Transcript: Episode 3 - CX – Your Keys to Customer Retention

Welcome to Experience, the podcast that turns you into an ecommerce expert. Your host, Andrew Rogencamp, shares his wealth of B2B and B2C business experience to take you on an ecommerce adventure. Each month, you'll hear from industry experts and meet people just like you looking to take their business to new heights online.

Alright. Welcome to The Ecommerce Experience, and this is podcast number three. My name's Andrew Rogencamp, and this is a podcast to help people out there to get the best out of ecommerce both in

B2B and B2C. So here we are in, I guess, month two of COVID nineteen, and I think everybody's sort of gotten fairly used to what's going on now and really looking forward to those restrictions being lifted certainly down here in Australia. I'm not sure what it is around the rest of the world.

But, yeah, we're seeing a lot of companies that have learned how to work remotely. We're seeing a lot of companies that are really taking this time to do a lot of things, especially around ecommerce, that they don't really have time to do when they're too busy, you know, in the business as usual sort of phase. So that's really good. That's encouraging. We've certainly seen a lot of B2B companies that have quickly implemented some B2C capability, especially in that food services area where they really need to sell those products.

A lot of those products, if they don't sell them soon, they're going to the tip. So that's really important for those customers, and and those sort of sites are are really starting to take off. And we've actually got we've seen a lot of customers out there out in the talking to customers that are doing some really unbelievable numbers. And it really depends on the type of products you're selling. If you're selling fitness equipment, you're doing pretty well.

If you're selling stuff that people can do at home while they're not going to sport and that sort of thing. They're doing well. Of course, if you're selling anything in PPE interesting. PPE was a term that not many people knew six weeks ago, but everybody knows what PPE stands for now. So that's really interesting as well.

So today's topic we wanna talk about is customer experience. You often hear it called it's called CX. And I think in today's environment, especially with a lot of sites getting customers that they've never seen before, A lot of ecommerce is happening with individuals out there that have chosen never to do ecommerce before. I think customer experience is super important. You've got customers that are hitting your site that are going to be first time customers, and depending on how you treat those customers will determine whether they come back to you long term or they're just a COVID nineteen customer.

So today, we've got a gentleman called Danny Phillips, and he's from a company called Arcade, and he's a CX expert. So welcome along to the podcast, Danny.

Thanks for having me.

So Danny, maybe you can give us a bit of background about what you do, where you've been, and, you know, what you can give to the podcast today.

Yeah. No worries. We worked mainly in the discretionary retail industry, so very much on a a B2C approach for most of the most of the time that we've been going. We've going for over twenty years in our company. We sort of started out as a design studio that moved into communications and digital, social media when that was a new way of getting to customers, then we started doing more in the e commerce and transactional space.

And it's really only the last five years that we've decided to lock ourselves in on this concept of customer experience, because we felt that the term digital was kind of obvious, calling yourself a digital agency. It's pretty broad, of course. Yeah, and of course there's digital involved in everything, so I think the term digital, whether it be in a role title or in an agency or a business, is a bit redundant these days. If you're digital, then you've got some

problems. Exactly.

Yeah, so customer experience for us is basically the sum of all the experiences a customer has with a brand. So as an agency, we really wanted to not sort of put ourselves in a corner and only do e commerce work or only do app work or customer service work or email marketing work. It's all sort of combined together. To sum it all up, it's the concept of retention, really. It's how do you retain customers?

We're not really in the acquisition game. Genuine loyalty, genuine advocacy is what we're trying to do. There's, I know Seth Godin's a bit of a go to person.

Yeah, I get his blogs,

yeah. But he's got a great idea of this sort of minimum viable audience. The idea that as a business, you really need to focus on making sure that you're appealing to the minimum number of people that you need to appeal to in order to be a viable business. It's less about trying to be all things to all people, so having that focus is important.

Yeah. We we I often talk about that eighty twenty rule that often 80 of your customers make up 20% of your revenue, and 20% of your customers make up 80% of your revenue. So you can have a really high cost to serve on that 80% that aren't really generating a lot of revenue for you. Definitely. And it becomes, as you say, not viable to be doing that.

So if you've if you've got a model that 90% of your customers are generating 10%, you've got some real problems there because it's the cost to serve 90% of your customers is way higher than it should be.

Yeah. And I find brands or businesses do spend, if they've got a retail footprint out in the real world and they've got their e commerce efforts or their online efforts, I often find that they will proportionately spend the amount of effort serving all customers equally. So 90% of your effort and your investment is going to making sure those 90% of people that make a very small portion of your revenue happy. So whereas a CX centered strategy is really about standing shoulder to shoulder with your best customer, looking back towards the brand and going, okay, brand, I as a customer are part of your top 10 or 20%. You as a brand define part of who I am as a customer.

I buy from lots of brands, but this brand that I'm talking about now, I buy a lot through them. So they are defined by people like me as a brand, and I as a customer as defined by this particular brand, because you're one of my special brands that I deal with. CX strategies, functions, features, utilities, approaches, the whole thing should be disproportionately centered around what those that small number of people want, and everyone else be damned almost. I'd rather see you happily turn someone away. I saw I saw a great example during this COVID nineteen thing where in my local area, there's local butchers and even the the local Woolworths supermarket was turning away people from outside of town that are obviously coming in there to scoop up, you know, bulk buying meat from the butcher.

And the butcher would be going, well, I don't know who you are. I've never seen you before, and I don't know why you want to buy 20 kilos of mincemeat. So that COVID fling customer you mentioned at front, I think is a really good point. So that was always true. This concept was always true.

You shouldn't have your best customer lining up behind an average customer. You know, if you go to, say, a Guzman and Gomez, the burrito, company, you'll see that their best customers do download the app, they do get that sort of, I just want to reorder what I ordered yesterday, and they'll walk straight up to the counter and pick up their order while everyone else is lining up. If everyone else is lining up, it's just going, I want a burrito today. I'm not even paying attention to that brand logo. They just sell the food that I want.

They're making some money, but they're happy to line up and they're not part of the best customer because that customer might buy a burrito today and you never see them again. Whereas the one that's got the app that's walking up, that's getting the better experience, that's that's the best customer experience.

And I I think it's important to enforce that that those customers experience. And I think that a really good example of a company that hasn't done that well out of it doing that sort of thing, and they've improved recently is Qantas when it comes to the business class line and the platinum line and things like that. So until recently, there was there's always been two lines, but they do not enforce who lines up in each line. And that makes those really high frequent flyers, the the people that are flying with Qantas week in and week out, infuriated when you see a whole lot of people lining up in those lines that, you know, you know, and it's not being, you know, elitist or anything. It's just that you spend half your life on a plane.

You're loyal to that brand, and you want some recognition for it.

Definitely. I mean, I think it's funny watching we often use the frequent flyer programs as an example when we start talking about maybe loyalty or known customer programs. Often it's because the executives we talk to, that's one of the only loyalty programs that they're really engaged with. They think the one thing I sort of just before I respond to your point, the one thing I always like to point out is just be very careful about differentiating a brand that is a grudge purchase versus an enjoyment purchase. They're very different types of categories.

So shopping, flying, insurance, fintech, anywhere where you have to do it anyway, it's a grudge purchase. I need to be in Sydney. I don't need to fly, but I have to. I'm not going to walk. They do a really good job of making that as good an experience as possible, whereas buying fashion or apparel or toys for your kids or something else is not really a grudge purchase.

You enjoy the purchase I sort of mention that because the whole priority queue thing, I think here in Australia specifically, that sort of whole tall poppy thing, the idea that for a while their customers, even people that had the priority queue access, wouldn't line up in it because they didn't like showing off in that queue. Everyone would just line up with everyone else. Now, is a decade or so ago, but very quickly that's turned around now, and this idea of a two speed experience is almost expected now, and I think Qantas and Virgin have done that. But but then by breaking that rule themselves, they've really undermined, you know, something that they've taken so yeah. That they've sort of fought so hard to create in the first place, and the fact that sometimes the priority line's longer than average flight is too expensive.

The the priority line, you know, depending on which airport you're at. If you're in Perth where, know, pretty much every fly in, fly out worker's a gold or platinum frequent flyer, the priority line's a lot longer. But yeah. And then they let them through both at the same time. So it doesn't really I used you know, I just get in the economy line because often it's shorter, and they go through at the same time.

But now what they're doing is quite good is they're just letting all of those priority people go through and then letting the other ones go through. Letting them get settled and take that priority. So in terms of customer experience, I think if you look at it, the concept has been around forever. It's been around way before ecommerce came out. That whole, you know, it's nothing new.

This is not a new concept to do with ecommerce. It's really just wrapping that whole go to woe experience up. But ecommerce is a big part of it, obviously.

I think the best way to describe the evolution of CX is that twenty years ago, we had a thing called good old fashioned customer service, and the customer's always right, right? And businesses were small enough to be able to, when a customer that they knew walked in the door, they could pick up where they left off because the employees had been there for ten years, people weren't moving around that much, so their local store was their local store. All these factors meant that customer experience was just amazing.

And they were face to face.

Yeah, exactly. So then what happened is over the and agencies like me are responsible for some of this downfall. I think we've we've sort of created the problem in the first place is we've helped brands or, you know, helped to sort of completely fragment their experience. There's so many ways that a customer can discover, can browse, can decide, can shortlist, can purchase, can return, can recommend across so many different channels now that it's fragmented. In order to manage that, the brands had to invent ecommerce departments and marketing departments, all these different departments that have got misaligned KPIs and metrics that they're being judged on, that all of a sudden started working against concepts of good old fashioned customer service.

CX, I think, is the discipline of bringing back good old fashioned customer service. Often, we get of knowing smiles from the older executives in the room because they go, This sounds very familiar, and I'm sick of being bamboozled by technology. This is great. We're starting to talk about this now. So it's one line I like to use, because often CX and marketing get lumped in the same bucket, I like to differentiate the two and say, Well, marketing is using the customer to solve business problems, whereas CX is using the business to solve customer problems.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

So once you identify what the customer problems are, and another way to frame that is the jobs to be done for the customer or what the customer uses your brand for. Not why do they love you, but just what jobs do they get done by using your brand. Once you define those things, then you say, well, okay, well, how do they do those jobs? And how does our brand help them do those jobs? And, yeah, an example I can often use here in in sort of apparel retail is I go to your website, I look at seven different pairs of pants, and then I go to your store and say, want to buy the black pants that I was looking at.

The store person goes, Well, I've got lots of different pants and lots of black ones. I don't know which one you're looking at. Then I'll say something like, Yeah, but I'm pretty sure those pants that I looked at have been following me around the internet all week because of your very clever advertising technology. Why don't you, as a brand, know which one I was looking at? Because I was logged into the website.

I even maybe saved it into my wish list on the website, how come you don't know? You go, Well, I'm not the e commerce department. You need to talk to the e commerce guys about that. I'm the retail department. The customer's going, Yeah, but you're the brand, right?

Sometimes you'll see the e commerce side as their competition almost.

Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah. I think the channel conflict, which normally is more about wholesale and retail, we're seeing channel conflict within a brand that's fully integrated. Stores are losing sales to the e commerce team and e commerce And also, we're

generally doing click and collect for the e commerce team as well.

Yeah. So we find that a lot, like, part of a CX strategy is looking at and realigning KPIs and attribution so that you're not actively working against your customers. One another good example that I've referenced quite a few times is the in store availability feature on a website using inventory from your store network. So obviously, if you've got accurate store inventory, which I'm sure is a battle for most brands in anyway, So here's another reason to get it right. If your store inventory is accurate, then on your website, you can say, well, you're looking at this particular product at our Chadstone store.

We've got 23 in stock, or we've got adequate stock. You can sort of use fuzzy, weasley words if you need to. Now, will that feature on the website increase the conversion rate of the website, which is the key KPI of the ecommerce manager? No, it might actually hurt the conversion rate.

Yeah, it will.

So now all of sudden, you've got an ecommerce manager going, why would I prioritize this feature on the website, it's going to hurt my KPI. Yet when we go and look at the customer service logs or the in store, we do a straw poll at stores and say, can you count the number of phone calls you got today where you were doing a stock lookup for a customer who's deciding whether to walk into your store or not? And yeah, it's forty-fifty percent of all calls to stores, and 40% of all calls to the head office customer service is an in store lookup.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I've seen one where they've got not only what they've got on stock in the store, but this is a company that sells DJ equipment. But they'll also say what they've got on demo. And if you think about buying anything where you wanna you know, you can look at a speaker online and say, yeah, that looks really good, but you're buying a speaker for what it sounds like. And so if somebody knows that they can go into the this company's got stores in every cap city, is that they can see that it's on demo.

They jump in their car, and they can listen to it. It's it's it's a big selling feature for them.

I think that's a hugely important point, and I think coming out of this into the new normal, there's a phrase that I've sort of coined called intentional commerce, that the idea that people aren't going to be just browsing anymore. People aren't just going to, you know, walk into Chagston and just walk around and see what jumps out at them anymore. They're going to go to a website. They're going to see that they like the product, that it's in stock, and to your point that I will be able to go in there and demo it at that particular store. And then, and only then, will I plan my trip and I come in there and I will go any and so I'd expect conversion rates in stores to be lifting just like they are online.

Because people are going

to avoid going to those to to be in public places unless they really have to be. That's that's the message I'm hearing out there.

Definitely. I mean, I think even if we get the complete all clear, which is still gonna be, what, a year or so away, I think psychologically psychologically, people are gonna be are gonna just be different. They're not going to be able to switch it back into the normal mode. And that's great. Think, yeah, if you think about what that means, it means we're not having a whole lot of retail zombies walking around or, you know, consumerism zombies walking around, just taking up time.

You know? Just it's a it's a it's a waste for everyone. It's a waste for the store teams. It's a waste for the the stock. It's people buying stuff and taking it home and bringing it back.

It's all these

sorts

of It's a of other

bringing products back. They they bring them home and then take them back the next day or after they've used them in some cases.

Yeah. Well, I think that's that's probably another good topic to talk about. I think if you're looking at what good CX strategies are, the whole managing the returns process is all and thinking about your return strategy is is a really good one. I think often we see the evolution of returns. It works this way.

Customers buy from e commerce and then they have to return to e commerce. They're not allowed to return to store because of all that channel conflict attribution we talked about earlier. Then brands realise that that's a bit inconvenient, so they start letting customers return to wherever they want to return. The next evolution is stores start going, Well, if you return to a store, that's an opportunity to upsell or cross sell or try something So they start waking up to the opportunity, and that's kind of good. Then the next thing that happens is, e commerce team starts seeing, Oh, Danny's just bought three shirts of the same style in different sizes.

He will be returning something, obviously. So let's make sure we put a return bag in there rather than make him request it and then go out of process.

Alright? Yeah. That makes sense. So you're actually thinking it to their intention. You you're fine.

You're saying, I'm fine with that. It's the same way you'd you'd do it in store. So I'm just giving you that in store experience except you're getting it at home.

Exactly. And then you think about the idea that, well, we will give that to to Danny because his annual spend with us is over $1,500, whereas we're not gonna give it to Andrew even though he spent the same amount as Danny did today because we've never seen him before. So maybe we don't give that experience to him just yet. Again, aligning your best experiences to your best customers. Often brands will say, Well, I can't afford to give a return bag to every Exactly.

And we're saying, You don't have to give it to every customer.

Right.

Yeah, so I think that sort of returns is really a remote change room experience with a deposit. Just treating it that way is the way to think about it. So yeah, there's an evolution. Every brand's sort of working through where they're at with that and sort of making peace with some of the decisions. It's sort of like evolving from transactional thinking to more sort of customer value thinking.

If you're trying to make your strategic decisions around the value of this transaction, Mhmm. I'll only do free shipping if it's over a certain amount today, and then who cares what value this customer has. That's like where a good CX strategy allows you to have a bit more of a broader view.

Yeah. Just to get those customers that are important to you to continue to buy a few. It's a no brainer for them to to buy those products.

Yeah. And I think if you but if you've got transactional rules in place, then a really valuable customer might say, sorry. You can't have free shipping because you've only ordered $70 worth of stuff.

Yeah. We could have ordered a $25,000 product yesterday, and now I've just forgot one cable for that, and I'm gonna charge $15 freight. It's a great example. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's about making sure that that that the customer is the the logic's attached to the customer, not to the transaction or the action.

That's that's really important. Yeah. What about in B2B, Danny? You know, I know you've got a lot of experience in B 2 C. Have you done much work in B 2 B around the CX type thing?

Not a whole lot. I mean, we've worked in some in some medical spaces in sort of a bit of a side, you know, side life doing some things there. I think some of our retailers are quite big purchases, whether it be homewares or something else. I think when it comes to spending When you're talking about the best customer, so we've got someone like an apparel brand that's got a customer that's that does spend $30,000 a year. Now that's that's B2B in my book.

So, I sort of see it as a blurry line. I think at the end of the day, these are the same humans. They're the same humans that buy a shirt that, you know, that say yes to a a, what, dollars 300,000 order on refrigeration parts for, you know, a a national tender. Right? So the same rules apply.

I think people are saying, I've got jobs to do. Make it easier for me. One example we've had that's sort of B2B is in the tool space. So we've got an app for tradies that buy through a tools retailer. They hate passwords and don't like websites.

They want to do it all on an app because they're on their mobiles all day, so great, we just use an SMS based password login to activate the app rather than trying to make them remember passwords. Yeah, that's sort of an idea. And there's somewhere inside the app, there's a way to export a CSV of the last financial year's purchases that gets attached to an email that we guess that they forward to their accountant. So it's the idea that, yeah, showing your purchase history is something you'd expect a brand to show their customers, but repackaging that up from a business context to be something that's useful for that small business is But we just see that as a power user. We just see that as customer experience as well.

It's just about understanding that a B2B customer is just a customer that has very high needs for specific utilities. And if they have to choose between vendor A, B, or C, they're gonna pick the vendor that makes their day easier, that helps them

get their job Yeah. And that's what I often talk about with B2B is that, you know, I'll call it you know, in B2C, you're you're calling it a buyer sorry, you know, a shopper, a consumer. But in B2B, they're really buyers. And their job during the day, you know, they don't leave home and say, oh, I'm off to work to go and buy some stuff. That's just often part of what they have to do as their normal job.

So it might be somebody who's the office manager that has to buy stationery from one of the big stationery companies, and they just wanna get that transaction done quickly, efficiently, and then move on. And that whole CX part of it that that goes all the way from when the sales rep first spoke to him about pricing to how that pricing's a bayed on the website, to how the products were delivered, what they looked like when they delivered, were they delivered to the right departments within my business and all of that sort of stuff gets down to, you know, that whole CX.

Look, I think I read, I mean, I don't know why I keep using airlines as an example, but I mean, I used to book my own Virgin flights using their consumer portals. I became a power user, I was starting to get annoyed by just all the sort of, Oh, you're buying a flight. This could be the first and last time you ever buy a flight, so let's throw the full kitchen sink at you. Then we set up a business account, and the business account is super lean, super light, works on mobile. It's just about who's flying, where they're going, here's the it's done.

Get an over there. It's a pretty

major decision. You know, they're not trying to sell you anything. The fact that you've got to fly has already been decided. You just need to, you know

Getting it done. Get it done. Yeah. But isn't it disappointing that that amazingly slick, super fast experience isn't available to the average consumer?

Yeah. I had no idea that was there. So we book all of our flights on Qantas just on the, you know, the standard quantas.com.au. And, yeah, you go through that whole experience every time. Whereas, you know, we do the same thing every time.

We just want the same sort of flights.

Yep. So saving my details, saving my credit card, saving all my delivery address, you know, being able to pick up where you left off. They're the sorts of terms that you you should be asking yourself, whether it be B2B or B2C. Can my customers pick up where they left off? CRMs get thrown around a lot as a solution to this problem, but I think CRM isn't there to help the customer or the client or the buyer.

It's there to help the seller, the marketer. So those tools are designed to help you sell more, not to help them buy more. There's a big difference.

Yeah. That's right. And I guess ERP comes into it as well because without the ERP system there being able to fulfill and efficiently ship the products and let other systems know about that transactional data that occurs, it's very hard to make a customer have a good experience.

Yeah. It's interesting. As we build out these sort of CX ecosystems, you're trying to decide, you know, the roles that all of these platforms play and how they work together. What we've found, this is where the Omnio product, which is a bit of a shameless plug there, that we've developed, we've designed it to fill a gap where we find that between, say, an ERP and a CRM or any of those sorts of things, they've got all the I call them the final facts. That's where the product, the price, the transaction, the customer record, the customer ID must live in your ERP.

It's the final facts for your accounting, all those sorts of things. But those tools generally aren't accessible in real time while I'm trying to do a job, or our customers trying to do a job. Exactly. Or the interfaces aren't optimized for getting jobs done. They're designed for interacting with facts.

Yeah. So what we find is you end up with either, some clever interfaces through middleware or, other platforms where you have what I call functional facts. What's the customer's copy of all this information? When I'm actually talking to them on the phone or in real life or they've got their own phone in front of them, that they can access their functional fax to get jobs done quickly? And then if any new fax get created, like I'm repurchasing that thing I bought last time, then a new that happens in that nice customer optimized experience, and then it it will end up as a final fact back in the the big dirty ERP where where the final truth is.

Yeah. So that that sort of thinking around CX software and CX strategies is, you know, try to find experience focused software that is designed for the customer to help them buy. Right. And then integrate it back into the core things which are there to help you sell and help you understand your business and help. When you close all the doors to your customers and go, Right, what's going on?

They're the tools you look at, your ERP and all those things. When you open the doors to the customer, whether it be a website or a selling process or a salesperson's tablet or whatever else, those tools need to be super fast, be able to be changed. Interfaces should be thrown out and redone every six to twelve months.

Well, that's not going happen in ERP. I mean, ERP I've been working in ERP for, you know, thirty years, and my experience is is that some customers upgrade once every three years. Some I've got I've known a customer that hasn't upgraded their ERP since 1998, and they still run efficiently on it. But when you compare that to ecommerce where, you know, you've got customers really upgrading their ecommerce functionality, UI, UX, all of that, maybe every three to four months. It's the the the cycle around it is is phenomenal.

And that should be true. I mean, I think that's where, you know, where where agencies, you know, like ours and like yours, those sorts of that sort of that service to say, these are the the big monoliths and the big this the glacial parts of your business that need to move slowly because when you change them, it's a big deal. And they maybe don't need to change as long as you've got an interface out to your business logic, and then that business logic can be exposed in real time to experiences that humans use. As long as those interfaces exist, then that takes the pressure off needing to move ERPs all the time. I think you can do a lot with some pretty old state.

I mean, old ERPs are Yeah.

The role of ERP, certainly, when I first started in ERP in the early nineties, it was everything. It did everything from, you know, the accounts, the inventory management, the CRM, rentals, manufacturing, all of that. Whereas these days, the role of ERP, almost call it the plumbing. It's it's it's the plumbing system where and now you've got all these other systems that are quite not easily integrated, but are integratable to those ERP systems. And ERP really is sort of really, as you say, just that transactional end at the back end that, you know, stores that source of data, you know, that one truth of data at the at the back end.

There's a few terms that go around when we talk about CX that I think can sort of cause problems. It's this idea of a single view of customer or a single point of truth. It's a utopia that isn't possible. So it's about talking about a shared view of customer. It's this idea of rather than thinking in the terms of a suite, a big monolithic suite that everything's in, like the old ERPs, you talk about a stack where you've got the ERP plays a role, but you've got a best of breed, light customer service engine over here, and you've got an email marketing tool there, and you've got an e commerce front end over there, and an app framework over here, and a sales rep app that we've developed that might lean on top of the

commerce It's really an industry's world these days. The days of having one application that is all things to all people is just way gone.

No, because as soon as you do that, it won't move fast enough. So it can be challenging, and I think some businesses that are out there start getting a bit worn down by the complexity. They go, Well, now I'm managing 12 different vendors, I've just got this one going, and now I'm feeling I have to change that. But I think that's the world. I think you've got to have a team that is comfortable with doing that, and if you're not replatforming at least one part of your business, always, you should always be reassessing.

I'd be very surprised if all of if if your entire stack is is remains best of breed for your customers in your industry, for more than three years. Right? So I'd imagine you should always be updating something for the right reasons, because you're delivering a better experience, getting better efficiency, saving money. I've seen some brands go from hugely expensive email marketing stacks or components of their stack, and then going to, much lighter ones because they realize they didn't use 80% of the features of that big marketing tool that they were sold. So there's a lot of opportunity to save money and do better things.

