![[RE-RELEASE] Creating a holistic view of the customer](https://cdn-images-3.listennotes.com/podcasts/designing-next/re-release-creating-a-jPdb6uNxa3U-oWaIvQEedLD.1400x1400.jpg "[RE-RELEASE] Creating a holistic view of the customer")
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Welcome to episode number eleven of Designing Next, Achieving Growth Through Transformation and Innovation. I am your host, Steve Gotch, and with me today is our co-host, Chad Bruff. Chad, here we are. It's our last episode of twenty twenty and it's been a year, to say the least. What have you been reflecting on?
speaker-2: Steve, I just think about how we end our podcast every episode and we we ask what's next. And at 2020, there couldn't be a year that I care more about what's next. it's been a challenging year for all of us. I'm excited to be able to talk to our our guests today and and to hear some of our recent guests answer that question for us and think about what the post pandemic world looks like. there's so much hope. It's going on right now as as we're just having finished seeing the first shipments of the vaccine move across our country. So I I I would say I feel a lot of hope as we end twenty twenty and look forward to what's next.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. It's it's the end of a year, unlike any other. And and as you touched on, it's like we're in two opposite situations. We're seeing COVID cases spike again in in many places in the country. but we're seeing the first people get the vaccine and and and there's there's doses being shipped all over. So there's hope to be had that we can be on a path to return to some sort of normalcy in twenty twenty one. But of course None of us know what that might be or how it'll affect us or our organizations or the customer experiences we provide or the experiences we'll be designing. There's so much unknown out there. but we as customer experience and experience design and innovation leaders, we need to forge on. And to that end, I think today's guest will be a good guide for our audience. We're gonna talk to Michael Hoffman. He's an author, a customer experience guru, a Customer technology futurist. He's also the founder of the customer strategy and customer value firm Client X Client. In his book, Customer Worthy, Why and How Everyone in Your Organization Must Think Like a Customer, is the synthesis of his work with major brands, executive teams, and innovators, where he honed the elements of his customer experience matrix that's presented in the book. And that matrix provides companies with a converged strategic financial technology framework that is centered on the customer. So we're gonna talk a lot with Michael today about what that customer experience framework is and what thinking like a customer will mean in twenty twenty one and beyond. Chad, what are you looking forward to in this conversation?
speaker-2: Steve, it's always good to talk to somebody who, you know, works with major brands and ask provocative questions of them about things like their customer. So I'm excited to hear how Michael's customer experience matrix works across divisions and complex companies, breaking down silos and developing a holistic view of the customer.
speaker-1: Absolutely. You know, Michael has a lot of experience and and a wide range of insights to share and all of it will be valuable. So let's get on to the interview. Welcome, Michael. Great to speak to you today.
speaker-0: great to be here. Great to be talking about about what's next.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. And we're glad to have you and and you're someone that can that can share a lot as we think about what's next and we look forward towards 2021. but you know, wanted to start kind of with your origins. And, you know, in college, I know you majored in communications and had a real focus on writing. how has that background informed your attention to the customer or audience experience?
speaker-0: Yeah, it's it's an interesting background when I look at how that how I went from that to to customer experience and customer experience evolved. and I was a writing I was actually a communications major. Then the school made me become a writing major and then I I had to pick up communications to you know, 'cause I wanted to be at school for four years. But what was interesting is in communications also you know, a big part of that was studying film. And if I if if you think about choreography and how that relates to customer experience. I think I think that probably influenced me a lot. so if you're a director or if you're working in in film, you know, you're at twenty-four frames per second. And if you've ever seen like Disney, you know, where they have the animation cells and they go and each each image kind of builds that picture and tells the story when you put them all together. I think that level of detail And kind of framing each moment really impacted also my me as a copywriter. where you know, you start writing commercials, you're writing brochures, and all these things are really trying to motivate somebody to do something to get some emotion and really make a a connection. So with that it was also extremely inquisitive and you you really need to understand who your audience is. So that that that whole aspect of analysis and understanding really tie it back into to customer experience by I tell the story about when I I was first given a an assignment to write something really thrilling, a a letter to checking customers at a bank. And I was a sophomore in college at the time. And my question with which I thought was obvious was, well, what kind of customers are we writing to? You know, 'cause you don't want more college students like myself because I have no money to put in my account. I just it's gonna cost you something. and they said, Well, we don't know, just you know, we always just write one letter. And they sent me across the parking lot to IT and said, if you can figure out how to find out which customers are which, you know, more power to you. And that kind of set me off on a journey of actually getting into customer analytics early, early on. Based on that, you know, ended up writing, I think, seven different letters, all at different tones based on what customers' needs would be. And, you know, and fast forward and that that really comes up to customer experience management, you know, CRM. putting things into a box and the limits that you can use to to create a moment when somebody opens a package, making it viral and sharing, all those types of things are all part of this kind of choreographer or choreography. How do you stage that whole experience? And in the case of, you know, sales and marketing, if my the desired outcome is to one make somebody happy, but really to sell something, you know, how do I How do I frame that story and how do I try to ensure my success? So it it does tie together pretty tightly. And then technology just keeps creating new channels and creating new capabilities that nobody ever thought of before. So very cool, but it really hasn't changed that much. It's just telling the stories kind of frame by frame, channel by channel, conversation by conversation.
speaker-2: Michael, you have found a way to continue writing and the world has been fortunate that you wrote the book Customer Worthy, in which you provided a framework for organizations to think about their customers or think like their customers. Tell us a little bit about the origins of that framework in your book, Customer Worthy.
speaker-0: Yeah, Customer Worthy has kind of been a journey unto itself. So customer worthy was published a while back and people are always asking, you know, why did you write a book? And it was really to share the experience I had, or let's say the enlightenment I had as as I was going through and working with some some pretty big brands and trying and helping them try to understand their customers and help them understand the best way to leverage technology and metrics and just figure everything out about customer. And I think one of the This whole idea of think like a customer. I was I I work with strategy teams and I at one position I was in, I was the in charge of kind of consulting and innovation services. And you know, you walk into I would walk into boardrooms, I'd be working with executive management. And one thing I noticed pretty quickly and over and over again was companies don't have a good definition of customer. And when I say that, it's not that each of the individuals, like marketing has a definition and finance has a definition. On all those definitions, even even within marketing, even within customer service, the definition of customer is is really all over the place. So that the issue isn't that they don't have a definition. Typically they have multiple definitions. So I I found I needed to come up with a method to like engage customers and then make sure that we were talking about the same thing. Because I was often brought in for like the annual strategy meeting for companies. That was a service that I was often hired for. You know, go to the company retreat, listen for for a day, and then I I'd have a block of time the following day to to kind of, you know, identify or make some recommendations and things. And what I observed was people didn't really you know, these executive managers and many of them extremely tenured, really experts in their field, across a variety you know, beat it business to business companies and business to consumer companies, multi-channel, et cetera, et cetera. Over and over again, people would just when they said customer, everybody nodded that they were in agreement. And what I realized is we were really talking about or they were really talking about totally different things. So I it needed kind of a you know like a Rosetta Stone kind of a a method or whatever that we could put up on a board and we could say, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about customer growth. Customers come, you know, customers have these needs, they come through these channels, you address them this way, which of your managers are responsible for those, how do we tie these all together and then make strategy measurable? So I I I came up with this thing called the the that we call now the customer experience matrix. And the customer experience matrix is really about putting all these these pieces together, but then also looking at where they all connect from marketing to customer service. To sales, but also through distribution. Like I mentioned, you know, when I when I pack a box, you know, in the shipping room, I can put a note in there, right? So that when somebody opens the box, there's a note or there's a couple different flyers, and I can do cross-sell and upsell, I can do some surveys, I can put labels on the outside of the box. So this ability to go and inventory every possible interaction and contact with my brand, with my product and my service is really what the customer worthy is about is how do I make each interaction customer worthy? And what actually even preceded that was I was working in advanced analytics, so artificial intelligence intelligence, a long time prior to that. And the intelligence was getting to the point that it was so advanced that you could ask pretty much any question and you'd get like a predicted outcome. And I was really looking at that and thinking of Okay, if if I can't answer any question, it kind of came down to the a genie giving you three wishes. Right. So I have this incredible capability with artificial intelligence and analytics. And now the the pressure's on to say, okay, so what do you want to what do you want to know? And what do you want to predict? And to simplify it, I started thinking that the most important thing was to know what a customer was going to do next. And it it it seems really simple. But and simple is actually a huge advantage here. But if you look at the customer experience matrix, it actually became, you know, not just an inventory for all those interactions, but it became the inventory of where I would want to place artificial intelligence and do some analytics to say, you know, if Steve and Chad were all on the phone, what is Steve gonna do next? What is Chad gonna do next? And if you look at it from a marketing standpoint, you know, you look at direct mail or you look at an email or you look at Even influencer marketing or somebody on an Instagram page, 98%, 99% of the people that interact with that aren't going to do anything, which isn't a bad thing, as long as I know if I can identify which of that 1% is gonna do something. You know, click the link to go to a web page, click the an item in an image in Pinterest to go and make a purchase, and then track those next steps, how far through the process do they go? So this whole idea of being able to again back to choreographing each of the interactions. So not only now am I taking the the old direct mail, direct marketing kind of paradigm, which is that your your the success of your program is based on the list that you use, you know, typically 40% is the target audience that you have, the copy, you know, the text and the package that you're putting together, and then the offer that you're making, you know, is 30 and 30 percent. Can I do that in every interaction and every contact I have with the customer? Digital, face-to-face, meeting and greeting somebody in a store or on a car lot, going into a meeting and maybe if it's business to business, you know, shaking hands or if we can do that again after COVID, going and just seeing what each individual's agenda is and where are they in their customer life cycle. So taking all that information together, now I can choreograph. that movie that I want to end with that person buying and enjoying my product, sharing their experience and you know creating some social influence and getting some cross sales and upsells within the company, selling them another product again. And there's this huge value in there, which is this other piece, which is I can actually now go and monetize them. So another part of my background is really working pretty heavily with customer profitability and econometrics. There's these layers within this CXE matrix that means I can work with finance, I can work with marketing, I can work with sales, operations, shipping and delivery. I can work with my partner groups, I can work with the different levels of management, and everybody's gonna understand how they're connected to customer. That's I I think it's that perspective and that breadth and a very practical, easy to understand tool. And easy to understand one of the huge, huge things I was trying to accomplish with customer were the in the CXC customer experience matrix was can anybody walk up to this and understand it right away? And could a customer understand where they were in the customer life cycle if they had this view? You know, you are here in terms of this process. And I I think it accomplishes that. So but it has all these layers that actually make it practical and go and execute. So I had I had to go and write about it. I I had a couple different meetings where, you know, CEOs, head of operations for Microsoft. walking out at at the end of the meeting they're like, You should really write this down and share this. And that same week I was with the head of analytics at Fidelity Investments. They had said the same thing, you know, you should really write this down. We got here very quickly. You know, we're talking about doing this in the in the course of like a forty minute meeting. So figured I was on to something. It was one of those things and I I felt I needed to share. And you know, now the book's been downloaded, I also pretty much give it away s on Amazon. If you've got forty nine ninety five or the company's paying but I I made it shareable as a as a PDF. It's a hundred and ninety six pages, so it's not exactly a an easy ebook and there's a lot in there. But it's been downloaded about a quarter million times now, two hundred and fifty thousand plus times.
speaker-1: It's really cool. And that's and that's awesome that you have it available and and we'll we'll share that link in the show notes to make sure that listeners wanna get a look at it, read it, and learn more about the matrix. Cause I think I love the idea of you know how it really promotes collaboration, promotes that holistic view of those we serve, our customers, our audience, whatever it might be. And then and making sure that everybody's thinking about it the same way, working together because At the end of the day, that's that's where the challenges often lie, the the the siloed way in which many organizations work.
speaker-0: Yeah, and you had Joe Pine on, you know, just to connect. I mean, I'm a huge, huge Joe Pine fan. My appreciation for his work actually goes back to before the customer economy, he had written mass customization. And mass customization was it there's a hammer book you know prior to that, but there was this whole movement about you know what's gonna happen as technology becomes more capable and I'm able to personalize and customize each product I have. which now it's morphed into, you know, each experience. And then I think the product and the the experience are all also, you know, morphing as well. And and Joe actually, you know, did a the early read on the on customer worthy when I was putting it together because I was also very influenced by by the customer economy. And then infinite possibilities I referenced just about at least every day in the whole metaverse concept. But I won't give people a headache about that.
speaker-1: Great. We love it when we can connect our guests across episodes, and that that's really cool. Love Joe and and for those who haven't listened, that's in our previous episode, episode 10, great interview with Joe Pine about the experience economy. So Michael, let's you know, Customer Worthy and the Matrix has has been around for a few years, but it's it's timeless. It's been it's it's it's value and simplicity and focus has been shown. but we're in this space, right? We're recording this mid December 2020. We're at the end of a tumultuous year. And you know, as we speak, the the first vaccines for COVID-19 have been shipped and and a few people have gotten the pokes. and that's gonna move us into a different world. We don't know exactly what that is in 2021, but it's it's hopefully we get to some points of consistency. But how do you advise customer experience and marketing leaders as We transition from this pandemic era of uncertainty to the post pandemic era. What what would you recommend people really look at?
speaker-0: Yeah, it it's yeah, I mean this obviously this this is all unprecedented, right? It's and the change that took place took place so immediately when COVID started and people really without notice were told, y you can't go to the office tomorrow and frankly it was it was like a science fiction movie that nobody would believe would have ever believed could happen. You can't go into your office, but you still have to work. and by the way, if if you have school-aged children, they're not going to school, they're gonna be in your house too. All of your partners, places that you're selling to, they're not going to their offices anymore either. And all your employees, your co-workers, your partners, they're not going in. So that that whole it was just so incredibly dis disruptive, and everything had to be recalibrated really in real time. What happened with that, without disclosing any secrets or some things people revealed? People were doing everything they possibly could to connect. And I'll say first on work, people were going people were using Zoom that had never used Zoom. You know, they found out about it, they plugged it in. Really, even if it was outside company protocol and their security standards and all those things. And we saw what happened with that. But you know, people just made things work. I was listening to something from a cognizant consulting firm was doing an interview with Phil First, who's at HFS Consulting. And you made the point that what they saw with their clients and what everybody really experienced were, you know, if you didn't know where you were in terms of your digital maturity prior to COVID, you found out right away. You know, where there were cracks where people couldn't communicate because they couldn't log in, or they didn't even know where to log in to to get information, or you had never done business that way. Right. You had never was something I was used to do, you know, walking into clients, they'd say, well, we don't sell online. Or we don't sell directly, you know, we're at the manufacturer, we're in a different part of the supply chain. Well, what happened was with Google search and everything else, people were finding the people that had PPE, they were finding the people that packed trucks, they were doing all these different things as workars to try to get things done. The experience matrix, one of the things I used to use is say, you know, well, let's go and Google your product. You're telling me that you're you're not that, you know, you're not online, people can't buy your product online. What you would see was there were were customers that were reselling products. There were distributors that were reselling products. That all just became like mainstream, right? That this all became popular immediately. And then COVID actually dragged on, right? So we started to figure out new ways to work. And if you look at it, what what had happened, if you look at the experience matrix, which is a little bit hard to describe, except it's 15, 15 columns. And the columns represent a customer life cycle from a customer who becomes aware of a need. customer then goes and gathers information on what they need, what sources are out there. They then go to this next column, which is they they start to do the the qualifications and what what works, who are eligible vendors is a good way to look at it. It goes through that they they shop it, they price it, they negotiate it, they have it shipped, etc. That that's across the top. And then down the down the rows are the different channels that people could use. So if if you look at what happened with COVID, I could I have to cross off all of those in-person channels. So that that's what happened when COVID started was I can't, if I'm business to business, I can't have that meeting. I can't go out and do the a demo of software or go and walk the plant floor. I can't walk into the lab with a bunch of scientists and I can't hold a meeting with a board of directors or with the executive decision committee. All those things aren't even possible. So how how do I do that, those with the newly available channels? You know, I can't shop in a store. I can't go to the grocery store. in New Jersey we had the you know, you can't return a product. I don't know if everybody experienced that, but if you went to the grocery store and their supply chain was all over the place and you know, I had an experience where I I'd gone shopping and in addition to not being able to get toilet paper and all those other things, going and getting meat and some dairy products and things were also kind of held up because workers couldn't go into the plants. And all those types of things. And so as a result, didn't know until after it happened that most of the meat in the stores were outdated. They were past the date. So you look at it and you go back to the store and they have giant signs and they say, well, policy is based on what the governor said we're we can't take any returns. Like, okay, and we're not giving you any credit for those either. So super bad customer experience. Understandable, you know. You I I think one of the things that I had a number of like webinars. and kind of sales coaching meetings set up with different companies post COVID. And I said, you know, the the interactions people are having in COVID, you know, isolate that situation for the return or isolate the situation where somebody's trying to get your product restock, refill, return, all those different initiatives, what pro what do they have to go through? How can I coach them through that? People are paying more attention. They're more sensitive than they've ever been to each interaction due to the the pandemic. And how it's personally affected them. As a relationship manager or as a sales manager, I said, this is your time as a relationship manager to really become personable. Customer experience is immensely overwhelmingly intimate. And in the pandemic, it was never more intimate. People had time to to talk on the phone, not just about your product, but they're gonna tell you or they'd be willing to tell you, and you'd probably be helping them what their situation's like. You know, how are you getting through the day? and make all of that investment, you know, kind of the the seven habits types of thing. This is this is your time to sharpen the saw and invest in relationships in a very real way. may not return sales right away, but lifetime value, you know, you're gonna build a relationship, you'll probably be feel better about what you do and what you provide and you can represent your company and your product and yourself better than you ever have. There's a lot of that going on. I I coming out of it right now, kind of back to your question. I need to kind capture the before the sense in the kind of framework to see which channels are people using. Remember what those channels are, and then look at what do I want those channels to be able to accomplish and accommodate going forward. Because everything changed. I don't think every I don't think many companies have gone and and frankly they haven't had the luxury yet to go and take the inventory of what changed and what's working. what adds value to the customers and maybe what detracts from either our brand value or in an ecosystem our partner value, all those types of things.
speaker-2: Michael, as as we think about all of this and what you shared and the learnings from the pandemic, looking out into the future, we always like to ask our guests, what's next? so with your crystal ball, what is next in customer experience? How do you see it evolving in the next three to five years?
speaker-0: Yeah, that's my favorite topic, right? 'Cause things that I'm working on designing today and speaking to people about really they'll be live and real from a product design and experience design standpoint in roughly three to five years. I think we you know, coming out of COVID, we dramatically increased you know it was like a giant beta test. If you're innovation or a product manager, all of a sudden everything was digital. There was no other option. So as a result, you you got to test a whole lot of things. You got to see, you know, every everybody in your company that would have said, I can't just do my job. You know, every nobody's gonna sign up to say, I could do my job sitting in my basement or sitting in my attic in my pajamas and operate at 100%. Nobody would have signed up for that the day before COVID, but some people have and delivered exceptionally. So we going forward, you know, we have to you have to take a look at that. People identified some skills that they didn't know they had. We've realized and used channels and partners. and production and operations in ways that we that we haven't before. The whole dialogue with customers across different channels. Phone, absolutely, and obviously. but then the capture of phone webinars and seminars and time shifting, you know, those things that everybody kind of applies to Netflix and Hulu are work kind of time shifted too. So are you in a company that can use that type of time shift where people can you know, kind of cut and edit and paste their work efforts and their collaboration efforts together. You know, obviously like Microsoft Teams as, you know, is racing forward and trying to scoop up as much of that as they can. Mural, who you also had on your podcast, is a fantastic product for designing collaboration. All those things have it would usually take, you know, year months to years to even experiment with those prior to adopting them. So those are all going on. When I look at the three to five years, there's enormous things happening in privacy. People sharing information, you know, what we see and what we see now in in the Senate and Congress, and you'll see more and more about with Facebook sharing information or capturing information and and Google and Amazon, et cetera. And all these devices that are listening to things, you know, people refer to it as speech, but the the fact that you can capture Everything, including things that you're not supposed to capture, but the fact that everything is listening. And listening, you know, is another double-edged sword, right? If if I use that information for good to help somebody, you know, if somebody's fallen in their hurt and something magically shows up because something triggered on their their smartwatch, which triggered to their phone, which triggered a 911 call, which also served up their healthcare record. And y you can right, this goes back to the movie that we talked about in the beginning. I can play out the best outcome of that movie. All the best resources are available and prepared. I can use the analytics to identify is the person's condition and their history. Do I move them or do I get the medical, you know, do I am I able to get the medical services, the equipment and the right expertise delivered directly to where they are and maybe use telemedicine to go and do that? You know, all those types of things, all these new combinations are things that we've just kind of rifled forward with. And now these are all like new capabilities that the innovators and the designers can go and test, but we can implement with some level of confidence. So this, you know, testing is when I say testing, testing what works and identifying what works, identifying patterns of things that we didn't we wouldn't have put together before. COVID kind of showed us some things that we you know, some capabilities and strengths that we probably didn't know that we had. Blockchain in terms of privacy and operations and doing this massive simplification of of processes. You know, DocuSign. The guys there used to be a client of mine when they were with responses. You know, they've they've got some interesting views on the world and and you really can't connect where their where their background came from. But you look at IBM, you look at some of the other you know, you look at AWS and where they're going with AWS cloud, Oracle's moves and all these other huge moves that are taking place. I spent a lot of time looking at them and trying to identify where I can use those new capabilities to again help somebody get through the customer lifecycle. You know, what's the best way to apply those? Virtual reality, enhanced reality, all these hybrids of reality, which I'll I'll give credit back to to Joe Pine to Ken in in Infinite Possibilities. He describes a number of different realities, and I I've used those to go and kind of mark out all the additional revenue opportunities and contact opportunities. Like enhanced reality, you know, an interesting way to look at it is, you know, Google, everybody kind of remembers like Google glasses. And when those didn't like work super well, you can't see, but I've I've got a number of different sets of virtual reality glasses and headsets and things in a in my office. And I've I've taken a number of people through different pieces there. But the idea that I could take the optimal experience, we'll say for training or executing some type of process. And I can superimpose over an image while I'm working with something what the best practice would be. And you see it currently in like repair excuse me, repairs, and you see it in medicine, where you can have the either a recording of a best practice or have somebody share and come in and kind of co-pilot a process, even though they're remote as you go through it. You actually saw it in the the shuttle launch, which I thought was very interesting. You had the astronauts that were in, you know, in the spacecraft. And with them, you had four other people sitting at a console that or four consoles that mirrored what they had on their screen so they could help them interpret what was going on. I think that assisted experience, that enhanced experience, which is crossing kind of space dimensions, right? Because people can now be anywhere, can cross time dimensions if we can record it or have AI that's able to kind of replicate what the optimal experience would be and then is continuing to learn that and be able to kind of propagate that out there. as well as unattended experiences, you know, where you look at autonomous cars. You know, autonomous cars a a an interesting argument for how they become funded is they're gonna give people more time. And more time is going to be spent though while they're in the car. So you A big thing in customer worthy is looking at how do I value customer time, how do customers value their time? How does a company earn the the right or the the ability to be using customer time when they're making a choice? So when when customers, employees are sitting in a car and now they don't have to pay attention to driving, we should all be asking what are they going to do? Well, a number of companies just want to sell that space to throw up ads, to throw up different pieces of work, all those types of things. So This is all within I believe it's all within five years of of happening. You know, it's gonna happen in a whole bunch of different like iterations and there's gonna be a lot of starts and fails, you know. Virtual reality, I've taken people to to virtual reality sessions and they put on glasses and they don't want to admit it while it's going on, but you know, we we go off the record after and they're like, that was really cool, but it made me excessively nauseous. And if you go and you look at reviews of VR and people that are using Oculus and those types of things, you'll see that's a a pretty like common kind of issue. So you you need to get over those things. We need to figure out how to do that stuff. But the future, you know, this is the greatest time ever to be alive. It really is. And coming out of COVID, I think we're we're gonna start to see that. I do think there's gonna be a little bit of a hangover coming out of COVID. And what I mean by that is people are nostalgic for the way things used to be prior to COVID and lockdown. there's probably some romantic notions of how great everything was and it was great to be in the office and all those types of things. after about two weeks, you know, up especially up in the New York, New Jersey area, even in in California as well, when you're sitting back in traffic again, you know, for an hour and a half to go to go fifteen miles, you you may be nostalgic back for the you know, shelter in place kind of lockdown, work out of your house type of capability. So
speaker-1: That'll be yeah, that'll be definitely interesting to see. The I think you're right. It it it and it's just a time where there's so much to think about. What happens after COVID and then so much that's just on the horizon in the future. And you gave us a lot to think about. So, you know, Michael, I wanna thank you for joining us today. And it's a great great episode for our last epis episode of the year to really think about How to plan for twenty twenty one and beyond and you've given us some great perspective. So thank you so much.
speaker-0: No, really appreciate it. And and obviously I appreciate everybody's time. It's the it's the scarcest commodity we have is each of our time. So greatly appreciate it. I think you guys are doing great work.
speaker-1: Thank you so much. So Michael had a lot to say about customer experience. Definitely gave us a lot to think about and consider going into 2021. Chad, what stood out for you?
speaker-2: I really liked what he said around companies lacking a holistic definition of their customer. Michael's been in rooms with top brands and discovered that in many companies that doesn't exist. And you know, you think about our guests this year, Steve, and more and more with different digital platforms and channels, the the relationship with the customer has become more complex. And I I thought it was really interesting what Michael had to share there. I also liked what he shared in terms of just what the future may bring to us, how you know, we may be nostalgic for the past, but in many ways, things that we've changed over the last few months with COVID may really shift the way we work and and the way we engage with our customers.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's really true. I really think for many of us, the next six months to a year is gonna be really focused on how do we apply the learnings from 2020 and and and what's going to stick and how do we redesign our experiences to to meet needs in this kind of new normal, if you will. And to make sure our new episodes are delivered to you every two or sometimes three weeks, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
speaker-2: And we're designers, so of course we want your feedback. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify or contact us directly at podcast at cast and hue dot com.
speaker-1: Awesome. Thanks everybody. And we'll speak to you soon.
speaker-1: Welcome to episode number eleven of Designing Next, Achieving Growth Through Transformation and Innovation. I am your host, Steve Gotch, and with me today is our co-host, Chad Bruff. Chad, here we are. It's our last episode of twenty twenty and it's been a year, to say the least. What have you been reflecting on?
speaker-2: Steve, I just think about how we end our podcast every episode and we we ask what's next. And at 2020, there couldn't be a year that I care more about what's next. it's been a challenging year for all of us. I'm excited to be able to talk to our our guests today and and to hear some of our recent guests answer that question for us and think about what the post pandemic world looks like. there's so much hope. It's going on right now as as we're just having finished seeing the first shipments of the vaccine move across our country. So I I I would say I feel a lot of hope as we end twenty twenty and look forward to what's next.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. It's it's the end of a year, unlike any other. And and as you touched on, it's like we're in two opposite situations. We're seeing COVID cases spike again in in many places in the country. but we're seeing the first people get the vaccine and and and there's there's doses being shipped all over. So there's hope to be had that we can be on a path to return to some sort of normalcy in twenty twenty one. But of course None of us know what that might be or how it'll affect us or our organizations or the customer experiences we provide or the experiences we'll be designing. There's so much unknown out there. but we as customer experience and experience design and innovation leaders, we need to forge on. And to that end, I think today's guest will be a good guide for our audience. We're gonna talk to Michael Hoffman. He's an author, a customer experience guru, a Customer technology futurist. He's also the founder of the customer strategy and customer value firm Client X Client. In his book, Customer Worthy, Why and How Everyone in Your Organization Must Think Like a Customer, is the synthesis of his work with major brands, executive teams, and innovators, where he honed the elements of his customer experience matrix that's presented in the book. And that matrix provides companies with a converged strategic financial technology framework that is centered on the customer. So we're gonna talk a lot with Michael today about what that customer experience framework is and what thinking like a customer will mean in twenty twenty one and beyond. Chad, what are you looking forward to in this conversation?
speaker-2: Steve, it's always good to talk to somebody who, you know, works with major brands and ask provocative questions of them about things like their customer. So I'm excited to hear how Michael's customer experience matrix works across divisions and complex companies, breaking down silos and developing a holistic view of the customer.
speaker-1: Absolutely. You know, Michael has a lot of experience and and a wide range of insights to share and all of it will be valuable. So let's get on to the interview. Welcome, Michael. Great to speak to you today.
speaker-0: great to be here. Great to be talking about about what's next.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. And we're glad to have you and and you're someone that can that can share a lot as we think about what's next and we look forward towards 2021. but you know, wanted to start kind of with your origins. And, you know, in college, I know you majored in communications and had a real focus on writing. how has that background informed your attention to the customer or audience experience?
speaker-0: Yeah, it's it's an interesting background when I look at how that how I went from that to to customer experience and customer experience evolved. and I was a writing I was actually a communications major. Then the school made me become a writing major and then I I had to pick up communications to you know, 'cause I wanted to be at school for four years. But what was interesting is in communications also you know, a big part of that was studying film. And if I if if you think about choreography and how that relates to customer experience. I think I think that probably influenced me a lot. so if you're a director or if you're working in in film, you know, you're at twenty-four frames per second. And if you've ever seen like Disney, you know, where they have the animation cells and they go and each each image kind of builds that picture and tells the story when you put them all together. I think that level of detail And kind of framing each moment really impacted also my me as a copywriter. where you know, you start writing commercials, you're writing brochures, and all these things are really trying to motivate somebody to do something to get some emotion and really make a a connection. So with that it was also extremely inquisitive and you you really need to understand who your audience is. So that that that whole aspect of analysis and understanding really tie it back into to customer experience by I tell the story about when I I was first given a an assignment to write something really thrilling, a a letter to checking customers at a bank. And I was a sophomore in college at the time. And my question with which I thought was obvious was, well, what kind of customers are we writing to? You know, 'cause you don't want more college students like myself because I have no money to put in my account. I just it's gonna cost you something. and they said, Well, we don't know, just you know, we always just write one letter. And they sent me across the parking lot to IT and said, if you can figure out how to find out which customers are which, you know, more power to you. And that kind of set me off on a journey of actually getting into customer analytics early, early on. Based on that, you know, ended up writing, I think, seven different letters, all at different tones based on what customers' needs would be. And, you know, and fast forward and that that really comes up to customer experience management, you know, CRM. putting things into a box and the limits that you can use to to create a moment when somebody opens a package, making it viral and sharing, all those types of things are all part of this kind of choreographer or choreography. How do you stage that whole experience? And in the case of, you know, sales and marketing, if my the desired outcome is to one make somebody happy, but really to sell something, you know, how do I How do I frame that story and how do I try to ensure my success? So it it does tie together pretty tightly. And then technology just keeps creating new channels and creating new capabilities that nobody ever thought of before. So very cool, but it really hasn't changed that much. It's just telling the stories kind of frame by frame, channel by channel, conversation by conversation.
speaker-2: Michael, you have found a way to continue writing and the world has been fortunate that you wrote the book Customer Worthy, in which you provided a framework for organizations to think about their customers or think like their customers. Tell us a little bit about the origins of that framework in your book, Customer Worthy.
speaker-0: Yeah, Customer Worthy has kind of been a journey unto itself. So customer worthy was published a while back and people are always asking, you know, why did you write a book? And it was really to share the experience I had, or let's say the enlightenment I had as as I was going through and working with some some pretty big brands and trying and helping them try to understand their customers and help them understand the best way to leverage technology and metrics and just figure everything out about customer. And I think one of the This whole idea of think like a customer. I was I I work with strategy teams and I at one position I was in, I was the in charge of kind of consulting and innovation services. And you know, you walk into I would walk into boardrooms, I'd be working with executive management. And one thing I noticed pretty quickly and over and over again was companies don't have a good definition of customer. And when I say that, it's not that each of the individuals, like marketing has a definition and finance has a definition. On all those definitions, even even within marketing, even within customer service, the definition of customer is is really all over the place. So that the issue isn't that they don't have a definition. Typically they have multiple definitions. So I I found I needed to come up with a method to like engage customers and then make sure that we were talking about the same thing. Because I was often brought in for like the annual strategy meeting for companies. That was a service that I was often hired for. You know, go to the company retreat, listen for for a day, and then I I'd have a block of time the following day to to kind of, you know, identify or make some recommendations and things. And what I observed was people didn't really you know, these executive managers and many of them extremely tenured, really experts in their field, across a variety you know, beat it business to business companies and business to consumer companies, multi-channel, et cetera, et cetera. Over and over again, people would just when they said customer, everybody nodded that they were in agreement. And what I realized is we were really talking about or they were really talking about totally different things. So I it needed kind of a you know like a Rosetta Stone kind of a a method or whatever that we could put up on a board and we could say, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about customer growth. Customers come, you know, customers have these needs, they come through these channels, you address them this way, which of your managers are responsible for those, how do we tie these all together and then make strategy measurable? So I I I came up with this thing called the the that we call now the customer experience matrix. And the customer experience matrix is really about putting all these these pieces together, but then also looking at where they all connect from marketing to customer service. To sales, but also through distribution. Like I mentioned, you know, when I when I pack a box, you know, in the shipping room, I can put a note in there, right? So that when somebody opens the box, there's a note or there's a couple different flyers, and I can do cross-sell and upsell, I can do some surveys, I can put labels on the outside of the box. So this ability to go and inventory every possible interaction and contact with my brand, with my product and my service is really what the customer worthy is about is how do I make each interaction customer worthy? And what actually even preceded that was I was working in advanced analytics, so artificial intelligence intelligence, a long time prior to that. And the intelligence was getting to the point that it was so advanced that you could ask pretty much any question and you'd get like a predicted outcome. And I was really looking at that and thinking of Okay, if if I can't answer any question, it kind of came down to the a genie giving you three wishes. Right. So I have this incredible capability with artificial intelligence and analytics. And now the the pressure's on to say, okay, so what do you want to what do you want to know? And what do you want to predict? And to simplify it, I started thinking that the most important thing was to know what a customer was going to do next. And it it it seems really simple. But and simple is actually a huge advantage here. But if you look at the customer experience matrix, it actually became, you know, not just an inventory for all those interactions, but it became the inventory of where I would want to place artificial intelligence and do some analytics to say, you know, if Steve and Chad were all on the phone, what is Steve gonna do next? What is Chad gonna do next? And if you look at it from a marketing standpoint, you know, you look at direct mail or you look at an email or you look at Even influencer marketing or somebody on an Instagram page, 98%, 99% of the people that interact with that aren't going to do anything, which isn't a bad thing, as long as I know if I can identify which of that 1% is gonna do something. You know, click the link to go to a web page, click the an item in an image in Pinterest to go and make a purchase, and then track those next steps, how far through the process do they go? So this whole idea of being able to again back to choreographing each of the interactions. So not only now am I taking the the old direct mail, direct marketing kind of paradigm, which is that your your the success of your program is based on the list that you use, you know, typically 40% is the target audience that you have, the copy, you know, the text and the package that you're putting together, and then the offer that you're making, you know, is 30 and 30 percent. Can I do that in every interaction and every contact I have with the customer? Digital, face-to-face, meeting and greeting somebody in a store or on a car lot, going into a meeting and maybe if it's business to business, you know, shaking hands or if we can do that again after COVID, going and just seeing what each individual's agenda is and where are they in their customer life cycle. So taking all that information together, now I can choreograph. that movie that I want to end with that person buying and enjoying my product, sharing their experience and you know creating some social influence and getting some cross sales and upsells within the company, selling them another product again. And there's this huge value in there, which is this other piece, which is I can actually now go and monetize them. So another part of my background is really working pretty heavily with customer profitability and econometrics. There's these layers within this CXE matrix that means I can work with finance, I can work with marketing, I can work with sales, operations, shipping and delivery. I can work with my partner groups, I can work with the different levels of management, and everybody's gonna understand how they're connected to customer. That's I I think it's that perspective and that breadth and a very practical, easy to understand tool. And easy to understand one of the huge, huge things I was trying to accomplish with customer were the in the CXC customer experience matrix was can anybody walk up to this and understand it right away? And could a customer understand where they were in the customer life cycle if they had this view? You know, you are here in terms of this process. And I I think it accomplishes that. So but it has all these layers that actually make it practical and go and execute. So I had I had to go and write about it. I I had a couple different meetings where, you know, CEOs, head of operations for Microsoft. walking out at at the end of the meeting they're like, You should really write this down and share this. And that same week I was with the head of analytics at Fidelity Investments. They had said the same thing, you know, you should really write this down. We got here very quickly. You know, we're talking about doing this in the in the course of like a forty minute meeting. So figured I was on to something. It was one of those things and I I felt I needed to share. And you know, now the book's been downloaded, I also pretty much give it away s on Amazon. If you've got forty nine ninety five or the company's paying but I I made it shareable as a as a PDF. It's a hundred and ninety six pages, so it's not exactly a an easy ebook and there's a lot in there. But it's been downloaded about a quarter million times now, two hundred and fifty thousand plus times.
speaker-1: It's really cool. And that's and that's awesome that you have it available and and we'll we'll share that link in the show notes to make sure that listeners wanna get a look at it, read it, and learn more about the matrix. Cause I think I love the idea of you know how it really promotes collaboration, promotes that holistic view of those we serve, our customers, our audience, whatever it might be. And then and making sure that everybody's thinking about it the same way, working together because At the end of the day, that's that's where the challenges often lie, the the the siloed way in which many organizations work.
speaker-0: Yeah, and you had Joe Pine on, you know, just to connect. I mean, I'm a huge, huge Joe Pine fan. My appreciation for his work actually goes back to before the customer economy, he had written mass customization. And mass customization was it there's a hammer book you know prior to that, but there was this whole movement about you know what's gonna happen as technology becomes more capable and I'm able to personalize and customize each product I have. which now it's morphed into, you know, each experience. And then I think the product and the the experience are all also, you know, morphing as well. And and Joe actually, you know, did a the early read on the on customer worthy when I was putting it together because I was also very influenced by by the customer economy. And then infinite possibilities I referenced just about at least every day in the whole metaverse concept. But I won't give people a headache about that.
speaker-1: Great. We love it when we can connect our guests across episodes, and that that's really cool. Love Joe and and for those who haven't listened, that's in our previous episode, episode 10, great interview with Joe Pine about the experience economy. So Michael, let's you know, Customer Worthy and the Matrix has has been around for a few years, but it's it's timeless. It's been it's it's it's value and simplicity and focus has been shown. but we're in this space, right? We're recording this mid December 2020. We're at the end of a tumultuous year. And you know, as we speak, the the first vaccines for COVID-19 have been shipped and and a few people have gotten the pokes. and that's gonna move us into a different world. We don't know exactly what that is in 2021, but it's it's hopefully we get to some points of consistency. But how do you advise customer experience and marketing leaders as We transition from this pandemic era of uncertainty to the post pandemic era. What what would you recommend people really look at?
speaker-0: Yeah, it it's yeah, I mean this obviously this this is all unprecedented, right? It's and the change that took place took place so immediately when COVID started and people really without notice were told, y you can't go to the office tomorrow and frankly it was it was like a science fiction movie that nobody would believe would have ever believed could happen. You can't go into your office, but you still have to work. and by the way, if if you have school-aged children, they're not going to school, they're gonna be in your house too. All of your partners, places that you're selling to, they're not going to their offices anymore either. And all your employees, your co-workers, your partners, they're not going in. So that that whole it was just so incredibly dis disruptive, and everything had to be recalibrated really in real time. What happened with that, without disclosing any secrets or some things people revealed? People were doing everything they possibly could to connect. And I'll say first on work, people were going people were using Zoom that had never used Zoom. You know, they found out about it, they plugged it in. Really, even if it was outside company protocol and their security standards and all those things. And we saw what happened with that. But you know, people just made things work. I was listening to something from a cognizant consulting firm was doing an interview with Phil First, who's at HFS Consulting. And you made the point that what they saw with their clients and what everybody really experienced were, you know, if you didn't know where you were in terms of your digital maturity prior to COVID, you found out right away. You know, where there were cracks where people couldn't communicate because they couldn't log in, or they didn't even know where to log in to to get information, or you had never done business that way. Right. You had never was something I was used to do, you know, walking into clients, they'd say, well, we don't sell online. Or we don't sell directly, you know, we're at the manufacturer, we're in a different part of the supply chain. Well, what happened was with Google search and everything else, people were finding the people that had PPE, they were finding the people that packed trucks, they were doing all these different things as workars to try to get things done. The experience matrix, one of the things I used to use is say, you know, well, let's go and Google your product. You're telling me that you're you're not that, you know, you're not online, people can't buy your product online. What you would see was there were were customers that were reselling products. There were distributors that were reselling products. That all just became like mainstream, right? That this all became popular immediately. And then COVID actually dragged on, right? So we started to figure out new ways to work. And if you look at it, what what had happened, if you look at the experience matrix, which is a little bit hard to describe, except it's 15, 15 columns. And the columns represent a customer life cycle from a customer who becomes aware of a need. customer then goes and gathers information on what they need, what sources are out there. They then go to this next column, which is they they start to do the the qualifications and what what works, who are eligible vendors is a good way to look at it. It goes through that they they shop it, they price it, they negotiate it, they have it shipped, etc. That that's across the top. And then down the down the rows are the different channels that people could use. So if if you look at what happened with COVID, I could I have to cross off all of those in-person channels. So that that's what happened when COVID started was I can't, if I'm business to business, I can't have that meeting. I can't go out and do the a demo of software or go and walk the plant floor. I can't walk into the lab with a bunch of scientists and I can't hold a meeting with a board of directors or with the executive decision committee. All those things aren't even possible. So how how do I do that, those with the newly available channels? You know, I can't shop in a store. I can't go to the grocery store. in New Jersey we had the you know, you can't return a product. I don't know if everybody experienced that, but if you went to the grocery store and their supply chain was all over the place and you know, I had an experience where I I'd gone shopping and in addition to not being able to get toilet paper and all those other things, going and getting meat and some dairy products and things were also kind of held up because workers couldn't go into the plants. And all those types of things. And so as a result, didn't know until after it happened that most of the meat in the stores were outdated. They were past the date. So you look at it and you go back to the store and they have giant signs and they say, well, policy is based on what the governor said we're we can't take any returns. Like, okay, and we're not giving you any credit for those either. So super bad customer experience. Understandable, you know. You I I think one of the things that I had a number of like webinars. and kind of sales coaching meetings set up with different companies post COVID. And I said, you know, the the interactions people are having in COVID, you know, isolate that situation for the return or isolate the situation where somebody's trying to get your product restock, refill, return, all those different initiatives, what pro what do they have to go through? How can I coach them through that? People are paying more attention. They're more sensitive than they've ever been to each interaction due to the the pandemic. And how it's personally affected them. As a relationship manager or as a sales manager, I said, this is your time as a relationship manager to really become personable. Customer experience is immensely overwhelmingly intimate. And in the pandemic, it was never more intimate. People had time to to talk on the phone, not just about your product, but they're gonna tell you or they'd be willing to tell you, and you'd probably be helping them what their situation's like. You know, how are you getting through the day? and make all of that investment, you know, kind of the the seven habits types of thing. This is this is your time to sharpen the saw and invest in relationships in a very real way. may not return sales right away, but lifetime value, you know, you're gonna build a relationship, you'll probably be feel better about what you do and what you provide and you can represent your company and your product and yourself better than you ever have. There's a lot of that going on. I I coming out of it right now, kind of back to your question. I need to kind capture the before the sense in the kind of framework to see which channels are people using. Remember what those channels are, and then look at what do I want those channels to be able to accomplish and accommodate going forward. Because everything changed. I don't think every I don't think many companies have gone and and frankly they haven't had the luxury yet to go and take the inventory of what changed and what's working. what adds value to the customers and maybe what detracts from either our brand value or in an ecosystem our partner value, all those types of things.
speaker-2: Michael, as as we think about all of this and what you shared and the learnings from the pandemic, looking out into the future, we always like to ask our guests, what's next? so with your crystal ball, what is next in customer experience? How do you see it evolving in the next three to five years?
speaker-0: Yeah, that's my favorite topic, right? 'Cause things that I'm working on designing today and speaking to people about really they'll be live and real from a product design and experience design standpoint in roughly three to five years. I think we you know, coming out of COVID, we dramatically increased you know it was like a giant beta test. If you're innovation or a product manager, all of a sudden everything was digital. There was no other option. So as a result, you you got to test a whole lot of things. You got to see, you know, every everybody in your company that would have said, I can't just do my job. You know, every nobody's gonna sign up to say, I could do my job sitting in my basement or sitting in my attic in my pajamas and operate at 100%. Nobody would have signed up for that the day before COVID, but some people have and delivered exceptionally. So we going forward, you know, we have to you have to take a look at that. People identified some skills that they didn't know they had. We've realized and used channels and partners. and production and operations in ways that we that we haven't before. The whole dialogue with customers across different channels. Phone, absolutely, and obviously. but then the capture of phone webinars and seminars and time shifting, you know, those things that everybody kind of applies to Netflix and Hulu are work kind of time shifted too. So are you in a company that can use that type of time shift where people can you know, kind of cut and edit and paste their work efforts and their collaboration efforts together. You know, obviously like Microsoft Teams as, you know, is racing forward and trying to scoop up as much of that as they can. Mural, who you also had on your podcast, is a fantastic product for designing collaboration. All those things have it would usually take, you know, year months to years to even experiment with those prior to adopting them. So those are all going on. When I look at the three to five years, there's enormous things happening in privacy. People sharing information, you know, what we see and what we see now in in the Senate and Congress, and you'll see more and more about with Facebook sharing information or capturing information and and Google and Amazon, et cetera. And all these devices that are listening to things, you know, people refer to it as speech, but the the fact that you can capture Everything, including things that you're not supposed to capture, but the fact that everything is listening. And listening, you know, is another double-edged sword, right? If if I use that information for good to help somebody, you know, if somebody's fallen in their hurt and something magically shows up because something triggered on their their smartwatch, which triggered to their phone, which triggered a 911 call, which also served up their healthcare record. And y you can right, this goes back to the movie that we talked about in the beginning. I can play out the best outcome of that movie. All the best resources are available and prepared. I can use the analytics to identify is the person's condition and their history. Do I move them or do I get the medical, you know, do I am I able to get the medical services, the equipment and the right expertise delivered directly to where they are and maybe use telemedicine to go and do that? You know, all those types of things, all these new combinations are things that we've just kind of rifled forward with. And now these are all like new capabilities that the innovators and the designers can go and test, but we can implement with some level of confidence. So this, you know, testing is when I say testing, testing what works and identifying what works, identifying patterns of things that we didn't we wouldn't have put together before. COVID kind of showed us some things that we you know, some capabilities and strengths that we probably didn't know that we had. Blockchain in terms of privacy and operations and doing this massive simplification of of processes. You know, DocuSign. The guys there used to be a client of mine when they were with responses. You know, they've they've got some interesting views on the world and and you really can't connect where their where their background came from. But you look at IBM, you look at some of the other you know, you look at AWS and where they're going with AWS cloud, Oracle's moves and all these other huge moves that are taking place. I spent a lot of time looking at them and trying to identify where I can use those new capabilities to again help somebody get through the customer lifecycle. You know, what's the best way to apply those? Virtual reality, enhanced reality, all these hybrids of reality, which I'll I'll give credit back to to Joe Pine to Ken in in Infinite Possibilities. He describes a number of different realities, and I I've used those to go and kind of mark out all the additional revenue opportunities and contact opportunities. Like enhanced reality, you know, an interesting way to look at it is, you know, Google, everybody kind of remembers like Google glasses. And when those didn't like work super well, you can't see, but I've I've got a number of different sets of virtual reality glasses and headsets and things in a in my office. And I've I've taken a number of people through different pieces there. But the idea that I could take the optimal experience, we'll say for training or executing some type of process. And I can superimpose over an image while I'm working with something what the best practice would be. And you see it currently in like repair excuse me, repairs, and you see it in medicine, where you can have the either a recording of a best practice or have somebody share and come in and kind of co-pilot a process, even though they're remote as you go through it. You actually saw it in the the shuttle launch, which I thought was very interesting. You had the astronauts that were in, you know, in the spacecraft. And with them, you had four other people sitting at a console that or four consoles that mirrored what they had on their screen so they could help them interpret what was going on. I think that assisted experience, that enhanced experience, which is crossing kind of space dimensions, right? Because people can now be anywhere, can cross time dimensions if we can record it or have AI that's able to kind of replicate what the optimal experience would be and then is continuing to learn that and be able to kind of propagate that out there. as well as unattended experiences, you know, where you look at autonomous cars. You know, autonomous cars a a an interesting argument for how they become funded is they're gonna give people more time. And more time is going to be spent though while they're in the car. So you A big thing in customer worthy is looking at how do I value customer time, how do customers value their time? How does a company earn the the right or the the ability to be using customer time when they're making a choice? So when when customers, employees are sitting in a car and now they don't have to pay attention to driving, we should all be asking what are they going to do? Well, a number of companies just want to sell that space to throw up ads, to throw up different pieces of work, all those types of things. So This is all within I believe it's all within five years of of happening. You know, it's gonna happen in a whole bunch of different like iterations and there's gonna be a lot of starts and fails, you know. Virtual reality, I've taken people to to virtual reality sessions and they put on glasses and they don't want to admit it while it's going on, but you know, we we go off the record after and they're like, that was really cool, but it made me excessively nauseous. And if you go and you look at reviews of VR and people that are using Oculus and those types of things, you'll see that's a a pretty like common kind of issue. So you you need to get over those things. We need to figure out how to do that stuff. But the future, you know, this is the greatest time ever to be alive. It really is. And coming out of COVID, I think we're we're gonna start to see that. I do think there's gonna be a little bit of a hangover coming out of COVID. And what I mean by that is people are nostalgic for the way things used to be prior to COVID and lockdown. there's probably some romantic notions of how great everything was and it was great to be in the office and all those types of things. after about two weeks, you know, up especially up in the New York, New Jersey area, even in in California as well, when you're sitting back in traffic again, you know, for an hour and a half to go to go fifteen miles, you you may be nostalgic back for the you know, shelter in place kind of lockdown, work out of your house type of capability. So
speaker-1: That'll be yeah, that'll be definitely interesting to see. The I think you're right. It it it and it's just a time where there's so much to think about. What happens after COVID and then so much that's just on the horizon in the future. And you gave us a lot to think about. So, you know, Michael, I wanna thank you for joining us today. And it's a great great episode for our last epis episode of the year to really think about How to plan for twenty twenty one and beyond and you've given us some great perspective. So thank you so much.
speaker-0: No, really appreciate it. And and obviously I appreciate everybody's time. It's the it's the scarcest commodity we have is each of our time. So greatly appreciate it. I think you guys are doing great work.
speaker-1: Thank you so much. So Michael had a lot to say about customer experience. Definitely gave us a lot to think about and consider going into 2021. Chad, what stood out for you?
speaker-2: I really liked what he said around companies lacking a holistic definition of their customer. Michael's been in rooms with top brands and discovered that in many companies that doesn't exist. And you know, you think about our guests this year, Steve, and more and more with different digital platforms and channels, the the relationship with the customer has become more complex. And I I thought it was really interesting what Michael had to share there. I also liked what he shared in terms of just what the future may bring to us, how you know, we may be nostalgic for the past, but in many ways, things that we've changed over the last few months with COVID may really shift the way we work and and the way we engage with our customers.
speaker-1: Yeah, that's really true. I really think for many of us, the next six months to a year is gonna be really focused on how do we apply the learnings from 2020 and and and what's going to stick and how do we redesign our experiences to to meet needs in this kind of new normal, if you will. And to make sure our new episodes are delivered to you every two or sometimes three weeks, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
speaker-2: And we're designers, so of course we want your feedback. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify or contact us directly at podcast at cast and hue dot com.
speaker-1: Awesome. Thanks everybody. And we'll speak to you soon.
