The Customer Experience Podcast

During COVID-19, businesses need to recognize that hearing from and listening to customers has never been more important. Your customers need to feel safe if you’re reopening.    To make customer experience the core of your business, you need to focus on the 4 truths of CX: it should be 1) differentiated, 2) easy, 3) visible, and 4) authentic.   In this episode, I interview Aaron Weiche, CEO at GatherUp and host of the Saas Venture Podcast, about the 4 truths and how to apply them tactically.   What we talked about:   - Why listening to the customer should be a core part of your business   - Prospective customers’ focus on reviews and need to hear from current customers   - Data collection without lowering customer friction is not the win you think it is   - Psychologically, a 4.78 is more attractive than a 5.0 review   - 3 tactical spaces you should provide opportunity for customer feedback   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Employee experience is the sum of all the touchpoints you have with your employer organization — which equals millions of touches.   Why, then, have 40% of managers not even checked in on how their employees are doing during the pandemic?   In this episode, I interview Gil Cohen, Founder at Employee Experience Design, about intentionality in crafting the employee experience.   What we talked about:   - How to design for the 8 aspects of employee wellness   - Why employee experience starts before hiring process   - How an investment in EX as an investment in your bottom line   - Why intentionality matters in designing EX   - Where the best place in your organization is to start an EX initiative   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Customer experience shouldn’t be an afterthought. Unless you’ve intentionally built it into your organization’s core, you probably aren’t offering an especially frictionless customer experience. Wait, what’s so bad about friction?   In this episode, I interview Anthony Coundouris, the founder of run_frictionless and author of run_frictionless, about removing friction by aligning 4 quadrants in your business.   What we talked about:   - How to reduce friction by designing to and operating from the four quadrants   - Why you should ignore your competitors and focus on customer expiry   - How to attract and hire people based on shared beliefs   - Why 70% of buying decisions are based out of Q3 (Who We Are) and how to insulate yourself by inspiring irrational buying forces   - How to uncover wild inconsistencies between what sales leaders think they’re selling and what’s actually for sale   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Data literacy is knowing how to read and understand data — such as the difference between a histogram and a flow chart. Data maturity is knowing how to use data to make decisions — like giving your customers what they want the most.    Right now, a time of great change, is the perfect opportunity to invest in growing a data culture so that in the post-pandemic world, you’ll have both the data literacy and the data maturity to thrive.   In this episode, I interview Piyanka Jain, President and CEO of Ayrng, about how to build data literacy and create citizen analysts. What we talked about:   - The definition of data literacy and its relationship to data maturity   - How data maturity is like making falafel   - Why a healthy data culture is foundational to crafting customer experience   - Why data personas precede data literacy   - Best practices for improving data literacy (3 problems to overcome)   Check out this resource we mentioned during the podcast:   - Ayrng’s data scientist and citizen analyst Academy   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

When there’s a face present, 70% of our gaze goes straight to it.   The problem that recorded video solves right now is the problem that it’s always solved. Video connects you to people in an immediate and intimate way that faceless digital communication scientifically cannot do. In this episode, I’m excited to unpack some of the science about video that I shared recently at Narrative Science’s Data Storytelling Virtual Summit.   I’m Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, host of The Customer Experience Podcast, and co-host of the CX Series on the B2B Growth Show, here today to share what I’ve learned about the science of video from 3 amazing podcast guests.   What we talked about:   - Our essential human interest in faces (and how our attention wanes when we see a profile instead   - The way that video makes us think we’re in close proximity emotionally   - How video jumpstarts social bonding   - The metric that I argue matters most in communication today   Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:   - Dan Hill on Faces http://vid.us/hqpw9j   - David Meerman Scott on Proximity http://vid.us/2521tx   - Vanessa Van Edwards on Connection http://vid.us/a0x55t   - Ethan Beute on the Science of Video http://vid.us/a0x55t   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Our ideas about customer experience have probably changed drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Customer experience is no longer just about getting value from a service or experience. It’s actually about helping each other survive.   When customer experience is that essential to keeping our livelihoods and lives safe, we have to revisit its deepest foundation: relationships.   In this episode, I interview Todd Hockenberry, Consultant, Advisor, and Coach at Top Line Results, about customer centricity and inbound organization.   What we talked about:   - Alignment is actually about teamwork   - True customer-centricity means knowing more about the customer than they know about themselves   - A traditional playbook is just frustrating your reps & customers   - We are all connected, and no one can succeed alone   Check out this resource we mentioned during the podcast:   - Dan’s book is Inbound Organization   - His coauthor Dan Tyre was also a guest on the Customer Experience Podcast   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

