This is an AI Group podcast. My guest today is jokesome. Joe is the CEO of Stone Fusion Consulting and an expert on customer experience. She helps organisations discover what their customers and employees really think about them, and where they need to focus to deliver both quick wins and longer term value.
Joe, welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. Great to have you here as well.
Let's start a bit about your background, and I'm interested in how you got here. So I know you have a background in customer experience, as well as marketing and communications. What drove you to set up your own consulting business, and I'm curious about why you're so passionate about customer experience. Sure.
So I left university, I guess, started off as a marketing graduate, and when I rose up the ranks after finishing my marketing degree, started off crossing a number of different industries. So I went through professional services, financial services, and rose up the ranks quickly. I found myself when I got to being Chief Marketing Officer, that I was being asked to drive acquisition campaigns and asked to deliver certain revenue targets and revenue numbers, and I kept getting frustrated that no matter how hard I tried, I could never get the numbers I wanted. When I started investigating what's going on here and digging into the rest of the business, which marketers often don't do.
They just sort of stay front end and don't really leave the kimono and see what happens behind. I started saying, you know, I can actually get much better results from my acquisition if I stop this bucket from leaking. So it was all leveraging it coming out the back in different ways. I thought, you know, what if I was to actually keep my eye on acquisition and build a brand as I thought leader, but also look at where we can infuse the customer throughout the rest of the business.
So started doing that and then sort of uncovered this world customer experience. I was doing mapping before I knew it was doing mapping, and then just found out that the company I was in at the time, lovely company, but it just wasn't the right place for me to be. And I had so many people saying to me, oh my gosh, you know what you're talking about when it comes to CX. I had some wins, I had some understanding of it.
So I thought, you know what, let's throw caution to the wind. Let me work my butt off for myself instead of somebody else. And yeah, and here we are 12 months later. Excellent.
You wrote on LinkedIn recently, you talked about customer experience or CX as we call it, becoming a bit of a buzz term. Absolutely. Much like digital transformation or innovation or these other terms that we hear about today quite frequently. Is CX just an ex big buzz term for organisations or is this the beginning of a much bigger focus on the customer experience?
It is absolutely at risk of becoming a buzzword. It's something that, as you mentioned, it kind of gets innovation, transformation, digitisation, and throwing out there. And the reason I think things become buzzwords is there's something to them. There's something that they say, I should be thinking about this.
But what happens with customer experience is one of those things that's very easy to understand. It's really, really tricky to do successfully. Everyone says, oh yeah, customer experience, I'm listening to my customers. Then they get into the detail and go, oh, I actually don't know how to do this.
And then the other thing with customer experience is there results are really compelling. The customer who focus on customer experience tend to get 15 to 20% increase in revenue, the same amount they're able to slash costs, and some new stats out, 88% of people will pay more for a good customer experience. So it is what he's going to differentiate in future. It is what he's going to drive business success.
So the CEOs are hearing these numbers and thinking, oh, I must get in on this. But then the issue with customer experience is it doesn't respect traditional hierarchy. It doesn't respect silos. A customer doesn't care if my issue needs to be solved by finance or compliance or customer service.
So people start getting into it and realise that in order to do customer experience well, they need to fundamentally think differently about the organisation. It gets during the cheap high-class. Yeah, I find it interesting when you talk about people paying more, being prepared to pay more for a better experience, because I think these days we're all used to everyone wants everything cheapest, everyone wants everything for nothing. But what you're saying is people will actually pay a little bit more of a premium if they're going to get a better customer experience, a better experience at the end of it.
Absolutely. When you look at your brands like your spotify and your Netflixes, they're starting to set the bar higher in terms of what customer experience should be. And these are the ones that are operating off an on a freemium model where you might have some part where you can get in for free and that might have a basic level. And a lot of companies are starting to look at how can they cheer their service level so that when you come in, this is what you get.
But then if you want extra, then you have to pay for it. And I think that's only fair. Yeah, and I'm a big fan of those organisations you just mentioned, like Netflix and Spotify. I'm a big user of those services.
Let's talk about other disruptive startups like Uber, for example. They've dramatically changed the way that we absorb services, the way that we absorb media on a daily basis. As customers, are we in charge now? Does this mean we want everything to be great?
