Navigating the Customer Experience

Adam Toperek is an internationally recognized Customer Service Expert, Key Note Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the Author of “Be Your Customers’ Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines” as well as the founder of Customers that Stick Blog. When he is not speaking or delivering high energy Customer Service Key Notes or Workshops, he can be found co-hosting the “Crack the Customer Code Podcast” and writing extensively on customer experience. Adam has an MBA and a Certificate in Customer Experience; he is also a Net Promoter Certified Associate.

Questions

• What is your Zodiac Sign?
• Would you say being people oriented, outgoing and very sociable are true characteristics of your personality?
• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• On a global level, do you think there has been any improvement in customer experience or do you think it is getting worse?
• How do you get people to develop a culture of service, a mindset where everything is in alignment with the customers in mind?
• Have you found that sometimes empathy is lacking in terms of the organizations’ connection with their customers and do you think it’s driven by how people are brought up so they are not able to connect with the customer when they are venting?
• In your book, you speak about 7 service triggers; can you share a little about that and explain what that means?
• Do you think it’s important for the entire organization to be exposed to emotional intelligence so that they can be better able to manage their own emotions?
• From a customer experience perspective, what are some considerations for entrepreneurs online to consider as it relates to customer experience and having a successful business?
• What are your thoughts on training and does it have a different connotation in the mind?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your business?
• Can you share what are some of that 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 your people?
• Where can our listeners find your information?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Adam shared that his sign is Sagittarius which is the early part of December. One unique fact about a Sagittarius is that they are extremely out going, and they are very people oriented and very sociable. Adam stated that he was not sure of the characteristics of a Sagittarius but that he believes those are definitely true of a person who is very good at customer experience and customer service.

• Adam stated that he is a 3rd generation entrepreneur, so business is in his blood. His grandfather owned a main street shoe store, his father started a wholesale business in the back of his mother’s retail children’s clothing store, so he grew up around business and doing sale tags and that has always been a part of who he is. As he opened his own businesses and went further along in his career, he eventually owned his retail business and got involved in franchising, one of the things he found was that in your own business, you could be the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Plumbing Officer; you’re everything but the part he always gravitated towards was customer experience and customer interaction. And the more he interacted with his customers, he realized how important the idea of customer experience was. Over time he started talking about it and then writing about it publicly on blogs, it then developed a following, it developed into a book, then into speaking and into key notes. But what he finds fascinating is that the journey that lead him there comes from having to be face to face with customers and having to work with employees that are face to face with customers and seeing the challenges and the struggles they had to deliver good customer experiences even when they wanted to.

• Adam stated that globally, expectations have changed; they are different from what they use to be and customers understand what good customer service is supposed to look like and then he also thinks customers sometimes have unrealistic expectations based on viral stories of customer service and that the customer is always right. These days customer service is the biggest source of competitive advantage for almost any organization. If you are not competing on experience, and you are in a competitive industry, you are in trouble.

Adam shared that to get business owners to focus on customer experience and develop their team members to translate that experience they deliver to the customers on a face to face basis, over the telephone or on social media, can only start with the numbers; there are many statistics that tends to open eyes. If you can use an organization’s own numbers that is helpful, you could use their survey data their ranking or their NPS. He stated 85% of customers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience, your retention equals profit. There are 3 different studies that show acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-10 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, yet most people put their time and energy into marketing instead of retention and customer experience efforts. Customer experience also affects moral and how their culture and employees feel and how they interact. Customer experience permeates the entire organization and you have to start with the numbers and the economic argument especially persons in the C-Suite, business owners or people higher up in their organization, they tend to be run by numbers.

• Adam shared that one of the things is that you’ve got to do is walk the talk as a leader. If you don’t have a customer centric culture, if you’re not leading from the top, if what they see from you as a leader is that customers are numbers and customers aren’t people then they are not going to treat them like people. There is nothing you can do for employees if you don’t first start doing yourself. You have to help people understand that they are dealing with human beings and that what they do matters. Adam stated that he has a chapter in his book, “Be Your Customers’ Hero” called “Everybody’s Rushed, Everybody’s Stressed”, because nowadays nobody has enough time and those are our customers, they don’t want to be hassled, they want to have easy experiences. A lot of the time employees will say this is just another retail job and this doesn’t mean anything and this doesn’t matter and the thing is to have a purpose and a mission to make them understand that purpose and mission centers around making peoples day better whether you are selling t-shirts, selling medicine or online software, whatever the services are around that, you are making a difference in peoples’ lives, you are impacting peoples’ lives. When you help them connect and if you help them understand the human on the other side of the phone, desk or email; that is one of the first steps in getting them to have a customer centric attitude and to act on it.

• Adam stated that there are a lot of factors at work like organizational and upbringing. He shared that one of the things he often teaches is that we are not biologically designed to be good at customer service. That is one of the reasons he focuses on training and why training is important. We have all of these things referred to as Cognitive Biases, there is negativity bias, human beings tend to look for negative information over positive information, we tend to give more weight and power to negative information instead of positive information and that makes sense, the brain’s job is to keep us alive. We have defense mechanisms, so when someone yells or screams at us, it is not natural for us to go, “Thank you for telling me sir, how can I help you better?” It is not a natural reaction, you have to train yourself to depersonalize, you have to train yourself to look at the other persons perspective not what they’re saying about you, not how you’re feeling. It is easy to empathize with somebody who is not being negative or who is not attacking you or your organization and it comes from caring and anybody that is built for caring or has been trained that the customer is important can find that empathy. It still is a trainable skill and it is still something you need to filter for because not every person should be in a customer facing role, there are some people that simply just should not have customer facing jobs but assuming that you have the right team, you have the right people on the bus, you can train empathy for easy situations but then you have to really train for them to not only empathize but depersonalize and to be able to be calm when the storm is coming and the communication skills and the techniques you need to help take that situation and move it down the road to a positive resolution.

• Adam stated that what is really interesting about the service triggers is that they are a preventative tool. When you talk about customer service, everybody wants to solve the problem that they already have, “How do I deal with a difficult customer? How do I this?” The service triggers are designed to create fewer problems to deal with, so the idea of the trigger is based on our psychological mechanism and we all have those triggers that could have been from when a song comes on the radio and you start to feel emotional, you look back and say that was the song your grandmother used to sing to you when you were little because that’s a trigger for you. We all have these personal triggers whether they be positive or negative and there are certain triggers throughout the population that are service triggers that are hot buttons for people in customer service situations where they tend to get really upset. Adam identified (7) triggers and not everybody has them equally and not everybody has them but when you’re looking at it at an organizational level, what you do, is try to approach it by “How could we prevent these from being pulled?” The first two triggers are “Being ignored” and “Being abandoned.” You’ve walked into a restaurant and watched the hostess walk back and forth and not even make eye contact. Being abandoned, they say they can’t handle that for you and will have the manager call you back tomorrow and what happens tomorrow? Nobody calls you, and what happens when you call them? You’ve been abandoned; you’ve been left on hold for 30 minutes. And these are triggers, so this happens at a restaurant and it’s your favorite restaurant, you might say it was a bad night, a new hostess and you’ll give them a break. But if you go in a second time and the hostess ignores you, you’re not going to wait 3 minutes, you’re going to wait 30 seconds and what happens is that we have these triggers that we carry from organization to organization cause once you’ve been sent from department to department, and wasted hours trying to get answers to your questions, you can get quick on the trigger. So if you ever experience this in your customer experience life, the customer gets an employee and they are saying “I have to send you to a different department or have my manager call you” and they say “What’s the manager’s name? What time will they call? Who do I call if I don’t hear from them?” and then they start going through a list of things. That’s a trigger, they know they have been burned before, they’ve been shuffled (another trigger), they’ve been abandoned. So what we do is look at the customer journey, we look at each touch point in the journey, particularly the major ones and say, “How could a customer feel ignored here? Are they not greeted in time? Is the phone not picked up fast enough? How could a customer feel abandoned?” And when you go through all seven (7) service triggers, if you can prevent these seven service triggers, you can revolutionize your customer experience by starting there.

• Adam shared that emotional intelligence has a frame work with it. It has to have the idea of being in touch with who you are and not only who you are but how you relate to customers. Adam Toporek in his book, stated that the first 3 sections are really about mindset because that’s how important it is. The first section is about the mindset of the customer service representative: how do we feel.

Everybody not only needs to come to grips with themselves and their own triggers and their own cognitive biases and their own ways of approaching customers and customer experience but also how they interact with each other, with their team, all of that mixes together to kind of create the perfect culture. Those are the things you strive for in creating a culture that is mixed with empathy across and throughout the organization and by looking inside yourself.

• Adam shared that the first thing to do is to map your customer journey because small businesses never do that, solo entrepreneurs and consultants rarely ever sit down and say, “What is my customer’s journey?” “Where do people come in, what marketing are they seeing?” “Where are they finding me, my twitter, my blog, this podcast?” And then what happens “What expectations am I setting? What is my response time? What is the next thing that happens?” You then look at the journey and look at what you think it is now and what you want it to be, what do you want your customers to experience? What do you want your response time to be? And how often do you want to monitor your channels? How do you want to communicate with your customers? Where do you want your business to live, is it on Skype, on email? If you look at your journey and go through from beginning to end, every piece of your brand that a customer or prospective customer can touch and then you take the approach of looking at each touch point and saying, “How can I make this touch point great? How can I make sure I don’t mess it up?” Adam stated that one of the concepts he teaches is that he breaks up the touch points and pressure points because there is not enough time if you try to focus on everything, nothing is going to get done, he says we all say everything is important in customer experience and it is. You have to start with the big rocks, you look at the pressure points, what are the 3-5 big moments when you interact with the customer and it may be to close the sale, when they sign up for your programme, when they buy your speech, when they buy your product or when there is a customer service issue, look at those big pressure points first. Get those as tight and prefect and then work on as many touch points as you can.

