About Joey Coleman
For over a decade, Joey has helped organizations retain their best customers and turn them into raving fans via his entertaining and actionable keynotes, workshops, and consulting projects. He has a long history of energizing and motivating audiences to enhance their customers’ experiences. He is an award-winning speaker at both national and international conferences – competing against NY Times Bestselling authors, business leaders, and internet sensations.
Joey specializes in creating unique, attention-grabbing customer experiences. With a background in designing outreach materials, packages, events, promotions, and brand identities, Joey works with businesses and individuals seeking to provide their clients with memorable experiences. Joey’s greatest talents include formulating creative strategies that build buzz and loyalty around products and services.
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Find about more on Joey Coleman on his website: joeycoleman.com
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Transcript:
Mary Drumond: (00:42) For over a decade. Joey Coleman has helped organizations retain their best customers and turn them into raving fans through his entertaining and actionable keynotes, workshops, and consulting projects. He is an award winning speaker at both national and international conferences competing against New York Times bestselling authors, business leaders, and internet sensations. Joey, how are you?
Joey Coleman: (01:06) I’m fantastic. Mary.Thanks so much for having me on the show today.
MD: (01:11) We’re glad to have you. Before we started recording, I was telling Joey how his voice is very familiar to me cause I’ve listened to so many episodes of his Experience This podcast with Dan Gingiss and it’s such a great show. I’d like to invite everybody to listen. I did an episode myself, so yeah, that’s one favorite customer experience podcasts for sure.
JC: (01:31) Oh well thank you. I appreciate that Dan and I have a lot of fun doing it and our theory behind the show is that there are plenty of negative stories about customer experience. We just tried to provide some little customer experience delight stories to inspire people, give them ideas and hopefully raise the bar in customer experience on the planet.
MD: (01:49) You guys recently hit a milestone, didn’t you, with the amount of episodes you’ve done?
JC: (01:53) We did. 70 episodes across three seasons. It was kind of funny, you know, season one we started recording and we got about 35 episodes in and we said, wait, did we ever say when we were going to end season one and we were like, okay, let’s end it at 40 and then we got a little more reasonable and now we do, I dunno, 15/16 episodes per season. It feels a little more manageable. But yeah, we have a lot of fun with it and we’ve got a great listener base, which we really appreciate, who send us ideas and we get the chance to feature amazing folks like yourself kind of sharing their stories. And it’s a non-interview model. So it’s kind of fun because we get to have little clips and then we riff on those. So we have a lot of fun doing it.
MD: (02:33) Since we’re on the topic, how did you come around? How did the two of you come around to this collaboration?
JC: (02:39) You know, it’s a funny story. So Dan and I were both at Social Media Marketing World and our mutual friend, and when I say mutual, I mean yours, Dan and mine, Jay Baer, was hosting a get together. And we were chatting, the three of us and he said, you know, you guys should really do a show together. What Jay didn’t know at the time, is I had Dan, probably now more than 20 years ago, because my college roommate went to graduate school at Northwestern where his best friend was a man by the name of Dan Gingiss. So I met Dan back when we were pups. We were just kids. We were fresh out of school. In fact, neither of us was actually working in the CX space at the time. I was a law student. He was a business school grad student, MBA grad student. And uh, we just kind of kept in touch via social media all those years later, bumped into each other at Social Media Marketing World and we were like, Hey. It was fun kind of having a mutual friend and roommate, why don’t we, uh, reconnect and see if we could do something fun with this show.
MD: (03:38) You know, I went to Social Media Marketing World this year and it was so fantastic. The people I met, the connections I made were absolutely amazing. It’s such a good place for networking and getting to know other marketers. And I feel like since everyone is kind of in the same vibe, it ends up working out really well, no?
JC: (03:56) It really does. Michael Stelzner and his crew at Social Media Marketing World put on a fantastic show. I actually had the pleasure, um, and since anybody who’s listening who may be less of a social media adopter like I am, to be very clear, when Michael asked me to do a keynote there, which I was very flattered and when I took the stage, I kid you not, I had 146 followers on Twitter. Not 146,000. 146.
MD: (04:25) Sounds like me.
JC: (04:25) Most of whom were people in the room, which was hysterical because they had seen that I was going to be speaking and I had all these people coming up afterwards and saying, did you just get on Twitter? What are you doing? And I was like, yeah folks, I’m sorry, I’m not a big social media person. I’m more of an in-person kind of guy. Which I know dates me and makes me seem very old. But nonetheless, they are welcoming to all at Social Media Marketing World. So you don’t need to be a million follower type person. You can be somebody who’s just interested to see how this could be incorporated into your business.
MD: (04:57) And I’m pretty sure that everyone kind of leaves Social Media Marketing World with that idea that they have to somehow open up their social media and understand the importance of that tool in every single vertical and industry, you can imagine. At least for sure, that was something that happened to me, right? I was like, uhh, I gotta get on Twitter.
JC: (05:20) I was a little bit less persuaded in the sense that I was like, I still don’t think I’m going to be on Twitter, so it’s there. But you know, my podcast cohost, Dan Gingiss is very active on Twitter. He teases me almost daily, will, message me and be like, Hey, it’s been 78 days since your last tweet. Thinking about tweeting? And I’m like, there it goes goes to 80. I’m not going to do it anytime soon. But, such is life.
MD: (05:44) Awesome. Joey, how did you get into customer experience? You just said you have a law degree. So what happened? Wait I read somewhere that you were like in the secret service or something?
JC: (05:58) I was. I did work for the secret service. I worked for the CIA. I worked in the white house during the Clinton administration. I sold promotional products. I ran an ad agency for 15 years. I was a teacher at the postgraduate level. I was a criminal defense lawyer. Some people hear this background, as a criminal defense lawyer for five years, and people hear this background and they say, okay, so I guess Joey can’t hold down a job. Which may be true, which may be true, but the moral of the story is while these different positions may seem very disparate in their focus or their industry, there is a common thread that connects all of them. And that thread is in order to excel in any of those positions, you had to have a keen understanding of the human condition. Why do people do the things they do and what can we do to influence or persuade them to do the things we’d like them to do? So when I was a criminal defense lawyer, it was how can I convince a jury to find my guy not guilty. When I was, you know, teaching it was how can I convince my students to actually learn this material? When I was running an ad agency, it was how can I convince some marketplace to buy more widgets? So there is this common thread that connects all of them. And that really is what spun into the customer experience. Because the more I looked that the human condition, the more I realized that how we feel and how we experience things really carries the day. It is the ultimate factor in deciding behaviors, our perceptions of what’s going on, our feelings about what’s going on and the experiences that are being created and designed around us.
MD: (07:38) Abso-freaking-lutely. Yes. And I talk about this everything single day of my life because that’s my job. That’s what I actually do here at Worthix. So we do exactly that. We try to understand what motivates people to buy. Why is it that they see value in the product that you’re offering or why don’t they? And if they don’t, then what do you need to change to get that market acceptance? So I could not agree more with you in that sense. But that’s what brought you then to CX?
JC: (08:00) It is. Yeah. So I was running my ad agency and I had done a rebrand for a client and they asked me if I would speak at their industry trade show on the main stage about their company and about their rebrand and about their kind of view on the world. This was in the tech space. And very, very long story short, you know, they said to me, you know, what do you normally charge? And of course at this time, to be completely transparent, I had not ever charged for a speaking engagement. And I said, well, you know, I would never charge you what I normally charge, what’s actually in the budget, you know? And they said, well, it’s X dollars. And I said, well, that’s not the usual fee, but I’d be happy to do it for that amount. And then I said, but you know, this is just between us. And after I came off the stage, one of their clients, who is a big technology company vendor came up and said, we’d love that talk. We’d love to hear it at company. And before I had a chance to respond, my client says, Oh yeah, well Joey’s fantastic, but you know, he’s really expensive. He’s gonna be a minimum of, and he does 2X the fee that he had paid me, which was a really kind gesture on his part. And the client said, yeah, that won’t be a problem. And I said,
MD: (09:13) So a new career was born right then.
JC: (09:17) A new career was born right then and there. I was like, I guess I just became a paid speaker. And about three and a half years ago, I went full time on this. I was, you know, getting more speaking opportunities than I could handle while still running my design business and that agency. And I said, you know what? I’m going to go all in. And it has been a fantastic ride since there’s no place I’m happier than that onstage. I mean that’s where my 10,000 hours are, whether it was in a courtroom, in front of a classroom, on the speech and debate team in high school, that kind of thing. So I really love the chance to get up on the stage and share some ideas and thoughts about how to enhance customer experiences.
MD: (09:51) Well, you said design, and I remember seeing in your material that you consider yourself a customer experience composer.
JC: (09:59) Yes.
MD: (09:59) Kind of a design symphony. Is that right?
JC: (10:02) Correct. Correct. Yeah. So I, you know, when I started my branding agency, ad agency, it was called Design Symphony. And the idea was to get all of your pieces of your business on the same sheet of music playing in harmony. And you know, I had come, I’m a singer and had kind of come up singing in various groups and I thought, well, you know, it’s interesting how many businesses have these functional silos that don’t really interact with each other. And if we think about going to see a band perform or an orchestra, if everybody’s kind of playing their own music, it sounds horrible. I mean, it just sounds horrible, right? We sometimes notice when you go to a live performance, you know, even if people are slightly off by a half beat, it sounds terrible. Let alone being on completely different sheets of music. And so the more I realized that there was an analogy to that, I really saw my job as helping to compose the music you were gonna play, helping to get the various pieces together. You know, when you think about a composer or conductor of a symphony, their job is really to oversee how all the pieces of the puzzle are coming together, which is really what I think is the analogy that most businesses could consider adopting. That is whoever’s in charge of CX should really be a C suite level position. It should be somebody who has the optics to see the entire business and has the authority and the backing and the resources to help tweak those so that they work together. All too often marketing’s kind of doing their thing. Sales is doing their thing, ops is doing their thing and kind of it rolls up to the CEO, but not really usually because usually the CEO is focused on a lot of other things. So I think there’s an opportunity for more people to think about the total customer journey and making that experience as seamless and as orchestrated as possible.
MD: (11:52) I love that analogy. I really do. It fits so well.
JC: (11:55) Thank you.
MD: (11:56) I really do agree with that sense of the person responsible for CX is really a composer. Just making sure that everything else is working together in harmony, because that’s one thing that we see a lot and when customers do tend to complain it’s because there’s somehow a gap in expectations along some course of the journey where the customer was expecting one thing and they got something entirely different, because at some point either the process failed or is out of sync, like you said. So great analogy. I love it.
MD: (12:55) Now tell me a little bit about your keynote itself, which talks about the first 100 days. It’s a methodology that you’ve created, right?
JC: (13:03) Yes. Well, what happened is I was doing some research one day, uh, this was kind of a late Friday night early on in my business career. This is before I had really focused in on customer experience. And I read a study that that was talking about how many bank customers left banking. And what we found in this study, what they found in the study, was that 34% of new bank customers will leave that bank before the one year anniversary. Now, I was shocked by this Mary. I was like, wait a second. Bankers as a general rule are people who pay attention to the bottom line. You know, they’re probably some of the most numbers-oriented folks in business and how are they letting so many people leave like what’s going on? And I dug deeper into the research and I found that half of those people, 16%, we’re leaving in the first 100 days. And I don’t know if you’ve opened a bank account recently, Mary, it’s not fun. There’s a lot of paperwork. You have to go into the branch, you have to get an ATM card, a debit card, you have to get new checks. If you’re old school like me and you like checks, you have to re-set up direct deposit, you have to re-set up bill pay, you have to sign signature cards. You go through all of this rigamarole only to leave less than three months later. That was pretty shocking. And so it took me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I was like, well how, when do people leave and why do they leave? And what I found is that across all industries around the world, somewhere between 20 and 80% of your new customers, will decide to stop doing business with you before they reach the 100 day anniversary.
MD: (14:32) Hmm.
JC: (14:32) To me, this is the biggest secret crisis in business today. Most businesses are hemorrhaging new customers. They’re running out the back door as quickly as we bring them in the front door, and no one’s talking about this. No one’s paying attention to it because it’s more exciting to talk about customer acquisition. Sure. It’s more exciting to talk about the new marketing plan. It’s more exciting to talk about upsells than it is to talk about retention. And when I started to, again, dive into the research even further, I found that there were things that you could do that would get customers to stay. And so I developed this first hundred days methodology because what we found is that the first hundred days in the customer relationship are the most important to the lifetime value. That time period is more dispositive of the lifetime value of a customer than any other time period in the customer relationship. And if you get the first hundred days right, if you get them today, in the typical business, they’ll stay for a minimum of five years. Once I realized that, I thought to myself, you know, there’s a lot of folks out there that could use help in this area, because they’re losing a lot of customers and if we developed a system and a process and a methodology and a philosophy that was all about, what do you do during this first hundred days? It’s a long enough time period to make an impact, but a short enough time period to keep your employees focused on it. Now we were off to the races.
MD: (15:53) Sure absolutely. I can’t imagine, in my mind I always thought of banks as kind of being one of those really stable markets when it came to churn rates.
JC: (16:02) Yeah.
MD: (16:02) Because like you said, it is so complicated to open a bank account. I, I was horrified when I had to open a bank account, especially because I come from a generation where everything is tailored to be as effortless as possible for the consumer. So when when you get hit with this like high effort, DMV, anything government, anything utility and banks, all of a sudden you’re like entering into this time machine.
JC: (16:34) Absolutely.
MD: (16:34) Where nothing works and it’s just red tape all over the place and nobody actually has stopped to try to make that process easier. Well they have. They have, but maybe that is why opening an actual bank account was so confusing for me because, you know, I have PayPal, I have,
JC: (16:54) Sure. Venmo.
MD: (16:55) Cashapp, Venmo, all of these things, and it’s so ridiculously easy. You press a couple buttons and you’re good to go.
JC: (17:04) It’s easy, it’s efficient, and the fees make sense. The thing that blows my mind with traditional banking is you jump over all of these hurdles to be told that you need to give them $12 to $15 a month for the privilege of them using your money to make interest. And make loans. And I’m like, wait a second, shouldn’t you be paying me to keep my money in your bank as opposed to me having to pay you to keep my money in your bank? Not to mention, so many of the fees in banking are archaic. You know, it used to make sense that paying $30 for a wire transfer was a way to do it because somebody actually had to call the other bank say, Hey, we just need to confirm this account number. We’re going to send this over. There were built-in fixed human costs. Now I can do it on my phone in a matter of seconds. Why am I still paying the same fee? It just doesn’t make sense.
MD: (17:56) On the very first season of this podcast, I spoke to Dominic Venturo, and he is the Chief Innovation Officer at US bank, and I brought these exact arguments up and I was like, Dominic, how, why are the banks, why are they always trailing so far behind? And he says, Mary, you have no idea how difficult it is to maneuver the system. But they’re trying and they’ve made some big strides. They’ve made some big advancements with technology and everything and you know, different ways to understand consumer behavior, especially with like credit card fraud and other things like that. And you know, recently Zelle, that almost everybody has today, has all of a sudden made it so much easier to do wire transfers. Like you said, it happens in a matter of seconds, but they really have, I think in general, banks have really tried to catch up because it’s a market that is begging for disruption. They’re begging for it, because it’s so difficult to do everything, and no one tolerates that kind of high effort anymore.
JC: (18:59) Absolutely. And you know, and Dominic and his team are a great example of some folks that are doing really innovative things. There are wonderful examples in, to be frank, almost every bank in the country, of teams that are doing really innovative things. The problem is, you’re right, it’s turning a battleship. And there they’re also, and I give a lot of deference to the banks in the sense that they’re operating in a regulatory environment with laws that were designed to make sense decades ago. And with all due respect to our elected officials, because I do think that, you know, being an elected official is a noble calling and it is difficult job. And I realize that is not the du jour opinion in our society, at least here in the United States today.
MD: (19:40) The job of servitude, right? At least that’s what it should be.
JC: (19:40) Yeah. I mean, that’s what it should be. You know, I grew up, my grandfather was the senior state Senator in Iowa for 34 years, and so I grew up in politics. I grew up watching that. And it’s difficult tasks. But when we have the people making the decisions about how customer experience should work in terms of the regulations associated with industries and they don’t understand how technology works, this is a problem. This is the big problem. Regardless of what you think about Facebook. I think most people understand that the reason Facebook is free is because the users of Facebook are the product, right? We’re the ones that are contributing our ideas and that’s being used. And again, we can have a whole separate conversation about whether this is being used for good or used for bad. But the moral of the story is when elected officials don’t understand how Facebook makes money, it suddenly becomes a challenge to say, wait and you’re going to regulate this?
MD: (20:32) Right, it becomes a joke.
JC: (20:34) It’s confusing to say the least. Well, I, again, I don’t mean to bag on the banking industry, but I think what’s, to me, the takeaway from this was, every industry is doing things that don’t make sense to their customers. Every industry, every business and the real opportunity, the gold mine for businesses is to get in close enough contact and communication with your customers that they will honestly tell you about the things that drive them crazy that you have been doing for so long that you’ve forgotten about or that you don’t realize drive them crazy. You just think because it makes it easier for you, it must be the way to do it. And it’s like, no, no, no. Reposition and reevaluate to make things more customer focused and it changes the conversation.
MD: (21:20) Is there any industry, you feel Joey, that wouldn’t profit from a revamp in the customer experience?
JC: (21:28) I gotta admit, I can’t think of one. I really can’t, and my theory, people ask me all the time, they’re like, well Joey, this first hundred days methodology, what industry does it apply best to? I’m like, well, if you sell to humans, this stuff works. If you don’t sell to humans, I’d love to have another conversation with you because I don’t know what business that is, and sometimes I’ll get folks that sell into like government contracting. They say, well, we don’t really deal with humans. I’m like, yes you do. And people are like, Oh well we’re B2B. I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re H2H it’s human to human. Okay, stop thinking your B2B or B2C. Your B on the other side is also a consumer and they’re comparing you to the other consumer experiences they’ve had, not the business experiences they’ve had. So yeah, I think there’s an opportunity for every business, and it’s the cool thing about the space you and I work in, right? The great thing about customer experience is there’s always room for improvement. The terrible thing about customer experience is there’s always room for improvement, right? But this is the joy of this industry. You’ll never go hungry because when you improve the experience to the point that you shift the expectation in your industry, well then what do you do to differentiate? You have to improve the experience again and raise the bar once more.
MD: (22:39) Well, that takes me to my next point, which is when you talk about how every single person in the organization plays a part in the CX. So you know, we’ve talked about that when we spoke of being a customer experience composer. But do you think that one of the main problems the market still has, is that companies are still siloed in a sense?
JC: (22:59) Absolutely. So, you know, I grew up in a farming community in Iowa.
MD: (23:04) Great example. Great example.
JC: (23:06) And let me just say, you drive past a farm and you see a grain silo. That makes perfect sense. It’s a really useful invention and tool on the farm. It is a horrible tool to take into the workplace. Like what are you thinking? No, no, no. And I understand and I have respect for how businesses develop over time and they grow and it becomes harder to manage. And so things get siloed off. But in 2019/2020, this isn’t acceptable behavior anymore. Your customers expect a seamless transition across every interaction they have with your brand. The silos don’t work. So I think there’s two pieces at play here. Number one, it’s the organizational senior management and hierarchy that is allowing silos to continue to exist. Part of the problem gets to be put on their plate. But part of the problem gets to be put on the employees’ plates who don’t realize that they are actually contributing to the overall experience and that they need to know who their counterparts are in the other parts of the company and they need to interact with them and be friends with them. So often I go into consultant work with companies and marketing hate sales. I don’t use the word hate very often, but I’ve been in the room and I’ve seen the vitriol, the just complete disdain for people within the same company, and the finger pointing and the blaming. And it’s like, folks, we’re all in this together. If we don’t all do a good job, the entire business suffers, which means all of these jobs are at stake, and I think there’s just huge opportunities for improvement.
MD: (25:08) I think maybe sometimes employees, people working inside the company forget that it company is actually just a group, a collective of people working towards a common goal and we think that somehow the company is still going to be armored against internal issues and conflicts and that it’s still going to work out because the company is greater than all of this, when it isn’t. A company gets taken down from the inside and from a breakdown of the communication of the departments and all of that. And I try talking about this a lot. I try making it part of my goal in customer experience to talk about how the way companies address their internal processes and specific departments need to change. You need to understand, like you said, everybody has to be on board and everyone is responsible because the experience isn’t just the buying or isn’t just the service. It’s everything from way before the purchase happens to way after the purchase is even done or the service is canceled. It still lives on. I like giving the example of, I subscribed to Fabletics, and Fabletics does gym clothes, workout clothes on like a monthly basis, and at the beginning one of the biggest problems that Fabletics had was that they made it ridiculously difficult to cancel, right?
JC: (26:27) Right. That age old theory of, Hey, I know a way we can keep more money. Let’s make it really hard to cancel the monthly subscription so we get at least one or two more months at the end while they’re fighting to get the canceling done. Not to say that that was Fabletics’ attitude, but it is an attitude that is pervasive in the subscription model world.
MD: (26:45) Right. But here’s the thing. Fabletics understood this. If there’s anybody from Fabletics here, congratulations, because what they did is they changed that, and they made it extremely simple. They made it possible to cancel your subscription at any time, day or night, like you could call at 12:30 in the morning and you were able to cancel your subscription. And what ended up happening is that every time I was like, ah, I can’t afford to keep paying this every month, I’d call and cancel, and then at some point I’d reactivate my subscription.
JC: (27:17) Because the canceling was not a negative experience for you. It was a positive experience. Absolutely. I think many businesses, not most, but many, focus on the customer onboarding. How do we bring a customer into the fold? It is only in my experience, the very best businesses on the planet that have a process for customer offboarding. How do you exit a customer for your business, which I think is every bit is important as how you enter a customer into your business. Because we have a tendency, all the brain science and research shows us, that humans live in a world of primacy and latency. We remember the first thing that happened to us, and we remember the last thing that happened to us. We don’t remember a lot of what happened in the middle. So they’re going to remember the onboarding, they’re gonna remember the off-boarding. And if you make the off-boarding a positive experience, like clearly Fabletics has done for you, guess what? Number one, the likelihood of that customer coming back dramatically increases. But even for the customers that don’t come back, when someone asks them about Fabletics, they will feel better about their experience because the last experience they had was positive, so they’ll talk about that one, as opposed to, Oh my gosh, you know, I really liked their clothes and the subscription model was really novel and interesting. But, Oh my God, it took me three months to cancel and I can’t believe I had to pay for those extra three months at the end. Oh, well then I guess I shouldn’t even sign up because now I have a fear for what happens if it doesn’t go right and I have to end the relationship.
MD: (28:50) Yeah. We always feel, as humans, like don’t mess with my money. Right. And we feel very, very protective of our spending and our purchases. So when a company treats you like a hostage or holds your money ransom, right, for your business, it doesn’t make sense. And there are still so many, especially in this subscription model universe, that do this. They’re like, you can only cancel between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
JC: (29:23) Right and you have to send us a letter in the mail.
MD: (29:25) A fax, a fax.
JC: (29:25) And it has to say your account number on it. Which by the way, good luck finding it.
MD: (29:33) It has to have the number of your birth certificate on it.
JC: (29:36) It’s ridiculous, exactly. I understand that being in business is difficult. I’ve my own business now for you know, 17 years. I understand that it’s difficult, but folks, there are two ways to keep your customers. Keep him in handcuffs or keep them because they want to just gather around you, and I can promise you the gathering around model while maybe not as secure and maybe not as stable, is certainly more fruitful and more successful.
MD: (30:03) Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. Part of the joy or the gratification that I get out of making this podcast is that hopefully somebody within the organizations that are still kind of messing up that experience will listen and possibly try to make those changes within their organization.
JC: (30:21) Oh, I love it, Mary. Yeah, and I think, here’s the thing. If I may make one plea your listeners: stop waiting for permission to improve the experience. You should stop. Like I get that your boss, either your boss or your boss’s boss or your boss’s boss’s boss doesn’t get it, but you do. So if you’re listening and you get it and you know what can be done to improve the situation, just start doing it. Period. Don’t ask for permission, don’t ask for authority, just start doing it because one of two things are gonna happen. Either A, the situation is going to improve, people are going to take notice, people are gonna come to you and say, tell me more about this. And suddenly you’re going to be in a much higher status in the organization for leading the charge. Or you’re going to do this and someone up the chain is going to say, Hey, stop doing that, and that’s going to be the signal to you, that it’s time to go get a different job.
MD: (31:15) Right.
JC: (31:15) So either the way you win folks, either way, when you either change your entire company and start a movement and start a shift in how they think about customer experience, or you have the perfect story to tell in an intro interview to a new company when you say, so, yeah, I actually decided to leave because they didn’t care about taking care of their customers and here’s why, and here’s what I developed on my own in the initiative I ran and here’s how it worked. And they didn’t like that. But I did my research and it seems like you care about your customers, so I’d love to come work for your company. Whoa. Now we’ve changed the conversation.
MD: (31:55) No, I’ve recently written about that because I truly believe that in the next very few years, you won’t be able to keep your employees if they are forced to treat customers badly because of internal processes. So if your employees feel like they are not allowed to respect and treat customers properly, they will leave you and you will end up without the talent that you need to keep your business going. Like, the unemployment rate is so low. Like in our company, we can’t find people.
JC: (32:28) And this is only going to increase. Here’s the thing. Most people are, and I say this respectfully because these are complicated topics. Most people I think are grossly misunderstanding how automation and how AI are going to change the landscape in terms of employment. The big conversation is about, Oh, there are going to be all these people unemployed who aren’t going to have jobs. And so the companies, a lot of them are thinking, well then finding talent is going to be a lot easier. No it’s not. It’s actually going to be more difficult because the type of people that were going to lose their jobs to automation in AI are not going to be the type of people who have the skillsets that you need to hire in your business going forward. Actually the competition for the most highly qualified employees is going to increase and what are we gonna do to keep those? And I totally agree with you, customer experience and employee experience are two sides of the same coin. As you focus more on one, it naturally improves the other. As you let one side go, it naturally drags the other side down with it. So we really need to, I think, think of employee experience and customer experience as being intertwined, as being connected in a way that we should double down on the customer experience and double down on the employee experience. You know, I wrote a book last year called Never Lose A Customer Again and the best thing for me personally, one of the best things that came out of the book was the number of readers who reached out and said, Joey we implemented it. It has dramatically increased our customer retention and our profits. But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was that our employees have a spring in their step. Our employees are reconnected with our mission and why we’re here. Our employee morale has gone through the roof. Mary this made me so happy because now we’re benefiting everyone in the ecosystem. We’re not just benefiting the customers. We’re not just benefiting the owners or the shareholders, we’re benefiting the employees as well. And why can’t we all have a better experience? It’s available to us if we’re just willing to put a little time, energy, effort, and focus on it.
MD: (34:45) Well, that’s a great way to wrap up this talk! Joey, if our listeners want to get in touch with you, if they want to learn more about you since you’re not on Twitter, where can they find you?
JC: (34:59) Don’t be fooled. You can find me on Twitter, but when you do, you’ll see that I don’t tweet. I sometimes respond to tweets, but I’m actually really bad at even doing that. No. The best place to find me is at my website, joeycoleman.com that’s J. O. E. Y, like a five-year-old you probably know. Coleman, C, O, L, E. M. A. N like the camping equipment, but no relation. Joeycoleman.com there you’ll find information about the book, Never Lose A Customer Again. You’ll find stories, podcast episodes, downloads, all sorts of things to continue the conversation. And let me just say in closing, Mary, thank you so much, not only for having me on the podcast, but for what you do to champion the importance of customer experience not only at Worthix, but through the podcast and through your work to continue to spread the word. I believe that we can get so much further by working together, and customer experience professionals need to spend more time supporting each other’s work, supporting each other’s content, getting it out into the world, and continuing to champion this message. So thanks so much for what you do.
MD: (36:04) Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. It makes every single episode worth it.
JC: (36:08) I love it. I love it.
MD: (36:09) Thank you.
