The Customer Experience Podcast

Customer experience is the emotions that a customer feels about your organization. The gateway to strengthening the positive emotions of your consumers is great storytelling.   In this episode, I interview Michael Ashford, Director of Marketing at The Receptionist, about the importance of storytelling in marketing.   Listen to Michael and I discuss...   - What it means to build heroic content   -...

Customer experience is created when 5 elements work in concert: intention, investment, invention, inspection, and iterations.   Each one of these elements has a different type of influence over customer experience as well as leadership and employee engagement. What are they and how do they work together?   In this episode, I interview Jim Rembach, the host of the Fast Leader Podcast and the B2B Di...

Please email me about this podcast. I would truly love to hear from you.   I’m not kidding. My email is ethan@bombbomb.com .   I’m Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, host of The Customer Experience Podcast, and co-host of the CX Series on the B2B Growth Show, here today to share what I’ve learned from podcast guests about customer feedback.   What you’ll hear about:   - How to make the bad...

To be a good community builder, you have to leverage strategy. Building a community gives businesses and organizations not only a thriving group of customer advocates but also a space to listen to and test out new ideas about the service or product.    But there’s an art to taking the customer experience from ‘I have a problem’ to ‘I am now an advocate of this platform.’   In this episode, I inter...

What’s a ghost kitchen & why will we be seeing more of them in the next 12 months?    Among the industries that have adapted the most during the pandemic are restaurants and commercial real estate owners (and in a fight, restaurants would win). We have much to learn about CX from their innovations.   In this episode, I interview Alex Grace, Head of Market Sales and Operations at Fooda, about adapt...

Engagement is the moment when customers and prospects interact with the brand. From that moment on, the reality of being that brand’s customer becomes the customer experience.    Without effective engagement, there is no customer experience.   In this episode, I interview Nema Hashemi, Director of Sales at Contentstack, about creating engagement between customers and brand and alignment between co...

Buyers barely even read the product description anymore. 96% of us scroll right to the reviews because we want to predict what our buying experience will be like.   The last thing we want is for an organization to over promise and under deliver. We long for transparency.   In this episode, I interview Todd Caponi, Founder at Sales Melon and author of The Transparency Sale, about why transparency s...

You already believe that sending video messages is one of the most successful ways to make you and your team members more visible to customers. But you’re a little iffy on exactly how to adopt video messages into your organization successfully.    I’m Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, host of The Customer Experience Podcast, and co-host of the CX Series on the B2B Growth Show, here today...

Not everyone knows exactly what a Chief Customer Officer does. Even fewer realize that their role is to create delight at every point in the customer experience journey.   In this episode, I interview Alli Tiscornia, Chief Customer Officer at Sendoso, about her relentless focus on customer experience.   What we talked about:   - Defining the Chief Customer Officer role & where they report   - Rete...

People buy from people they like, people they feel an emotional connection with.   But when our sales strategy is to launch directly into the pitch in the first conversation, we get feedback that our company is “too salesy.”    The flip side of that is a sales experience focused on human connection.   In this episode, I interview Tori Belkin, Senior Director of Sales and Sales Enablement at Ceros,...

When your tech-oriented customer base is growing faster than you can hire your customer support staff, you have a big CX problem.   Obviously, the solution is to create an internal training program from scratch, right?   In this episode, I interview Richard Myers, Vice President of Customer Support & Success at Linode, about developing his CS training team.   What we talked about:   - The integral...

64% of all event planners have never done a virtual or hybrid event before. About 60% of attendees have never been to a virtual or hybrid event. Those numbers are from just a few weeks ago.   How can we know what makes a great virtual event so that we can host one?   In this episode, I interview Corey McCarthy, the CMO at Socio, about how to host great virtual events.   What we talked about:   - W...

We all want to belong to a tribe. The greatest way to grow your business is not to build your brand or throw events — it’s to grow a community around the solution to a problem.   In this episode, I interview Sangram Vajre, Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder at Terminus, about how he created the category of and community around account-based marketing (ABM).   We cover:   - A lightning round discussio...

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic created a variety of crises and challenges at each of its 3 stages. Though the pandemic persists, its consequences are more clear and the crises become more manageable. As we enter a post-crisis phase (Jun 2020-Dec 2021), we must focus on the systems we’ve put in place to communicate with customers in terms of both how they’ve changed and how they must further ev...

Video meetings are more than likely here to stay.  They’re exhausting, though — way beyond mere eyestrain. If more of us are going to work remotely, we need to implement these 3 ways to overcome “Zoom fatigue.”   I’m Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, host of The Customer Experience Podcast, and co-host of the CX Series on the B2B Growth Show, here today to share actionable ways to improve...

During COVID-19, businesses need to recognize that hearing from and listening to customers has never been more important. Your customers need to feel safe if you’re reopening.    To make customer experience the core of your business, you need to focus on the 4 truths of CX: it should be 1) differentiated, 2) easy, 3) visible, and 4) authentic.   In this episode, I interview Aaron Weiche, CEO at Ga...

Employee experience is the sum of all the touchpoints you have with your employer organization — which equals millions of touches.   Why, then, have 40% of managers not even checked in on how their employees are doing during the pandemic?   In this episode, I interview Gil Cohen, Founder at Employee Experience Design, about intentionality in crafting the employee experience.   What we talked about...

Customer experience shouldn’t be an afterthought. Unless you’ve intentionally built it into your organization’s core, you probably aren’t offering an especially frictionless customer experience. Wait, what’s so bad about friction?   In this episode, I interview Anthony Coundouris, the founder of run_frictionless and author of run_frictionless, about removing friction by aligning 4 quadrants in you...

Data literacy is knowing how to read and understand data — such as the difference between a histogram and a flow chart. Data maturity is knowing how to use data to make decisions — like giving your customers what they want the most.    Right now, a time of great change, is the perfect opportunity to invest in growing a data culture so that in the post-pandemic world, you’ll have both the data lite...

When there’s a face present, 70% of our gaze goes straight to it.   The problem that recorded video solves right now is the problem that it’s always solved. Video connects you to people in an immediate and intimate way that faceless digital communication scientifically cannot do. In this episode, I’m excited to unpack some of the science about video that I shared recently at Narrative Science’s Da...

Our ideas about customer experience have probably changed drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Customer experience is no longer just about getting value from a service or experience. It’s actually about helping each other survive.   When customer experience is that essential to keeping our livelihoods and lives safe, we have to revisit its deepest foundation: relationships.   In this episode,...

The only two currencies in the world are dollars and emotions. Emotion is also an often overlooked component of customer experience. When it comes to human emotions, the face is the window to the soul, meaning that facial expressions — if you know how to read them — truly reveal what is happening on the emotional scale.   The insight that there are 7 emotions in terms of facial coding and that onl...

Everyone tracks some form of data. (We track quite a lot of it if we’re rolling with the times.) But amassing data isn’t meaningful unless we can create a narrative out of the facts.   For example, if you just looked at the cold data of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’d start to feel pretty hopeless, but if the data started to produce fact-based stories, we humans would start to be able to understand i...

We always talk about brand as a collection of promises that a company is making to its customers. At the end of the day, brand really comes down to the essence of a company.   However, if the people spending the money on the advertising do not have a strong bond with the people delivering that customer experience — the ones facing the customers — you have a catastrophic breakdown between promise a...

Now more than ever, having a focus on the customer experience matters. If we're not empathetic to what our customers are going through, we won’t just not make a sale, we’ll make an enemy. This timely reminder underscores the importance of customer data as an avenue for relating to the deep needs of the customer.    You’ve heard of account-based marketing and selling… Account-based information ties...