 Thank you for having me. Birmingham, Birmingham Ham. I've not been to Alabama aside from driving through for spring break. I stayed in Birmingham very briefly as we had a night off and then we hit the road again the next day. I'm one of these guys that, whenever work says, hey, do you want to go somewhere, like, yeah, I'll go somewhere, like Lincoln, Nebraska. Yeah, why not? I've never been to Lincoln, Nebraska, probably not going to pay to go myself, so I'm going to go to Lincoln, Nebraska. My company signed a recent deal with WordPress VIP. We've been amongst other things and you'll hear throughout this talk the various things that we do, but we've been designing websites for 20 years and we've been using WordPress predominantly, but we signed on with WordPress VIP. And that was when I decided I really start to roll my sleeves up and get involved more in WordPress and WordPress community. I've known this event has been around for quite a long time, forget about the pandemic years, but has strong support, so I really wanted to come down. Curious to know, I've got a pretty kind of in-your-face topic or it was pretty in-your-face as it keeps disappearing. We all good? Yeah, here we go. Anyone have any questions, comments or smart remarks if they even kick things off? We'll get into it, but I'm just curious because I put it out there and I didn't advertise anything around this one. I thought, okay, we'll go for it. So let me tell you how I got here today. So when I booked this trip a few months ago, I agreed to come down here. I wasn't aware that I was going to have my three kids by myself this weekend. And then I wasn't anticipating that my youngest one, who's seven, was going to get strep throat on Thursday. So it's kind of been a thing. The other thing is there's no direct flights from Indianapolis where I'm currently housed down to Birmingham, Alabama. So it's two flights here and it's obviously two flights going home. But the booking process. I usually fly with Southwest, but Southwest don't have direct flights down here. So I thought to myself, you know what, rather than go to Southwest, I'll hit Google and just search their flight, their engine to find any type of flight. And then we came across Delta and Delta seemingly had the best flights for me to get in in the morning and out in the afternoon to cater to the three kids. So I select the 5th of February and I go from the Google website into the Delta website. And I book the flight and it sends me the confirmation notice. And so for, you know, all of our finance friends at our organizations, I have to have receipts and things like that. So I swing back into the email and it's got February 27. So I didn't book February 27, but it's got me on a flight on February 27. So I go in and I cancel the flight on February 27 and I start in Delta and I rebook. So what happened is between the Google search engine and the Delta website, it's magically selected its own date. That was the first problem. All right, I'll keep going. So once I got all that figured out, I was like, you know what, Delta kind of sucks. And I haven't even stepped foot on the plane yet. Then I get down this morning and I download my boarding passes to the Apple wallet. The boarding passes don't have gates on there. Now I'm transferring through Atlanta. Who's been to Atlanta Airport? That's massive. Indianapolis Airport is the USA's best airport voted six years in a row because it's tiny and not many flights go from there and there's not many flights go from there. You don't miss flights and everything gets away on time. Atlanta is enormous. So now I've got no gate where I'm leaving on my second flight so I'll go to Flight Aware because seemingly Atlanta is bereft of the big screens that they used to have. So now I don't know where I'm going. So I'm on Flight Aware and it says to me T6. So I go from A to terminal T. That's kind of a long way. I walk like 25 minutes because I had time. I got there and it's not my gate. So I find one of the big mega screens and it tells me it's B6 which is all the way back. I make it back, it's fine, but still my boarding pass in the Apple wallet or the phone wallet still doesn't have any gates on it. So there's no punchline or anything. Just hold on to this information in your head because I'm going to refer back to it. So as the introduction, look at me, I didn't think a screen was going to be this big but it's pretty epic. Someone should get a photo of me and I've got myself on the big screen. I'm Chris Belly. I look after all the sales and marketing at a design and innovation consultancy in Indianapolis. We've got clients all across the country. Thank you for being here and thank you for having me in your city. I walked around earlier, I went and got some food and then I always do a kind of bit of a foot tour of places and I think it's fantastic. So thank you for having me. I told you the story about how I got here this morning but I'm going to tie it back but let me get into the session first. So the next 30, 40 minutes I'm going to speak to you. Next 30, 40 minutes I'm going to kind of present. I like everything to be a bit more open and collaborative. So if you've got questions or comments or something that you need to go deeper on, throw your hand up. I can't see very well up here or just yell it out to me and then I'm going to save time at the end for actual questions. Some of what I say over the next 30 minutes is going to irritate you. That's the Australian way. The things that I'm going to say though are really going to resonate with you. Some of the things that I say as learnings are going to seem really simple, almost common sense but as I'll allude to a few times over the presentation common sense unfortunately is not very common. So as I said I want to keep it conversational. Feel free to raise your hand, yell out a question. No question isn't valid and so let's dig into it. So when the designers gave me this deck I thought it was pretty rude, I thought it was a bold but it says bold. Bold because I implied at the start of this that why your customer experience sucks. I don't know any of you. I don't know anything that you do but I am implying that your customer experience wherever you're working probably does indeed suck. But let me ask you a few questions about the organ. Actually let's get a bit of a yell it out. What's everybody's roles at their organization? Up the back, anything? E-commerce, anyone else? Growth, okay. CEO, that's a good one. I need that one. Developer, lots of developers here. Agency owner, cop agency owner. I steal my ideas and do this same presentation somewhere else. Developers, designers. Okay, that's good. I like to kind of know the audience. Okay, so let me ask you a series of questions because I've alluded to the fact that why your customer experience probably sucks. In your organization, does your brand resonate with your ideal customer profile? Second question, does your website that you have at your business guide users seamlessly through a journey and conversion points that is meaningful for your business? Does every employee at your business understand and can articulate what you do for your clients? Is your platform consistent with the brand experience that you are presenting in other areas? And is your mobile app meeting the needs of the end user? There's so many more questions than that, but there's five, right? And I can tell you with a great deal of certainty, every person in this room is experiencing a pain point around one of those. Whether or not it's your area of business or somebody else's responsibility, there is a pain point there. So whether your own backyard is in order, your customer experience is so much more than just that one area. All right, so let me kind of go to the developers on this one. If you're a developer and anybody can scream out the answer because I can't see, if you're a developer, can you clearly articulate the value that your company provides to its clients? Okay, no one? Yes, you can, okay? If you're a copywriter, does your company's website guide users seamlessly through a journey? All right, these are all questions that are intended to be designed with, yes, I've got my own backyard in order, but there are other parts of the business that are letting down the entire experience. Oops, jumped too far ahead. If you've not thought about your role in service design, all right, 2023 should be the year that you start to think about it. Who's heard of service design before? It's one of these new fancy buzzwords, anybody? Okay, so service design, service design or the entire experience is the craft of tying together the human, the digital, and the physical experiences to create one truly differentiated experience for your customers. So the human, in simple terms, is your brand and how people experience your brand. The digital is your website, your digital product, your mobile application. The physical is the interactions that you have with the customers, either via email in person, customer service reps, or the physical contact, right? So today more than ever, customers expect their needs and desires to be met instantly and consistently across channels anywhere and anytime, and businesses who understand that can gain a competitive advantage by delivering amazing customer experiences. So let me give you an example of what I believe to be a company that does service design very well. So Southwest Airlines. So the human or the brand, I first came into contact with Southwest Airlines at business school back in Australia, but Southwest Airlines doesn't fly in Australia. So why are we doing case studies on Southwest Airlines? Because Southwest Airlines have a brand that is the envy of the airline industry, right? So when Southwest Airlines first comes to mind, you often think of the iconic blue planes with the yellow and red tails, but more than that, the satiric slogans that seem to accompany all of their ads, they're able to offer one of the best brand experiences in the business and they do it with the lowest prices, which is a brand advantage, right? So let's say they've locked down the brand aspect of it. The digital product. The digital product's so good that I've got muscle memory now when I use the digital product. So I'm a Southwest lifer, right? I can do it with my eyes closed. I can do it while I'm driving a car. Because I've got the turnaround time so quickly this evening and I want to get home to my sick child, I switch from Delta, because I told Delta suck, right? And I've gone back to Southwest, but Southwest I know are going to offer me for $30 to upgrade to a priority boarding position because I want to be at the front of the plane when it hits Orlando so I can make my 25-minute turnaround. So the Southwest digital product, in my opinion, I'm not a designer or a developer, is by far and away a superior experience to what exists out there. I tried to change a flight with American Airlines a little while back on their mobile app, and I've got to pop up. Please call 1-800, you know, go waste your time. And I did that 35 minutes later. The physical. The physical. The physical. I couldn't believe this when I first had to do this, but it's different, right? It's a differentiated in-person human experience where you get your boarding number and you walk up and you look at the thing and you look down your A35. Excuse me, what number are you? A37. I'm right in front of you. It's like you line up like elementary school students to get on a plane, right? Now, you can pay for the upgrade. You can do so many different things. I'm sure there's business advantages for Southwest Airlines, but at the end of the day, it's a differentiated in-person experience, right? If you don't like it, you can pay more and go work for a different airline or go fly on a different airline. And I've already told you the story about that. Southwest, I didn't realize this until I was doing research on this presentation. Southwest Airlines almost exclusively fly on Boeing 737 aircrafts. So there's something about not only on the employee side and I'll get to that, their maintenance crew, their in-flight crew, their pilots. The training costs are significantly reduced by everything being on that one aircraft and from a... I mean, if you... And if you think about that in any industry, if you're only working on one product, have good and efficient, you would become at that one product. I guess it's why agencies like to stick with things like whatever CMS that they're deciding to go into because they can become experts on it. But it also does something about the psyche of when you book, like, I know when I'm boarding the plane, I know exactly what seat I'm going for because it's exactly the same seat that I had last time I flew with them. So that's the in-person experience. And then what I'll go into a little bit... So we covered the human, the physical... We covered the human, the digital and the physical experiences that we spoke about a little earlier. But what I'll go into a little bit here and I don't want to go into it too much is the employee experience, right? So Southwest consideration of the employee experience has helped them outlast their competition in tough financial times, right? And the reason for this is their flight attendants are encouraged to live out the Southwest culture and values in their own way, not like a bunch of robots that are spitting out the same message. And that's why it's unique and that's why it feels so personal. The attendants, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but they're friendlier. They're more attentive. They seem to love working for the airline. A friend that lives in my neighborhood, he's actually a pilot with Southwest and he's actually all in on Southwest. Like, he can't get enough of it and they treat their employees really well. And that employee experience is kind of another element to that entire service design approach, right? So you're probably sitting back and saying, well, none of this relates to me because I don't work for an airline. I don't know if there's any airlines based here in Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham, Ham. And you're saying probably none of it relates to me. I work for a much smaller organization. It's not applicable. But I would argue differently because these larger enterprise companies have already got so many poorly established practices in place that they're hard to break down. If you're working for a much smaller organization, you have a greater opportunity to make an impact to align all of these experiences holistically versus just in silos. An example of that is a company that are taking big strides. Here's a big picture that I've got here, the big strides. Anybody use a... let's call it a chatbot called Drift? Yeah, Drift. It's a chatbot, right? At the end of the day, it's a chatbot but it's a great chatbot. But what's so great about the Drift chatbot is they've got a great brand. They've got a brand that makes you want to align with them. If you're going to choose any chatbot on the market, it's going to be Drift because they're the cool kids. And they've worked very hard at positioning themselves as that elite brand in their space. Now, of course, they've got a great product but when it comes to the entirety of the brand, the human, they're nailing that. The digital experience is great as far as chatbot goes. And then the human, every employee seems to be bought in on the brand, on Drift. It's like the desired... If you're in that space, it is a destination where you want to end up. So whether or not they were practicing service design when they started out building their product, that's anyone's guess, but I can tell you this, they never relied on the features of their product to differentiate themselves in the market. They worked very hard at connecting the human, the physical, and the digital experiences. Now, let me tell you about a misaligned service design experience that I have often. So I've told you about Southwest and I've told you about Drift, big company, smaller company. Let me tell you about the experience I get almost on a weekly basis at Studio Science. We get people coming to us. I deal a lot with CMOs or VPs of marketing and they'll come to us and they'll say things like, hey, we need to redesign our brand for XYZ reason. There's various reasons why you need to redesign your brand, right? Positioning, messaging, all these type of things. The company that I'm referring to have a really good digital product and they're going to need to have all the brand work then eventually present itself or be designed onto the website, the most public facing brand asset. When it comes to the mobile experience, as my client said, the mobile experience just plain sucks. It sucks so bad that if we have to show people through the sales process, they generally decide not to buy from us, right? Or if we've taken them through the sales process and then they ask to use the app beyond becoming a customer, it pisses them off. So on day one, you're on the wrong foot with your newly acquired client. So I've said to my client, okay, so you can clearly you can clearly identify where improvements are needed to be made across the entire experience, right? He's asked to me was, can you do the brand, the website and the mobile app? Of course we can. When can we start a project? Well, here's the problem. He doesn't have the budget responsibility for the product or the mobile app. He's only got his own budget responsibility for the brand and the subsequent website. So the company is thinking in silos. They know what's right and they know what they should be doing in order to achieve the desired total experience across all channels, but they only have budget responsibility for their specific areas. So whilst they're thinking in silos and they're not thinking about the entire experience, herein lies the connection to the title of the presentation is why your customer experience probably sucks. So what is great customer experience? So now that I've given you the background on the importance of service design and creating a differentiated customer experience, let's dig into the things that will help you fix yours. What is a great customer experience and what needs to go into a great customer experience? For many organizations all of these things go into creating a great customer experience. Research, brand, website, digital product and employee experience. It's intentionally designed as a DNA chain because it's the foundation in which decisions in your business should be made. I'll give you one example. Your brand strategy is your business strategy. Those two things are 100% aligned. So research, the first of those things. I had complaints about this slide in the past. Don't dig in too much on the things on the slide. Don't ask me to share. That is a journey map for another company that's going to have zero relevance to you unless you work for Angie's List five years ago. So if there are a few takeaways from this session, this is one that I really want you to understand and relate to the research. Stop being so competitor obsessed and start being more customer obsessed. By customer obsessed, start speaking to your customers. Start doing the research on what your actual stakeholders think and believe about your business or about the product that they're using or anything about any interaction that they have with your business. Human centered insights, whether you're in B2B or B2C can provide you with clearly identified opportunities for differentiation in your market. So research and the analysis of those findings should be the foundation in which every decision that your business should be the foundation in which every decision of your business is based. It is fact. These are the met and the unmet needs of your stakeholders who buy your product or your service. So research in the form of service blueprints, customer journey maps of your external stakeholders will uncover insights about your brand, your product and your service that you can't possibly figure out internally. You become so focused on your own business, on your own product that you can't see what your customers tell you as part of this journey. And armed with that research, you can start to identify opportunities for differentiation from your competitors across their brand, product or service. When it comes to brand, have you established a clearly articulated value message that buyers will immediately understand? So what is the positioning and messaging of your value proposition that sets you apart from your competition? Are you visually differentiated? Does your brand stand for something? Are all of these things appealing to your ideal customer profile? Your brand, like your website, can't be a snapshot in time. It needs to be its own living, breathing organism that evolves as quickly as your customers are evolving. One of the things that happened at Studio Science more recently was I analysed a lot of our marketing performance from last year. We were getting enough leads through our channels, through our paid, through our demand gen, through all the things that we spend time doing. But there's a misalignment between the number of leads that we were getting and the actual conversion of those leads. And the growth guy over here should probably pay attention to this. And the gap comes back to Studio Science as a business had matured far beyond the ideal customer profile that the brand and the website was pushing towards. So not to say the website and the brand was wrong, but it was right three years ago. And so what we've identified is there's an opportunity to improve the brand and the website so that when we do get those leads in, there's a consistency in what people expect after they've clicked on an ad to what they're getting once they go back and hit that website. Your website. So I gave you that first bit of wisdom, which was stop being so competitive or obsessed and start being more customer obsessed. Here's another one for you. Pens at the ready, right? When it comes to website, people don't have a short attention span. They have a short consideration span. So when was the last, so anyone can yell it out, the last TV show on Netflix that you binge watched? Ozark. Okay, never saw that one. Yep. Wednesday. Okay. My seven year old with Strep watched Wednesday like two episodes. That disaster. She was up for like a week. What's the record that you've sat down and watched binge watch shows back to back? You haven't done a whole series in a night like 11 episodes? Okay, so everyone's kind of done it, right? I would say with a great deal of certainty if you've sat down and watched a whole series of a TV show, there's probably nothing wrong with your attention span. All right? I don't know if you've noticed this, but I dart around with so many topics because I've got the attention span of a four year old boy. I'm just, I'm too kind of out there and lively. But when I say people don't have a short attention span, they have a short consideration span, right? Your website is your most public facing brand asset. It is your always on sales person, right? When a prospective buyer visits your website, if they can't immediately understand the benefit that you're providing to them, they're going to bounce off and go to one of your competitors, right? So great website experience accounts for consideration span, articulates value quickly and clearly, guides users seamlessly through a journey and helps users reach the desired destination through call to actions and things like that. Each of these can actually be dug into much, they're almost their own sessions. I'm just giving you kind of the overview of these. Anybody following a comedian called Ronnie Chang? He's a Singaporean guy. He spent a lot of time in Australia where I came across him. He does this great skit on Amazon Prime being too slow, right? And he comes up with this, she's laughing at the back. I can see you got a little torture on you. Have you seen this? But he basically says, Amazon Prime needs to be bigger, stronger, faster, harder. When I hit the buy button, I expect to put my hand back and someone drops the product in my hand, right? And he calls it Amazon Now, right? And he's like, bigger, stronger, faster, buy, here it is. Yeah, like that. And he gets so excited and so passionate about Amazon Now, right? But much like attention span and consideration span, the reference that I made earlier, in this day and age, when we live on our phones so much, who has the time for a mobile app experience that sucks? Right? It's just one of these things. It just shouldn't happen in this day and age. Right? If having a mobile app is a basic requirement of the way that you do business, you best exceed in its ability, you best invest in its ability to exceed your customer's expectations. The employee experience. Again, I don't want to dig into this one. This one can be a little bit more complicated, but employee experience is much more than just about the perks, right? It's about the training because things like well-trained staff are going to be more productive and have a desire to go above and beyond the call of duty for your organization. And then back to the Southwest reference and things like that. Well-trained staff brought into the culture and allowed to live the values of your business in their own way, are going to contribute to the overall experience that your customers receive at the end of the day. So think of this, I'll just leave you with this quick comment. Customer experience and employee experience are two parts of one cohesive system, right? And if you think to yourself, the easiest way to do this is, how frustrating is it? When you love a brand, you'll do anything for that brand. You're loyal to that brand. And at the end of the day, you speak to a customer service representative who doesn't know anything about how to help you, right? It just puts that sour taste in you now. All right, Southwest Airlines. We're back to Southwest. Now, you may have been scratching your head earlier when I used Southwest as a company who does great service design, because I put this presentation together for another show last year, and I liked using Southwest. And then Southwest kind of dropped the ball around Christmas time and gave everyone a really bad customer experience, right? So now I've got to go back and revisit this slide and kind of explain to you or highlight to you one incident, one poor interaction with, you know, a customer service rep, one bad flight experience can destroy all of the other parts of the customer experience. So when I asked you to think about this holistically across all areas, right? It can't be just you've got a great product. Now, I'll give you an example of that. Delta Airlines, right? Their planes were beautiful, brand new. I sat in the comfort plus section, right? Tushy's never felt so good, right? Two hours down here, magnificent. Couldn't find my gate and walked halfway backwards and forwards around the Atlanta airport, right? To me, it's kind of, it's almost like unacceptable. What about though, if you had the great digital experience, the great in-person experience, the great everything experience on an airline and their name was like, off the Simpsons, laughing clown airlines or something like that. Do you have any confidence in flying with those guys? I'll give you another example of that, of the brand or a name or a logo or a color palette, not matching the desired experience. I have a client back in Australia. I used to work in professional football and one of the corporate clients was a travel agent. Remember, travel agents 20 years ago? You'd actually go in and sit down and like book a ticket with a person. I know, you're saying, Chris, you can't be that old. You look so young, but yeah, true. So this travel agent, the guy's name was Craig Turtle. Turtle, like the sea creature. His travel agency was Turtle Travel. They would exactly scream like Concord Travel or get there faster travel. And I never said that Craig was a good guy and he ran a very successful business, but this was 2006. This is getting on 20 years ago. Now I've never forgotten how misaligned that name was to what he actually did or the value or the benefits that he should have been able to glean from working with a company like Turtle Travel or any type of travel agency. Comic Sans. Who doesn't love a bit of Comic Sans? Where am I going with this, Chris? All right, Comic Sans. Who'd have thought Comic Sans was a font that you would use, right, that the ultimate benefit of using this font would be greater adoption by the end user? Tell you who loves Comic Sans? School teachers. You guys ever use a product called Blackboard? Okay, I didn't because I didn't go to school over here and I never really finished a whole lot of school when I was doing it. Blackboard had purchased a company called Elon which was a publication for school teachers and stuff like that. Through research, this is where research becomes really popular. Through research, all the way down to what font we should use, Comic Sans was the chosen font and teachers absolutely love this publication. Talk about the experience and being able to influence someone's desire all the way down to a font. Don't think fonts aren't important, they are. My pink shorts, they're kind of purple on this screen, but believe me, they're hot pink, right? They're hot pink. I was going to Las Vegas for... I'm going to Las Vegas, right? What was I going to do in Las Vegas? Stupid, crazy. And I wanted pink shorts for Las Vegas. So I found these pink shorts and they were advertised through a veteran-owned business. They weren't a swimwear business, they were like a workout company. But these pink shorts, I wanted these pink shorts so bad. So I thought veteran-owned, I'm doing the right thing here, this is going to be fantastic. So I bought the pink shorts. I got Vegas is about a week away, plenty of time because everything comes on Amazon Prime or Amazon Now, right? I get an email three days later, I'm thinking, where are my pink shorts? I get an email three days later saying, thank you for your order. Oh, this isn't good. This isn't good. We are a veteran-owned business and we are a small staff. We are getting to your order and it'll be delivered between seven and 10 business days. In this day and age, I don't care what type of business you are. How is it acceptable to have seven to 10 day shipping? Right, crazy. Had never bought from them before, we'll never buy from them again. I'm sorry, but great product, but it's not meeting the expectations around the experience. The same with easy contacts. I wear contact lenses. With a little bit of research, you would understand that people buy contacts, I've not done this research. I've done some assumptions which goes against everything that I've said so far, right? But with a bit of research, with a great deal of certainty, I can tell you, people buy contacts the majority of the time when they're out of contacts or when they're nearly out of contacts, right? I was loyal to these guys for so long because they sold the same product at a bit of a discount and there were a few little things, but they were fine. I liked them until, and I don't even know, I think it's around Christmas time, Passover, the religious holiday, their whole operation closed down for Passover. Thank you for your order. Right, remember, I'm down to either one day or two days of contacts at this stage. Thank you for your order. Our whole team have decided to take Passover off for the next seven days. We'll get to your order when we get back. Ba-ba-on, never again. Thank you, you just lost a loyal customer. Maybe I'm fickle, but maybe society has taught me that I have an expectation around what experience should be delivered. And if each of your businesses are competing against other businesses, chances are you need to start to dig into what is going to exceed your customer's expectations. One other one on the pink shorts. Anybody used, bought from a really reputable retailer like Adidas, right? Or Adidas, as we say in the rest of the world, right? And then you get lasership delivering it. Lasership, anyone know lasership? Lasership is like a, I think it's like an Uber for freight. And they sent it to a warehouse and some guy in a 1999 Chevy Malibu with one wheel falling off goes and collects your thing from the warehouse and brings it to you. But you are getting the digital experience it's updating with you until you get, two-day shipping becomes five-day shipping and then on a Sunday you get a note. You've watched your item in a warehouse in Indianapolis for the past three days, not move. And then it says, unable to deliver due to weather. So I go outside. It's 45 degrees, perfect sunshine, hasn't snowed in a month. Where's my product? I'll never buy from Adidas again online. In-store when I can get it immediately but never again online. Takeaways, let's go back to easy contacts for a second. Questions so far, I mean we're getting to the end now, but I want to, before I get into the kind of takeaways has there been any questions that have come up that anyone put their hand out, yell out? You just yell them out, we're not ready for questions, questions yet, but... No, I wouldn't have bought from them. The question is if they had been up front about the slow delivery times would I have, would it influence my decision? I'm not here to tell you whether it should or shouldn't influence my decision because this is not Chris Belly's shopping preferences presentation. I've got another pair of these boots the other day, aren't they killer? $100, same pair of boots, different colours. I've got the whole set now, it's awesome. That's my shopping preference. I'm here to tell you though that each of these companies should have invested in customer research prior to that and that would ensure that they've got a loyal customer for life. They're a friend of mine, we did some brand work for them. If you're into college sports, look them up. Homefield apparel, right? He's a mate of mine, he's a client of mine. I ordered a t-shirt off him during the NFL season because now he does NFL licensed merchandise as well. And it was the same thing, it was seven days and he's just in Speedway, Indiana which is where the Indy 500 is which is kind of in the city. I could have driven over there at lunchtime and picked it up but I mean it was fire and I was like, Connor, we should have a chat because this is failing the customer expectations, yep. Oh, sure. Has Amazon's two-day shipping not set a false expectation that everybody should be able to meet that same speed and even Amazon can't do that now. We regularly have lost packages or long delays in a single place where I could go pick it up. The biggest Amazon problem is is that not a false expectation that you're assuming every business should be able to keep up with a multinational conglomerate? Again, but let's not focus on whether it's Amazon's two-day and somebody else's. Let's focus on business in general and the leader setting the standard for which everybody else has to follow. And it is unrealistic for a smaller business to do that but you need to provide value somewhere else. In the case of my friend Connor, he's the only guy doing vintage collegiate apparel coast-to-coast across America. If I want to walk into the bookstore at the local college and buy some kind of general generic t-shirt, that's one thing but he's got a differentiated product in a different way. He's the only one doing that but when we look at the expectation that's set and I'll go back to my website example, if I've got company A and company B and I go to company A and I can't understand what they do within the 12 seconds that I'm going to give them and I go to company B and go, you know what, these guys have nailed it. I know exactly what they're going to do. I know exactly what value they're going to bring to me and that's who I'm going to purchase from. So you know Amazon can't meet two-day shipping but are you shopping anywhere else? You are? No, not me. I'm impatient. I told you attention span of a four-year-old child. Let's get into the takeaways and then we'll go back to the questions. So the takeaways the 2023 New Year's resolutions right? There's three and they're here on the screen. Understand your buyers and customers. I can't stress to you enough that undertaking customer research will provide you with insights that will enable you to create value that will be truly differentiated between your company and the competition. The second is design for people and when I say design for people agency owners will understand this. I mean design with a capital D like designers in create for people design for people, right for people, build for people like stop being so competitor obsessed and start being customer obsessed and armed with the research and the identified opportunities for differentiation designed for the very people that you're trying to attract. So if you're trying to attract contact lens buyers design a service experience that gets the contact lenses in their hand in the expected amount of time. Align your internal teams to deliver better experiences. This is perhaps the hardest one. But start the conversation in your organization around aligning for the greater good of the entire experience. How rude is it if you're a free rider and you write the best blog of your entire life and some developer who's got other priorities parks it on page 700 of the website and no one ever gets to see it. What about the pink shorts guy, whoever designed the pink shorts is thinking I'm going to sell a million of these and we'll be the hero of the company until everybody realizes they can't deliver on the speed and efficiency of the mailing. So when I talk about aligning internal teams to deliver better experiences start the conversation. Start to encourage your organization to think holistically about aligning the human the physical and the digital experiences and most importantly advocate for budgets that simultaneously make improvements across the entire spectrum of the experience otherwise you end up in a situation like me I need more money for demand generation and marketing but I'm not going to spend any money on website or brand and now I've got a misaligned experience between the two and now I'm starting to waste money instead what should have happened is I need budget to fix all of these moments along the customer journey that I've identified as being met and unmet needs of my stakeholders that are going to make improvements across the entire experience and then I always finish every presentation that I have on questions comments or smart remarks there's usually one about crocodile dundee that's not a knife or something like that when the smart remarks one comes up. Any other questions happy to answer them we've got like three minutes yes one second let me get the mic over to you so actually I have two quick questions in your presentation you mentioned you spoke about budget responsibility where did you get that term from I like it I want to use it in my sales process budget budget responsibility where did you get that term where was the first time you came across that term well budget responsibility I have budget responsibility within my organization when I say budget I don't just mean my expense budget for marketing and advertising purposes but I mean my budget for revenue as well how that correlates to return on investment from those activities correct correct so my question is that I'm in sales it's a nice term so I'm going to use it in my sales process so I wanted to know where could I learn more about that term I made that up that's a quite budget responsibility I'm a sales guy I run sales and marketing but predominantly I'm sales in a marketing guy's body but sales isn't a dirty word stop treating sales people like dirt bags yeah they can sell you anything because they're really damn good at selling but sales is responsibility the success of an organization is on the sales person whether that sales person has the title of sales but on somebody's ability to sell is that's the responsibility of the organization and the quick follow up to that is that the presentation you gave that is what is missing in my business a lot so where would I be able to get more resources around that this presentation I think if you're looking to align the experience more holistically I really do think people need to start thinking about service design service design is total experience service design it's called so many different things there's a blog on our website that one of my colleagues wrote and he calls it the new new thing and it's like UX CX in healthcare it's PX it's everything's and it's just it's all I said at the start I think why is this stuff seemingly so common yet nobody's doing it because common sense is unfortunately not very common any more questions wrap it up is it time for one more quick question yet yes you mentioned that you gave a couple examples of a cluster experience that you had and you decided you're not going to go back to them again is there anything that they could do to win you back as far as like I said they improved their brand or their processes is there anything they could do to win you back and would you have recommendations for people who may have given I gave the customer a bad experience what would be some recommendations that they can do to win them back perfect question great question because when I talk about doing research I talk about doing my agency does competitive market analysis what your competitors are doing looking feeling how they're talking about themselves internal stakeholder interviews right that is the people that understand your business understand the market and understand the trajectory of the business right the third one is the external stakeholder interviews that is your customers existing customers prospective customers and lapsed customers right tell you how they're going to win me back hey Chris see that you bought once and never bought again where did we go wrong well pink shorts guys I went to Vegas and nearly didn't have my pink shorts and that was a big problem for me and so that's like that's the whole engage in customer research and then you'll understand where the wet for me that was an unmet need from that company and so I think that's the that's kind of the the answer to that one there I think that's it Birmingham thank you for having me all right let's welcome crowd let's thank Chris again for coming to Birmingham and great talk Chris are you going to be around