Posted on Tuesday, April 28, 2020

How Freshly’s Focus on Infrastructure & Empathy Supports Fast Growth with Colin Crowley

Episode 138

Play here (the red triangle below), on Apple Podcast, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Colin Crowley is the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, where he directs a two-hundred-person department across five locations in the United States and beyond. He specializes in building customer service departments from the ground up with a focus on scalability, infrastructure agility, technological innovation, and gold-standard quality and efficiency.

In this conversation, Colin shares the five key pillars of customer support that Freshly adopted, their cross-functional communication and how they involve customer service agents into their strategic process, how a voice of influence needs to have a good sense of the on the ground reality as well the strategic big picture, and more.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters and that they can make it matter more. I’m Andrea Wenburg, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Today, I’m speaking with Colin Crowley, the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, where he directs a two-hundred-person department across five locations in the United States and beyond. He specializes in building customer service departments from the ground up with a focus on scalability, infrastructure agility, technological innovation, and gold-standard quality and efficiency.

In this conversation, Colin is going to tell us a few things. You’re going to hear the five key pillars of customer support that Freshly adopted, and let me tell you right now that they are very applicable across customer experience. So, I really encourage you to listen and think about how you could apply some of these to your own company.

He talks about their cross-functional communication and how they involved customer service agents into their strategic process. And I ask a few direct questions about just how that plays out for them, and the benefit to both the customer service agent and to the organization and customer.

And then finally, he shares about how a voice of influence needs to have a good sense of the on the ground reality as well the strategic big picture.

Here’s my conversation with Colin about how Freshley’s focus on infrastructure allows them to grow fast.

Andrea: Colin, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Colin Crowley: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Andrea: Can you tell us a little bit about Freshly and your role there?

Colin Crowley: Sure. Freshly is a ready-made meal service that’s very active in what’s called the food tech space alongside companies like Blue Apron and HelloFresh. We’re very different from those companies, though, because rather than shipping ingredients to customers that you can use to cook meals and have the experience of enjoying your kitchen, we ship ready-made meals that are already prepared.

So, essentially, you get the meals delivered in an insulated box, and you can pop them in the microwave for about three minutes. Or if you so desire, you could pop them in the oven instead if you don’t like the microwave, and then you’re all set and you’re ready to go. We really sit at the nexus of health and convenience, and we’re there to provide healthy meal options for consumers who otherwise are too busy in their lives or don’t have the time to get up and cook as much as they would like to or not like to as the case may be.

We know that there’s definitely the need for this sort of service in a very modern world like this that’s so very, very busy. We’re also healthy food, which I would define as all-natural and gluten-free. We’re actually the largest certified gluten-free meal producer in the country right now.

I’m the VP of Customer Experience at Freshly, which is to say I’m in charge of our customer support function. We have approximately two hundred customer support agents, with some in the United States in New York and Arizona. And we also have two offices abroad that we use to supplement our customer support as well. We’re active on phone lines, webchat, email, text messaging, and even Apple Business Chats. So, we’re pretty active in all contact channels, and we’re available 24/7.

Andrea: I love the idea of your product. And it’s amazing to me how quickly you were able to scale and bring people on board in your customer experience function. How many people did you say are involved with that now?

Colin Crowley: We have approximately two hundred people.

Andrea: How do you help all of those people to not only… of course, they’re going to need to know about their product, your product and the answers that they need to provide, but to almost even be able to really represent you well as a brand?

Colin Crowley: Yeah. That’s actually a great question. A lot of what we did is we focused very early in growing customer support on infrastructure building. And I should also provide the caveat that when I joined Freshly, which was about four and a half years ago, we had just moved our headquarters to New York City. So, back then, we only had one other person in customer support, only a single person who’s answering all the phone calls and emails from Arizona.

So, I built up the team from the bottom up from there. So, we went from that one person in 2016 to about 12 people by the end of 2016, to about forty people by the end of 2017, and it’s just grown exponentially from there. We spent a lot of time investing very, very early in quality assurance at Freshly, knowing that if you really want to set standards for how you want your customers to be treated, it’s important to do so very early in the growth of a customer support organization.

Because once you grow an organization and you reach a certain size of even like fifty agents plus, it’s much harder to go back and then try to impose standards on those people almost as a second thought, because by then you have agents who have, you know, learned certain bad practices, let us say, and it’s just harder to get buy-in from agents on the ground. So, you really have to be proactive.

Very early on when we only had about six agents and this is at the end of 2015, I worked with the seniormost of those agents to establish a pretty intensive quality assurance program, which we’ve grown overtime to make it even more specific. But we really sat down to ask ourselves, “What do we value in the relationship with our customers, and what do our customers need from us as a customer support organization?”

And we define five key pillars of customer support. And then we ask questions like, “How do you realize those pillars in actuality as opposed to them being theoretical concepts?” So, one idea being that we focused on empathy as a key component, and of course, empathy is important in all aspects of customer service. But it’s especially important for us because we deal with the product, namely food, which is very personal and which directly impacts people’s health.

So, the ability to have a free-flowing, meaningful, friendly conversation with a customer support agent is important for our customers in particular, because they’re inviting us as a company into their lives in more intimate ways than perhaps if they were buying shoes. And we wanted to make sure that the customers felt comforted by that interaction, that we did the best we could to assist them.

Another example is that we are very conscious of the fact that as an organization, we were – and still are – in a very unique space where there really isn’t another company that’s doing what we’re doing – namely shipping fresh meals – not frozen on a national scale across all forty-eight states. Again, we have a lot of companies that are meal kit services, but we don’t really see companies that are actually in charge of such a vast operation in producing the meals themselves as opposed to outsourcing that to local vendors.

We are very conscious that customers may come into the relationship with us not quite knowing what service we provide and thinking we are a meal kit service. So, we put a lot of emphasis in our quality assurance program on what we call being outgoing or basically being proactive, and defining certain pieces of information that should be delivered to customers, even if it’s not directly relevant to the customer’s question or concern. That’s just making sure that customers fully understand the nature of our service, and that we’re trying to get ahead of future problems or future questions they may have rather than be reactive.

Andrea: I like that. So, what would one example be of an outgoing or proactive statement that you feel your customers would need to hear, even if that’s not what they’re necessarily calling about?

Colin Crowley: Sure. A perfect example is the fact that we’re a subscription service. So, you sign up with us, and you order a box of four, six, nine, or twelve meals that will actually be delivered every week. And of course, you choose the day of delivery that makes the most sense for you, and you can change that after the fact, and you can change your meals from week to week, etcetera. But we’re really designed to fit into someone’s lifestyle as opposed to being a one-time thing.

And of course, retention and loyalty is very important for us among our customers. It doesn’t mean that you get us every single week of your life because maybe you want to go and you do want to cook some weeks, etcetera, but we really aim to be a longer-term health solution for customers. But again, we have a lot of customers coming in not necessarily understanding the nature of our service.

And one thing that we identified early on is that we found customers were confused by the nature of the subscription process. One thing we do is we are a weekly subscription as opposed to a monthly, so when you order through us, we don’t kind of staple you into receiving meals for an entire month, but rather give you flexibility to skip week over week, which is meant to be more flexible for the customer. But it also can create more confusion because you have a quicker turnaround if you want to skip receiving meals one week and so forth.

So, we put as a standard in customer support that when you identify a customer as being a new customer – and we have definitions of what a new customer is; so you know, typically someone who’s on their first or their second order – and you have an interaction with those customers, you should proactively make sure that they are aware that we are a subscription service. And you should proactively assist them by mentioning the deadline that we have for every customer to either skip your next week or change your meals for your next week, knowing that that is a pain point for a lot of early customers who either don’t know we’re a subscription service or if they do, they may not be cognizant of how quickly they have to make decisions about what meals they want for the next week.

So, we’ve enforced that pretty regularly over the past four years. And it’s definitely helped us to get in front of problems and make sure customers have a better experience, because those customers that we’re informing about our subscription service are now less likely to be confused and suddenly they find that they’re charged.

Andrea: And were you able to kind of anticipate that ahead of time? You said it’s been going on for four years that you’ve been saying this particular thing, or is it something that you responded to once you realized there was a problem?

Colin Crowley: It’s something that we responded to when we realized it was a problem. It didn’t take long. I think that’s probably a truism, generally speaking, in customer support. I mean, in a lot of cases, data is important and the ability to collect data is obviously very important. But I think most companies probably find that the information about what your customers care about is pretty much there under your nose if you’re willing to spend just a little bit of time to find it.

So, it was very easy for us early on to identify, “Wow, these are some of the pain points that our customers have.” And it’s a logical pain point too because customer service challenges tend to go along with logic. So, we identified it reactively, so to speak, but it’s something that we acted to handle and address very quickly as well.

Andrea: Mm-hmm. So, would you mind sharing briefly the other three pillars?

Colin Crowley: Sure. So, aside from empathy and what we call outgoing, we also focus on interactions being clear, which we define as the agent making sure that they are fully understanding what the customer’s needs are. Because sometimes there could be ambiguity there, and if you don’t appropriately ask questions or appropriately understand what the customer needs, you can’t really address their concerns well.

So, making sure that the agent understands the customer’s concerns and also making sure in their response that they’re very clear; so removing unnecessary clutter from the communication, and not overwhelming the customer with information they may not need. And also, just making sure that – digitally speaking – if you’re writing an email to someone that it’s presented in such a way where it isn’t just this huge paragraph, but rather information is broken down where it’s more digestible.

Another pillar we have is a professional pillar, as we call it, which encompasses more of the standard QA type of stuff that a lot of companies engage in where we’re looking at spelling, and grammar, and syntax, and things of that nature. And we have certain standards as to what we expect from agents there and very typical phone etiquette. For example, also included under that last pillar we have is rational, which is to say we always want our agents to talk up and not down to customers, and explain to customers the reason that they may be limited in being able to assist so that we’re not just sitting there quoting policy at people, but we’re making sure that we’re explaining what we can and cannot do. And being honest and upfront in what we can and cannot do for them.

Andrea: Those are great. When you were first creating these pillars, was there… Do you have any tips for people who are looking at creating their own or refining their own? Do you have any specific things that you would suggest people look at?

Colin Crowley: Well, I think it’s definitely true that to some extent those pillars are relatively universal, where I think most organizations would discover that being clear, and being empathetic, and being professional and proactive, etcetera are all important characteristics of good customer support. But where I think it really may change from company to company is the weighting on where your emphasis is.

So, for instance, for us, empathy is important, to be outgoing and being proactive is very important, which is why they exist in separate pillars. And the fact that they exist as separate pillars is relevant because in our scoring system the pillars are all given equal weight, but you may have other companies that, you know, being outgoing is important. But there are other aspects of the service that are more important, especially if you’re in a very highly regulated, very sensitive field like a medical field or finance or what have you.

So, I can envision that in those particular cases, you may have other things that you want to weight appropriately, which are better justified as a pillar. So, I think it’s less that the principles are different and it’s more how you weight where your concerns are, because how you weight the concerns not only impacts how you handle scoring, but it also impacts what agents see because agents know what pillars we rate them on. And so, what we choose as pillars also is what is essentially a branded into the minds of agents as to what we overarchingly care about as an organization. So, it also helps to direct the people handling customer inquiries as to what you care most about as an organization.

Andrea: Okay. So, I know that Freshly is particularly good at cross-functional communication. Maybe in particular with your marketing department and customer experience departments; I’m curious, how do you guys pull together and do this cross-function communication well?

Colin Crowley: We adopt an approach that encourages what I would basically call a liaison with other departments and teams. So, as an example, one area which is relevant for a lot of companies now, because even companies that are brick and mortar stores now have an e-commerce component – so more and more companies, and more and more customer service departments are dealing with people in the product world and people in engineering to get anything done.

So, we have someone in the department who is our kind of niftily titled Associate Director of Infrastructural Efficiency. And his job is to serve as a conduit between the customer support world, and the engineering and the product world, where typically in a lot of companies, it’s very easy to have a wall that exists between customer support and engineering and product – and of course, customer support, really, and anyone; but, especially, when it comes to engineering and product.

So, this gentleman, who served as a supervisor for many years with us, has a great understanding of customer support operations. So, he brings that with him, and then he went through project management training. So, he also understands the nature of project management and he’s able to bring the customer support knowledge with him to serve as our voice in product and engineering discussions when it comes to our backlog, and items to prioritize, and various innovations to our backend order management system. And he, in turn, also works to coordinate more granular feedback.

So, we have this thing called pod, where customer support agents in all our locations can raise their hand and volunteer to be a member of this pod where they are given like sneak peak access, so to speak, at some of the technological developments coming down the pipe, be these changes to our website or changes to our backend order management system or anything of that nature. And they have the ability to test run those and to provide comments on them from a customer support perspective. So, maybe they notice that, you know, this feature could be confusing to customers based on our knowledge of what customers need.

So, they’re able to provide ground-level feedback to product people and engineers who otherwise would not have such an easy way to get that feedback, and at the same time, these agents – because they have a sneak-peek into these different innovations – they’re also able to be used as trainers when these changes go live. So, they can be there to assist other agents on the ground in understanding the nature of any new features that are premiered and make the learning curve a little less steep. So that model has been very successful with us in terms of bridging the gap.

Andrea: How do you choose the people… or you said that they volunteered themselves to be in the pod?

Colin Crowley: Yes. In the case of the agents, they volunteer. So, it’s on a quarterly basis. So, every quarter, we send out an invitation for agents to raise their hands. And they have to go through, like, not a too onerous application process, but they do have to spend some time explaining why they would be a good candidate to be in this pod. And, you know, we’re looking for people who had opinions, and we’re looking for people who are good at expressing opinions. And we’re looking for people who have some degree of tenure; if not with us, just with customer service generally, so they’d be a good advocate or voice for the customer.

And of course, we’re looking for people across our different offices, because we know that different people in different locations can bring different observations to the field. So, it’s literally a form that agents fill out, and they volunteer themselves, and there’s an internal discussion as to who would be best suited. And when you’re chosen, you’re in the position of being in this pod for a quarter. And you can reapply at the end of the quarter if you so desire, but at least it gives the opportunity for new people to join the fray and to have their voice heard.

Andrea: Have you had any feedback from the people that have participated in pods in the past and their sense of loyalty or importance of how they feel about Freshly?

Colin Crowley: Oh yeah, definitely. I would say that it’s a huge benefit in a lot of ways aside from the informational benefit I mentioned where people in product and engineering get more on the ground feedback from people who actually deal with customers. But yeah, it is definitely a morale booster for agents because it’s very typical at a lot of organizations where customer support people are kind of isolated in the corner someplace and aren’t particularly consulted on much. And it’s not particularly unusual for customer support people to feel less valued than other people in an organization.

So, having something like this is really important because it helps these agents not to feel isolated and really to feel that they’re part of a larger organization with a larger purpose and a common objective. And it also helps, of course, because it enables people to feel that rather than just being reactive… which customer support people often feel is their lot in life because they’re dealing with issues from customers that are the result of changes made by someone in product or someone in marketing, or someone someplace else.

So, you kind of get this overwhelming feeling that you’re at the bottom of the hill, and everything’s flowing down to you, and there’s not much you can do to change that. This really puts them… not really in the driver’s seat, but it put them in the passenger seat at least, where you have the ability to impact what the company is doing and some of the decisions its making.

Andrea: Yeah, I really love that. I love that it also sounds like [it] kind of gives them the sense that their voice really does matter in not just with a particular customer, but within the context of the whole organization.

Colin Crowley: Definitely, definitely. And especially as, you know, like I said, our customer support organization is laid out all over the place. So, it’s not like even within Freshly we have one location where our customer support people live and breathe, but rather we have New York, we have Arizona and then we have two locations abroad. And even within the US, we have many people who work remotely, and I think that’s true in more and more companies. I mean, especially now, unfortunately, as a result of COVID-19, we have so many people working remotely.

But that’s just a truism for a lot of companies, and that just creates more challenges for anyone in an organization, but especially customer support people to feel that they’re a part of something larger. So we’ve found getting more customer support involvement through this pod process and through having designated liaison to the different areas of the business has been very successful.

Andrea: Yeah, it sounds great. Okay, so then another practical question. How do they receive this information and share back their ideas? Is this through a virtual medium? Is that through a group, or how do you do that?

Colin Crowley: Right. It’s usually through scheduled meetings weekly or bi-weekly. And of course, we make a lot of use of instant messaging. So, some of the feedback that agents provide when they’re testing a new product is through instant messaging; or if one of our product managers has an open question, then he’ll ask it broadly in a special instant messaging channel we have, specifically for this pod, and he’ll be able to get responses from the agents. So, it’s usually either through meetings for more official types of communications – like the premiering a new product or what have you – and then in between, there’s a lot of messaging back and forth.

Andrea: So, if giving people the opportunity to share their ideas and share their ideas with other people in other areas of the company is an important thing for you, how does that work when you’re training managers or directors? What are the kinds of characteristics do you look for in somebody when you’re hiring? And then also, do you have any particular things that you do to encourage them in these in this area?

Colin Crowley: Well, I would say one thing, which has definitely been consistently true… And this is true even of our hiring practices for agents, I would say as well is that we traditionally haven’t looked for people who are solely backgrounded in like call centers or contact centers. We found that the ideal candidate – and again, this is true for managers too – is generally someone who has some sort of mix between the two, where they have a background in contact centers so they can appreciate some of the nuances and context in our policy.

Like attendance policy, as an example, which – if you’re not coming from the industry – can appear too strict and too stringent, but makes sense if you understand the industry. So, that’s important, to get that ground-level understanding, but it’s also important to get someone who spent time outside the contact center because it’s true that a lot of contact centers may not be the best environments.

So, people can become very jaded being in the contact center environment too much in a company that didn’t particularly invest a lot in their customer service people. So, we also want to make sure that we get people with experience that’s a little bit broader from that. So, as a result, we try to have a balance between those two characteristics.

The gentleman who is the Associate Director for Infrastructural Efficiency, he’s someone who has a background in customer service, but it wasn’t initially in the commerce space but rather more in the face to face customer service space. So, he had great knowledge and great understanding of customer support, even though it wasn’t in an e-commerce context. And he also had a background in sports management, so a different field outside of customer support. So, it’s kind of a good example of someone who has a good balance.

I think another thing, broadly speaking is – especially when it comes to managers – looking for people who are just good at relating to other people generally. Because a lot of the goals we’ve set for our leaders to remove organizational silos really depends on people being good team players, and good team players meaning that they have the ability to build relationships and communicate their point of view, but also understand the point of view of others. And that, of course, is a quality you can’t really train someone, per se, or at least it’s very difficult to train them. So, there’s been a big emphasis on choosing leaders who are at heart very collaborational and who show a history of being collaborational in their past, I would say.

Andrea: Well, this has been really good. I feel like there are many other questions I could keep asking you, Colin. Let me kind of close with this particular question. When you think about yourself, you think about the people that you look to as a voice of influence in your own life, do you have any particular advice for somebody who really does want to have a voice of influence?

Colin Crowley: Yes, I think a few things that I would say are pretty key… the first is, broadly speaking, you have to know what you’re talking about. And I would define that specifically as having some sort of balance between being a manager, so you’re not in the weeds, but at the same time making sure that you connect yourself to on the ground realities because you really need a balance of both to be able to go and advocate for your organization when it matters. Because if you’re too far above the weeds and too much in strategy, then you’ll miss the operational nuances that are essential for your organization to smooth functionally and not appropriately represent those when it matters. And of course, if you’re too much in the weeds, then you can’t see the big picture and you won’t be taken seriously when it comes to the larger strategic meetings.