• Adam stated that he agrees with the concept of development rather than training as there have been a lot of bad training and there have been a lot of training when people sit in a class for a day or a half day or 3 days and then everything went back to normal but what is particularly harmful is when you have training and you don’t have the culture to support what they learn in the training. He stated that if a company brings him in and he gets the team jazzed up and ready to help customers and they have the skills and they are feeling more confident now on how to handle difficult customers, providing them with communication tricks, helping them to work on their mindset and then they go back to a culture where there is nothing but just rules and policies and managers that are yelling about numbers and nobody seemingly cares about customers, then you wasted your money because it won’t be effective.

Being customer centric and wanting to help the customers has to be in the DNA of the organization. And that resistance to training is because it is not part of the whole package, it’s just like “customer service is down, let’s get a trainer.” They are really not getting the whole suite and to fit a square peg into round hole – just will not work.

• When asked how he stays motivated every single day - Adam shared that he just does as he has always been doing….staying goal oriented; he looks at his goals regularly. One of the things he does is try to stay healthy and fit as it makes all the difference. He has a treadmill desk, so staying healthy helps the mechanics of the internal motivation and also he loves what he does, he trains and teaches and he has always enjoyed teaching and he likes helping people solve problems and teaching people new things. When he can teach somebody how to deal with customer service, it’s not easy but some of what they are dealing with is easy and he can help, so it is really rewarding and that’s the biggest thing to teach people and to help people make their lives better and be more successful in their jobs.

• One tool, website, resource or app that Adam shared he cannot live without because of all his travelling is TripIt. Trip It manages all his trips and he said it is insanely cool, so you get your email from your airline, you get your email from your hotel, just forward it to TripIt and it puts it in an itinerary with all of your codes and your confirmation numbers and the phone numbers and it puts everything in order, so it will do your flights, the hotel check in, then the flight and your hotel check out, it puts in the rental car. It also does alerts if your flights are running late, so instead of signing up with each different airline, you just send everything to TripIt and it alerts you. This app is available on App Store and Google Play Store.

• When asked what are some books that have had the greatest impact on him - Adam shared “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie this book is about how you interact with people, how to treat people and how you communicate with people. Another book Adam shared that has had the greatest impact is called “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport and his thesis is essential. Today one of the greatest things you can do if you are in a knowledge field, is take time to do deep work, to really focus on getting rid of the noise. The author really dives deeply into the idea and shows people how they have done it and different modules for doing it, that idea of really having focus time to work on projects and to think and create great things. He stated that it is a valuable book for him because it is what he believes in intuitively.

• When asked what is one thing he is working on to develop himself or his people that he is really excited about - Adam shared that he is hitting a long-term goal as it is something that he always wanted to do but it never made the cut which is to create an online training because it is truly the future and it’s getting more virtual everyday and he is launching his first online customer service training course coming out the first week of September and he has a couple other concepts that he’s working on, so hopefully there will be 2 or 3 online training courses out by the end of 2016. The first one being released is based on the 7 service triggers.

• Link for Course

• Adam says listeners can find him online on any of the below links:

Customers That Stick Website

Adam Toporek Twitter

Adam Toporek LinkedIn

• Adam shared his quote that he refers to in times of adversity and challenges and really contributes to his very own success - “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

• The other is a poem called “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

Links

• “Be Your Customers’ Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines” by Adam Toporek
• Crack the Customer Code Podcast
• TripIt
• “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
• “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport
• Customers That Stick Website
• Adam Toporek Twitter
• Adam Toporek LinkedIn

Chloë Thomas is an Author, International Speaker and Host of her own podcast, eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast. Chloë has been working in eCommerce since 2003, learning how to increase orders, up customer retention and recruit new customers cost effectively. Working with businesses from the High Street right down to start ups, eCommerce MasterPlan is the result of Chloë’s years of experience, the books, blogs and courses have all been created to help eCommerce business owners and Marketers to make the right decisions as they build their own path to eCommerce success. The eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast exists to bring a weekly dose of inspiration direct to the desk of eCommerce business people all over the globe. Power Retail Australia named Chloë as one of the 10 top eCommerce Commentators in the world and within 6 months of launch, the podcast was already the top eCommerce podcast in the UK. Chloë is also the Author of “Customer Manipulation: How to Influence your Customers to Buy More and why an Ethical Approach will Always Win.”

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your journey
• How do you feel about Customer Service in the UK?
• Give 2 companies that you really admire in terms of they are doing customer service and doing it well
• What are some everyday solutions you believe can help improve customer experience?
• Can you share a little more about the book, what inspired you to write it and who the book is targeted to and how can it help them?
• Do you find that companies are moving towards marrying the relationship between marketing and customer service? Or is there still a divide in terms of there is a marketing department separate from a customer service department?
• How do you stay motivated every day?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your business?
• What are some books that have had the biggest impact on you?
• If you where 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 consistently motivated human capital, what advice would you give them to turn their team members and turn their business around to create more success?
• In doing your research for your book Customer Manipulation, do you find that if the company has poor leadership, that it translates into a poor customer experience?
• What is one thing you are working on right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your 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

• Chloë grew up in the United Kingdom (UK) in a rural area called Cornwall (located right down the far South West of the UK), she stated the she was lucky to get into Oxford University and from there was lucky enough to get a job at Barclay’s Bank working in Marketing and quickly realized that smaller businesses is where she wanted to go. She left the very large bank and started to work in retail for a High Street Retailer in the UK and that sparked her love for data and marketing, and how you can improve results and optimize. Over the last 13 years she has been honing that skill until 4 years ago she launched eCommerce MasterPlan and so now 4 years and 4 books later here we are!

• Chloë stated that she thinks that the UK is okay at Customer Service but is nowhere as amazing as it is in America. She said one of her favourite things to do in America is to go to the mall and find a nice Department store and wander around until someone goes “Can I help you?” It is just amazing how they care about you. There’s more customer service ethics in America, it is more valued as a job in the Hospitality and Retail Sector but in the UK, eCommerce Sector, it has been heartening over the last 12-18 months to hear everyone from the smallest to the largest businesses talking about how important it is to listen to the customer and to deliver what the customer needs and that’s a real turning point because up until then the conferences were just full of bright, shiny, exciting new pieces of tech and clever marketing campaigns but now, everyone’s talking about the customer and that’s a real benefit. Chloë stated that there is a paradigm shift in terms of how people are being more adjusted to customer experience. It’s because the industries have come of age, they are no longer in that early adaptor stage and now moved into an early majority at which point people have got to stop trying to be bright and shiny, you’ve got to say, “We are great at what we do, this is who we are, this is why you should buy from us and why you should buy our products.” Which is more powerful and interesting and quite a relief for her as a consumer as well.

• After asking Chloë if she could share with us one or two companies that she would recommend as offering great customer service – she lightly shared that she will share some unconventional companies as possibly everyone is expecting her to share Zappos and Amazon. Chloë shared that the companies that she admires are Project Repat (https://www.projectrepat.com), an American company who turns t-shits into blankets, so they’ll take all your old college t-shirts, cut them up and sew them up into a blanket and send them back to you. They really nailed one of the most powerful ways in eCommerce of helping customers, which is to gather the email addresses as quickly as you can and then build a phenomenal welcome sequence. What they are doing is absolutely fascinating on that clear focus and their welcome emails are beautiful. They listen and respond to what the customer is worried about. The other is a UK company called Miso Tasty (https://misotasty.com/#) which sells Miso Soup which Chloë says she thinks is a brilliant business name. They spend a lot of time getting their product right and they realize they’re going to be bringing new flavor sensation to the UK, it is an Asian flavoring that they are not used to. She stated that what she loves about Miso Tasty is the way the products are structured; they reduced the risk to a customer buying, not wanting to spend £20 (which is difficult) on buying this thing to try it out. What they have created is a 2 soup pack that only costs £2 and they can do free postage and packaging. So for customers to try out their products on their website, it only costs them £2 and that’s less than the cost of a pint of beer and it’s just amazing how they thought of the customer’s journey.

• Chloë shared that often people think Customer Service and they immediately think of the Call Centre down the corridor but real Customer Service embodies the entire process and experience with your business – it is everyone’s responsibility to do true customer service and that is why she truly appreciates the 2 businesses mentioned above Project Repat ad Miso Tasty. For example - It is not about waiting for someone to pick up the phone and say, “How long do I have before getting those T-Shirts to you before I have to buy again?” – they have listened and placed it in the welcoming email so they provide that knowledge to the customer without them having to call up. Chloë says of course there is a financial benefit to the fact you will get more conversions and less people having to answer the phone but there is the whole embracing of that experience through your marketing, strategies and products which is really important.

• Chloë shared some everyday solutions that she believes can help improve Customer Experience is everything really. She shared that she thinks a couple of really simple tools would be User Testing usertesting.com which is a fantastic site where you can go and just put up almost a job where someone from a certain segment of the population takes a look at your website and answers some questions. For example – you could put your website up there and say buy a lawnmower and then you get a video of that person trying to buy a lawnmower on your website and talking you through it and it is such a great way because sometimes we all sit around with great ideas saying, “Oh I think we should do this website, or oh I think we should do this with the website…” but to actually get some real human data on how someone who has never seen your business before is struggling with it is a great way of improving your user experience. It is great because if you have been looking at your analytics and you find people are dropping off somewhere or they are not going to that page and you can’t figure out why…..User Testing is a great fast track to solving that problem!

