 Hello and welcome to a special Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto Studios of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and also the co-host of theCUBE. We're here with Blake Morgan, who's the, she's the futurist author speaker around the concept of customer experience and has a great new book out called More Is More. Blake, welcome to the Cube Conversation. Thank you, John. Thanks for coming in. So I love that it's a hard cover book. The book is great, feels good. The pages are viewed as really, really good read but it's got a lot of meaty topics in there. So let's just jump in. What's the motivation for the book? Why the book? Why More Is More? So I've been in the contact center space for over 10 years and basically everyone under the sun is a customer and we all know what it feels like to have a bad customer experience. Have you had a bad customer experience ever? Always. Yeah, right. So there's no shortage of work to be done in the space and I think now it's a great time to be in customer experience because there's more awareness about what it actually means. So I wrote the book to basically provide some kind of definition and to really help people understand what is customer experience? Is it customer service? No, it's not. So what does it mean? How can businesses improve customer experience and what do they need to know to get started? Talk about the evolution because, you know, digital has really changed the game. You've seen cloud computing, machine learning, AI techniques, bots certainly. I mean, Twitter came out over 10 years ago. I remember when Comcast Cares came out, you know, that was a revolution. It was this one guy who decided to be on Twitter and we saw that beginning of that trend where you can now serve and touch folks with customer service and experience. But then again, the blinds between customer experience and customer experience is blurring. Now there's multiple channels. Do you send them a Snapchat? Do you do an Instagram? All kinds of new things are emerging. So how do you define as a frame the customer experience in this new context? Yeah, you're right. There's so many channels. It's really overwhelming for a lot of businesses. So I think it's important to really cut out the noise to think about who are you as a business and who is your customer? What does your customer need? And I really encourage businesses to make their life harder to make it easier on the customer because in so many situations, companies make it easier on themselves and make it harder on their customers. For example, say you do tweet a company, they might tell you, hey, now you need to call us and repeat yourself or now you need to send us an email. Well, that's not easy for me as the customer. So it's really all about making customers' lives easier and better. That's the name of the game. So what was the findings in the books? When you did the research for the book, what was the core problem that companies are facing? Was it understanding customer experience? Was it the reimagining of customer experience? Was it just a strategic imperative? What was the problem that you uncovered that was core to this new customer experience equation? So a lot of people equate customer experience with customer service and that's a big problem because for most companies, customer service is a cost center. It's not a revenue generating arm of the business. It's not exciting, it's not a money maker, it's not marketing or sales. And so that's really what people think of when they think of customer experience. But the book is based on this Do More framework and Do More is basically represents an acronym and each piece of this six piece framework represents a different piece of where customer experience lives. So the first D is design something special. The second, I'm not going to read you every, I'm not going to bore you with every single word, but the second is about loving your employees because that's a part of it too. So culture, modernizing with technology, obsessing over your customers, having a culture of customer centricity and embracing innovation and disruption. So these are all varying pieces of Do More, which really helps companies understand it's not simply something that sits in the contact center. For example, let's say you've got your laptop here and you love your laptop, but your experience of the laptop is not only shaped by, say you have to contact the call center, it's also shaped by how that laptop was built and how about those people who built the laptop, were they fighting at work with each other? Did they like their jobs? Did they like their boss? Honestly, that's going to impact your experience. Was it a sweatshop? I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, there's all kinds of issues about social good. Two kind of comes into it with that. It actually does. I write a lot about social good in my book and some really great CEOs today get that social good is important. Like the CEO of Patagonia or Mark Benioff. I mean, you can just rattle off so many examples of stuff that he's doing, whether it's equal pay for women or his huge house in Hawaii where he's housed monks to help them when one of the monks had cancer, actually. And I mean, Salesforce is constantly doing good for its employees and for the community at large. Like take me through your view of how executives should think about customer experience with all the digital transformation because a lot of business models are shifting. You're seeing mobile apps changing the financial services market because now the app is the teller. So you have three kinds of companies out there. You got the customer service-oriented company like a Zappos or you got a tech company like Google or and they don't really have but they're all about product innovation. They got companies like Apple and others that are like the big brand and cult of personality. So you got these three different kind of positions as an example. Each one might have a different view of customer experience. How do you tie, how does an executive figure out how to match the more into their DNA? That's a fantastic question. I think it's important to have somebody accountable to it whether it's a chief customer officer or your CMO because the CEO is ultimately responsible. However, the CEO has their hand in so many things. It's not scalable for them to be so involved on a granular level on customer centric metrics and so on and so forth throughout the organization. So I would encourage a company to actually hire somebody who's accountable who creates even tiger teams across the organization with these customer centric metrics in mind. So everybody's working together and they know that their job no matter if they're in HR or finance or marketing or customer service that their metrics, their performance metrics are tied back to the customer satisfaction. I know you do a lot of talks and you do a lot of speeches out there in events. What's the common question that you get? I mean, what are people really struggling with or what are they interested in? What are some of the things that you're hearing when you're out on the road giving talks? I think it's hard to actually put some of these practices. I think it's actually hard to put some of these ideas into practice. For example, I recently gave a talk at a large technology company down here in San Jose and I presented some pretty wild ideas about actually the energy for influencing change. So how do we keep that high level of stamina with our employees when it's just quite hard to sometimes even keep up? And I remember I gave this speech, I talked about a lot of very eccentric ideas about self-management. Like when you're a worker you need to take care of yourself because the corporations never going to give you a pass to let's say rest or do what you need to do to feel good, to be good at work. And I noticed some of the people in the audience were all texting each other and afterwards someone came up to me and said, you know, we're all texting each other because you say these things and the speech was purchased by the leader of the company. However, when it comes to actually working here, that's not really the vibe here, that's not the culture. And so I think that a lot of even the best companies today still struggle every single day with some of these ideas because when you do more, when you work harder than others, it's tiring, it can take its toll on employees. So how do you keep people fresh? Fatigue, yes, it is an issue. So how do they solve that? Because again, it's experience and the employees themselves represent brands. How do you put some of the solutions for that? Yeah, so it's normal that people in these big companies feel fatigue when they're working harder for the customer. But it's really important for people to just manage themselves because no one is going to give you permission to take 10 minutes to go for a walk, take 10 minutes to go meditate. So it's really about management, providing the room for employees to breathe and also modeling it as an example. If leaders just work 24 seven, it's all about the grind, the grind, the grind. That's not a healthy culture. So they need to push their people but also give them some kind of safety that they can take care of themselves as well. So talk about the book target. Who's the ideal candidate for the book? Who are you writing the book for? And what do you hope to accomplish for the reader and the outcome? So I write for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine. And I have a lot of different types of readers because customer experience really affects everybody in business. So it could be the CMO. It could be the Chief Customer Officer. It could be CEO. In fact, the CEO of 1-800 Flowers wrote the forward for my book, Chris McCann. So this book is really relevant for a wide variety of people who are interested in making their company more competitive. That's a great point. So let's drill down on that. Customer experience just doesn't end in a department. We've seen this in IT information technology where it's a department. That becomes now pervasive with cloud computing. You see social media out there. So customer experience has multiple touch points. Hence the broad appeal. How should someone think about being the customer experience champion? Because you always have the champions that kind of drive the change. So you got change agents and you have kind of, I mean their preexisting management in place. What's the human role in this? Because remember, you've got machines out there. You've got bots and all this machine learning technology out there. It's important that the human pieces integral to this, right? I mean, what's your view on the role of the person? Yeah, I am not anti-technology. I'm not anti-bot. I'm excited about the Amazon Go cashierless stores. Amazon Go stores. But I do feel that technology can help us without totally replacing us. I think that we need thoughtful people in charge of these technologies to lead us to make smart decisions. But you can't just let the technology go. I think that can be really scary. We've definitely seen so many TV shows about this. You can't blink without seeing another TV show about robots taking over the world. That's always a concern. What's the biggest thing you've learned from the book? What was the key learnings for you personally on when you wrote this book? Well, writing a book, there's a lot of learnings. I actually had my daughter, I was pregnant while I wrote this book. And so I think for me to be totally candid, it was a lesson in patience and working through that period for me being pregnant and having all, so I was like giving birth to the book and actual baby. So to be totally truthful, that was my life. You got a lot more than book coming. Well, congratulations, how old is the baby? She's 16 months. Congratulations. Thank you. Well, thanks for coming in and sharing about more is more. Blake Morgan, futures author on the customer experience, more is more, it's the CUBE Conversation, really an impactful thought because customer experience transcends not just the department, it really is a mindset, it's about culture, it's about a lot of things and certainly in the digital revolution, it is really going to be fundamental. Thanks for sharing. Thank you so much. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto Studios for CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching.