Are You Ready for AI?
Jump on this live broadcast May 9 with me, DAC Group, and Chris Penn, talking about what marketers need to learn (and teach their teams) to harness AI.
Going to be a good one!
The ROI of Empathy and Innovation in Customer Experience
Really enjoyed this conversation with Christian Montes, on the NobelBiz podcast. If efficiency the enemy of empathy?
Top 50 Customer Service Leaders of 2024
Thanks to Amplifai, for naming me a Top 50 Customer Service Leader.
To Persuade Make it Personal
As a rule, I try not to use airplane toilets.
But sometimes, rules must be broken.
And thus I found myself in a freakishly compact restroom on a United flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis (I'm usually a Delta loyalist, as you may know, but very few San Francisco flights were available).
I discovered this sign, which was so perfectly executed, I ultimately went BACK to the bathroom to get a photo:
It's of course not uncommon to see signage beseeching us to not put certain items into a toilet. But United NAILS IT here with the outcomes statement:
"Clogged toilets delay flights"
That one simple sentence makes all the difference. Because it articulates that putting napkins, toys, chicken bones or other manner of flotsam and jetsam into the loo doesn't just inconvenience the airline and its workers, it inconveniences YOU.
The very best way to persuade people to do anything is to do what this sign does....align the incentives.
During the pandemic, my former team at Convince & Convert was retained by The University of Arizona (my alma mater) to convince students to download and use a bluetooth-enabled contact tracing app.
Led by my pal Maggie Young, we conducted a ton of research on student attitudes. We discovered that students cared about health and safety, and cared about not taking Covid back home to elderly relatives.
But the only message that caused them to ACT was when we aligned the incentives. The core theme of our campaign was "if you want to get back to being a college student, and going to class, basketball games, and parties you need to use this app." And it worked.
To persuade, you must make it PERSONAL
Days after I discovered the bathroom sign, I had lunch with the CEO of a company for whom I'd delivered a keynote speech.
He asked me how to get people in his company to care about customer experience if they weren't customer-facing in their roles.
I resisted the temptation to show him the bathroom sign...gauche, at the table. But we did talk about aligned incentives.
Most of us know or believe that better CX yields better financial outcomes, EVENTUALLY.
But getting to eventually can be a time-consuming and potentially expensive march. Which is why whenever you're trying to change a culture or build a customer-focused enterprise, you must align incentives.
You can't tell the team that the most important thing is customer satisfaction and retention, and then bonus people based solely on net new revenue. Those are misaligned incentives, and will always cause trouble when choices and trade-offs are made.
Which is why it can be powerful and effective when businesses bonus their entire employee base on metrics like Net Promoter Score, and similar.
If you say you care about customer experience, you must measure and reward your people accordingly. If you do so, the incentives will be aligned, and you might be surprised how quickly your customer experience optimization journey unfolds.
The Books Report
If you've ever had an inkling to make some or all of your living creating and publishing content - as I'm doing with the Tequila Jay Baer channel - this is the book for you.
From Joe Pulizzi and an all-star cast of contributors, The Content Entrepreneur is the complete (and brand new!) guide to starting, scaling, measuring, and monetizing your content business. Terrific read!
Jay's Faves
Apple TV+ keeps turning out shows I adore.
My wife and I just finished season 2 of the terrific travelogue The Reluctant Traveler, featuring Eugene Levy.
The conceit of the show is delicious: Eugene Levy doesn't like to travel. At all.
After visiting many countries and experiencing new sights, sounds, and smells will he be convinced travel is worth the trouble?
Great cinematography, and Levy is as droll and delightful as ever.
More Issues
