#7 Adam Toporek: Key Strategies for Enhancing Customer Experience in Any Business
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AI is getting better at answering basic questions. That's the goal. Hopefully it gets better at giving you your account balances, giving you the basic information. Most of the studies show that the more empowered an employee is, the more engaged they are. You know, and I know it's one of the great challenges of customer experience is

The reward is down the road for investing in customer experience, right? The reward is not tomorrow. Hello everyone. Today I'm speaking with a customer experience expert in the truest form. Adam Toporek is an internationally renowned customer experience thought leader, author, podcast host, facilitator, and keynote speaker among many other things I'm sure.

In researching Adam, I absolutely could not wait to speak to him because of his human-driven approach to servicing customers in all industries and sizes of business. So no matter your role, I think there's a wealth of knowledge for you to learn from Adam. So Adam, so excited to have you here. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, Lauren.

Yeah. So when it comes to customer experience, I'd love to just dig in and understand if there's one thing that you think the audience needs to know about you, what would that be? About me? I'm a third generation entrepreneur. So a lot of people have a big corporate lens. They've come through, the people that are in the customer experience space have come through that big sort of corporate environment. And I've worked in those as well. But in my heart, I'm a small business person.

Grandfather had a Main Street shoe store. Mom had a children's clothing store. Father had a wholesale music distributorship. So my lens has always come from that perspective of not having a lot of resources, not having a big team. And that sort of informs my real world lens or approach to customer experience.

And it's so important. I mean, it's so important in any business, but especially in a small business, that customer relationship is essential, right? So I can totally see how that is something that's been a through line for you.

So you're widely recognized as a customer experience thought leader. You had a podcast called Crack the Customer Code. You had 500 episodes on that. You are so well-versed in this space. I'd love to understand what are some emerging trends or areas of innovation that you're particularly excited about in this moment?

Am I allowed to say AI or is it too obvious? No, please. I mean, we talk about that a lot here. Yeah, obviously artificial intelligence is the order of the day right now. Everyone's talking about it. It is impacting experience across the board, not just in large organizations, but there's a ton of resources out there for smaller organizations to also use artificial intelligence.

And I think how it's being used, that's certainly something we can talk about more, but it's very interesting. One of the things, another, I don't know if it's a trend, but it's something that's been happening over the last five, 10 years. And it's just organizations prioritizing customer experience, CX, as a strategic priority, right? Having it as a strategic priority. I think that's crucial.

The number of industries in which you're not competing on experience shrinks every year, I think. And experience really is how most companies and most organizations are going to win their market.

And then, you know, this is, again, not necessarily a recent trend, but it's sort of a decade-long trend. And it's my area of focus, which is the importance of emotion in that human experience. And the more we talk about digital, the more alongside it we're understanding, okay, well, we still can't forget that we're humans and we're wired as humans. And we have these brains and this biological wiring that is not computer-like at all.

I've heard you speak about the emotional response within the customer experience. And I think it's so important. You know, we often say, okay, we need to provide a good experience, but like, what does good actually look like? And I think you've really illuminated a lot as you speak about the emotional component of the customer experience. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you think about emotions as it relates to the customer experience? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think the data is pretty clear at this point that emotion is the biggest determinant of customer experience results. Okay, now that if there aren't strong emotions associated with an experience, it may be other things. But in general, we are emotional creatures. If we are really happy or really angry, that is going to define our interaction or more broadly can define our relationship with an organization.

So for me, all experience, whether it's digital, hybrid, human to human, should be based on how do we eliminate negative emotion or prevent negative emotion from occurring. I talk a lot about hassle-free or what most people talk about as friction or effort. And can we create moments that generate positive emotion? Now, we can't surprise and delight every interaction. That's not realistic. It's not scalable.

But we can look for opportunities and we can do little things, right? And that can be done digitally. We even have, you know, we have gamification. That's sort of the smallest little version of what I'm talking about. Definitely. How would you recommend to leaders to really think about the emotion that they're evoking throughout their customer journey?

I think one, you know, you've got to look at the entire experience. But the other thing is you've got to figure out what your moments of truth are. Because the reality is there are certain things that are more likely to provoke an emotion, you know, either negative or positive than other experiences.

Reactive service is almost always a moment of truth. If there is an issue and we have to service that issue, we have to resolve that issue, that is almost always going to be a moment of truth. That is almost always going to have a major impact on how we feel about the brand. You know, Steve Jobs had this expression or this sort of concept called brand deposits.

which was, you know, every little interaction you're putting a little, if it's a positive interaction, you're putting sort of change in the drawer, you're depositing a little bit in the account. So when there's a withdrawal, there's a big issue or something, you've got some built up. And what we found is his analogy sort of holds water academically, right? It's we are...

customers are more likely to forgive, they're more likely to trust, they're more likely to recommend when they've had positive emotional experiences versus negative emotional experiences. And one of the things that impacts that though is how intense, how intense is that experience?

Yeah, the deposits I think is such a good analogy and I talk about this often in my work as a customer success consultant and coach around when we're building trust with our clients, when we're building trust with our teams.

You add, you know, sometimes they're pennies, sometimes they're nickels, they're dimes, like more and more depending on the situation. But you can also break the piggy bank so easily and lose that trust with your customer or anyone for that matter. So yeah, it's a tricky thing. But how do you really track that? Like how can a brand track those moments of truth and the deposits that

that are coming from it? Well, the modes of truth I'd say is a little hard. I don't know about tracking it. You can identify them through journey mapping. You can identify them through your customer data, through actually talking to your employees, which is to say, you know, no one seems to really get mad when they're using our app. Okay. But when they, or, you know, when they're shopping, but when they go to checkout, this is when we get all the complaints.

Okay, we know that checkout now we have a moment of truth and that's sort of a simplified example. So we can identify the moments of truth. Now, as far as tracking it, that, you know, we're talking about human emotion, so it is hard to quantify. But obviously I think what we can look for is positive sentiment, behavior, and as well, we could also look at, you know, how are our customers

not only behaving, but just sort of, are they recommending us, right? Are they speaking positively about us? Are they giving us positive feedback? But I mean, the challenges and to your point though, is one really bad experience can erase 10, 12, 15 okay experiences. Like, okay, I'm happy, I'm happy. And I like to use the analogy of restaurants because it's something everyone can relate to.

You go to your favorite restaurant in the neighborhood. It's not like, okay, it's fine. It's not the best place you ever go, but it's close. It's good. You go there and you're fine. You go there 10, 15 times. Everything's good. And then you have a waiter who is horrible. I mean, rude, treats you with disrespect, makes you actually angry. Out of those 16 experiences, which one do you remember?

The terrible one. You remember how people made you feel, right? Right. And that's a variation of that peak end rule, which is we remember. What we remember is the intensity. What we remember is that peak emotion. And that's why it's so crucial to understand where the moments of truth are, where they're most likely to happen, that can happen at any point, and to try to build in the experience, design the experience to prevent them as much as possible. Yeah.

So in your book, Be Your Customer's Hero, which I love that you have your poster up on the board, you wrote this book for client-facing teams and the people who are actually interfacing with customers day-to-day online.

I'd love to understand what inspired you to write that because we can talk about, you know, customer journey and all this high level stuff. But at the end of the day, it's those it's that waiter, right? It's that person answering your issue that ultimately drives that lasting experience. So I'd love to understand why you wrote the book and maybe what you learned from from that experience as well.

So I wrote the book because I wanted a resource. I was working in a retail concept and I just saw how people did not. I grew, like I said, I grew up in it and I had,

you know, I guess parents who were my role models and they were customer centric before that was even a term that was just sort of their nature. So I grew up that way. And then what I realized as a small business owner was most people don't have that. They don't get it naturally. It has to be taught. It has to be learned. And I just wanted a resource like, okay, here's like 80% of what you need to know to work a frontline customer service job. And I looked around and I couldn't find it. So I wrote it.

And that's where Be Your Customer's Hero came from. And, you know, I learned a lot writing it. It's definitely a journey. It was interesting to see what parts resonated with people the most. That's always my favorite because there's one that is my own concept. I got it just working in retail and, you know, working with customers. It's called Let Your Customers Punch Themselves Out.