We want it now and everything on our terms? They've absolutely changed the landscape. But to be honest, I think what's changed the landscape more is the smartphone. So now you have your phone and you get every single device.
You can get everything at your fingertips. So rather than it just being a phone now, it's your bank, it's your groceries. You can do everything from it. And I think what's happened is consumers have looked at their phone and said, well, if I open up one app and it's Spotify and it does this.
And then I open up the next one, I go to the next website. Their last reference point is the last app they were on. And they know that the device allows that to happen. So they go on to your website and they say, well, why can't I click to call?
One of the most simple things that many small businesses are implementing. Someone's on your website on their phone. You need to put code in the back end where you can click on the phone number. It will launch the phone call on the mobile phone.
So that's an example of something really small that people now expect this table stakes. So they're continually rising. Let me talk about customers being in control. Also, we're entering an era of radical transparency.
So we're entering an era where it's very difficult to keep things hidden internally with sites like Lastdoor, All the Reviews. What happens inside now happens outside. We talk about the convergence of internal and external brands. So when you've got an era of radical transparency, you've got an era where a disenchanted customer can tell billions in the flick of a tweet in 128 characters or whatever it is.
So absolutely a new era. And I think companies who don't respect and understand how these rules are changing, who think that they can just hide things or know, I'm going to give it to the customer when I'm ready for them to have it. They need to completely shift their mindset to say, if my customers now in charge, I need to play by their rules. They're the ones who they basically made over.
They made over a success and they brought down the taxi industry. And they're prepared to do it with others. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess it's the old adage, you know, bad news travels fast.
But these days that bad news travels even faster. So how do we respond to that? You know, I follow TripAdvisor, for example, I'll consult TripAdvisor if I'm going on holiday. Do my research through that.
And it's very, very easy to see some of the comments that people have made about their experiences. And that becomes very public very quickly. It does. And this is where in an era where we are inundated and bombarded with so much information at the moment, you can go trip to New York and you can find thousands of things.
What's happening is in the presence of so much information and information overload, we look to other people to help us filter that information and work out what's right for us. So we look for TripAdvisor, Yelp in the US, we look at the things that can help us understand what do people like me like in New York. So this is where the prevalence of reviews, which in essence is kind of online word of mouth, become really, really important. So when you're in a business who is particularly service-based, the experience is what you're purchasing from somebody.
So you've got to find a way, how do I give my customers a platform to talk about their experiences of me? Because they're doing it anyway, whether you believe it or not, they're talking about you often online, you just got to make sure that you got your ears open. Absolutely. So I saw you present recently and I was really struck by the term that you use all this concept of outside in.
And that really struck a chord with me. Tell me more about that outside in. Sure. So I am a big believer that I've started talking about the death of customer experience, not the concept in itself because I'm a big believer, but I'm worried that it is becoming a buzzword and it will be sort of parked in the too hard basket and it will get diluted and just become a platitude.
So also with customer experience, you can't be customer experience, you can't become customer experience. It's not an aspiration. So what I'm trying to do is simplify and take away all the buzzwords, all the waffle and boil it down to four steps to becoming outside in. And that is really putting the customers at the center of everything you do.
So working outwards from your customer, instead of working, starting with your company and your capabilities and what products you want to launch, and then going and finding someone for those. So I believe the four steps to being outside in is you need to listen to your customers. As I said, they're already talking today, you just don't have your ears open. You need to build a happy tribe of employees because you're employees are the ones who deliver your experience, so it's really important that they're engaged.
You need to understand what's broken with your experience. You need to understand the moments that matter. You need to make sure that you understand what's going on there and then you need to fix what matters to your customers. So if you find yourself able to do these four things and the reference here is that this isn't a linear piece, it's very iterative.
You will unleash a customer driven growth engine that will drive advocacy, will drive growth and make you differ from everybody else. So don't do this, you're at risk of focusing on products, focusing on price, racing to the bottom, racing to anyone can copy anything now. So you will find yourself, I guess, just become, you will be lost in a sea of sadness instead of actually standing out for who you are and what you can deliver. And this is what organizations want to achieve these days, some differentiation to stand out?
Absolutely, and it's really hard to do that these days because you can't really differentiate. You get to differentiate on the what you offered, so you used to differentiate on your products or your services or your packages and in pricing has always been one. You go back to the rules of marketing, anyone who's done any marketing subject, talked about the four P's of marketing from the 50's or the 60's. But now, if your price can be copied instantly, your product can literally sometimes be printed by somebody else and deconstructed really quickly.
Distribution channels, the internet has made, if you take a place in terms of your four P, the internet's given everybody the same equal market, so it's very difficult to compete in that area now. And so what's left then is how do I make sure, sort of an off and another peer-to-wise purpose, so you need to make sure you can align to your purpose, and how do I make sure that I compete on the experience? So not what I deliver, but how I deliver it, so the product itself becomes less relevant. Great, okay, so I picked up on what you said about a tribe of happy employees, I think it was.
Let's talk about CX and an organisation's culture. I'm curious about the link between happy employees and happy customers, tell me more about that. So now proven there's a direct link between engaged employees or happy employees and how successful somebody is at different customer experience. Because if you think about this logically, if you're going to deliver, go above and beyond for your customers.
That requires your employees to think outside the box and do more than just what's on their job description. So if their job is to answer the phones and to churn through so many calls per day, then they will answer the phones and they will churn through so many calls per day. If it means that they have to, technically they do have to do these three things. If they have to do number four to actually help the customer get an outcome, then that's going to require them to actually enjoy where they were going to be engaged in their job, for them to go that step above.
I mean there's many, many examples of companies who don't do this well, where they say, oh we want to engage our employees, and then we want to empower our front-line staff to make a difference for their customers. And then they give them their budget, and then they say, well no, no, you have to go to risk if you want to send someone a bunch of flowers. Is how do you put the right structures and processes in place to really make sure you've got engaged employees. There's some data that shows generally in and out of ten employees you've got only three that are engaged.
You've got five-ish that are a bit neutral kind of passengers. If you think about it as a boat, you've got three at the front paddling. You've got five in the middle who are kind of watching the scenery go by. And you've got two at the back who are drilling holes in the boat trying to sink you.
So you've got two toxic employees. You've got five passengers and you've got three rowing. So if you can just get one more person rowing, think of how fast you will go. And you can tick one of those toxic people over the board and get rid of them or turn them into passengers at least.
You will go that much faster. Yeah, I love that metaphor. I think it was Richard Branson that said happy employees are what's most important. Before happy customers, because happy customers follows happy employees.
Absolutely. When you start to understand when you think about your organization and what's broken, usually where your customers are frustrated, your staff are also frustrated. There's usually a very close alignment when you start doing activities like journey mapping and you get your staff perspective of where your customers are stuck. It's where they get from part of his phone calls or where things disappear internally into a black hole.
And then the customer feels that at frustration, lack of communication. The employee is just digging the heels in to get something done because internally you've made it really hard. And how important is it to have the CEO and senior executives on board for an organization to focus on CX and to execute an effective CX strategy? I think without your CEO on board, you don't have much of a chance of getting a huge impact or the impact that you desire.
So certainly I see a lot of companies where you get skunk teams or groups kind of set up and they do their best to iterate and try to improve the experience. But because customer experience knows no balance, it busts through the silos. Unless you've got that CEO support and you're prepared to shift things around and re-look at your incentives, you're not really going to get the traction that you could possibly get if you've got that next level of support. Yeah, and do you see this quite often?
Do you see an organization perhaps a more junior executive has a great idea to improve the member experience or customer experience? And they take this great idea to senior leadership and they just say, yep, good idea to just get on with it without the tap-paps endorsing it or helping get it delivered? They don't have been with people and they've said, yes, we want to improve the customer experience, but you go off over there and go do your thing and don't disturb us. So it's more this, I guess, often they can be like a leadership buying as to what is involved in actually improving the experience.
So often it will come through somebody on the junior side, I might come through marketing or it might come through somebody saying, look, I'm trying my best here, but we've got fundamental problems wrong and you're asking me to make X, Y, their target. So I'm going to do that while all these other things are happening if you talk about the leaky bucket scenario. So if you've got someone that says, I want to plug the holes in my leaky bucket, but often then you can run the risk of them just looking at it through a very narrow lens. If you actually want to make a holistic improvement to your customer experience, it has to be top-down.
