How can brands deliver experiences that create loyal customer advocates?

Transcript

Robert Zirk: Do you remember the last time a marketing activity had you talking about a product? Perhaps a perfectly timed product placement prompted a recommendation to a friend.

Customer 1: Those running shoes are the best!

Robert Zirk: Or maybe an influencer you follow teamed up with a restaurant to release a signature menu item.

Customer 2: Did you see that burger she posted on her feed? You've got to try it!

Robert Zirk: Or maybe you found a really entertaining and informative branded podcast that answers big questions about digital customer experience...

Hint, hint – please subscribe!

These kinds of marketing and PR initiatives, if done well, can certainly get customers and prospects talking. But word of mouth isn't limited to your marketing or PR departments.

Your customer experience can create customer advocates who will enthusiastically promote your brand. And this is something that can often be implemented on a much lower budget.

Today I'll be joined by expert guests who will share how you can create experiences that get customers talking enthusiastically about your brand. And why you may not be generating word of mouth right now, even if your customers are generally satisfied with their experience.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: How can brands deliver experiences that create loyal customer advocates?

Robert Zirk: Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

Robert Zirk: Meet Jay Baer.

Jay Baer: I'm ready for questions... for, for now.

Robert Zirk: Jay is a keynote speaker, advisor, author, podcaster, tequila influencer, and seventh generation entrepreneur. From childhood, he was taught about how important customers were to his family's livelihood and that the choices customers make aren't only driven by price.

Jay Baer: It is truly an experience differential. And that goes back into the – literally the 1850s, 1860s, when my great-grandfather started doing furniture delivery. And nobody else would ever deliver furniture. You want furniture? You got to come get it. He's like, "No, we'll bring it to your farm."

And so, growing up in that culture, the primacy of the customer and not just, like, platitudes and things like that, like "the customer's always right" or whatever, but truly understanding that the experience is what actually makes people loyal to the business much more so than the inventory or the price.

Robert Zirk: And if that experience is exceptional, it doesn't just build loyalty. It can generate word of mouth, which is when customers actively recommend your business to other potential customers. Throughout his career, Jay has noticed a disparity between the emphasis businesses place on experiences that create word of mouth relative to the business value word of mouth can create.

Jay Baer: Word of mouth has been, and will always be, the best way to grow any business. This is true since the first caveman sold an arrowhead to another caveman. “Get arrowheads from Glog, he's amazing,” right? This has been true forever. Yet, fewer than 1 percent of businesses, fewer than 1 percent of businesses have a defined word of mouth strategy.

Robert Zirk: That led Jay to write Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word-of-Mouth.

He sought to identify how brands were successfully generating word of mouth and to address the myths surrounding word of mouth that he'd come across by working with other businesses. And one of the biggest mistakes Jay sees business and CX leaders make is the assumption that word of mouth is created simply through a great customer experience.

Jay Baer: Everybody just assumes that your operational proficiency creates word of mouth, that competency creates conversation. It doesn't.

People don't talk about how good your business is. People talk about things that they don't expect. So you should run a good business. You absolutely should be operationally sound. But that doesn't create word of mouth. What it creates is retention, right? It keeps your customers in place.

But nobody ever says, "Hey Robert, let me tell you about this thing that happened last night. It was perfectly adequate." Nobody ever says that because it's not a story.

And what we forget is that every incidence of word of mouth, whether it's truly out of your mouth or a review, right? A review is just word of mouth with shelf life. Any sort of expression of support or warning is strictly based on whether or not there's a story to tell.

This is why there's so few three star reviews. Because there's no story there, right? "Yeah, it was all right. Three stars." Like, people don't take the time to write those unless they're just review nerds.

And that's the way word of mouth works. We are wired to discuss things that are different and ignore things that are average.

Robert Zirk: Jay highlights that while an effective word of mouth strategy can work for any business, there are even greater opportunities in B2B, citing a recent study suggesting up to 90% of all B2B purchases are influenced in some way by word of mouth.

Jay Baer: And that makes a lot of sense intuitively, because B2B purchases typically have a higher degree of risk, they have a higher degree of expense, they're made less frequently, switching costs are higher if you get it wrong. And so most of the time when people are making a B2B purchase, they are going to research that purchase in more depth, they are going to go out of their way to seek out the opinions of existing customers, etc.

So consequently, the B2B side of it is, in my estimation, the place where word of mouth can actually have the greatest slingshot effect on any business.

However, you've got to do something else they didn't expect you to do, and that's what actually creates the conversation. So it's one of the great mysteries of my professional life in that B2B is where word of mouth can have the greatest impact, yet B2B is the least likely to actually engage in proactive word of mouth strategies and deployment at the CX level, which I'm still out here fighting the good fight. I'm trying to convince people one company at a time.

Robert Zirk: A business might have strategies for collecting customer feedback or training its customer service representatives. But as much as statistics show how important the ripple effects of word of mouth can be, Jay notes that a defined word of mouth strategy is still something many businesses overlook, and he offered a couple of reasons for why that is.

Jay Baer: You have to be a bit of a long term thinker to do this, right? If you're like, "Hey, we either want to do a word of mouth strategy that lasts forever or a coupon that's going to drive inbound calls Monday." Like, those are not equivalent theses, right? And so you have to be a bit of a long term visionary to be like, "Hey, we're going to start planting conversational seeds now that will pay off a month from now, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now."

It's one of the reasons why companies don't do word of mouth as much as I think they should. It is not the fastest way to get customers, I will very much acknowledge that, but I will tell you over time, it is both the best way to get customers and the least expensive.

Robert Zirk: So what kinds of experiences can exceed expectations and prompt proactive word of mouth, or what Jay calls "talk triggers"? Jay says that there are four attributes that need to be met for a talk trigger to be effective.

Jay Baer: The first is non negotiable, which is it needs to be remarkable. It has to be a story worth telling. It has to be unexpected enough that a customer or somebody who interacts with your talk trigger is going to say, "Wow, I didn't see that coming. That's novel."

If it's not novel enough, like, if you were like, "Hey here's what we're going to do. We're a restaurant and if you buy 12 sandwiches, we're going to give you your 13th free. That's not a talk trigger. People have seen that gambit before, like, that's not going to meet the test. So the first thing, it's got to be remarkable.

Robert Zirk: The second criteria is repeatability. It can't be a one-off, or a special promotion, or something you only do on a certain day of the week, or only for a certain subset of customers.

An effective talk trigger should be something you can commit to on an ongoing basis. And Jay notes that it should go on indefinitely or until it's no longer effective.

Jay Baer: When you say word of mouth, they think stunt, right? They think surprise and delight. They think we drone dropped a birthday cake in their yard or whatever.

And that's cool. But to me, that's PR, right? That's a temporal moment. You get a spike in chatter and then that spike goes away because you just did the thing once or twice or three times.

A true word of mouth strategy is baked into your operations, which is why word of mouth done right, a talk trigger done right, is not marketing. It's customer experience that yields marketing outcomes.

Robert Zirk: Jay referenced one company that, quite literally, has a repeatable word of mouth strategy baked into their operations.

Jay Baer: DoubleTree Hotels, for example, gives out a warm chocolate chip cookie when you check in. They've been doing this for 35 years. They give out 75, 000 chocolate chip cookies a day worldwide. We did a case study with them for the book. One third of their customers have told somebody else a story about the chocolate chip cookie. That's a lot of stories. And not coincidentally, DoubleTree spends less on advertising than any other hotel in their competitive set because the cookie is the ad and the guests are the marketing department.

So the key is that this isn't "What are we going to do this week that would be wacky?" It's "What do we do in our operations, in our customer experience, that we can literally deploy forever?"

Robert Zirk: The third attribute is that it has to be reasonable. And this is something that Jay has seen many B2B companies struggle with at conventions, where some companies' booths might hold a draw for a larger than life grand prize, thinking that a luxury car or an all-inclusive vacation will interest people enough to get them talking about the brand.

Jay Baer: But what's fascinating is the research shows the exact opposite occurs. You ready? When the talk trigger is too big, it actually depresses conversation, because people don't believe it. They don't think it's true.

So you can be reasonable. DoubleTree cookies, right? It's a great chocolate chip cookie. It probably costs them a dollar. Like, it's a really good cookie. They spend 75, 000 a day on cookies or whatever, but they're not giving you a car, right? So it doesn't have to be huge. It just has to be different.

Robert Zirk: And the final attribute of a good talk trigger is that it has to be relevant – something that aligns with your story.

Jay Baer: It has to make sense in the context of your business and who you are and what you are, right? This isn't randomness because otherwise the conversation becomes, "I don't understand why they're doing it." So you want it to be thematically tied to the business.

Robert Zirk: Jay shared a great example from a car dealership in Brisbane, Australia that found a way to provide something unexpected, but still relevant.

Jay Baer: They've got a green roof with all kinds of plants and stuff up there for ecological reasons and on the roof of the dealership, they've got a bunch of beehives to pollinate the plants and what have you. When you take your vehicle in for service, when you pick it up, in your cup holder is a little jar of honey with a handwritten hang tag that says, "Yes, this honey was produced above the dealership. Hope you enjoy it."

It's awesome because the honey was from above the dealership. Now, if it was just random honey, not made above the dealership – it was just like, "you get honey." It wouldn't work as well because you'd be like "Why? Is this dealership owned by a bear? They just love honey here? I don't understand this."

The best talk triggers make the most sense, but yet are still unexpected enough that you want to tell your friend a story.

Robert Zirk: Jay emphasized the difference between a satisfied customer and a customer advocate. A satisfied customer might offer a recommendation if the topic comes up naturally in conversation.

Jay Baer: Let's say you're out to dinner with friends and somebody says, "Hey, I'm thinking about changing car insurance providers. Didn't you change car insurance providers recently?" You're like, "Yeah, I did. And I went with whatever. And these guys are amazing. You should go there too."

Robert Zirk: That's word of mouth, but it's reactive. If you weren't asked, you wouldn't be talking about car insurance to your friends, family, or colleagues.

Jay Baer: What really builds companies, though, is proactive word of mouth, and this is where you switch from a satisfied customer to a true advocate. And in this scenario, you're out to dinner with the same group, and the topic of conversation is the NFL...

Robert Zirk: That's the National Football League...

Jay Baer: ...draft, and you say, "Yeah, I hope we get a new cornerback too. But between picks, let me tell you about the experience I had recently with this insurance company. I never saw this coming. It was amazing. I can't believe how good this experience is." So the difference is you are inserting the topic into the conversation as opposed to passively answering a question once it was addressed to you. That's when somebody crosses over from satisfied customer to an advocate.

Robert Zirk: Our next guest wrote a book all about creating customer advocates, and she was actually recommended by Jay via word of mouth for this episode.

Brittany Hodak: I remember as a kid, I was so fascinated by brands. My mom hated taking me to the grocery store because I would insist on buying the brand from my favorite TV commercial or billboard or an ad in the newspaper or a magazine.

Robert Zirk: That's Brittany Hodak. She's an award-winning entrepreneur, customer experience speaker, podcaster and author of Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates.

From a young age, Brittany wanted to work in the music industry and she eventually went on to work at record labels and entertainment companies. Along the way, she noticed that some artists had huge fan bases and others didn't, but also that the size of an artist's fan base didn't necessarily correlate to how talented the artist was or how good their music was.

Brittany Hodak: And what I started to see again and again was that the artists who had the staying power, the ones who built the communities that wanted to come back, that wanted to tell their friends, that wanted to have this not just be, like, a few hours of fun on a Friday night, but part of their lifestyle, were the artists who were most connected to the fans.

And it hit me. Superfandom is a two way street. If you want your audience to love you, you've got to love them back. And in many cases, you've got to love them first. You've got to show them that you want to invite them into the story. You want to invite them into everything that's happening. And once I had that realization, I thought, "Wait, this isn't just about music. This is everything, everywhere, all around me."

I went back to school. I got a master's degree in consumer behavior and marketing. I took all these psychology classes and I started to realize that everything that I had been saying to artists, everything I had been talking about inside the record labels were true of CPG brands, were true of B2B brands, were true of startups, were true of Fortune 10s.

Like, everyone needed to make their customers feel more of the love so that their customers would continue to come back and would tell their friends. So they would go from being just someone who showed an affinity for this product or service to someone who couldn't stop talking, would not stop advocating about the experience, about what it feels like to be part of this community of people who love this thing.

Robert Zirk: Or, in other words, a "superfan".

Brittany Hodak: I define a superfan as a customer or stakeholder who is so delighted by their experience that they become an enthusiastic advocate.

Robert Zirk: So here's how Brittany breaks that down. For starters, they're a customer or stakeholder first before anything else.

Brittany Hodak: This isn't someone who loves you because they know you socially. The customer or stakeholder, they've actually done business with you that gives them the credibility to advocate in a way that's going to hold some weight.

Robert Zirk: Second, superfans have to be delighted by their experience. Brittany shared that there are really only three types of customer interactions: ones that leave the customer feeling better, ones that leave the customer feeling worse and ones that leave the customer feeling the same as before, with the last type being the most common.

Brittany Hodak: To the extent that you can interrupt that pattern, that you can leave your customer better than you found them, even if it's in those micro moments, you are going to go from being a neutral to a positive, which is a pattern interrupt in their brain and they're going to remember.

So in my book, I talk about this idea of intentional experience design, looking at all of the predictable, repeatable moments that you know are going to happen along a customer's journey. It could be before they buy your thing, after they've already bought your thing, during the experience itself, doesn't matter.

There are predictable things that you know, to a certain degree, are going to happen to most, if not all of your customers. So ask yourself: in that moment, what can you do to elevate it to make it feel special?

I was at the dentist yesterday. I love my dentist because as you're leaving, the very last thing that the hygienist says to you is, "Would you like a smoothie or maybe a coffee?" and they've got a smoothie bar and a coffee bar. It looks like you're going into a coffee shop when you go into the dentist and they send you on your way with a smoothie or a coffee or whatever else you order.

It's an amazing way to end the visit. Because normally when you end a visit, what are you thinking about? Either the bill that you just paid or the fact that you've now made this appointment and you've got to come back in six months or whatever it is. So they are redesigning that last moment, that last touch point before you leave.

Robert Zirk: And lastly, a superfan is created when the delight they feel from that experience leads them to become an enthusiastic advocate.

Brittany Hodak: And what I mean by that is when they have the opportunity to recommend you, they do. And research has shown that a customer that comes to you as a referral is five times more likely to refer more business to you.

So that's where these superfans become incredibly important. Not just because you've got an army of people out there talking about how amazing you are, but because the customers that they send your way are much more likely not just to make a purchase, but to continue to tell more customers, to continue this amazing inbound marketing influx of people who don't want to work with someone who does what you do. They want to work with you.

Robert Zirk: And there's always the potential to look at things differently. As Brittany points out, even a negative experience can be quite literally elevated.

Brittany Hodak: This elevator that is at the Legoland Resort in Winter Haven, Florida. We've been to Legoland a bunch of times. I've got two little boys and they love it. And there is an elevator there that is probably their favorite part of the entire resort.

You walk into it, there's Lego decals all over the walls, like dancing mini figures. There's a mirror ball, there's lights, there's music. Every time the door is closed, it's like the Bee Gees and ABBA. It is a party. My kids love dancing in that elevator.

The first time we stayed at the resort, it wasn't until probably like the 10th time I'd been in the elevator, probably like the third day we were there, that I realized it was the slowest elevator I think I've ever been in my life. Literally the slowest elevator. The whole song "Dancing Queen" would play between when we got on at the fifth floor and when we got down to the lobby. It took forever. And because it was a small elevator, it was usually just one family at a time because it was hard to fit more than four people in, especially if you had luggage.

That should have been a disaster, but instead of me being annoyed at how small and how slow this elevator was, it took me three solid days to even notice. And once I noticed, I didn't mind because they had taken this small elevator and transformed it into an experience.

And the reason I love to share that story is because whoever is listening to this right now, I promise you that in your business right now, there are some slow elevators. Your customers might be feeling them. Your team might be feeling them. You might be feeling them. And instead of just throwing your hands up in the air and saying "I can't replace the elevator" or "I can't make the elevator go any faster," ask yourself if there's anything that you can do to re-engineer that experience.

Can you make it feel different? Because in almost every instance, you can use creativity and intentionality, sometimes for no money at all, to completely reimagine this experience.

Robert Zirk: And slow elevators can exist in any type of business.

Brittany Hodak: The fact that you're digital-first or digital-only does not excuse the fact that on the other side of those ones and zeros is a real person, is a customer with a life, with a story, with a family who wants to be treated like an individual person, not just another user, not just another order number.

I placed an order for makeup online a few months ago. My sister in law had raved about this brand. She was like, "You've got to try it." So I placed this order. And a couple of days later, we got a terrible ice storm and there was no mail, no delivery. Honestly, I completely forgot about the makeup order 'cause it was like, we're about to run out of milk and we can't get out of this neighborhood 'cause all the streets were iced over.

And I got an email from that makeup company that said, "Hey, Brittany, we noticed that your shipment has been delayed. We're so sorry. We know you've got places to go and people to meet and even though shipping is out of our hands," and then they said "Reminder: you can check the status of your shipping at any time by clicking here", " We wanted to send you a gift while you wait. Here's an e-code for $15 off your order. Thank you again. We hope you love your makeup when you get it. Let us know. Stay beautiful."

And I thought, "What an amazing touchpoint." Because maybe I had been, every single day, refreshing that order page, saying like, "Where's my order? Why isn't UPS coming? Why isn't the mail truck coming?" So the fact that they proactively built a system to say, "Let's check the status of orders and when something is delayed, let's get ahead of it before the customer has an opportunity to reach out to us and say, "Where's my thing?", or to go to FedEx or UPS or whoever and say, "Where's my thing?", own it.

We know it's not your fault. But instead of saying, "Don't talk to us, talk to the carrier," you're saying, "We're so sorry you don't have it yet. Here's a gift while you wait." That was an amazing touch point, an amazing way to transform a digital slow elevator into something that I'm still talking about.

There was a 14 day trial and they said as part of that email, "Don't worry, your 14 day trial doesn't start until the day your package is delivered, so you don't have to worry about it." And in that moment, I was like, "I'm not sending this stuff back, even if it's not the right foundation color, or even if I don't love the lipstick, because how great are they?"

In an alternate universe that could be handled completely wrong, but through a little bit of empathy, a little bit of strategic digital engineering of "this is what I want this experience to feel like", I now have reordered from them and will continue to support them because of how they make me feel.

Robert Zirk: On the B2B side, Jay cited an example by a lumber business in California called WindsorONE.

Jay Baer: So their customers are all carpenters and contractors and construction companies, and if you're a carpenter, you're pretty particular about your wood, but there's a lot of different companies that supply lumber in California. WindsorONE just happens to be one of them. So their thought was, "How do we get more customers disproportionately? How do we do it at a low cost? Let's have an actual word of mouth strategy. Let's create a talk trigger."

So what they did is every board that they manufacture has on the reverse side, a stamp. Just have a rubber stamp. And it says, "Call Kurt for a shirt" and an 800 number. Call Kurt for a shirt. So you're out there on the job site, you got your saw out, you're getting ready to trim up this piece, you're like, "Who's Kurt? What? What are you talking about? Call Kurt for a shirt?"

So you call it up, hit the number, "This is Kurt!" You're like "Okay, yeah, it says call Kurt for a shirt."

"Yeah, I'm Kurt. What's your name?" I'm Jay Baer.

"Where you at?" Oh, I'm in Petaluma.

"What are you working on?" Oh, I'm working on re-siding a church.

"Cool. What kind of products are you working with?" Well, I got this, this.

"Hey, did you know we also have these other products, et cetera?"

So Kurt goes through a whole product array while you're there, and then says, "Hey, what size are you?" I'm an XL.

"How many guys you got working with you?" Six or seven. I got some mediums, I got some smalls. Like great. Next day on the job site, in a FedEx box, is a t-shirt for everybody on your crew sized to them and samples of all the products that were discussed on the call.

Now, since they went to that program, WindsorONE has distributed thousands and thousands of t-shirts, but more importantly, they have reduced their advertising budget by millions of dollars because the stamp and Kurt and the shirts are the ads and their customers are now the marketing and sales department.

Robert Zirk: That's an example of talkable generosity, which is one of five different types of talk triggers Jay identifies in his book of the same name.

Jay Baer: Talkable generosity is when you give the customer more than they expect to get: a free cookie, you get a free jar of honey, you get a free t-shirt. It's the one that you see most often in the wild because it's typically the easiest to think through operationally. "Okay, we're going to give them a thing anyway. So now we give them a thing plus another thing." When you're starting to think about sort of CX design and CX scalability, it's the one that people tend to lean towards first, because it's not that hard to figure out how to provision it, but it is by no means the best, it's just the most common.

Robert Zirk: Another type of talk trigger is talkable speed — delivering responsiveness in an unexpected way. This is one that Jay expanded on in his most recent book, The Time to Win. He shared the example of a local B2B accounting firm that prides itself on a five minute response time and consequently, how speed is cited in almost all of the reviews customers leave for them online.

Jay Baer: We care about our time more than ever, so if you can be faster than customers expect, they will talk about that in a way they may not have previously.

Robert Zirk: But while talkable speed can be one way to establish a talk trigger Jay cautions that brands need to make sure they're still meeting all four of those attributes that were defined earlier: remarkable, relevant, reasonable and repeatable. In particular, an unexpected response time won't work at the expense of being reasonable.

Jay Baer: It is very true that you can be too fast. And when you are too fast, it actually decays trust. So if I said, "Hey, I need to get LASIK surgery tomorrow." And you call the doctor, like, "What are you doing at 3 o'clock?" You're like, "That seems too quick to schedule a surgery. You are too available." This is not like buying a burrito, right? Or what I would say on stage is that you don't want to go to the fastest tattoo artist in town. That's probably not what you're looking for, right?

So it turns out that in this continuum of confidence we designed, there is a perfect amount of elapsed time in every customer interaction. So certainly not too slow, but also not too fast. It's like the Goldilocks zone for responsiveness and we call it The Right Now. So The Right Now is the perfect amount of time, and essentially the way we define that is The Right Now is slightly faster than customers expect, so if you expect it to take seven days, you do it in five and they're like amazed. But if they expect it in seven days and you do it in 12 hours, you're like "What's going on?"

Robert Zirk: Talkable usefulness can also be a talk trigger, providing convenience in a way that customers wouldn't ordinarily expect.

Jay Baer: Barilla Pasta, dried pasta company. You get a narrow band of success making pasta. There are many different shapes of pasta, and each of those has a different density, of course. So in fact, you really should cook them slightly different times in order to get that perfect al dente experience.

Barilla was doing a smart thing. They were doing a lot of social media listening and they were doing a lot of mining of Reddit and X and Facebook and Instagram and stuff, and they realized that a lot of people were frustrated that they thought they got it right. Like, "I followed the instructions on the box and I thought this pasta was going to be perfect. And it was overdone. It was underdone. Like, how hard can it be?"

So they were like, "We can solve this." So they created a whole series of Spotify playlists. And the way it works is if you've got spaghetti, you boil your water, you hit play on the playlist, you dump the pasta in. And it's a bunch of different, like, funny and interesting Italian songs. The second the playlist is over, you take the pasta out of the water and it's perfectly done.

So they've got, like, a spaghetti playlist, a rigatoni playlist, etc. One for each of their pasta shapes. Massively popular. Hundreds of thousands of downloads. Free to the consumer. Free to create. Didn't cost them anything to make this. You can access it through a QR code in the packaging now. Brilliant. Talk about talkably useful.

Robert Zirk: Another type of talk trigger is talkable attitude.

Jay Baer: It's when you're just a little bit weirder than people might expect or a little bit more irreverent. It's typically rooted in humor or something like that. It's probably the hardest one to pull off because typically organizations themselves aren't irreverent, it's individuals, but you can do it you can have great success with it. And ironically, I will tell you that this is one where B2B can really crush it because people don't expect B2B companies to be funny or irreverent or goofy. And so, when you do it, it works wonders.

Robert Zirk: Jay shared an example of how a B2B online conference call company made the experience of waiting for other participants to log on a talkable one. Instead of typical hold music, you'd instead hear the company's co-founder, a musician himself, singing a self-written song about the experience of being on hold.

Jay Baer: And it was hilarious. He's like, "Where is everybody? Do I have the time wrong? Was my calendar wrong?" And then he leaves the call. And as soon as he leaves the call, everybody else joins. It's like a classic tale. And it was so popular that people would literally join calls 10 minutes early just to listen to the "I'm on Hold" song from this B2B VOIP company.

Robert Zirk: And last but not least, there's talkable empathy.

Jay Baer: Talkable empathy is one that I probably wouldn't have even pointed out a handful of years ago, because it wasn't a conversation you ever had to have, right? Like, of course you would treat customers with dignity and kindness and respect and humanity, but somewhere along the way we lost our way and we find ourselves where we are here, which is in an era of empathy deficit. And so that kind of makes me sad, right? So if you treat them well, holy cow, it stands out so much and it becomes a talk trigger. They tell their friends about it. Like, "I can't believe this person was so nice to me. I never expected them to be so nice to me."

Robert Zirk: And to get a great example of talkable empathy, I had to speak with Rajiv Dhand. He's the regional vice president for Asia Pacific and Africa at TELUS International, and every month he shares stories recognizing team members for the exceptional customer experience they provide in an internal monthly newsletter called Special Ops.

Rajiv Dhand: One memorable story I recall involved two members from Bulgaria. The two team members collaborated closely to help an elderly widowed customer who was calling in for an issue with her device, which was preventing her from tracking her health. Post unsuccessful troubleshooting of the out of the warranty device, the customers offered a discount for a new device. Unfortunately, the customer could not afford the new device, even with the discount due to her high medical bills. Following close collaboration , the customer was provided a replacement device as a special exception. The customer was so delighted that she called to share her feedback, stating no one has ever shared such love and support to her. What a truly amazing, exceptional way to convert good experience into advocates.

Robert Zirk: And Jay highlighted Chewy, an online pet supply retailer, as a business that truly understands the importance of Missing resource for 6eKRQ8L67kBxpAEr15UKvY.

Jay Baer: Do they have a lot of good products? Sure. Do they have good prices? Sure. But do they have a disproportionate advantage? No, they're not dramatically cheaper than anybody else, but what they do have is an unyielding commitment to empathy that nobody else can match . So the way it works most noticeably is that if you have a pet who has deceased, they will discover that or maybe you'll let them know. The most classic story is you say, "Hey, I've got an unopened bag of dog food. My dog passed away. What do I do with this? Should I return it?" And they always say "No, donate it to a local animal shelter." But then they've got a staff of 1,011 oil painters. They have a thousand oil painters on staff. They will go on social and they will find a picture of your pet, make an oil painting of your pet, with a handwritten thank you note, condolences for the loss of Bugsy, and then FedEx it to your house.

The next day, knock on the door, here's an oil painting of your recently deceased pet. And there are some really powerful videos online about people receiving those kind of boxes from Chewy. And every time I talk about this on stage, I ask the audience the same question: "Will the recipient of this box ever spend even a penny on pet supplies with any other provider for the rest of their lives?" And the answer is almost assuredly not.

If you get it right, empathy is the best possible talk trigger, but it's not easy to get it right. You have to really have it together. It can feel very forced and saccharine and it's not one you can just be, like, in a conference room, "Okay, let's be empathetic tomorrow." It's just not quite that easy. Because it's gotta be organizational, right?

Robert Zirk: And Rajiv highlights that the reason TELUS International team members are able to go above and beyond for the customers of the brands we support is because of the organizational focus on employee engagement, by creating an experience for team members that's inclusive and creates a sense of belonging.

Rajiv Dhand: We strive to create an environment that fosters creativity and comfort, making our team members feel at home. When you feel at home, you feel accepted and this sense of belonging drives you to be the best you can be. When our team members are engaged and feel valued, they deliver the best work, benefiting both our customers and the company as a whole.

Robert Zirk: Brittany shares a similar line of thinking about employee engagement. She stresses the importance of creating superfans within your organization. To do that, leaders need to ensure their employees aren't just passionate about their work, but that they feel their work is purposeful.

Brittany Hodak: Every single employee at any given moment is the acting chief of experience for your brand. What they say and what they do is how customers are going to assume your entire company is organized.

Intentional experience design for your onboarding, for your training, for your continued check-ins with your employees is so important because you don't want a customer to think "Even the employee doesn't want to be here. Like, they don't even want to be here and they're getting paid. So why should I come back?"

An apathetic employee is never going to create an engaged customer ever. So what you've got to do is model the behavior that you want your employees to use with your customers. You've got to treat them even better than you want them to treat your customers. And if you do that, they will absorb the culture. They will understand that experience does matter and they will absolutely treat your customers better.

Robert Zirk: So if this episode is inspiring you to create your own superfans for your business, how do you get started? Brittany notes that brands should begin by asking themselves some tough questions.

Brittany Hodak: Superfans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer story. So the first thing you have to ask yourself is why should anyone care? Why do I deserve superfans? What am I doing to be not just transactional, not just relational, but experiential? What is the benefit that I am providing? How am I making my customers lives better than my competitors? Because a lot of times I think people don't think about that. Like, I talk to people all the time who say, "Our business has an awareness problem. Not enough people know about us. We've got to spend more money on ads. We've got to do a sponsorship."

And it's not an awareness problem at all. Plenty of people know, they just don't care. It's an apathy problem. You haven't given them a reason to want to choose you over your competitors. So that's the first part is asking yourself, "Why do I actually deserve superfans?"

The idea is that if you want to create superfans, being great is not good enough. You've got to be SUPER.

Robert Zirk: And SUPER, in this case, is an acronym. It's a framework Brittany uses in her book, Creating Superfans, as a way of outlining the steps that brands need to take.

Brittany Hodak: The acronym SUPER stands for start with your story, understand your customer's story, personalize, exceed expectations, and repeat.

And SUPER is a five-part framework that affects every single part of your business, not just your customer service team, not just your sales team, not just your marketing team, not just your ops team, because experience truly is everything and everything is experience.

Robert Zirk: To create an experience that exceeds expectations, or a talk trigger, Jay outlines the process in five steps, with the first one being to do a deep dive on conversations that are happening about your organization.

Jay Baer: Get a feel for when people talk about your CX now, what do they say? And that probably requires you to dig a little deeper on social listening, talking to customer success agents, interviewing customers, et cetera. And a lot of times, the talk trigger is right under your nose. It's something that maybe you're already doing or you're doing a little bit. You just haven't fully emphasized it.

Robert Zirk: The next step involves interviewing customers about their customer journey.

Jay Baer: So what are the key inflection points in your business? Is it the order stage? Is it the payment stage? Is it the delivery stage? Is it the procurement stage? What are the key inflection points? And then what you want to do is ask customers: "What did you expect would happen?"

And if you do that well – you don't need to talk to a lot of people, a dozen or so will usually do it – you'll find some interesting threads that you're like, "Oh, they expected this to happen. What we could do is this other thing instead and they wouldn't expect that to happen."

Robert Zirk: After you've gathered that information, it's time to pinpoint a place along the customer journey where you can implement a talk trigger that will reach as many customers as possible.

Jay Baer: You identify that inflection point, then this is when, only here, do you actually sit down and say, "Okay, what ideas do we have that meet the four Rs..."

Robert Zirk: Remember, that's remarkable, relevant, reasonable, and repeatable...

Jay Baer: "...and are one of the five types of talk triggers?"

Robert Zirk: Those are talkable iterations of generosity, speed, usefulness, attitude, or empathy.

Jay Baer: This is the part where you get the pizza party with your staff to riff on some ideas. You come up with a couple of candidates that you think make sense, that you can actually do and scale, right? That are not impossible. And then you test it. And that's really important. You want to actually do a true test where only every nth customer experiences it and then see if it actually creates conversations. And if it does, then you scale it to all customers.

Robert Zirk: Once you have your word of mouth strategy in place, how do you measure success?

Jay Baer: There's two types of measurements that we use. The first is observed talkability, where you gather all evidence that people are actually telling the story. So you're looking at customer reviews, you're looking at social media, you're looking at discussion boards and forums, you are talking to your customer service team and your sales team saying "Did customers mention this at all at any point," right?

So you're literally creating a spreadsheet or some such which says " This many customers experienced it. Here's how many sort of nodes of evidence we've discovered that people actually mentioned it proactively."

And then the second one is defined talkability where you actually say, "Alright, let's survey people. So this, you typically wrap into some kind of Net Promoter Score survey or some kind of CSAT data.

So customer experiences the talk trigger. Seven, 14 days, whatever makes sense for you later, they get a questionnaire or survey or whatever from you that says, "Hey, scale of zero to nine, how much would you recommend us? By the way, have you told anybody a story about your experiences with us? Yes or no. If yes, what did you say?" Open text box, right? Because you want them to be able to unprompted mention the talk trigger. That's the best case scenario.

Third question is, "Did you happen to mention any of these things?" And you give them a pick list. Price, service, responsiveness, and then hidden in the list of six is the talk trigger. Checkbox, et cetera. So you're checking for proactive mention, and then you ask them the question, "Did you tell a story? Yes or no? If so, did it mention any of these things?" One of them's the talk trigger, then you're in great shape.

What we look for in the test phase is a talkability rate of about 15 percent or so is where we're at these days. If 15 out of 100 customers say they've told a story, they remember it, they mentioned it, et cetera then you should consider rolling it out.

Robert Zirk: To wrap up, Jay reiterated that the ways in which brands deliver customer experience might change, but the effectiveness of word of mouth is evergreen.

Jay Baer: And that's why we wrote the book, Talk Triggers, is to demystify word of mouth, right? It's not black magic. It's just customer experience and you can make it programmatic. Like, you can have a strategy, you can have metrics, you can have testing, you can have a budget, like, you can treat this like any other initiative in your company.

Robert Zirk: And if you're not sure where to start, Rajiv outlined some of the ways a CX partner like TELUS International can help.

Rajiv Dhand: It means going above and beyond their expectations , really unearthing the concern they have and showing empathy and ultimately resolving their issue quickly and effectively. It is also important to find ways to surprise and delight your customers. Taking the time to know their preferences, needs, and pain points, and finding creative and meaningful ways to address them.

Robert Zirk: That last part is key. As Jay and Brittany had mentioned earlier in this episode, a customer experience that meets expectations might bring those customers back, but it isn't enough if you want them to generate word of mouth about your brand. And Rajiv reiterated the importance of exceeding expectations.

Rajiv Dhand: Exceptional service can make your customers feel valued, heard, and delighted and inspire them to share their positive experiences with others.

Robert Zirk: Thank you to Jay Baer, Brittany Hodak and Rajiv Dhand for joining me and sharing their insights today. And thank you for listening to Questions for now, a TELUS International podcast.

If you found today's episode talkably useful, please share it with a friend or colleague and follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice.

I'm Robert Zirk. And until next time, that's all for now.