• Chloë then shares the other everyday solutions she would recommend for a business is Web Chat Services – that service that pops up on a website and says, “May I help you?” She shares this one in the UK is getting a lot of big players in eCommerce, they are playing around and working out how best to use it, rather than thinking of it as a customer service tool, think of it as a sales tool as well. When they notice places where people are getting stuck, they’ll activate it and say, “Can we help you?” or “What’s happening?” Usually found on product pages or elsewhere so they are creating a very tailored service for the customer and that is something which is a really easy solution, it doesn’t cost much to put in place and it’s something that even a small business can do and can make a massive difference to customer service and therefore the sales.

• Chloë shared that the reason she called the book “Customer Manipulation” is because as it all gets more competitive online and consumers are able to voice their opinions so much more easily and as marketers we want to be successful. We need to embrace the fact that every email sent is aiming to manipulate someone to buy from us, every tweet we send is aiming to manipulate someone to think better about us. If we can embrace that then we can get under the skin of the science of manipulation and the way of using manipulation but it is our choice whether we manipulate for good or for evil. If you choose to manipulate for evil then you are very quickly going get found out and it will be the end of your business. Chloë also shared the inspiration for her book and she says it had been a few years since she has done a big book and she had this model that she sometimes refers to as the “Customer Journey” or the “Customer MasterPlan” lurking around in her head and making its way onto slides, chats with clients and networking and then finally it was ready to be turned into a book. The role of the model is to help people, rather than thinking they need to do Social Media or to think they have a problem turning visitors from their website into enquirers to people who have given their email address and what is the best way of solving that problem. Can Social Media have an impact on it and which part of Social Media might it be? It’s kind of another way of the industry growing up rather than thinking oh email, oh Social Media, oh pop ups, it’s about thinking this is our current problem and the problem is turning visitors into enquirers, it’s getting people to the website, it’s getting enquirers to become first time buyers, it’s getting first time buyers to become repeat buyers and what are the ways for doing that. The book is structured into the 5 stages of getting people from those different customer relationship levels to the next one and filled with changes you can make to your website, improvements you can make to customer services, improvements you can make to marketing and also to your products where relevant to take you up and to encourage your customers to move between those customer relationship levels.

• Chloë says everything that she writes is for the small business owner, so someone with a team of less than 10 and usually for a team less than 5. It is very much for an owner/ head of marketing to help them work out where they should be deploying their resources and lots of ideas of what they can do. However, she knows bigger businesses and other persons have used the book to improve relations in heir B2B’s.

• Chloë thinks the businesses that are doing customer service well and who will do well in the future are seeing it as one group (Marketing and Customer Service), you may have different departments but they are finding ways to make sure they are working together because there are so many over laps and if you want to do customer service well, it’s got to be through everything you do in the business. Chloë shared that on her podcast a couple episodes back (Episode 55) – she had the head of Brand from Tesco, one of the five largest retailers in the world (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/055-tescos-tamara-duschl-talks/id1005744797?i=1000371058713&mt=2) - she asked her guest just out of interest on the eCommerce side what does the eCommerce team do and what does the Marketing team do as per getting people to the website. The guest stated the eCommerce team sits in one building and they look after the website and Marketing team looks after the promotions and the traffic and they are in a different building. So Chloë shares Tesco does have a way to go as you can’t mothball the conversation – everyone needs to be integrated for a seamless Customer Experience.

• In asking Chloë how she stays motivated everyday she stated that she is just very lucky to be doing something that she loves and has spent some time over the last few years working out how to structure her days and her work load so that they suit her and having to do the things she likes and not having to do the things she doesn’t. She stated that motivation is something that comes naturally and wished she understood it as she reckons she could write that book but she can’t explain it.

• Chloë shared that the app that she use frequently is Asana (asana.com) , which is a team and task management tool for organizing. She uses it to organize herself and part-time/out-source people in her business. She further stated in her business that it is her and a lot of part time people so it does keep it all together. There is a web version and also available as an App.

• Chloë shares that 2 books that have had the biggest impact on her are: “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown which is all about prioritization and working out what you should be focused on in your business and your life. It helps you on the journey to becoming a person who knows how to prioritize as well as giving you tricks and tips along the way. The other book she loves is “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain which is all about introvertism. She stated that this book helped her to embrace who she is and to learn how to make the most out of it. Chloë shared she is an extremely introverted person and that book helped her tremendously.

• In answering our question on what’s the one piece of advice she would give a business owner who lacks the constantly motivated human capital – Chloë lightly shared she would just change the people as often times it is easier to motivate new people than old ones but that’s not very possible at times due to legislation and other things. Therefore, Chloë shared that is starts at the core, what is the vision of the business, what is the mission, and what are the values. Often times when businesses take a leap forward or an about turn from a bad pathway, it’s because they got really clear about what their vision and mission is and they have reintegrated that into the business and got that back to the heart of what they do. If you can get your people embracing that and believing that and understanding this is what they do then it becomes a lot more straight forward.

• Our trigger question for Chloë was how did she feel leadership and the lack there of translates into a poor customer experience – she shared she thinks that a business with poor leadership will struggle with delivering good customer services. She made reference to Tesco, stating the problems they have had with falling profits and sales was because the leadership got lost and they lost track of where their mission was and the vision and what they brought to the world. They quickly realized unless they go back to their roots, they are finding they are getting the success back again. That would be an example of where bad leadership led to a decline in customer experience and now they are turning it around.

• When we asked Chloë what’s the one thing she is excited about that is going on in her life right now - she stated this is her favourite time of the year when this podcast is being recorded (August) that she is not traveling for conferences for a few weeks so she is excited about analyzing lots of data, doing reports and surveys to work out what is the next thing she should do. She is weighing some options as to what her customers need her to produce next in terms of should it be an online course, should it be a Master Mind group, should it be a Membership Site or maybe even another book. She’s super excited about all that probably for launch in January 2017.

• Chloë says listeners can find her on her website eCommerce MasterPlan Website , she also shared the best way to get in touch with her is through Linked In and Twitter (@chloe_ecmp).

• Chloë shared that the quote that she always uses to keep her focused during times of adversity and challenges is “Keep Optimizing” (a quote she came up with) which reminds her that if something hasn’t worked, then that’s okay because we’re just going to optimize it, we’re going to learn and move forward, or if she is trying to make something too perfect before putting it live, she’ll remember this quote.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

Links

• eCommerce MasterPlan Website
• “Customer Manipulation: How to Influence your Customers to Buy More and why an Ethical Approach will Always Win” by Chloe Thomas
• Asana
• User Testing
• Project Repat
• Miso Tasty
• “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown
• “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain
• Chloe Thomas Twitter
• eCommerce MasterPlan Twitter
• eCommerce MasterPlan Facebook
• Chloe Thomas LinkedIn
• eCommerce MasterPlan LinkedIn

Brian is the founder of Brian K. Wright International whose mission is to motivate and inspire others to discover their unique talents and follow their dreams in life. With extensive experience teaching and training in academics and corporate environments, he understands that many people live far beneath their potential, primarily because they don’t believe they deserve success. Through his experience and research, Brian has learnt and practiced the principles he teaches in his book Student Leadership Strategies: 21 Easy Ways to Become a Center of Influence in Your Group. Brian is also the host of the Internet Radio Talk Show Success Profile Radio on the Rock Star Radio Network. Brian holds a Degree in Communication Studies and holds a Master’s Degree in Adult Education from the University of Nebraska in London. He discovered a passion for speaking and influencing audiences by speaking competitively in High School and College and by being heavily involved on campus while in school.

Questions

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey
• Can you give an overview of some of the topics in your book?
• How do you feel about customer service as a customer yourself?
• What are two (2) everyday solutions that you believe that can help improve customer experience on a global level?
• How do you stay motivated everyday?
• What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• In helping to write books, do you help clients from conceptuality throughout the writing process?
• 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 your people?
• Where can our listeners find you?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Brian stated that he got his Degree in Adult Education at the University of Nebraska and taught at a Business College for almost 5 years where he taught Public Speaking, English Composition, and Business Mathematics (a really fun combination of classes). He expressed when someone is taking a class that is required – you have to make it fun. He further expressed that he taught at this college and even though it was a private college they ran it as a business. He also shared that most of the students that attended the school were non-traditional aged students. He stated that he wrote resumes to help people find jobs which was fun. Fast forward a few years later, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona and is now hosting a personal development radio show entitled “Success Profiles Radio” where he interviews world class achievers and learns how they succeeded and what they overcame and what lessons we can learned from that. A few of the persons he has interviewed includes Darren Hardy, Jack Canfield, Dr. John Demartini from “The Secret”, Laura Longmire, Sharon Lechter and James Malinchak – ABC Secret Millionaire.

• Brian stated that “Student Leadership Strategies: 21 Easy Ways to Become a Center of Influence in Your Group” is his first book and has been out for a little while. He stated that when writing the book, he wanted it to appeal to young people. Brian says that he thinks leadership is absent in a lot of arenas and the types of people that are in leadership positions maybe can do a better job or they are very self serving and that is not leadership and he wanted to write a book about that. At the beginning, he started to ask himself what makes a great leader?  And his goal was to come up with 21 answers to the question. He ended up with 30 and as he started writing, he realized that some of the topics were similar and those 30 topics turned into 21, so he was thankful that he still made his goal. The number one thing that he wrote about was that excellent leaders have a vision for the future.

