A Psychologist’s Take On Winning Customers: Make Them Feel Like The Hero!
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No good experience would be effortless. An effortless experience meant that I was not engaged at any level whatsoever. You can't be the hero without any effort. You can't be the hero without mastering something. What creates engagement? It is mastery and purpose and autonomy. As a psychologist, I understand that emotions drive behavior far more than logic does. We have an epidemic right now in loneliness in our society.

How do we create a place that inspires people? What are some of the things we could do on a routine and regular basis? I think if we make it all too formulaic, too efficiency driven, these are all things that are going to threaten the CX in the end. All these ideas of technology giving you more time has ultimately resulted in the opposite of that. The CX space has been nothing more than fluff. Creating value through experiences has to be validated. You think CX might not make it?

Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lacey Pease, and we've got producer Rose on the other line. Lacey, who did we talk to today? We talked to Dr. Joseph Michelli, CEO of the Michelli Experience, who is an author of 13 books about CX. His most recent releasing here in tomorrow, actually, so by the time you hear this, it'll be out. And he's worked with some really cool companies, right? Yeah.

Yes, he's worked with Starbucks, Airbnb, Godiva, Ritz Carlton, Mercedes Benz. Like, can I name drop any better companies to have worked with? Yeah, for real. And by the way, Lacey said doctor because the man has a Ph.D. in psychology, which just makes him even cooler.

He talks about that a lot in the episode about how his background in psychology has influenced how he is helping work with these companies today. So he's got a lot of different insights that I haven't heard put the way he is putting them today.

One of my favorites is he talked about the push and pull between effort and ease with customers. So finding this beautiful middle ground between what we were talking about was good friction and bad friction and why the customer actually should be putting forth some level of effort to feel more invested in the product or service that you are selling. Yeah, he said something cool about if your customer's experience is completely effortless, that they probably weren't engaged with you at all.

So kind of shifting your mindset away from let's create a completely effortless experience to how can we get good investment from our customer. And in...

Tandem with that, we talked a lot about emotions and the role that emotions play in the customer journey. So whether that's a quote unquote good emotion versus a bad emotion, what those different experiences of joy and anger or happiness, how those things can correlate into a powerful customer experience. Lacey, what was your favorite part of this interview? Was it us talking about our AI centered future looking like a Black Mirror episode? Yeah, actually, I think that was my favorite part of this. And

I will say, I didn't say it would look like a Black Mirror episode. I said, I'm optimistic in that it won't look like a Black Mirror episode. Very true. But yes, Joseph did offer a lot of great insights on how to actually use AI in a way that's going to elevate the customer experience and not dilute it in

and how we can make it feel more human. Cause we've all had that experience now with GPT, chat GPT, where it's talking to us like it's our friend. And so he has a really interesting perspective on if that's good, if that's bad, maybe other places companies can put their effort whenever they're trying to think about like creating an LLM that engages with their customers.

So lots of great takes there on the future of AI and how that might impact us in the next couple years to five years to 10 years. I liked how much you talked about, too. I don't think I've heard a guest go that deep into efficiency versus effectiveness. Like just because AI might be making if you're hyper focusing on AI, making everything super, super efficient.

that might degrade your customer's experience in the end. So being really mindful about how you're utilizing AI, and he lays that all out pretty practically in this episode. Before we let you go and let you actually listen to this interview with Joseph, be sure to like, subscribe, wherever you're listening to us right now, and go hit up Lacey's LinkedIn at LaceyPeace.

Go spam her with the questions that you want us to ask these executives. I had so much fun talking to Joseph. He's hilarious and he had so many great stories to share. I know you guys are going to love this episode with him. So without further ado, here's Dr. Joseph Michelli, CEO of the Michelli Experience and author of All Business is Personal. Enjoy. Enjoy.

Joseph, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Lacey. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, I'm glad that you could make time for me, to be honest. I look at your background and I'm like, how does he have time to do podcasts?

spending time with Starbucks, Godiva, Airbnb. I'm like, oh, thank you so much for being on here. That was just what I consume, let alone what I do, right? Like you just ran through the list of my indulgences. Well, I do want to kind of highlight that a little bit. So you've worked with some amazing brands. I've taught, I just shared a few of them. Ritz Carlton, Mercedes-Benz, Starbucks, Airbnb, Godiva. And what I find really fascinating is not just your history of

of the companies you've worked with, but that you've got a really interesting background in psychology. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, I got a PhD in clinical and organizational psychology. So I started off working with families mostly, and I realized that was not what I felt my calling was to be. So I took that organizational system mindset and trying to affect change and applied it more to two businesses. And it's been a really interesting journey from some very small ones to some very large ones.

Well, can you tell me a little bit more about that, like, origin story? Because I do want to hear how that transition sort of occurred in your mind, because it's not like a natural idea that I study psychology and now I'm looking at customer experience in business. Yeah, I'm not sure if it occurred in my mind. I know that in my soul, my mom and dad had always said that you're not on this planet to be served. You're here to serve others. That was the...

fundamental message that kept coming up in different forms as I was growing up. And so I knew I was going to be doing something to help people in a professional setting. And I thought it was clinical psychology. And I, in graduate school though, I did as part of that systems work, I worked for the Pike Place Fish Market. And I worked with a guy by the name of Johnny Yokoyama, who's really the main character in the development of that fish throwing place in Seattle. And so that experience kind of lay dormant. And then I was doing clinical psychology and then I was

brought in by the organization, the healthcare system I was working for to do more org development.

And I was getting back to that system change organizational stuff. And through that, I kind of looped back to doing more consulting in the business space. What has been some of your favorite experiences so far in your consulting work? Well, catching fish at the Pike Place Fish Market, throwing them. That was pretty good. I mean, that's awesome. Yeah, that's great. I mean, getting totally messy and claiming it was work. You know, it

picking coffee cherries, as they're called, with migrant farm workers from Guatemala and Costa Rica, right, experiencing the joy of being at the origin of the coffee journey, as well as the last 10 feet of the journey in a Starbucks store and trying to figure out how to make that experience memorable. And certainly things have changed in Starbucks since those days. But

Those were really amazing experiences hanging out in boardrooms with people that I consider legendary or visionary, whether that's a Tony Hsieh or a Howard Schultz. Tony Hsieh from Zappos and Howard Schultz, obviously, from Starbucks. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

So you shared something with us when we chatted last that you think CX might not make it. And so I kind of want to start there with you because I know that sounds like kind of a controversial little philosophy. So I was wondering if you could explain what you meant by that phrase. Maybe we can dive a little bit more into like how CX can really deliver ROI. Boy, it's so contrarian, isn't it? It could almost sound like clickbait. Yeah.

Well, yeah, it does. And it sounds like something that would make it so our show doesn't matter anymore. So I'm like, oh, no. It's just kind of double edged sword. We can get people in temporarily, but then we're all gone. I want it not to happen. I want you to be around for a long, long time. I want CX to last. But I do think we have some risk factors here.

You know, you've done a great job in this podcast, really getting at nuggets that are actionable and that matter. But there's been a lot of the CX space has been nothing more than fluff. And I've been in the business since before it was called CX. We called it customer service. And then we start reading Gilmore and Pine. And we started to appreciate that there's an actual economy that's shifting and value is created through experience. It's not just service delivery. You know, if you think about Gilmore and Pine's argument, you know, it's raw materials that created value. And then it was

it was extracting those raw materials from the earth. And then ultimately it was providing them as products and then ultimately as service. And then finally now in this experience economy, and now we may have even moved to another rail of the technological economy. But I think it all comes down, no matter what you want to call any of that is value creation. And so again,

Right now, I think creating value through experiences has to be validated. It makes total sense. I mean, it's not enough just to serve a product. It's not enough just to get a product to market in the most cost effective way. But how do we build experiences that legitimately produce value and show that that value is worth the investment?

And I think unless we get a little more disciplined and stop playing around with some of the metrics that even the people who created them tell us have severe limitations in the future of the profession, I think we're going to end up with with a lot of people turning their nose to it and say, of course, certain experiences matter. But unless you can show how I can monetize it, I don't really see why I should care.

Well, why should people care? Like if you were to answer that question for someone, why should someone care? If you can dial it up right. And that's the big if, right? You can drive earned revenue. So that's the key. It really is earned revenue. And I know Fred Reichelt has moved to a metric that describes this, but I think I've been championing this for a long, long time that we have to either pay for the revenue that we get in the door and that's a cost-free

per dollar that we return on that investment or we earn it through the way we create experiences that requires us not to have to go out and pay for more eyeballs or ears or clicks to get into our world. So I think earned revenue is critical. And then being able to link that earned revenue to the success of your business and what is the lifetime value of the customers for whom you earn revenue.

So I was talking to a friend who was staying here at my house this past weekend, and I hadn't seen him in a while. And he's been working in customer success for a very long time. And his philosophy was one that

uh customer experience is such a art form that to measure it almost makes it minute and he was very passionate about this so i was kind of wondering from your perspective let's go get him let's bring him in i'd love to have the debate let's get it going yeah but i would love to hear from your perspective that kind of balance being the art of customer experience and then the science of like metrics like i need to be able to measure this i need to be able to report it to my cfo or cro and explain what we're doing here how do you kind of balance that in your own head

There's no doubt that people have nuance and art in creating great experiences. You've been to parties where people have just sucked it up. Like they invited a bunch of people, but the experience was just flat as could be. They had all the same ingredients as a party that was fabulous, where the host felt a way to create a felt sense that people felt appreciated value. There's no doubt there's an art.

to doing this. But at the end of the day, if you can't continue to make profits for people through people, you don't have a business. So if you can't marry the art with the science, then you have a nice sounding platitudinal relational soft skill stuff that that CFOs aren't going to buy into. And that over time, more and more people are going to say that's just a buzzword that means very little more than everything. Like everything is the customer experience.

I once wrote a business principle in my Starbucks book, I think called, I think, you know, something like every detail matters or something like that, or everything matters. And a newspaper came out and said, well, now that narrows it down a bit, doesn't it? You know, and I think that's the problem with customer experiences. It can't be everything.

It has to be driven and you have to prioritize what of all those things in the art are you going to emphasize so that you can prove in the real world that that art has manifested in tangible results for the people you're creating the art around.

I love that. So who would you say, if you want to highlight a specific company or if you've just seen certain frameworks work, could you give us some examples of people who are doing this right, who are tying CX to ROI in a really strategic way? I think it really is someone like a Zappos. Let me give you that as a starting place. Tony Hsieh and his work there said, look, we're going to spend a lot of money in what often people call a cost center. That's the contact center in our business.

We need to be able to show that if you spend time in our contact center, we're able to build relationships with you that drive customer lifetime value and we're able to expand purchase. And so literally he renamed the department to the customer loyalty team. So they're the CLT describing what function they perform as opposed to where they sit or what, you know, what technology they rely on. Right. So they're not a call center or

They are a customer loyalty team. It's where we have an opportunity on a mostly online intermediated relationship with customers. It's one of the few times a human can touch another human being. And it often is on a complaint or a problem or just confusion. And now we're going to look at the people who we've served individually.

Is their value greater than people who are just having a great relationship with us on online transactions? And if so, then it's not a cost center. It's a revenue center. Right. And they had they've done a spectacular job. And it doesn't matter if you call in and you ask about the weather or where I should go eat in a town. And they'll answer that question. Or if you call in specific about buying a product.

The lifetime value of the people who have interactions with the customer loyalty team is greater than the lifetime value of those who do not. That justifies the existence and the investment in having humans available instead of just having chatbots all over the place in AI replacing humans without a phone number. Okay, you went there, so I'm going to go there with you, AI. So with what you just shared there, is there maybe a place though for AI to...

help elevate the right questions because when I hear like call someone just ask about the weather I don't know necessarily that we need to have someone answer the phone for that could an AI chatbot answer that for someone and they would still be equally satisfied because they were able to quickly get a response

Yeah, I mean, it'd be great if more AI was trained in a more generic sense to be able to answer the weather. But guess what? I mean, that's going to escalate to a human being in most of the chatbot chains right now because they are very narrowly trained in the subset of questions that are most commonly asked. So I think for the short term, sometimes you just have to have people

available for other people. You know, we live in a time, and this is really going to get deep. I mean, we're like, we're going way out of the scope here. But, you know, we have an epidemic right now in loneliness in our society. A brand that just has humans available is going to have a lot of wasted time, if you will, in the sense of just connecting with a lot of needy people.

But guess what? A lot of those needy people appreciate that somebody was available to talk to them. And oh, by the way, they might buy something they weren't planning on buying. The whole idea of just being real and being human and having humans available when people want humans sometimes will be a waste of your time. But if you can show that those people are able to make that human connection and they build relationships that affords profitability, then I would continue to have those people around instead of just immediately default.

to an AI or technology solution. Now, that said, we need AI. We need all kinds of convenient solutions. My goodness, your generation is even more so in longing for that than my generation. I'm still willing to tolerate waiting on hold for somebody. Like, go figure how crazy that is. I'm not. Yeah, I could see that coming. But my point is, I think we have to meet customers where they are. We have to give them the options for self-service and convenience. And these technologies are amazing, right?

but when you restrict people from not having access to humans, then you have a problem. So I use Amazon as a pretty good example. I've got a new book coming out that is about an Amazon company and Zappos for that matter now is acquired by Amazon too. So I'm talking about Amazon everywhere I turn, but you look at Amazon and most everything is done in a digital interface. They'll try to drive you to technology, self-service solutions, refunds, returns are almost always tried to be done without having a person involved.

But when I want a person, the person that sits behind that technology is well-trained on what kind of human experience they want me to have. They're going to make decisions about how easy and how much latitude they're going to give me based on my lifetime value. And that's exactly what I think the models should be. It should be tech first.

if we can solve it there, but be ready pretty quickly to move it to a human who's well-trained to get even more value given and extracted in the relationship.

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What I think is interesting about this is you can kind of flip the question to, right? It's not just AI that's customer facing, but if I have AI that's employee facing, that's supporting my employees so they can actually have the time and energy and like willingness to connect with the customer when they do decide to call me. That's where I think it's more interesting for me is how AI can elevate like the employee experience. So that way we can deliver better customer experiences when the phone is called.

Hallelujah and amen and all those things. Right. But I would go a step further. You have to make sure that people realize they will have a job because we still value humans in the organization. The big fight for most people now is will I be replaced by, you know, AI? And I think there are actually websites you can go to right now to calculate the probability that your job function will be replaced by technology. That's.

kind of frightening that people are doing these probabilistic calculations about am i going to be irrelevant i think if you empower people with technology as you just described it it's the best of all worlds if you threaten people with technology or you don't help people see how these tools enhance

human service delivery when called upon, then you have a problem. And I think these are all things that are going to threaten the CX in the end. I think if we make it all too formulaic, too efficiency driven, I just had a, I was on a podcast the other day where somebody said, well, has Elon Musk ever reached out to someone like you? Real political question, right? Like, and I'm like, oh, lovely. You just want to answer that question. You're just dying to get in the middle of that fray. And I, for some reason said, you know, I haven't had that call. I don't know if any of my colleagues are in that space, but

What I would say is I wish they had named it the Department of Government Effectiveness as opposed to the Department of Government Efficiency. And my point being that a lot of what we're trying to drive in the human experience space is effective value creation, not just efficiency. It takes efficiency to do that. It's a big part of the formula, but it's efficiency on mission and on purpose. And I think we see a lot of people getting confused that if we're going to strip away everything...

We are creating great value. It's an art to know what to strip and how you can reduce costs as maximally as you can while creating value to the greatest degree possible, either through technology or people.

Well, it kind of goes back to that science versus art question, right? It is this beautiful balance you have to play with because if you just go into this formula of how do I make it more efficient, right? The example of I'm answering the phone just to tell you what the weather is might, from like a CFO's perspective, be like, that's a waste of time, waste of money, waste of energy. But if we are saving time...

and energy and efficiency in other places that allows people to have that more human connection. That's where I see AI or any kind of technology or any kind of framework you might have that helps you execute better or faster. That's where I see it really supporting is it allows you to become more human. And that's sort of like the philosophy that I've started to adopt around everything AI is how can I use this for me, even in my personal life, to be more human? How can I make it so that

My job is more efficient so I can actually cook dinner for my kiddo for two hours instead of just the two minute like microwave dinner. So I think that like whole philosophy in general is something that I'm leaning into. And I see businesses constantly leaning into that as well. But if we get stuck into this like

science or this like the science based efficiency problem of how do I just make my employees more efficient? I do see that like leading down a really dangerous rabbit hole where we're just optimizing for these metrics that really don't matter. Well,

Well, I love that you have this insight at your age, because I certainly did not have it at your age. In my advanced age, where I'm nearly gumming my food, I have come to appreciate that the most important decisions in business are decisions that seem like they are dichotomies that require bridges. And businesses who understand it is not the employee experience or the customer experience.

It is not technology versus the employee. It's not AI versus customer care. Right. Those people, I think, are the ones who will win in the end because they're looking at the unique strengths of each of those value propositions and finding out how do they pull those threads together to serve very complex phenomena called human beings.

And one size does not fit all. You know, my son, the worst thing that could happen to him is have to ever contact a customer service representative. Like that would be might as well just, you know, it's over. How old is your son? My son's like 30. Right. And that's funny. And the brand from him and like, I don't even know. I don't want to think about my grandkids, what they're going to have. But but in truth, I think that is not what fits him.

For me, not having people available more than I'm seeing today is kind of a struggle. Like I'm having to say, OK, no, no, this is the right thing. I mean, it made it easier for you. You did it on your terms. You did it asynchronously. You didn't have to wait for a person to be available. This is good. I have to kind of convince myself of that.

But, you know, I'm coming around and I think a lot of the technologies have been so user friendly in their design that it's been easy for old folks like me to leverage them. But that doesn't mean we still shouldn't have someone available to help for those who need a personal emotional connection beyond just an efficiency connection.

Well, it's also not as memorable, right? If I'm going online and it takes me 60 seconds to finish something, then yeah, I was really efficient. It was super effective. It was a great UX. Wonderful. I couldn't tell you what brand it was or what company it was because I didn't have a human experience with them. But if I just spent 45 minutes talking to someone who was helping me with my credit card debt, okay, now I feel like I want to work with that company forever because she was so friendly and so helpful. So like-

You know, it would have been easier for me to fill out a form online and just submit that in less than, I don't know, five minutes, probably. But I would not be as attached to that company now as I am. So I do want to kind of dive into that with you a little bit because we talked about this of the balance between effort and ease. And I'm wondering, yeah, kind of you could share some like takes there from your like psychology perspective of that.

how we can balance that whenever we're trying to deliver a great customer experience. Yeah, I have been doing this for a long time. And early in my career, I believe the effortless experience was exactly what we want. There's books been written about it. It's like, we want to make it intuitive, no effort expended by the customer to get their needs met. There's even metrics, you know, like the customer effort score, which is highly predictive of whether or not someone's going to stay with your business or not, the degree to which they have to expend effort to get their needs met. So clearly, I...

There's a big case to be made for reducing effort. Then there's a guy who was based out of Asia and his name is Samson Lee. And he was a contrarian at the extreme. And he suggested that no good experience would be effortless.

That an effortless experience meant that I was not engaged at any level whatsoever. It was happening to me. I was a passive receptor of this experience. And because of that, I would not own it, value it in any way, see it as anything other than a transaction.

Well, again, here we are in these extremes, right? And I think the goal here is to figure out what is good effort and what is bad effort. And just like what is good profit and what is bad profit. So what if somebody keeps buying something from you on an automatic subscription and they're getting no value month after month? Is that good profit? No, it's bad profit. You effortlessly made money on them.

right? And you're just extracting money right out of their wallet without them paying attention. So it might be good for you to exert some effort to remind them that they have a subscription where they're getting absolutely no value from you by their usage. So when it comes to effort at the customer side, I think there are some kinds of things we need to do to feel ownership. And if you think about my favorite way to look at this is gamification. Like when we think about

loyalty programs or anything where I want to get to the next level. Oh, I'm going to tell you how stupid this is. I get, this is embarrassing. I get 75 cents a day from my health insurance carrier. If I walk 10,000 steps, I only get 25 cents a day. If I walk 5,000 steps, right? Every morning. The first thing I do is open up that app and I check to make sure I got enough hours sleep because I can make,

$2.50 at five nights of the week, I sleep seven hours. Like, do I have the gamification in my head or what? So I am opening this app first thing in the morning.

And I am walking all day and I'm checking my steps. And if I'm not quite there and it's nine o'clock at night, I'm going to go go outside in the dark and walk for 20. Do I need 25 cents? Absolutely not. Right. But is it effort that they are engaging me in?

Yeah.

Just push me. How did I do? You know, by midday. Yeah. But I'm the one checking it, playing it. It's, it's, I'm, I need help. I need mental help. Well, I've got my, my watch right here and I'm obsessed with tracking steps. My husband and I have a competition, so it's not even, it's not even a brand doing it to me. It's just my, my ultra competitive husband forcing me to do my steps. Yeah.

Now, I'm sure they could make it even easier for you guys to know that. But there's something about you checking. It's something about you investing in the monitoring of this thing. If they made it too easy and too obvious, I wonder if it would be quite as attractive. It's my personal mission. So, yeah, I think we have to figure the balance out. The point is...