Obviously bottom up buying as well, otherwise people will just dig their heels in, you've got to have both, but without that leadership push, you're not going to get as far as you could. And I guess this comes back to our earlier discussion and your experience as a marketer focused on acquisition and retention campaigns and those only being as effective as the customer experience that the broader organization was able to deliver. Absolutely, and I'm a big believer that you need to find a way for brand and your customer experience to work together. So everyone has different views of what a brand is, but my view is the brand is the promise you make to your customers, and that's really what marketer is in charge of.
So they're making the promise to your customers, and then the experience is how you deliver on that promise. So then you need both to work hand in hand, so you need the organization to deliver on the promise that has been made about this is what coming to us, will feel like this is how this is the problem of yours that will solve, you need both to work hand in hand in order for it to be kind of an effective outcome for an end customer. So again, it's about the how, not the what necessarily. It's all about the how, how is the new buzzword.
Excellent, okay, so let's talk about younger generations and digital natives, they might be called, these are people that have never known a world without the internet. Our children are probably a good example of that, millennials. Do they have different CX expectations as customers today to perhaps older people? I think there is this widespread belief that the millennials are, they are digital natives, they've grown up with the internet, they've known nothing else.
They're certainly a lot more savvy and willing to try or take a risk on new apps, new companies, you know, start up to perhaps a disrupting industry. So they're often the first to jump on board, you have to look at things like Snapchat and see how to skew the younger audience are to others. But I think there's also this danger of just saying, well, that's only B2C, it's only millennials, if my target audience is older, they're not the same. And I know that my father is about to donate, he has his MacBook on, his desk, he has two iPads now, he has his iPhone, he's trying to use Siri.
And he's always trying to chat online with people because he finds it much more convenient than waiting on hold. Also sometimes his hearing can be going, so he can almost be fast at typing, than worrying about hearing. So we can fall into traps of making assumptions about just by somebody's age, the number and date of birth, therefore that means that they want this method of service. Whereas really it comes down to how do you understand the channels that your customers want to interact with you, and if they've chosen to interact through chat, then respect them on chat and serve them properly on chat.
So again, it's about customer on demand and needing their needs, but thinking outside in. Definitely, it's about understanding what they want and then how do you help solve that problem. And I think your dad's a great example because the internet's probably only been around for about a quarter of his life in reality, and yet his expectations have risen by using those technologies and now wanting to expand his customer experience, his engagement experience with friends and family using that technology. Absolutely, and he was over there on the weekend and he was expressing his frustration that one of his fund managers, who's more of a traditional fund manager, didn't have an app.
And he's an 80-year-old winching that a fund manager didn't have an app and he was going to move all his mates to commsick because he could trade on his phone. Now, that's not something probably that this fund manager should remain nameless. I'll be thinking about if they've got an old-scued demographic, often all three planners. They don't want to do day trading, they don't want to do this, or in reality, if they took the time to understand who their customers were and how they want to interact, the experience they want.
Even though my dad's just playing with penny stocks and flicking money here and there, that's what he does with his time, his enjoyment. So they could be a market opportunity for them by really understanding that customer niche. How do they cater to that? I think that's a beautiful example and he's probably using other apps like Online Banking, where he's getting that real-time experience and being able to engage with the organisation quickly, efficiently.
And so he's saying, well, why can't I do it with my fund manager as well? Exactly, and that's what the likes of your Netflixers and your Spotify have changed rules for everybody. The one thing I will say though is that people tend to say, well, you know, we'll give the digital ladies a lot more tech-savvy. You do have to make sure that you are making your experiences simple.
So again, my dad was on the phone too, he was having some problems with his Mac and the guy told him to go and clear his case. And now to most people under 30, they know how to clear their case because they do it on a regular basis and remove the cookies. My dad called me because I'm his health disc and said, what's the case and how do I clean it out? So we also need to make sure on this person talking to him on the phone would have been probably 22.
So how do you make sure by understanding your customers that if you do have as old-ascued demographic, you understand their level of tech-savviness and you're not making them feel dumb? Because dad called me and he said, the guy told me it's really easy, but I don't have a clue about how to do this. He was making him feel stupid and because of that he was resenting the brand. Instead of using his opportunity to educate and really empower your customers, you can flip that emotion and really help them learn a new skill if you reframe it and then they'll become accustomed for life.
We talked about the importance of an organization taking a longer-term view, having a longer-term strategy with customer experience or even a medium-term focus. But what are some quick things that an organization can do to improve their customer experience and do those quickly and those could be quite effective? I think one of the biggest things you need to do is start to think about your culture differently. So there are many ways, in a lot of companies, customers are these things that sit behind dashboards and numbers and people, they forget that they're humans involved.
So often I work with clients who start telling customer stories in every meeting or who's even working in a business. In the end of a meeting we were talking about inflows and outflows and we had this many funds and management and I turned around and got the numbers and I said, let's just read it right guys, amongst all of that. This week we gained 160 new customers and we lost 280. The look of silence in that room when I actually put humans and customers behind all these numbers that we hid behind, everyone's just like, oh, we lost more than we got.
It can all get wrapped up in the numbers. So to me I'd say you need to bring the customer into your organization, you need to bring them to life. Best way to do that is with stories and start the conversation in a different way because this is not a fast journey. You can't band aid your customer experience, that's called process improvement and that will get you some way but you need to hold a lot of literature.
The other things I think you need to start doing is thinking as you start to shift this culture, you need to start thinking about how do I iterate more. So many companies want things to be perfect, they want things to be done and it might take them a year to launch your product. Instead, how do I perhaps shift my focus and before rather than giving myself a 12 month window, what if I were to say, all right, I'm going to do something in three months. I'm actually going to ask my customers to get involved in the creation of it.
So I'm going to co-create with my customers, I'm going to bring them in and I'm going to launch something in three months. It's not going to be perfect but because I've evolved my customers, I've launched the bit that's the most important to them. You might call it agile, you might call it whatever you want but this way of iterating knowing it's not perfect, putting it out there getting feedback because you're listening to your customers and then making it better and continuing iterating is the way that you're going to have to operate as a business if you're going to survive. I like that saying perfect is the enemy of good.
Well my manager is done is better than perfect. When I started adopting that, that changed my life and I'd say to people, is it done? They say yes but it's not perfect. I don't get it out there because your version of perfect is very different to what your customers version of perfect is.
So you can be going with your goggles on and your blinkers on thinking that I need this to be perfect. When in reality your customers were screaming for something that was only half of what you packaged up, they wanted it six months ago. And so I guess this applies to competitiveness as well. If you're aiming for perfection and implementing all these big strategies and tactics around improving the customer experience, they're going to take a year or two to implement.
And in that time your customer's expectations are going to change. So you've got changing customer expectations, you've got a rapidly shifting competitor landscape and if you're not in a position to move faster and adapt and react, then you will be left behind and become a dinosaur very quickly. So then is it easier for a small business perhaps to execute an effective CX strategy than a larger organisation? I think so.
I think to be honest a lot of it comes down to the will of the leader and the drive through which they want to do this. I mean you've got bigger companies, they're bound by a lot of legacy systems, they've got a lot of deeply entrenched silos. If you've got a smaller company that are nimble and you've got leadership on board who say yes, I think they are in a far better position to actually focus on their experience to bring their customers internally. There's not that many layers between each person and a customer.
You don't have a company of 10,000 employees where some poor person in the back office has 27,000 layers between them and a customer and they're so far removed. Often these smaller companies tended to start off very customer centric. When they start off with one or two people, they're very connected to their customers. And as they've grown, they've become more internally focused, they've become more focused on growing their team or building capability, which is what can happen.
But then you need to make sure you're re-shifting back to becoming outside. I think customer experience is a huge opportunity for the small companies to take on the big guys. Because to be honest, in online, no one knows how big you are. So you can be a one-man band and you can look as big as somebody else.
But what we'll differentiate you is the experience you give your customers. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really good point. At the larger the organization, the more places to hide as well.
Absolutely. And the more silos that you have to smash through and the more ways that customers have to be passed off between different teams. And more and more companies now are starting to create teams that can solve a particular customer problem or serve a particular segment. And I'm going to not have a marketing department and not have a customer service department and a product department and all these people operating separately.
So I'm going to put them all in one team focusing on one segment and I'm going to put two marketers and put one digital person or one product person and one IT person and they're going to run off a negative fire. I love that they call it the two pizza rules. So you need to have a team that can be fed by two pizzas. If they need more than two pizzas to feed that team, self-organizing team who are impounded to get the job done, it's too many people in it.
