The Modern Customer Podcast

According to Robert Tercek, author of Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World and former President of Digital Media at the Oprah Winfrey Network “Every aspect of our economy and society is set to be reconfigured by technological forces that only a handful of increasingly powerful companies have mastered.” Tercek reveals the inner workings of the biggest cultural and economic change since the industrial revolution. Tercek is a business futurist and digital media pioneer. In his 22-year career, Tercek has launched startup ventures and served in executive leadership roles at major media companies including Sony and MTV. In this podcast he talks about how goods become information intensive they begin to lose the characteristics of physical products and take on the properties of a service. In this podcast you will learn:   How has the connected consumer created the “activated audience” and the “activated consumer” When consumers are always connected, they become a force that commands the attention of marketing execs in every industry. What are the implications for brands that consumers now have the power to shape trends, influence product development and shape prices, access and product design How can brands in retail create innovative experiences including game-like experiences, digital delights and check-ins to engage the customer in the store? What does a “software-defined” society look like?    

If your food could talk to you what would it say? Would it help you cook? Would it provide some tasty pairing ideas for dinner? Or would it just tell you you’ve got a devilish smile and you’re ready for a night on the town? This is precisely what Absolut, the Vodka company, is currently mulling over in pursuit of a bottle that talks to its customers. Their digital innovation manager Markus Wulff said he believes Absolut will become a more service-oriented company because of the Internet of Things. Absolutely! Many companies will follow suit. I had the chance to interview Markus on a podcast where he talked about what Absolut’s vision is for their products and the internet of things. In this podcast you will learn:  -The inspiration for the internet of things program at Absolut-The landscape of the internet of things; what will those vodka bottles look like in the future?- Expert predictions around how brands of the future will engage with consumers via the internet of things  

What is the purpose of a brand? This is a question I’ve been asking to a handful of thought leaders. Ryan Hanley--the VP of Marketing at TrustedChoice.com, speaker, podcaster and author of the Amazon bestseller, Content Warfare--was someone I discovered through his show on Periscope where he took it upon himself to dissect an article I had written on the purpose of a brand.  The purpose of business–according to Peter Drucker one of the most popular management gurus of the 20th century–is to create a customer. But what about the purpose of a brand? How does this popular management quote apply to business today? In this podcast you will learn: How to create a successful content curation program How to be a successful content curator The modern purpose of a brand  

When you work in customer service and you’re dealing with an angry customer—it’s likely the last thing you feel like doing is giving them a hug. However this is exactly what author Jay Baer encourages you to do to improve your customer relationships. Baer’s newest book is Hug Your Haters: How To Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers. In the book Baer gives many examples of the various ways customer service has changed in today’s digital environment. Some of the challenges companies face include when "mom says yes and dad says no." When many companies do not have a good grasp of basic customer service is it a surprise that many of them are struggling with social customer service? Baer says, “We’re creating social media problems for ourselves because we’re not good at legacy customer service. Someone calls and it’s a 30 minute hold, or an email is sent and there’s no response for two days. Then they take it public—taking something that should have been easy to solve.” According to Baer 71% of all social media complaints started on another channel. Brands have enjoyed the privilege of control for 1000 years. In the past it was only phone or email or in-person interactions—since the caveman days. Baer says—because of social media—customer service is a spectator sport now. What You Will Learn From This Podcast: Why companies don’t hug their haters Where customer service has gone wrong and what you can do to fix yours How to hire and train for social customer service Examples of ways to hug your haters, and the benefits Jay Baer is the founder of Convince and Convert and the author of Hug Your Haters: How To Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers. For more please subscribe to Blake Morgan's newsletter here.  

Customer centricity is something we all intend to do--it sounds like it means being "into" your customers. You are interested and focused on them right? Well not really. Customer centricity as defined by Dr. Peter Fader of Wharton might be different than what you think. I saw Dr. Fader speak at the 2nd Annual Customer Centricity Conference--there was a debate with the audience around the purpose of a brand. It quickly became clear everyone disagreed about customer centricity especially as it relates to the purpose of a brand. According to Fader, customer centricity is when the brand identifies the most valuable customers and surrounds them with relevant products and services. The brand creates enough influence with their key customers that these customers see the brand as a trusted advisor.  Clearly there are differing opinions today about how you treat your customers. Do you take your most financially rewarding customers and spend all of your time creating services, products and loyalty programs for them? Or do you treat all of your customers equally? In this podcast you will learn: The role of big data in customer centricity The business case for customer centricity Case studies from the gaming community on customer centricity done right  Dr. Peter Fader is Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and taught marketing at Wharton for 29 years. He is the author of the book Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage.