So what is a you you do CX strategy. What does a CX strategy look like? What does it entail? There's a lot of talking to customers, imagine, and then, you know, coming up with a strategy and what components are in there and what the steps are to implement.

Yeah. I mean, we sort of break it into three parts. There's good old fashioned goal discovery, like what is a brand trying to achieve? Just in general, I mean, customers are obviously going to play a role in that. But we just need to know from the brand's point of view, what are you doing?

How do you value things? How do you choose what to invest in? How is your appetite for risk and all those other things? That's what we call goal or viability. Then you talk about feasibility.

That's where we go, show us your tech stack. Show us where everything talks to each other. Where are the gaps? What are the disasters? What are the skeletons in the closet?

What are the things that are working really well from a technical point of view? Do you have the culture and capability to support it? Are your vendors on board? Do they move with you or not? So that's what we call the feasibility or platform discovery step.

Then we do what we call the desirability step, which is about customers. So what do the customers want from you? Who are they? What jobs do they have to be done? What channels do they like to use?

We typically don't go out and do a big research piece, like a customer research piece. We're not trying to understand customer segments or personas necessarily from a marketing point of view. We're trying to understand that job's to be done. So we often find sometimes we work alongside branding agencies or marketing agencies or strategists that are doing that kind of thing, back to that whole using customers to solve business problems analogy I used before. Put all those three things together, and you've got desirability, feasibility, and viability sort of worlds that everyone can understand.

And then it's just a backlog of features. So what's next? Click and collect. Great. What's that gonna cost?

This amount of money.

Get the low hanging fruit first and just start working down fruit.

All of that.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Typical strategies. And and often what that'll that'll entail a regular catch up with all departments and going, what are the top three things that are causing you problems right now, you or your customers' problems? And how might the customer experience ecosystem on hold help you? Maybe it can't. Maybe there's a particular problem which has got nothing to do with customer experience and we can't help you, but sometimes we're surprised.

If the service team, if the sales team, marketing team, logistics teams, the CFO all bring out their top three problems, you might find that, okay, if they're really your top three problems, if one of those was to go away in the next two months, that's a big deal, then great. Let's pick an initiative that's going to address that.

You mentioned a lot of departments there. Who owns customer experience in business?

This is a huge problem. I've had CEOs say, We are customer centric, so therefore every head of those departments owns the customer. I go, Great. So no one does, because you know that. Everyone knows those rules.

So unless you've got a CXO and you've got a CX department, then no one is in charge of it, and that's the problem. Yeah. It's huge problem. And I'd say the CEO has to own the CX because they are the representative of the customer ultimately, or they'd say they have responsibility to the shareholders, so it's kind of different. Not having a CXO is a huge problem, marketing is the wrong department for it to be under.

That's often who gets it. I find that's not the wrong department. It's usually a problem. I mean, if it's a retail brand, then we'd say probably retail operations probably is the next most likely owner or maybe the customer service teams, but customer service teams are usually the they're just there fixing other departments' problems. They're not really proactive.

So a CMXO really is is vital if if you're looking

to retain customers. And that person needs to be somebody that works well with all the other departments. Because often what that CXO wants to achieve, they can't do themselves. It's gotta be done. So if you wanna all of a sudden be doing track and trace, well, you gotta be speaking to your logistics people and all of that.

You know, this

But that's just like a a CFO can't do everything either. Right? So a CFO can only have an have a point of view that everyone else has to like, I need emails to cost less. So they'll go to the email marketing department and get them to fix it. So it's a C suite thing, for that very reason.

I think one thing that's a pattern that we've found is that a CX strategy, by definition, includes two or more departments. Because if it doesn't, then it's just an e commerce strategy or it's just a marketing strategy. So it's almost that was sort of an accidental byproduct of our thinking, but it just goes, oh. So whenever we have to pull people together that don't normally work together, looks and smells like a CX project.

Yeah. That's good way of thinking of Yeah. Yeah. Alright, Danny. Anything else you wanna add?

I think we're we're probably getting towards our our limit on the podcast. But, yeah, is there anything else you wanna add? Especially around, you know, COVID nineteen, what you're seeing out there. I've certainly seen two models. One where people have just said, I'm gonna use this to blow these new customers away.

And another one that have said, I'm gonna cut my staff while this is on. And I just think that's the wrong strategy, personally. I would be putting into ecommerce and that whole customer experience every potential resource you've got to make all these new customers coming on board just go, wow, I didn't know this company existed. Aren't they fantastic?

If I had a team of really well performing store sales people weren't able to work right now, if they're not on live chat rostered almost 20 fourseven a day, then you are missing a massive opportunity. Don't expect them to be outbound sales reps. They're not the sorts of people that can get on phones and call people because that's not how they work, but they can be there to help. I've seen some brands, even in light of all this, because of the cost savings, can't afford any new agent accounts on our customer service software. If you put one new agent on your customer service on Live Chat, that will make the cost of their wage and their agent feedback in two days of the month.

Absolutely. ROI is a no brainer at the moment.

At the end of this crisis, you will probably double number channel customers you have, the number of customers that are willing to buy online and in store. Usually, most brands, it's about 10% of their customers would be willing to buy online. 90% of their customers would only ever buy in store. So if that's not doubled by the end of this, you've done something wrong. We know that multichannel customers now can purchase from you 20 fourseven.

Once everything starts waking up, it's a huge opportunity to get a real long tail increase of customers that have now been booted up the butt to to purchase in different ways. So it's a great opportunity.

And I guess the other risk there is is if you even if you stay with the same amount of resources you're putting into customer experience now, Because the volume on a lot of these sites is some are some sites are doubling at the moment. What you could be doing is now all of a sudden, all those customers that you were treating well, you're no longer treating well because your bandwidth is just blown out, and you're gonna lose those good customers that you had.

We bought from an Australian toy retailer, and given that toy retailers have generally had a bit of bad run lately, up until this point, two and a half weeks ago for my son's six year old birthday, which was yesterday, and none of it arrived, no customer service replies, phone rang off the hook. Yeah. And we bought, I think it was like $400 worth of toys, all of these toys from one place. Two and a half weeks ago, probably cutting a little bit fine, but you'd think, and you see what's happening with another discount department store that's got a queue to wait to get into the online store.

Crazy. That

is madness. Yeah. I I I mean, I I can I feel for them? I know exactly why that's probably happened to them, but it's it's spending money or what money you've got. And people just don't some branches don't have the money.

They don't have the war chest. So I really have

some people going Not everybody's got an unlimited war chest to just do that

type of Especially in retail too. Think, you know, as much as these strategies for you may sound obvious, I just think literally they just can't. They'd love to. They just can't. I'm hoping with the JobKeeper thing coming in that they'll be able to activate some staff again.

Absolutely. But yeah, look, I think the opportunity's there. I think the only other thing I'd say at the end of all of this, people often talk about the ROI of CX, the back of the napkin ROI I usually throw at people is, what's your ATV? What's your average order value? If it's a hundred dollars, if it's a thousand dollars, whatever it is.

What if, and then how many active customers do you have in a year? How many customers shop with you as a known customer at least once in a year? Great. What if one in five of those people shopped one extra time next year? Or one in two?

Or all of them shopped one extra time on average? Because that'll be the sum of your CX improvements will be they they'll just buy that one extra time. It might even just be bringing a transaction forward. But if you go from one in 10 to one in one customers buy one extra time a year at your ATV, what does that add up to in your revenue? That's what you've got available to you.

Because you don't have that cost of acquisition on them buying again.

And then as a result of them buying again, what's the chances of a portion of those active customers advocating that someone else should buy through you?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, good news travels, but bad news travels faster.

Exactly. Give everything you've got to your best customers. Don't let them down and just don't I see so many brands spending so much money on acquisition. Marketing 101 costs five times more to acquire a customer than to keep one. But I don't see any brands spending anywhere near enough time on concept of retention, and that's the number one thing to look at.

How many customers shopped with you for the first time last year that haven't shopped again. That's unacceptable.

Yeah. That's a failure. Yeah. Okay, Danny, thanks for your time today. Really appreciate your insight.

I've learned a lot about customer experience and, yeah, hopefully, our podcast listeners have as well. Thanks very much, Danny.

No worries. Pleasure.

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