I love that. So interesting dichotomy because what you're saying is that one-hander smaller organization can compete with a larger organization using technology and be on a level playing field. On the other hand, a smaller organization that's perhaps having more traditional human connections is able to compete more effectively because there is more of a genuine connection. I think that's where small businesses are closer to their customers and they often do have more of those personal relationships.
They need to leverage off those. What they need to do is really understand where the moments that the humans are. So for example, I know a lot of professional services firms and one of their key moments that matters is that with the new client is that first meeting, that first introduction into the company and kind of exploration of can we meet your needs and what that look like. Companies say, well that's really important and I need somebody to come and do all this work.
What smart companies are doing is saying actually the whole point of that conversation is to build a connection with them. Me sitting down for 20 minutes and saying, Elder's child's name, how do I spell that feeling in a heap of forms? That to be honest your customer would probably prefer to fill in the night before sitting in front of their television in their own time. And then you use the time you're together to actually have a deep and meaningful conversation that involves a human because a robot can take down a first name and last name and how do you spell that.
In power of the customer to do the bits where you're not adding any value and then you use your time in that introductory conversation to really understand their needs and to probe on that. Not to ask the name of their six children and six benefactors and what their dog's name and what biscuits they like to bring their will. So there's a lot of companies that are now starting to think differently, a small company, how can I still leverage technology? If I've got four staff, how can I reconstruct that experience of mine differently that makes me stand out from everybody else?
Excellent. Okay, so customer experience, customer satisfaction, however we want to term it, is this becoming a goal that's just too lofty? Our expectations are now growing so rapidly. We all want the perfect experience.
Are we ever going to satisfy people? Are they going to be always sort of wanting more or feeling so they're not getting enough? I think it comes down to the moments that matter. So you think about a lot of businesses and for example when you take something like if you're an online business or even the after taking payment.
You don't need to allow me when you take my money. Just do it consistently. I would not try to trade off if I'm buying something online. It's not always just about speaking to check out.
I would rather it take an extra half a second more and it not fail because you've got robust systems. That's not really a moment that matters. It's an important thing to take out friction and make that easy. But then perhaps if I bought something, what I want to happen is then after I've bought it and I'm feeling really excited and you want to avoid that kind of post-purchase dissonance where someone's like, oh, did I do the right thing?
And that's when you get a lot of returns. That's when you get a lot of returns. That's when you get a lot of returns. That's when you get a lot of returns.
That's the moment that matters. I need to now give you a platform to go and share what you just done in your awesome work. Because if you've told everyone you just bought something, whether it's a new barbecue or whatever, you're less likely to wrinkle on it. So by understanding the moment that matter, you can really shake that conversation.
But customer experience coming back to your question, it's not a silverboard. It's not necessarily easy. But I think it provides a huge opportunity, especially when customer experience can be a bit of a catch-all because in that you innovate. In that you digitize, you automate, you use AI.
So it's becoming a bit of a catch-all for everything. If organizations use it in the right way is a rally cry. We need to fundamentally change our business around our customers. We need to prioritize the moments that matter.
But the humans where they best add about you. And let's put the technology where it makes it easy for our customers. Let's take away paying and take away friction. Then if you line all those up, then you've got a really good recipe for success.
I love that moments that matter. And you talked about sharing that, reducing that post-purchase dissonance and sharing that with others. And then you're less likely to, you know, renege on your purchase or be unhappy with your purchase. Does that relate to social media?
I think social media has become the platform by which you can share these things really quickly easily to click a button. So you've got to give people the opportunity to share those really quickly and easily. I think we've probably become, some would say, an oversharing culture. Now with social media, you can share anything in a heartbeat.
So that's probably an evolution over the past ten years where now everyone's encouraged to share everything with their friends. And then you only have to, anytime you buy anything online, you instantly flick to, you know, give us your star rating or your smiley face. So again, it's part of capturing customer feedback, which is really important. But you've got to make sure you put it in at the right time.
Joe, we talked about customer stories. And I'm really interested in learning more about that and what that means. So customer stories is a really great way for a company to bring their customers to life internally. So rather than just sticking customers' pictures on the walls, which is what many people do, oh yeah, we bought the customers inside, or occasionally bring them in for a tour of the office, which frankly doesn't have much value.
You start really going in and understanding what are the problems you're solving for your customers, and then you bring that to life. So you might, for example, start off a staff town hall. And maybe your focus for the month is on improving contact center, or maybe you've got a new product launch coming up. What you do is you start off that meeting by talking about, before we start, I'd like to tell you about Beryl.
And this is Beryl, and this is the problem that she has. And this is what some of her needs are, this is what causes, you know, she's one of our customers. And last year she was dealing with us around our last product launch, and she did XYZ. And that then starts to relate to what you want to do in the future.
So I think bringing it to life and telling stories about customers, the problems they're trying to solve, what's going on in their life, makes them more than just customer 4.56.A.1. When suddenly they're married to Robert, they've been married 55 years, they live in the morning to peninsula, and they have 16 grandchildren and they love dogs. It's very easy then to start thinking about, okay, well, if Beryl wants to buy a new product, what do I need to do for her? What do I want to make her feel?
How do I connect her into a motion? Yeah, so it's personalising it. It's bringing it to life, and it's also connecting. Absolutely, and you need really to, one of the core elements of customer experience, you need to build into your company's empathy.
And the best way is really hard to connect with numbers. You can't really understand what numbers are thinking and feeling, and how do we change the conversation, or how do we change that emotion? Whereas when we're dealing with people, real people, how many companies are now creating personas for their different audiences? So they will bring that particular segment to life with a persona who, and you can do this kind of, you know, workshop where you can do it properly using data, I'd recommend a letter, but we'll come back to that.
And to really bring, and then you kind of have your five to eight segments of your customers, and then you build for those. You bring them to life, you understand what type of car they drive, what type of handbag they have, and then it's in a much better situation to then develop concepts, services, offerings that are going to meet their needs because you understood them. So again, this is outside in? Completely outside in.
And if I hear you correctly, what you're saying is this is important to share with customers, so we might use these stories for social media, for example, to illustrate the benefits that we bring to a customer's life and how we've made their life easier and more rich perhaps, but it's also to share with our employees to say, okay, this is a persona of one of our customers, this is how we help them in a real-life situation. That inspires them, it educates them, informs them, and helps them to deliver a better customer experience. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely.
So really storytelling is now becoming the new advertising. The days of dis-shouting at people and saying, by this, by this, by when get one free, it's completely ineffective. We're exposed to between three and five thousand advertising messages a day. They're not sinking in.
What's starting to sink in now in terms of how you get your message up to your market is telling stories of your employees, of your customers, of their lives, and really connecting, finding a way to make your company human and connecting to that human, on a human to human level. So you need to start thinking about that externally. How am I being more human? How am I relating to my customers as humans?
Not just talking about the products. It's more what does somebody do with my product. People often talk about the whole, no one ever buys a drill. You actually want to hold on the wall, and you don't really want to hold on the wall.
You want to hang up your family photos so you can read your memories. So how do we make this shift from selling drills and drill bits and this size precision and this big motor to what photos you're going to put on your wall? What family memory are you going to put up to cherish or what piece of art that you bought when you were strolling along the sending parrots, and every time you look at that picture, that brings back that memory. So you need to do that for your customers, but also internally so that you start your staff, start understanding who are your customers and how do we do mystify this dashboard that has this many products aisles and widgets and turn over and churn and revenue and everything else that a business has to have.
You've got to start putting some humans behind that. Excellent. Well, this has been really insightful. I've really enjoyed our discussion today.
We've covered a lot of great stuff. Is there anything you'd like to leave us with today? I know you've summarized it exceptionally well just now, but is there anything else that you would leave us with to finish? I think this is a really exciting time for business.
I think while customers may be in charge for those businesses who can recognise the shift who can take advantage of it, there is such opportunity for them to really grow their businesses and succeed. And I'm loving there's a big shift I mentioned about the humans. How do we help make our customers' lives better? There's more and more companies now that are wanting to make the world a bit of place.
How do we help make our customers' lives better? And that starts with that human connection, understanding the problems you're trying to solve, and I really think all business smart businesses who get to jump on this bandwagon but do it properly are going for a real treat. I agree 100%. Joe, thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks for having me.