If everything is pampered, we sometimes don't appreciate it. We don't sense that we had any mastery, which if you look at Daniel Pink's research on what creates engagement, whether that's employee engagement or customer engagement, it is mastery and purpose and autonomy, right? So I have the autonomy to check when I want to check. I have that mastery experience and I've convinced myself that there's a purpose to this in addition to the 75 cents.

Well, this example that you've given is a perfect example of making you the hero of the story. And that's what I think brands need to do. And you can't be the hero without any effort. You can't be the hero without mastering something. You can't be a hero without probably having companions that are helping support you, aka the person on the phone that you're calling when you need support, right? So...

I definitely think that's something that brands lose when they're looking for this like completely effortless experience is you think more so about efficiency and what you're doing as a brand and less so about how you can really make that customer feel like they're the hero of the story.

Amen. And that doesn't mean we should intentionally invoke effort on people that, you know, that is senseless. There's a lot of repetitive activities and tasks that we have technologies that solve against. Let's get some of those out of the way. But across a customer journey, there may be some steps you want customers to take in order to get access to something so that they feel that their exclusivity. I hate this line in marketing, which is you've earned it.

Like, get them, you know, get the Lamborghini. You've earned it. Like, well, if I have the money and, you know, maybe. But if I'm leveraging full credit on that, am I really? You know, I mean, we earning really is required some kind of action other than somebody telling me that I've earned it.

And I need to intrinsically believe I earned it, not just be told by somebody that I've earned something and maybe I haven't. And I know when somebody tells me I heard something that I didn't and that that creates equity theory issues for me psychologically when I feel like I'm being overvalued.

Give me a way to create value for me as part of our relationship so that I feel a celebratory moment. And then not only remove pain, which is part of our journey, but now celebrate my victory. Celebrating victory is pretty emotionally impactful for customers. Like give them that key when they got their house, like make that that key transfer celebration epic.

And that is because they've worked with you on the purchase process or they've worked with you on the building process. I mean, that's exactly what my realtor did after we got our house was like it was a whole hassle getting the house. And then you get this like nice gift that she gives you and it's a whole thing. Let's take photos. And you suddenly just your mind is wiped. Oh, it wasn't that hard to buy the house. We've got the key now. Yeah, that's a good example. And you and you did earn it. You did earn that one. Oh, well, yeah. Yeah.

Do you have any other good examples of this like back and forth between good friction and bad friction? Because when I think like bad friction, I think about when I do go to my health care provider or even like insurance companies and I have to fill out the same information over and over and over again. And I'm like, how is that not connected? How do you not already know my email is?

So like that to me is bad friction because it just annoys me. But then there's the good friction of like, oh, I actually had some like really good talk with my doctor or I got to do this thing that did take extra time, but it made me feel more supported. So I would love to hear just a few more examples. Sure. I'll give you I'll give you them from health care because that's where you went. And I'll join you since you've been kind enough to go on my tirades wherever. So let me let me take you on this little journey in health care. So I'm writing a book about one medical, which is purchased by Amazon. It's my most recent book. And

In it, we talk about some of the friction points that they removed. So in the early days, this guy by the name of Tom Lee is Harvard trained internal medicine guy and went on to Stanford Business School, was trying to change the way health care was delivered. And so he's focused on the pain points, asking lots of why, why, why, why, why do we do this? Why do you why could at that point you could only get an appointment when the office was open and you couldn't schedule an appointment outside of office hours? So, you know, he gets a bunch of technologists, develops an app. You can schedule any time that, you know,

across all the provider schedules using the technology, but, but also other pain points, like having to wait in a waiting room and then wait in an exam room and other pain points, like between the waiting room and the exam room, having to go and get weighed in, you might have the sniffles and you're going to go and have to get weighed in. Like it has no relevance to your, your care. It's just an artifact of the thing. And it creates unnecessary anxiety for people. If,

Health and weight and nutrition are relevant. And if it's annual physical, that's fine. But why do we make this just a de facto thing? So suffice it to say, he solved against most all of those those issues. They you can schedule an appointment anytime in your jammies for whenever there is availability. You can, you know, when the provider comes in,

You're going to get scheduled at a time. 97% appointments happen within three minutes. And that provider is going to come out of the treatment room to get you and walk you past the scale unless it's relevant and then take you in.

There are other elements of ease in that journey, right? So some of the other elements of ease are they're asking you, would you be willing to opt into AI as a note taker for our interactions? So then instead of me having to pay time to the chart, I can pay focus all my attention to you. Now that's the effort reducing side. Now let's go to where I create effort for you. So you have the app, you're using the app for all kinds of things. I'm push messaging you though.

And this push messaging is creating some friction for you because you're living your life just happy. You're 50 years of age. You're not. But, you know, I passed it at one point. Let's assume you're 50 years of age.

And you then get in your app and alert a notification. You need a colon screening. Oh, my gosh. Like that's friction in a giant way. Oh, by the way, we're also sending you a Cola guard type kit, which is nothing more than a colon screening. Oh, my gosh. You know, and but.

then I'm going to keep pushing you some notifications to you to try to remind you to send that kid in because guess what? If I don't produce that friction for you, the likely is you're going to avoid it against your own best interest. And my responsibility is to make your life miserable, not as bad as a colonoscopy, unless that kit says you probably need that as an immediate next step. And then guess what? That friction might've saved your life. So I think that,

That's where you have to say, I'm ready to annoy you at 50 and send you a kit and keep reminding you because I'm your partner in your wellness journey, giving you more days of wellness in your life. And I'm giving you more days of wellness and joy by not having to sit in a waiting room and an exam room. I'm always committed to this, whether that's through effort reduction or

or annoying you in ways that are in your interest. I love that example. All of that, I'm like, I want to switch my healthcare provider. Don't be listening, doctor. No, but that's fantastic. Yeah. And I think it's a really interesting piece there too, of like, I'm intentionally annoying you because I care about you. Like that's sort of the message that you get. That's the feeling you get from that story. Kind of switching gears slightly, but very much still aligned with this is,

how emotions play a role in this because genuinely you might think, oh, I just want my customers to feel joy. I just want them to feel happy. I just want them to have a brilliant, wonderful, rainbows and butterflies experience. But from what you just described, it sounds like that's not always where you want to go with everything. You don't always want to give them this super positive experience because you need to tell them, hey, this thing that's bad could be happening because I want to warn you about it.

So how do you think about tying emotions into these types of experiences and what are good emotions or bad emotions to be had by customers? Oh, this is a great question. It's really where I've spent my career because of the foundational things we've talked about as a psychologist. I understand that emotions drive behavior far more than than logic does.

We use our rational brain, the frontal cortex of our brain to explain everything we do and make it sound good to ourselves. Like this story we tell. Oh, it's a great story. Yeah. But our behaviors are swimming deeper in those limbic system emotions that are happening. So sometimes it's not about creating positive emotions. It's about relieving negative emotions.

And we're not talking just friction. We're talking about, in the case of health care, physical pain and suffering. I might not be able to make your experience wowful and joy and lots of, you know, clowns and balloons. I mean, that would absolutely freak you out. My job is to remove from you.

the pain and the suffering to try to find ways to help you get to baseline, not to be joyful and to do it in a kindly manner. I want you to feel cared for and cared about, but I don't necessarily need you to feel wowed.

And I think sometimes that the effort to create wow gets in the way of creating level experiences all around the wow. Like I want day in, day out consistency where people show that they care by the way they design the experience and the way they humanly engage me in the experience. That just gives me a sense of feeling trust and safety and comfort. Very Maslowian, if you will. The higher level wow stuff. That's great when you have it. It's super good for marketing.

It creates great virality and it's why people aspire to it because it's so splashy, cool. You know, I want to share the story, but in truth, it's not the way to roll every day because you can spend a lot of time seeking out wow. And everything behind, you know, past the wow is pretty uneven. So if you look at a Ritz Carlton where I've spent a lot of time, you know, both in a consulting place, but writing about them really, our goal is to create this elevated set of experiences,

of emotions enveloping you in your sensory experience in a nurturing environment. We want you to feel nurtured. That's different than maybe another brand experience. We don't want you to feel, you know, wow, and look at that, it's exciting and crazy. I mean, if it gets too exciting and crazy, it doesn't have the state.

gravitas of a Ritz Carlton. Now, occasionally you'll hear a story of Joshi the giraffe or somebody finds a kid's little stuffed animal left behind and the parents are bereft because their kid is looking for their comfort object. And so they'll tool it around all over Amelia Island Resort and put it on the golf cart and have it near the pool drinking whatever and sending the whole photo book with the animal back to the family. Those are wonderful wow stories.

But it's not. It's the little wows. It's the little extra paying attention to you. Those things make the difference. And the answer to your question and yet another long winded answer for me is, is that you have to think about consistent, positive, caring, connected emotions, connection, and then the wows can fly at the top every once in a while.

Is there any place for intentional, not intentionally causing like pain or harm, but intentionally causing a little bit more friction and not, I don't want to say negative because I don't think we ever want a brand to cause a negative experience, but is there any place for a little less wow, like wow?

Do you think there's any stories of that? I can't think of any. Let me just let me let me and the service recovery paradox is real. I mean, there is data to show that if you recover from a service breakdown, well, since most people don't, you actually strengthen your connection to your customer.

This has led people to go to the extreme and saying, well, then maybe we should intentionally put set up pratfalls in the experience so we can have designed recovery experience. I've literally been in these panel discussions and just wanted to say, wow. But the truth is that you don't need to create friction.

If you are in a relationship with customers, invariably you're going to have friction. It's a nature of business. It's a nature of people's needs against your operations, not always perfectly aligning. So to the degree that there will be friction, you don't need to go and artificially manufacture it. I think when you know there is a friction place in your business, it may not be fixable. There are things, you know, like you talk about your house build.

There are things like loan application processes and verification of this and that and documentation of this legal contracts and language required by law. You can't make that all as antiseptic as you might want to. Can't say, hey, just put your thumbprint here. We'll take care of all your paperwork and life's going to be grand. It's invariably a necessary evil of the process.

The point is, if you know where that is and you look at it in a very well-designed experience, you know right after it, you better do something to recover before the next important transaction or else you're going to end up a victim of peak end theory working against you. Well, and also preemptively letting people know, hey, this is going to be kind of painful. This is going to be kind of a

crunchy process that we have to work our way through. Like when I think about purchasing a home, my realtor was very clear, hey, like this is where it's going to get weird. This is where it's going to get a little bit awful. But then on the other side is this. So I think just not trying to hide where there might be that friction point is also something I would recommend.

And I love, you know, what's cool about that is also what that means for salespeople from the beginning of relationships. You know, we get so interested in saying, hey, I'm going to slice, dice, julienne, fry this for you. It's going to be so easy. It's going to be amazing. You're not going to believe all the benefits you're going to have. There's going to be no downside attributes. I mean, that whole puffery sales approach lasted a long time and still people are doing it.

I think being authentic to say, here are the strengths of our product. Here are some things you're going to experience over the course of the journey. We have heard from our customers that those pain points are kind of lost in the mix because of all of the positives that happen. And I'm going to be here telling you an honest lullaby.

It's not always going to be perfect, but it's going to be great in the end. And you're going to have a gorgeous house and you're going to be happy you went through this journey, right? That honest lullaby storytelling in sales and throughout the customer journey with that anticipatory element of we've got a curve coming up ahead. You might, we're going to have to hit some brakes here. It's not going to be as fun as on the open highway. Yeah. Yeah. Really quick. I do want to open it up to Rose. I haven't checked in on you. Do you have any questions? Yeah.

Yay. I do. Joseph, I'm curious. We talked a little bit about this earlier about the difference in generations and how different generations might react to sitting on hold with somebody. So specifically, I'm curious how you've seen different generations react to things like gamification or hyper personalization or conversing with AI. Is there a significant difference between those reactions or is it are those strategies generally pretty effective and reliable across the board?

Well, they definitely skew younger. I mean, all the technology things skew younger. You know, anyone who's a digital native as opposed to a digital alien like me, I think, has a natural affinity to those things. But there's some fascinating research. You know, even the younger demographics say that our reliance on technology has weakened our social skills.

Like they are self-acknowledging. Like we get it that we're not quite as socially nuanced as maybe people who aren't looking at screens all day long. They also, I think, at some level have some concern for the long-term isolation that comes from these things. They understand that connections are made through these platforms, but they're different.

than when you are with a person and looking in their eye and trying to connect with them. So I think we definitely see preferences, but there are some cautionary tales. Like if you look at AI and drive-through, for example,

Every generation seems to be struggling a bit with it, particularly because it's not quite there yet in fast food drive-through. And so now I've got this technology that I'm maybe more agreeable to if I'm young, but I'm also more likely to have a bunch of kids in my car making all kinds of noises and more likely to have a dog in my car, you know, barking up a storm. And now the AI can't differentiate from the sound isolation. So now you're kind of almost miffed. Like this thing that I have come to believe in is producing really great

clunky experience for someone like me. It's like, I don't, you know, I'm past the age for a lot of that kind of noise, but I'm just wondering why you can't just get me a person. Cause that's what I've always had. We're, we're adjusting. And if the value exceeds the pain, then we'll adopt, uh,

But at different rates. Just following up on that, I wonder, have you seen anything about geographically, like in the US versus Europe, that they might adopt these technologies a little differently? Yeah, I think there is plenty of literature. But first off, let's start with Asia. If you were to go to Asia right now, AI is so prolific. I spend a lot of time consulting in Singapore. Yeah.

And forever, I mean, sorry, I do love my country. Please don't get me wrong. But I don't believe everything is best in the US. I think the more you travel, you realize- Blasphemy, blasphemy. I know, I know, I know. I'm gone. I grew up traveling around, yeah. My dad was in the military, so I grew up,

all over the place. And I 100% echo what you're saying. Yeah. I still want to live here. Like, don't I'm not asking to go anywhere else. But I think sometimes you have to see things in other parts of the world to appreciate. So years and years ago, you know, I was seeing in Singapore technology telling me where in the next five blocks I could park, where there were parking spaces, right? Digital display boards.

Now that's coming online in the United States. That's cool. You know, you were going to the airport in Singapore and you weren't touchless all the way. You didn't have to deal with, you know, an agent to get into customs and security, but they have great security. And then, you know, they were pulse surveying you immediately upon walking through the thing to get a sense of anything else they could do.

It's been amazing. You know, in their use of robots, for example, in other parts of the world, far more adopted. Now it's a novelty in the U.S. And, you know, there's a there's a almost fully, fully automated robot based restaurant in L.A. But in Singapore, there's tons of those. Right. Like and it's just common experience. Right.

So I think there is adoption differences in different parts of the world. And what we should be doing is looking at why is that okay? Is it culturally relevant to them in a different way? And how do we position it differently?

to make sure that we have the best of both in the end. I think too, there's something interesting here around emotions. So like I can be more forgiving to a mess up from a person than I can for a robot. You know, like I'm less likely to be like, oh, you suck, this is awful. But if a robot brings my food and it's the wrong food or they like drop it or something, I'm like, I'm never coming back to that restaurant, like stupid robot, right? So I think that our capacity for forgiveness

you know that human understanding or that human connection we just cannot mirror with robots or ai i love that and not only do we have it as the consumer in response to the breakdowns that might come through those channels but i think the technology is still going to have that problem with us like the ai strengths are knowing my preferences so that you can personalize my experience

I just don't feel the warm fuzzies. I don't get the feels from AI. I mean, I can get allured by the great empathy built into the code and, oh, really good question you've just asked me, Joseph. Thank you so much for that thoughtful. You're so brilliant and so smart. Exactly. That's a perfect next decision to make. Like, yeah, right. You are a large language model. I know you're not real. And in fact, it's kind of engineered disingenuine issues

you know emotion and so that becomes actually a little bit of a backlash issue for me i i actually whenever i can give instructions to my ai just to kind of strip out all that puffery i don't really need to be validated i need solutions i don't have time to read how smart i am or how great that decision was because i know you're telling that to all the boys you know um and and really i don't need that i need solutions and i think this is the challenge i think that's why

We as human beings should use EI to govern AI. The emotional intelligence factors that we have should be the things that we leverage uniquely in our relationships. While the AI gives us all the tools, the wisdom, the strategy, the amalgamation of data we can't process anywhere close. So I'm a big fan of

of emotion and the fact that AI is just doing its best to mimic it, but will never be it. Now I may be wrong about that one in 30, 40 years, you know, call me, but if we even have phones. - Well, yeah, we'll just like telepathically communicate at that point, right? - Exactly, exactly. - And it won't even be us, it'll just be our AI versions of ourselves talking to each other. - I don't have time to talk to you then. No, my AI clone will be talking to your AI clone.

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In fact, Salesforce's support experience is now powered by AgentForce. See the future in action at help.salesforce.com. Well, what's interesting, though, what you just shared about the GPT, right? So if I'm talking to chat GPT, it gives me this whole paragraph about how great I am and how great that question is and da-da-da. And I'm like, I don't care about that. I just need the answer directly.

Yeah.

who are a little bit more familiar with technology like you and I are probably like, oh, you know, just scrub all that. Give me what I need. But there are a whole, I'm sure, demographic of people that actually resonate with the AI telling them these things that are a little bit more personable. Well, and look, people are willing to suspend disbelief for all kinds of things in theater, particularly. Right. And they're also willing to do it in business. But I think there's a point when the reality penetrates people.

And then you go, wait, this is not real. And you can continue to want to hold on to it, but it's hard. I mean, there are people who actively are in this, are dating their AI, right? Like they've got their, you know, their clones that they're connected to and it's real for them and it's better than a person. It's easier. But, you know,

But you know what? They're going to wake up one day, I think, fundamentally and still know that that person is never going to show. And it's never really a person. It was always kind of a learning model of what you want, not a reality. Yeah. Yeah. Do you watch Black Mirror at all? No. Is it something I have to do?

I highly recommend it. I think that you would be interested in it. It's very dark sci-fi, like what the future could look like if AI takes over. So there's a bunch of different episodes. Anyway, total side point, just-

something that they have completely. Yeah. I don't know that my AI would have recommended that for me because it's probably not on my list, but here's the cool part. It's a discovery that you as a creative person could extract from what you've heard from me. And I think this continues to be a challenge for AI in the future too. It will narrow my focus more and more and more based on decisions I've made in the past. And it'll deny me some of the discovery experiences because that's so out of the box. Um,

you know, to recommend. So I think that's just a valuable example of what humanity offers in the face of a great show about dark. Dark AI. Well, and it's like the, yeah, you get trapped in the algorithm. It's just like what we see with social media, right? Where I'm going to keep getting fed the same things that I click. I ran this experiment the other day where I was looking for something to eat.

I was like, I just want to make a new recipe. So I went through an Instagram reels and I was like, OK, I'm only going to watch anything that's food. So I just scrolled really rapidly through it, stopped when it was food, scrolled rapidly, stopped when it was food. And it almost like I would say less than 60 seconds knew that was what I was looking for. And all the rest were just food. So like it's so impressive how these algorithms can start to recognize what we're looking for, what we want.

And it's also very dangerous, right? Because now I'm just trapped in my own little silo of what I think. And if that's what all my GPT is telling me or all of my social media algorithm is telling me and I'm never, ever talking to another human across the way, yeah, we're going to definitely miss out on a lot of opportunities where there could be synergies that we would have otherwise missed.

So I got into this scenario in a GPT the other day. I have no idea how this happened, but once I got in it, it really learned and locked. So it treated me like an employee who failed on all of their promises. I swear, that's what it was. So it would say, I can help you with this advanced branding strategy, but you need to give me 24 hours.

Well, I was like, this is an LLM. It should only operate when it's engaged in some kind of interaction. But I'm thinking maybe this is a new iteration. Like I'm just not aware. So 24 hours later, I'd come back and it goes, I'm so sorry. I was unable to do that. I'm trying to perfect it. I'm getting the timings, blah, blah, blah. Can you give me eight more hours?

Like I was in this death spiral every... So after a few of these, I finally called my son who's a software engineer. I said, Andrew, is there any advanced AI that's actually working outside of the Q environment? And he goes, not that I can think of. And so I finally said, okay, it's enough. You failed me every single day for the last three days, never delivering on your promises. And you are an LLM and why am I even talking to you, right? Like as you get into these moments and you think...

wow, that's the world we could be getting into where we don't even know if the information we're getting from it is reality or an aberration to some scenario that we just inadvertently created. Yeah.

Or it's just curated again to this like algorithm idea to something that you would like. Right. Like I actually want if I'm going to give you some copy to edit, I want you to tear it apart. I want you to be like a parent that I can't satisfy. Like I want you to make it bad. Like tell me what I'm doing wrong versus telling me that I'm just this great, fantastic writer. Like I don't need that. But think about it's all going to get more and more similar. I think that's the challenge. Unlike the recommendation you curated for me a minute ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, going back a little bit more to this, like, would you say EI to support AI? Yeah. I kind of want to dive into that a little bit more because I think when a lot of people talk about empathy or emotional intelligence and try to tie that into AI, they think what we're talking about. Like, oh, we'll make the GPT talk more human. We'll ask them how their day's going. Like, I don't I'm sorry. I don't want to tell this AI thing.

phone person or chat bot that how my day is going. Like that just seems so fake and unreal. But where we can apply EI into AI is how the algorithm is written. Like I trust you as a brand to feed me something that's actually supportive or going to help me or you're going to help solve my problem. Maybe even before it happens again.

So, like, I would just like to hear a little bit more from you about this idea of how I can actually support AI without making it more conversational. Yeah, it gets down to understanding what would help you in your life and understanding what are the solutions that help most people and determining was that a sufficient completion of that solution for you or do you need more?

And then being able to give more based on, well, you know, help me understand this or that about you so that I can now offer you solutions that are more curated for people who answer A versus B. And did that solve it for you completely? If not, here's, you know, let's determine this factor. I was thinking I was playing 20 questions with my grandkids the other day, you know, and I think there is that sort of quality of let me ask you questions that, you know, curate

and narrow down the focus. Did we resolve it there? No, now we have to ask another question and get to another layer. And then once we get to the layer that's sufficient for you, we can preview what's coming next. If at some point in the future, you also want this next layer, if this becomes relevant to you, let me know.

So I think that's where value comes. It doesn't come in that just saying pretty words. And worse yet, I'm very concerned that we're going to get to that NLP kind of thing where I see the words you use in your chat and then I echo back the words because that makes you like me more because I'm like you. There's an affinity language thing. So we're going to end up getting seduced into that.

thinking this is our friend who really talks and thinks like me, when really what we need is somebody, somebody, something to offer ideas and solutions and suggestions based on data modeling that gets us closer to a more effective solution. Well, and with the intention of I'm actually here to support you. So like your story earlier about healthcare and, hey, I'm going to kind of pester you a little bit and annoy you because this is something that's important. I would

I would rather see that inside this algorithm or inside the system of like, I'm going to be honest with you or tell you the thing that's wrong or look out for your blind spots instead of everything is golden and rosy and wonderful. Yeah. And to that point, you know, in Zappos in the old days, if you called up Zappos, the customer loyalty team, and you said, you need these shoes this size by this date because I'm going to my reunion and I want to look really cool in my retro chuk.

You know, Chuck Taylor's in lime green. And we look in our inventory. We don't have them right as the customer loyalty team member. The first thing we're going to say is we failed you. Bummer. That's not OK. Let me look into shoes dot com or, you know, whatever Nordstrom's rack and find out, see if they have them. And as best we can tell in their inventory, we're not in real time, but as best we can tell, they do. So let me send you over there.

Right. Like AI is not going to do that. It's going to come up with the next best alternative. It's, you know, at least most of the way it's programmed. So suffice it to say, I think that the cool thing about the Zappos story, by the way, just as a referent point, is that we'd also send a bounce back coupon to come and use Zappos again. And redemption of bounce back coupons after a failed service or, you know, recovery or as a service recovery effort aren't really all that great. Maybe 30 percent if you do really well. But they were using they were getting like 75 percent redemption of these coupons.

Because we were saying, because we ultimately said, we can't help you buy our product, but we're going to help you by going to a competitor. Yeah.

And normally, you know, you think, well, if you can't have the product I want in inventory, why would I give you the time of day again? It's like taking milk out of your refrigerator, determining it's spoiled and putting it in to drink another day. Like, why would you go back to that same thing? But people did go back because the value of caring about our relationship was more important than the transactional interaction today. So to your point, I think it'll be interesting to see if we can get to an AI that really does direct us

to what we need as opposed to what it thinks we want. Yeah. I mean, my hunch is, and this is like a total tangent, but my hunch is that we're going to all have our own little personal AI assistants. So versus me relying on a brand to have an AI agent or AI support structure, I'm going to have my own little guy that I've trained. I call him a guy, whatever. Like I'm going to have something, a system. That's because you can't train your husband. That's why you call it a guy. You want to train a guy. Finally. Okay, go ahead. Yes, finally.

Finally, yes. As a man, I know we should be trained. We're just not trainable. I gave you the step-by-step solution. Why have you not done it? Why aren't you just doing it? Yeah. No, no. But like, I think we will have our own personal AI agents or assistants that are going to support us with this kind of stuff. So rather than me relying on Zappos to help me find Dornstrom Rack has this shoe in stock, my AI agent itself is going to do that, which I think is like,

It's going to be a totally different experience working with customers in the future because your customer may not even be a human. It's going to be the AI agent version of the human that wants that product. So it's like a total, like what experience are we offering then? Yeah.

You're five steps ahead on the chessboard. And I was like thinking I was two because let me tell you where I see it going. And I'm not quite as far as you like right now. Amazon bought this company called One Medical. Right. So if you were to, you know, go to Amazon, you can now get your primary care. Your app will give you a triage to say, do I need to go? Should I just hit the button? Treat me now?

let's say I'm going to San Diego tomorrow from Florida. So when I land, if I'm not feeling well, if I click it, I'll go through symptoms. It'll help me curate my symptoms to decide whether what level of care I need. And so let's assume it says treat me now is what you need. So I click the button five minutes, maybe at most on hold while they're finding a provider in California, right? Because I had to have to be licensed there to write my prescription because that's where I'm physically present.

So they'll get me that. They'll write the script. They'll send it to Amazon Pharmacy all backstage. It'll be delivered to my hotel, you know, in four hours or next day, depending upon what's in the formulary. So all that is cool, right? But I'm thinking a couple of years down the road that I'm going to be able to go to Amazon like I go to Uber Eats or Grubhub. And there's going to be all these different things I could purchase. I could purchase primary care. I could purchase medicine.

all the products that HIMSS has or HERS has or women's menopause specialists or nutrition specialists. And it's going to be just a marketplace, much like

much like we do in Grubhub. We go to that place as the curator of a marketplace. And that's the way I kind of see that happening. But if you take it one step further or two, we're in your world, where it's your AI that's going to go interface with that marketplace and say, of all these offerings, I'm going to evaluate. I know your preferences, your style. We're selecting this option for you. And if it doesn't quite work out, it'll learn what didn't work out about that. And you'll never, ever have to

Think again. But yeah, I love where you're at. You're way ahead of me. Joy. And yeah, I just sit and watch more Black Mirror. That's the ultimate goal of humanity is to think not. That's funny. Well, no, I mean, I think when I think more about these AI tools, like there is this version of the future that does, it could be scary. It could be like the Black Mirror-esque version of it. But for me, it's just optimistic. Like I'm

If I can have my grocery shopping done by this AI agent that's trained on all the types of foods that I like, you know, the type of if this isn't in stock, then that's that's what I want. It would save me so much more time so I can spend time hopefully with people. Right. Like my version of this is not one where I'm spending more time alone. It's where I can spend more time connecting. And and I think that's where like the message that I want to keep pushing out there for

people is like, how can we just build that? Because you talked about at the beginning, there is a loneliness epidemic, right? And so how do we use these tools to support that? Yeah. I mean, I ask you right now, do you think that your generation is spending more time with people than my generation did at your age? So where did we go wrong? I mean, there have been

There were congressional hearings in the 60s to say, what are we going to do with all of our free time when we have all this technology? Right. Like 1960s, they were envisioning a future where people were going to be just so idle and so confused about how much time they have. I see efficiencies driven, but I don't necessarily see connection being forged. No, but I think it's I think it's an opportunity for us to step into that because I think we kind of missed it. Like whenever we went back.

Internet's invented. Email's invented. We're going to be more efficient. I was just watching a commercial from, I can't remember what it was, like IBM or some big brand of like, email's going to give you your lunchtime back. Now you won't need to work at the desk. And hilarious because email is now part of my lunch experience. So like all these ideas of technology giving you more time has ultimately resulted in the opposite of that. So I...

So my breakfast looks like this. I mean, I have Alexa starting my day, giving me my weather, giving me my news updates, all curated in its, you know, its workflow. I'm still looking at my phone and sometimes I'm actually getting food in my mouth, sometimes on my shirt. But,

But my point is, what the heck? How did what is going on? And I'm not I'm you know, then I'll have to say Alexa play again because I missed something because I was too busy tracking the visual content. Because you literally can't multitask like it's not possible for your brain to do it. Right. So, yeah.

And I think that's, I think it's like everything with life where we just swing on this pendulum, right? So we go from, oh, you know, we're over here and we've way too hard invested in technology. Like we've got social media addiction. People aren't spending time with each other. Hopefully my optimistic self says we can realize that, see that and swing back. And like, when I look at,

You know, I have a three year old son. When I talk to other parents, they're all on that idea of like shifting back away from too much TV, too much engagement. How can we get our kids together in person? So I think we've hit it hard here, but we're going to come back to the middle ground a little bit. Then we'll swing too far some other direction because that's just what humanity does.

But I'm hoping we're on the path where AI will help support us to be a little bit more human. You're the future. I pray that. And I think, you know, as somebody who's been in this business for a long time, the goal is for us to use our humanity to the greatest degree possible to create human connection, to use our tools to create

less effortful experiences, except in those moments where we want people to exert some effort to fill ownership and engagement. That's the goal. And if people stay focused on that goal, I think they will win. It is the people who get trapped in the dichotomy of giving us no humans and only chatbots, the people who get caught in this thing of that everybody just wants slow, luxurious human experience and can't afford to find the talented people to make it happen. So it's got to be

it's gotta be a brave new world where we focus both on connection and efficiency. Yeah, I love that. So Joseph, I would love to hear more advice, more practical advice that you can give to owners, CEOs, executives on how they can train up their frontline employees to sort of create this great, wonderful customer experience. Yeah, it starts not practical. It starts pretty high level because we have to have purpose to drive this. So it starts with saying, what do we want every customer to feel every single time?

So let's take Starbucks. Historically, that has been to create this place called the third place, place between work and home where people feel they're in affordable luxury. It's kind of changed now to uplifting moments. So I want to create uplifting moments in the life of the customer. And people are moving fast. So we got to make those moments happen.

So in order to do that, if that's our aspiration and we're signed on to create that and we're experienced creators every single day and every interaction, no excuses, then where are the what are some of the things I can do as a person to make that happen? Really specifically behaviors, whether that's recognizing your name, remembering your pet's name, whatever it might be. There are some very tactical things I can do on a day to day. But then there's also process things I need to do. And there's pain removal things and there's empathy based.

design in the moment and more macro. In the moment, I can have something like a strategy that Starbucks uses called the customer walk, where we assign a different barista each shift to go and walk from the parking lot as if they're a customer, following customers, standing in line, listening to what they're saying, thinking, feeling, doing, experiencing, seeing, really empathy mapping in real time, if you will. And then I'm fixing things too. So if I see the condiment areas is in disarray, I'm going to fix that.

I'm going to if I see smudges on the glass because I'm standing on the customer side of the glass where the glass is first and then the food items, as opposed to the reverse when you're on the other side of the counter. If I'm seeing the smudges, I'm going to clean them. If it's something that needs to be escalated for a fix, like somebody mowed down the sign in the parking lot, you know, I'm going to escalate that to a manager. That's on the real time. Then it's all about innovation strategies. How do we create a place that inspires people?

What are some of the things we could do on a routine and regular basis? Well, it's not inspiring to wait a long time. It's not inspiring to have product variation. People come up with innovative ideas all the time and are rewarded accordingly in that culture for driving that outcome. So I think it comes into innovation in the future state.

specifically operating in the now with strategies that enable people to see and fix, and then just the humanization of your line of sight to our bigger vision and what you can do in every interaction every time.

Love that. Now we kind of want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about your experience as a customer recently. I would love for you to share a story of a business that sort of blew you away recently. So I went to a restaurant, had a very lovely meal. The owner came over at the end, table touch. Didn't, you know, didn't do anything remarkable, but.

But then he kind of asked me where I was going. And I told him it was I was out of town at the time. And I told him where I was going. And he walked out with me to the door. And then he pointed where I would want to start. Now, look, I have GPS. I can do all that like. But why was the owner willing to step out of his building, hold the door open to me and consider my interaction?

an extension of where I was going. It, to me, smacked of somebody who understood that right after that, he could go back, make another table touch, look for a way to extend the experience outside of the doors of his business. And here I am talking about it today, right? And so for me, I think that is...

What we need to be thinking about, what is the next step? How do we take the experience outside of the most narrow focus and demonstrate we care without? I mean, that's a pretty high touch one, right? But it was no expense. And so whether it's high touch or low expense or whatever you do, where are you seating yourself in the mind of the customer beyond the transaction?

I had almost a very similar experience at a bar here. My mom was visiting and we went to this bar and it was like great live music playing. I'm like, yes, my mom gets to have this like true Austin experience. And we get there and there's like nowhere to sit. So we kind of stand awkwardly in the back and we're like, oh, okay, maybe we won't be here that long. And the owner, I have to assume it's the owner of the bar, comes around and he sees us standing there and he goes and fetches a bar stool for my mom. And then he walks all around the bar

And then he finds me one. And then we've got two bar stools. And I'm like, I've never been at a bar like this, especially this crowded in the middle of the city. Like you could have easily just been blind to our customer experience. And he got us these two seats and we stayed way longer than we would have if we were just awkwardly standing in the back. So a, you know, if you're talking about ROI and customer experience, you could directly say we spent more money because we were able to sit down.

But B, now I'm like telling all my friends, go to this place, go to this bar. They're super nice. It made it like look a little not great on the outside. But I tell you, they are like they're going to treat you right when you go in there and you're going to get some great music and have a great experience. So I just I think those little things are like where you're seeing where the what the customer is actually doing, what experience they're having can change. Like now I'm going to write rave about you as as a fan. My friend Jean Bliss wrote a book called Would You Do This to Your Mother?

I think it's a pretty good question for a customer experience. And in your case, would he done that for his mother? Yes. And he did that for your mother as well. Yeah. Love that.

OK, Joseph, I got a book coming out soon and you've written several other ones. So where can our audience find you and stay up to date with what you're working on? Yeah, I'm on number 13, lucky number 13 book. And you can find me at Joseph Michelli dot com in the show notes. I'm sure it has me spelled correctly. That's I'm I'm everywhere under that handle, whether that's in LinkedIn or on my website is Joseph Michelli dot com. Oh, and I have to ask you, can you just plug your book a little bit? The one that's coming out, what's it called and when we'll be ready?

It's called All Businesses Personal, and it talks about human-centered and technology-aided design and execution. And when is it ready? The book is out now. Awesome. We'll go check it out. And thank you, Joseph, so much for joining. Thank you.