The Modern Customer Podcast

Dan Roam will always be your most interesting dinner party guest, not just because he will explain complicated topics to you on the back of a napkin. For years he has been espousing the benefits of communicating through simple images. He broke ground with this bestselling book Back Of The Napkin, and has recently released a new book called Draw To Win: A Crash Course On How To Lead, Sell and Innovate With Your Visual Mind. In the book Roam provides the tools necessary to thrive visually, using step-by-step diagrams and easy-to-master lessons that will make you an expert in communication and creativity. Think this isn’t relevant for customer experience professionals? Think again! Simplifying content for customers should be priority number one for every brand. Gone are the days when customers had the attention span for long wordy documents explaining terms of service, how-to content, or self-help guides. Learn from Roam what you can be doing to improve your customer communication through images. An internationally bestselling author and the founder of the Napkin Academy, the world’s first online visual-thinking training program, Roam has helped leaders at Microsoft, Boeing, eBay, Kraft, The US Navy, Senate and many more solve complex problems with simple pictures. You won’t want to miss this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast.   More About Our Sponsor Plantronics: Plantronics offers one of the industry's most complete families of corded and wireless products for unified communications. Widely recognized for their sound quality, reliability and comfort, Plantronics' audio solutions help companies extend the benefits of IP communications throughout the extended enterprise, fostering better business communication and efficiency regardless of where professionals are working. https://www.plantronics.com/us/company/

How important is it to organize your data around your customer? It turns out that variation in customer demographics can be a powerful thing, and you want to make sure you are taking that diversity of customer into account when building customer programs. Today on the Modern Customer Podcast Zoher Karu ebay’s Chief Data Officer talks about the importance treating different customers differently. He recommends integrating different internal and external data elements together and explains the art and science behind understanding customers. At eBay Karu believes every customer is different and your customer strategy should reflect that. Learn more in this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast.   Zoher Karu is Vice President and Chief Data Officer at eBay where he works to drive more personal and relevant experiences on eBay Marketplace properties. Prior to joining eBay, Zoher served as Vice President of Marketing Analytics and Insight at Sears, leading efforts to drive customer behavior, loyalty and growth, both in-store and on-line. Zoher holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.  More About Our Sponsor Plantronics: Plantronics offers one of the industry's most complete families of corded and wireless products for unified communications. Widely recognized for their sound quality, reliability and comfort, Plantronics' audio solutions help companies extend the benefits of IP communications throughout the extended enterprise, fostering better business communication and efficiency regardless of where professionals are working. https://www.plantronics.com/us/company

Peter Strebel serves as chief marketing officer and senior vice president of sales responsible for creating and driving innovative branding, communications, marketing and business development strategies to increase awareness, capture market share and build revenue for the brand. Strebel stewards Omni’s centers of excellence including revenue management, global sales, e-commerce, customer loyalty, reservations and call center, branding, advertising, communications, web and digital marketing and market research. Previously, Strebel was the senior vice president of operations and oversaw the development of brand-wide property standards, guest rooms and other operational areas for the brand’s growing convention collection and resort portfolio. He also worked directly to support Omni Atlanta Hotel at CNN Center, Omni Nashville Hotel, Omni Parker House, Omni Berkshire Place, The Omni Homestead Resort and The Omni Grove Park Inn. A long-term Omni veteran, Strebel rejoined Omni in 2009 as area managing director and general manager of the Omni Berkshire Place. In his role as area managing director, he oversaw all marketing, sales and operational aspects of Omni properties in the Northeast. During his previous tenure at Omni, he had a successful 10-year career in sales and marketing positions of increasing responsibility, ultimately leading to his appointment as vice president of sales and marketing. What You Will Learn In This Podcast: How Omni Hotels differentiates itself with so many disruptions coming to hospitality How customer experience is defined at Omni Hotels Who drives customer experience at Omni Hotels How is customer service organized at Omni Hotels More About Our Sponsor Plantronics: Plantronics offers one of the industry's most complete families of corded and wireless products for unified communications. Widely recognized for their sound quality, reliability and comfort, Plantronics' audio solutions help companies extend the benefits of IP communications throughout the extended enterprise, fostering better business communication and efficiency regardless of where professionals are working. https://www.plantronics.com/us/company/

The role of the Chief Customer Officer is not an age-old role. It’s a unique new role that’s set up differently at every organization. One example comes from MetLife who has seasoned industry executive Claire Burns running customer strategy. Burns serves as the Chief Customer Officer for MetLife which covers 110 million customers and 65K employees. The global company has an extensive and diverse product and distribution channels. Burns leads transformational change – tasked with shifting from a product centric corporate strategy to a customer centric corporate strategy. Burns, reporting to the CMO, has a “matrixed” managed team of 50 change agents around the world who are responsible for implementing these customer-centric programs.  Burns’ task is aligning the entire company around the customer. She helps the company decide what kinds of products they need to create. Burns also evaluated what services are going well and what ones aren’t. She ensures the company is treating its customers as an asset—helping the broader organization gain clarity with their priorities and ensure they align. More About Our Sponsor Plantronics: Plantronics offers one of the industry's most complete families of corded and wireless products for unified communications. Widely recognized for their sound quality, reliability and comfort, Plantronics' audio solutions help companies extend the benefits of IP communications throughout the extended enterprise, fostering better business communication and efficiency regardless of where professionals are working. https://www.plantronics.com/us/company/  