So, you really need someone who strategically maintains certain anchors in on the ground realities. I would say a second thing is you really have to focus a good deal on data if you want to have a voice of influence; because the great thing about data is if it’s done correctly, data is like a universal language. So, it’s a bit like music to some extent where you can have English, and French, and Spanish, etcetera; and you can get a bunch of people in a room and they can’t communicate together, but music is universal. And data is universal – where if you start talking about values and principles and theories with someone who’s in marketing or product and engineering, then you’ll get all sorts of different opinions in certain areas that are crucial.

But when you talk data, data is like a common language where as long as you’re tracking the right data points and you can make a case with data, you can get across to someone your position much better than if you argue theory. So that also is another important thing. I would say the last thing that strikes me as being pretty key is really to be a good listener. I think a lot of people [who] lose their ability to have a voice of influence, that they spend too much time talking.

And I would say this not only with colleagues in different departments… which, of course, is important to listen so you understand where they’re coming from, because sometimes a lot of communication challenges are created because there’s just a lack of understanding of someone else’s position and the relevance of that position. But also being a good listener within your organization so that people under you are able to surface the issues that matter and then have a substantive impact in on the ground reality.

So, if you have a good understanding of that and you’re willing to listen, it puts you in a much better position to be able to speak and makes other people more likely to listen to you in turn because they register that you’re taking their concerns seriously.

Andrea: Love it. Okay, Colin, is there any place that you would like to direct the listener to either find Freshly or even follow you?

Colin Crowley: Definitely. Firstly, it’s nice and easy, freshly.com. We’re up and running and doing very, very well during this period of time. And we know especially now with the COVID-19 that the interest in getting healthy meals delivered to your door is more frequent than ever. So, you can visit us right there, and we’d be honored to have people sign up. I’m freely available on LinkedIn, so people are more than happy to message me and connect, and I’d be happy to start some great conversations.

Andrea: Great! And we will link to that all those things in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being a voice of influence for our listeners today, Colin.

Colin Crowley: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Posted on Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Creating a Magical Experience with Jace & Holly Barraclough

Episode 130

Play here (the red triangle below), on Apple Podcast, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jace & Holly Barraclough are locals reporters in my town who recently did a story on me and also featured me on their Disney podcast, Navigating the Magic. If you know anything about me and my book, you know that I’m a particular fan of Frozen and Frozen II, but I also really appreciate the company of Disney, how they approach customer experience, and how they provide such an inspiration for innovation.

Holly was a cast member for Disney for a few years and she also worked at Disney Radio. So, there are several things she brings to the table when it comes to understanding how Disney was able to teach her how to be her best for the customers (aka, their “guests”). Holly also shares her take on how she went from not caring that much about Disney to loving her time working for them. We also talk about innovation and get Holly and Jace’s take on what it means to be a voice of influence.

Take a listen to the episode!

Mentioned in this episode:

Free Training to Improve the Efficiency of Your Voice

Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, but they work to make it matter more. I’m Andrea Wenburg, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

One of my favorite ways to find guest for this podcast is through personal connections. I do this a lot. I’d like to hire people through personal connections. I like to create friendships and networks through personal connections, and that is one of my favorite ways to find people for the podcast. And today is one of those special occasions where I get to bring on somebody who I have met and have a personal connection with.

Our local news station recently did a story on me. And through that opportunity, I got to meet a reporter who is super fun, and she and her husband who also works at the news station have a podcast. Their podcast is called Navigating the Magic and it’s all about Disney, so fun. And if you know anything about me and my book, you know that I’m a particular fan of Frozen and Frozen II. But also, I really appreciate the company of Disney, what it stands for customer experience, and how they provide such an inspiration for innovation.

So, as we’re in this conversation, I would encourage you to really think about and hone in on what Jace and Holly believe is so especial about Disney.

Holly was actually a cast member of Disney for a few years and worked at Disney Radio. So, there are a number of things that she brings to the table when it comes to understanding how Disney was able to teach her how to be her best for the customers, for the guests that would come in. So, we’re going to be talking about customer experience and how to create special experience for others. But then also, it’s interesting to hear about Holly’s take on how she kind of went from not caring so much that much about Disney to working for them. And in the process of working for them, really fell in love with the company and with the whole Disney experience.

I don’t know about you but I want that for the people that work in my company. I want people to believe in what we do, to want to go back. And even if they’re not working to think about the things that we talked about, to dig in a little more, to experience the things that we provide. I want the people, who, not only our customers, our clients to appreciate what we have to offer, but also for the people who work for us, who work with us, the people on our team. I know that that is something that a lot of the clients that I’ve worked with really want for their team. They want their team to buy in. They want their team to believe in the mission and vision of their company, to believe that what they do matters.

So, it’s interesting to hear Holly’s take on her experience with Disney. We also touched on innovation and what it means to be innovative. And we get Holly and Jace’s take on what it means to be a voice of influence and how you can make your voice matter more.

And just a side note, they actually interviewed me for their podcast right before we did the interview for this podcast. So, you can find that interview in the show notes of this episode at voiceofinfluence.net. In that conversation, we talked about Unfrozen, my book. And, we talked about Disney and my take on a bunch of Disney related items. So, I encourage you to go listen to that one. It’s a fun, fun episode.

All right, so just so you know, the audio might be a little bit different because we’re actually doing this live and in person. So, it’s a little different than usual, but I think that you’re going to love this conversation with Jace and Holly.

Andrea: So, today, I have with me Holly and Jace from Navigating the Magic.

Jace: Hello!

Holly: Hi!

Andrea: It is so good to have you here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Holly: Yeah. Thank you for having us. We loved talking to you on our podcast and we’re so excited to be a guest on your show. Thank you for having us.

Andrea: So, first of all, tell us about your podcast. How did you get started with Navigating the Magic?

Holly: Yeah, how do we get started Jace?

Jace: You know, it’s kind of funny. So, I was actually the one that was obsessed with podcasts before and, because Holly and I were really into Disney and things like that, I started listening to Disney podcasts. And I was like “These guys are talking about things that we talk about in our normal like everyday conversations anyway, why don’t we just put a microphone in front of our face and push record and have these conversations.”

Holly: Did you invent podcast? No, but I was there.

Jace: Yeah.

Holly: No, he was like one of the first people I knew that was really listening to podcasts several years ago. And he was working at a radio station at the time as an intern and they said “Hey, we know you love Disney, would you guys like to do a podcast with our podcast network?” And that’s kind of how it was born and we’ve evolved a little bit since then. But that’s how it was originally born.

And my love for Disney comes from…I used to work at Disney World as a performer for five years and then I worked at Radio Disney after I left Florida. And ever since then, I’ve just become a lifer, as I call myself a Disney lifer, and so we’ve been back several times. I’ve been to the Pixar Fest. We went to D23.

Andrea: Oh, I want to go.

Holly: Yeah, if you know D23, it’s like the Comic-Con for Disney every two years. So, we are just obsessed with Disney and, you know, as you can see from our Disney room that you’ve been in is like a throw up of Disney just everywhere of my years of working for them. So, that’s kind of how our podcast was born was his love of podcasting and my love for Disney kind of gotten married together.

Andrea: So, Jace, do you love Disney now, would you say?

Jace: So, when she kind of got introduced to Disney, she was kind of lukewarm on the whole Disney thing up until she started working for them. But for me, like my family went to Disneyland every single year as a family. Like we’re not talking a few kids, we’re talking…

Holly: Nine.

Jace: Yeah, there’s nine of us. It’s like yours, mine, and our situation, but like all of my brothers and sisters went. All of our like 20 some of our nieces and nephews, we had to have like two of those 15 passenger vans.

Holly: With no window.

Jace: Yeah, and so we would travel. In fact, we would start off in SeaWorld in San Diego and then we’d come back up and finish the trip at Disneyland for three days. When we came, we came like right or rock and roll, you know what I mean?

Andrea: Yeah, you did.

Jace: So, my love for Disney stems clear back from then, you know, plus growing up with all the movies and things like that, which Holly wasn’t able to do. But like I could rattle off, you know, the classics of the classics with anybody like that’s my jam.

Andrea: I love it. OK, so, are there any particular movies or sets of movies in Disney now that you are totally into? I mean, are you Marvel people? Are you Princess people?

Holly: Jace is huge into, I would say, Lucasfilm. So, Star Wars and the Avengers series.

Jace: I love the Avengers.

Holly: He’s always listening to different podcasts, giving them downloads. No, just kidding, but about when they’re reviewing those movies or when they’re talking about the behind the scenes, he loves the kind of the inner workings of Marvel and Avengers and Lucasfilm. And so, he is really good at that, I would say.

Jace: Yeah. And Holly is definitely more like she’s got the cast member connections, if that makes any sense. So that’s more of, you know, her point of emphasis. But I would say as far as like the movies are concerned, her favorite is Wreck-It Ralph, I think.

Holly: Oh yeah, anything animation. I mean, I think part of the reason I love Disney is just the escape from reality, right? I think that’s why a lot of people love Disney as an adult. And so, for me, I feel like the animation films give me a little bit of that escape to reality and go back to being a child again. And so, anything animated is probably one of my favorites, and they’re almost always a feel-good ending. Maybe they’re a little rough at the beginning and someone’s parents die but usually by the end of yeah…

Andrea: Usually…

Holly: Yeah, almost always, there’s some kind of message to be gleaned from them usually. And so, I would say, the animated films are some of my favorites. And I love looking for the Easter eggs, Andrea. I don’t know if you know about the Disney Easter eggs, but I love looking for the Disney Easter eggs.

Andrea: Any particular Easter eggs that you always look for?

Holly: Which ones would you say?

Jace: I think the Pizza Planet van or truck is one that we always, yeah, are always trying to find. And then in all the Pixar films, they try to incorporate, the little Pixar ball. So, even if it’s like sitting on a shelf blurred out in the corner, they always have the Pixar ball somewhere.

Holly: One of the most recent ones that we watched that came at Frozen 2, I think I counted three different Easter eggs. But _____her snowman character she builds Baymax from Big Hero 6, you know.

Andrea: Yes.

Holly: So, I noticed that. There was just a few in there that I thought “They’re really up in their game with the Easter egg thing.” If I can catch them with the naked eye and have to pass them real fast, you know. If I could see in the movie theater, they’re making this emphasis and I think that’s always a fun thing for me to look for.

Jace: Well, we always love watching the Pixar films and then going back afterwards and pointing out some of the Easter eggs that we found after doing a little bit of research. And I think Toy Story 4 has like the record for how many…

Holly: _____.

Jace: Yeah, because they go into that antique shop and that’s like where they spend most of the film. So, at almost any scene, there’s always an Easter egg of some sort.7

Holly: True.

Andrea: What do you think is so special about the Easter eggs? Why are those so special to people like you, to any of us, like what do they do for us?

Jace: Well, first of all, a lot of them are kind of _____ to other projects that some of those creators have worked on, but there’s a couple different theories that somehow Pixar, like all the Pixar movies are connected. And I think they’re trying to kind of portray like keep that little myth or whatever you want to call it ethos whatever going by doing that. So, people are like “Oh yes, I knew it. They’re a part of the same universe, this is, you know, whatever.” But then you’re totally involved somewhere in Big Hero 6 or something like that, right? And so I think that’s one of the reasons.

But also Disney understands that, I mean, they’re trying to make movies appeal to kids, right? I mean, that’s their niche but they also want to do things to keep adults engaged. And so, when the word gets out that “Hey, oh my gosh, have you heard of Easter Eggs and blah blah blah?” And they start researching it on YouTube and whatever. And so from that point on, they’re going to the movies and being like “OK, I wanna see if I could see anything,” aside from, you know “Oh, I just have to take my kid to the movie,” if that makes any sense.

Andrea: Yeah, I mean the experience that Disney provides is just out of this world. I know Holly you spent a lot of time in Disney. You have a lot of experience with the Disney experience. What’s it like as a cast member? What did you learn about how to create that experience for people?

Holly: I would say, I learned the only other companies I had worked for called me an employee or they had different ways that they treated you. And so working at Disney World, yes I was a number but I was treated next level. I started as an intern. I started on the Disney college program, so I was intern level. And even as an intern for Disney, I was treated very well. You know, they gave you a Christmas present and all these things. They had 600,000 employees at the time that I worked there with all the resorts and the parking and all the things you don’t think of that aren’t just at the park. And so I thought “Oh I’m gonna be treated like a number.”

And so, the way that the company runs of calling you a cast member, everybody has a part in the show and they say it’s the show. And so, when I would go out and perform, we had a little, I don’t know what you call, but it’s called PASS. So, PASS and it would stand for something you were supposed to do on every shift. So, when I came out and signed autographs it was P was the Pre-show, so you would do pre-show with someone. Invite them over to you, say hi to them, wave to them; that was your Pre-show. A was your Animation so you would animate something of if the ring a birthday button, “How old are you?” “Is it your birthday,” something like that.

Andrea: So you’re doing that with your hands?

Holly: Yes. Yeah, over animating, and so part of being friends with the Disney characters, you had a tryout that was, one was dance and the other was animation. They want to see how well you could be expressive with your body. And so, we would do the animation part and then the S was Sign and Share. If they had an autograph book then you would sign and share and then S will Send off of wave and say bye and then you’d send them on their way.

So, they had everything broken down and you were set up for success so that even if there was a day you felt like a number you knew what you’re supposed to be there. And everybody is a part of a show being called a cast member not an employee. And even the people that were selling the popcorn or sweeping up the floor, cleaning the bathrooms; they were part of a bigger show. And as a performer I really liked that part of everybody had a piece in this show and we’re putting on a show for the guests.

They weren’t clients or customers, they were guests in our home of Disney and we were bringing that Walt magic and, you know, paying homage to this guy who set up this huge wonderful world for us and we’re continuing his legacy.

Andrea: You know, you told me earlier that you were kind of went from being somewhat agnostic or you know like ho-hum about Disney to being involved there and growing more and more interested to the point where you’re doing a podcast about it. You stayed for a long time that to me says something about the way that Disney was able to get you to buy in. They care they cared enough about you apparently.

Holly: Yeah.

Andrea: I mean, is that part of what it was caring about you and then also being a part of a bigger story, really?

Holly: They have a huge reach and I realize Disney had their hand in everything. Their reach, their voice was so worldwide. I thought if I work for this company, think of all the opportunities that I have out there. I mean, there’s ESPN, there’s ABC. There’s so many other opportunities. Even when I left Florida and moved back to Salt Lake City to finish my degree, I got a part time job at Radio Disney. So, I continued to work for the Disney company.

And yes, before, I remember sitting in the den, which is what we call my computer room at my parents’ house. We’re sitting in the den. I got the e-mail that said “Congratulations, you have been extended an offer to be a Disney college program intern in Florida from these dates. Do you accept and write us back if you do.” I remember, I almost turned it down like that was how much I was just lukewarm about Disney, that just I didn’t love it. I just was like “I don’t know, maybe I should be responsible and finish my degree.”

And I was talking to my mom and I thought “What else in my lifetime, am I gonna be like single, unattached, no mortgage, no kids that I’m gonna be able to just go work for Disney on a whim like this.” And I thought “I gotta do it.” So, ever since then it started this ball rolling for me of wanting to be involved with them in some way or another whether it was, you know, Radio Disney or podcast going back even just as a guest or experience it from the guest side.

And because their reach and their influence is so wide, I thought “I gotta capitalize on this opportunity to then continue to maybe work for them and keep my options open, leave the company on good terms, then I do have to leave because there’s so many opportunities and baskets that Disney has their hands in that I could potentially be a part of in the future.” Because they treat you well and you get to see like insider stuff. Like there was a cast member-only event all the time. We would preview the parade the night before they come out for Halloween or we would have cast previews of a ride before it opened to the public.

So, there are so many little opportunities that gave us that I felt were so special, one of a kind, first people in the world-type things that we got to experience by working for the _____ that maybe the general population wouldn’t be able to experience. And I think that’s kind of what kept me coming back.

Andrea: So, even though you were behind the scenes, and in times at least you had, you know, you could see behind the curtain, you still were a part of the magic. You still got to experience the magic.

Holly: Yeah, even like there were several days off that I had that didn’t align with my friends, and so I would just go to the park by myself because I just loved it that much. Because I got to experience the magic but then to even go as a guest even though, you know, I was working there but if it was my day off, I would just go single right or I would just go sit and just taken on and beyond of the castle. Maybe not even do anything and just kind of chill on a bench and people watch and just, you know, smell the smells and see the sights.

And that probably sounds really weird to some people or really boring to some people but until they’ve experienced the magic of Disney and gone there, they can maybe understand why you would go to the parks by yourself, which sounds a little bit intimidating maybe. But I actually love those moments. They were the quiet moments where I could go on the Country Bear Jamboree or do the little things that maybe if I was with a group they’d be like “We wouldn’t wanna do that. That’s a waste of time or something.” And I could just go and enjoy the moment and that’s really something special. So, come my day off, I wasn’t just ready to just go home and chill I wanted to be back at the park.

Andrea: Mm-hmm. OK, so you both you both love Disney.

Holly: Yes.

Andrea: This is fun. OK, so your experience with Disney, do you ever feel like inspired creatively by Disney? Are you this creative? Do you feel inspired in that way?

Holly: You’re the most creative one here. Yes, editor at the TV station right here.

Jace: I mean, so here’s the thing is Disney has a great formula for everything they do. But the one thing I always tell people that Disney does best is making memories, right? If they can somehow rope you in to having a good time and making that, you know, a memory that you’re always going to have then you’re going to go back to the park and be like “I remember when I sat on this bench with my dad when I was a kid and we had the $15 turkey legs, right?

You’re going to go back 10 years 20 years later, sit down on the bench, buy the $25 turkey leg because you have that memory and it’s just so special to you. So, with pretty much all of my stories, I try to I try to encapsulate that formula of what is going to make this memorable not only for the viewers but the person that I’m interviewing right now. What are they going do, you know, five years from now and they’re like “I remember when I was on the news, and oh yeah I remember Jace was my reporter and gosh he did such a great job on my story.”

And then I always know when I’ve done that when a few days later I get a phone call or whatever from our station manager saying “Hey, we got an e-mail of somebody you know thanking us for sending you as the reporter to do the story. They said you did an excellent job and they really enjoyed working with you.” And so, I feel like that’s kind of the Disney in me of trying just to make those connections and make those intangibles something that they’re never going to forget.

Holly: Make those stories memorable.

Jace: Yes.

Andrea: Mm-hmm love that. I’m always very inspired by the creative process and I love the idea of being more creative but when you walk into Disney World or you go on the ride, the Carousel of Progress and you’re going around and seeing these, you know, different timeframes and different periods of time. When things change and innovation just taking shape and you think of everything that Disney brought to that and now currently brings into that and then I feel like there’s so much then that we can be inspired to do. How can we be innovative, how can we tap into that in ourselves and be inspired in that way, I think it’s just really fantastic.

Holly: Yeah, and think about like the time period, you know, the 50’s when Disneyland opened and what resources they had then versus what we have now is amazing. And I think if Walt were to see it, he would be thrilled. He is a businessman, of course, he wants the dollar, but I think what they’ve done with the innovation and the changing of the times, and he even said like “I’ll find myself getting sad when Disney closes a parade forever or they take down a ride and they’re not planning on bringing it back.”

