The Customer Experience Podcast

Direct mail used to be a highly “spray-and-pray” activity. On top of that, printers might take weeks or months to send offline collateral. But with the oversaturation of digital touchpoints today, direct mail has come back with a vengeance—which is why Michael McCarthy founded Inkit. Inkit has upgraded the direct mail game, allowing you to integrate your CRM with direct mail and automate offline a...

“Obsession is the complete micromanagement of the customer experience.” According to Matt Knee, Founder and President of MyCompanyWorks and author of the book Startups Made Simple, obsession is a superpower. Steve Jobs, Herb Kelleher, and Jeff Bezos each have/had it. There aren’t a lot of great companies whose founder wasn’t obsessed with seeing their vision of the perfect customer experience come...

Whatever job you do, whatever industry you’re in, people are going to tell stories about their experiences with you. It’s been said for a long time that customers that have a negative experience with a business are two to three times more likely to leave a review of that business than customers that have a good one. A couple more stats that prove how important good customer experience is: 88 perce...

What’s a surefire strategy to solidify your reputation for offering a superior customer experience? We’ll give you a hint. It involves tacos. Jordan Olivero is the director of customer success at Swimlane. He visited our podcast recently to discuss the power of moments, doing things that don't scale but doing them anyway, giftology, and being your own PR firm. Olivero read The Power of Moments a y...

Sometimes, we get it backwards. We focus on our KPIs, or what we think the customer needs or wants. We deliver on our expectations, … and then the customer leaves. Because we missed their desired outcome. How do we become masters of achieving the desired outcome? There’s no one better to discuss this issue than Jonathan Bolton, our Sr. VP of Operations here at BombBomb. Jonathan nearly single-hand...

Trust matters when it comes to customer experience. People line up at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar in part because they’ve come to trust that they will get a great customer experience. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C, how can you create trust with your customers? To find the answers, I spoke with Charles H. Green, CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He's the author of Trust-Based Selling: Using Custome...

You've got a hundred days to make customers for life. Do you know what tools to employ to guarantee they’ll stay? Joey Coleman does. He is a speaker and writer who's deeply steeped in the customer experience. He's the founder and chief experience composer at Design Symphony [TK: there is no URL for “Design Symphony” - this link is to his consulting website joeycoleman.com], and the author of Never...

If you think a checked box on a survey or net promoter score is an accurate customer satisfaction metric, you’re in trouble. So says Samantha Stone, the founder and CMO of the Marketing Advisory Network. She's the author of Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook That Drives Sales, and a regular conference speaker. Stone has worked in marketing, product marketing, partner marketing, and brings a gr...

Your sales strategy is as much science as art. The secret is to understand how to improve the way customers buy, renew, and get retained. Jeremey Donovan, senior vice president of sales strategy at SalesLoft, the leading sales engagement platform, is an expert in sales strategy. His top level priority, especially in B2B, is about ROI. A prospect needs to trust that you are the right partner to hel...

Like it or not, your customer’s experience is your brand. How do you make your branding win in the long term? To find the answers, we spoke with David Brier, Chief Gravity Defyer at DBD International, a branding consultancy and agency. He's the author of Brand Intervention: 33 Steps to Transform the Brand You Have into the Brand You Need.

“I want to rehumanize the way people think about their communication. I just think people are better face to face.” Today, almost everyone relies on email, texting, message boards, and other impersonal methods to get their work done. Unfortunately, these messages lack the body language and vocal signals that we humans rely on to fill the communication gaps. And emojis can’t cut it. Darin Dawson, P...

Sometimes it’s a bad thing when the sales team closes the deal. Customer experience often starts with the sales team promising something that the customer success team can’t deliver. We asked Nick Hart, Customer Success Manager at Outreach.io (a sales engagement platform), how to make sure that the sales team and customer success team are all on the same page. Salespeople frequently have the menta...

If you want to know why customers leave and you want to know how to win them back, have I got a podcast for you. I learned so much from David Avrin, a customer experience & marketing keynote speaker, consultant and author, whose most recent book is Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back): (24 Reasons People are Leaving You for Competitors, and How to Win Them Back*). Avrin helps companies b...

“Any brand that you frequent, or are fond of, or use, there's been a journey of some kind,” says Kurt Bartolich, the founder of GUTS Branding, and the author of You Can't Ride Two Horses With One Ass. Whether your company offers an active (Build-A-Bear) or passive (Southwest Airlines) consumer experience, there are some basic branding truths that successful companies observe. Unfortunately, a lot...

Customer experience touches every place a customer could possibly interact with your company, even before they buy the product. Rachel Ostrander is the director of runner experience at Brooks Running. “I heard a quote, ‘If you want to know where a customer or a company is, look at their sales. If you want to know where they're gonna be, look at their service.’ I believe in that, and my entire care...

How do you get people to pay attention to your message? Whether you’re selling to a customer online or speaking in front of a live audience, you need to create a shared belief about what the other person will be getting out of it.   To deep dive into that concept, I spoke with Steve Pacinelli, the CMO at BombBomb who is my co-author of our book Rehumanize Your Business: How Personal Videos Acceler...

Your content IS your customer experience. So says the queen of content marketing, Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and author of the best-selling Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content and Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business. Listen to learn: Mea...

Businesses are just like people. They must stay healthy and agile, or watch their enterprise arteries harden through apathy and face an early death. Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of species that survives nor the most intelligent, but the one that is the most adaptable to change.” The key to survival is transformation and reinvention. Thus says Joseph Jaffe, the “admiral and co-foun...

You feel cheated. You‘ve tried to create amazing content to win the content marketing game. And yet your revenue hasn’t shot through the roof. Why? The problem isn’t your content, it is how you’re putting it all together. You need to put your content into a content experience framework according to my podcast guest Randy Frisch, who is CMO at Uberflip, a speaker, and author of F#ck Content Marketi...

With the right attitude, business relationships, instead of being a depreciating asset, could be transformed into compound interest that pays you over and over. Getting your business in the right relationship mindset is the business of Zvi Band, CEO/Co-Founder at Contactually, a SaaS-based intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) platform for relationship-oriented industries that helps u...

If your customers can’t trust you, how long will you stay in business? Probably not long. You’ll dwindle, flounder, and grasp for meaning and a customer base, but at the end of the day, if your customers don’t feel like they can trust you, you may as well close up shop.

At the center of everything, at the core of your business, what is the most important metric that your business can measure?  The customer experience.