The Dallas Mavericks are famous for a few reasons. They are the 9th most valuable basketball Franchise in the NBA valued at $1.4 billion dollars. The other unique aspect of the team is Mark Cuban their highly involved and enthusiastic owner. The Dallas Mavericks Chief Technology Officer--interviewed in this podcast--is used to hearing from Cuban whether it’s about engaging digital fans or a customer complaint Cuban found on social media. Management of the team make customer experience excellence a habit. The Dallas Mavericks continually invest in technology in addition to other leadership development practices such as the Disney Institute to maintain a strong level of quality throughout the Mavericks fan experience. Today’s Modern Customer guest, Chief Technology Officer Ken Bonzon talks about how he started his career with the Dallas Mavericks 17 years ago and the many transformations he's seen the team go through. Fan engagement has always been a priority for the team, and now with technology engaging partners and fans has become even easier. Learn about what the Dallas Mavericks are doing to engage fans and maintain brand relevance in this podcast.

Amazon repeatedly tops customer experience lists in addition to every other category for innovation. So what’s the secret? John Rossman was an early employee with Amazon and started with the initial leadership team in the early 2000s. In his book The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind The World’s Most Disruptive Company provides an inside-look at what makes Amazon so successful. Today Rossman serves as a Managing Director at consultancy Alvarez & Marsal. At a time when Amazon rarely talks to the press Rossman’s book looks at all the reasons why Amazon remains competitive and the decision-making that makes the company consistently high performing. Don't miss these critical tips in today’s modern customer podcast.

Why does it seem like start-ups are having all the fun lately? All too often big companies will launch an incubator or start-up environment in their company only later to close it once the company starts to feel nervous about their growth. In today’s Modern Customer Podcast we learn from Michael Docherty the author of Collective Disruption: How Corporations & Startups Can Co-Create Transformative New Businesses. In the book Michael reveals how the smartest corporations are learning to partner and co-create with startups for transformative innovation. The book provides established companies with a practical framework for plugging into the startup ecosystem to fuel and incubate new businesses. As CEO of Venture2 Inc., Docherty and his organization work with leading companies to transform their innovation capabilities, build innovation ecosystems and accelerate the commercialization of breakthrough new products, services and business models. He is a frequent speaker on innovation and corporate venturing and an active supporter of the entrepreneurial community.

Some of today’s most innovative brands are content publishers that are engaging customers with content in addition to finding smart ways to monetize their websites. Take PopSugar who are tapping into big data, machine learning and predictive analytics to make better decisions about how they engage with customers. PopSugar—a site that’s attracted more than 100 million visitors worldwide and 1.5 billion monthly content views—has more than one hundred editors creating content driven by site analytics, to discuss the impact that predictive analytics has had on its content strategy, readership numbers and conversion rates. A millennial publication focused on fashion, beauty and fitness—PopSugar turned to Adobe Analytics to make sense of its user data—including search and social behavior—to evolve and refine its content strategy.  Listen to this podcast with Chris George SVP, Product Marketing and Sales Strategy at PopSugar. In this role, Chris has launched The Bakery, PopSugar's full-service creative shop; PopSugar Insights; and SNAP, PopSugar's native advertising platform.  Chris joined from SpinMedia where he served as EVP, Marketing Solutions managing all aspects of revenue and sales solutions. He’s also held management positions at Fox Interactive Media where he oversaw advertising products, sales development and market intelligence for MySpace and others. He holds a BA degree in Advertising from Michigan State University.  

A new study from “The Math, the Magic and the Customer” found that inundated with troves of analytical data - today’s marketers often mistake the “algorithm” for the “person”.  Today’s marketers seek to have gotten so ROI-centric on every campaign according to Bain they are missing out on some of the magic of engaging with and understanding customers. The report says that “Humans, after all, are pesky creatures. We make decisions with our hearts as well as our heads. Our wants and needs can’t always be reduced to, or predicted by, data.” Today’s guest on The Modern Customer Podcast is Laura Beaudin, partner in Bain & Co’s San Francisco office - leading the firm’s Digital, Customer, Strategy & Marketing - as well as Telecom & Media practices could offer your listeners a fresh approach on how important it is to not get lost in the data and maintain connection to the customer as a “person”.  I thought this might make for an interesting show topic as it addresses a dilemma facing marketers today and offers proven strategies to deal with it. To access the report click here.

Are we living in the experience economy? In today’s episode of the Modern Customer Podcast I interview Joseph Pine, co author of The Experience Economy –a book that predicted we are living in the Experience Economy. The book was updated and re-released—and almost twenty years after its initial publishing it still provides excellent fodder for the customer experience conversation. It was the original book to hit on the subject of customer experience. The book provides a well-researched discussion of how businesses won’t survive by doing what they’ve always done. Businesses must look to some of the major inspirations such as Disneyland, Hershey's Chocolate World and other exciting experiences to engage the customer. To simply provide a product or service is not enough. In this podcast we revisit the principles of The Experience Economy. We see how businesses stack up today when it comes to providing the ultimate experience as defined by Joseph Pine in his book. In this podcast you will learn: What is a customer experience according to The Experience Economy? Are we living in the experience economy today? What can businesses do across their business to improve the customer experience?