Peter Drucker's grandson Nova Spivack, CEO of Bottlenose, says that Drucker would have felt today that real influencers are not spending a lot of time on social media. In The Modern Customer Podcast this week we talk to Spivack who is an entrepreneur and investor who at six years old remembers being in line behind Jack Welch for an appointment to spend time with his grandfather, one of the most famous management thinkers of our time Peter Drucker. These memories are vivid for Spivack who today spends time thinking about the big business questions we face today. Spivack believes his grandfather felt real influence is not visible but built through face to face interaction. From personal branding and influence to building a brand’s influence, we cover it all in this podcast. There are many challenges Spivack sees for brands that are trying to build influence. He says while people may be brands, brands are not people. While you can "friend" a brand, this is not a bi-directional relationship. Brands have to recognize that they aren't people and the relationships they're building are not like human friendships. Brands need to become memes--virally replicating ideas that spread through cultures. Spivack says brands are more like viruses than they are like people. Spivack's grandfather coined the term the "non-customer." Spivack argues that you still need to understand these non-customers as much as you seek to understand your customer. It's your non-customers that represent your potential for growth. Brands today spend an immense amount of time but not enough time trying to reach their non-customers. Recently through there have been some debates around the focus on non-customers from a branding perspective versus purely focusing on the valuable top spending customers. According to Spivack one of the things brands need to do is think of the risk of having only one niche. If we look at evolution the species that have survived—if you can compare this to brands—are the species that were not confined to one ecological niche. They were able to colonize other niches. You can think of demographics and audience segments as niches.  In this podcast you will learn The best ways to build influence as a brand How you can identify new market opportunities Examples of brands that are generating awareness through killer content  

Kevan Gammage is senior manager for MailChimp’s social and Pro support teams. After joining MailChimp’s support team as an agent in 2013, he now helps manages the company’s overall support strategy and shapes the way agents communicate with Pro customers and users through social channels every day.

We're at a crossroads in education. There is an increasing gap between the skills that are in demand in the workforce, and modern day education. It simply is not making the cut. Even though the education system today is largely an old machine, sometimes you come upon stories that give you hope. Enter Paulina Raguimov, a young creative gamer who at the age of 16 applied for an internship at JumpStart--a well-known game company--got the internship and ended up pitching a concept for a new game to the CEO, and getting that game produced. Now at the age of 20 Raguimov continues to do cutting edge work at JumpStart and finds time in her busy schedule to mentor younger people as well. Raguimov took the road less travelled by skipping college (so far) and wants to provide information and resources to others like her in school who don't know exactly what they wanted to be when they grow up. Raguimov has generated a lot of attention already with features in TechCrunch and Huffington Post. I have met Paulina Raguimov many times and am happy to have had the opportunity to share her story with Forbes listeners. What You Will Learn In This Podcast: Learn how a young person can navigate the waters of tech and seek gateway opportunities early on Learn about why young girls benefit from going into gaming Hear tips from Raguimov on how to generate opportunities with tech companies For more on Paulina Raguimov follow her on Twitter @PollyRag or LinkedIn here. 

Darren Pleasance leads the Global Customer Acquisitions team for Google, dedicated to driving Google's growth in the global SMB space across a diverse set of countries and industries. In this capacity,he’s responsible for guiding Sales, Marketing, Market Intelligence and Support teams globally to attract small and mid-sized businesses to Google's many services. His goal is to make businesses aware of how Google's services can help them succeed and to provide the highest quality on-boarding experience in the industry. In his previous role as a leader in McKinsey and Company's North American Marketing & Sales Practice, and the founder and co-leader of McKinsey's global Small- and Medium-sized Business (SMB) practice, he specialized in helping senior executives in their efforts to build high-performing sales, marketing, and support channels for serving SMB customers. He serves on the board of the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, California and on the board of the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

In 2006 I was working at a conference company and I wanted to book Brian Solis as a speaker because he was the foremost thought leader on the topic of social media. Almost ten years later and Solis continues to be on the forefront of digital innovation. Solis, the Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group has recently published his new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design. He joined me for the Modern Customer Podcast to share more of his ideas and inspirations for his book. Solis says companies that compete on an experiential level can charge higher prices, generate and retain more customers and overall outperform companies that focus on shareholder value. Solis says we live in a time where there’s a confluence of technology and innovation that has an effect on societies. The idea of a brand is not what it used to be. Today’s brand is created and strengthened by visuals, images and business infrastructures. Additionally the modern brand now becomes a piece of someone else. In the podcast Solis also says we’re becoming an accidentally narcissistic society – a brand has to be relevant, understand who the consumer is and who that consumer wants to be. A brand has to become a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Experiences according to Solis are the new brand. Today we need experience architects not brand architects. Solis says a brand is measured in what he calls “expressions,” not impressions. Why is Apple the most innovative brand in the world? According to Solis it’s because Apple thinks strategically about experience architecture. Companies today need to think about experience architecture at every point across the organization just like Apple does.  However the problem today is companies get caught up in quarterly pressures—it takes disruption or an influential change agent to make the case to do something different. Very few companies are thinking and acting about what Solis calls the “x” factor. If companies don’t innovate, they risk their business. For example Uber took the taxi industry because the taxi industry stopped innovating (or never really did). They stopped competing for relevance. Measuring success by impressions, conversions, sales, projections and revenue destroys the customer experience. To add insult to injury Solis says we use technology to get further and further from people. The biggest opportunity for innovation looks at how we fight for relevance. One example is Airbnb. Solis shares the story of Brian Chesky who read a book by Walt Disney and was influenced by the idea of storyboarding. Chesky brought in a Pixar artist to lead Airbnb through a storyboarding process to understand the different types of Airbnb hosts. He looked at different customer profiles as well. They took all the data from the customer and the host side and found friction—room for improvement. They then storyboarded out a new story—one for hosts and one for customers. Airbnb came up with their new logo, new positioning in the market and built a new community for their hosts (including an entire conference specifically for hosts too). We know how the story with Airbnb unfolds—they’ve achieved massive success. From Solis’ interview it’s clear that by understanding the customer experience your brand can accelerate customer acquisition and retention. Don’t miss our podcast where you hear from Solis what gives company the “x” factor!  Follow @BrianSolis on Twitter