The only two currencies in the world are dollars and emotions. Emotion is also an often overlooked component of customer experience. When it comes to human emotions, the face is the window to the soul, meaning that facial expressions — if you know how to read them — truly reveal what is happening on the emotional scale.   The insight that there are 7 emotions in terms of facial coding and that only one of them is truly positive will help companies shape the customer experience and the employee experience.   In this episode, I interview Dan Hill, President of Sensory Logic and author about all things EQ, to hear about how video can unlock human emotion.   What we talked about:   - 3 tips for framing your face properly in video   - One person on camera is better than two … or three … or more   - Our buying choices stem from desiring pleasure and avoiding danger   - The less you see of the face, the less your brain fires   Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:   - Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success   - Famous Faces Decoded: A Guidebook for Reading Others   - First Blush: People’s Intuitive Reactions To Famous Art   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Everyone tracks some form of data. (We track quite a lot of it if we’re rolling with the times.) But amassing data isn’t meaningful unless we can create a narrative out of the facts.   For example, if you just looked at the cold data of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’d start to feel pretty hopeless, but if the data started to produce fact-based stories, we humans would start to be able to understand it and use it to make decisions.   Even greater than comprehending data using narrative is creating community with data. Our guest today is an expert at both, a person who spends most of her time analyzing not just what the data is saying but how it can serve people by connecting customers not just to her company, but to each other.    In this episode, I interview Stef Caldwell, the Senior Customer Success Leader and Community Architect at Narrative Science, about customer experience and customer success.    What we talked about:   - What your data can and can’t tell you about your customers   - What the relationship is between CS and CX   - Why we must scale the human touch in Customer Success   - Why to create community around your core beliefs   - How Stef founded Manifest to address the missing rung — the first step that carries women into management   Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:   - Manifest   - Lululemon    - Goal setting with Michael Hyatt   - James Clear’s Atomic Habits   - Charles Duhigg’s Power of Habit   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

We always talk about brand as a collection of promises that a company is making to its customers. At the end of the day, brand really comes down to the essence of a company.   However, if the people spending the money on the advertising do not have a strong bond with the people delivering that customer experience — the ones facing the customers — you have a catastrophic breakdown between promise and delivery.   Employee experience is customer experience if employees believe in the brand they are hired to represent.   In this episode, I interview Chris Wallace, Cofounder and President at InnerView Group, about marketing and branding to employees, not just customers.   A few of the takeaways:   - Build employee satisfaction to drive customer satisfaction — an upward spiral   - Avoid brand dilution by closing the gap between your brand promise and your customer experience   - Infuse your team with a sense of pride and purpose in their work and in your company   - Techniques & strategies for improving employee experience   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.

Now more than ever, having a focus on the customer experience matters. If we're not empathetic to what our customers are going through, we won’t just not make a sale, we’ll make an enemy. This timely reminder underscores the importance of customer data as an avenue for relating to the deep needs of the customer.    You’ve heard of account-based marketing and selling… Account-based information ties into the customer experience just as closely.   In this episode, I interview Shanee Ben-Zur, Head of Marketing, Media, & Growth at Crunchbase, about using data to develop fuller pictures of your customers:   What we talked about: - Shanee’s A/B test strategy and project team - CX touches wants, needs, and desires - not just finances - Organizing and interpreting customer interviews - Deeply understanding who the customer is means recognizing their stress & problem solving from a desire to help - If you can’t measure it, should you be doing it? - Where sales meets marketing meets product Subscribe, listen, and rate/review the Customer Experience Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play or Google Podcasts, and find more episodes on our blog.