The Customer Experience Podcast

“I want to rehumanize the way people think about their communication. I just think people are better face to face.” Today, almost everyone relies on email, texting, message boards, and other impersonal methods to get their work done. Unfortunately, these messages lack the body language and vocal signals that we humans rely on to fill the communication gaps. And emojis can’t cut it. Darin Dawson, President and Co-Founder of BombBomb, which makes it easy to record, send, and track video emails within the systems you already use, has built a career on this idea. He joined us on a recent Customer Experience podcast. Below are some of his ideas on rehumanizing business communication and the world.

Sometimes it’s a bad thing when the sales team closes the deal. Customer experience often starts with the sales team promising something that the customer success team can’t deliver. We asked Nick Hart, Customer Success Manager at Outreach.io (a sales engagement platform), how to make sure that the sales team and customer success team are all on the same page. Salespeople frequently have the mentality of just getting deals across the finish line. From a financial point of view, the sales team needs to be incentivized to prioritize prospects who are most likely to renew. In this episode we discuss: The Perils of Productivity Customer Success Metrics Where Sales Causes Problems Who Should Send Marketing Materials? Bring Your Executive to Work Day

If you want to know why customers leave and you want to know how to win them back, have I got a podcast for you. I learned so much from David Avrin, a customer experience & marketing keynote speaker, consultant and author, whose most recent book is Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back): (24 Reasons People are Leaving You for Competitors, and How to Win Them Back*). Avrin helps companies become responsive to their customers and prospect’s needs. Since the advent of the iPhone 11 years ago, everyone has gotten acclimated to instant gratification. The problem today is that every failure in customer experience becomes magnified because every person you encounter is armed with a video camera on their phone. Everyone is on camera. Everything is being recorded. Everything is being shared. People feel it's not only the right, but it's their responsibility to go online and rant about any slight or infraction. Unfortunately most companies haven’t adapted to this faster pace. Only 15% of companies have adopted an always-on business model to accommodate their always-connected customers. Rightly or not, people expect an immediate response. To learn more about how to get your customers back, click on the podcast link in the first comment below.

“Any brand that you frequent, or are fond of, or use, there's been a journey of some kind,” says Kurt Bartolich, the founder of GUTS Branding, and the author of You Can't Ride Two Horses With One Ass. Whether your company offers an active (Build-A-Bear) or passive (Southwest Airlines) consumer experience, there are some basic branding truths that successful companies observe. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses get customer experiences backward.

Customer experience touches every place a customer could possibly interact with your company, even before they buy the product. Rachel Ostrander is the director of runner experience at Brooks Running. “I heard a quote, ‘If you want to know where a customer or a company is, look at their sales. If you want to know where they're gonna be, look at their service.’ I believe in that, and my entire career has reinforced that.”

How do you get people to pay attention to your message? Whether you’re selling to a customer online or speaking in front of a live audience, you need to create a shared belief about what the other person will be getting out of it.   To deep dive into that concept, I spoke with Steve Pacinelli, the CMO at BombBomb who is my co-author of our book Rehumanize Your Business: How Personal Videos Accelerate Sales and Improve Customer Experience. Here are some highlights of what we discussed. Customer Experience as the Exploration of a Shared Belief Enthusiasm Is Contagious Making Yourself Valuable to Your Audience Keep Your Audience Interested Little Things That Make a Big Difference

Your content IS your customer experience. So says the queen of content marketing, Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of the best-selling Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content and Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business. Listen to learn: Measuring your content by your brand message The biggest improvements come from the most basic principles. Who is your inspiration? What brand has inspiring customer service? Putting the content customer experience into practice

Businesses are just like people. They must stay healthy and agile, or watch their enterprise arteries harden through apathy and face an early death. Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of species that survives nor the most intelligent, but the one that is the most adaptable to change.” The key to survival is transformation and reinvention. Thus says Joseph Jaffe, the “admiral and co-founder” of The HMS Beagle, which is a strategic consultancy whose name is a nod to the exploratory ship Charles Darwin was on when he developed the theory of evolution. The HMS Beagle helps clients navigate the journey to survival because everyone is in the survival business nowadays.

You feel cheated. You‘ve tried to create amazing content to win the content marketing game. And yet your revenue hasn’t shot through the roof. Why? The problem isn’t your content, it is how you’re putting it all together. You need to put your content into a content experience framework according to my podcast guest Randy Frisch, who is CMO at Uberflip, a speaker, and author of F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience to Drive Demand, Revenue & Relationships.

With the right attitude, business relationships, instead of being a depreciating asset, could be transformed into compound interest that pays you over and over. Getting your business in the right relationship mindset is the business of Zvi Band, CEO/Co-Founder at Contactually, a SaaS-based intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) platform for relationship-oriented industries that helps users develop and strengthen authentic, long-lasting relationships. Band is also the author of the upcoming book Success Is in Your Sphere: Leverage the Power of Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals (publishing April 5, 2019).