Adrian Swinscoe’s RARE Business Podcast

Today’s interview is with Jeanne Bliss is the Founder and President of CustomerBliss, and the Co-Founder of The Customer Experience Professionals Association. Jeanne is one of the foremost experts on customer-centric leadership and the role of the Chief Customer Officer and joins me today on the podcast for something different. Rather than conducting a straight up interview, we rummage around some of the big issues and challenges in customer experience right now in a short and punchy rant-off. We also talk a little bit about Jeanne’s new book: Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers. Hope you like it. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Agatha, NLU and turning customer support agents into geniuses – Interview with Deon Nicholas of Forethought.ai – and is number 319 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jeanne: Creating a great customer experience isn’t just something you do, it requires a fundamental shift in leadership including …

Today’s interview is with Deon Nicholas, Founder of Forethought, an AI company and 2018 TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participant, that has a vision to enable anyone to be a genius at their job. In practical terms, they do this indexing and surfacing content that matters the most in the context of their work. Deon joins me today to talk about the difference between NLP and NLU, winning last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield and how Agatha aims to make it easy to be a “genius” at customer support. This interview follows on from my recent interview – You can’t transform something you don’t understand – Interview with Annette Franz – and is number 318 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Deon: Forethought builds A.I. tools that index information within an organization and then deliver information to employees when they need it. Their first area of focus is the customer support agent. Their experience suggests that they can help agents and their teams triage and categorize tickets as …

Today’s interview is with Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc, and an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader. Annette joins me today to talk about her new book: Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business), what it’s about, what we can learn from it and her views on the current state of customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Audio is an overlooked dimension of the customer experience – Interview with Jeff Yasuda of Feed.fm – and is number 317 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Annette: Annette has recently published her first book: Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business). It’s not only a book about journey mapping. The book is really about putting the customer into customer experience and developing a customer centric culture. Only at the end of the book does Annette delve …

Today’s interview is with Jeff Yasuda, the CEO and co-founder of Feed.fm (Music as a Service), which helps game developers, content publishers, and e-commerce retailers increase customer engagement, retention, and conversions by incorporating popular music into their environments– at the lowest possible cost. Jeff joins me today stop talk about Feed.fm, the impact of music on customer experience and what others can learn from their experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Taziki’s is closing the disability employment gap and enriching their customer and employee experience at the same time – Interview with Dan Simpson – and is number 316 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jeff: Life is too short to work with people that you don’t like. And, life is too short not to pursue what you really love doing. Feed FM provides music as a service. They handle all of the effort associated associated with licensing and curation of music and also make it easy for their customers to …

Today’s interview is with Dan Simpson, CEO of Taziki’s Mediterranean Café, which is a fast casual chain of franchised restaurants based in Birmingham, Alabama that purveys Greek and Mediterranean cuisine such as gyros, sandwiches, soups, and salads. Dan joins me today to talk about Tazikis and eudaimonia, what it is, how they bring it to life, bringing hope and joy to others and what companies should be doing differently to improve their customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – If you want to improve your B2B customer experience, manage customer distress – Interview with Robert C. Johnson of TeamSupport – and is number 315 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Dan: Eudaimonia is a Greek concept, first discussed by Aristotle, which means finding out how you’re wired, what your passion and gifts are in the world and then living those out in community with others that are doing the same thing. Literally it means lasting happiness from living an authentic life …

Today’s interview is with Robert Johnson, the co-founder and CEO of TeamSupport.com, a cloud-based, B2B software application built to help customer-facing support teams serve clients better through stronger collaboration, superior teamwork, and faster issue resolution. Robert joins me today to talk about the difference between B2B and B2C customer experience, the Customer Distress Index (CDI) and what B2B companies should be doing differently to improve their customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The Commonwealth of Self Interest and customer engagement – Interview with Paul Greenberg – and is number 314 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Robert: A lot of providers are doing basic B2B customer support but there are very few that are focusing exclusively on the B2B marketplace. B2B is a fundamentally different marketplace. Interactions in the B2C world tend to be high volume, low complexity and low material value. B2B tends to have relatively low volume support inquiries, but they are generally complex and tend to be …

Today’s interview is with Paul Greenberg, best-selling author and founder & Managing Principal of The 56 Group, LLC, an advisory firm, focused on customer-facing strategic services. He is often called the “Godfather of CRM” and joins us today to talk about his new book: The Commonwealth of Self Interest: Business Success Through Customer Engagement, what engagement really is, the challenge and what we should be doing to improve how we serve our customers. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Given the choice 75 percent of customers would prefer to use messaging channels for service – Interview with Joshua March of Conversocial – and is number 313 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Paul: Paul has been focused on CRM (customer engagement) for over two decades and has been given the nickname “the Godfather of CRM”. If you want me to stay in my relationship with you, you’re going to have to know me. The Commonwealth of Self-interest is effectively a handbook on …

Today’s interview is with Joshua March, Founder and Board Director of Conversocial, a digital care platform for social messaging, and also author of Message Me, a book about the future of customer service in the era of social messaging and artificial intelligence. Joshua joins me today to talk about some recent research that Conversocial just released, the overall state of digital customer care, what the future of messaging and customer care looks like and what we should be doing about it. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Real competitive advantage in customer experience comes from understanding customers and what drives them away – Interview with David Avrin – and is number 312 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Joshua: A few years ago private messaging really started to accelerate and now asynchronous messaging (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc) on a phone has come to dominate how many people interact. It has the potential to replace the phone as the main service channel. …

Today’s interview is with David Avrin, a keynote speaker, an author, a consultant and also CEO of Visibility International. David joins me today to talk about his new book: Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back), what it’s about, what we can learn from it and what we should be doing differently to improve customer service and experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Gender and diversity imbalances will impact your ability to connect with and serve your customers – Interview with Adriana Gascoigne of Girls In Tech – and is number 311 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with David: David has recently published a new book called Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back). People and organisations around the world define and understand customer experience very differently. It doesn’t mean anything when you tell us that our call is very important to you and then you put us on hold for 45 minutes. The book is written …

Today’s interview is with Adriana Gascoigne, founder and CEO of Girls in Tech, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization devoted to empowering, educating and engaging women in the tech industry across 43 chapters in 32 countries. Adriana joins me today to talk about Girls In Tech, her new book: Tech Boss Lady: How to Start-Up, Disrupt, and Thrive as a Female Founder and the impact that gender and diversity imbalances have on an organisation’s ability to best serve its customers. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Adriana: Adriana is author of a new book called Tech Boss Lady: How to Start-Up, Disrupt, and Thrive as a Female Founder. Wrote the book as she was sick and tired of reading startup books and manuals and listening to podcasts where only men were being interviewed. However, there are many awesome women out there that are launching their own startups, creating their own companies, building products and services that are very innovative and very important for society today, not only for the general population, but for women in particular. In writing the book, Adriana interviewed over forty five women and featured twenty two womens stories within the book. You need resiliency to succeed …

Today’s interview is with Michael Redbord, General Manager of the Service Hub at HubSpot, a technology company that builds sales and marketing software. Michael joins me today to talk about their new research into the state of customer service, what we can learn from it, what the future holds and what we should be focusing on if we are to deliver a great customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – How using a network of experts can dramatically improve customer service automation – Interview with Antony Brydon of Directly – and is number 309 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Michael: I spoke to Michael last year about the challenges of scaling customer service and support departments. Hubspot recently published a new report called The State Of Customer Service in 2019. Some of the hypotheses that drove this research were things like: Do people trust less? Are people really more impatient? How is that affecting service and relationships between brands and …

Today’s interview is with Antony Brydon who is the CEO and co-founder of Directly, a leader in customer support automation that works with enterprise companies to launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. Antony joins me today to talk about asynchronous messaging, conversational interfaces, AI and expert networks. This interview follows on from my recent interview – How your procurement team is impacting both your employee and customer experience – Interview with Todd Olson of Pendo – and is number 308 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Antony: For many years companies have tried to wean their customers off the phone, a very expensive support channel. But, customers kept sticking with the phone saying that is the channel that we’re used to that is the channel that we like. However, the phones that we now hold in our hands today are not really phones anymore they are asynchronous messaging devices. And, the dominant applications on those phones are text messaging and WhatsApp …

Today’s interview is with Todd Olson who is co-founder and CEO of Pendo, a product experience platform that helps product teams create software customers love. Todd joins me today to talk about software product experience and how it impacts both the employee and customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Becoming more empathetic can be hard. Pega’s new AI-powered Customer Empathy Advisor aims to help – Interview with Rob Walker of Pega – and is number 307 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Todd: There is this tendency that when people build software that they think that more is more and bigger is better. However, this trait has given software a bad name. User experience, particularly the experience of employees using software, is becoming a growing dimension in the procurement of software. Thus, procurement decisions are becoming more about value and a shared understanding of value. Pendo is the Latin for the word for value. Your procurement team is having both …

Today’s interview is with Dr. Rob F. Walker, Vice President Decision Management and Analytics at Pega. I caught up with Rob at Pega’s recent customer event, Pegaworld, in Las Vegas and we grabbed a few minutes to talk about his keynote presentation, Pega’s upcoming Customer Empathy Advisor, what empathy is and the value of being more empathetic in customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The good, the bad and the ugly of customer service – Interview with Tom Libretto of Pega – and is number 306 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Rob: You can watch Rob’s keynote at Pegaworld here. I’ve talked to Rob a number of times before. We have talked about next best action strategies, transparency in AI and now we are discussing empathy. However, our conversations have always been about the over-arching topic and pursuit of customer engagement. The companies that Pega works with are typically Fortune 500 companies and, as such, they see a lot …

Today’s interview is with Tom Libretto, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Pega. I caught up with Tom at Pega’s recent customer event, Pegaworld, in Las Vegas and we grabbed a few minutes to talk about Pega’s recent research report: 2019 global customer service insights: The good, the bad, and the ugly, what they found out and what lessons organisations should be learning and what they should be doing differently. This interview follows on from my recent interview – C+/B- is the grade the customer experience industry currently deserves – Interview with Bruce Temkin – and is number 305 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Tom: Check out Pega’s new research report: 2019 global customer service insights: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Here’s the highlights: The good – Customers and service providers agree on what matters most Customers, employees, and leaders all agree: the three most important aspects of service are a fast response, knowledgeable service agents, and a quick resolution …

Today’s interview is with Bruce Temkin, Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute. He joins me today to talk about his view on the current state of the customer experience industry, what it needs to focus on next, being acquired (twice in a few months) and what’s coming up next for him and the XM Institute. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The removal of friction represents a huge opportunity for customer experience – Interview with Roger Dooley – and is number 304 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Bruce: Experience management (XM) is the discipline around bringing experience data (X data) and operational data (O data) together so that you can run your business more effectively and be more adaptive. If you apply experience management correctly then you’re continuously learning, propagating insights across the enterprise and rapidly adapting to change. We need to learn how to change the focus away from a predominantly process and technology view to one that focuses more …

Today’s interview is with Roger Dooley who is a a speaker and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, the popular blog Neuromarketing, and Brainy Marketing at Forbes. He joins me today to talk about his new book: FRICTION?The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, what friction is, how it affects us and what to do about it when it comes to customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Behavioural economics, alchemy, customer experience and the power of ideas that don’t make sense – Interview with Rory Sutherland – and is number 303 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Roger: Emotion, customer experience and the impact of psychology and behavioral economics/science have risen up the agenda in recent years. Roger has been speaking and writing about these topics on neursciencemarketing.com since 2005. Roger has just written a new book called: FRICTION?The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage. The origin story …

Today’s interview is with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy in the UK and author of a new book: Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. Rory joins me today to talk about his new book, behavioural economics and what we can all do to uncover stand out ideas that don’t make sense. Note: This interview is longer than many of the usual interviews that I conduct but dive in and enjoy it as it is packed with wit and bags of insight from Rory. This interview follows on from my recent interview – How many exposure hours have you had with your customers over the last few months? – Interview with Andy MacMillan of UserTesting – and is number 302 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Rory: There are 11 rules of alchemy in the book. One of them is that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. The whole idea of customer experience doesn’t really submit …

Today’s interview is with Andy MacMillan is CEO of UserTesting and joins me today to talk about their new research report: The Rise of the Experience Economy – The 2019 CX Industry Report, the work that they do, what the best brands do to understand their clients and what leaders and professionals in the CX space should be doing more of. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Everyone in an organisation should be a loyalty leader – Interview with Sandy Rogers of FranklinCovey – and is number 301 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Andy: Talking today about UserTesting’s new report called The Rise of the Experience Economy – The 2019 CX Industry Report. The big headline this year was that people have really starting to talk more about the overall experience more than technology or just digital. The implication from this is that in the last few years whilst firms might have said they wanted to be customer centric or customer …

Today’s interview is with Sandy Rogers, the co-author of new book: Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion and the leader of FranklinCovey’s Loyalty Practice. Sandy joins me today to talk about the new book, how leading companies develop loyalty (Spoiler alert: it’s not about a loyalty programmes), what they do to get in the way of loyalty and how they can put themselves on the right path. This interview follows on from my recent interview – New tech at work and improving the employee experience – How to get it right – Interview with Carrie Duarte – and is number 300 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees. Here’s the highlights of my chat with Sandy: Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion was co-authored with Leena Rinne and Shawn Moon. So much of the difference between a good and a great experience comes down to how we feel about the people serving us. The book advocates for three core loyalty principles: empathy, responsibility and generosity and each comes with …