• Brian stated when you think of Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star Trek series, he just created this whole entire vision for what he thought the future should be like, an opportunity for people to explore space, somewhat Utopian! Brian even gave mention to the Wright Brothers who created the first airplane and Elon Musk as a modern day example who created PayPal and changed the platform and functions of eCommerce completely and even created Tesla and SpaceX.

• When you can have people buy into your vision, you’re going to be much more successful because no great leader can accomplish anything by themselves. Just like politicians, they have to sell their vision of what they want to do in order to get elected and get enough people to believe in that vision and that’s an amazing accomplishment, which leads to another thing that is important to being a successful leader and that is the idea of networking. And going back to the political example, you have to have a huge rolodex of people you can count on in order to accomplish anything. The key is not just getting them to do what you want to do but getting them to believe that what you want them to do is something that they also want to do. He also stated that excellent leaders make people feel welcome in their presence. If you’re a leader and you don’t feel comfortable following someone or you don’t feel comfortable with way that the leader is acting, you are not going to stick around for long so helping people feel comfortable in your presence means creating a culture and that is something you help people buy into. Brian shared most people like certain companies better based on the Culture they have created. In his examples he shared if you have a company that has theme days, a vending machine or foosball table in the break room – these small components help to set your company culture apart. Creating an environment of fun and that is welcoming where people want to continue coming and that’s what excellence leaders do.

• Brian shared as a customer he has had some good and bad experiences. He stated that what really gets to him is when people don’t listen which is one of his biggest pet peeves. A question is being asked and they are not answering the question being asked or they are answering the question they feel like answering. This mostly is because they have a script, they don’t really know, so they just fall back to a script that they are comfortable with. A customer may request to speak with a supervisor and sometimes people are happy to pass the call over and other people may get a little upset because they want to help but they are not being helpful, people want to speak with someone that can answer a specific question. He shares that what irritates him the most is when he would have to be calling over and over for an on-going issue and no one bothered to take notes about the first call. He mentioned a situation that happened and he had spent 45 minutes on the call with a representative, when he called back a few months later for a follow up on the issue that he spoke about before, he asked about the company fee’s for what they were doing for him and the answer he got from the first representative was great but then when he called back the second time and asked the same question, that representative stated that there are no notes about that, he was not happy that he had spoken about that issue for 30 minutes out of the 45 minutes conversation that he had with the representative. He felt annoyed the representative didn’t think to make notes. Brian also mentioned that if you say that you will follow up with a phone call or an email about a resolution, do what you can to make that happen and follow up. Making proper notes and listening are absolutely critical in customer service.

• Brian recommend that business owners should spend a day in the trenches with their team so that they can see and hear exactly what is going happening on a daily basis. You get to meet the people on your team; you get to learn what they are going through every single day. Let them train you as to what they are doing and why they are doing it and if you sit with enough people in one day where you take some calls, you will get a much better sense of what’s going on with your team and then you can make training recommendations. That will be outstanding because you be able to feel and experience what your team is feeling and experience or even better you could be a mystery shopper, call your company, call your customer service departments and see how they treat you, see how they handle things. Mystery shop your company to see the kind of experience you are receiving to see if it is aligned with your mission and use it as a training opportunity for your company to do better. Brian shared if your company is interested in doing better and performing at a world-class level – you will engage and do some mystery shopping on your business and then move into some well-needed training.

• Brian stated that staying motivated has to do with hanging around persons who have similar goals and missions. He mentioned a quote by Jim Rohn “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you are not experiencing financial success, look at the 5 people you are hanging around, chances are they aren’t either. If you’re 30 pounds overweight and you wish you have a better body, look at the 5 people you are hanging around, they are probably eating oreos on the couch after work too. If you want to lose weight…..find 5 people who look great, feel great, have a handle on they’re eating pattern and ask them what they are doing, ask them for advise even get a personal trainer if you need to. People who want to help you become a better sales person, people who want to help you with online marketing, so if you want to learn those things, know who you can tap into and get some help with.

Brian also mentioned that he enjoys walking and running out in nature but in Arizona it is too hot so he is a member at a gym. He says he is able to enjoy his own thoughts when he walks and runs. He further believes that if you take care of yourself and who you are; you will have much to give to others very much like when you travel and the Flight Attendant states in her safety briefing place the mask on yourself first and then help the passenger next to you – you must be able to help yourself first before you can help others.

• Brian shared that the one app that he frequently uses and cannot live without in his business is Facebook. He stated that the guests that he gets for his Podcast show is mostly through Facebook and people that he admires and he also receives guest referrals. He stated that he also helps people write their books, so there is a lot of dialogue through Facebook as well. Brian said that he hasn’t done any ads via Facebook as yet; he has been talking with persons and will be starting that soon. Brian says he believes everyone has a book inside him or her; he helps them find their story within and helps them connect and find a way to connect with the world.

• Brian stated that he does help with the conceptuality of writing books, as he believes that everyone has a book inside them somewhere, somehow. He talks with them about their topic and what makes their topic unique. So if they want to write a book on customer service as an example, there are many books about that, it’s a very common topic. So he would ask, what spin would they place on that topic that would make their book interesting to read and would not be like the other books out there? And that would be an exploration of their background and what they’ve gone through. He coaches them on what topics that can be talked about in the book, create on outline together and the life stories that they would share because people relate to stories kind of how Jesus taught through his parables. He also stated that he helps with the self-publishing aspects as well, he has resources for format and layout of the book, designing the book cover and also printing of the book.

• Brian shares the books that he has read that has had the greatest impact on him are first - “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield, Brian said he read it several times within a year (2005), it has so many exercises and suggestions for things you can do. He also mentioned that Jack Canfield was interviewed on his show in 2015. Brian also mentioned that he is now reading “The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure” by Grant Cardone.” The idea of setting massive goals for yourself and taking action on it has really helped him focus on thinking really big. Brian shared the first personal development book that he read was “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David Schwartz which really had an impact on him as well. He shared that the book was written in the 50’s.

• When we asked Brian what’s the one thing that he is excited about and working on in his life to develop himself or his people right now, he happily shared that he is currently working on a book called “Conversations with High Achievers.” He has some of the interviews transcribed and he is doing some editing as well as he has some extra writing to do and hoping to release the eBook version before December 2016. Just the idea that the book could be a huge springboard for more speaking opportunities and for an opportunity to do a live event someday and having some of these great speakers come to speak at his event is exciting and also providing opportunity for people to learn and develop themselves. He says as he re-visits all of these great interviews that he has been reviewing – he has learned so much and it has been a huge blessing for him. Brian shares listening to interviews with successful people is one major thing people can do to develop themselves.

• Brian says listeners can find him on

Facebook - www.facebook.com/Success-Profiles-Radio-166132613536941/

Twitter - www.twitter.com/MrBriankwright

Radio Show Page - toginet.com/shows/successprofilesradio

Personal Website - www.briankwright.com

Email - [email protected]

• We asked Brian for one quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge helps him to re-focus and re-engage - Brian said he had a moment earlier this week where he was feeling overwhelmed by things and he recalls a verse from the Bible Isaiah 43:19, as he frequently reads the Bible – “Behold, I will do anything for you.” He stated that it is a promise that is given and means that you are not going to stay where you are forever, something new is on the horizon for you, something wonderful, something great, something fantastic that will change your life.

Links

• “Student Leadership Strategies: 21 Easy Ways to Become a Center of Influence in Your Group” by Brian K. Wright
• “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield
• “The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure” by Grant Cardone
• “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David Schwartz
• https://www.facebook.com/Success-Profiles-Radio-166132613536941/
• twitter.com/MrBriankwright
• com/shows/successprofilesradio
• briankwright.com

Tony Bodoh is a #1 best selling author and he’s the founder and co-founder of 5 companies ranging from Customer Experience Consulting to Small Business Training to Television, he easily navigates the International stage, speaking at both personal growth seminars as well as the Uber Nerdy Technology conferences. Tony writes his business blogs, personal growth essays and children’s stories. While he now coaches executives, he has taught High School for 1 year and in the Business Department of Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee for 7 years. As a passion believer in the power and possibility that is contained in each moment of the human experience to alter the course of history; Tony financially supports the building of sustainable villages in Africa and Haiti.

 Tony learned at an early age the power of listening and letting people know they have been heard. He started a lawn care business at 11 years old, while his friends had 1 or 2 lawns to cut; Tony kept busy all summer with 16 clients including the local Post Office and Post Master’s lawn. He learned that while quality lawn care mattered, most people just wanted to connect and be acknowledged for who they are.

Questions

• Tell us a little about yourself and your journey
• As a Customer Service Consultant, what do you think are 3 challenges that people face why their customer experience is not consistent in their business?
• What are some everyday solutions that you believe that can help improve customer experience on a global level?
• How do you stay motivated?
• What is one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your personal life or business?
• Do you think that customer experience is linked to a company’s bottom line?
• 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 your people?
• Where can our listeners find your information?
• What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?