I’ll find myself getting sad but then I go back to the quote that Walt Disney even said himself “Disneyland will never be finished. It will never be complete, it will always be changing always be evolving.” And so, I think that that was a test him of like I should be OK with it because the founder himself was OK with evolving and changing with the times and realizing and adapting to what your audience wants, what your audience needs, and what they’re relating to at your parks and your movies and so they’re adapting with the times. And I think he’d be really proud of what they’ve done and adapting with the times what they’ve done with these parks.

Jace: Well, you’ve got to think too Walt himself was an innovator. So, like he was one of the ones that wasn’t fitting the general norm at the time of, you know, the way he did business and the way that he did certain things. So, a lot of people, in fact, them trying to find investors to help with Disneyland was one of the hardest things that they had ever done. In fact, I think Walt put the mortgage of his house like in pretty much all of his investments into this just on a prayer that it was going to work out. I mean, we can see today how big the Disney Company has gotten as a result of Disneyland.

So, I think it’s kind of a lesson for all of us that, you know, sometimes you have to be that change, sometimes you have to be the person that’s innovative enough to take the first step and follow what you believe is right.

Andrea: To be an influencer, you do have to put something on the line. What do you guys see for yourselves when you think about the kind of influence you have both with the podcast and your jobs at the news station? What do you feel like is on the line for you? What at stake?

Jace: So one of the things that I think is the hardest is, I think, generally, people are afraid of the rejection or not rising to the occasion of maybe in a successful as you want it to be. And thinking, you know, when we were talking to you earlier you said I thought my book project was going to take three months and end up taking two years. And I think having that patience is something that you really kind of have to do. Like we were probably the same way of we’re going to start this podcast and immediately we’re going to get thousands of listeners and it’s going to be the greatest thing in the world. And because we’ve a podcast in our profession, we’re going to be more marketable and that sort of thing.

I don’t know that anybody’s even asked us professionally, if they even care that we have a podcast or anything like that. So, that clearly wasn’t the case. And I feel like it’s all about basically just being consistent and learning to find ways to just enjoy what you’re doing and be in that moment rather than worry about the analytics or the business side of things all the time and just kind of live, if that makes any sense.

Holly: And I think what’s on the line for us, I think, we’re really blessed at North Platte is that we get to cover the fun and fluffy stories. We get to highlight fun people in our community, and we’re not always covering death destruction and crime. When we worked in Salt Lake City that was a lot of our stories that the reporters would cover is, you know, these big investigative pieces or these you know corrupt X, Y and Z people. And so I think we’re blessed here living in middle of America, you know, there’s low crime and low, I don’t know what you’d even call it but story of that give me anxiety.

So, for me it’s a blessing because I don’t have to put myself on the line of doing a three month investigative piece like they would in Chicago or a Salt Lake or a Detroit or something where they’re investigating these, you know, big city problems. And I think living in a small town America has been a blessing for me and for my anxiety levels and that because I get to go cover the dog kissing booth at the park or for Positive Partners. Or I get to come and highlight fun people like Andrea, that are getting highlighted in national magazine.

So, I think that that’s been a blessing for me of having less that I have to put on the line. Yes, my reputation is strong one every time I do a story but in a smaller way because I get to do some of the feel-good stories that I think are like kind of good for my soul.

Andrea: Mm-hmm. OK, so besides Disney what other big influences have led you to the place where you are in a place of influence yourselves?

Holly: So, Jace I recently just got asked to be board members for the Miss Nebraska organization through the Miss America organization, formerly known as pageants but they’re now called competitions. So that’s been a little bit tricky for us to navigate, but we have found that what that does for our voice, yes, but for young women’s voices as well. Sometimes, young women at that age are feeling like they maybe don’t have a voice or they’re not being heard or their ideas are dumb or what they’re trying to do is stupid.

And so, for me, I’ve loved being a board member for the Miss Nebraska Association because we’ve been able to help those girls find their voice. And then they all have formally called the platform but now it’s called a social impact initiative where they’re going out in the community and they’re using their voice for change. We have one that we did a mock interview with that does blood drive. She was really trying to push blood donations for the blood bank. And then we have another one that’s talking about social media and bullying and how people hide behind their phones and can create fake accounts and try to bully you.

And so, them going out and speaking to schools and speaking to their community and being on newsmakers on TV and putting their voice out there has been really fun for us to be a part of helping them push their voice forward and having their ideas heard. And their ideas aren’t stupid. They’re not too small. Every little bit that they’re doing is an extra thing. Maybe someone had never even thought about getting involved in a blood drive and didn’t realize we had an American Red Cross right here in town. Just little things that they’re doing are big things because their voice is getting expanded because of that sash across their chest and crown on their head. People take them a little more seriously and that opens more doors for them and it’s a vehicle for them to go and create change in our community. So, we’ve loved being a part of Miss Nebraska, specifically.

Andrea: Yeah that’s cool. I mean, Miss Nebraska, the competition is actually here in North Platte.

Holly: Which is crazy.

Andrea: Yeah.

Holly: I’m so happy because I thought that’s maybe at Lincoln or Omaha. When I first moved here and found out it was here in our town, I was so happy. I was so happy we got that here. That’s a big deal.

Andrea: Yeah, it is, it’s special. And so what are your thoughts on how to make that competition even though we’re in North Platte, we’re not in Omaha where there’s big venues, lots of people around, you know, how to make that the best it can be for the state?

Jace: It truly is advantageous, honestly, to have it in North Platte. If you open up any of the programs, in fact when we judged a pageant or I guess a competition about a year ago in Omaha and we had a big dinner and they pulled out these boxes that had all these old programs from all the Miss Nebraska’s since the 70’s.

Holly: Back to the 70’s.

Jace: But if you open up any of them like 90 percent of the sponsors in there are from North Platte. So, it almost made sense for them to bring it up here anyway because those are the ones that are, you know, donating all the money and, you know, doing a lot of the work and things like that. So, it just made sense, but also one thing about small town Nebraska, and maybe it’s like this other places, but I know for sure it is here is when the community finds out about an event or something like this program, everybody wants to jump on board and everybody wants to be a part of what’s going on.

And I think that’s a lot harder especially kind of looking at stuff. You know, we’re from a big city in Salt Lake City and I don’t feel like, I mean, maybe it gets some backing but like not everybody wants to be involved in a bigger city. So, it’s harder to get people excited whereas you get the buzz going in a town full of 20,000 people and they’re like “Oh, yeah did you hear about this? Did you hear about this?” And it makes kind of your job almost easier because of the word of mouth, if that makes any sense.

Holly: And there’s not as many distractions as there would be in Omaha and Lincoln, there’s not a million events to go to in the town here, so when there’s events, there’s more support. And so, I think it’s smart to have it here because the town does come out in support and that high school is full.

Jace: Yeah.

Andrea: OK, so wrapping up a little bit here. When you think about having a voice of influence and what that means to you, and my guess my question is what advice do you have for somebody else who wants to have a voice of influence?

Holly: I think, we scare ourselves the most from being a voice of influence because I’ll talk to myself down more than anybody else. Like, I’ll tell myself “People don’t wanna hear what you have to say or whatever,” and nobody else would ever come up to me and say that really. I mean, unless you know they’re just being hater and hiding behind the computer. But no nobody would say to my face, “Nobody wants to hear what you have to say.” And so, I always have to just remind myself that the things that I’m saying are important and valuable to someone and maybe what I’m saying isn’t for everyone and that’s fine. And what I’m saying maybe not someone’s variety but maybe somebody needed or wanted to hear that. And so, I have to just not be the one to talk myself out of it.

It’s the same thing like when girls want to go and compete for a competition for Miss America. And they say “Oh, I don’t know or I’m not gonna try.” And I said “The judges can’t pick you if you’re sitting on the bench. If you’re not even on the stage, how can they pick you if you didn’t even go?” And so it’s the same thing for me of like “Nobody can hear my voice if I don’t try and share it.” And so for the different platforms whether it’s podcasting, TV through Miss America if I share it then people can pick and choose whether that’s something that they want to accept or consume. But for me, I did my part of putting out there what I felt like maybe somebody needed.

Jace: I think one of the scariest things for me or most alarming things for me was when we first got into TV and people were starting to recognize us, you know, around town and things like that, I felt like I always had to be on 100 percent. And not even like I was being someone that wasn’t me, but I was just afraid to show people my normal self, if that makes any sense. And as we’ve kind of gotten here and I’ve gotten more comfortable on people who have actually seen the real me, I found that more people are interested in the real Jace rather than the one that is, you know, on TV. And not that the one on TV is necessarily a lot different, but you know you can tend to be more fun and exciting and stuff like that in your personal life than you can, you know, you’re professional and I think anybody can attest to that.

And so I would definitely say it’s just basically just allowed me to, I guess, prove the point that you’re a lot more interesting and fun when you are yourself and not somebody that people expect to see on television.

Holly: Not trying to be someone that you’re hoping that they like or that you’re hoping. Because the same thing with when we judge, Jace and I have judged several competitions and then formerly pageants in Salt Lake and then now in Nebraska, and it’s the same thing. I can always tell the girls that are trying to be the girl that they think I want them to be. Or if they’re trying to copy the former Miss Nebraska and think the outgoing queen is the only one that we’ll ever pick.

So, I can always see right through them when they’re trying to tell me something that they think I want to hear where if a girl tells me an answer that doesn’t align with what I think but they’re convincing me of it and they have backup points for it then I’ll always score them high because they’re convincing me and they’re truth and they’re manifesting their truth. They’re telling me their truth and their reality even if it’s not something I agree with maybe their point is a point that I wouldn’t take, but if they back it up I will respect their voice and I will respect their opinion and still judge them well because they backed it up and gave me valid points.

And so, for seeing them in that aspect, I always like the ones that are being themselves. Even if it might create waves, not everybody likes someone who’s creating waves. But if it’s creating waves, I at least know they’re being genuine and not just giving me a cookie cutter fluffy answer that they think they want to hear.

Andrea: Mm-hmm, keep it real.

Holly: That’s right.

Andrea: Love it. OK, guys so where can the listener find your podcast and find you guys online?

Jace: So, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook at Navigating the Magic podcast.

Holly: And we’re on all of the platforms for podcasting, so wherever you like to listen to it we have it on Google Play, iTunes, Spreaker, iHeartRadio.

Jace: Spotify, iHeartRadio.

Holly: And Alexa can even find it for you. So, anywhere you find a podcast, you can find this and we love when people engage with us on our social media pages too.

Andrea: Awesome. Thank you so much for being a voice of influence for our listeners.

Jace: Thank you.

Holly: Thanks for having us, Andrea.

Posted on Monday, September 23, 2019

Creating Memorable Experiences with Manuel Christoffel of Woom Bikes

Episode 108

Manuel Christoffel is the (Interim) Chief Customer Officer at Woom Bikes where he manages marketing in customer service for all North America. Prior to joining Woom, Manuel has held global cross-functional customer success, program, marketing and brand strategy roles at ADP, Dell, American Express, Bazaarvoice, Hearsay Social, and his own consultancy business.

In this episode, Manuel explains what he means when he says huis declared goal is to deliver the best possible internal and external customer experience by combining EQ with IQ while cutting the red tape, the importance of realizing that the one purchasing your product isn’t always your true customer, why he believes there’s no such thing as “finding the right person” for your customer service team, why he doesn’t have penalties for team members who make mistakes, how he helps his CEO share their voice of influence, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Manuel Christoffel from Woom Bikes USA. He is the (Interim) Chief Customer Officer at Woom Bikes, managing marketing in customer service for all of North America. Prior to joining Woom, Manuel has held global cross-functional customer success, program, marketing and brand strategy roles at ADP, Dell, American Express, Bazaarvoice, Hearsay Social, and his own consultancy business.

His declared goal is to deliver the best possible internal and external customer experience by combining EQ with IQ while cutting the red tape. Now, we discussed ahead of time Manuel. I gave you a fair warning. I would like to know what in the world you mean by that. Please, please do tell us. Thank you for being here.

Manuel Christoffel: Well, of course, thank you for having me, Andrea. And yes, you did warn me with one minute heads up but as you said, I wrote it. So what do I mean by that? Really, to me there’s a difference. IQ to me does not necessarily mean that you went to an Ivy League school and they gave you a 4.0 GPA. It doesn’t mean people who go to an Ivy League and have a 4.0 are not highly intelligent.

But to me what comes down to is where’s your passion and are you intelligent about articulating that passion or pursuing that passion. Then taking the EQ to it where it’s not just about you and how you get the most out of this passion, but how do you really bond with your customers, whether internal or external, and how do you really make it a win-win along the way, right?

So, for us at Woom, I’ve basically and I’m the third iteration of our team here for customer service. I believe this is the winning team; phenomenal people, very driven, very passionate people, which is challenging for me because I come in and I’m just a little grumpy. I have a 4 year old and a 4 month old, so I’m not getting sleep. And my head of customer service, Sherry is just there. I’m not kidding you; she’s dancing at 8 o’clock in the morning with biggest smile ever and she’s like 20 miles one way to work before I even get there, right?

So, super, super passionate that will be done with the customer service team. I deliberately hired a mix of parents and non-parents and bike people, non bike people because to me it’s very important.

Andrea: Interesting.

Manuel Christoffel: I don’t want a bike specialist. My ultimate customer or consumer is a child. The people buying our product are parents; at least most of them are not hardcore cyclists. They might be bike enthusiasts. They might enjoy family bike rides.

Andrea: Can you just say that again?

Manuel Christoffel: I apologize. Yeah, what I was saying is a lot of our parents are, you know, they’re bike enthusiasts but they’re not hardcore cyclists, right? I live in Austin. Obviously, Lance Armstrong is here. There’s a lot of people that are a very hardcore, you know, race bike community, triathlon community, mountain bike community. So, we have all that.

But then there’s all these other parents, the normal people, and normal parents like myself that say “I have certain fond memories of my childhood riding a bike.” Falling on my face a couple of times until I learned is not one of them. But you know, all said and done, they were certain bonding moments with your parents when you achieved this monumental feet of balancing and propelling yourself forward. So bringing that passion to our brand is phenomenal.

And that’s why I said I don’t want, you know, semi-professional athletes only on my customer service team. I want people who are parents who have gone through some of these anxieties finding the right size, finding the right weight, even the right color, because the color makes a difference. You can buy the best, the nicest bike if it’s not the color the child wants _____. So there are all these aspects.

And so for me, it’s very important that I have an ecosystem of mutually, and I say, complimentary traits and skill sets and personalities. You know, when you start realizing, this is a very emotional purchase or there’s some anxiety around some inquiries around the bike, “Are they more technical in nature?” “Hey, maybe you should talk to my colleague.” “Are they, you know, more emotional in nature?” “You know what; you should talk to my colleague. He has three children.”

He literally started working here. He harassed us so much that I had to hire him you know. He’s phenomenal because almost every question we get in that regard he will say, “Well, you know, when I faced this decision, here’s what I thought about this. Here’s my decision making process. Does this sound anything like yours?” And you know, you have this bond that you can’t script it. You can’t pre anticipate of what is somebody going to ask and how do you, you know, maybe soothe this anxiety.

How do you justify the purchase price of our bikes, which in all fairness are not, you know, the most affordable in the market? They’re a little bit in the upscale side of things, but at the same time, what we hear time and time again from everybody across the board, our bikes are designed for children. They do make a difference.

The reason your 6-year-old girl does not really know how to brake is not because she’s not coordinated. She may not be able to reach the brake lever because she has a kid’s bike but these all shrunken down parts from a grownup bike. They’re not custom designed for a child’s hand at that age, right?

So, some of these attention to details that we put into bikes that ultimately turn people from, let’s say, potentially curious about the product in what they’ve heard into people that will take to social media and share their experiences that will send us pictures, videos, testimonials, you know, and triggered saying, “This is so phenomenal.” “We’re so happy.” “Thank you so much for putting the smile on our child’s face.” “Thank you so much for this experience.” And that, you know, it’s just a validation of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is the right thing.

Andrea: Hmm. So, you mentioned that you get a variety of people who participate on your customer service team and that they readily refer each other for different causes or different problems that come up. I love that. How do you start the process where they begin to get to know each other well enough to know that this is the person that should handle this call or talk to this person about this particular problem? How do you develop that atmosphere besides, you know, finding the right people, like what’s the other process when it comes to getting to know each other?

Manuel Christoffel: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there is no such thing as finding the right person, right? You find somebody that I would say fits the mold about 80% and then 20% is you hope for the best, you pray for the best. And at the same time, you also hope that this person will take to your atmosphere, your style of management, and your company philosophy, right? And if all this works out, it’s great.

For us, when I started this entire team, it pretty much came on at the same time. I made it very clear, “Look, here’s X amount of _____ discretionary budget that you have to make a customer whole.” I do not want to nickel and dime somebody if a bell breaks or you know, if maybe a grip gets worn or whatever. If they take the time to call us, let us give them a new one, right?” And our people feel empowered doing that. And on the flip side, internally, what I keep preaching is essentially I want us to be reflective, not reflexive.

And by really hearing what a customer is saying, and this is something that’s very hard, our founder here, you know, Mathias, will tell you, he’s been in customer service. He’s meant the phones and he has a deep appreciation for what our people do because he self-admitted he said, “I can’t do it anymore because three seconds in, I know exactly what their problem is. But I also know they will talk for another two minutes and obviously it’s rude to not hear them out.”

So, just listening factually what are they saying and how are they saying it? The more rational person will say, “OK, rationally, I can answer this, but I’m sensing there’s some emotional triggers in this. There’s some anxiety about this.” And then it’s all about probing questions. So, we role play a little bit, but much of what we do, even after a call, you know, see they were transferred or end it, it’s the, “Hey, I heard you say this and that. Can you tell me more about this?”

It’s not necessarily that we police each other, but I want to foster this level of curiosity the way I hear something that “Hmm, I would’ve maybe said something different. Why did you do it this way?” “Oh,” because you know, you only hear the customer service side of things in the office. You don’t hear what the customer’s saying. And like, “Oh, OK, I understand. I’ve been through three bikes and weight is the most important feature.” Not necessarily the custom designed handles, not a different feature that we’re very proud of. It might really be the weight.

So, the entire conversation is around the weight or lack thereof with our product and our bike. And as we kind of have this, our knowledge base expands, and we have huddles every week where we say, “OK what was the best and the worst call you’ve had this week and why?”

Andrea: Love it.

Manuel Christoffel: So, this is sort of what we kind of, I don’t want to say we celebrate our losses because now we have some escalations, we have some unhappy customers. We cannot make all of them happy. And at times we feel it’s our fault, absolutely. But in kind of talking about that, what I see that the point we’re getting to is the team self regulates. I rarely have to step in and say, “Well, maybe you should try this or you should try this.” Because everybody feels comfortable enough to sort of admit their mistakes. They know I’m not going to, you know, publicly demean them or not really a penalty for making a mistake. My big ask is let’s learn from them and more importantly, do you now understand how this mistake came about?

Andrea: OK that is really, really important. I’m not sure how long have you been at Woom and was that already the way that it was?

Manuel Christoffel: So, I’ve been consulting to the CEO for about three and a half years and I’ve been here full time for this year. On the philosophy piece, it definitely always has been that way, but you know, we are essentially still as someone in startup mode. You know, a four and a half year old company started in a garage and moved to the third office, if we count the garage as an office, you know, in Austin growing nicely.

But it is very challenging because our CEO, a collegiate athlete, very, very passionate about the bike, about the product but really more, I’m going to say, from the bike geek point of view. So his passion doesn’t necessarily translates. So has the passion always existed? Absolutely; and our CEO will be the first person that will tell you, “If I’m not been passionate, I can only plead insanity as to why we are still here and why I didn’t give up along the way.” Because there’s definitely been some moments where you’re new to a market, you’re more expensive, nobody knows your brand and it’s difficult.

So, no matter how passionate you are about it, kind of seeing that basically your baby not being appreciated for what it is or being misunderstood, you know, it’s going to be very challenging. So, the passion has always been there. My job sort of is to say, “OK, how do we translate this?” Very similar to, you know, _____.

When I joined Amex early in 2007, I was a very hardcore visa credit card user. And I did not understand why people would pay for a charge card, because in my mind, the message that Amex had at a time was very much, “If you can’t afford this fee, maybe you just don’t make enough money.” That was my perception of the company because their brand messaging, their value messaging was not tailored to a personality like mine.

And going in and having some opportunity to speak with some marketing leaders and getting some feedback, they’ve heard some of that. But we’ve also gotten better as a company just educating and supporting our customers in understanding the value around some of these products.

So, fast forward, what I’ve seen is, it’s not about trying to hit your CEO over the head and saying you’re doing everything wrong, it’s about what matters and what is getting lost in translation and how do we add these pieces back in in a way that it resonates not just with the bicycle community.

And they are very passionate and they’re incredibly supportive. They spread the word. We would not be where we are without the bicycle community, no doubt. But you know, there are also other parents out there who don’t know the single pieces of a bike and why it matters that this is manufactured one way on machine the different way.

So, how do I translate this into a broad set of audience in a way where you understand there’s passion and there’s pride but you don’t feel necessarily like you walk into this high-end boutique and the salesperson will just never leave your aside. I don’t want that impression either. I want you to be able to form your own opinion. That is why we have the up-cycle program where you can return your bike when you buy a bigger one, or you’re a part of our up-cycle membership basically you get 40% of the initial purchase price credited towards the new purchase, the bigger bike that you’re buying.

It’s something where we say, “We do appreciate your initial purchase. We do understand we’re a little bit more expensive than some of these other brands out there. And we want to give you an incentive to stay with us. You know, we do want to acknowledge that that is why we rarely ever ask how did something break.”

But of course, if somebody you know, bought a bike a day ago and says this thing is totaled,” we will ask and say “You ran over it with your truck. I’m sorry. There’s not much I can do. I may send you a shirt just to cheer you up, absolutely but I can’t send you a new bike.” But generally, _____, like what does this mean functionally? This means, you know, we’re not going to nickel and dime our customers. This means now we will really hear them out and if we need to transfer them, not because we’re tired of them, but because we sense that somebody else can support them in a more meaningful way.

Andrea: OK, so you have so much here that we can dive into and I have some questions based on what you were just talking about because there’s so much here. And one of the things that came up here kind of more towards the end of what you were saying was that you really help the CEO kind of apply and act on their vision as it applies to customer service.

Manuel Christoffel: Right.

Andrea: Our company is called Voice of Influence, the podcast that we’re on right now is called Voice of Influence and what you said was that, you know, there are times when you have to be a voice of influence with the CEO in order to help them to translate their vision into something that’s going to make a difference for the customer. So, do you have any specific ideas about what is one of the best ways to communicate that to the CEO themselves?

Manuel Christoffel: It really depends on the personality of the CEO and the relationship that you’re able to establish and the authority that you kind of bring to the table. In my case, the company is extremely fortunate; our CEO does not have what I call “founder syndrome.” He does not have an ego. You could be an intern on your first day and literally radically change an aspect of the business just by asking one question because it just doesn’t make sense to you. In some companies I’ve worked at, you would have probably been scolded for even daring to speak up on day one, let alone talk to the CEO.

Andrea: Right, right. So people have a voice?

Manuel Christoffel: People have a voice, and because he’s always sort of known that it takes a village to build a brand, right? And it takes a community to grow a brand and really, you know, become a brand even in the first place. So, for him, it’s all about how do all these individual pieces, all these things he wants to accomplish, how do we kind of prioritize them? And also, you know, we’re growing quite a bit.

So, we get inundated or he gets inundated with so many increases, so many proposals, so many suggestions, so many tools, and so many partnerships. I’ll say “OK, let’s ignore all that for a second, either you will read through all this tonight or I will do this or somebody else will do it. What matters to you? What are we doing this quarter or this year? Or what’s the single biggest thing you just wish we could change? Then let’s see who can help us on this journey whether that’s internally like hiring the right people, growing the right people.”

It’s important to me that when somebody comes and works at this company, especially on my teams, since I have the most influence over them, that they are more marketable and more knowledgeable than they were before they came to us. Obviously, I don’t want people to leave, but I understand, you know, opportunities are out there and some people, you know, may just want to move to a different city. They want to live by the beach. So, I never want to stop anybody, but I will make sure that we’ve also made your career more noteworthy and meaningful while you were here.

Andrea: So that’s connected to your purpose, it sounds like. You feel that you can make a difference in their lives and so that’s something that’s going to come out in the way that you lead.

Manuel Christoffel: Definitely, I do feel that way, but I have almost unlimited patience and support in pursuing that from our CEO because he does it for you.

Andrea: Yes. That is awesome.

Manuel Christoffel: He understands. You know, as I said he’s a very intelligent person. He’s a very accomplished person. He understands that not everybody is here for the same reason he is here, but it’s his baby. It’s his company, right? So he can’t expect it. So what he’s saying is how can we make this meaningful and at the same time, how can we make this, for lack of better term, how we can make this as a partnership. It’s not an employment.

There are two or three very, very hard rules that I pursue. Aside from that, and these are predominantly related to like, you know, HR and just don’t do silly things. Let’s be PC here, right? But aside from that, you can revamp on almost everything. If there is potential, there’s promise. And we do not want to be that boss that hindered your career, that CEO that just did not even give you a voice.

We want to be, at times, that people that kind of save you from yourself internally. I’ve had that in my career many times when a boss said, “You know, I know you’re really angry, just go take a walk. Don’t say what you want to say right now, just go take a walk.” And it takes some time to realize you just saved me from myself.

Andrea: Yes. That’s awesome.

Manuel Christoffel: So, I kind of want to be that and, you know, some people are very receptive to this, obviously others are not. But what’s just really important for us, we know if we jive, we’ll work well together. We support each other, you know, no matter really what that takes. Our customer service team, at times, comes and helps build bikes. At times, some of our technicians on the up-cycle program come and help mend the phone lines if we have incredible demand.

And there is not really like this, “Oh, I have to go out there and it’s kind of warm and I have to build the bike” and “Uh, I just really want to answer phones.” It’s the “OK, maybe there’s a suboptimal,” if they even think that. But it’s much more, “Hey, you know, let’s just get this going what needs to happen. What do we need to do?”

So that’s what I look for in people. I don’t want people who want a job. I’m looking for people that want a career. I think that’s already a big distinction. And then I very much ask them, “Hey, look, what can I expect from you and what are some things I should look out for?” And some of that stuff I’m hearing, at times, I have heard of people that we have hired, I didn’t love so much, but you got to appreciate the honesty.

Andrea: Yeah, they admitted it.

Manuel Christoffel: Exactly. You’d have to admit it. I mean, you know, I know right before a job interview, “I’m gonna Google this company. I’m gonna Google all the answers. I’m gonna go at Glassdoor. I’m gonna know how I’m gonna be 85% perfect in all my answers.” So, somebody really breaking script and being honest, like this is a phenomenal starting point because that means I can be honest with you and you’re going to tell me whether this resonates or not.

Andrea: And…

Manuel Christoffel: Sorry, go ahead.

Andrea: No, I apologize. Keep going.

Manuel Christoffel: No, no, by all means.

Andrea: Well, I was just going to say, and they’re not going to feel shame. You have created a culture where it’s not about shame. There’s not this penalty for making mistakes, like you mentioned before, and so people can more freely share their voice. They can more freely be authentic and make mistakes but go for it more too.

Manuel Christoffel: Absolutely. You’ll pursue your passion and if you work something, you know, this is an ongoing thing that we’re still working on, at times, especially when you go in like chat on social media. When you get into like, you know, comments you want to respond, you try to be somewhat brief. You don’t want to write a book because, you know, people will just not read a book but you do want to address the comment. So, as you kind of track it that down, at times we some, I want to say, less fortunate phrasings and whatnot.

So, I know, we’ve come across and like “hey” and usually it’s like, “Oh, that last thing. Yeah, I was struggling with this too. I really wanted to say this but you know, we’re trying to keep this below X amount of lines, so that’s why I chose this.” “You know what, make it two lines longer. It’s OK, it’s just really is the better thing.” But we’re getting into such a groove to where it’s not this, “Oh my God, you’re just tearing me down and I can’t do anything perfectly.”

We’re almost in sync already but we’re still kind of, you know, feeling each other out a little bit. Where is that perfect balance of what you said, keep it below X sentences. I’m trying to do that. In my mind though, it would have taken another sentence or two. So we’re compromising, “You know what, use what I’m saying as a guideline.” It means don’t triple the amount of sentences, but if in doubt, if it’s between potentially unfortunate phrasing or really saying what you want to say, say what you really want to say.

Andrea: Hmm that’s really empowering for them too.

Manuel Christoffel: Honestly, it helps me because it helps me understand how they take what they are good at. Some people, on our customer service team, are phenomenal with local customers and walk ins. They’re passionate about it. They really love it and others say rightfully. We know you have a local sales department, but I really was helping our people predominantly under phone or email, like more traditional customer service supports type of role.

So, “OK, where are our personalities?” What do you prefer doing?” I want everybody to be well versed, but it doesn’t mean we can’t try to specialize down a little bit and say, “OK, do we have the bandwidth for, you know, my person who really loves talking with customers and interact with children and share his story about his children and all these other things?” Yeah. If in doubt, I want that person. I want him to speak to our customers. I want him to spend some time with them. And even if they don’t buy a bike, he’s just had a really good time at work giving thoughts about what he’s passionate about, sharing things about his family life, and about his children in our customers.

Even if they don’t buy anything, you know. Again, they don’t have this boutique experience, they’ll come in “What bike do you want? What size? What’s your credit card? Oh, you want to try, what do you mean you undecided? Why? You didn’t do your research?” And that’s the experience that some customers have with some other brands, or you know, just generally when it comes to that type of purchase.

So, we really want to make sure that we do a very good job educating our customers upfront, sharing some of the pride and the passion that we have and being really empathetic and listening to their needs and then kind of making that decision, “OK, you very clearly know your way around bikes and you have a concern about this and that.” We may not even have the right person in customer service, “You know what I have a bike technician that you would really love talking to. Do you mind holding, either you mind holding for a minute or can he call you back within the next five minutes?”

Andrea: That’s got to be like really impactful.

Manuel Christoffel: It makes a difference and this was, you know, my philosophy. I personally would rather exchange 15 emails than pick up the phone once and call customer service. So then the worst thing you can do to me is put me on hold for 10 minutes. So, if you tell me I’m going to call you back within 10 minutes and you call me back into three, by default, there’s almost nothing you can do to upset me at this point.

Andrea: Right? And _____ somebody else and you’re like breaking scripts I can tell. You’re breaking script with the customer.

Manuel Christoffel: It’s the red tape, right? We’re a call center; rep just does not have the authority. I mean they may want to say, “You know what, Pete over there knows so much more about the ins and outs of your fiber line, but unfortunately I can either transfer you to a supervisor if you really want to escalate or you have to hang up and call back.” So, a lot of people in his industry, in customer service don’t have the freedom to kind of say, you know, “May I please transfer you to one of my peers who can help you a lot more.” Or you know, “Hey, you seems really, really unhappy.” And then you got up, “Hey, look, this person is really unhappy. I honestly think they wanna feel heard, you have a good title; if you want to talk to them.” And, you know, it tends to work.

Again, we can’t make everybody happy. We make mistakes, we learn from them, myself included. But to me, what’s important fundamentally is the attitude and really just reiterating, “It’s OK to not be perfect, but let’s be honest along the way.” That to me is important and when we hear, “Hey look, now there’s still some more red tape, or I still don’t have this. I don’t have this.” “Hey, we don’t really know what’s going on in the company.” Our CEO went to the extreme, he set up 15 minute one-on-one every single month with every employee at his company.

And I can tell you, he doesn’t really have all that much free time. He said “If they really don’t know, I could do a town hall, but guess what, some people can’t make it. Some people are stuck on the phone. I will talk to every single person and we’re gonna do this, you know, every month.” For the time being, _____ because it’s not sustainable, right? But it’s the “You’ve spoken, I’ve heard you.” It’s not that “Well, let’s send it to an assistant who then tries to schedule a calendar.” And “Who are you, you have been here two months and you want to FaceTime with the boss?”

Now, we have all this in companies that are a lot smaller than us. And you know, we’re not all that big word, you know, on a good day we’re 50 people in the US. So, it’s not that we’re all that big, but I’ve been at smaller companies and you just did not get FaceTime with, you know, you skip-level, let alone the CEO. So that to me is just very important that really everybody here feels like they have a voice and more importantly they have an opinion, we hear it.

Sometimes it’s, you know, this would be perfect. I have a wish list of tools and infrastructure and people for that matter, “Hey, if I do my job right in three to four years, I’m gonna get all of that. For the time being, well, here’s why you can’t have it, but this is what you can have. What can you do with this?” And that to me, again, is more powerful than just saying no.

Andrea: Yeah. Wow, that’s really, really great. I love this. I love that you and your company are focused so much on helping people to have a voice and utilizing their voice to really make your company better and make your customer service better. And that is a clearly making a difference in the way that your customers experience your brand, so congratulations on that because that’s a huge feat.

Manuel Christoffel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Andrea: So, Manuel, if people are interested in Woom Bikes or interested in you at all, where should they connect with you or could they?

Manuel Christoffel: Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, I’m a really, really big fan of LinkedIn, although I will say, I sadly do not know every single person in my LinkedIn profile. But you know, that’s Manuel Christoffel on LinkedIn. My Twitter is a little bit harder because that’s manuel_c, apparently there’s another manuel_c out there.

Andrea: We will link to those on the show notes so that people can find you. Go ahead.

Manuel Christoffel: No, thank you. But, absolutely, I mean it’s been a phenomenal journey. It’s a great company. I love talking to people. I like learning from people because what we’re seeing, you know, a lot of the best bits of, you know, I’m going to say food for thought we’ve received from some people, not necessarily in the marketing industry or the customer service industry or even the bike industry. It’s just people who, you know, have lived a life who say, “Well, you know, when I have to scale something or when I had this problem or when I manage people, here’s kind of what I do.”

Those kinds of tips that’s what I’m saying networking is so incredibly underrated. A lot of people only network when they need a new job or they need a reference or an introduction or something. To me, it’s kind of like you kind of pay it forward its service leadership and the networking space in a sense, because one of these days you hope karma is a real thing and somebody else will return the favor. But for the time being at the very least, let me meet some interesting people. And even if we have some opposing views or, you know, tell me really why you think everything we do is so fundamentally wrong.

I’m not saying I’m going to convince you, but at the very least it’s going to potentially help me maybe reevaluate some of the things we do and say maybe we should fine tune this because we will grow and we might hit this particular problem down the road, how can we kind of preempt? And that that to me is very important.

And networking is great. Meeting new people is phenomenal, you know, going to conferences kind of speaking, hearing opposing views. And hopefully, in the process getting some more people to come visit the website, take a look at our bikes and become part of our journey.

Andrea: Hmm. That’s great. Well, thank you so much Manuel. Thank you for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Manuel Christoffel: Thank you, Andrea. I look forward to seeing you in Chicago.

Andrea: Yes!

Posted on Monday, August 12, 2019

How to Unite Your Team With An Anthem

Episode 102

It should be a goal of every corporate leader to get their employees to buy into the company’s mission and brand. Yet, the further you get down the line, the more difficult it becomes to do that. You end up with people who don’t feel like they have a purpose within the organization and then they’re there just for the paycheck.

In this episode, I explain how you can help your employees feel like they have a purpose and a voice within your organization by creating and utilizing a team anthem specifically for your customer service team. I also explain what a team anthem is, the three reasons we utilize team anthems with our clients, how to create your team anthem, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Fascinate Assessment

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. One of the things that we often talk to people about is brand awareness and the opportunity that people on, sometimes, the frontlines or throughout the company have to be able to truly represent and embody their brand.

That is something that leaders usually want. They want everybody in the company to be on board and buy into the mission, the vision, and the values of the company. And yet, it’s very easy, the further you get down the line in terms of seniority to end up with people who feel less than excited about the brand, less than committed to the company and the company’s success where it might just feel like a job. It just feels like a job to them that they want to maintain to get paycheck, which is a legitimate reason to have a job.

But there’s something significantly missing when there are people in your company who work at your job just to have a job, something significantly missing for them and for you.

One of the most important things for us to remember when you are a leader is that the people around you want to know that they have a purpose. They want to know that their voice matters. If their voice doesn’t matter within the company or with your customers then it’s just a job. However, if they find purpose and meaning and believe that their voice really does matter then they’re going to have a different level of investment into the success of the mission and vision and values of the company.

One of the things that we do is work with individuals on their own voice of influence, so helping people to really believe that their voice does matter to find their authentic voice so that they can make a difference. So that their advice can be _____, so that their expertise can be accepted and utilized, and so that their leadership can be followed.

When people are searching for their voice of influence, one of the tools that we utilize is the Fascinate Assessment in order to be able to help people kind of understand how the world sees them, how they are perceived by others. It is a fairly simple assessment, which is what I love about it because I love the really in depth stuff but at scale. In depth is very difficult to apply and utilize fully.

The Fascinate Assessment has just enough meat on the bones that it can really make a significant impact. But it’s also simple enough that people can take it real quick and then have some results right away and come up with what they call a personal brand anthem, something that would help them to remember what their purpose is. And so this is an assessment that we use and I love the terminology, the anthem.

So, we have applied this idea of having an anthem to the importance of having one as a team. A personal anthem would be based on your personal purpose. The things that you’re particularly good at or what you bring to the table that is significant and that others need to know about how other people really see you when you’re at your best, but what about the team as a whole?

A lot of times companies have, you know, values and mission statements and things are super important to the DNA of the company and you want to maintain that throughout every bit of the company. But what about teams? You know, sometimes a team needs to have their own sense of identity. Why does our team in particular matter?

And it’s interesting, but customer service can tend to feel like it sort of everybody wants to be important. Everybody wants the customer experience to be good, but at the same time it has historically been sort of these are the people that are taking care of the hard stuff and they’re dealing with the hard conversations. They’re just cleaning up the messes and that sort of thing.

The problem with that is that if you are hiring people to participate in customer service and you want them to do a good job, then you’re trying to hire people that care. You’re trying to hire people that would be good with people and that sort of thing. Those are all very important things.

But if they don’t have a personal connection to the purpose, to the vision, to the mission of the company, if they don’t see how they fit in as a team, as a customer service team that matters to the bottom line, that matters to the leadership of the company, if they don’t feel like they really matter, then whether they mean to or not, whether you mean to or not, they’re going to end up feeling as though they don’t really matter.

I’ve spoken with a number of managers or customer service teams or call centers who feel as though the bigger company and the leadership of the company doesn’t respect the fact that their frontline customer service people need to understand what’s going on in the company.

So when there is a strategic initiative that starts or when marketing is going to take a turn or a new product is going to come into play, many times the customer service team is the last one to know about these changes, which is unfortunate because they’re often the one place that customers actually have contact with the company itself.

One of the very first or most important voices of your company is your customer service team. And if they don’t sense that from you, if they’re not getting that sense or they’re not truly connected to the bigger purpose, mission, vision of the company then it becomes more difficult for them to really truly embody it and represent your company well.

So, today we’re going to talk a little bit about creating a team anthem for your customer service team. Why we do this? Why is this a piece of what we help companies to do and how can you do it for yourself? So we’re going to start here with an anthem.

So an anthem, let’s think about this in terms of a national anthem. So the United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner is played on a regular basis at ball games and sporting events and political gatherings and all kinds of places that is played on a regular basis. Why is that and what is it about an anthem that is so important?

Well, we got three things here. So first of all, an anthem is really, really important for providing perspective. When an anthem is played before a competition, there is a sense of we are all together under this anthem, under this one nation and we are a part of this bigger story.

There is perspective to be gained when we take a step back and say, “Wait a second, this is what we’re all about. This is where we came from. This is where we’re headed, this is what we stand for,” that sort of thing. So, having perspective and understanding that in the moment of the fight, in the moment of that point of a competition where things get really intense prior to that you’ve said that moment is important. But overall we’re on the same team. And when we can say that, then those little moments though they might be intense and people might fight really hard to come out the winner. That’s great.

But bringing that sense of perspective allows people to remember that they’re really a part of something bigger than themselves. And this is not just about me and winning this competition, but who we are as a people and where we come from is really important. And that we don’t have to compete on that in particular. The anthem reminds athletes who and what they’re actually representing. This is about something bigger than ourselves.

So, when we offer people an anthem, when they have an anthem to rally around, then that helps them to gain a perspective about what we’re all about, where we come from and the fact that this is about a bigger story, this is about more than me, “I am not the only piece of this puzzle that matters, but I am a piece of the puzzle that does matter.”

And that brings us to point number two. A good anthem calls out our identity. Who do we say that we are as a people, as a company, as a nation, who do we say that we are? In the United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, at the very end you hear a very clear “This is who we are. We are the land of the free, so we are free and we are a home of the brave.”

So, this is where you can really find a place when you are brave. You are brave and you are free and that piece of identity at the end of the national anthem, every time it is sung, every time a whole huge crowd or every time that we hear “The land of the free and the home of the brave” and that is belted out at the end and we all rally around that sound, those words. It’s an amazing opportunity for people to f to be reminded of their identity and who we are. This is important. I am important. I can be brave and I am free.

Then finally number three an anthem provides, I don’t know if you’d call it motivation or really a sense of purpose. So perspective and identity and purpose, they all sort of come together. They come together to help people to feel like they know, “OK this is what we’re all about. This is where we come from, this is what we’re all about and this is what I’m here to provide. This is how I show up. I show up as brave, I show up as free, I show up with respect that sort of thing.

So when a company adapts this idea of having an anthem, a good anthem is going to provide those three things; it’s perspective, a sense of identity, and a very clear purpose. This is where we come from. This is who we say we are and this is what we say we’re all about an anthem, for even a team like a customer service team is going to bring all those three things to bear. It is going to make sure that those three things are hit on so that the team can rally around this anthem and have that sense of identity and perspective and purpose.

But what happens when there’s an anthem and there is a sense of discrepancy between what the anthem says and what people are seeing in their company or in their country. When they see an anthem, when they’re hearing an anthem and they hear these words like respectful invitation or, you know, freedom and bravery and these values or these words that really call out something really beautiful and important and purposeful. And then they look at the company or they look at the country and they say, “But that’s not what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing a discrepancy between who we say that we are and what we’re actually doing.”

You’ve probably been quite aware of some of the controversial ways that the anthem in particular of the United States National Anthem has been used to discuss this and bring up conversation about the discrepancy that athletes are seeing between the anthem itself and what they’re seeing in the way that it plays out for equality. And the way that some of these people have chosen to address this or to bring this discrepancy to light is to kneel during the anthem instead of stand, which is an interesting way to do it.

There are lots of different perspectives on this and having had grandparents or relatives that have served in the military almost giving their lives or giving their lives for the country, I can understand the depth of intense feelings that people have around this issue. And yet I think it’s important that we always look at, especially for if you’re going to have a voice of influence, you going to be able to take perspective. You got to be able to look at the way that other people are seeing the world as well.

So, why would somebody kneel during the national anthem? Is it possible that they actually do respect the national anthem and they respect the many ways that people have contributed or sacrificed for the freedoms in the country so much that they see that there’s a need to do it even better. They see discrepancies between that freedom that we proclaim in the national anthem that people have fought for and what they’re actually seeing in real life. And this is a way that they are choosing to bring this to light.

So the point for a company is that there are going to be times that even if you do create an anthem or if you have a set of values that you say, you know, on a big scale mission, vision, values for the company. And those get down to the people who are on those front lines that you get down to the customer service folks and they look around and they say, “Yeah, but I’m not seeing that here and I’m not seeing that here.”

How would you like them to handle the discrepancies that they see? Do they have an opportunity to share their voice, to help make the communication or the anthem that of the company actually get everybody aligned underneath of it so that it’s not saying something that’s not true about your company because if values aren’t aspirational, I don’t know what they are.

Obviously, they’re not going to be perfect in a sense an anthem should be calling out what’s already present, the strengths that are already there in your company or in your customer service team or in you as an individual. But if people are seeing discrepancies, they should see discrepancies. What should they do with those discrepancies? What do you want them to do about it? Do they have the opportunity to really voice their concerns and make a difference? Does their voice matter?

So, as you’re thinking about an anthem and giving people an anthem, it’s not something that you actually create for other people. Instead, it works so much better if a team gets together to create their own anthem because then they do have a voice. When you do have that company mission, vision, values and then try to get it to filter out through the whole company; different sites, different divisions, different teams, it’s good to have all that but it’s even better when a team can come underneath of that and in alignment with what you’ve already created be able to get even more specific about who they are as a team and who they are as an individual.

When they do that, you’re going to find that the people, the individuals have a clear sense of what they bring to the table, their own sense of perspective, identity and purpose and that they see how that connects with their teams sense of perspective, identity and purpose and then they see how their team fits into the strategic mission, vision, and values of the company then things feel more aligned.

People don’t see as many discrepancies or when they do, they have a better sense of what to do with those discrepancies when they come up. So as for the technical pieces of an anthem besides this general sense of perspective, identity and purpose, how do you do that? What process can you go through to take your people through this opportunity to find an anthem for your team?

There are different ways that you can do this. There are different people that have different systems that give you one word or give you a set of values or give you whatever. There are lots of different ways that you could do this. And the basic concept is that you want them to be very, very clear on the perspective, identity and purpose.

The way that we do it with companies when we do a voice of influence program for like a customer service team or a sales team is we go in and we identify the strengths of the team itself. People take the fascinate assessment and we give people the opportunity to create their own anthem and then from there, their own anthem in the Fascinate Assessment is like an adjective and a noun. It’s what you do best and how you do it.

So for example, empowering expression is one of the pieces of my personal anthem. So when I walk into a room, I’m thinking to myself, “This is what I bring to the table. I bring empowering expression. This is the perspective that I have. This is where I come from. I know in my own mind and heart just the background of why that’s important to me and what I’ve done to be able to get to the point where I can actually help people with that. I know that’s my identity. This is who I am, this is what I provide. But it’s also my purpose.”

I can help people by helping them be able to express themselves. And when I have that as my main mission, when that becomes the goal then most other things tend to fall into place because I’m very, very focused on what I can bring to the table. I’m very, very focused on my anthem.

When it comes to with voice of influence, and our anthem is Voice of Influence, what we have chosen to do is to take that same model, the adjective and the noun and create four or five different adjectives, noun phrases that would describe different pieces of who we say that we are and what we’re all about. And by doing that then we use a one sentence to describe that to make it very clear and then we use a question to ask, “Are we really doing that? How does this actually play out? Is this a thing that we can actually do? Are we doing it well?”

And so that is the basic format of the team anthem that we help teams create. You can do that on your own or if you need help with that, we could certainly help. But that is so important for people to be able to come together to create this together. And once you have an anthem, you can utilize the anthem to create a system of checks and balances to create a system of accountability if you’d like to incorporate it into your personal reviews, personal reviews for the person.

If culture and tribe and getting everybody together to be aligned with that mission, vision, and values of your company is important to you then spending time on an anthem, spending time on giving people a voice, helping people to find their own voice and to be able to connect it to the voice of your company is so worth it. Because in the end you’re going to get more buy-in and you’re going to get more engagement.

When people really feel like they understand the perspective of what this company is about, where they came from, what your company says that they are, who they are and who they are as a team within the company and then their purpose. When they know that your purpose and their purpose are connected, they’re going to be motivated to be able to do more and really truly embody the brand of your company.

If you’d like any more information about creating an anthem, you can find more information on our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net/99 and folks that means that next time it will be Episode 100 for the Voice of Influence podcast and we are celebrating here on our team. We’re very excited about Episode 100. So in that episode, I’m going to be back again to share with you what we have distilled over the past two years, two plus years of interviews and working with clients, working with individuals on their voice of influence. What are the six main elements of a Voice of Influence? Why are they so important?

Clarity around these things changes the game. When you are wanting to a difference, you need to know the six elements for yourself and for helping your team know these six elements for themselves. If you’re looking for emerging leaders to come up and come up the ranks in your company, this episode is for you. You’re going to want to hear it. We’re excited to share it with you next time and until then, until Episode 100. Go and find an anthem for your team and go make your voice matter more.

Posted on Monday, June 3, 2019

How to Build a Fun Feedback Culture

Episode 94

When you carry influence, there will be opportunities for you to speaking into the lives and others and others might see this and you being critical of them. As people of influence, we need to find ways to turn feedback into a situation that actually builds people up instead of making everyone as if they need to defend themselves. In this episode, I provide three tips for making a feedback culture normal and natural in your organization. Mentioned in this episode:

Email me: andrea@voiceofinfluence.net

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Posted on Monday, April 29, 2019

Help Your Workforce Become Ambassadors for Your Brand

Episode 89

As you likely know by now, I’ve been focusing on customer service for the past several weeks and interviewing my fellow Smart Customer Service conference speakers. Today, I would like to give you my personal takes on customer service. In this episode, I briefly discuss three of the most important aspects to keep in mind while building a customer support team and then I go in depth about the main component that often gets overlooked when working on these three things.

Mentioned in this episode:

Smart Customer Service Conference
Email Me: andrea@voiceofinfluence.net

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! So over the last couple of months, we have been really focusing in on customer service here at the Voice of Influence podcast. And the reason why we’ve been doing that is that I’m going to be speaking at Smart Customer Service, which is a national conference for customer service in Washington, DC on April 29^th through May 1^st. So, I’ve taken this opportunity to connect with other speakers at this event and invite them to participate in interviews for the Voice of Influence podcast for a couple of different reasons. First of all, to share customer service insights from some of the nation’s leading experts then also to be able to connect with them personally. I wanted to kind of get to know some of the people that I’d be speaking with and then also to promote the conference.

Well, today, I want to share with you a little bit more about what my take is on customer service. So, I think that we all know that service isn’t all about the other person. It’s about connecting with them, helping them solving their problems, making sure that they’re having a good experience with your brand, with your company or with your organization. You’re wanting to be there for the people that you’re here to serve. That’s what customer service is really all about. But there are a number of things that can get in the way of really doing it well. And some of those things have been already talked about in the last couple of months.

One of those things is branding and brand voice and making sure that customer service agents really know what to say, how to say it, and how to really communicate in a way that is in line with the company or the brand. So that the person who is calling or the person who is interacting with that customer service agent that they would always have a similar experience and that they would feel like they are really connecting with the brand when they’re connecting with that person. That’s one really important thing.

Another thing would be the idea of essential skills or the ability to communicate well, the ability to empathize, and the ability to write well utilizing those centralized documents or branding elements and bringing that into how they communicate. So communication is really another big piece of it.

And there’s always the issue of “Well, how do you keep people? How do you keep customer service agents? It’s a kinda hard job.” If you think about it, there are people who are listening to complaints almost all day long. Now, there are some benefits, I mean, one of the things that you do all day long is solve problems for people, and so in that sense, there is something that can really be satisfying about customer service. But in general, it can be a really kind of a difficult job. You’re always putting yourself out there to help out, but you might not always be able to be the one to make the difference. You might not always be able to solve the problem, and you might not always know what the next thing to do or where to send people. Or you might be dealing with somebody who’s really upset and they’re not necessarily mad at you, but you’re the one that sort of taking on the brands of all of the anger and frustrations of the person you might be speaking with. So, customer service agents also have to deal with that.

It’s a rough job; I mean it’s not easy to really do and to do it well. And so it’s difficult to keep people in those positions. So companies are always looking for ways to encourage people and to keep them. And one of those ways can be rewards and recognition, giving a raise, or keeping track of how well they’re doing on things. So, these are all really, really important aspects of doing customer service and having a customer service team and training them well to be able to handle all these situations and all these needs, and to know how to handle all of the technical things as well. But I fear that we can miss out on something if we just do those things. If we are giving them everything that they need but they’re not still staying, you know. Maybe they’re still leaving. They’re still not sticking around. The numbers aren’t as high as you want them to be or your customers are still coming back with a lot of complaints. Customer satisfaction still isn’t where you want it to be. Maybe you’re hitting the status quo and it’s working out okay for you, but you know that there’s another level. Like you know you could take it to the next level, but you’re not just sure how to do it because you’ve been working on all these different things like centralization of information and rewarding your people and doing all these things that you can to give them the skills that they need to be able to do what they need to do their jobs.

But I tell you, there’s something that is missing and that’s something gets down to the core of a person. And it hits on a human need that is so, so vital for us to connect with and that is helping your people to truly connect and genuinely connect with your company’s purpose and your customer’s need. So, when I think of customer service and all of the issues that are surrounding it, the struggles, the solutions, the main thing that I keep saying not being present, at least not to the degree that I think it could be is helping the workforce to truly connect with the company’s purpose, with the company’s values, their mission, or their vision to feel like they’re really a part of it. So that when they come to work every day, they feel like they have meaning, that their work has meaning and purpose. So they’re not just going to work but they’re going to meet a challenge, to bring the best of who they are to the challenges in front of them.

And my guess is that it if you’re listening to this episode, this podcast; you are probably the kind of person who really does want to see that happen for your people. You want them to feel purpose-driven. You want them to have a sense of passion inside of them and care about what their job is. You want them to have meaning and to feel like that their work matters in the world.

So on the podcast, I frequently ask guests “Why did you start getting interested in your specific area of expertise?” “Why do you do what you do?”

Well, let me answer that question for you. So, Voice of Influence is born out of my background in actually singing. When I was young, as a child, my family would sing together. We would go around to different churches in our small community and put on these little programs and I would sing solos and my sister and I would sing duets, and our family would sing all together. And we had this just little thing going on where we would sing a lot and I sang a lot growing up, and that was kind of what I wanted to do when I grew up.

When I was in high school, I ended up choosing a college that was a big music school, and I was really excited to be able to use my voice. And the reason why I was excited to use my voice is that I knew that when I got up in front of an audience that they would be moved by what I would sing, and I knew it because I’ve done it over and over again. I just knew how to connect to the meaning of the song and then invite other people into that experience so that they could connect to the meaning of the song as well. So that they would feel moved.

Well, one of my college professors, she taught me something about my voice. You see, voice is something that is really kind of personal. It’s different than playing the piano or playing a different instrument, because a different instrument, it could go out of tune on its own. You know a key could break or something could need oiled and that’s something that’s apart from the person who is performing. But a voice, on the other hand, this comes from your own body. It’s something that arises out of you. There is a certain natural ability that people have with their voice. They are able to sing high or low. They are able to have a certain kind of tone or hear the pitch so that they can make sure that they’re on key. All of these things are very, very personal because they come out of the person themselves.

And so when I was in college, I had a voice teacher who was sort of different than the ones I’d had before. Instead of just welcoming me into her room and starting our scales and then working on our technical details that came up within songs that I was practicing, she would start off by asking me how I was doing.

Now, why would she waste time at the beginning of every lesson to say, “How are you doing?” I asked her this one time and her response was something to the effect that “If people come into my office and they’re all worried about something else that’s going on, they’re not going to be able to use their voice freely.” And I thought that was so profound.

I see that and I see how people use their figurative voice, their voice of influence, the one that comes out of themselves in order to be able to have an impact on others. And this voice that wants to make a difference, this voice that wants to help, that wants to serve well, this voice is just as personal as the one that I was using to sing. It’s personal. There’s a vulnerability to using it and to practicing it. It can make a huge difference in somebody’s confidence level and their ability to really use it well.

So at Voice of Influence, we believe that everyone has the ability to have a voice of influence, that every voice is unique. That we’re born with the ability to do certain things and we’re born with the passion to do certain things but then we can also gain skills. We can get better in other areas as well.

We believe that every voice matters on a human level that every voice in your company matters and every voice that calls into your call center or works with your customer service team, that every one of those voices matters. But at the same time, we can do things to make them matter more. We can grow. We can become more of a voice of influence, not by forcing technique, not by saying, “We have to push it out.” “We’re trying to get people to do things.” “We’re trying to force our customer service team to say it this certain way or to drop people in and not to be forceful but to be influential, because it’s not only our voice that matter, it’s also the voice of the customer that matters as well.”

So if you’re wanting your customer service team to be an influence, to build their influence with your customers, then they need to know what it means to have a voice of influence. They need to be able to have a sense of their own personal identity and connect to the purpose of your company and really know what it means to be a voice of influence.

Do they need that knowledge? Do they need to be able to know what it is that your company does and how to help your customers and what their job is? Of course, they need that.

Do they need skills to learn how to communicate and to be able to handle the processes and the people well? Of course they do, but they also need to be able to connect to the purpose of your company.

They need to be able to awaken their passion and feel like they can be a genuine ambassador of sorts for your company. You don’t want your people to pretend that they care. You want them to actually care and that’s what your customers want as well. And if your people, if your workforce actually cares and they really do feel connected to the company, then they are going to be able to connect more naturally, more freely with your customers. And then soon your brand promise and your scripts, your centralized documents; those are going to become part of your customer service agents. Instead of having them be an external tool that they use, that they’re trying to put on for your customers, they’re going to become those things so that they truly embody the brand promise. The things that you really care about as a company, they’ll embody that and be able to be a true ambassador for your customers.

Now, one of the questions that always comes up is, well, if we know that this is what we need to do, if we know that it’s important to build culture, to do a good job of communicating our purpose and our values to our workforce, then why aren’t we doing it? Or why aren’t we studying the companies that do it really well that they’ve had success?

One of the answers that I’ve heard and I’ve heard it a number of times is that the executives feel like that’s beneath them. It’s beneath them intellectually to go down to that personal level and help their people to really connect with their company. But I don’t think that’s the only thing.

I think it might be to serve this level thing that you might see in some companies, but I think that more often than not leaders wanted to help their people do this. They see it. They see that it’s a good thing. They can acknowledge that at least in their heads. But deep down, they really don’t think that they have what it takes to pull it off.

Leaders struggle to think that they can actually help their people and really turn around the culture this idea of connecting. It may not be something that they’re good at, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t willing to go there. It’s just that it’s so scary because it’s not familiar.

But let me tell you something. If you have any desire, whatsoever, to really almost empower your workforce, to help them to embody your brand, your brand promise, to help them really become ambassadors for your company; if you long for that, if you want them to feel purpose and meaning in their work, that is all it takes to start the process. If you start out with that longing then I’m here to tell you that you can do it.

You do have what it takes. You may also need to develop skills. You may need to gain a sense of your own personal identity and your own personal sense of purpose. But if this isn’t purposeful, if it isn’t meaningful to help your people find meaning in their work to connect with your company in a deep meaningful way, then what it is? It starts with the longing and then if you really don’t feel like you have what it takes, if you’re not sure what next steps to take, then that’s something that we can help you with.

As I mentioned, I will be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference here in Washington, DC in about a week. And in that talk, I’m going to be talking specifically about what your people need in their training in order to be able to truly connect with your company and your company’s purpose. I’m also going to be talking about how to get buy-in, executive buy-in, as well as buy-in from managers and frontline service agents in order to make this kind of transformation.

If you’re able to be at my session, I would love to have you there. Please tell me that you listened to this podcast, I’ll have a special gift for you. If you’re not able to be there, then email me at andrea@voiceofinfluence.net. That’s andrea@voiceofinfluence.net. We will find a way to share that information with you because just like the people who work for you, your voice matters, and you can make it matter more.

Posted on Monday, April 22, 2019

How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Customer Relationship Management with Bob Fernekees

Episode 88

Over the past several weeks I’ve been speaking with other presenters who’ll be joining me at the Smart Customer Service conference in Washington D.C. starting on April 29^th. Well, today I have a very special treat for you because I was fortunate enough to speak with the leader of the conference, Bob Fernekees. Bob is also the Publisher of CRM Magazine. In this episode, Bob discusses what led him to the customer service industry and why it means so much to him, the work he does at CRM Magazine, how the Smart Customer Service brand came to be, the changes and trends he’s noticing in the customer service field, his thoughts on A.I. and how it will impact the landscape of customer service and brand management, the details of his upcoming Smart Customer Service conference, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Alright folks, so you know that the last couple of months we have been focusing in on customer service, in particular, in leading up to the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29th through May 1^st. And today I have with me Bob Fernekees who is the publisher of CRM Magazine and is in charge of this conference.

Andrea: So Bob, we’re honored to have you with us today.

Bob Fernekees: Great! I’d love being here, Andrea. I love it!

Andrea: Alright, so Bob, can you tell us, first of all, tell us a little bit about CRM Magazine and what you do there?

Bob Fernekees: OK. Well, I’m the publisher of the magazine and I understand that a lot of people may not know where the magazine is these days. But it was the chief form of communication, especially in B2B 20 years ago. We launched the magazine in 1998 actually as sales and field force automation. Around 2000, we saw that things were changing and we changed the name of the magazine to CRM Magazine.

Sales and field force automation is still a thing, believe me, but CRM has grown well beyond the scope of just sales and marketing customer service. But I’d say in the last 20 years, the big change has been that the customer service piece has really become huge. And that’s reflected in the pages of the magazine or website Destination CRM.

And we actually started a second website, Smart Customer Service to support not only the conference, but really to give customer service people a dedicated place where they could get information. Not much marketing automation or sales type of information, it’s 100 percent customer service focused. So, we’re still going strong 21 years later, so it’s been an exciting ride and things have changed so much but I’m sure you know that as well, Andrea. Things have changed, you know, unbelievably in the last 20 years in technology.

Andrea: Oh, certainly. So what are some of the biggest changes that you’re seeing now?

Bob Fernekees: Well, you know, it’s funny because every single year, there’s almost a theme of new technologies that are sort of bursting on the scene and really become just all over the place in terms of media coverage and messaging from vendors and things that people are concerned about. This year, definitely I would have to say artificial intelligence and machine learning is sort of the big buzz.

As with most technologies that especially really large, you know, large life-changing technologies, it will take many years for these technologies sort of work themselves through the system. And probably in 20 years from now, they’ll kind of dropout of sight almost like when, the turn of the 2000’s cloud computing was a huge change in technology.

It couldn’t even be thought of before that because, you know, in the 1990s, late 1990s, most people were still using dial up. You just didn’t have the bandwidth or the infrastructure to support real cloud computing. But now it would be really odd if you heard, end users or vendors touting their ability to kept cloud computing. It just becomes everywhere and that’s probably what’s going to happen to a large degree with the artificial intelligence and machine learning, you know, in a decade or two.

Andrea: So it’ll be so normal that we won’t even talk about it anymore.

Bob Fernekees: Absolutely. I guarantee that that will happen.

Andrea: Sure.

Bob Fernekees: And there are many, many different cases of that, but you know, just think cell phones, just think anything. And yeah that’s the way it’ll go but it’ll take a while.

Andrea: So do you think that AI will replace customer service to a certain degree or completely? Or do you think that there’s always going to be a role for human to human connection in customer service?

Bob Fernekees: Well that’s a really good question and we’ve done lots of webcasts and lots of content around this. And I could tell you for the foreseeable future, AI, machine learning, you know, all the technology portions of it will do pretty much more of the same which is what the technology does great. It takes low value interactions and automates them. So that nobody really wants to talk to a human being, especially if they want to do something that’s fairly simple.

And that will just become, you know, web self-service on steroids where the AI or the machine learning portion of it will just make that so much easier, so much faster, so much more efficient voice, which was a big thing 20 years ago is coming back around with all the conversational technologies and natural language, you know, conversion. So that people will be interacting instead of using a keyboard, especially since everybody is on their cell phones right now, a voice will become huge.

And so all of that self-service that can be conducted through AI or machine learning will be done, but there will always be humans on the other side, especially for high value or really complex or just the out-of-the-ordinary types of questions and issues. Now, from what I understand is that, that will really make the life of your typical contact center agent a lot more interesting just because they won’t constantly be asking, “How do I reset my password?” “How do I do this?” “How do I do that?” They’ll just be dealing more or less on more interesting, less repetitive types of service issues.

Andrea: High value, as you said. Interesting. I just had a question in my mind, just a second. So how do you see AI helping being almost like a brand asset more than even just as a quick answer to solve a problem? Is there a way the AI is or can be even encouraging the brand connection with the customer or is it mostly going to be just “This is the way we do it. We get it done fast and that’s what we’re offering you here in this moment.” Is there any kind of way to connect with the brand anymore with AI?

Bob Fernekees: You know what, I think that really forward-looking business leaders right now are looking at that piece of it, AI and brand, really hard because you know as the old song goes, it’s really, you know, a lot more…well, put it this way, selling on price the old way doesn’t really create value for a brand because everybody can sell at a lower rate up to a given point.

Andrea: Uh-hmm.

Bob Fernekees But when you’re using AI, and that’s the other great thing about the industry and the technology piece that we’re in right now, Andrea, is that it’s not customer service and marketing have blended together, customer service and sales have blended together. So in many ways, there won’t really be those kinds of delineations. Yeah, there’ll be outreach demand generation and those types of things but building a brand that will be done through sort of a mixing or melding of all three. So when you’ve got AI into the mix and, you know, machine learning, you’ll really have brand managers trying to capture the essence of what their brand is to a prospect or a customer.

Now, it’s really hard to see when we’re talking about consumer product goods. I don’t know enough about consumer product goods, I’ll say it right now, but to build a brand around, you know let’s say laundry detergent is really hard for me personally to conceptualize. To build a brand around mountain climbing equipment, that seems a lot easier because, you know, immediately you can say that, you know, “Hey, delivering high quality content, or somebody climbing El Capitan is something that could really enhance your brand.” I’m sure you can do that on a laundry detergent side too, but it’s just a lot easier when you think of a brand that’s much more extreme.

So yeah, I think, you know, AI will definitely allow all those things and it’ll be able to do trillions of computations to say that Andrea Wenburg would really enjoy receiving this communication from us and here’s what we think will be her next action and, you know, all those things that you can’t really do right now. And it’s probably very hard for a lot of people to conceptualize these things right now just because no one else has. But we’re headed into that territory where there will be lots and lots of clever users that no one has thought of before. I mean, just think of Facebook.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Bob Fernekees: I mean, you know, everybody knew it’s a great idea just because there was social media before that, but to this extent, probably not literally changing democracy.

Andrea: Oh yeah. Well, and I was even thinking about Facebook algorithms and how the other day I purchased a Growth Mindset workbook for my kids, OK. And then the next day on both Instagram and Facebook, I’m seeing ads about another workbook by that same company that’s on resilience now.

Bob Fernekees: Right.

Andrea: It’s a lot like what you’re talking about in terms of being able to predict what the next step would be for the customer.

Bob Fernekees: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, I think the way that most companies, and believe me it’s getting way, way, way more complex, especially up to maybe two years ago, I think most companies did that type of ad serving, you know, in a very heavy-handed flatfooted type of way. So that if you bought a Ford car and signed the deal last month for the next six months, you’d be seeing ads for Ford cars and it’s like “Ohh, I already bought one and I don’t know why I kept seeing this now.”

Now, you know, that’s just a technology in its infancy. But, you know, now whether or not they predicted the needs of your children to get these workbooks, probably not, but they definitely predicted your likelihood of buying another workbook on a similar but different topic in serving you that ad. And that’ll just get way more, way more creepy.

Andrea: You know that’s an interesting way to put it, because I do think that people feel a little like creeped out by things like that.

Bob Fernekees: Sure.

Andrea: Yeah, they probably should. But at the same time, it sounds like we’re going to be not creeped out by that in 20 years is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees: Well, yeah. Like I said, I mean, you know, there’s an episode of The Office where Dwight is trying to sell his car to Andy and he keeps saying, “Buy this car, buy this car, buy this car.” And that’s kind of what we’re getting right now in terms of the immaturity of technology right now. So, yes, it does sound, you know, it is heavy-handed and not real subtle. But, you know, possibly in the future there will be targeted offers for things that you really need, didn’t know about but could really use that ad value to your life other than just buying the exact same workbook with a slightly different content.

Andrea: Sure.

Bob Fernekees: And, you know, in all the ramifications like how I could figure out how old these kids are and what they’re doing, you know, going along through every grade that they go into from now until they get out of school.

Andrea: Sure. Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m trying to think of what the subtle way of doing that would be, but it would be something less obvious is what you’re saying.

Bob Fernekees: Something less obvious but also could be completely, you know, obvious or it could be something like “Hey, you know, you bought a car and that one component of it, you know, that 100900 was bad and it could fail.” Well, you know, that’s just a recall issue but you kind of get what I’m trying to say that there could be some things that are like a lot more helpful to you and of value to you.

Andrea: You were talking about forward-thinking companies and it sounds like they really do have to be forward thinking. They really do have to be able to map out the customer experience and journey and what could possibly happen and all those sorts of things, so lots of innovation and forward thinking, like you’re talking about.

Bob Fernekees: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that probably astounds people that aren’t, you know, sort of sitting in our seats where we get to see lots of different vendors and lots of different applications and end users. So you’ve got a really broad view of things. That’s an inch deep, but you do have a broad view of the customer service market.

And one of the things that really surprises me all the time is how much real thought, real effort, and real research goes into customer journey mapping and all of the different sort of strategic people process type, definitely the technology too. But, you know, just sort of encapsulating the whole thing, obviously, you can’t just plunk technology and you really need a strong idea of how you want your customer to progress and all of those other things that go along with great technology, but it’s amazing to me. And I’ve met such intelligent people that have really devoted a lot of serious research and I’m sure you have as well. That’s the part that is really encouraging to me.

And the other thing, having done this for quite a while and just seeing things progress, is how far people’s expectations have come. I mean, it’s hard to believe that we used to do things the way we used to do. It was the best you could do at the time. But I think 10 years from now, we’ll be looking back on 2019 as a stone age, as how did we ever deal with having to dial a phone or, you know, just the simple things. So it’s really encouraging and there are a lot of really smart people that have put a lot of time and effort into figuring that out.

Andrea: So Bob, what drives you in this industry? Like why did you get involved in the first place and what kind of, I don’t know kind of excites you about it or feels like it’s a purposeful for you?

Bob Fernekees: Well, OK that’s a fair question. Basically, I was involved in the professional broadcast video film industry on the publishing side. I worked for CBS, but I also worked for magazines, you know, magazines that dealt with professional B2B broadcast video and film production. So, you know, I kind of did that. Me and another salesman actually split the cost of some sales force automation software. I got really interested in at that point.

And around 1998, I guess it was, I heard of a magazine that was starting up. I really liked the idea of it because that just, for whatever reason that’s what I did. I felt like it was going to be a really interesting area to go into. Like I said, the sales automation part of it really was eclipsed very quickly by much larger customer service aspects.

Marketing automation, people don’t really probably remember this, but really marketing automation, didn’t really start to take off until after 2010 in my opinion or maybe even a little bit earlier than that. But you know, it’s relatively new, which is a really exciting piece of it as well but, it’s relatively new. But that’s kind of how I got interested in CRM. It was through Sales Force Automation which was the first iteration.

And when we launched the magazine, it did extremely well. We changed the magazine to a name CRM Magazine. At that point in time, I think there was only one analyst that was using “customer relationship management” as an acronym, so we kind of see where things are going. And for the last 20 years or so, it’s just been really exciting because there’s different that kind of die out and the river changes course, and it’s just really an interesting way to just watch for patterns and see what’s coming up.

You know, we’ve jumped into technologies or different facets which haven’t exactly panned out. Mostly things don’t pan out and then they come back in five years or so when there were more possible to do. Like I said, when I started off cloud computing, I mean, there were people trying to do cloud computing in the late ‘90s and it was virtually impossible because they still tried it. People still bought solutions, but trying to do cloud computing on dial up connections was, you know, hard.

Andrea: Yes. I’ve heard that sometimes it’s better to be the second one on the scene after the first person is kind of, yeah, yeah. OK, so let’s talk a little bit more about the conference. So what are the different aspects of the conference or the tracks and tell us a little bit more about it.

Bob Fernekees: Sure. OK, so first of all, we’ve got the conference coming up April 28th through May 1^st, Washington, DC. It’s actually work distinct conferences co-located together. So it’s a total of about eight tracks. Now, you know, if you had a Venn diagram sort of the piece in the middle would be customer experience. We’ve got speech tech. Speech technologies are used in all sorts of things, conversational interfaces for one. We’ve got some great keynote speakers, which we’ll talk more about that.

But speech tech, huge with contact center, huge in many other different ways. We’ve got CRM Evolution. Brent Leary is the chair. That’s three tracks. We’ll be covering the breadth of CRM technologies and people and processes as well. Geoff Ables is doing smart customer service. Actually, it’s the first year that Brent is doing CRM alone, and Geoff will be doing smart customer service. That looks like it’s going to be really exciting, super successful, and it’s a great place if you want to come and meet people.

As I was mentioning to you before, we’ve also got a digital experience as well, which is a newcomer. That’s the fourth conference as well. But just, you know, to stick with the customer service portion of it, the thing that we’ve done differently with, especially CRM Evolution Smart Customer Service, is that although we have speakers that are aspirational CMO’s of very large companies. We also got people that you actually read on our websites and in our magazine.

So lots of analysts, lots of well-known authors, industry gurus, thought leaders, and you know, you can put a name to the face. It’s a conference where it’s very easy to talk to these people. It’s not a large conference where, you know, the session ends and you can’t get near the speaker. So if it’s a really good place to get out, meet people, and especially meet some of your peers and do some networking on the peer side as well.

Andrea: Great! OK, so who would you say it’s for just any company that’s dealing with these particular issues, or is there any more of specificity to the target audience?

Bob Fernekees: Well, you know, that’s a great question. We do everything in a broad way. So we’re like horizontal. It doesn’t really matter to us if somebody is in financial services versus government applications. For us, especially for Smart Customer Service, 90 percent of the people that go to the conference are involved in customer service probably at the manager or the director level, really depends on the size of the company. If we had a VP from Zappos, they’d probably be speaking not in the audience but there could be a VP from a smaller company and that’s kind of how those things go.

But, you know, it’s great for all sorts of call center or customer service or people that are dealing with customer experience. And like I said, there’s so much research and information out there to go to the conference and to be able to ask the speaker, “Hey, you know, I’m seeing some conflicting information,” or “Here’s my company, here’s our situation.” And to get some positive feedback with an expert because a lot of the speakers are consultants, analysts, people that seen a wide variety of different types of end users and also have an in depth knowledge of a wide variety of industry solutions and technologies.

So, it’s a great place to come and ask those types of questions. In today’s day and age, you know, a lot of people don’t like to pick up the phone. But I still think that, you know, getting face to face and making connections with people is just a great way to go beyond, you know, remove the digital wall and make a human connection and there’s so many different ways things can go from there.

Andrea: I can definitely attest to the personability or the way that the speakers are ready to connect and help out. Because having interviewed more than a handful of them, I know that they all really care and they’re sincere and they are smart. And I just really enjoyed connecting with them personally and so I know that your attendees are going to really appreciate being able to connect with the speakers as well.

Bob Fernekees: Yeah. You know, as we were talking before, you know, one of the things that I really liked about this industry is the type of people and professionals that, you know, have made this career. I definitely like working with people like this and just having them enhanced my life and definitely enhanced my professional life as well.

Andrea: OK, Bob, so anybody that’s listening, if you’re on the fence, it’s time to sign up because it’s right around the corner here now. And, Bob, if they can’t make it or even if they do make it, what kind of offerings does CRM have? Do you have a magazine? Tell us a little bit more about how they can connect with CRM Magazine and your other offerings.

Bob Fernekees: OK, so, just right off the bat because I may not have mentioned this is that if you googled CRM magazine, you’d find our site. Our site is actually called destinationCRM. So you can go there, you can sign up for the magazine. It’s free to anybody that’s qualified. If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m sure you must be qualified unless you have a strange taste in podcast. So just go there, sign up for the magazine, either site destinationCRM or smartcustomerservice.

You can sign up for any of our newsletters, any of our webcast. By the way, we do webcasts once a week on different topics. You’ll be notified if you sign up for one of our newsletters or promotions of what we’ve got coming up. People really love those. We’ve been doing them for 20 years back in 1998 when there was no broadband and we were trying to do them live from a TV station through camera shoot when there was no broadband. So that was an interesting thing.

So yeah, we’ve had some troubles with getting a little bit ahead of the technology. But, you know, we’ve got that. We got tons of white papers and we will have a bunch of the content on video that you can watch after the conference is over. Most of it will be edited down. So you’re getting more of a flavor or maybe some of the major bullet points, but I think we will have some long format video as well. So there’ll be those opportunities, but there’s nothing like sitting in the audience of, you know, I’m thoroughly convinced.

Andrea: Yes, I agree. And you know what, if you happen to be there on April 30th, I’ll be speaking at 1:45 about transforming your call center from a customer service model into a customer’s ascension model for profit and purpose. So I would love to see you there too.

So, Bob, thank you so much for being here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast and for providing this fantastic conference and connecting people to all these really important solutions around customer relationship management. And we’ll be sure to link everything that you talked about in the show notes on our website.

Bob Fernekees: Great! Thanks so much, Andrea. It was fun being here and I just think you’re doing a great job. It’s pleasure meeting you. I can’t wait to meet you at the conference in person.

Andrea: Great! See you then.

Posted on Monday, April 8, 2019

Counterintuitive Ways to Overcome Service Obstacles with Jeff Toister

Episode 86

Jeff Toister has written three customer service books; including his new book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service. Jeff has been recognized as a top customer service thought-leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and COM100. More than 140,000 people on six continents have taken his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning (a.k.a. Lynda.com). His training videos include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture. In this episode, Jeff discusses his new book, how he got into the customer service field, why he firmly believes providing great customer service isn’t just a matter of using common sense, why customer service leaders shouldn’t be dismissive of angry customers, how customers sabotage the service they receive, a breakdown of the “Zone of Hospitality,” and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

So, if you’ve been listening to episodes in the last few weeks, you know that we are talking to experts in the area of customer service, in particular, because I’ll be speaking at Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29^th through May 1^st. And we’re speaking with some of those other presenters for the conference and today is definitely going to be a treat. If you want to know more about the Smart Customer Service Conference, you can go to voiceofinfluence.net where we will have links to that conference there.

Today, I have with me Jeff Toister. Jeff Toister has written three customer service books, including his book, Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service that just came out a week ago from this airing of this podcast. He has been recognized as a top customer service thought leader by Global Gurus, ICMI, and Comm100. More than 140,000 people on six continents have taken his video-based training courses on LinkedIn Learning Lynda.com and Jeff’s training videos include Customer Service Foundations and Leading a Customer-Centric Culture.

Andrea: Jeff, it’s great to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jeff Toister: Oh, Andrea, thank you so much for having me and I have to commend you, it’s fantastic that you’re doing these podcast sessions in the lead up to the Smart Customer Service Conference. So I’m really looking forward to see you in person at the conference but, of course, I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Andrea: Yeah. This has been really fun. It’s been fun to connect with people and I think that what’s interesting is that everybody has a little bit different perspective and a little bit different of expertise to bring to the table and that’s always exciting to really hear that. And I know that you just came out with your book; can you tell us a little bit about your new book?

Jeff Toister: Sure. Well, it’s called Getting Service Right as you said, and the promise behind that is just that all of us have experienced poor customer service and if you were customer service leadership, you’ve seen your employees deliver poor service. And most of the time their reaction is “It’s so obvious what they should have done, I can’t believe they didn’t do it the right way.” And what the book tackles are hidden, counterintuitive, sometimes unusual obstacles that get in the way. And they’re all based upon real experiences. I’ve done the research so you don’t have to but then I’ve also found solutions that actually work. And so it’s kind of a fun look at how hard it really is to serve customers but how we can learn to be much, much better.

Andrea: What was the kind of the origin story of Jeff Toister? Were you always interested in customer service? What got you into this field?

Jeff Toister: Little did I know that I would start this book or get interested in customer service or training, and really I have a background as a customer service trainer. The very first customer I’ve ever served, my very first job, it was a service failure and has spurred me forward.

So what happened was, I was working in a retail store. I’m in high school, so I’m nervous. I don’t have a lot of experience and the person who was supposed to be training be gave me about 15 minutes of orientation and said “Well, I’m going on break, here’s the key to the dressing room, good luck!” And I was terrified and so I’m secretly hoping no one comes and talks to me until she comes back from break. But of course, you know, my worst fear is a customer who approaches me and he was definitely had this kind of tension, like he was looking for something and he needed help. So he comes right up to me and says “Do you carry Dockers?”

And I didn’t know and now you know and I know and I’m sure your listeners know, if you don’t know the answers to a question, go ask someone who does. But tell that to a 16-year-old kid who’s nervous and barely knows what he’s doing. I couldn’t stop my mouth from saying what my brain was thinking, which is I don’t know. That’s actually a skill to stop your mouth from saying everything what’s going on in your brain. That’s a skill you learn overtime. And at 16, I hadn’t learned that yet, so I said very nervously, “I don’t know,” and I didn’t get a second chance. He got angry “Kids these days,” stormed out of the store.

I remember feeling in that moment like an idiot. I knew I said the wrong thing. It was my inexperienced that didn’t prevent me from doing the right thing. And so I wanted to get better and never feel that way again but I also realized that it was certainly my fault. I needed to take responsibility. I was also not set up for success. The person who should have been training me didn’t put me in a position where I could answer that question with confidence. So that’s always fascinated me how can we set people up for success, and in particular, in the customer service world.

Andrea: It makes a difference for the company but it makes a difference for that person too. I’m sure that as a 16 year old, you were feeling like, who am I, what am I doing and that sort of thing when it came to that difficult conversation that ended up happening.

Jeff Toister: Well, of course, and you know, most of us, I’m sure you had that new job feeling. I think we’ve all had that feeling at once whether it goes well or it doesn’t go well. You have a certain level of nervousness and then to have a failure almost immediately on top of that. You know, failure can be a powerful learning experience but it can also be a signal to a lot of us that “I made a bad decision. I don’t even know why I’m working here.” And often that happens to employees. They have such a horrible first experience at first introduction that you lose their commitment almost instantly when they start a job.

Andrea: Absolutely. Yeah and then it has ripple effects for sure. So I’m curious why did you end up writing this particular book? I know that you’ve written a couple of other ones as well. What led you to this one in particular?

Jeff Toister: I think it’s the notion that customer service is easy. I’ve heard so many people, even leaders talk about it in terms of common sense. I wanted to debunk that. I’m very curious about kind of the why behind how people operate. So I would see somebody, you know, do something and I’d wonder why they did it, you know, whether it was good or bad performance.

And I started kind of digging into research and the more I dug, the more I found. So as an example, one thing that’s always frustrated me as a customer service trainer is how dismissive many leaders are about angry customers. And they’ll tell an employee, “Just don’t take it personally.” I never like that. I didn’t think that was very helpful advice. So the more I looked into it, the more I realized, you know, we all have this instinct called the fight or flight instinct where when we’re confronted with an angry person, our instinct is either to fight them, you know hopefully not physically, but we argue with them perhaps or flee. And that’s the flight part, in other words, to get away. Yet, in customer service, we’re saying, you can’t argue with them and you also can’t run away, you have to smile and take it.

So our instinct as a human being goes against the very fabric of what you’re supposed to do in customer service. And when I realized that I said “That’s something, right? We need to help employees deal with this.” And then if you look at the leaders, I discovered really fascinating study that it’s easier for our customer service leader to delegate something unpleasant to an employee than it is for them to do it themselves.

In other words, that customer service leader who is dismissive and says, don’t take it personally, they’re probably insulating themselves from those same angry customers. So it’s easy for them to give that flippant advice because they don’t have to worry about taking it personally. And those types of things over and over I kept finding that there are ways around these repeated service failures, we just need to find them. And ultimately, that all the research became a book.

Andrea: So is there some sort of purpose then that’s driving you to solve these problems, to dig into these questions and these things that you’re saying? Why do you care? Why did you go into this?

Jeff Toister: Well, I think at a basic level. I don’t want anybody to feel like I felt when I was that 16 year old. But what I’m fascinated by is really helping people and teams unlock their hidden potential. And this is very similar, I think, to what you do. So I would call myself a customer service trainer, it was really what I started doing. But there’s so much more than formal training. There’s often different obstacles that are in the way that have nothing to do with training. And to me, it’s both fascinating to figure out what the obstacles are but then immensely rewarding to help an individual or to help a team figure out a way to overcome the obstacle.

And sometimes it’s surprising. And an example, a small company years ago hired me to do customer service training because the CEO felt that employees were being rude. So the natural solution they jumped to is, let’s do a class to teach to teach people to not be rude. It turns out most of us know how to be polite. It’s situational, so what’s causing the rudeness. And I spent 15 minutes with the team and it’s not that I’m some sort of wizard, it’s just I asked questions where the leaders in that organization did not. And what I learned was that, at certain times of day, certain days of the week, they were under staffed and they would have people waiting on the phone for 30 minutes. Well, that creates this kind of tension, right? “I’m nervous about how many people are on hold so I naturally get abrupt with the person I’m talking to because I’m trying to get them off the phone. I’m anticipating the next person is going to be angry at me for keeping them waiting.” And so that was really the root cause.

And for this company, fortunately, the solution was pretty easy. They just needed to change their schedule to better match demand. Sometimes they had too few people, but other times they had too many people. And so without adding staff, they just needed to redistribute their staff throughout their week to better match when those people were actually going to be calling. And that small adjustment was enough to dramatically change the perception of rudeness with no training required. And so to me that is so much fun, but the reward is this great performance where before those employees were pretty frustrated with their jobs.

Andrea: Hmm, I love that because I’ve noticed that with individuals, with teams that sometimes you think that something is an internal problem like I have a problem, there’s something that I’m doing wrong. There’s something that I don’t know psychologically that’s wrong or whatever. But when it turns out, it’s a piece of overwhelm or stress that could so easily be taken care of with a slight tweak like you’re talking about. That’s fantastic!

Jeff Toister: I guess the only problem is I end up talking myself out of doing the training class, but that’s OK. I’ve learned to accept that. I’d rather have my client be successful than to sell them to the cookie-cutter solution.

Andrea: Right. I’m sure that the training would still be beneficial though. You seem to be really connected to why things matter and motives and things like that. Have you found that values play a pretty important role when making customer related business decisions?

Jeff Toister: Values are tricky and I’ll tell you why. You know, almost every company has set of values. The most common value, there was a study, and I apologized because it’s at the top of my head and I can’t remember who did the study. It’s a few years old, but they looked at the most common corporate values, and the number one value was integrity. And what’s interesting about that is Enron listed integrity as one of its core values.

And you may know the story and your listeners may know the story, it’s one of the hugest scandals involving fraud in the history of US. So there’s a huge disconnect between stated values in what we say are our corporate values and what are values actually are.

Values are actually are agreed upon norms that influence your behavior and thinking and it’s great if they’re explicitly defined. But what really tell us what the true values are are the behaviors and how people act, how people communicate, and how people treat each other. And so in a lot of our organizations, I mean every organization, has values. The question is whether or not their actual values match what the value statements are on the company website. And I’ll give you an example from my own client work.

A mid-sized credit union hired me to work with them to understand how well their values that they communicated to the entire organization and how well people are living them. And it was a fascinating project because almost everybody in the organization could recite. There were five core values. They could all recite them. So they’ve done a fantastic job of that. Where they struggled was there was universal disagreement as to what behaviors constituted a values match. And even on the executive team, they could not agree as to what living the values actually looked like and not to coincidentally one of their values was integrity.

Andrea: Sorry, it took me just a second understanding what you meant by that. That was pretty good.

Jeff Toister: It’s alright. It was an Enron call back, right?

Andrea: Yes.

Jeff Toister: Everybody’s got integrity as a value. It doesn’t mean that your…

Andrea: Right. That was good. Yeah, I think that there can be such a huge disconnect but when those things are connected, it does seem to make a difference.

Jeff Toister: It’s huge because then you can explicitly say, this is how we operate and you can share that with your employees and then they’ll know exactly what behaviors are appropriate and rewarded and what behaviors are frowned upon.

Andrea: So I’d like to get into your book a little bit if you don’t mind. There are few different things that came up for me that I’d like to ask you about and one of those really stood out to me. You say that customers can sabotage the service that they receive, what does that mean?

Jeff Toister: I’ll start with the research. I always like to start with the research.

Andrea: Great!

Jeff Toister: Two things; one is customer service expert named John Goodman who has done a lot of research on customer service data and the sources of service failure. In his research uncovered that about 20 percent of service failures are caused by the employees, about 60 percent, this is a rough-cut, are caused by poor product service or processes, so out of the employees’ hands, and about 20 percent caused by customer errors.

And some of those errors are accidental “I’m confused by the instructions.” “I don’t know how to operate this product,” and some are delivered. There’s this air of certainty that customer sometimes possessed that they’re doing it right even when they’re doing it wrong, which leads to something else that’s fascinated me on this notion that we have that the customer is always right. And I think a lot of people believe that.

And I in fact, I want to do a research, who first said this? Like I was kind of angry, I wanted to track them down and maybe send them like a box of glitters or something. I’m just not happy with this person and come to find out no one first said it. What has happened is over the years, we’ve taken quotes and there are several potential candidates for the origin, but we’ve taken quotes and twisted them to mean something different. An example, one possible origin is Cesar Ritz, you know, the Ritz Carlton Hotels. He allegedly said, from the research I found, he said “The customer is never wrong.” And the context of that is not that customers don’t make mistakes, they do. It’s just that we don’t argue with customers. We try to help them be right.

You can imagine if we’re both on the same side that can work beautifully. But if there’s an insistence on the customer point of view that “No matter what I’ve done, I’m right and you have to figure out how to fix it,” that’s doesn’t lead itself naturally to great service outcomes. And unfortunately a lot of customers have that attitude and that leads them to, you know, withhold key information or dig their heels in and refuse to follow a sensible solution, you know, get unreasonably angry.

There’s even something I lovingly call “the rule of three,” which is customer psychologically will exaggerate how bad things are sometimes by a factor of three just to make it feel like it’s actually bad. You know, if I waited five minutes, I’m not going to get any of my friends to cry with me about that. But if I say, I waited 15 minutes, maybe. Or you know if the person was stern with me that won’t engender sympathy, but if they cussed me out, uh, well that was terrible. So customer will often exaggerate about how bad things are as well.

Andrea: Really, why do you think that they do that?

Jeff Toister: I think it goes back to the customer is always right. If you created this construct that I am right, you are wrong, the psychological defenses come up and they start protecting our ego by doubling down on “No, it’s your fault and you have to fix it, I’m the customer.”

Andrea: You know, that’s interesting and I’m going to take this to an interesting, a different place for just a second. But I’m a part of an initiative where were working on bringing more positive communication about our community to social media in conversations and things like this. And one of the things that we’re noticing is that there are a lot of people who do this, who kind of exaggerate in those small groups.

You know, I’ve got a group around me and maybe I’m getting my hair done and I start talking and I start making a little bit of exaggeration and I start placing the blame on other folks. It’s almost like customer service. It’s almost like the people of a community even looking at their town as a company that they’re not being served by but in a sense almost, I’m having an a-ha moment so, you know, forgive me. But it feels like kind of what you’re saying, does that sound similar to you?

Jeff Toister: It does, and part of it is I think positive fuels better. We’re naturally wired to be more heavily influenced by the negative.

Andrea: Yeah.

Jeff Toister: So in a service situation, companies often talk about wowing the customer. What we should really work hard to do is avoid angering the customer which is equally challenging. But the impact of a wow versus the impact of a service failure, that service failure is far more impactful because negative things stand out more. That’s why we see more negative new stories.

That’s why, you know, we hear more people complaining rather than saying, that was really good. It’s just how we’re wired. And I’ve learned to stop feeling bad about us being human and just try to better understand it, like in a customer service context knowing that people are naturally wired to think about things in more of the negative. I’ve spend more time there and I think companies spend more time trying to prevent things from failing.

And the funny thing about that is you can be perceived as brilliant by your customers if you’re just consistently good. You know, forget the wow stuff. That’s really tough to do and you don’t get a chance to do it every day. Just be consistently good, make what people’s lives a little bit easier and somehow that stands out from the crowd.

Andrea: OK, what is the zone of hospitality?

Jeff Toister: The zone of hospitality is kind of a mindset thinking that anybody around me and this generally works, I think more so in face-to-face situation, so retail, restaurant, hospital, etc. Anybody around me, I’m creating a zone of hospitality and I’m going to make them feel welcome and try to help them. This can be a challenge because of the way people are led, so let’s use a retail example. In retail, a lot of associates on the retail sales floor have customer service responsibilities but they also have kind of task oriented responsibilities, like rearrange a display or fold all of those jeans.

Well, at the end of the day, it’s easier for the manager to be able tell if the display or the task was completed versus whether or not that employee was servicing customers at a very high level. So the default usually coming from the leaders is to focus on the task first rather than service first. And so zone of hospitality is just kind of a mindset that says, I’m going to create a zone of hospitality around me regardless of whether or not this person fits kind of my job or my department.

I’m going to help them out. I worked with a client that was on a college campus and they had people in a variety of different roles and it just wasn’t their job say to help a student find a classroom. But the zone of hospitality says, I see someone with that lost look on their face wandering through my area near to me. As a human, I can tell they have a need and so I’m going to approach them in a friendly manner and offer them assistance. So that mindset says, despite it not being the task oriented part of my job, I’m still creating this zone to make them feel welcome and find a way to help them.

Andrea: Yes, zone is so important. You talked also about viewing our roles from the customer’s perspective and that there’s sometimes a difference or a dissonance between the way that we see or what we see our job to be and what they see our job to be. Is this similar to what you’re just talking about? Does that coincide with that?

Jeff Toister: It does. I’d say it’s little parallel. The example there is have you ever had computer problems where you needed to contact support or IT internally?

Andrea: Of course.

Jeff Toister: Well all have, right? So think about it and that could be a perfect example. When you’re having computer problems, your need is to get back to work, to do whatever it is that you were doing. It’s very natural for the IT support person to view your need in terms of the language you use. My computer is not working, so it just naturally, they’ll focus on the task fixing your computer and there becomes a disconnect because you really need to get back to work. You don’t care how they do that, and they’re looking at the kind of more technical aspect of providing solutions. But the most technical and easiest solution might not be the best way to get you back to work. And so that requires kind of reframing things from the customer’s point of view saying “Well, how do I get you back to work?”

An example, I was once hosting a webinar and I needed support about 20 minutes before the webinar started and I kind of panicked and nervous because I have all these people, you know, it’s a client that’s paying me to host this webinar and now things aren’t working. And I’ll never forget the technical support walked me through the problem, but she was also very sensitive to my anxiety because I explained what was happening. And she did something I’ll never forget she said, “I’m gonna stay on the line with you until your webinar starts just to make sure everything is working properly.” Now, she was focused on a task.

She would say, “Hey, it’s working, I’m onto the next thing.” If her job was evaluated based upon efficiency, that would be exactly the behavior that she should have chosen. But in that moment, I was lucky enough to have someone who’s realizing that the real need here was to give me some relief that my webinar was going to go off without a hitch. And by staying with me just a little bit longer, I had so much more confidence and peace of mind. Then if she had simply fixed the problem, I still would have been really nervous about it.

Andrea: I love that. Almost like a safety blanket.

Jeff Toister: That’s very true.

Andrea: That’s fantastic! So do you think that there’s pretty clear line or is it kind of difficult for companies to decide when customer service should be more based on, you know, completing the task and efficiency versus being able to provide that extra level of emotional support as well that that you’re just talking about?

Jeff Toister: This is where it gets a little counterintuitive for leaders if we look at how things are measured. We use contact centers an example because there are so many things that are measured. I know how long an agent spends on a phone call and I know how long they spend on their average call and I know how much that costs me. That’s very tangible. So the default, because it’s easy to measure that and I’m trying to be efficient and reduce costs, the default is to measure handle time or how many emails per hour you can respond or how many chats you can handle at one time and clear out in your shift.

The challenge with that, of course, is when you put someone on a clock like that; their natural inclination is to speed through things. I had one agent say, “You know I get a lot of really angry customers but I only have six minutes to solve their problem. I don’t have time to make them feel good. I just have time to tell them what to do.” It’s counterintuitive but if you were to focus agents on solving the issue completely and fully but efficiently and take the clock away from them so don’t put it in front of them.

As a leader, may be you still measure but don’t put it in front of the agent. When I talked to companies who have done this, it was really interesting. What happens is they spend just a little bit more time making sure that the person doesn’t have to call back. And if you were to measure that when people call back, now that problem becomes a lot more expensive because they had to contact you twice, but that’s just harder to measure. The other thing that’s counterintuitive when you’ve taken the clock away from the agent and say, “Just focus on getting the customer through this as quickly as you can, but in a way that they’re delighted about.”

The average time it takes to resolve a problem either remains the same or goes down slightly. And I hope I’m not getting too much in the weeds here but what happens is when agents know that they’re on the clock, they’ll speed things up. But here’s the other thing that I think a lot of leaders don’t realize it’s when agents think that they have extra time, because it was a short problem, it was easier to solve, they slow things down. So they work, always work towards the standard rather than just getting the customers through as efficiently and fully as they possibly can.

Andrea: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Jeff, this has been a great, great conversation. I hate to stop now but we need to because of time. So can you tell us a little bit about your session? I know that you’re presenting with someone at Smart Customer Service, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jeff Toister: I am so lucky because I am presenting with my good friend but also the, in my opinion, customer service writing guru, Leslie O’Flahaven. And our session is How to Write Like a Human in the Age of Speed. So we’re combining our expertise. I’ll share research I’ve done on people’s expectation for response time, particularly email, and how those expectations influences sometimes to make mistakes. And Leslie is such a fantastic writing coach. She is going to send us through some very interactive exercises on how to better understand our customers and write better but also faster. So it’s going to be a very interactive session and it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Andrea: That’s great! And if you the listeners are looking to hear my conversation with Leslie, it’s episode 81, How to Write with the Voice of your Brand. So I’m glad that I was able to have this conversation with you and Leslie in different times and I look forward to connecting with you in D.C.

Jeff Toister: It’s going to be a lot of fun and thanks for doing this. This is such a cool idea.

Andrea: Alright.

Posted on Monday, April 1, 2019

How to Align a National Team with Tisa Sinclair

Episode 85

Tisa Sinclair’s work experience has given her the opportunity to engage in several areas of communications from public relations to social media and digital marketing. She currently leads a D.C. based team that forges the ongoing social care strategies, processes, and official responses to members and nonmembers as they interact with AARP’s digital content. This program is a key feedback component to the AARP customer experience strategy.

In this episode, Tisa talks about her role at AARP, how having a clear company vision and a centralized communication hub for all branches of the company allows AARP to keep their communication and messaging consistent across the board, how they were able to get their employees and representatives in 53 different states to buy into their communication strategy, how customers usually provide feedback to AARP and what she’s found surprising in all the feedback, how having company values and purposes are valuable to the service teams, what it was like building loyalty and trust with their social media followers and customers, the three Experience Pillars AARP aligns their values and messaging with, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! If you’ve listened to the last few episodes here on the podcast, you know that we are interviewing people that are going to be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC, April 29^th through May 1^st in 2019. These folks are experts and leaders in the customer service arena and it’s fun to have them here. It’s fun to learn more about them, to be able to hear a little bit about their personal experience, what motivates them, and their expertise. So I’ll be a fellow speaker at the conference, so there’s some personal enjoyment for me in just being able to connect with folks ahead of time too. But I think that what you’ll find is that in this conversation with Tisa, we’re going to really have the opportunity to hear from somebody who’s really in it right now and has had some major success at AARP.

So, I’m just going to share with you a little bit more about her here in a second. But if you’re interested in attending the Smart Customer Service Conference then go to the show notes at voiceofinfluene.net and we’ll have links there for you so that you can learn more about it and possibly see us there.

Andrea: So, Tisa, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Tisa Sinclair: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here!

Andrea: So tell us a little bit more about your role at AARP?

Tisa Sinclair: Sure. I mean, you explain a bit in the intro, but I lead the social response, or more widely known as social care function, here in AARP. As you know, or for those who don’t know, AARP is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations that’s really dedicated to empowering Americans who are 50 and older, especially when it comes to choosing how they live as they age. My team oversees everything from response governance to customer analysis. And like I said, this program is a key feedback to the overall customer experience strategy, especially since that team or that area is responsible for really defining and developing the strategy and tactics that’s necessary to enhance the overall consumer experience.

So we engage with and assist members in need. We proactively share resources. We answer questions and offer guidance. And we provide that response for home governance, customer experience feedback, brand perception analysis and just act as an overall escalation point for our sensitive issues and topics that’s encountered by our organization.

Andrea: You just said something that I don’t even know what you mean, so you said, you provide escalation for sensitive topics that are relevant to people in AARP?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah. So the way that the response function operates in AARP is that we have an internal, sort of in-house, escalation team, and then we work with a third party vendor that works with our more transactional sort of items. So they focus on interaction such as member questions, how to join. Membership items for AARP take up more than half of our volume. So it’s really important that we have a team that’s dedicated just to that area, and they will then escalate anything more complex or nuanced to the internal social response team. But all teams that engage with our consumers, they do so we’re aligned with messaging. We all work under one tool so we can centralize our operations, and this also alleviates us not to have to respond natively and in each channel, so ongoing centralization is really key. Hopefully that answered your question.

Andrea: Yeah. So it sounds like AARP has done a lot of work on coming up with what that central ideas, the central principles or messaging, the way that you message things that that is all centralized, then you work from that. Is that kind of part of what you’re saying then?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah, definitely. So we’re a relatively new team, I would say. When it comes to centralization and consistency, that was one of the major key initiatives that we wanted to really improve our overall experience. The addition of our new operation has really kind of widened the interaction channel choice for the 50+ community so we can be there to meet them where they are. And once we were setup and established, we then focused on a lot of initiatives but the main one was definitely centralization and consistency. So by kind of funneling all of our social channels into one tool to engage, we were then able to really ensure that all of our answers across properties were consistent and then all of our processes scale.

In addition to that, we’re pretty unique because in addition to the social response team, my team, we also have 53 state offices who have their own social properties. So it was important that we coordinate with them so then they can properly be equipped, and we can all be aligned with responses. And that includes building out like an internal communications hub to create that further drive, that consistency of centralization to help drive those state contacts and information that will align with our guidelines.

Andrea: Sure. So it sounds like you have done an incredible amount of work, number one, to just identify what needs to be in that tool, what needs to be in the communications hub, but then also to be able to communicate it to everybody that’s all that up there in the frontlines. Do you mind sharing with us a few of the things that are in the communications hub, in the centralized documents, or the things that are key components that you’re trying to make sure stay centralized and consistent?

Tisa Sinclair: Oh sure. We have sort of like a master document or guideline so the states can kind of make sure they have that resource there, just in case they want to kind of grab under various topics, under various issue areas. It’s really important that we’re aligned on how we do certain things. So you know, the how-to’s, what to hide, what to block, how to respond to certain messages regarding membership, how do we respond to trolls, or how do we respond to partisan comments. We get those pretty often as well.

We also wanted to make sure that we provide a quick access to certain tools that we use because some of their tools are different, which is fine. But the whole point is to make sure that we’re centralized in the resources that we have and the messaging and the talking points because it’s really important that we’re aligned across the board.

Andrea: Is there anything in particular that you have done that really has helped to make sure that everybody is onboard and everybody is able to understand these guidelines, understand how to use the things that are in your communications hub?

Tisa Sinclair: It was definitely a huge effort to kind of create this centralized space to drive those state contacts. I first did a discovery phase. This is where we kind of find out the states challenges so we can better accommodate them and develop just better solutions for consistency across the organization.

And then the next phase was kind of figuring out how we can alleviate some of those pain-points from a social response perspective to then start building out that page, and it did include focus groups and surveys. So I work with various team members for each of the states just to kind of figure out their pain-points, figure out what’s working, what’s not working, and then after that just kind of doing my little analysis to figure out how we can better serve them and how they can better, you know, help us as well.

Andrea: And then was there some sort of training that was involved as well?

Tisa Sinclair: Well, we haven’t done the training yet.

Andrea: Oh, OK, you still in the middle of it.

Tisa Sinclair: You know, we’re still in the thick of things. We’re still trying to get that hub, that centralized space up. But when that does happen, because we work on a separate engagement tool that we will have to roll out a distribution plan to eventually get those states trained on the tool that we use because it would make sense, right? If we want to be centralized, if we want to aligned, if we want to be consistent, it would make sense to engage under the same umbrella and under the same tool. So we definitely have plans to roll that plan out soon.

Andrea: That would be really hard. I’m just in awe and admiring the work that you’re doing, but I’m wondering too how are you able to get buy-in from folks that have to make changes? Is there anything in particular that’s kind of come up and you’re like “Oh, this is something we’ve had to address to get buy-in.”

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah and no. It actually wasn’t hard at all. I think even just from up top, there was this need to be centralized. You don’t want to look like an organization that’s saying different things from different areas. So everyone was really excited where everyone was really onboard. You know, people are always maybe apprehensive to change but once they realize that we’re moving in the right direction and these changes are only for the better, I think that it was a lot easier to really get that buy-in. It’s really no easy feat, right? We’re talking about 53 states, to train, to respond, to answer any questions. But from what I’ve seen so far in the thick of things and my work, it’s been that with positive response.

Andrea: That’s awesome! Is there one thing that you think has made the difference in the success of your customer service team or this whole process in this initiative?

Tisa Sinclair: I think that goes back to the centralization and consistency. Like I said, having everything under one roof, being able to scale, because of that we were able to grow our social properties. And as a result, we had really surprising and engaging conversations which then revealed really new ways to increase member engagement and loyalty, which is key, which is really, really important for our function.

And as we continue to kind of wire in more of our social properties to even widen the amount of channels that we service, I think right now, we’re at over 25 channels and that includes social media. We service article questions. We have a very expansive community forum that’s extremely active and we try to help out there. We even respond to app reviews. Because of this, we will be able to see those deeper effects that we haven’t seen before in the space, like MPS and membership renewals and just membership lifetime value for our members.

Andrea: I can imagine that working in customer service to provide excellent service or excellent experience for your members probably comes with its own set of challenges in trying to know exactly what they need for their age group, for their demographic. Is there anything in particular that you came across that surprised you?

Tisa Sinclair: Honestly, we get a lot of misconceptions about who or what AARP is. I don’t know, I found that pretty surprising. I always felt like it was a brand that people kind of automatically equated or related to an organization for the 50 plus community but a lot of people think we’re an insurance company. They think we’re aligned with certain parties. So it’s always interesting to hear people give their opinion on the type of organization that we are. I think that that really surprised me the most.

Andrea: And when you say they’re giving their opinion, does that mean that comes out in conversations, in social media; where do you see this coming out?

Tisa Sinclair: Definitely, even under our own media. We do a certain post about something that we support an initiative or a campaign. You know, people very freely voice their opinions, as we encourage, you know, we don’t sensor people within reason. We encourage people to have dialogue among themselves and with us. And through that dialogue, we’re able to kind of glean sentiment and how people feel not only towards AARP but just toward whatever issue that’s plaguing them at the time. So it’s really great that we’re able to be there and step in and show our support and share resources, anything that we can to help our members and nonmembers.

Andrea: I would imagine that that’s really helpful for creating the documents that you need or the talking points that you need to put in your centralized hub.

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah. It’s really kind of cool to see the work that we do and how it can help shape the conversation and that helps us report on trending topics and adoptions and really encouraging and facilitating those conversations among our members. It’s a great, great opportunity these comments to identify opportunities to probably convert brand detractors to brand loyalists, to watch for member prospect opportunities, or to reinforce the multidimensional value of AARP. There are just so many ways that we can tap into our engagement and our comments in the community.

Andrea: Have you found that values or having a personal purpose are important in the training and empowering of the service team?

Tisa Sinclair: Definitely.

Andrea: I’d love to hear about it.

Tisa Sinclair: You know, I think that your values, they really help to define your brand. It’s important that you clearly define your core values and then act in accordance with them. You want to show that in everything that you do. You want to celebrate that. You want to tell employees and customers what they are and you know, we do have our own strategic pillars to help guide our goals and that’s to monitor, to console, and to engage. We want to act as that real time beacon for AARP outside brand identity and reputation and we do. We try to deliver our value though our advocacy. We try to deliver our value through our information and of course we try to deliver that through our service. So it’s really crucial that we provide things like training that helps kind of reinforce that culture and really help strengthen your workforce commitment to those values. And you know, hopefully, that will help provide that direction towards your goal.

Andrea: Sure, and do you personally feel connected to values or feel like you have a purpose in this? I can imagine that you do. You sound pretty connected, so I’m wondering what makes this personal for you. Why do you care besides, you know, it’s your job?

Tisa Sinclair: No, no. I care because, well, A: I love what I do. And you know what they say, people who fully know and understand your organization’s value, they’re more likely to describe themselves as fully engaged with their work compared to people who do not. I think that shows in the work that I do. It shows in the work that my team does. You know, I like to feel like I’m a part of something that’s larger than myself. And this feeling of commitment and belonging, it really helps bring out the best in myself and in my team and I see that every single day.

Andrea: Do you feel like you have that sense of purpose, that you’re making a difference for the older adults in the country or that sort of thing? Is there also that kind of lofty kind of purpose that you have too?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah! I mean, we do so much. And it’s really important to me and to my team that we develop and focus on a really intimate, empathetic relationship with our members through these conversations that we have with them day in and day out. It really helps build trust and positive sentiment because with this demographic, we’re starting to see that growth on social channels.

There was sort of apprehension at first, but once they start seeing that people were there, in the trenches, answering their questions, servicing them, and meeting them where they are, I mentioned that before, we started to see that trust kind of slowly, kind of like peeling the layers. And because of that, we started to see that engagement grow, which to me is a testament of the work that we do.

Andrea: Do you think that that took a certain amount of time, I mean, how long did it take for the sort of positive sentiment, this trust to kind of start to really grow for AARP?

Tisa Sinclair: Yeah, it didn’t happen overnight, right? It’s a slow process. First of all, having that empathetic language is really key to a lot of our conversations, particularly when we converse around those sensitive topics. So it’s really important that we make sure that we kind of ladder up to our pillars by expressing our values with empathy, honesty, and humanity. You know, that is how we inspire that trust and it’s not something that happens overnight. Like I said, we’re very young and scrappy team and we’re less than two years old. And we’re just now starting to see that change, which is really exciting because we know that it can only grow and scale up from here.

Andrea: I know that AI is kind of becoming more and more in the conversation about customer service and how we interact with people, are you finding that that is coming up for people in AARP? Is this going to happen more you utilizing AI more? What changes do you see coming down the pipe in the next few years?

Tisa Sinclair: I think right now the focus needs to be or is going to be on the importance of customer experience. You know, I think a lot of companies, from what I’ve seen from the conferences that I’ve attended and just being here in the organization, you know, brands and organizations across the globe are starting to really integrate that CX into a sort of broader range of business operations. I’ve always said, you know, we all need to create a culture that has costumer focus which means that every decision is made with the customer in mind and everyone in the organization knows or should know, how they impact the overall chain of customer service strategy.

And I think a part of that is a couple of things, you know, there’s personalization. We need to create a more personalized, I would say, frictionless experience for our customers because they now expect more and more of brands and us to provide them with experiences that are just more tailored to their individual wants and needs since they do expect brands to be relevant and timely with things like promotions and campaigns and products. Or just any services that’s based on their own personal data. I find that more and more consumers are starting to find impersonal experiences really frustrating. So I think companies really need to get, including ourselves, we really need to get on board with personalization and consumer expectations because it is continuing to shift and we should expect this to be more of the norm.

Andrea: And I know that it has a lot to do with the people who are actually on the frontlines, the people who are actually having conversations with the customers, with your members. What makes that person who is on the phone or maybe it’s through an email or whatever it might be, what makes that person a really trusted adviser to the customer while at the same time being a brand ambassador for the company? Have you found anything in particular that’s helpful for that?

Tisa Sinclair: You know, and, I feel like I’m repeating this, we always want to be direct, transparent, and human, which is why we make sure that we align ourselves or align our messaging and our voice with our experience pillars, and we have three. The first is that we want to ensure they’re interacting with us is inspiring. That can be anything from making your greetings personalized using that empathy and manners. You know, please and thank you go a long way, being authentic and even a little bit of surprise and delight, you know. If you can or when you can, you want to go above and beyond to really provide members and nonmembers with the peoples’ community with back to back, that personalized service and that solution that they might have never considered.

You also want to provide that effortless experience and that can be something as simple as making sure you’re meeting the members where they are and responding in the appropriate channel and being really specific with their resources. You know, giving as many applicable details as possible and really sending those relevant links that leads directly to the actual needed information and resources that they requested. You don’t want to send anyone down a rabbit hole and make them even more confused and just being concise in providing the right information while not overwhelming them. And then I would say the last pillar is making sure users are compelled to feel that AARP gets them.

So that can be anything from being casual you know, you want the people who reach out to us they feel like interacting with the real person and not some like automated system. That means customizing our language to match the tone. Of course, you know, we have a template language as a guide.

It’s always important to have that but also adding that customization for each response to kind of match the questions and the tone of the member. Basically speaking their language, using the same words that they use if you can and I think it really shows that AARP is a trusted source. And it makes you feel like you can open up and it makes you feel like, “Hey, I can come back to the same source and they would be able to help me in my time of need,” whatever that may be.

Andrea: So many great things that you’re doing and it’s interesting to hear about this. I’m sure that you’re going to be digging into this more deeply at the conference. Can you tell us just a little bit about what your session will be about?

Tisa Sinclair: Sure. So one of our major goals this year is to focus on thoughtfulness in the language. To improve the customer service experience, via social and like I’ve said that empathetic language is key through a lot of our conversations, particularly when we converse around sensitive topics, particularly caregiving. So we knew that a solution to this problem was to kind of enhance our interactions by crafting our responses to be more human and validating in nature, therefore non-template based.

We want to kind of treating these new interactions at casual conversations among friends. So members kind of feel reassured if they’re talking to a real human as opposed to a bot. I’ll definitely dive more into this at the event but you know just showing how our team works really hard to kind of implement this more intimate and personal approach and the route that we took. The trainings, working extensively within our in-house caregiving team to ensure that our voice and our messaging was aligned.

I’m going to talk about the topics that we included such as overhauling our knowledge base to help agents find those relevant resources faster inserting that, sort of, appreciative language in our responses. So this includes starting our messages by just thanking people for being a caregiver. You know, a lot of caregivers, they don’t feel appreciated so that touch of validation alone can have a huge impact and some of these stories are just heartbreaking.

So it’s really important that we let them know that before we go into our spiel about resources that we have which is really important, we just want people to know that we’re there. We’re here and just thank you. Thank you for just being such an amazing person. Thank you for doing what you’re doing with your spouse, with your parent, just thank you. And that little touch right there made all the difference and we started to see a shift in how people reach out to us in our overall engagement and I’m going to dive into how we did just that.

Andrea: I love it! I love that idea of validating the person that you’re talking to. That’s huge. I love it!

Tisa Sinclair: Thank you!

Andrea: Well, thank you for being here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast. Tisa, I appreciate you sharing your experience and I look forward to seeing you at the conference soon.

Tisa Sinclair: Same here. Thank you guys so much for inviting me. I had a great time.

Andrea: Awesome! We’ll see you soon.

Posted on Monday, March 25, 2019

How to Convey Warmth and Competence with Chris Malone

Episode 84

Chris Malone is the Founder and Managing Partner of the research-based consulting firm, Fidelum Partners, and has previously held senior marketing positions at leading organizations such as Choice Hotels, ARAMARK, Coca- Cola, the National Basketball Association, and Procter & Gamble and has consulted to a broad range of Fortune 500 companies.

Chris is co-author of the award-winning book, The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products & Companies. He is also a frequent guest and contributor to CNBC, FOX Business, Bloomberg TV, Wall Street Journal Live, Forbes and Businessweek.

In this episode, Chris talks about the work he does with his current company, what the warmth and competence human perception model is, what led Chris to study this model and write his book, what we can do to ensure others perceive warmth in us, the role confidence plays in both warmth and competence, how his work relates to customer service, and more!

Mentioned in this episode: