The Trend Report

Understanding Customer Experience with Stacy Sherman

• Sid Meadows, Stacy Sherman • Episode 136

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Unlock the secrets to transforming every customer interaction into a golden opportunity as Stacy Sherman, a maven of CX excellence, joins us to pick apart the customer experience puzzle.

Join our exploration into the integral role of empathy and communication in business, the surge of artificial intelligence in customer experience, and how to marry AI with the irreplaceable human touch to elevate your business game. Don't just listen—transform with us.

Links and Resources
Episode 58 - Creating a Great Customer Experience with Stacy Sherman - https://www.sidmeadows.com/episode58
Net Promoter Score (NPS) - https://www.retently.com/blog/good-net-promoter-score/
Blog Post - Ensuring Customer Loyalty Amid Price Changes: Lessons from Wendy’s Public Backlash - https://doingcxright.com/2024/03/01/ensuring-customer-loyalty-a

Connect with Stacy:
Doing CX Right - https://doingcxright.com/
Doing CX Right Podcast - https://doingcxright.com/podcasts/
Stacy on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacysherman
Stacy on Twitter - https://twitter.com/stacysherman
Stacy on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/doingcxright/
Stacy on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQu4U9uRSUhPoQE-jTBYQ2A?reload=9



Connect with Sid:

www.sidmeadows.com
Embark CCT on Facebook
Sid on LinkedIn
Sid on Instagram
Sid on YouTube
Sid on Clubhouse - @sidmeadows

The Trend Report introduction music is provided by Werq by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4616-werq License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Speaker 1:

Hey friend and welcome to the trend report podcast. Thanks for joining me for what I know is going to be another really great conversation with my returning guest, a renowned speaker, writer, now podcaster and soon to be published author, stacey Sherman, who is truly an expert at doing cx right. I'm Sid meadows and I'm a business leader, coach and consultant and a longtime student of the office furniture industry, and in this podcast we have powerful conversations with industry leaders, innovators and others making an impact in their business and our industry. My goal is pretty simple to provide you with valuable insights, information and resources to help you grow and your business grow.

Speaker 1:

So let's dive into today's conversation Now, stacy, when you are on the show, way back in episode number fifty eight that's so hard to believe. We talked about a wide range of topics Now. They included things like the critically understanding customer needs, influence of employee engagement on service quality, how technology is shaping customer interactions, the importance of continuous feedback and improvement In in establishing a customer centric culture, the need for businesses to adopt actionable strategies to enhance their customer experience. I think I can keep going on. You got two more that I wrote down here the role of empathy and adapting the digital expectations to your customers. Today, while stacey, we talked about a lot on episode number fifty eight and welcome back.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thank you so much and I wanna make sure that when you said doing cx, right, I want people to understand what is cx okay, then let's start there.

Speaker 1:

I know we define it in episode fifty eight, but define it and I got a file. I got a question for you, so tell us what is cx.

Speaker 2:

So doing cx right. Cx means customer experience, which is not the same thing as customer service. So customer experience, I want you to think about a holistic, every interaction point that a prospect or customer has with your brand. How did they learn? How did they buy, get used, pay and get help. And get help is the customer service, as you may know it to be getting help with a problem. That's usually reactive, whereas customer experience is proactive design.

Speaker 1:

So I really appreciate that definition. I think it's very clean and concise to understand the difference between customer experience and customer service. So this is the business question that I want to ask you that directly relates to that. So thank you for that. As a business leader, how do you measure the impact of customer experience initiatives on business outcomes?

Speaker 2:

Oh, I love this question. So if you're not measuring anything, then a good starting place is the standard net promoter score nps system, which fred rick held is the create co creator of, and I have a podcast episode with him talking about this, and it's been a very long time where people have used this one question how likely are you going to recommend our company, how likely are you going to recommend our service, our product? And people rate it on a scale of one to ten, and if you have a nine and a ten, you know that they are promoters. And so there's a scale. Okay, you have.

Speaker 2:

You have detractors, you have passives and your promoters. And if your promoters, those are the people that love your brand and you want to activate them, they love your brand. If you have detractors who score you one through six, they don't like you and you want to know why. You know you can improve their experience. And then you have those passives in the middle and most people ignore them and that's dangerous because they're going to pick a side and they're all, and they're going to bad mouth you on social media to just like the detractors if you don't make it right by them. So you want to know who they are.

Speaker 2:

Now, you're just starting out. That's great, but don't stop there. And PS is not enough. And I bet you, just like every car dealer, any company, a distributor, a manufacturer, anyone, is going to want to know how likely someone's going to Recommend and work with them again. Now, what else can you do? You're probably thinking what's beyond that? Well, what's beyond that is to really understand the why. Why are they going to recommend you or not? And you figure that out by asking certain questions and, by the way, the data behind that. We can talk about how you get that. But the, the measurements are examples, like effort score how easy or difficult is it to do business with us? How easy or difficult is it to buy from us? How easy or difficult is it to get help when you need it from us? So, when you think of the customer journey, understanding the effort is essential, because it's really hard and difficult. They're going to go to someone else.

Speaker 1:

So I hope everybody is understanding why I said you are truly an expert in doing CX right, because that two minutes was already a masterclass, I believe, about customer experience and creating the right one. But I want to go back to a couple things that you said. You got in PS, which you said was the net promoter score. We will I was not familiar with that, so appreciate the explanation of it will be sure to grab a link to that website and that information and drop down into the show notes for everybody to go click on it. But you got three positions in that scale detractor, passive and promoter. And we want promoters because promoters are what help us grow. But we also need to understand why the detractors are detracting and how do we address those issues and needs right To get a better score from that person. But I want to be even more simple with this as a business. How and when do we ask those questions?

Speaker 1:

Now, before you answer it, I've been on, I'm an old school guy and I like to talk to people, so I don't necessarily use chat bots, I don't necessarily go to the website. I find where I can call customer service and I call customer service right and sometimes after a long time and hear the music and I get the option for the call back and all that kind of stuff and typically at the end of talking to an agent they say hey, mr Meadows, would you mind taking a short survey for me? At the end of the call, or they'll say something like you're going to get a follow up email from us about your experience today. If you wouldn't mind, please take the few minutes, take you five minutes to do it and complete that. Is that the way you should do it? To gather that information? Say like how should I can office furniture deal or go about gathering those data points?

Speaker 2:

Yes, so I want you to think about this as journey management.

Speaker 2:

Okay, Okay and there are moments of truth across that journey from an omnichannel perspective. So what I mean is how people interact with your brand. If you go back to the learn by get use, pay, get help that journey framework, there are moments of truth in each of those sections that you interact with the customer. So at those moments of truth, that's where you either can do structured data collection by asking your customer or asking the caller or the prospect. They're structured and there's unstructured. So structured is, for example, there.

Speaker 2:

I used to have a team who would call customers and ask them six months before their contract was going to end how's it going? What can we do to make it better, so that I know way in advance they're going to renew or not renew when I have some time to do something about it. And that's a relationship kind of feedback. But then there's transactional. So after you bought something in a store, the store can ask you how did it go today? Now that's not at the end of the journey, that's early on. You just bought something, sure, or it got delivered. There's a moment of truth.

Speaker 1:

OK, that was about to ask you what is a moment of truth?

Speaker 2:

It's a point of interaction. Ok, you as a company are having with a customer that can make or break that experience. So if a dealer is saying to a customer you're going to get this furniture on this date and they don't deliver, even if it's not their fault, you want customer feedback and a point of communication.

Speaker 1:

Oh my gosh, Everybody listening can identify with what you just said. I know you have roots in the furniture industry with your dad, right, or your grandfather right, so had an office furniture business. But every person listening to this has had an experience where a truck line did not deliver the product on time at the appointed appointment. Either they didn't show up, they were late, sometimes days late, or they were early. Everybody has experienced that. So I appreciate you drawing that very real experience to us. So when we think about this in the understanding, the point of truth and that interaction, you mentioned structured. So what is structured is like asking straight up, either, as your example was six months before the contract was up, or at the point of sale, ask what is unstructured.

Speaker 2:

Unstructured is what's on the internet. People are talking about your brand. They're leaving reviews and ratings on different websites that could be industry related. They're tweeting, they're commenting. You need, as a company, to be very aware of what those conversations are, and here's the game changer. Many companies have a department that manages social media that doesn't work or sit with your front line, that doesn't sit with other parts of your organization. So what happens is the data becomes siloed and it's not being used for strategic decision making.

Speaker 1:

OK, I appreciate that because two different departments not working together, not knowing exactly what's going on. One gets one set of data, one seeing another set of data and they got to come together to understand the real data. So let's go back to my question. Would you recommend to an office furniture dealer, as a tactical thing, that they send out a survey at the end or they send out an email asking to be rated Like? Is that a good next step in order to start gathering the data?

Speaker 2:

So there are many ways to get data collection. There's an art and science to it, because you don't want to have survey fatigue and going through your journey with your entire team, every department in the room, so that everybody understands what's being communicated by whom and what is said through the entire process, and then you can identify OK, where can we collect information from the customer? It could be a survey. It could be that if it's in the buying journey that your salesperson is taking very good notes, that goes into a system so that the next point in the journey, that team is really getting that insight and can do something with it. So it's surveys, but it's not always just surveys. Feedback collection is in different ways.

Speaker 1:

OK. So I appreciate that, because a lot of times when you hear let's gather the data from somebody, you think about a survey. Right, that's the easiest way to get it, but paying attention to what's being said, taking notes and putting those notes in a certain place is a really good thing to be able to do. So let me ask this the data that you collected that is me. I wrote a note down and I put it into the thing Is that considered quantifiable data, because I heard it and then I put it in a system, versus somebody saying the same thing on a survey?

Speaker 2:

So there's qualitative and quantitative.

Speaker 1:

Yep.

Speaker 2:

And sometimes, like I had a team in the elevator industry where they called the property manager and they would ask them literally the same thing as filling out a survey. But it was a person asking them, the questions Got it, so they literally asked at the end of the call hey, I just want to know how likely you'd recommend our company to a friend or colleague on a scale of one to ten and you don't lead them to an answer.

Speaker 2:

Yep, yep, and so, therefore, you're getting some information Now. When I triggered someone to call the customer versus a written email survey, it was purposely designed when the phone call happened. One more thing for you in terms of structured and unstructured feedback that needs to be aggregated is you have a website. You have a contact form. If your contact form is designed correctly to get feedback, that becomes a data source for you.

Speaker 1:

How do you design a contact form to collect feedback? Tell us.

Speaker 2:

So, besides saying hey, what are you here for? Yeah, you can define. Are you looking for the nearest dealer? Are you looking to get help on something? What is that? Sure? Are you frustrated by something? How can we help you?

Speaker 1:

Sure, those are great points, and that requires a place for people to write a comment and leave Burbage of what it is they're after, rather than what's my name, what's my email address, what's my product of interest and which of these five boxes do you check and where there's nothing for them to do. So I just happened to open up our website at thingspaceofficecom and looked on and we call it Get A Quote and every field is required and we say how can we help you? And that's it. And those come to me and we respond to those within 24 hours. Some of them are typical spam people trying to sell me something email list and cleaning services, right but most of them come from real-life people that want to do business with us or looking for our products. So what I heard you say is for the moment, we've got it done pretty good, because we're giving them a place to tell us what it is they want or what they think about something, and not giving people that ability on your website can be bad.

Speaker 2:

Or data collection about their experience. That informs some business decision-making. The other thing is I don't know if you read about in the news this week how it's not related to office furniture, but there's a lesson here. So Wendy's decided to make some pricing changes. It was backlash and now it's changing. It's not going to do the pricing changes, but what happened was because they did not get the voice of the customer feedback early on they implemented and then they had to retract and it got bad press.

Speaker 1:

Which is never good, because almost everybody knows about that situation.

Speaker 2:

Correct. So if you decide, even as you're going to make a pricing shift, you're going to change something on the customer. You have to get the feedback along that journey point and know and be able to mitigate that risk and keep customer loyalty. And so that's why the voice of the customer at different points of interaction are so important.

Speaker 1:

So what I appreciate about you sharing that story is what I think is a little bit comical now is their competitors are making fun of that. Burger King put out an ad about something relative to something about sir. They used the term surge and they had a picture of their burger or something. So not only did their customers come at them, their competitors are using it as leverage for you to make the choice of which drive through you pull into, because typically those restaurants are within a block of each other. Right, you didn't know that?

Speaker 2:

I didn't hear that, and I wrote a blog article about how to keep customer loyalty when you're changing your prices today. Yeah, so that's going to be a second article.

Speaker 1:

I'll find the video that I saw and send it to you, but we always sure to drop that blog in the show notes so people can go read it, and I appreciate the example of what not to do. Okay, can you share a success story with us? Is there a recent success story, without necessarily naming names, of a company that you know that significantly improved their customer experience?

Speaker 2:

You know it could be any company. It really boils down to how does a company empower its people to deliver customer excellence, which is the basis of my LinkedIn course, because you could have all the policies, you could have all of the how to guides, but if a customer is not happy at different points of interactions with your brand, if your team is not empowered to be able to make it better for the customer on the spot, they'll leave.

Speaker 1:

So I personally appreciate how a podcast or fellow podcaster on the other side of the screen for me is taking control of this conversation and driving it to a place that I wanted to take it. So thank you, stacy. I absolutely love it because you dropped a little nugget right there that I think is really, really important, which is congratulations to you on being asked by Lina To create a LinkedIn course. It is absolutely wonderful. I looked at it. I watched the whole thing. It's called increase customer loyalty by doing CXRite with Stacy Sherman. If you have access to LinkedIn learning, you can just go in there and type in Stacy's name and her course will come up. It's a I don't know about an hour and a half long. It's fantastic. So, before we dive in, a little bit about the course what was it like creating that course?

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh, it was so phenomenal. And a couple of reasons. One, it forced me to narrow in so much around customer experience. Literally it's huge, so it forced me to narrow a topic one. Two, it really blended the world customer experience and the fact that there's no customer without the employee or staff experience, and partner experience and vendor experience, like it is a holistic approach. So I got to really teach both angles, because there's a lot of companies that focus on customers. There's a lot of companies that focus on HR and human factors and they all blend. People don't think about that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's great. So when you got the call, how'd you feel? When you got the call, like hey, Stacy, we've come create a course for us.

Speaker 2:

It's pretty big. Oh, it was so big and it's just as big to be called back again to do it again this year. And guess what? I actually believe so much in course creation that I am now starting coaching people to create courses. Look at you.

Speaker 1:

It's awesome. So I want to talk about this because you say something, so in full disclosure. Stacy and I hang out with each other almost every day of the week, monday through Friday. Yeah, every morning we have coffee with a group of our 30 closest friends on Clubhouse talking about all things, podcasting. So I've been doing that with Stacy now for probably three years at least, right? So you shared and you said something in our Clubhouse conversation when corporate left me. So talk about that for a minute and what has happened since corporate left you and listen up, friends, this is impressive.

Speaker 2:

Oh, thank you for that. So, oh, we could speak ours on this topic. But the bottom line is that I had been working in corporate for 25 plus years and last year I got the call that I didn't expect, last February, and they said there was a board decision and we had to cut from the top. Nothing personal, but you're done, that's it. Computer was then shut down immediately. I'm like but wait, can I? Can I tell my team what do you mean? And unfortunately, no, that's just corporate way.

Speaker 2:

And I was grieving. Honestly, I was grieving and it took me time to grieve and I didn't understand grieving because nobody died, but there was loss. So what really helped me a lot was that I had started doing CX write as a blog in 2016. A baby blog had no idea anyone would read it, and they did, which propelled me being a guest on 50 plus shows, including yours. Which propelled me to start my own podcast, which then continued to be my flywheel.

Speaker 2:

And so when corporate left me, I had a brand. People knew me, and I hope everybody decides to figure out their passion and do something with it, even before you know that you need it, and so that's how things happen. And so last year, I decided consciously to take a gap year and see what I can build as an entrepreneur that I never, ever understood entrepreneurship. I was a corporate woman and so so much magic happened by showing up, as our friend taught me, as all of you showed me bet on myself, and that's what I did. And here I am with so much fruit of the labor of betting on me.

Speaker 1:

And say she's talking about our friend, dominic Lawson, who is the host of the podcast Black is America and it's a 22 time award winning podcaster, dominic, and he did say something I remember the day say see, he said bet on yourself, bet on you, and you went all in on that. Tell us some of the things that have happened to you since you said I am betting on Stacy.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and this is a great example because I want people to not overthink it. We were in clubhouse, literally, we were talking about the topic. Dominic said that to me. We were talking about awards and I said All right, I'll pick an award. I threw a dart and I picked the.

Speaker 2:

W3 awards and I went online and I applied to win an award. Well, sure enough, I won and I got best host of a podcast. It was very prestigious it was literally throwing a dart that day and there's a lot of award companies, but I picked the one. I didn't overthink and analyze which one, and so I did that. And then again, a few months later, after doing the application, I won, and now I said, okay, I'm going to bet on me again and I just applied for the webby award. I'm waiting on the answer on that but it took a chance and I stopped overthinking everything and so I won that. I then did the same thing in my industry, where there's global gurus, and so I applied that in the customer experience world and at a 30, top 30, I got awarded number six. So bet on you, just like, don't overthink it. Take you know, even with my podcast, it took me six months to start because I was afraid to take the mic out of the box. Same thing.

Speaker 1:

So, but you also, first off, congratulations on all that success, right? I think it's absolutely amazing and I need to take your advice on some of those things, right. But you also leaned heavily into LinkedIn and creating content on a regular basis. Guys, if you are not connected to Stacy Sherman on LinkedIn, we're going to put her link down there. Please go connect her and let her know you heard her here on the trend report and start following that amazing content, because Stacy posts on a regular basis.

Speaker 1:

So you leaned into LinkedIn, right, which then got you noticed, which then got you a LinkedIn course, which then got you now another LinkedIn course coming up next year, right, which also leaned into you doing consulting and like really building out your business and continuing to bet on you. And then you got a book deal, where you're now writing a book. What have I missed? Because I think the list keeps going. Oh, you've been speaking around the world. You went to Dubai, I believe, to speak. You've been doing podcasting, live at some of these events that you're going to, so you're way downplaying all the things that you have accomplished since corporate left you and you decided to bet on yourself.

Speaker 2:

Yes. So I have been around many places in the world speaking and my book book publisher did reach out to me, so the book will come out later this year. My LinkedIn course second one is going to be this year. Oh great, yes, so, yes. So there is all these wonderful things and I'm betting on myself again in. I think, the hardest thing when it is when it comes to money. Betting in yourself means that you're literally paying for things before you even monetized, which is what I had to do last year, and that was so damn hard, so hard. But what I have now is a brand new CRM, a customer relationship management system. I'm going after the National Speakers Association. I paid to be in that, which is not cheap, and get certified. I'm doing all these things before I even could necessarily say that I've got a positive ROI. I had to go through that mental mindset too. I want people to realize that.

Speaker 1:

It's so very important, right? It is a process that we go through, and so I'm going to shift gears on us because I love all of that and I know that there's a lot of takeaways for not just me, but for anybody listening to this is you got a passion about something and you're knowledgeable about that topic and you know what you love to do. Bet on you and lean into it, whatever that it might be, because you never know what might happen and how your career might skyrocket by doing something like that. So, again, kudos to you, stacey. But I want to go back to the course. So the course is called Increased Customer Loyalty by Doing CXRi. What are the three principles of that course?

Speaker 2:

The three foundations if you will Top three.

Speaker 2:

I would say it's about understanding A. What does customer experience mean? And I want people to think about customer not just from a pure transactional here's money, right. Your customer is your partners, anybody who does anything with you. I'm your customer right now by being a guest, because by you being an awesome host, I'm going to come back and listen to your show and I'm going to tell other people to listen to your show and engage with you. So I want people to understand what is a customer. Then I want you to understand that. How does a customer experience really happen? And that's where it's your workforce experience and how do you stop the attrition and make them deliver a great experience for your different definition of customers.

Speaker 1:

So I watched the course. I loved it. I have a page full of notes. There's a download that's available with it and, like Stacy, when I watched it a couple of weeks ago, there were almost 600 saves. People had saved your course. Like I'm like that is fantastic when I saw that number at the top, that means how many people have watched it. Are going to go back and watch it again. But I really appreciate the three principles. But I want to talk for a minute because you use the terminology in the course agent. Right, and I know the course was. It was geared to customer service agents, meaning call center agents. So talk to us about how you can listen to the course and understand by swapping a word or two out.

Speaker 2:

Oh, yes, very important. So, while this focused on the front line, who take calls from customers and non-customers by definition, in many companies that's a customer service representative. I want you to listen to it. Where anybody, anybody in your company who literally faces a customer or someone who can become a customer, this course is for you. It is teaching you how to actually turn that other person on the other side of a phone chat or in person becomes loyal to you, even when mistakes happen.

Speaker 1:

So good, that's so good. Yes, so I have a couple of takeaways. There's a whole section in the course that you are talking specifically to leaders, and when I posted about it on LinkedIn, I said any leader, every leader, regardless of your company, should watch this course, because how you talk to us was really, really important, and this doesn't happen enough and I've talked about it before and I probably haven't talked about it loud enough or often enough, but you said something that is critically important for every leader, for every business, regardless of whether you're a three person company or a 3000 member company, and I have it written down right here in this bold edit on my notes Ask your team what they need to be successful. Ask them. They will tell you Right and I think it's important to understand from a leader perspective that's not always money, right, and what they need may not be anywhere remotely related to money.

Speaker 2:

So I loved that part of the course, by the way, Thank you and I want to highlight something because it's very real and I had this woman, tressa, in the course where she worked for me and she had a stroke and during her job she worked before her stroke and then after her stroke with me and I asked her hey, what do you need to do your job because you're so important? And she didn't say money, she said I need a better headset because I get headaches. And that's as simple. As a leader, you could ask her people and they'll tell you. Okay.

Speaker 1:

The dots just connected for me. She's in your course, yeah, and she talks about that, but I didn't realize that she had had a stroke. She mentions it. I wasn't picking it up. I get it now because when you said that, I went oh my gosh, that's the lady that pops up in the course and she talks about the headset and how powerful that it was. Good job, cicely.

Speaker 2:

So that wasn't money? Right, that wasn't money. And I have like 60 minutes of footage with Tressa. We just pointed to that one.

Speaker 1:

Sure.

Speaker 2:

You're right. I want people to take away that. Ask your people, because what's important to one person is going to be different to somebody else and money is not always the driver.

Speaker 1:

Right, so what's course number two going to be about?

Speaker 2:

So it is going to be all about the journey management, but with a very strong lens on communication, because communication from department to department and to a customer is such a failure point and it doesn't require a lot of money. It's not a high tech solution that you have to invest in.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love it because you've talked a lot about when you reference the word customer, to remember your employees are your customers too, right, just external, but internal. Yeah, you got to pay attention to your internal customers. All right, I'm looking forward to that one. I am a Stacey Sherman fan, obviously, as you guys all know that, and I'm excited for your journey and where you're headed. I really, really appreciate all the insights that you continue to share with us. I have one last question for you. Okay, I want to talk for just a minute about empathy and empathy and service, because everybody listening to this podcast has a customer somewhere along the way, whether it's a architect or a designer, or it's a dealer, or it's an installation company, or it's an end user. We all have customers and I'm sure each of you are thinking about who's my customer right now. Talk about the use of empathy. What is it and how can we better employ empathy in our business?

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, empathy is where again. Going back to Tressa right, she had a stroke. I had empathy for her situation and, instead of making assumptions that she's falling short on delivering on her role, I sat with her, asked her what's going on for you and heard her story and then I could have empathy to say how can I make your life easier, how can I make it easier for you to do your job? And that's empathy, it's putting myself in her shoes and then literally helping her to be able to succeed with whatever's going on in her life. And so when you literally go through a journey of how people not only is your customer having empathy about their pain points, but also your internal staff who are responsible for their parts of that experience what are they going through? Yeah, that's the empathy and action in customer design.

Speaker 1:

Basically, it requires a skill of listening. It also requires a skill of asking the right question to truly understand what's happening with them and how you can help them, support them with what they need. So I think a lot of times we get so caught up in the whirlwind of business and how fast things tend to move that we forget about empathy, we forget about being empathetic, and I think it's something that we really need to remember on a regular basis.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

From that too.

Speaker 2:

Well, when I see doing CXRate, it actually starts with getting the basics right.

Speaker 1:

Always so Stacey. Are there any trends coming up in the customer experience world that you see that might be in coming out in the next couple of years? If so, could you share a trend that you see with us?

Speaker 2:

Oh, definitely. Obviously, the big trend is AI, artificial intelligence and emerging technology and it can be very useful to save people time and there is a replacement in some workflows, but it cannot replace human factors. So, as an example, I love this use case where AI can simulate a real customer. So before a salesperson goes out and talks to a real customer, you can use an AI and there's some platforms that I love for this that you as the company let's say you have a sales team you could deploy this and give this to your sales people who are onboarding per-ficace to actually practice before they go on their real sales call or serve a customer. So the AI simulation acts like a customer and you can practice, get graded and not even have to share that with your boss until you're ready.

Speaker 1:

Ooh will you send me a list of what some of those tools are? I'll drop them in the show notes so that people can click to them. Perfect. So, in full disclosure, I used AI in preparation for this interview because I do believe it is a powerful tool. It's still emerging, I'm still learning it, goodness knows. There's like dozens of them, right, dozens upon dozens of them.

Speaker 1:

But I took the recording of your episode. I'd listened to it two weeks ago, made some notes, I'd listened to the course. Obviously, I connect with you almost daily, right, so I know you and I know a lot about what I wanted to talk about. So I took the audio of episode number 58 and I dropped it into chat GPT and I said please listen to this, recap the conversation for me and then give me 10 bullet points that I could use in a follow-up conversation. It was Tacey and it took it 60 seconds maybe to do that. I could listen to an hour long episode and then gave me. I was blown away and I've used some of those bullet points in our conversation today. I didn't use all of them, but I used a couple of them. I was like, wow, this is really cool and so, to your point. It can be used to teach you something new, to help you get better, and it doesn't. You don't have to have your bosses say do this in order for you to do self improvement.

Speaker 2:

Yes. Now I would say to you if one of your dealers was really frustrated and they reach out to you never, of course, in the rare chance and they reach out to you and you respond with a auto response what do you think is going to happen?

Speaker 1:

It diffuses the situation because they're hearing your voice, and that is my opinion anyway Hope you're going to tell me I'm right because they wrote you an email and I can. You can probably feel the anger coming through or the how they're upset coming through, and then, if you respond to that by sending them a voice note, in my opinion it diffuses the situation and they go wow, Sid took the time to actually truly respond to me rather than just writing back an email to me. That's my opinion.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's personalized.

Speaker 1:

Did I do good? Did I get okay? Did I get passing grade? You did you did great.

Speaker 2:

Here's the other passing grade that I want people to realize and I know we're talking in context to a podcast, but look how much time and research you did before our interaction.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's so important to me. That's part of the journey. It's a great point. See, that's something that I forget about. Right, I see it as just prepping to have a conversation with Stacey Sherman of doing CXRite and so what. I want to be prepared because I want you to have a great experience with me, but, even more important than that, I want the listener to be able to go walk away from this and go, wow, I got a lot of value out of that and it has helped me, and even it was only one segment that they got a lot of value out of it and they could implement something in their life or in their business that moved that forward. I raised my hand and say I've done a good job and this podcast is serving its purpose.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and podcasters, content creators, salespeople, service reps, it, it serving the internal customer. Like I leave you with this. You, whoever you are listening, you have a CX job and may not realize it.

Speaker 1:

That was a mic drop and with that, that was great. And with that, stacey friend, thank you so much for being here again as a returning guest. We'll drop the link to episode number 58 in the show notes, as well as to your podcast, to your website, to the LinkedIn course, all things. Stacey Sherman will be in the show notes. I hope that you will go out there and connect with her. But, stacey, thank you so much for being with me again on the show today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

So, everyone, thank you also for joining in today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of today's conversation and go out there and make today great, and we'll see you again in a couple of weeks. Take care everyone.