 Welcome to Exchange for Media, Martik India Bridge 1 CD. We have with us Mr. Adam Toporek, President, Customer Experience Advisor, Chief Client Hero CTS Service Solution. He's gonna talk about how customer experience is changing as we enter a very challenging phase in terms of marketing, brands. And before we begin, I want to just talk about that Adam is an internationally recognized customer experience expert, a keynote speaker and customer experience trainer. He's also the author of the very popular customer that stick blog, and the co-host of the crack the customer code podcast. And welcome Adam to this session that we have. I just want to begin with, tell me how are you spending this time? I mean, everybody is talking about spending, how is it this phase for you? So for me, it's interesting because I worked at home before because I was either on a plane doing trainings or speaking, doing keynote speeches. Or for the most part, I worked out of my house. So I'm pretty used to that part of it, like that wasn't a big change for me. So I was very fortunate in that way. For me, I'm reassessing how we approach the business. I'm reassessing how we scale and approach things. And I'm sure we're going to talk about how other companies are reassessing right now. And just also working on some personal projects now, taking some time to focus on a few other things. Right, so I mean, the entire business model has moved online and remote is the next big word that we are hearing from everyone. Tell me, coming from a world 90 days back, a very different world to a world where remote distance, socially distance, zero touch is the norm. Is it difficult for brands to create experience, the kind of engaging customer experience? Is there a shift? Is there a change? Is there a challenge? A hundred percent. And one of the things we've seen in the past few months is that organizations that were already in the midst of digital transformation that were already embracing some of these ideas, they had a head start. They were already further down the road and they're able to pivot better than organizations who didn't have those components. And it's super tough. So you just look at something like channel volume. Right, so you think, let's do an airline. If we talk about an airline and they've got all these people coming in the airport. And then all of a sudden, within a week, almost no one's in the airport and all the representatives they have in the airport that handle all these situations, all that volume has moved to chat and email and phone, right? And now how do they shift their resources? How do they scale and take this volume that was over here and move it over here rapidly to make sure the customer has started, right? So you've got the channels are shifting, then you've got the business models shifting. So if you're a restaurant, now your entire business was set up or the majority of your business was set up to serve people in the restaurant. And you may be back to that or you may not. But if you're back to it, it's still a smaller part of your business. Now you're doing pickup and curbside and handling, I don't know, five times the orders on the phone that you did before. So there's this challenge of simply allocating resources and the shift in the model. And then the final, I mean, to me, the big challenge, I know we're gonna talk about this of the day, is that the emotional state, the expectations of the customer have shifted. And not only adapting to all these operational and logistical challenges about delivering experience, but adapting to that at the same time is super challenging. Right. You know, there's also, you know, the kind of volume, volume people are handling in terms of, say, you gave an example of airport or the restaurants, you know, re-adjustment, for example, a quick re-adjustment is not possible, not from the infrastructure point of view, not from the training point of view, you know? It's impossible to be re-adjusting such a short span. But do you think still, businesses have done good, you know, in terms of at least adjusting to it so fast, very agile? Well, we have an expression here that's a necessity is the mother of invention. I'm not sure if you've heard it. But, you know, people start to figure out things really quickly when they have to. That said, yeah, the performance has been all over the map. I think some organizations have done fantastic with it. I think some organizations have struggled. And part of that is, as I said before, some people were further down that road already. Right. Right. So if you take something like Amazon, you know, we think, okay, Amazon, this is the ultimate digital, still soft goods business, right? But, you know, they were already digitally transformed. Their business is digital. Right. But they had to shift to, wait, our volume just tripled 10 times. Wait, are we going to make sure that we can't handle the volume? Are we gonna have to start delaying even these people that pay us for prime that pay a bunch of money a year to get their items in two days? Are we gonna have to tell those customers, hey, we're not sending sweaters out that fast? It may take two weeks because here's the medical necessities. Here are, you know, food and staples and all these medicines. Right. Things that they prioritize. So even they had to shift. Right. And so it's, yeah, I think it's super tough to, it's been challenging for some organizations to find that balance. And, but on the other hand, the ones that have pivoted have, the word I like to use is they've accelerated. They're, you know, they took what they were already, the path they were already heading down, but now they're just 5X, right? 10X, they're accelerating how they go down that path. You know, as you mentioned earlier also, there is this longing for a human connection, you know? I mean, no matter how much we deliver online and keep them engaged, but this human connector, that factor is always missing on the scene. How can that, how can brands kind of offer something which is fulfilling this vacuum of human disconnect that we witnessed right now? What is your advice to brands to market yours in this situation? All right, well, thank you for that question because that's something I was talking about before COVID happened. So I actually came up with a term years ago called signal stripping. And what that means is we're wired for each other, just evolutionary biology. We are wired, it's why I can read facial expressions. We can read tone of voice. We can read a smile versus a frown. We have all this wiring to sort of know if somebody came out of the forest 10,000 years ago whether they were a threat or not, but we're wired for them. And here's what happens when we go down the channel chain, these human signals that help us understand, doesn't mean we can't have misunderstandings face to face, it happens all the time. But it's a lot less likely than in an email or in a chat because we don't have, I can't tell if you're smiling, you know, or if I forget the emoji. So when we strip away these signals, the emotional connection is more distant. It's harder to maintain. And one of the things organizations have to look at is okay, how do we, to your question, how do we bridge that gap? So with that set up, there's a few ways we can do that. The one is making sure that we are trying to create an emotional experience. Okay, and a positively emotional resident experience. So there was actually a study, I think you'll like this real, there's actually a study of, sorry, customers that have had a positive emotional experience versus a negative one. And the ones that had a positive emotional experience for 15 times more likely to recommend. 15 times, that's NPS. Eight times more likely to trust, six times more likely to forgive. That's the power of emotional connection. So what the first thing I would advise companies to do is this, start with the word you said a little bit ago, training. They've got to have empathy. We have to understand that if somebody's calling about their mortgage in the middle of COVID, if you're a bank, that, you know, some of those calls were already scared and negative before, now a lot of them are gonna be. They're worried about their job, their spouse's job. They're worried about the economy. They're worried about they, you know, they lost their job. And having the team that's on the other end of that phone when they get that call, trained to understand empathy, to understand the person and where they're coming from is one of the best ways to create that emotional connection. Right. I know, I agree, you know, online is there, but there's a limitation of communication. For example, it's a non-verbal communication when you're in present, when you see, read the expressions, you know, the aura around, I think that cannot be repeated online. Or do you think we can reach a tech stage where this can happen? Just want to add, since you know so much about this. You mean like way in the future, like augmented reality virtual? Yeah, I mean, I think if augmented reality gets really cool, probably it can be pretty, I mean, it'll get pretty close probably. I don't know, there's still like energy when you're with somebody, you know, that I don't know if that'll be replaced. But what we do know is the mind is really good at being fooled, so the virtual reality gets really good, it'll be good. Right now, this is one of the best ways, is what you and I are doing. Like this would be an entirely different feel if we didn't have the video. Absolutely. It adds a lot of layers. So there's a lot of operational challenges to video, bandwidth challenges, also whether the customer is set up for video, but to the extent that you can add video to replace, not replace, but to augment chat and email and phone is powerful, right? Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. You know, there's brands are facing another challenge, which is that one, they are going through a dip in sales, you know, overall, so they have to deal with that part of it. And at the same time, they have to focus on their customers. So they are torn between two ends at the same time. How to deal, how can brands deal with the situation better and focus on the customer while they have also the business challenge because of low sales and you know, the growth is, the business is low at the moment. What is your advice to brands in such a situation? So I would say this, you know, it's, they're all one thing, it's easy to separate them, but they're sort of all one thing, because if you're dealing with resource, to me, I wanted a few people that you're in CX that'll say this, the great majority of customer experience challenges are resource challenges. If I had an unlimited budget and unlimited staff, do you know how good my customer experience would be? You know, in the end, it's a question of where do you put resources, how do you allocate resources? So one of the things I look at, if you're in a situation where, you know, your business is shrinking, your industry got hit, my industry got hit, training and keynote speaking, I'm not on stages right now, right? One of the things is do what's called an 80-20, right? And that's, I don't know if you know that principle, it's the idea that, okay, yeah, 20% for the listeners, 20% of your inputs create 80% of your results, 20% of your customers create 80% of your sales, 20% of your customers create 80% of your headaches, et cetera, right? Focus on the 20, figure out the vital few inputs that really matter the most, even if that, if you can't staff all your channels, so which ones are the most important? Which hours are the most important? If you have to, which customers are the most important? Which touch points are the most important? When you're constrained, you've gotta maximize the impact of what you can do. And approaching that way, whether it's channels, touch points, staffing, training, budget, whatever it is, trying to figure out where you're gonna get the most bang for your investment, for your focus in the experience is the best way to approach when you have limited, we always had limited resources, and you have more limited resources than before. That's my best advice. Perfect, perfect. There's another issue which is happening that in this, we are in well over 90 days into this situation and habits have been formed. There's a certain mindset that is getting set for market years, for brands, for customers and everybody else. Tell me this phase, which is gonna last for some more time as people say, till we find the vaccine, how would it impact the long-term engagement with customers? Would it create its own impression on the way we deal with the customers, the brands deal with customers, or the customers deal with brands? How do you see that impact being created? Well, I'd say 100% that's true. Now, it is going to differ by industry. Different industries have been affected different ways, right? For Amazon, it's sort of a short-term challenge and they've grabbed more market share than they probably planned on. I always joke Amazon's executing their 10-year plan in three years right now, right? Just owning more of the pie. But if you are a restaurant, you are car rental, if you are hotels, all these things, there's gonna be a lot of shifts and some of those are gonna, in some cases, buying patterns have permanently changed, I would say, right? So here's an example. Somebody was talking to a customer about this. It's a big home improvement store and they could never really get curbside pickup as a thing. Like nobody, this is never any buy-in for it, right? Now, huge focus, huge focus, big shift, right? Something that couldn't get off the ground so you're gonna see that internally in organizations. If you look at a restaurant, all right, let's do that. They're gonna go back to full capacity, maybe not. Until one of the biggest restaurateurs in New York, Danny Myers, said he may not open until there's a vaccine because he doesn't know if he can run his businesses half full. He doesn't know if the margins are gonna be there to cover the expenses. And one of the big things, and I'll just keep with the restaurant, is this is a good example because it's one that's really changed. For a lot of restaurants, particularly ones in nice areas in Manhattan, things, their profit is at the bar. Like the food keeps pays the bills and then the profits at the bar. Well, the bar, what's the bar look like right now, right? So I think you're gonna see a lot of adaptation. Absolutely there's gonna be major changes but it's gonna depend on the industry and it's gonna depend on what happens next, right? Do we have a vaccine in three months? Do we have one in a year and a half? What does the vaccine mean? How effective is it? So it's a lot of change but some of it will be permanent and organizations need to start anticipating and trying to understand what the future looks like in their industry particularly. Right. I'll come to my last question but I have one quick question. A lot of brands and marketers are waiting for the vaccine to be discovered. A solution to be discovered to this problem. Tell me is that the right strategy to wait for it or should you let your business strategy be agile and get into a new kind of open up and look for some solutions quickly even though the vaccine is not there. What is the best approach that you think at the moment marketers and brand owners can take? I would say that's a complicated question. So I will say number one, I am not a medical doctor. I'm a customer experience expert. So we'll just add that in. But with the vaccine, there's not a lot of certainty what that looks like, right? I mean, right now we have flu vaccines but we never know what strain of fluid is right in every year, right? So we don't know what the vaccine's gonna really mean even when we have one. That said, I mentioned Danny Meyer what the comment he had made. I think that to me you should be looking for what you can do. You can't just wait on a lightning bolt out of the sky. Now if you can't think anything maybe you are waiting, but you shouldn't be waiting because you think that's the way to, I'm waiting for things to go back. You should be adapting now because you don't know if it's gonna go back. You should be figuring out what you can do. A lot of restaurants are doing that, right? They're doing curbside pickup. They don't have in restaurant dining now. They've pivoted that way. Now they probably aren't at full staff. It's not as good, but they're keeping the doors open and they're creating revenue, creating profit. So to me, I believe in taking control of your destiny whether you're a person or a company the extent that you can and I don't think you should just wait around. Right, right. You should be looking. If you don't find anything that's one thing but at least you looked, you tried. Perfect, well said. My final question is about as an expert, customer experience expert, what are the broad trends that you folks see? Emerging from here on as we move. A few. Number one, the thing we just talked about at the individual level, I think that is one of the biggest ones is uncertainty. Organizations have to adapt to the idea that there are no three-year plans right now. They're gone. They don't exist. There's no such thing. I mean, maybe depending on your industry if you're a manufacturer, a big picture for a lot of industries, there is no three-year plan. You're lucky if you have a three-month plan. So you've got to have a short, I mean, you've got to have a short cycle that's based on flexibility that's based on, okay, before a lot of organizations said, oh my God, who could have seen this coming? Okay, fair enough. But what about now? Now we know, okay, it may come back. It may do this. It may do this. There's sort of these different pathways it could go. Do you have a plan for each of those? Right. So planning for uncertainty, embracing that as part of your strategic planning is huge. Next thing is, we've been talking about this already, is greater digital integration and transformation. All right, I use the word integration to talk about that connection between the human and the digital. So it's important to me to talk about it as integrated as opposed to transformed, but it doesn't matter. It's the same thing in the end. And that part of it, figuring out how you're going to transform, how you're going to use digital to make up, whatever way that is for your industry and your business model, how you can use that. You know, for example, if you had online ordering before or something like that, right? Or you had online shopping. Well, now do you have it in a way that integrates with the new in-store method? Okay, you're using the app to communicate with customers about whatever. How far distant they have to be. All the cleaning things you're doing, all the safety protocols that they have to wear a mask, whatever it may be in your situation. Are you using the technology to keep up with the times? Right? And then finally, I think one of the last things I'd say is really trying to understand that the psyche of your customer has changed. We alluded to this earlier. I think the customer has changed now. The customer is more scared, more concerned, more uncertain. And if you can be, if you as a company, as an organization can be a rock for them, can be something they can rely on, something they can have faith on, something that they know is there for them. You talked about that emotional connection. Well, part of that emotional connection is, I can rely on you. You're not going to take advantage of me because I lost my job. You're not going to take advantage of me because you have the last supply of Clorox, you know, whatever it is, that, there's a huge opportunity to, right now it's a, it's bad how we got there, but there's a huge opportunity for organizations to prove how much they care about their customers at this time. Right, right. Thank you so much. Lovely, great insights. It's been an insightful discussion and hopefully next time when the world opens up again and we hope to see you in India talking to us one-on-one, I would love to do this session offline, you know, someday. Thank you so much for talking to us and to Exchange for Media. I look forward to seeing you again very soon. Well, thank you, Raheel. I really enjoyed it. Thanks. Thank you. Bye.