Highlights

• Tony started by sharing that he grew up in Central Wisconsin, it was a place where there was not much exposure to the outside world. When he went off to college in Virginia, he began to see the world that he didn’t know existed and it lead him to start asking questions and really looking deeper into what he wanted to do with his life. He then got a Liberal Arts Degree as that was the path he was on. He shortly realizes that he wanted to run multiple businesses and went and got his MBA. He worked several corporate jobs for large companies where he built analytical systems. While on that journey building those systems, he learned things that he could do to look at data and understand behaviour from data. Tony was given the opportunity to take over the customer experience world in the hospitality company he worked for to do surveys and understand what the guests and meeting planners were saying. Tony started a consulting company in 2009, which focuses on customer experience and was able to bring growth to other businesses that he started. It has spread from the customer experience consulting to small business training and consulting and now building businesses in the television industry.

• Tony stated the challenges people face why their customer experience is not consistent in their businesses is the human connection – the shared experience that an employee has with a customer or a leader has with an employee is what drives the value for the customer. We talked about the customer’s side and that it starts with the leader and employee and the engagement they have with each other and how they are connecting. Also, the ability to listen, often times we are caught up in our own lives and our minds are distracted. The employee may come to work and because of the challenges in their life they get distracted and are not playing at the top of their game. They are not able to connect in the same way. He also mentioned that there is a disconnection if you don’t believe in the products or services you’re offering and you don’t have the confidence to speak boldly about it. If you don’t believe that you can solve a problem that a customer has, that is a huge disconnection as well. If you’re not unreasonable in your commitment to the product and services that you offer and commitment to solve a problem, you are not going to have a consistent experience over time.

• On a global level, he believes that people need to experience the product that they are working with, the company that they are working for needs to be willing to invest in their people. Anywhere from 50% to 85% of a customer’s experience is based on the connection they make with the person. Connection is #1 and you have to hire the right people who know how to connect and you have to train them up from there. So you want to keep that skill set growing, keep finding ways for them to connect with challenging people, with people in different scenarios or even if they are having a bad day, how do they build up their emotional ability to connect and to take control. Mindset training is one of the biggest things a company can do.

Tony also stated that as a company, we should be asking what is it that our customers are feeling? What do we want them to feel? If we want them to feel this way, what benefit will move them there and what features create those benefits. Do that and we will end up with an amazing product that people will say, how did you do that? It’s because you started with the end in mind.

• Tony shared that he keeps motivated by running multiple businesses; there is a lot of stuff going on, so one of the things he does every morning is visualization and meditation.

“Visualization is geared towards what is it that I am grateful for and what is it I want to achieve today, what are my intentions for the day. And a part of that is to always focus on the abundance around me. Sometimes we get easily caught up with everything, instead just allowing the abundance to flow.”

• Tony shared that the one app/tool that he frequently uses is Evernote. He is a huge fan as he is able to put every idea, blogs, emails and anything he can in Evernote. It also enables him to upload video and pictures as well. He uses Evernote because he has a lot of ideas to pull from whilst dealing with his clients.

• He mentions that customer experience is not about statistics, we can use it to measure but it is about a particular experience in the moment. As it is only in the moment that we have the power to change our trajectory whether it’s our personal life, as a leader or as a business. We can’t change it in the past, we can’t change it in the future, and we only have this moment.

Tony stated that Customer Experience is the opportunity to turn this world around in so many ways because when people have good experiences just even a smile or a connection with the person behind the counter, if we were all a little more empathetic, it would change the world. When someone experiences an act of kindness or another person sees an act of kindness or someone does an act of kindness all of this leads to a better world.

• Tony shares that the book he is on right now that he absolutely loves is “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics” by Richard Thaler, he is one of the leading behavioural economists, so it’s that link between psychology and economics. He talks about the many different cases where behaviour of the human person is irrational. He also shares that the book that really affected his life is “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield, he stated that was the first self-improvement book he read right around the time that he was told he was taking over the customer experience for the hotel company. It was his first step into the world of psychology and the understanding of how people think and feel and behave.

• Tony shares that he is currently working on a project called Beast Mode Live. He is working with one of the leading mental performance coaches in professional athletics, who has worked with Olympians and they are taking the principles that he has taught for years to professional athletes and bringing it to corporate life and using it with team members in his company. They are now bringing it into the US military on a global scale. They are doing it where it is not funded by the Federal Government or the Politicians but by corporate sponsors so that they can help the military. Tony says, “We are really passionate about it because we have found that 35 - 40% of the military that have completed the service, end up leaving the service and they don’t have a job and many times end up homeless. The sponsorship will help them to touch every member of the military, so that they are at a higher level of performances and when they leave the service they will have control over the money and their emotions and can go out there and do something great because they have done such great service already. Most of them have never had a job outside of the military because they went in right after high school and college and so they don’t understand how their skill sets translate into the corporate life and they want to help them with that. They don’t understand how their skill sets translate into the corporate world. He says this is definitely a passion project and they are putting a ton of effort into it. Tony Bodoh believes that mindset is where everything starts at because that is how he changed his own life.

• Tony says listeners can find him at tonybodoh.com and also

www.twitter.com/TonyBodoh

www.linkedin.com/in/tonybodoh

• Tony shares that this is a quote he has been using lately and it’s from his mentor. She shared it with him in a time where he wasn’t seeing the results he wanted to see in a particular area of his life, he sometimes go back to it as he has it is on his desk.

“If the thinking and actions you’ve been doing produced what you were in love with, I’d say keep at it but clearly it’s time to wire a new set of thoughts and then grow them through reputation into new and more expansive results.”

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

New Online Course - Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue - 50% off for all who sign up in September.....A Must Have Course for all Business Owners, Entrepreneurs - http://bit.ly/50OFFMCXIR

LINKS:

www.tonybodoh.com

www.twitter.com/TonyBodoh

“Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics” by Richard Thaler

  “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield

Jenny Green Powers is the CEO of Running With Heels. Running With Heels is a New York Invitation Only Society for the “On-th-Go” “In-the-Know” Women Executives and Entrepreneurs. It is a members-only event series designed to elevate your personal and professional life through curated connections and inspiring conversations.

Jenny is a lifelong New Yorker and she is a graduate of the New York University and she doesn’t believe in strangers only people she hasn’t met as yet. In 2012, she became extremely tired of and exhausted in attending a series of awkward and just plain awful networking events and so she set out to create a different kind of Networking Event, one where women were excited to attend and left feeling educated, entertained, empowered and eager to attend future events.

As a first step she hosted a focus group and the criteria to participate was that YOU had to be a workingwoman who hated networking and networking events! These women were not hard to find, they were everywhere and they were all too happy to share why networking made them cringe. Armed with their plentiful feedback, Jenny took their advice and re-created the traditional networking event and Running with Heels was born. Today she hosts Women Networking events for women who hate networking and they love them. She is also mom to a lovely little girl who says she is going to be the President of the United States when she grows up whereupon she intends to move The White House to Brooklyn Heights.

• Jenny Powers started by sharing that she was the Vice President of a non-profit organization for a decade and she was going to networking events to just meet colleagues of other non-profits, potential donors and she realized the networking events just had this “salesy” feeling to them, everyone was just pressing business cards into your palm, everyone felt uneasy like they were being sold to. Jenny shared even though as consumers we all like to buy, no one likes to be sold to. Jenny shared that it was at this point she realized “Networking needed a Facelift.” Jenny shared that there are so many different industries that have dynamic changes from year-to-year and she said networking is not one of them. She further emphasized that networking has been the same forever and that she was sick of the “old boys club” and she was sick of the women events that she was going to that felt like sororities and that is when she brought the focus group together to find out what women wanted to see in a networking event and what they did not like. She then explained that is exactly how she built the first platform for Running with Heels based on the feedback she collected.

• Jenny shared the top 3 main reasons coming out of the feedback why the women hated the networking events. They hated because they felt as if they were being sold to, they did not feel as if it was authentic, they felt like people were coming to simply fill their quota. There was no time for that Know, Like and Trust Factor. It was just like everyone was being looked at like a cheque book. Jenny also shared there wasn’t any agenda and you go in and get a name tag and you move around aimlessly, there was no programme and so you just wait to be spoken to and if you went alone it can feel very uncomfortable and awkward. So that is when she created a format for Running with Heels and so all of her events has speakers which allows you to come and get educated but it also serves as an ice breaker for when seated together to all hear the same conversation and discuss the topic afterwards. Jenny said the final reason for women hating the networking events was there is either no food or bad food. Jenny then said as a result most of their events now are dinner parties. What she identified was most women would come along and be standing holding their briefcase, coat, gym bag, umbrella in their heels extremely uncomfortable. Now you can check everything in when you arrive and sit down at a table. Jenny says that she pre-matches all of her guests with different dinner companions. The example she gave was if I attended one of her events - I would be seated with five (5) different women that Jenny thought I should know based on my profile, however, at each course during the meal I would sit with another five women. She believes the awkwardness would be minimized because I would be already seated with people matched for me.

• Yanique shared that she does not really enjoy attending networking events and she feels there is usually never a direct strategy to actively engage the participants/attendees to engage in conversation with each other. Jenny agreed and added that is one of the reasons why she has a strict agenda that focuses on the guests being strategically seated in order to eliminate that awkwardness.

• Jenny shared that if you are in business, regardless of what business it is - you are always in Customer Service. Jenny says that she thinks Customer Service can always be improved upon. Jenny says that for her whether as a client or for her own clients - she wanted to treat everyone like a VIP. She says it is indeed true when someone is happy they will tell someone but they are unhappy they tell everyone.

• Jenny shared that curating the guest list and paying such attention to detail for the pairings has been critical to the success of Running with Heels. Jenny shared when she just started one of her clients who was at the time her business coach said, “This is first event I have ever gone to that I don’t want to leave.” Jenny said in a 2-hour dinner - her client shared that she ended up calculating that she brought in over US $16,000.00 worth of business. Jenny shared that she wasn’t handing out business cards, writing down names etc. but instead having these authentic conversations with people that followed up with her, hired her for coaching and then referred her. So in one event she saw US $16,000.00 of revenue and has been coming to Running With Heels events for four (4) years now.

• Jenny shared that right now - she's running the business as a “One Woman Show” with her assistant but she has plans to have pop up events in other major cities around the United States and see if the Running with Heels brand will be a success there. Jenny is very committed to spreading the word on more people knowing that Networking is all about building relationships.

• Jenny’s first tip for business owners to be a success with Customer Experience is to ask and ask often. Jenny shared that she believes women in particular believe that asking may appear as if they don’t know how to do something or make them seem vulnerable. Jenny says that for her asking actually shows a sign of strength. Jenny says many times women are told to just do everything yourself, or fake it until you make it but asking for something is actually okay. Jenny says her #2 tip is about accountability, being a soloproneur - it can be hard as you do not have a board of directors or mentors…so who do you have? Jenny says for her having a Mastermind is critical - she said Masterminds are not new as explained in “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. Jenny said her mastermind is her brain trust. Jenny says she has a mastermind comprising of four (4) persons who meet monthly and they do deep diving and it allows you to talk about things in your business and get into the weeds. Jenny’s #3 tip is try it….you only fail if you quit! She said her favourite quote in the world is “Never be afraid of something new remember amateurs built the arc, professionals build the Titanic.” Author Unknown 

• Jenny said that she reached out to her network of persons, not necessarily her clients or persons that she was close to but someone who had a podcast that she loved and another person that had a book she really liked - people who were doing things that she wanted to do. She reached out to them and explained that she wanted to start a group so she could have an accountability partner and it was a great match. One of the two ladies that Jenny reached out to brought someone else into the group - when they all sat down and looked at their strengths; they realized they were lacking a member that had a strong financial background and that’s when they found their final partner - Farnoosh Torabi of the So Money Podcast. Farnoosh has written five (5) books on finance - many of them for millennials and even one for women breadwinners. So Jenny recommends just going into your network and finding people you admire and people who have done something already that you want to do. Jenny suggests no more than five persons for a Mastermind group. She shared that she loves doing her Mastermind in person but it can also be done via Skype, Zoom or just a conference call. She says there is just something about those monthly in person meetings that just cannot be replaced.

• Jenny says that she loves to read and she is always in hand or have a book in her handbag. Jenny says that she is always reading self - improvement books as they confirm things she already knows or she has the opportunity to learn new things. Jenny says another big motivation for her is self-care - she says she sees so many women entrepreneurs with families who always put themselves on the back burner. Her example was when you travel and the chief flight attendant/purser announces place the mask over yourself first and then help the person seated next to you is a key example of placing yourself first. Jenny says, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself what oxygen mask am I going to put on today and what is going to take care of me so that I can be a better wife, mother and business owner?” It could be meditation, reading one of these self-improvement books but self-care is very important.

• Jenny shares that her favourite book in the world is “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill and she also likes a book that was released a couple years ago called “Think and Grow Rich for Women” by Sharon Lechter that was approved by the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Jenny also shared because she loves classic books - she would recommend “How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie and also “Eat the Frog” by Brian Tracy. Jenny then shared she never anticipated this as one of her favorites by a musician Amanda Palmer - “The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help”. Jenny shares that even though she is not very knowledgeable of Palmer’s music career - the books speaks to all of the jobs that Amanda Palmer has requiring her to have to ask. She was a silent street performer like one of those mimes - persons who do not speak but live on peoples’ generosity. Amanda would dress up, put on these costumes, put on make up and give people eye contact and really saw inside people’s soul.

• Jenny shared that the one app/website that she absolutely cannot live without is LinkedIn - Jenny says that she is a huge evangelist of LinkedIn and it is how she has gotten most of her clients as it is an invitation only society - you can profile the persons that you will be connecting with. She has secured almost all of her speakers through LinkedIn. Jenny has her own podcast “Broadcast: Broads Building Businesses” for the past year and she has gotten most of her guests through LinkedIn.

• Jenny shares one tip she would recommend for entrepreneurs using LinkedIn - she shared there is that default message that goes out when you send a request - “I would like to add you to my LinkedIn network” - but Jenny says that is just the lazy way out as you could be sitting there clicking on 100 people. Jenny says if she is sending a request for someone to be a speaker she will explain in her request that she came across their profile and they seem like great fits for one another’s business and she would love to have them as a speaker and that she wants to connect with them and share some more information. This way her message is not perceived as this random arbitrary thing that seems it is just another standard message sent to everyone else. She further shared it is the same approach she takes when someone reaches out to her with some specific details as to why they are connecting.

• Jenny says the best advice that she could give to a 9-5er looking to launch on the entrepreneur road is surround yourself with people who have done what you want to do.

• Jenny shares one thing she is super excited about is that she already runs Live Masterminds in New York called Running with Circles and it is framed after the Mastermind that she developed for her own personal group but what she is even more excited about is that she is going to start doing Virtual Masterminds Online as a way to connect with people around the globe. Jenny says the Virtual Masterminds Online will start in October 2016 and promotions for this programme will start in September 2016.

• Jenny says listeners can find her at running-with-heels.com

• Jenny explains what inspired the name of her company - “Running With Heels” - she says as women we all know that we are running everywhere and usually running in high heels. She said it all started when she was in this high end shoe store in New York City, Bergdorf Goodman and she was trying on these expensive heels and it is a very sophisticated, serene and quiet atmosphere and she was in there all of a sudden and she stood up in the shoes and she thought to herself….”the only way I am going to buy these shoes is if I am able to run in them because I run everywhere - to the subway, to pick up her daughter from school” and so she did a bit of a sprint around the sofa in the store and everyone was looking at her as if she was nuts and the salesman looked at her like she was running off with the shoes. The salesman then asked her, “Are you okay? What are you doing?” Jenny said she responded by saying, “In order to know if I should spend this kind of money on these shoes, I need to know if I can use them?” She said she observed all the women just looking up and their expressions were like I totally get that. She further shares that is where her inspired name came from because she knows it resonated with so many women.

• Jenny shares a quote that she lives by so much - she actually has it tattooed on her right inner wrist - “Choose Your Own Adventure” - Jenny says don’t live by how someone else thinks you should be living, what your guidance counselor says, your boss, your mother…..choose your own adventure!

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

LINKS:

• Running with Heels Website
• Jenny Green Powers LinkedIn
• Running With Heels LLC Facebook
• Running with Heels Twitter
• Jenny Green Powers Podcast - Broadcast: Broads: Building Businesses”
• “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill
• “Think and Grow Rich for Women” by Sharon Lechter
• “How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
• “Eat the Frog” by Brian Tracy
• “The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help” by Amanda Palmer

Dr. Fader is the Professor of Marketing at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Fader's expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as consumer packaged goods, interactive media, financial services, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains.

Many of these cross-industry experiences have led to the development of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/wcai/), a new research center that serves as a “matchmaker” between leading-edge academic researchers and top companies that depend on granular, customer-level data for key strategic decisions.

Professor Fader believes that marketing should not be viewed as a “soft” discipline, and he frequently works with different companies and industry associations to improve managerial perspectives in this regard. His work has been published in (and he serves on the editorial boards of) a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences. He has won many awards for his teaching and research accomplishments.

Dr. Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantages.

Questions:

• Tell us a bit of your journey
• How do you feel about Customer Service on a global level?
• What is Customer Lifetime Value? Why is it important for a business to understand what that means?
• Whats the difference between Customer Friendly vs. Customer Centric? (as described in the book “Customer Centricity”)
• Traditional Segmentations vs. True Segmentation
• How can companies adjust with customers who want Instant Gratification specifically the Millennials?
• Leadership and getting them understand there is a great connection between Customer Experience and their bottom line?
• What is really Customer Relationship Management?
• How do you stay motivated?
• What is the online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
• Are there any books that have had the greatest impact on you?
• What’s the one things that is going on in your life that you are really excited about, something that you are either working on to develop yourself or your people?

Highlights

• Dr. Fader expresses how fulfilling his journey has been from being an IT Major at  MIT. He further states this journey is one that he would have never imagined as he never thought he would ever wake up saying “I wanna be a Marketing Professor” and quite to the contrary - he says that he’s a Math Geek - he enjoys predicting things in particular granular things. He says it is rather fun to predict….which customer is going to buy, when, what and for how much and how often are they going to come back!

• Dr. Fader says that during his undergraduate programme at MIT, one of his professors just observing how he loved predicting stuff in sports and music…suggested “You ought to throw some of that predicting stuff in Marketing.” He says 30 plus years later, he has never been happier because it is such a natural domain for someone who loves math, predictions. He further says the field is just waking up to appreciate the needs for these kinds of technical skills and equally important strategic implications that arise from that.

• Dr. Fader states he is in two minds on Customer Service - he says that he believes that it is way better than it was decades ago and it has improved. He says companies genuinely care more, as a consumer it is more fun and interesting. On the other hand he believes that some companies are going a little bit too far. They are not going to get a good ROI on the investments of customer service as they are rolling out the red carpet too broadly, too eagerly without being very careful to understand what impact these customer service activities are having on the value of their customers. They are taking a “one size fits all”, “Customer is Always Right” approach. 

• Dr. Fader states frankly that he believes that is irresponsible as the companies should really not be doing all different kinds of customer experience activities without understanding in a precise manner the impact that it is having on the value of the customer they are serving.

• Dr. Fader says that while everyone should know the ins and out of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), however, he states there are a couple of problems with that as he believes it is like “Cheap Talk” it seems companies are checking a box instead of really, truly, building the business in a formal, strategic manner around CLV. He further stated the way companies are doing the calculations if they are doing it at all…..tends to be pretty poor. He further explains, for instance the companies will find proxies for CLV, they might look at historic profitability, Net Promoter Score (NPS), even credit scores, FICO score and just use that as a proxy for CLV! Dr. Fader says, “I’m not saying that those are bad metrics, but they are not CLV and if you are going to be building strategies around it then you had better be calculating it the right way.” Dr. Fader says, “Once you calculate it the right way, validate it, understand the underlying components of it…..then that will drive so many strategic decisions not only when it comes to Customer Service but even when it comes to deciding which products to launch, which regions to go into, which competitors to worry about etc.” Dr. Fader says it has far reaching strategic implications.

• Dr. Fader in explaining the difference between being Customer Friendly vs. Customer Centricity states that part of it he believes is his own fault as he should have come up with something more unique for his book title because he thinks Customer Centricity makes it sound more like…”Let’s just be nice to The Customer, The Faceless/Nameless Entity who happens to buy our products and services..…that’s the Customer Friendliness part.” Dr. Fader says he looks at all of these great stories of world class customer service such as Nordstrom giving a customer money back for tires that he did not buy there and wonders..… There are lots of companies that put Customer Service as Job #1 and reinforcing what he said earlier, Dr. Fader says that is often a mistake! Dr. Fader says that you have to understand which customers you are being friendly with and what impact that’s going to have on them and what other kinds of customers that is going to attract. A specific example, Dr. Fader says he looks a lot of companies that are hiring an army of people to monitor Twitter and everytime they see someone tweet about their company, if they are having some problem, they will get the SWAT team out there to fix whatever the problem is for the customer and it sounds so nice! Dr. Fader says in many, many cases - it is a complete waste of money! Dr. Fader says what companies need to do is when someone is tweeting about them for better or worse - companies need to understand the value of that customer and use that; kind of as a way of doing Triage…..making sure that the really valuable customers if they are having a problem - we are going to handle it first and the lower value customers…..(don’t ignore them or chase them away) but if they have to wait, even if they have to suffer a little bit….that’s okay! Dr. Fader says companies should be always on call for those high value customers. So it is essential for companies to sort out this generic, one size fits all, we will be nice to everyone kind of Customer Service vs. Service Activities that are closely tied to the value they are going to create.

• Dr. Fader states that customer segmentation is not the same as we learnt in our Marketing 101 classes as Dr. Fader says in most cases companies are segmenting their customers on the basis of observable variables such as demographics, where they live, media habits or other observable traits. Dr. Fader plainly states, “I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that….but it’s ineffective.” Dr. Fader says the best way to segment is on the basis of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). “So let’s pull out our magic wand and figure out the forward looking value of each of our customers and then break them up into groups/percentiles, top 10 percent, 20 percent and all the way down to the bottom 10 percent and then let’s understand how these customers are different from each other. Then after doing that we can layer on the demographics and the media habits after we have done the segmentation as way to profile to the different value tiers as opposed to the original way of creating segments in the first place. Once we see these differences among our customers - this new data will guide a lot of the activities that we will be doing in Customer Service.”

• Dr. Fader in response to Millennials being the bulk of the work force and wanting instant gratification stated he would respond in two parts. He firstly stated that he does not like this whole Millennial thing as he does not like or agree with that kind of stereotyping as he believes that it is wrong and ineffective! Dr. Fader says to paint with the same brush on people who are born between a certain set of years is a terrible, terrible mistake and companies need to stop doing it which goes back into what Dr. Fader said earlier - companies should not be segmenting customers based on when they were born and instead segment them based on what they will be worth in the future. With reference to answering the group of persons between the ages of 19 and 35 years old, Dr. Fader says there will be tremendous heterogeneity within that group, there will be some who absolutely follow that stereotype, there will be some who resemble the “Baby Boomers” like Dr. Fader (as he jokingly refers) and other people within that same group who aren’t so lazy and spoilt. 

• Dr. Fader says there are some customers out there who are going to be needier, who are never going to be happy, some customers that when you give them one thing they are going to want more and more! Dr. Fader says that’s where CLV comes in as the CLV will help companies understand the value of these customers and the cost of delivering on that value as well as acquiring and maintaining customers like that. Dr. Fader reiterates that’s one of the reasons why the second part of his book is  titled “Focus on the Right Customer for Strategic Advantage.”

• Dr. Fader says focus on the right customers for Strategic Advantage - as a business you have to pick and choose as some customers will be more valuable than others and as a business you really need to invest to figure that out and if you don’t - you will be wasting a lot of money on some low value customers. Dr. Fader says there a lot of people out there that are kind of afraid of CLV as they think it’s kind of “scary” and “mathy” and they are not sure what they would do with it, it’s kind of this great unknown - so they just throw themselves into Customer Service and Customer Experience and Customer Journey and believe if they do all of that really good then it absolves them of really doing CLV. Dr. Fader says there is a beautiful interplay between the two because companies cannot do Customer Service, Customer Experience and Customer Journey unless they are comfortable with and cognizant of CLV.

• In response to our question on Leadership and getting the company owners and leaders to understand the great importance of Customer Experience to the bottom line - Dr. Fader responded that is why he wrote his book “Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage.” Dr. Fader says he has been developing these CLV models for years and years and years going around to companies preaching how this can really help their business and the company would respond saying, “We have all these geeks and nerds over in analytics….go and talk to them because we have a business to run here, I’m the CMO….I’m too busy for that kind of non-sense.” Dr. Fader said he found all of that rather frustrating. He further stated that a lot of companies are truly missing the mark. Dr. Fader said he wrote his book Customer Centricity as a call to action, as a wake-up call to get get C-Level people to really appreciate the strategic importance, the competitive imperative of really understanding Lifetime Value and all of the different ways that it can be leveraged.

• Dr. Fader says that he is a number cruncher but a number cruncher that’s on a mission to get the C-level people to wake up and smell the CLV!

• Dr. Fader says that it is pleasing to know that companies such as Starbucks have wised up and made a 180 saying that we get it now and we have to focus on the CLV, not all our customers are the same.

• Dr. Fader said CRM was out there too early when it was originally released in the MarketPlace and many businesses did not know what to do with it. He says now because of the stagnation of product centricity, globalization, the millennials and all these different reasons….Customer Centricity is more understood and much more necessary and now it’s finally time for the CRM Revolution.

• Dr. Fader speaks about a book that was very influential for him when writing his own book “Angel Customers and Demon Customers” by Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin. The book makes reference to a bank that had a customer that applied for Mortgage services and the experience was as if the bank and the mortgage section were two separate entities! There was no integration with the teams that dealt with regular day to day banking. The truly  Customer Centric companies truly understand the 360 approach of viewing customers not just from one activity but all activities. Dr. Fader says banking has been one of the more impressive sectors that have woken up to really try new and innovative ways to understand their customers. 

• Dr. Fader further states that he wants everyone in the company thinking of the customer and the customer value regardless of where they are in the business  productions, sales or customer service.

• Dr. Fader states another popular thing in business now is “Customer Based Corporate Valuation”, because if you are a company where the vast majority of your revenue comes from customers and you can figure out the CLV from the present customers as well as the customers that you are likely to acquire in the future and you add all that stuff up - that’s the value of the firm! Dr. Fader says he has been doing that with companies - checking the CLV and matching it back with Wall Street’s value of the company and matching them up and the reason he is doing it because he wants the CFO to really look at it and see the direct co-relation between CLV and the bottom line! Dr. Fader said this is actually more accurate, more timely, more actionable, more valuable than the top down methods of valuation. Dr. Fader says he wants CLV to be this Gold Standard Metric that everyone in the organization can appreciate so there will be less battles in a company over these different kinds of metrics.

• Dr. Fader says he really loves what he does and he’s building all of these predictive models and he knows in a small way he’s changing the world and that brings him great joy! Dr. Fader says he loves the teaching, research and the companies that he deals with for research. He really believes that he has been very fortunate and he works across every sector imaginable!

• Dr. Fader says his number one app is Twitter - he further says it is very much where he gets all of his updates and connections. He really loves Twitter. Dr. Fader further states on a side note of apps and websites he loves - he created a website called coolnumbers.com a website dedicated to the world’s greatest collection of dollar bills with interesting serial numbers. He says if you have too much time on your hands you can head on over to that website and put in any 8 digit number and it will tell you how cool it is on a 0-100 scale! Dr. Fader says that it is utterly pointless and there is no redeeming social value and it’s completely stupid but a simply nice outlet for someone who likes to crunch numbers. He comically says this is where he let’s his true geek hang out!

• Dr. Fader says he has a whole bunch of  books he would recommend as being influential as he is an avid reader! He mentions “Consumer Behavior Models for Non-Statisticians” by Jerome Greene and he states Greene was a media researcher not an academic that went into some statistical and technical data that has been helpful to him and continues to be helpful for his students. He further mentioned another book - “How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp as a Professor at the University of Australia. Dr. Fader says he highly recommends this book to everyone because the principles presented here are radical but they are supported by the kinds of models that Dr. Fader builds along with other people around the world and it is completely non-technical as it has mostly stories and principles.

• Dr. Fader is very excited about Zodiac - his new start up! He shares Zodiac (zodiacmetrics.com) is an online platform that bolts right on to a company’s transaction log system, sucks out their transaction log data, calculates all the CLV in real time and then injects them right back into their CRM system. Dr. Fader says he does not want to tell companies what to do, what experiments to run, which customers to go after - Dr. Fader just wants to give them the right ingredients for them to be able to do that. Dr. Fader wants to create that magic wand, that engine that will give companies one less excuse to not do the CLV thing.

• Dr. Fader also mentioned he’s already thinking of a follow up to his first book - the CLV Playbook - once more companies get to really understand and practice the true functions of CLV - this book would be their guide.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here! 

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.PeteFader.com

www.ZodiacMetrics.com

www.Twitter.com/FaderP

“Angel Customers and Demon Customers” by Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin

“Consumer Behaviour Models for Non-Statisticians” by Jerome D. Greene

“How Brands Grow” by Byron Sharp

Jay Baer is the world’s most retweeted person among digital marketers. He is a renowned business strategist, keynote speaker and the New York Times best-selling author of five books who travels the world helping businesspeople get and keep more people. Jay has advised over 700 companies since 1994, including Caterpillar, Nike, Allstate, The United Nations and 32 of the FORTUNE 500. He is the founder of Convince & Convert, a strategy consulting firm that helps prominent companies gain and keep more customers through the smart intersection of technology, social media, and customer service. His Convince & Convert Media division owns the world’s #1 content marketing blog, the world’s top marketing podcast, and many other education resources for business owners and executives.

Jay believes that now more and more of our customer contact is in public, and that changes the dynamics of customer service considerably.

“It changes the value of customer service considerably, but the problem is most businesses haven’t figured it out yet”

He says most businesses are using old customer service playbooks to solve 2016 customer service problems.

“The other thing that’s really useful for executives is to show them how customer service is the new marketing.”

For example, when a customer has a great customer experience they talk about it, when the experience is shared on social media as part of a rating, review or tweet, that is part of your marketing.

“One-third of customer complaints are never answered.”

Most of these complaints are via social media and they go unanswered by the company. These are public complaints that other customers or prospects can see and have access to, yet they remain unsolved.

80% of businesses claim to have exceptional customer service, however only 8% of their customers agree.

“There is this massive difference of opinion between what businesses think is good customer service and what customers think is good customer service.”

Jay adds that customer service is chronically underfunded for almost every business because for generation’s, customer service has primarily been a “necessary evil” and nothing more.

He notes that customer service is public now through social media and has more impact on purchases; companies need to re-evaluate their current focus on customer service.

Jay points out hiring the right people for your customer service front lines are crucial to your business. Recruiting people who have the type of personality that can show empathy for the customer is very important.

“You can learn an awful lot about somebody’s skills as a potential customer service representative just through an exercise.”

Jay shares one online tool that his company could not live without, virtual desktop software called Sococo. While working with people from all over the world, Jay says this is the tool to keep everybody connected.

“The greatest managers in the world understand, find out or determine what motivates each person (employee); they put incentives and programs in place at the individuals personal level to motivate each person instead of trying to motivate everyone together.”

Jays sees the value in developing his people. He started a six-month program for his staff so that they could grow their speaking skills in order to go and speak at conferences all over the world.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.ConvinceandConvert.com

www.HugYourHaters.com

www.Sococo.com     

“Different” by Youngme Moon

“Procrastinate on Purpose” by Rory Vaden

Marc Mawhinney is on a mission to help coaches build stronger businesses! A lifelong entrepreneur, he achieves this with his podcast, “Natural Born Coaches”, and his 1:1, group and online coaching programs. He frequently makes media appearances and is a contributor for Entrepreneur.com. You can learn more about Marc at NaturalBornCoaches.com!

We have all been taught that the customer is always right, but Marc has a slightly different view on this topic. Marc has experience in both brick and mortar and online businesses, and from those experiences he feels that there needs to be a common area where the client and the business have mutual respect for each other.

“I think there has to be a balance and there has to be respect between both the business person and the customer.”

After Marc’s experience in Real Estate and dealing with all types of clients, Marc’s coaching business allows him to have the freedom to have more control over who is a well-fitted client for him.

“I can say that I am much less stressed. I look at where I am today compared to when I was twenty-something and doing real estate, with coaching I can say that I really have fun working with my clients because I have a tighter set of criteria with who I work with.”

When Marc was asked his thoughts on the controversy of turnaround times regarding responding to emails, Marc feels he does not have an obligation to drop what he is doing in order to have a quick turnaround and 24 hours is a reasonable amount of time to reply.

“I’m not surprised if it takes a few days for someone to get back to me because if they’re successful, they’re busy!”

Marc shares some everyday solutions that could help improve customer service on a global level.

“I think it is really important to put yourself in the customer’s shoes, which sounds like common sense but I don’t think it is very common. What I’ve always made an effort (before when I was in real estate and now and with coaching) to try and put myself in the customer’s shoes and look at it that way.”

Marc stays motivated by reading a lot of motivational and personal development books, but also he blocks people out of his life that are not supporters of him, which is something he has gotten better at over time.

“The other way I stay motivated and conserve energy is I don’t jump into things that don’t warrant my energy.”

Marc says the biggest online resource, tool or app that he cannot live without would be his online calendar. This is how Marc controls his time and schedules for each day.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.NaturalBornCoaches.com

www.TheCoachingJungle.com

www.YourFirstFiveClients.com

www.NaturalBornCoaches.com/ABCbook

ScheduleOnce

“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill

“Thick Face, Black Heart” by Chin Ning Chu

“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

“The Fountainhead” By Ayn Rand

Vance Morris is a Service Trainer & Management Alumni of the Walt Disney Company. He now coaches companies to create magical and profitable service cultures in their businesses through his companies; DELIVER SERVICE NOW INSTITUTE (DSNI) and The Marketing & Entrepreneurial Growth Alliance (MEGA). 

With Vance’s background and experience, he wanted to find a business that he could add his special touch of high level customer experience to. He found a franchise to work with that had strong systems and processes already in place.

“They already had a framework that I could work from and then take that and be able to add to it what makes me special, and provide a complete service powerhouse.”

Vance shares about a service technique that he uses in setting the tone for reciprocity by providing a housewarming gift to clients.

He was able to implement different qualities and concepts from Disney into his business, including providing a monthly newsletter highlighting the company’s level of customer service and detail.

“I think it is very important that you educate your clients and educate your customers, especially when it comes to the details you are providing.”

Another thing Vance has implemented from Disney is having a set of service standards. He notes that for over 50 years, Disney has had the same standards in place.

“You know Disney only has four (guiding principles) that have been with them for 50 years now and they are: Safety, Courtesy, Show, and Efficiency. I have taken that 100% into my business.”

Vance feels that businesses have been too focused on profitability and cost cutting, which has led to a major decline on customer service.

“They have created a department called Customer Service when in fact it should be everyone’s job”

He is really excited about being part of a mastermind group, and says the help and support you can get from other businesses owners is phenomenal.

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.DeliverServiceNow.com

www.GKIC.com

www.Vistage.com

www.facebook.com/DeliverServiceNow/home

“Be Our Guest” by Disney Theodore Kinni

“Good To Great” by Jim Collins

Angela Powers is an instructional designer helping entrepreneurs become “freedom-preneurs”, partnering with them to create and optimize their online programs. She has designed, developed and delivered training to hundreds of thousands of students globally for the past 12 years, working with large companies including Google, Amazon, Boeing and F5, as well as individual entrepreneurs.

A few years ago, Angela decided that she wanted to be a coach, and she says this had been something she was thinking about for a long time.

After completing coaching school, she came up with multiple ideas of what she wanted to focus on. She realized that her greatest expertise was as an instructional designer, building online courses.

Angela shares that her main motivation as an entrepreneur is her family, which includes her 5-year old daughter.

“As a freedom-preneur, I can work from home and set my own schedule; I work with the people I love to work with.”

She worked with her first coach 10 years ago, which transformed her own life.

“I work with a lot of coaches. I love being able to help them transform more people’s lives and have a bigger impact.”

Tools that she used during her time in the corporate work, like design logs, are important in her current role working with clients. Angela says issues such as communication and tracking are just as vital for small business owners to pay attention to as they are for large companies.

“I think that’s a big part of customer experience, being on the same page”

Angela believes that customer service on a global level needs improvement and as a customer herself, her own standards keep going up.

A good amount of Angela’s expertise has been acquired through on-the-job training, and she also received her certification in professional learning and performance four years ago, which required about 150 hours of work, written tests and projects.

Usability testing is an effective tool that she uses when creating content.

“You can’t get any better than real (people) actually using your prototype and giving you that real time feedback.”

She takes advantage of multiple platforms to help clients create programs, including Udemy, and says that they all have different advantages and features available.

“I’m open to really finding out what somebody wants to achieve through that training”

Angela stays motivated by breaking her goals down into 12-week timeframes, which keeps her focused. She has also successfully used accountability partnerships to keep her on track.

She is a big believer of taking care of herself, by blocking off personal time as well as meditating every morning.

Angela is most excited about learning ClickFunnels, a tool designed to create sales funnels for online marketers.

“As an instructional designer, that’s what I’m usually doing; creating a specific path to get you to a goal.”

The mantra that she lives by is “We’re born to teach.”

We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!

INTERVIEW LINKS:

www.LearnWithAngela.com

www.Facebook.com/LearnWithAngela

www.Twitter.com/LearnWithAngela

Make It Stick

Immunity to Change

ClickFunnels

Wunderlist

Books by Brene Brown

Brene Brown’s interview on Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast