What Makes A Memorable Customer Experience - Interview With Dan Gingiss - Part 1
What makes a truly great customer experience in branding agencies?
Remember when it was such a pain in the butt to switch banks, cell phone providers or cable companies that nobody really did it?
Now, it’s so easy, which makes a memorable customer experience that much more important. We don’t just need a reason to show up, we need a reason to stay.
So how does this translate to branding agencies? How can you use this to your advantage, and use it to help you bring in great clients, time after time?
Dan Gingiss (Image courtesy of B2B Marketing Exchange)
You might not think of customer experience as marketing, but it is. And if you’re a small agency, you might not be thinking about building long-term customer loyalty. Clients come and go.
But what if they had a killer experience with you? They’re probably telling their friends. And if they had a terrible experience with you, they’re definitely telling their friends!
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dan Gingiss to talk about this very thing.
Dan is author of ‘The Experience Maker’ and ‘Winning at Social Customer Care’, as well as co-host of the podcast ‘Experience This!’ and an internationally renowned keynote speaker.
He believes that a remarkable customer experience is your best sales and marketing strategy, and in this revealing 2-part interview, Dan breaks down why it’s worth investing in your customer experience and why it’s a great way to stand out in an ever-crowded marketplace.
[Pia]: So excited to be with you, especially since I truly enjoyed your book, ‘The Experience Maker’.
Tell me a little bit about how you came to write this and where your experience came from.
[Dan]: Sure. Well, I spent 20 years in corporate America, doing the daily grind and trying to climb the corporate ladder.
I worked in different industries - financial services, healthcare, fast food - all sorts of things, and eventually moved from being a marketer at heart to really being passionate about customer experience.
And it took a role at Discover Card to teach me the power of customer experience.
And once I got a taste of that power, it was very difficult to go back.
What I mean is that I learned you can make very small changes to the customer experience that have a very outsized impact.
Little things like removing customer pain points or barriers to doing business with you, and it doesn't seem like a big thing.
But when you think about how many barriers and how many pain points we go through every day, customers really appreciate that - it builds loyalty and satisfaction.
So now I like to joke that if I never have to do a marketing campaign again, it’s too soon!
I would much rather focus on creating such a remarkable experience for people that they do the marketing for us.
As any good agency worth their salt knows, the best kind of marketing out there is word of mouth, and my belief is that the key to word of mouth is to give somebody an experience that they can't wait to talk to people about.
We've all had that occur where we reach into our pocket or purse, we pull out our phone, and without even knowing we're doing it, we’ve got to grab that moment.
Whether we're sharing it with a friend or a family member, or we're posting it onto our favorite social media channel - it doesn't really matter. We're sharing that experience because it was so positive.
[Pia]: I love that.
So you're saying that you could divert funds, money, energy into customer experience, and still really see it as a marketing spend, right?
Because it really is going to facilitate the marketing of your business, creating more referrals and word of mouth.
And that might be a really great way to focus. It seems like you think it's the better place to focus.
[Dan]: Oh, 100%. If you look at how companies spend on sales and marketing, and compare it to the spend on customer experience, it's a joke!
We are spending all of our money as business owners, trying to bring new people into the organization, and we're spending no money trying to keep them there, or trying to have them refer their friends.
What's wrong with us? I think it really comes from how, especially public companies, are judged on growth.
The thing is, the top line growth of bringing in new customers is great, but if they don't stay, then you end up paying for it on the other side.
You know, for example, that if you have people come in just for the promo price, and then they leave a couple months later, they were just price shopping. You haven't gained anything.
But when you can gain a loyal client or customer and get them to spend more, stay longer and refer their friends, now their lifetime value is so big, that you understand that it's worth investing in them.
Because their staying another year means them spending x more and hopefully referring another couple of people and that it just continues to grow like that.
But when we bring in customers and then ignore them, and don't provide them with any sort of experience, we're basically giving them permission to go search for another company, right?
This is especially if they're price conscious, but even if they're just ‘experience’ conscious.
The switching costs in almost every industry now are so low, it used to be that it was such a pain to switch banks or cell phone providers or switch cable companies. Nobody did it and those companies used that inertia to their advantage.
Today, it's not that hard to switch almost any company. That makes customer experience that much more important, because we’ve got to give them a reason to stay, not just a reason to show up.
[Pia]: I love it. I can see that in the world, as somebody who interacts with companies all the time, right? We’re constantly buying things or looking at advertising.
So, how does that relate to me and my people - 1-3 person branding agency owners?
We're working with a lot of clients who are also 1-3 person businesses, and we're not even necessarily trying to work with them.
Over time, I'm very, ‘I love you, I'll do everything for you - don't let the door hit you on the way out - I'm ready for the next client.’
But that doesn't mean that I don't want to give them an incredible experience, especially because that is where referrals and goodwill and all of that comes from.
So can you give me some examples of what this might look like for our micro businesses?
[Dan]: Yes. If I think about the agency world, the companies that are depending on you are looking to obviously bring in more customers.
When you think about branding, it's often about the marketing of the company, right?
But if we peel back what that actually looks like, most brand marketing is really promising the experience.
Think about your favorite beer company, for example.
What they're talking about is how it's going to feel while you're drinking their beer, right? And how great it's going to be on the beach with a bucket of ice, or how great it's going to be with friends at a restaurant or whatever.
Think about your favorite hotels or restaurants or cars. You know, basically all car marketing is about how it's going to feel to drive that car.
So a lot of what's being done - even though we call it branding, marketing, advertising - is really promising the experience.
At least I think good marketing does that, right?
Because what we know is today, competing on price is a loser's game - it's a race to the bottom.
If you look at the two gas stations across the street from each other, and they're selling gas at the same price - one of them drops it by a penny, the next one drops by a penny a couple of weeks later - next thing you know, they'd be giving away the gas for free!
So competing on product has become incredibly difficult for industries like gas companies - they're selling the same stuff, right?
Another example of that is Uber versus Lyft.
Uber was one of the most innovative companies of our generation.
But today, if you're sitting in a rideshare service, I dare you to tell me whether you're sitting in an Uber or Lyft.
You don't know, and likely you're sitting in both, because that driver’s working for both companies.
That’s how undifferentiated the product experience has become. So when you take away price and product, what's left is experience.
That's really all that we've got that we can differentiate ourselves with.
Whether it's an agency or it's the agency's client, the best part about experience is that it's delivered by humans, and only your company, only your agency has your humans.
And that's the differentiator.
So people hire you because of you, the human and no one else can replicate that. That's your competitive advantage.
If you're competing on price, good luck to you.
Let's face it, there's 1000 agencies people could choose from.
It’s not that you're necessarily doing anything completely innovative compared to other agencies.
It's that people like you, and I think that's true with most businesses.
The joy of having a nice meal at a restaurant - sure, it's in the food, but it's just as much in the service. It's just as much in the experience of being there.
In my book, I interviewed Stephanie Izod, a former Top Chef and Iron Chef champion.
She's an entrepreneur and owns a bunch of restaurants. But she's a chef, right? She's a Top Chef.
I asked her, ‘If you were looking at a pie chart, and you had to allocate the food and the experience, how would you do it?’
I fully expected her to give me an 80/20 answer on the side of food. Instead, she said 50/50, and I thought that was a brilliant answer, even more so coming from someone who's made their career as a celebrity chef.
She is saying, ‘Yeah, the food has to be there. But if the experience isn't there too, people aren't coming back.’
It's just as important and I think that It's true across industries.
[Pia]: And that's why burgers cost $30 in my neighborhood in Brooklyn! You're paying for the experience, you're paying for the lighting. That's true.
I leave a restaurant if the lighting isn't good enough. I'm only there for the lighting.
So can you give us some advice?
Because I, what I'm hearing you say is that your prospects and your clients are here for you.
Because they're here for the human, and you are the human, and then creating that experience.
Our job is to start with who we are, and figure out what kind of experience we want to give people, that's going to be specific and unique to us.
Am I hearing that right? Is that a good path?
[Dan]: Yeah. So if you come to me, and you say, ‘Hey, I'd really like to work with you, I really create great logos.’
I’ll say ‘Well, awesome. There's 1000 million other people that can create a logo for me.’
That's a commodity exercise - it’s not worth hiring a top tier agency for, if that's all that you're bringing to the table, right?
That's the equivalent of ‘I sell gas.’ Great. You know, there's lots of companies that sell gas. And I don't know about you, but I can't tell the difference. If I go from a Shell to a Mobile to a BP, I can't tell the difference. Maybe my car knows, but it doesn't know how to communicate that to me.
So if that's your lead, then it's a tough sell.
If the lead is:
‘Hi, I'm Pia and one of the differences about my agency is that we intentionally only take on a maximum of seven clients.
And the reason why we do that is because we want to make sure that we are there for every client in full with 100% of our being.
And if we take on more than seven clients, we're not able to do that. And so you will be one of the most important things that I am working on, always, I will always be there for you. I am your partner, I am invested in your success.’
Now, I don't even know what you do yet, but I want to hire you, because I need somebody like that - I want a partner, I want someone who's invested in my success, I want someone who's going to always be there for me.
I think where we saw this really come to a head was actually at the beginning of the pandemic.
What was so interesting about March, April, May, June 2020, was for the first time in any of our memories, we were all going through the exact same thing at the exact same time.
So if you couldn't show empathy at that point, then I don't hold out any hope that you can ever show empathy, because we all knew what our clients were going through.
We were going through it too, right? So we were all worried about the same things,
I found that very early on in the pandemic, every company I did business with fell into two groups.
The first was the group that sent out that email (and I know you got it because we all got it 100 times) talking about the enhanced cleaning procedures.
They were always enhanced.
They weren't improved. They weren't better. They weren't…whatever.