- Tell me more. - That comes from boxing. So there's an old idea in boxing, you just sort of shell up and you let people punch themselves out, they get tired and then bam, you knock them out. Now, we're not supposed to knock out our customers with points not to hit back, but there is a very useful idea behind just let them get it out. And we even teach, let them get it out, and then when you think that it looks like they're slowing down or they're done,

ask them again and let them get it out a little more because they're never done. And you'd be surprised because it's counterintuitive. All right, every frontline rep, our own instinct, if someone's yelling at us is to say anything we can to get it to stop. It is not to just sit there and let it wash over us. So it is counterintuitive. It is counter instinctual, but it works like a charm 95% of the time. And in the book, you can read what the exception is.

I think it's such a good point. I mean, I've run multiple customer service teams and I think that's the, when I really see someone who's super skilled in their role versus someone who struggles, it's the people who understand that concept of, I need to let this person like breathe, get it out, feel listened to, and then we can talk about what solutions are. And then I can share how I can actually help them. Even if it's not something that they want to hear, at least they felt heard, right?

because otherwise you're just going to go into a downward spiral of them being more and more upset. So, oh, go ahead. I was just going to say, yeah, I mean, that's where we get back to the emotion. You have to, most people are solving the, we have like a whole 3S service process we teach. Most people are solving the issue and not solving for the emotion. And that's the difference that you just mentioned, really. Yeah. It's a really important reframe.

So when it comes to teams and leading those teams, I've heard you speak about how the employee employee experience is just as important as the customer experience. How should leaders go about really solving the employee experience so that they can deliver on the customer experience? That is a very broad, very broad topic. I'll throw out a few pointers.

So, I mean, I think there's a few things. I'll talk about the stuff through the lens of customer experience because there's obviously a lot to leadership. There's a lot to employee engagement. Here are some things that are specifically tied to the customer experience that also impact that employee experience.

First one is training. I know I've got a dog in this hunt. We are a training company, but you have to give your team the tools to handle the difficult situations and to just manage the workload. Customer service is not an easy job.

It can be challenging. It can be emotionally draining. And the first step before you get into, you know, how their schedule is structured and all that thing, all those types of things is to give them the tools they've got to. The problem is most training is operational training. Well, here's how you fill out form X. Here's what you do to get the customer through this process. Here's how you fill out the TPS reports. And then we,

We wonder why they're not ready when somebody's yelling at them or screaming at them and they don't have the right language and they don't know how to depersonalize and they don't know how to let customers, you know, punch themselves out and things like that. So number one is training. Two is empowerment, which goes hand in hand with the training. Employees, most of the studies show that the more empowered employees, the more engaged they are.

Empowerment to me is the win-win-win of customer experience because we want to solve, we want to remove hassle, we want to remove negative emotion. So we want to solve customer issues in real time when we can. Not always possible, but empowerment's the way we get as close to that goal as possible. So giving them that power when they win because they're actually solving the issue, they're not having to manage a customer who's upset.

The customer obviously wins. The customer gets their issue solved. They're not waiting. They're not going through more layers. And the company wins and management wins because you're making more money. Every customer service issue costs money. Forget the emotional toll and all that.

It just costs money. It costs time. So those are a few things where I think employee experience and customer experience, there's a few parts of employee experience that are directly related to the customer experience. And I would add just having that cultural vision that goes with it, right? That sort of wraps all that, that over, I don't know, say overwraps all of those types of things. I'm like, that's a word, but. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to double click on empowerment because it's something that I think a lot of leaders struggle with. And I think maybe first let's define what empowerment really is. If you'd like to give us a definition or make something up on the spot, just what does it really mean to empower your employee? And then I want to ask, you know, how we can do that right and effectively.

So empowerment is simply giving somebody more either responsibilities or more ability to complete things. That's not the scientific textbook definition, but that's essentially what it is. There's horizontal empowerment. There's vertical empowerment. So you can expand what they can do in their role. You can give them.

more access to what other roles have. So there's a lot of ways to empower employees. And there's different types. You can empower them financially. Anybody at Starbucks can make you a new coffee. They don't have to go get a supervisor, right? That's a form of financial empowerment. They can give the product. They can

But there's also other types of empowerment. They don't have to check with legal for maybe A and B. C, they do. D, they do. So there's other types of empowerment. But what was the second part of the question? Apologies. Well, then just going from there, you've given some examples, which is really helpful. I think the

giving the employees the freedom and kind of the boundaries of here's what you can do and here's where it's too far. But anything within these boundaries, you go for it. You make that new coffee, you, you know, take time to do X, Y, and Z to make sure that that customer is walking away. Um,

feeling happy and feeling satisfied by the experience. I think it's just so important. And so I'd love to understand, you know, what are some of the common mistakes that you would say you see leaders make around this topic and kind of keeping their team back? There's a bunch. There's a lot. The first one is just fearing it. Fearing, you know, trying to control everything. So I always tell a story about when I was in small business,

When I first opened it, I just controlled it. I was like, you know, if you want to give a refund, manager has to approve it. If it's over a certain amount, I had to approve it. And we had this huge blow up once with this customer. And I just, you know, I'll say the long story, but essentially my manager came to me and tells me what's going on. It's been going on for days. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it.

They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. She leaves, I'm like, I'll take care of it. I want to talk to the owner. I was like, I'll take care of it. But as soon as my manager leaves the room, like my heart sinks.

Because I know exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to refund the money. But now we've already ruined it. It's three days later. And this was in a new business. We were trying to generate positive word of mouth. This was an early fan of the business. And because she couldn't just get the refund immediately, because she went through all these hoops and then just had to complain, became this squeaky wheel,

Right. And I just realized that's what I had this big sort of revelation at this moment. Cause I had BBA, MBA had this business background where you just control costs. This is what you do. This is how. And I just realized that like traditional business wisdom was ridiculous. I was like, and this wasn't $500. This wasn't $200. This was the most expensive $50 in human history. Okay. Literally it was 50 bucks. I'm like,

And I just, I really had to wake up. - And how much time, how much time was spent solving that? And you know, from a cost, like you spent more than $50, well more than $50 solving this problem. - And not just that, think of, you asked about employee experience, time and emotional stress of the first employee, time and emotional stress of the supervisor, time and emotional stress of the manager, and then finally mine, 'cause I have to manage all three of them, and manage the really irate customer.

So you're right. And I just learned that, okay, this is ridiculous. We've got to look at costs in a different way. So some of the other mistakes, because what I did was I empowered everybody. I was like, okay, anything up to this amount, just whatever. Don't even blink. Just refund them.

Right. All this type of stuff. But we created forms to track it. And just so we knew what I was worried we were going to give away the store. All right. So it's like, let's track it for a couple of months. Let's let's keep an eye on it. And of course, we didn't. And but what I learned was this. And later, as I got became a customer experience person and all of that, I found the academic literature that supported it.

There is a huge difference. One of the mistakes people make, there's a huge difference between actual empowerment and psychological empowerment. So actual empowerment is what I did here. You have the actual ability to do X, Y, and Z. Psychological empowerment is do they feel empowered to use it?

Do they feel comfortable using it? And if you're transitioning from command and control to, oh, you know, you saw this podcast interview, you saw the light, you're like, we're going to empower everybody. Well, it's not that easy because if you've been on them for years about controlling every cost and all of this, and you've had this command and control type of culture,

You have to really let them know that, hey, you're safe, right? You can empower. You can do this. We want you to do this. If you make a mistake, we're not going to eat your lunch for it. We'll have a talk. We'll talk about how to do it better the next time. You're okay. And when you asked about those mistakes, that's one of the biggest ones is not recognizing that difference between actual empowerment and psychological empowerment. Yeah. And you really need to walk the walk.

in that. It's not just, okay, here's a document that says you can do X, Y, and Z, but I'm still looking over your shoulder all the time. I don't really trust you to... Yeah, exactly, exactly. A few years ago, I took the Ritz-Carlton customer service training, and I was so impressed with

with the amount of empowerment that they would give to every employee. I don't remember the amount of money, but essentially they were saying- It's $2,000, I can tell you, because it is my biggest example I use when I talk about empowerment. Yeah, exactly. And so anyone can spend $2,000 on making someone's experience either solving a problem or just making an experience great. And

And they would tell us all these stories of customer experiences where, you know, two parents who had come to the hotel before had lost their daughter. And so they bought the parents a star and named it their daughter's name and then set up a telescope on the beach so that they could have an experience like with their daughter in this place that they'd had so much fun the year before. Like things like that, like they will never forget it. They are going to tell all their friends, but that doesn't even matter. It's the fact that like,

that the employee also got to provide that. And that's it's so fulfilling all around. So, yeah, that's really you sort of get to a crowd source kind of a crowd wisdom, right? You can't you can't sit in your C-suite and ever think of what you just described. An employee on the ground is going to think of that, right? That's where you just can't because the variation of situations and they require

action in the moment. They require, you know, a sort of improvisation in the moment. And that's where the empowerment comes in. And it's, I just started, I laughed in a good way when you mentioned Ritz Carlton, because that's like my big example is Starbucks and Ritz Carlton. You know, if you want to stick with this theme and one of the interesting thing is how they empower.

Because they really, they empower around customer lifetime value. And I use this because we believe in smart empowerment. People are so scared and leaders are so scared to empower. And if you look at it, Starbucks is not empowered. A Starbucks employee is not empowered for $2,000. I don't know what their limit is, but we know it's a cup of coffee, right? We know they're going to remake your drink.

And this isn't an official Starbucks number, but one estimate has their customer lifetime value of a Starbucks customer is like $14,000. So they're not going to tick you off for something that costs 50 cents, right? They're just not going to, if they're smart, they're not going to do that, right? You say, that's not what I ordered. They don't argue. They don't say, oh no, you ordered the, nope, they just, yep, okay, got it.

Well, here's the thing. Ritz-Carlton, as you pointed out, you're right there. Everyone's empowered. Even the janitor who walks by you with the mop bucket is empowered up to $2,000. Like one of the most popular blog posts and YouTube videos I've ever done, like literally in my entire decade of doing blogs is the Ritz-Carlton's $2,000 rule. But here's the thing. It is also tied to customer lifetime value. The customer lifetime value at the Ritz is not $14,000. It's a quarter million dollars.

if you're a Ritz Carlton customer. So they don't want to tick you off for even 500 bucks or 300 bucks because you are worth a quarter million dollars to them. And I think you said something really important, just scrolling back a little bit to the fact that it's the employees on the front lines that actually often know what's best for their customer. Like we can't just assume we know what's best when we're not actually speaking to them. And

I think there's going into mistakes that I see often is leaders not really spending time with the employees who are customer facing and listening to the employees that are customer facing and doing workshops and brainstorms with those people who they may say, oh, well, they need to do 100 tickets a day.

It's really worth everyone's time to have them pause on the tickets for a moment and spend time reflecting back the things they're seeing and ideating around how they can make that experience better. I love that. Yeah, it's so true.

For sure. For sure. So I'd love to talk kind of going back to what we spoke about in the very first moment is AI and what you're seeing in terms of how AI is changing the customer experience landscape. Well, let's start with that as a broad thing, but I'd love to get into some examples of things that you've been seeing as well. Wow. So the impact's crazy because it's happening so fast.

Right. It's really happening at breakneck pace.

What's happening? So I look at technology really through a very customer service-y kind of lens, which is I look at technologies on stage and backstage. Now, obviously, they're all connected. But on stage, when we talk about on stage technology, that's customer facing. That's what they're using. That's your app, your Netflix app, whatever it may be. Backstage technology is our CRM, right? Our ticketing software, whatever we may be using.

to manage the customer experience. And I think AI is impacting both in incredible ways. You know, on the front end, AI is truly impacting personalization. It's going to impact probably, it's already impacting communication. I think it's going to impact it more. We know chatbots is probably the biggest, I'd say, currently impactful development on the front end.

Okay. I mean, until the metaverse and we're all in our little holograms and all that starts becoming real. Right now, I think chatbots is really, from a customer facing standpoint, what's changing the game. And it's incredible how powerful they are. Obviously, they're not human. They're better than humans in some ways, but in general, they're not. And, you know, I think that

front-facing chatbot is certainly going to change how we staff and is going to change, hopefully for the better, those moments of truth that are the human interactions. It's going to free up, particularly as so many organizations are struggling with staffing and budgets are tighter, it's going to hopefully free up our human agents to have a

more time to work on the more difficult situations, right? And the things that only humans at this point can do. On the back end, what's happening is incredible. How AI is assisting agents and how AI is supporting them. And, you know, anytime your technology can facilitate how your agents are working with the customers, right? That's always a win. And

The things I'm seeing with AI as far as that are pretty incredible. Just things like, you know, taking entire client history and giving. So, you know, one of the big issues, right? We hate, we talk about customer hassle is okay. Lauren, I just talked to Bill and I talked to Jenny and I've told my story seven different times before I talked to those two. And now you want me to tell you my whole story again.

Right. It's like one of the worst forms of hassle there is, is telling your story over again. Well, AI and some software I've seen is actually taking entire client histories and summarizing them so that the next agent has two or three paragraphs to get up to speed and at least not, you know, they may not have every detail, but at least not going blind, not going like, oh, can you tell me what's happening? Yeah, totally.

are there any examples that you've seen like of companies who are doing this really well i mean i think i

I'd be hard, hard pressed to peg one. That's particularly doing it. Well, I just haven't because quite frankly, I haven't been using it. Yeah, totally. And it's so new. I mean, I'll, I'll be honest. I obviously host this podcast. I talk about this. I think about this all the time and I'm kind of surprised that I'm not seeing more streamlined customer service, especially when it comes to chat bots. Like I,

I'm still typing in my account number. When I'm going from their platform into the chatbot, I'm like, why am I doing this? And I just feel like there's a lot of difficulty in actually rolling this out. And I'm not sure if you have any thoughts or opinions on that, but I'm like, why aren't we here yet?

Well, if you notice, you might have noticed my change in enthusiasm when I went from onstage to backstage. I was much more excited about the backstage. The onstage is still, it's incredible how fast it's getting better, but it is. I have had more bad experiences than good ones for anything that was more than just basic account information. That's very good at that, right? But it is getting better. I haven't had any that have wowed me personally yet.

But I think the best companies, and I've been saying this since before AI became a big thing, because it was always this case with chatbots, the best companies make it easy to have an off ramp, make it easy to get to a human, because that is where the frustration really comes in, is when you're just stuck and you can't get out. And they're like, I see you're having this, you know, you're like, agent, what is it about? This. You're like, agent,

here are five things that could be the no i've already read the five things i've been doing this for 20 minutes agent right and that's where you get frustrated completely and i think like ai is we cannot replace humans with ai

And I see some companies do that where they don't have, there is no agent option. They're just like, oh, you can do this. Like I think Uber did this at one point. This was many years ago and obviously before like the age of AI that we're in today. But I remember I could not contact someone. They had completely removed the ability to contact someone in their backend. And I noticed they changed it back eventually.

I could be wrong about this and I just missed the button, but I was like, I can't speak to anyone and I'm so annoyed. And then eventually it got fixed, but we can't replace humans completely. We still need to give that as an option and use AI to actually help that human do a better job.

Exactly. And to take work off their plate. I mean, AI is getting better at answering basic questions. That's the goal is hopefully it gets better at giving you your account balances, giving you the basic information, giving you the FAQ, hopefully not after you've said agent, but and things like that. But that is...

That is one of the things, I guess I'm going to be speaking about macroeconomics a little here, but that's one of the things where competition really stinks for consumers when there's not big competition. Because companies cannot get away with what you just described when there's competition, because people will leave. Now, when they are the 800-pound gorilla in the industry and there aren't that many other big options,

They can start to get away with that. And that is one of the places where I don't want to, I hate to see where this might be headed for some organizations that have that type of power, that have the, they know their customers won't leave. Yeah. So I hope that customers. So frustrating. Right? Then we're angry that we're stuck here. Well, exactly. I mean, even if you can leave, like this is the way it is in banking. Most people hate their banks.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of banks out there doing great work that are trying, but most people, the great majority of the share is with really large banks. And most people, I won't say hate, but really have a love-hate relationship with their banks. And even though they're not technically trapped, the switching costs are so high. It is such a hassle to move, particularly if you have business accounts, right? The effort to move is so huge.

So that's the thing. They are able to get away with it because the switching costs are so high that they know most people just don't have the energy to leave. Yeah. And no, it boils my blood. So when it comes to measurement, you know, beyond like traditional KPIs, like net promoter score, have you seen much innovation in the realm of being able to track the

customer experiences through new technologies. I mean, I think digital tech has its own set of metrics that are more specific and more narrowly targeted.

usually related to time or engagement or how many clicks and all that. So I think there's always that set of metrics, which I'm not an expert in. As far as to me, I always step back from the NPSs and effort score and CSAT and all that. Because to me, we mentioned customer lifetime value when we're talking about empowerment. I look at sort of the holy grail for all customer experience, all business is three things, right? Do your customers stay longer?

Do they spend more? And those two are essentially customer lifetime value. And then the final one is, do they refer? So I think to the degree that you can assess that and have the ability to track those metrics, they're not specifically targeted. They give you an idea of how you're doing overall. They're not going to, as a rule, help you troubleshoot a problem in your experience, right? That's where we do need...

the sort of transactional NPS and things like that. But to me, all that NPS or CSAT or effort does is tell you how well you're doing towards those goals, which are, you know, those are the end goals. You know your experience is good if they're staying longer, if they're spending more, and if they're referring you. You're doing what you need to be doing.

I mean, it's a long game too. Like when we think about the lifetime value, if we think about retention and spend and the customer lifetime value in general, it's

That is ultimately the goal at the end of the day, right? And I think sometimes we can get stuck on this. Well, this month, this number, maybe we weren't as efficient as we wanted to be or some numbers weren't as great, but they're very short term. And I think it's really important for us to be looking in the longer term how we're bringing this customer along through their journey and really building that trust with them in the long run.

So I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. Well, yeah. And because it's, you know, that, you know, and I know it's one of the great challenges of customer experience is the reward is down the road for investing in customer experience, right? The reward is not tomorrow. If I put another three salespeople in their seats, I could probably predict what that's going to mean.

If I cut costs, I know exactly what that means. And replace everybody with annoying robots, then I know what that means. But customer experience investments, they pay off later. And so it's harder to see the direct connection sometimes.

100%. I think that's one of the biggest struggles for us customer experience leaders, anyone in a post-sale role where your efforts are not directly tied to revenue in most cases. And it really requires us to, I believe, tell the customer's story and understand

it's not always about the numbers. It's also about what experience are we providing and how can we show that experience in a qualitative way? Because we can't put a number on how big someone's smile was, unfortunately. Not yet, at least, right? Working on it. Yeah, that's a great, yeah, that's a great, and I think, you know, you can't, you, depending on the C-suite, I mean, you're always going to need numbers, but

To your point, it's good to sell, to show the stories, right? To connect. That's how we all react is to stories. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. Well, Adam, I've learned so much. I have one last question for you. What is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should hear? Well, that's our motto at CTS is experiences made human. So I'm just going to say this, all experiences are human experiences.

We're so blinded by digital and it's so important. Don't get me wrong. It's crucial, but we get so down the rabbit hole sometimes that we have to remember that the person, and it is a person to which all of this digital leads, you know, that customer is a human and is a human that is more emotional than logical and a human that is going to, you know, not just be swayed by efficiency, but is going to, you

you know, fall in love with your brand because they've had a great experience that is essentially not created negative emotion and it's hopefully generated positive emotion. So just remember all experiences are human experiences. So well said. I want to put that up on my wall. It's a good one. Well, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful day. And to those of you listening, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe for more. And Adam, where can people find more information about you?

Well, feel free to connect with me on the socials, of course, LinkedIn, AdamTaporkCX on Instagram. But most importantly, our home base is CustomersThatStick.com. So CustomersThatStick.com. And thank you so much for having me. It was a great chat. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force. And it is bright.

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