Tell me about your vision.
Yeah, it is all about doing customer, client,
experience right.
And to me, having worked in companies of all sizes
for over 25 years and doing tons of research
and speaking on stages and workshops with people,
I've come to learn what right is.
And the fact of doing,
cause so many people are thinking about customer experience
and customer loyalty, but not really doing it right.
Tell me more, I'm very curious.
There's some very, very specific words you use in that.
It gets me very curious.
So tell me more about that.
Good, curiosity is good.
That's intentional.
So customer experience, customer service per se,
has been around a very long time.
That's when you think about, you have a problem,
you pick up the phone or you chat with the contact center
to get help, but customer experience
is the broader experience you have with a company
from how you learn about them.
Marketing is a big play there.
Buy, could be e-commerce, could be retail.
Learn, buy, get, use, pay and get help.
And there's these micro experiences within them
and there's a journey.
So what doing CXRite entails is this formula
of how do you go through the journey
and make sure that every single interaction point,
we call them moments of truth is exceptional.
Because if one part, if learning about your brand's great
and buying it's easy, but paying the bill is so hard,
customers will leave.
And the whole experience matters.
So that's really where I encourage listeners
to really learn about through me, through the internet,
whatever your best means is to understand
what is customer experience, what is the journey mean?
And then what I teach and educate is how do you do it right?
How do you measure, how do you know that you're doing it
right so that people come back again and again
and tell others?
That's awesome.
Most of the entrepreneurs, they are focused on
getting new customers and converting new customers.
Very, very few can get to this stage
or even think about this stage where that experience
is what they focus on and building systems
and processes around that.
But we experience that every day.
Me, you, specifically in the Western world,
I mean the brands you go around, think about Walmart,
think about Google, think about Facebook.
The customer experience is impeccable.
Netflix, for example, they have thought it through.
And that's one of the reasons that the market leaders
in that place where even Costco is also one of the examples
of they get you to buy big stuff.
They put the big TVs in front of you,
same as Walmart is starting doing that as well.
But you can see you walk in and there's a big TV in there.
And so you don't feel guilty about buying small groceries
and small gifts and small tokens.
So that's a very, very big part of what the customer
experience and not people are focused on that.
So for you, Stacey, how did you get into this world
of doing customer experiences and focusing on that?
Where did you start?
Yeah, I graduated college in marketing
and got my master's, my MBA in marketing.
And I did sales in companies.
Then it started to evolve.
Around 2013, I joined Verizon and I started to be
in different roles in the company.
And CX, customer experience, started to become
a real known career path.
And it blends all the roles that I did have
in marketing and sales into how do you really keep
those customers?
Because as you said, getting new customers in the door,
that's like flashy lights and it's exciting and it's sexy,
but keeping them the loyalty, that takes a certain skill.
And there's so many studies that say that acquiring new
is more expensive than keeping the ones you have
and they buy more and they become your walking,
talking billboard to others.
That's a goal that's so valuable to the brand.
So I started to learn that, study that and be a practitioner
in Verizon and then in other companies after that
in different industries.
And I consciously made that decision that to me,
it is so important for businesses because when prices go up
and they do, the economy, you can't really control that
from where we sit, but prices go up and other things happen,
it's experience that keeps people coming back.
It's what they remember.
And when you said about some of these great brands,
I would challenge to say that they're not perfect.
Yet when challenges happen, they take the right actions
to be transparent, to inform and to own the challenges
and customers see that, they realize that,
they're forgiving versus others that don't do that right.
Exactly.
I wanna focus on the one key word you mentioned.
You mentioned that it takes skill to do this.
Can you tell me more about that?
Yes, so half of this is common sense.
It's like the basics.
It's what we learned in kindergarten.
Say hello to your customer
when they walk into your retail store.
Say goodbye, say, the common things that show appreciation.
The skill comes in where there's a real CX practice
on how do you actually design the experience,
the journey map, the validation with real customers
to know that you're meeting their needs, the measurements.
Obviously there's net promoter score and PS,
but that's not it alone.
And so there's a skill and there's more things
that people need to learn how to do,
or they come to people like me who say, I can help you.
You worry about your core business.
I will make sure that you're doing it right
and course correct.
Yeah, I wanna emphasize on what you said there.
There is no way an entrepreneur can learn every basic skill
or every good skill out there.
If you did, you're gonna go crazy
and you'll never be gonna be able to do it yourself.
The skill I think the most entrepreneur need to learn
is hiring the right people at the right time
for the right job or bringing together the right experts
that need that you don't know what to do.
I'm in digital marketing as well,
plus business growth strategy.
There's so much more I can do,
but I know the value of teams
and what teams bring to the equation.
So hiring the right people or bringing in the right people
for what they need, even if I can't afford them
or a salary, there's a lot more you can do.
So entrepreneurs do not focus on that.
So thank you for sharing that.
You have something you wanna share.
Go ahead.
Yeah, to what you said is very important
that even if you're a solopreneur,
you still have partners, experts that you work with.
You might have a virtual assistant.
There is a team.
A team doesn't have to be what you think
in a traditional corporation of full-time employees
and a tight-knit team per se.
Part of doing CXRite is when you're designing the journey
that your clients go through, your customers go through,
it does take into effect the people that you work with
because if, for example, you have a virtual assistant
and they're handling the communication
as a part of your team,
they have to be trained on customer experience.
They have to deliver an experience
that's consistent every time from beginning to the end
of working with you.
So I wanna emphasize that doing CXRite
is not just about you, the owner of the company.
It's also, it's the whole ecosystem.
I wanna add to what you said.
There is a difference between bringing the right people in
to help you do what you do
and there's also bringing in the right people
to build you the system that's required
to run the people that you hire
that go to the customer experience
or the people that make the customer
go through an experience.
So supposedly, if I hire you to come in
and help with my customer experience,
my goal would be to have you build me systems, processes,
and resources, templates, and designs
so that my team can rely on those
when our contract is over
or if whatever you came in to do is completed,
that those people can refer back to those systems
and templates and resources so they know
what to do in regards to what to do when this happens
and if these customers experience this.
So the skill they need is hiring the right people
with the right choices, with the right skills,
and figuring out who not to hire and who to hire.
And I think that's also part of what you were saying as well.
So thank you for sharing that.
Yeah, it is.
And I personally believe the philosophy
in my doing CXRite framework is co-creation.
I don't know your business as well as you do.
So I'm bringing that expertise to actually audit.
What are you doing now?
Specifically, specific questions
on how are you really taking care
of your customers and clients?
And then validate what is today
actually is how they want it.
If you only offer them, let's say,
let's say a chatbot that they can carry out
and they can communicate for help,
but they really wanna talk to a person
and you're not giving them that option,
you need to know that.
Yes.
Right?
The same thing if they are talking to a chat
and let's say the chatbot can do some really good
quick answers, but the person says, you know what?
This is a big cost to me, to my business.
I need to talk to a person.
Well, how easy is it to get to a person?
Is that bot giving the information to the human
so they don't have to repeat themselves?
Like those are the kind of things in the journey
that you might not realize how it can make
or break the experience for them
and they'll go somewhere else because of it.
Yeah, people find reasons to go places all the time.
And think about, and there's so many nuances
to think you said and I think you're very, very, very right
in mentioning that.
Think about when, so I recently had an experience
when I was looking for, I can't remember what it was.
I think I was looking for some sports equipment
and I was at a shop and usually those sports equipment
costs a lot of money and in the moment,
usually I think online's cheaper
or online's better or whatever.
There's warranties, information.
So I'm looking at the things he's showing me
and I'm looking at the prices online
and right as I'm doing that, he said,
hey, we have a price match guarantee from online.
I'm like, oh, that saves me a lot of time, energy,
and effort, like hey, this is something you mentioned.
And that's part of the customer experience
that most people don't think about.
Where like, what is, what am I experiencing?
What are my concerns when I'm going through your experience?
Most people don't have any systems or processes
in place to onboard a client, let alone to de-board a client.
They don't have systems and processes to place
when you're taking information from them
or when you're making them go through back and forth
on things they need from you.
So like in website world, in development world,
there's cycles people need to follow
to build the right product for someone.
You need to be continuously talking to them,
like hey, is this what you need?
Is this what you need?
Do you want to change the strategy?
Do you like this experience?
That's how it's gonna look like.
And most people don't have that.
They're so focused on the right now providing
for their family that they can't think about it.
And we have to get them out of that mindset.
We have to get them out like hey, focus on this
while you're doing this so you can build this.
Yes, when I was working at a company
in the e-commerce department,
I was managing the marketing and the e-commerce
of the website experience.
And something that was so essential to this success
was really looking at the voice of the customer,
getting the customer feedback,
both in a structured way like surveys,
but then also unstructured, unsolicited,
looking at social media, reading or review sites,
taking all that information and being able to see
what the customer's saying about you behind your back
and in front of you, and then being able to make decisions
not from one-off topics, but really those areas.
And you learn a lot that people can't get through
the e-commerce funnel, they get stuck.
And you have no clue why are sales going down
when there's just simple points in the funnel
that they get stuck.
So there's so many examples and I want listeners
to understand that whether you're a really small company
or big, that really understanding and gathering
that voice of the customer,
you are flying blind without it.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.