can figure out a way to save your customers time while ensuring that they’re still being provided with the best quality service in the most easy and convenient way, you’ll be surprised to know how your bottom line would tremendously increase because you’re making things so much easier for them. Customers like to know that they’re doing business with an organization and that the organization has taken the hassle out of doing business with them. If you have to go somewhere and you have to figure out what to do, where to go, how to get this done, why is it so complicated, why is it taking so much time, why do I have to follow up with them much, it’s so frustrating at times, you’re going to look for an alternative that’s going to cause you little or no stress, so the aim of an organization is to find unique ways to reduce the stress and basically improve on the convenience, improve on the hassle free experience, ensure that when the customer has finished completing the transaction they feel like it was so easy they could do it over and over and over again because it literally takes nothing out of them to complete the transaction, that’s the mind set you need to be in, Convenience is the next "BIG" thing in customer service. 

What are you doing in your business to create convenience?

Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue Online Course

Sheree Martin, is an experienced Executive with a strong result oriented focus. She has spent the last 15 years driving strategies geared towards increasing business value, known as an inspiring and strategic leader with the proven ability to establish effective teams. She has a track record of achievements in the areas of business strategy, marketing, risk management, organizational transformation and corporate innovation. After a distinguished career at The National Commercial Bank Group, Sheree decided to join The Jamaica Public Service Company Ltd. in January 2014. She was appointed to the Executive team to lead human resources, government and regulatory affairs, revenue management, customer service and communications. The company recorded significant improvements in its survey ratings, employee engagement and customer satisfaction while she headed those portfolios. During her time overseeing HR, Sheree placed an expanded focus on leadership development by spearheading a new high potential programme called JPS iLead, which exposed select employees over a 12 month period to advanced leadership competences, knowledge building, executive mentoring and targeted on the job training. Recognizing the intrinsic value of productive and well-rounded employees, Sheree also introduced the first company wide corporate wellness programme at The Jamaica Public Service. The programme, which started in 2015, has been a contributing factor to improve staff moral and reduce health care cost.

Question

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you tell us 3 successful factors you find that have made you successful as a leader to yield the kind of results that you’re looking for, not so much the financial result but more so the inter personal result?
• Why these dimensions of wellness are so important and how does this relate to customer experience and customer service?
• Can you share with us 1 or 2 success stories that you’ve really seen the individual transform because of exposure to this kind of strategy?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• We have a lot of managers and business owners who feel they have great products and services but they lack the constantly motivated human capital, what’s the one piece of advice would you give them to have a successful business, specifically as it relates to constantly motivated human capital?
• What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or people?
• Where can our listeners find your information online?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Sheree Martin shared that she listens a lot to what her heart tells her, in a lot of ways she tries to passion and purpose in what she’s doing and if there is resonance with a particular path or an activity, she finds that she typically pursues it, that started as a very conscious way of living. Around 1997, a year after her first daughter was born, she came up on a book called “The Power of the Subconscious Mind” by Dr. Joseph Murphy and it really led her down to insights that really spoke to her about opening up herself to be more specific about her visions and her goals and being more purposeful about how she creates her future and so she will typically engage in activities or pursue paths or form alliances and partnerships with companies, people, teams that are just consciously put into her space because of what she’s trying to create and what she’s trying to create is just this sense of being able to give back, being able to have others think of themselves as empowered creatures and just being able to manifest their desires and their goals and she brought that over to the corporate world in a very conscious way, JPS has allowed her to do that, NCB was wonderful in a lot of ways, as far as her learning and growing on her own self but at JPS she has been able to extend it to others and so, in a round about way, what has happened over the last 20 years of her career really represents an unfolding of herself and sharing that with others.

• Sheree Martin stated that it’s amazing that what she just shared that Yanique took away was the fact that you start with self and in service and customer experience she feels the same way for companies because a company is an entity and she thinks that one of the elements of successful companies is that they are driven by a service culture internally.
• What are the processes?
• What are the policies that are not customer friendly?
• How are your employees able to be served internally, across departments, across teams, across the visions?
• Sheree Martin has seen and lived the example of teams and companies and departments where internal service is taken as first pillar towards an ultimate external customer experience that the company can boast about. She also thinks that companies that look at taking feedback from their constituents both internal and external in a structured way and in a sustained way and using that feedback along with other strategies to drive their business actually continues to execute have found success and sustainably so. One of her most favorite TV Shows, she remembers when it was just launched and she was just fascinated and wondered if it was staged but only to learn that it was actually real and that was “Undercover Boss”, she adores that concept of bosses going out into the field, interacting with their own employees, listening to what their issues are on the ground, possibly interacting with customers as well and using that to take back to the board room or to take back to their executive team and talk about how the company is showing up, she believes this is very powerful. Just like self, in terms of your own development as an individual, companies should start internally, looking at how the first line of service which is internal is actually being handled, treated, given focus, what are some of the pain points, how can you address those pain points, how is the flow internally because what you get on the outside is as a result of a lot of internal work and getting feedback constantly and in a structured way from your constituents really does help you to drive better decisions.

• Sheree stated that using the analogy of what we put inside our body is what we see on the outside and typically when we think about wellness, we think about physical wellness or nutrition, so you have to be conscious of how you are feeding your body with energy and the food that you choose obviously impacts your ability to manifest, your ability to perform, your ability to execute on your goals and your ability to show up the way you want to show up. Physical wellness, nutrition, fitness is absolutely critical but typically what you find is that companies or individuals stop there, most cases they think that that’s the extent of wellness, “I just need to make sure I eat properly and I’m exercising.” She finds, however, that we are missing out on other dimensions which has to do also with energy, which we don’t typically hear about or learn about, but are just as important and energy is everything. Even your thoughts can affect how you eventually show up and what you’re seeing around you, what you’re thinking about, so what are you consuming mentally and how are you feeling emotionally as a result of thoughts and perceptions and receptions you’re getting from the various stimuli in your environment, that is an aspect of wellness that at JPS they now have consciously started talking about more and more. She stated that she read something interesting the other day and she re-tweeted it, just talking about What’s App and how it is so popular and how many messages, over 50 Million messages being transmitted everyday between people yet 40% of persons claim that they are lonely. https://twitter.com/SherMart/status/892418979637194752. So we talked about physical, we talked about emotional, we talked about social wellness, how are we integrating internally and how are we making connections that are meaningful and vibrant with each other, those things are important. Intellectual wellness, are we learning, are we mentally stimulating our minds on a constant basis, she is very wary of people who call themselves experts because things are always changing and there are new paradigms and new versions coming out in whatever field that you’re in and so this habit of continuous learning and wanting to consume additional information and not really claiming that you’ve done and that’s it, “I’m now an expert.” There’s layers to that and she loves when people are talking about how they are continually trying to improve their knowledge, so there’s intellectual wellness and there’s a whole business that we don’t talk about in environmental wellness, she’s a big fan of your physical space representing your mental space, so when she goes into areas whether it’s a company or department or a car and it’s cluttered and it’s dirty, she doesn’t want to pass judgment but she immediately get a sense of what could be impacting this persons ability to be able to think clearly or to just perform flawless and clean execution because if their environment is cluttered, invariably 9/10 times their mind is also cluttered and so environmental wellness and just being conscious of how we are integrating with nature, those are things you don’t typically talk about in the corporate but companies that she have found and read about are seeing success when they look at wellness in a more holistic way because now they bring this to their employees, they facilitate programmes that allow the employees to think about all dimensions of wellness not just open a gym or have a salad bar at the cafeteria, that’s not the extent of it, they go further and then that shows obviously on the outside and impacts their service with their customers. Spiritual wellness means whatever your relationship resources, whatever you call source, it is something that you want to consciously cultivate, consciously develop, consciously maintain and use it as a source of power, a source of comfort. She finds that it allows her to refresh, she meditates everyday and she makes sure that she is constantly trying to keep in touch with source and the results are just really astounding.

• Sheree shared that one of the measures of success in terms of the programme is the extent to which a number of these persons get selected for promotions or other leadership roles at a more senior level in the company and to date, they have been very successful to the extent that the persons that they see are performing at a higher level and are showing up and are being given more responsibility have come form the iLead Programme, so that is a measure of success for them. She personally has a team of 6 individuals, not all members of the iLead were selected for the but 4 out of the 6 are and she have watched and have been privileged to be apart of seeing them develop their leadership competence because one of the things she talks about in JPS is they are great technically, there’s no question about their energy expertize and their ability to master the industry from a technical stand point, what she does find that they struggle with is their leadership ability, just the hallmarks of emotional intelligence, how to create teams and how to build teams that can move mountains, they don’t teach that in engineering school, so you come into an environment and you start to talk to people about their responsibility to harness the potential of others once they’re leading a team and people look at you funny but they get it and they start to talk more and more of how can they show up and it has been a pleasure to see how leaders now take responsibility for their teams, some were naturally doing it, others are really seeing the benefits of focusing more on managing their teams with that sense of heart and that sense of purpose and invariably they’re getting that exposure through iLead and the Corporate Wellness Programme and she’s convinced that it has contributed significantly to JPS success in the last couple of years.

• Sheree shared that by staying motivated, her family is her biggest source of motivation, she has an amazing support network, she could not ask for anymore in terms of her husband and her daughters and her parents and just this sense of, “I can do anything, I can go after any dream, I can chase any aspiration.” And every day she thinks about that support network, she feels fearless and she comes into an environment not nothing fazes you to the extent that you know that you’re going home to this sanctuary, once she turns into that drive way, she can breath and that is so important and has been a critical part of her success, her family and that keeps her because she just refreshes….she resets, it’s like a reset. She also finds that she makes a conscious decision to find things to appreciate and to be thankful for, so whenever there are issues and road blocks, anything that might be coming at her that might cause her to put up some negative reaction to or feel negatively towards, she tries to do what she calls this process of pivoting where she tries to understand what is it that she is reacting to in this moment and why? And then she deliberately try and focus on something that makes her feel good, so she will say, “Okay, this is really bad but there is something great about this.” You’re learning, “That person had on a wonderful pair of shoes, I wonder where she got it from?” so even if she’s barking at you, she always try to find something to appreciate and that helps, it gives her a sense of perspective and a context that says, “Listen, this too shall pass.” Nothing is permanent and it keeps her focus.

• When Sheree was asked about an online resource, website, tool or app that she cannot live without, she stated that her daughters are Millennials and they are very much driven by their smartphones and what they find. She shared that they went to the country last week and it was amazing how they’re the ones insisting that they stop and play a board game. They were like, “Put down the phone mommy and let’s play Taboo.” She stated that her online resource is Twitter, she finds that Twitter is very effective for her industry because there’s a lot happening in energy right now and even when she was in banking, it was the same, she was in charge of innovation and that was a new part of banking at the time, so she would keep abreast with some of the things that were happening in other banks or the whole concept of innovation and she is just so proud of NCB how they have done an amazing job at transformation and digital investments. So Twitter is a must do tool and a must have, she uses it for a lot and she also keep up on the news, she doesn’t get to read the papers so she usually go to Twitter for news both local and international and she can see how everybody is commenting. So she would say Twitter from both a professional standpoint and a personal.

• Sheree mentioned that how she got on her journey, that she read the book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy. She mentioned that there is also Gregg Braden who is a cross over scientist mystic philosopher, he makes that bridge between science and spirituality and she always watches his videos and the book that comes to mind is The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief, he talks about the connection of the heart to the mind and just how powerful the heart is as an electrical and magnetic field for energy and she went down that rabbit hole after Joseph Murphy many years ago and was influenced by those thinkings and those perspectives. Anita Moorjani, Wayne Dwyer, Neale Donald Walsch, John Randolph Price, there are so many authors out there who’ve had personal experiences or who through their own insights have really started to show us a different way of thinking about who we are when we come on to this planet and what we’re here to do and she found herself gravitating towards those considerations and moving away from the typical views of, “You’re here, you must suffer to get everything you want.” It just makes sense to her to think about something else.

Yanique stated that you control and at the end of the day you have a choice as to what it is that you’re going to feed your mind with. In any situation, you’re not forced to go according to what’s happening around you, you can choose what it is that you want your mind to be thinking about, what you want to expose yourself to and with the age of technology, it’s right at the finger tips either through your phone or your computer. You can feed your mind with any content you choose to feed it with, whether you want to watch news everyday and hear about people being killed and the world is coming to an end and is just terrible or you want to focus on the fact that there are a lot of opportunities and positive things are still happening despite the crime and violence that exists.

Sheree agreed and stated that we need to shout that from every rooftop in Jamaica and across the world because it is that sense of empowerment that we need people to start embracing. She believes in a collective consciousness and when you have societies, towns and cities caught into a mindset of lack, a mindset of doom and gloom, it does reflect on what that city, town, and country can eventually achieve and how they continue to evolve. So we need to start telling people that they do have a choice.

• Sheree shared that this is really important; she doesn’t believe that the consciousness of an organization can rise above the consciousness of its leadership. She would say, focus on your leaders. At National Commercial Bank (NCB) they had 2500 people and they had possibly 10% of that as leaders, at Jamaica Public Service (JPS) it’s a similar percentage, similar ratio, they have around 200 leaders and one of the things that Kelly Tomlin and her spoke about when she was there was that, “We can’t effect change just cart blanch across the entire workforce, let’s focus on the leaders in the company.” And that would now start to send a different message because your cascading a certain philosophy and you’re even looking and cultivating certain talents and a certain way of being that defines the culture and it comes through the leaders and so she would recommend that companies start first by paying far more attention to persons who are being given responsibility to lead others and even from the head, she’s saying this to the Board, Directors and to Shareholders, you talk about your leaders from the top and how does that cascade down to the front line supervisor because there is a constant thread running throughout leadership around how that culture is built and it’s going to come back to the decisions leaders make on the ground everyday, how they treat their staff, what they prioritize, how they’re measured, what is valued, what is given discretion and autonomy, it really for her starts with leadership.

• Sheree mentioned that energy is very exciting right now, it’s a wonderful time to be in the energy business because there is so much, you’re in an industry of significant disruption and transformation, a very one way model of delivering energy to customers have been around for 100 years and now we’re seeing that being turned on its head and so, alternative energy and what does that mean for energy independence in particular for Jamaica that so blessed with natural resources just as sun and wind. She is part of a team now that’s looking at alternative energy far more strategically and far more intently than even 5 years ago and we’re still struggling just to keep energy prices down and to get Jamaicans to start to conserve and to even think about how they can put the power in their hands, now we’re saying, “What other solutions can we provide them?” and renewable energy, different options of delivering energy in a distributed way has her very excited and has her very hopeful and optimistic for Jamaica’s energy future.

• Sheree shared that listeners can find her at -

Twitter - @SherMart

Instagram - @martinsa876

LinkedIn – sheree-martin

• Sheree shared that the quotes that she always reflect on is by Neale Donald Walsch, “Nothing has meaning except the meaning you give it.”

Links

• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy

The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief by Gregg Braden