PODCAST PEOPLE: A Summary from the Real Leaders Podcast
“Simply if we make people’s lives easier and better, if we reduce stress, if we build and curate experiences for other people that we personally would want to have, we will always have a customer.“
Blake Morgan is a keynote speaker, customer experience futurist, podcast host, and author of two books on customer experience. She is recognized as one of the Real Leaders Top 40 Female Keynote Speakers Worldwide.
The following is a summary of Episode 126 of the Real Leaders Podcast, a conversation with customer experience futurist, Blake Morgan. Read or listen to the full conversation below.
How to be Customer Centric
Blake explains that as a customer experience futurist, she teaches companies how to prioritize the customer over product or profit. The mark of a customer-centric company is one that endeavors to make the customers’ lives easier and better.
“Companies do not organize themselves around the customer. They organize themselves on how to be most profitable for the next quarter. And they’re not willing to make these bets, make the investments, be misunderstood for long periods of time, like the Amazons of the world, like Netflix. And that’s a shame because the companies that do it well, they are reaping all the profits and the others are getting left behind.”
Blake lists Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify as examples of companies who offer a positive customer experience because it has been built into the fabric of each company. They continue to come out on top because customers want to come back — the service is so seamless customers rarely have to call for customer support.
“My belief is that you should never, ever, under any circumstances have to call a company unless you want to. And [Amazon] really understands that and they’ve taken it to such an extreme level that this company has put a stake in the ground on customer experience. And they’ve got billions of dollars in profits to prove it.”
Blake suggests that many businesses could learn from this example, as there are still so many industries renowned for poor customer treatment (such as insurance companies, healthcare providers and the DMV). Covid has made the need for a seamless customer experience all the more pertinent, because inconveniences like requiring in-person visits and manual receipt signatures are obsolete in a pandemic world.
The Customer of the Future
Blake explains that companies need to address three elements to remain resilient in the future and create an overall positive customer experience:
psychological – building customer experience into company culture and operationalizing leadership development into company strategy
technical – shifting to digital operations, incorporating big data, analytics, AI and machine learning, tracking customer history and anticipating their needs, but at the same time incorporating more human interaction, not less
experiential – marketing and customer communication, having a data and ethics mission statement, serving customers who expect a zero friction, customer experience, and taking care of a customers that are not reading the terms and conditions
Transcript
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