Stan Phelps is a Forbes contributor, TEDx speaker, and IBM Futurist who focuses on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business. He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a certificate for Achieving Breakthrough Service from Harvard Business School. In this episode, we discuss how Stan became interested in the field of customer service, how he believes marketing should focus more on the customer’s experience with your company or product, why he feels you either exceed someone’s expectations or you fall short, why he wrote his “Goldfish” book series and what they cover, the two sides of the customer experience coin, what he hopes those attending his presentation at the Smart Customer Service Conference will walk away with, and more!
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Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! I know you really want you and your organization to have a voice of influence, and I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best for the people that you serve. Well, I’ll be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC on April 29th through May 1st 2019. If you’re listening to this episode before that conference, we highly recommend you attend. But over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring interviews with experts who will be speaking at that conference. And each interview will feature insights related to different aspect of customer service. So you can find out more about the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net. Well, today, we have with us Stan Phelps. Stan Phelps is a Forbes Contributor, TEDx Speaker, and IBM Futurist focusing on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business. He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a Certificate in Achieving Breakthrough Service, which I’m curious about that, from Harvard Business School. He lives in Cary, North Carolina with his wife Jennifer and two boys, Thomas and James.
Andrea: Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, Stan.
Stan Phelps: Thank you for having me, Andrea.
Andrea: Well, let me just ask what’s in your bio. What is this Achieving Breakthrough Service?
Stan Phelps: Yeah, it’s a certificate that Harvard does. They offer it a couple of times a year. You get a chance to spend a week on campus with some of their top professors talking about how the ins and outs of how to achieve service that kind of catch through the noise and creates differentiation.
Andrea: Which is exactly what your area of expertise is in, I realized that. So why don’t you tell us just a little bit about what you do?
Stan Phelps: So yeah, I don’t do much.
Andrea: I believe that.
Stan Phelps: I am an author and a speaker, so I spend my time kind of looking at the future of both customer experience and employee engagement. And I’ve been fortunate enough and speaking in 16 different countries. I spend my time travelling either doing keynotes or workshops on the different areas that I write about.
Andrea: How did you get interested in this particular topic? Were you involved in customer service before?
Stan Phelps: You know, really, it’s interesting. I studied both law and business. But undergrad, I was a marketing major. I was always intrigued by marketing. And that was my first two decades working on both the agency and the brand side doing marketing. I just realized that the type of marketing that I was doing kind of the traditional tell and sell interruption marketing, I didn’t think it was going to be the marketing of the future. All I knew from my days of being a brand marketer was I was not part of the solution; I was just a huge part of the problem. Andrea, I didn’t really know that fast forward and back about 10 years ago, back in 2009, I spent about a year writing about every element of marketing trying to search for this kind of key aspects. I had, what I call my moment of truth and, decided that marketing should be more about the experience that you provide and how you do that in a very specific way that gets people to come back but also gets them talking about the experience.
Andrea: We absolutely agree with you here. So I am curious what was the actual story of your moment of truth? How did you figured that out or how did you come to that moment?
Stan Phelps: Well, I used to live in Connecticut and I was working for an agency that was a New York agency. And I happen to be in Manhattan about to go in that working event with one of my colleagues and we were in one of these rooftop bars in Manhattan. It was summer time, beautiful, and I joked, I was enjoying as you only can in Manhattan a $15 beer, if you can even enjoy that. But it was a crowded place and we’re waiting for a couple of people to show up and I noticed this older gentleman sitting right across from me. He was by himself, and everyone _____ scanned the room like he was looking for someone and, it becomes obvious to me that he was waiting for someone to show up. And like a half hour goes by and no one has showed up for this guy, so I just started a conversation with him. He started talking about the _____ you know waiting and being on time. And this guy, Andrea, told me something that changed my life. He looked at me in the eye and he said, “No one in life is ever on time.” Wait a second, I been on time before, not often, but I’ve been on time. He raised his finger to me, and you can’t see it but it gave me a kind of Dikembe finger wave and he said “No.” He goes, “In fact, on time is a myth.” He said “People in life are either early or they’re late.” I took the train home that night to Connecticut and I thought to myself I said, “That same reasoning applies in marketing in business with the customers that we serve every day. No one in business simply just meets the expectations of a customer that they serve.” In fact, I think if the only goal that you have is satisfaction or meeting expectations, I think that’s a losing battle. So people, you know, and brands in life you either exceeds someone’s expectations or you fall short. And literally, I went on a mission that next week to say, I’m going to purposely look for brands that aside to do a little something extra to go above and beyond just the transaction, to stand out and differentiate themselves. And that was the start of the journey.
Andrea: Hmmm. So when you were back in marketing and you noticed this issue of being an interruption marketing kind of a situation and you said that you realized that you were contributing to the problems instead of helping solve it, was there something about that felt personal to you? What drives you about this, like why did you end up going in this direction do you think?
Stan Phelps: Yeah, I mean, like the old school thinking was how you measure effectiveness in marketing was through the concept of impressions. How frequently did you get your brand in someone? How were you able to tell that message? Did you get any earned media? Did you look at owned media, paid media? And I just realized that “Hey, your brand is no longer what you tell people it is.” It just isn’t. It’s what somebody experiences. It’s what they feel and most importantly, it’s what they tell other people about you. I just thought that marketing, the paradigm needed to shift and I just realized that I had something to add to that conversation. And my goal was, Andrea, at the end of the day to get brands to think at least as much about the customer that they serve rather than the prospect that they’re chasing. I think, we’re so concerned with getting people in the “funnel” that we fail to understand that the best marketing that we do is the experience that we provide to the customer that we serve.
Andrea: Yeah, yeah. That’s so good. OK, so you obviously have this quality, and I’m talking about you personally, of being a thought leader. You’re somebody who sees the problem and wants to help solve it from what I can tell. I mean, that’s everything that you’ve said so far. Is that a quality that you think you’ve always held? Have you always have that desire to contribute to the bigger conversation to help solve these problems and that sort of thing? Is that been something that you’ve always experienced?
Stan Phelps: Yes and no. I think I’ve always looked to see what the issue is or where I think thing should go and to try to be part of that change. But to be honest, if I learned anything through my legal education was, to be able to look at a set of facts, to be able to spot any issue, to be able to understand what maybe the overarching rule or current practice was, and to be able to maybe look at a different way going forward. But I think you’re probably giving me too much credit as a thought leader. I saw what I thought was a problem and I wanted to be just part of what I thought the solution could be.
Andrea: Well, I think maybe thought leadership is a lofty term. But at the same time when you’re a writer and a speaker, you’re certainly somebody who is contributing to that dialogue in a very important way and having influence on it.
Stan Phelps: What fascinates me and I tried to in all the books, Andrea, and there’s now eight different colors in the Goldfish series but all of them were based on the idea of looking at hundreds and hundreds of examples.
Andrea: Can you share with us for a second what is the Goldfish series? I know what it is but I don’t think the audience knows yet.
Stan Phelps: Sure. So after that moment of truth, I started to look for companies that did that little extra and so I needed a project or like a crowd sourcing name for it and so I called it the Purple Goldfish. And the Goldfish has a lot of kind of, there’s a lot of plot behind that metaphor. But just for now, it’s the idea that it’s something that small, right? And the first three books were; Purple, Green, and Gold and that was a reference to Mardi Gras because the word that I absolutely fell in love with that I felt embodied this comes from New Orleans. And so Purple, Green, Gold; and now there’s just been a series of books that I’ve tried to tackle of what I think is an emerging issue with an either _____ or the employee engagement side of the coin, which I think you can’t have one without the other.
Andrea: Right. But why is that? Why do you see that as pairing of both of those?
Stan Phelps: Well, I think we’re all of the value driven. A friend of mine _____ like the value zone is the distance between the frontline, you know the front of the brand, that person serving the customer and the customer themselves. That’s the value zone. That’s where everything is created. So you can have this lofty idea in terms of what you think the experience you should provide. But if you don’t have people that are bought into that on the frontline and that value zone then you’ll never going to be able to make that change. So what I personally found is the companies that really got it for the customer, Andrea, even got it more so for the employees. In fact, nine out of ten times they’re actually placing a greater emphasis on the employees and the culture that they want to drive than they are in the customers themselves.
Andrea: Sure. Absolutely, I mean, if the frontline folks, like you said buy in, almost embody the brand in their conversation and in the way that they serve then it totally changes the game.
Stan Phelps: Right. Yeah, so all the books in the series have kind of focused on, and some, I think, the best books in the series have touched both sides of it. So for example, I wrote the Red Goldfish is entirely about purpose or the Yellow Goldfish is all about happiness. But here’s the deal, purpose is magical because it catch across both the customer side of the equation as well as the employee side. And yellow is all about happiness, so it’s about making sure that your customers are happy but, at the same time, your employees are happy as well as the fact that you’re looking at society and should then give back to societal happiness.
Andrea: OK, let’s take a look at some more specific around differentiation for customer service. What are some different things that you talk about that are really important for somebody who wants their company or their brand to be able to have a voice of influence, to be an influence in the world and with their customer themselves?
Stan Phelps: Yeah, you know, so I’ll touch on Purple because that’s what I’m going to be talking about in DC and I hope everyone comes out for Smart Customer Service 2019. Purple is really about understanding that I think there are two sides of the coin when it comes to customer experience. The first side of the coin is all of the value that you provide. And so throughout Purple Goldfish, there are six different ways you can provide a little bit of added value. The other flip side of the coin is the concept that I call maintenance. So value is all the things that you do for your customer. Maintenance is all of the things that your business processes due to your customer. Meaning, how easy do you make it for them to be able to do business with you? And so how do you do the little things to reduce friction and improve the experience? So I think at the end of the day, there’s no big magical answer but it’s about finding the small and little things that you can do that can make a big difference. You know, this isn’t a Trojan horse, right? There’s no one big catch all. It’s a lot of little things that if you can understand your customers and what drives them and you can design these little things and you can deploy them effectively that’s going to be the key to success. It’s something I called the “3D development.”
Andrea: OK, so do you want to take that any further, that 3D development?
Stan Phelps: Yeah, I mean it’s not complicated. Again, the first ‘D’ is Discovery and understanding who you are as a brand and what your customers value the most, not to over think it, right? You want to be great to the things that your customers value the most and you want to understand where you want to be in the market place. Once you understand those two things, you can then go to the “D” of Design.” So you go from discovery first to design. And Design is thinking ways that you bring those things to life. How can you accentuate the things that matter the most to your customers and how can you do the way that reinforces who you want to aspire to be as a brand. And then third is this idea of Deploy. So how do you test, pilot, and validate those things as well as how do you make sure that your team has bought into it, that you create a process around it, and that you have the resources that you can do it again, again, and again. And what do you do once you deploy, you go right back to that first day of discovery. I say it as it’s a continuous development idea.
Andrea: Yeah that sounds great. Alright, so do you have any examples of little things that you’ve seen companies do that really make that big difference. Now, I realized that this might not be applicable to every single company that’s out there but perhaps there are some ideas that could spark other ideas.
Stan Phelps: So I’ll give you a couple on the value side of the equation. And so we spend a lot of time on this idea. One of the categories is first and last impressions and doing a little something extra to make that strong first impression. You know, there’s this idea of _____,you remember the first thing and typically the last thing we experience and maybe it peak somewhere. So like the DoubleTree hotel, they’re one of my hall of famers. That chocolate chip cookie, it’s that warm, great first impression and it’s something that they have down to a science in terms of the consistency of doing it. I think it embodies what they want to be seen as a brand. They wanted to be seen as that kind of warm, welcoming place. And so it’s very well-positioned as a great strong first impression. Another example in the value category is a category we call sampling. And so one of my favorite examples is an ice cream shop in St. Paul, Minnesota called Izzy’s Ice Cream. It’s such a simple thing but when you buy a scoop of ice cream at Izzy’s, they let you pick a second flavor for free and this small little mini scoop and they actually _____, so you can’t copy if you’re an ice cream shop. But it’s this small little mini scoop and that little mini scoop is called the Izzy.
Andrea: That’s cool!
Stan Phelps: It’s brilliant. I mean, this is an amazing strategy for the customers that already do business with you, Andrea. On average, they only know 20 percent of what you can do for them. So with the people that are already customers with you, why wouldn’t you invest a little buck to give them a little taste of something else? So I think, unfortunately, we most often think of sampling as something we do for prospective customers. Why can’t we use it for the customers that we already have? So that’s the value side. I’ll be giving an example or two on the maintenance side of the equation and so a couple of those over there, one is convenience. So how do you do little things to be more convenient? One of my hall of famers there is that company called TD Bank. They’re on the East Coast open seven days a week. Some nights there are open till 8 o’clock at night. Even if they don’t decide to be open seven days a week or open till 8 o’clock, you can take this thing that they do. They actually open the doors of the branch, Andrea, 15 minutes before what scheduled opening is and they actually keep the doors open 15 minutes afterwards. So think about it. Each day, you might have some people four or five customers that show up before the bank officially opens, but what do they do, they open the door and greet those customers as a way of reinforcing that convenience. And we’ve all been there rushing to get to the bank before it closes; they open the door for 15 minutes for people and that scheduled in, right? That’s scheduling in a little more convenience to reinforce what they’re all about. Another great example is what we call an added service to make it easier to do a little something extra. So, Safelite, when they come and do a repair of your windshield, you know, while that Epoxy is filling that crack and setting, it takes about 10 minutes, they typically will vacuum the interior of your car. They’ll get glass cleaned or do all of your windows. Now, that was never part of the deal, but they have that little extra time and they invest that as a little extra buck. And their front line, I think each and every week, every person on the front line gets their own NPS score at Safelite.
Andrea: Nice. That’s really cool! Those are great examples. Thank you for sharing those. Alright, so Stan, why should somebody attend your specific breakout session at the Smart Customer Service Conference?
Stan Phelps: Well, I’d like to think there’s probably going to be a lot of people that already understand the importance of providing that great customer service where I would say overarching experience. My hope is that their perspective might even get slightly shifted and they’re going to walk away with kind of the recipe for being able to create signature differentiators for their brand to create that experience that people talk about, to read about, and post on Instagram about.
Andrea: Awesome! OK, so how can people find you?
Stan Phelps: A couple of ways, StanPhelpSpeaks is my personal speaking site and then I’ve got about eight other co-authors for these books, so purplegoldfish.com is kind of the Goldfish collective and the think tank.
Andrea: Perfect! Well, thank you so much for taking time to be with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in DC.
Stan Phelps: Awesome, can’t wait!