They were always ‘enhanced’, and linking us to the CDC website, which we had been linked to by 50 other companies.
I call it ‘check the box’ activity.
They looked around and said ‘Oh, boy, everybody's sending out these emails, we better do the same thing.’
Then I got an email from Charles Schwab.
Charles Schwab said to me, ‘We know that you must be really nervous about a volatile stock market. So we have all of these tools available for you for free, that will help you through these difficult times.’
And I'm thinking, ‘That's exactly what you want to hear from Charles Schwab, at a moment of volatility, in a moment where you're nervous, there's empathy, there's an understanding of the situation.’
They know that I don't care about their cleaning procedures. It's just not that important to me.
But what's important to me is my money and what's happening to it. In that email, even though they didn't actually say it, the message I got was, ‘we're here for you.’
At least as the pandemic was happening, that's exactly what I wanted to hear.
Whereas other companies were just telling me that they're using better chemicals to clean their countertops, that just didn't mean anything to me.
You know, we're all consumers in our real lives. No matter what we do as a profession, we're consumers.
So we know (hopefully) what a good experience looks like.
We know when we've been at a restaurant, and we've just gotten stellar service, and we can't wait to overtip them.
We know when we go through a sales process that doesn't feel smarmy, but actually feels like we're on the same team.
We know when we have a product that not only works as described, but maybe surprises us with extra features.
If we can take that and provide that to our clients in whatever business that we do, then we know it's going to land with them because it’s what lands with us.
And I think that's the beauty of customer experiences.
It's not rocket science.
There's a reason why there's no advanced degrees in customer experience. A lot of it just comes from common sense and from your own experience and understanding what kinds of experiences you like.
Look, I'm a one man show, too. I'm in a different business, but I'm a one man show.
I'm a solopreneur, so I understand that a lot of what I'm selling is me.
So I'm making sure that when clients do business with me, they have a great experience doing it. I can create some surprise and delight that I can do some unexpected things.
Even when I go on stage, I try to be a little bit unexpected. There’s a point in one of my keynotes where I break out into song. At a big business conference, nobody expects the keynote speaker to do that!
But I'm here teaching you how to create remarkable experiences.
And what I love about that is it's so easy.
And it doesn't have to be expensive.
You mentioned my book. All the examples in my book went through the filters of being simple, practical, and inexpensive.
Customer experience doesn't have to be this multimillion dollar project that you embark on, that takes a whole bunch of years.
It's about looking at every touchpoint with your clients, every time you communicate with them.
Can you have a little fun with them? Can you make it a little bit quirky? Can you show some personality or show the human behind the agency, versus sending out a template or a form letter or, or something that is boring?
One of my mantras is ‘refuse to be boring’.
You know, it's not hard.
Say you send out an invoice - that seems like a pretty standard procedure, right?
But why does sending out an invoice have to be a standard procedure? Why can't we have some fun with that invoice?
Why can't there be a message on the invoice or a sticker or a smiley or an emoji or a comment of some sort?
That gets that person to say, ‘Yes, this is why I do business with this company. Because even when they are asking me for money, I still love it.’
[Pia]: Yes, I love that you brought the invoice up, because that's actually a great example of something that people don't think about, is totally boring and is almost more of an opportunity to delight.
I'm going to just take us on a little tangent for a second.
I'm thinking about all the different experiences that I have with people, and some people really go out of their way to give you an experience, and other people don't.
As a consumer, I find that I’ve had the ‘delight’ experience, where I just want to give this person a hug, or I can't wait to write them a review. One time, this woman checked me out at Target, and I'll never forget her. I was having a really bad day, almost crying. And she just really took the time with me, and looked me in the eye, and I thought ‘I'm just gonna write this woman like the best feedback form!’
And that was a perfect example of someone just being themselves. She wasn't taught to do that, right? But it was so touching.
But I also have a lot of experiences that feel forced, so I'm curious what your take is.
The first time I got a big fancy box from this company that had three little things like a bath balm, a journal and a pen, and maybe a little candle. I thought ‘Oh, that's nice.’
The second time I got that box with a couple of different things from somebody else. So then I thought ‘Oh, this is so not magical.’
They shouldn’t have wasted their money on me. I really don't need a bath balm - I don't care about this stuff, and it feels very frivolous.
It's not that I don't appreciate the thought, but it felt like they’re trying to create an experience for me.
So I feel good about your company, but not delighted.
I'm just curious what you think about that.
As somebody who is also creating experiences, when I'm thinking about creating that experience for my clients, I'm not a big gift person already, so I don't want to create that experience for people.
The only gifts I give are my ‘No BS’ mug, because I'm like, ‘That's fuckin awesome!’ I know people love this mug, so I send that to my people, until I find something else that's equally cool.
So that’s where we’ll leave it this week…
In Part 2, Dan talks about the role gifts play in the client-company relationship, and how to create a memorable experience that will have people talking about you, and bringing you business, with very little effort on your part.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to learn how to create memorable experiences in your agency, as well as all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!