CX Passport

The One With the Retention Revelation – Daniel Granja Baltazar E236

Rick Denton Season 4 Episode 236

What's on your mind? Let CX Passport know...

Why do so many companies chase new customers when the math clearly proves that retention wins every time? Daniel Granja Baltazar joins from Rotterdam to unpack the “retention revelation”... how conversion rate optimization (CRO) is really about experience, not just clicks. Daniel’s global lens from the Netherlands to Brazil gives a fresh take on blending sales, marketing, and CX into one connected journey.

✈️ 5 First-Class Insights

  • Conversion is the outcome, not the goal. Real CRO success starts with understanding the customer’s experience.
  • Retention beats acquisition. Companies still pour money into getting new customers, while neglecting why current ones leave.
  • Listen before assuming. Numbers reveal what’s happening... but only talking to customers reveals why.
  • Bridge the silos. Sales, marketing, and customer service thrive when united by shared goals and active communication.
  • Empathy drives everything. The best in sales, marketing, and CX are curious first, persuasive second.

🕓 CHAPTERS

00:00 Welcome to Rotterdam
1:40 CRO vs CX: What’s the real difference?
4:24 The retention revelation
7:08 Why companies ignore their data’s advice
10:27 Rewarding existing customers
12:33 Global differences in customer culture
15:08 First Class Lounge
18:09 The watchmaker side hustle
19:34 The Wolf of Wall Street myth of sales
21:27 Empathy as the CX superpower
22:56 Breaking the silos
25:44 How qualitative insights drive smarter decisions
28:33 Talk to your customers... or you’re doing it wrong

🔗 Guest Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgbaltazar/

Watch store: https://uniqwatchmods.nl/

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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed are those of the hosts and guests and should not be taken as legal, financial, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified attorney, financial advisor, or other professional regarding your specific situation. The opinions expressed by guests are solely theirs and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of the host(s).

Rick Denton (00:19)
Welcome back CX Passport travelers. Today we're headed to the Netherlands to meet Daniel Granja Baltazar. Daniel's path has flexed in some fascinating ways from sales and recruitment into digital marketing and now with a strong focus on conversion rate optimization, AKA CRO. Along the way, he's seen the friction and the magic of bringing together sales, marketing, and customer experience.

What stands out with Daniel is not just his data-driven CRO mindset, but also his conviction that genuine listening and connection matter just as much. His career has taken him across borders with an internship in Paris and a study exchange in Brazil, giving him a front row seat to different customer cultures. That global perspective adds some spice to how he thinks about customers today. Daniel, welcome to CX Passport.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (01:14)
Thank you, Rick. Thank you ⁓ for having me.

Rick Denton (01:17)
Yeah, and where

are we talking to you today? I know the Netherlands, but where specifically?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (01:21)
Yeah, I'm dialing in from Rotterdam. So the city where I live and where I was born and raised as well.

Rick Denton (01:25)
All right.

Excellent. Well, that's exciting to be in your hometown today. I know that when we talked earlier, you mentioned you have spent a lot of time thinking about CRO, conversion rate optimization, and customer experience optimization. Are those aiming at the same objective or is there a tension between?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (01:40)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think it kind of depends who you ask this question to. Because if you ask this to some people who work in CRO or some people work in CX or CXO, they will say, no, it's different. It's not the same. But I think CRO conversion rate optimization, kind of suffers from the fact that it has a poor choice of name, so to say, of naming.

Rick Denton (02:16)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (02:17)
So for a lot of outsiders, when they think about conversion rate optimization, they literally think, well, it's about optimizing the conversion rate. So usually what people think about is I want better conversions on the landing page, or I want more sales to happen on my website, or I want my email campaign to show better conversion numbers. The whole flaw with that way of thinking,

Rick Denton (02:36)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (02:46)
is that the conversion rate is not, how do you say that? The conversion rate is an end result. It's not something you chase for. It's something that happens as a consequence. So I think where the similarity is between CRO and CXO, customer experience optimization, is that you should take the customer or potential customers in mind. What kind of experience are they having? Whether it is on a website,

Rick Denton (03:00)
Mmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (03:16)
via ⁓ email campaigns or even in the MyEnvironment, like the close off environment for customers, we should think if we place ourselves in their shoes, what are they experiencing? What are we doing well? And what can we improve? ⁓ And where CRO is really good at is showing that with A-B testing and all these ⁓ quantitative research methods, ⁓ we can actually test and see what's working.

Rick Denton (03:30)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (03:46)
But I think an opportunity that's missed a lot is also the qualitative research side. So using surveys or actually interviewing customers or potential customers.

Rick Denton (03:52)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I want to get into some of that quant versus qual aspect of it ⁓ a little later. I do like what you're, you're pointing out there that I get that people tend to label and put themselves in silos and that sort of thing. But ultimately we are talking about if we identify the customer's needs, well, then their conversion, if you will, will accelerate at a greater rate. I know that when I'm thinking about CRO, before talking with you,

Daniel Granja Baltazar (04:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (04:24)
I, my brain immediately goes to new customers. But when we were talking, you mentioned that the role of the CRO is also there about retaining existing customers. How can this conversion focus play in both worlds? Is it complimentary or is it conflicting between the new and the renewing?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (04:42)
I think it's complimentary. I think the whole acquisition versus retention game, so to say, is something that not only is CRO, but also if we look at marketing, usually there's a lot of focus on getting new customers in and not really enough focus about thinking why are existing customers unhappy and actually leaving us. ⁓ It's a very simple math exercise that it's always...

Rick Denton (04:56)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (05:11)
doesn't matter which industry, which country you're located. ⁓ It's always less expensive. It's more affordable to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones. ⁓ Even if you're doing like everything organically and not using any paid media, then still the effort that you're putting ⁓ into creating all that content and making sure that people know about your company, get to know your products, get in touch with sales and eventually convert.

Rick Denton (05:22)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (05:40)
is always much more expensive than just looking at the existing customer base and say, Hey, what are we doing well? And more importantly, what are we, what should we improve? And then the question is, how should we improve it? And I think a lot of organizations get stuck in that last part, the how should we improve it? So if for example, in the data can see that people are unhappy or leaving at a certain stage.

Rick Denton (05:52)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (06:10)
And then everyone wants to know why is that the case? What can we do about it? And too many companies get stuck at making assumptions about the numbers. While the reality is you should just talk to them. You should just figure out like what's happening and more importantly, how can we fix it? Yeah.

Rick Denton (06:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Can I ask

you about the, when I've asked that question before, you're right, the math is proven. It's better to retain than it, and less costly to retain than it is to bring in the new. And I love it that you talked about it. doesn't matter the industry. It doesn't matter the country. That is universally true. What I've had trouble getting my head wrapped around is, okay, then why? Companies are pat themselves on the back, break their arm almost, reaching back there to pat themselves on the back.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (06:47)
Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (06:57)
with how good they are with data. If the data is saying focus on your renewing, why is there so much energy pushed upfront in the acquiring the new?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (07:08)
Yeah, that's a good question. And I think it's partially kind of a shiny object syndrome, you know, like, you know, it's, it's more exciting to do a new marketing campaign about a new product or service and try to get new customers in. And people tend to get a little bit bored after a while when it's like, ⁓ now it's the same old thing that we need to do. I kind of feel that the retention game is more about looking at the structure that's already there.

Rick Denton (07:15)
Okay.

huh.

Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (07:37)
and finding out where the leakages are and how you should fix them. While the acquisition part is also often focused on like new channels, new ways of getting new customers in. ⁓ And also if I speak for myself, right, if I'm doing the same thing for far too long, I get bored as well. I think a lot of marketers, like a lot of humans in general have that problem that we get a lot of energy from something that's new at the beginning.

Rick Denton (07:50)
Mm-hmm.

Ha ha ha.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (08:07)
⁓ we get even more energy once we start to master it, but that kind of newness effect starts to fade out. And that's where the borad kind of sets in. And a lot of people, when that tends to happen, tend to pick up other projects, focus on other things. While if you look at the business, like from a helicopter kind of view, ⁓ it is as important to acquire new customers as it is to, ⁓ keep existing customers in because.

Rick Denton (08:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (08:37)
Yeah, doesn't matter what the numbers are, right? Like even if we would say for every customer leaving, there's two new customers coming in. If we still know that out of those two customers, there's one customer leaving, I can tell you at the end of the year, we do the math and the bottom line is negative because those acquisition costs are too expensive. customers that are leaving, if they're really unsatisfied with the product or service are going to make negative advertising for you.

Rick Denton (08:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that absolutely makes some sense. When you're talking about kind of the energy of it, I felt it though, as a customer, ⁓ in the product world, it feels like some of the products that I use, even just for this production, there's some features being added all the time. And one of the products that I use, I'm actually leaving them as a customer because they said, Hey, we put in all these great new features and we have tripled. I'm not exaggerating tripled our cost.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (09:54)
Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (10:10)
to you and I said, I don't need them, I'm out. If you had focused on just retaining me as the customer with the features that I needed rather than giving me things I didn't need. And I think a lot of it is what you said, hey, I'm a product team, I'm paying for a product team. They're just sitting around. I need them developing something new.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (10:27)
Yeah. I think there's also like internal pressures, you know, for like the new stuff, like what kind of new things are coming out. And I think product teams are definitely feeling that pressure, also getting those questions asked. So yeah, suddenly you turn into feature factory instead of just optimizing what's also there. And if we talk about ⁓ rewarding existing customers,

Rick Denton (10:42)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (10:55)
I don't know how it is in the U.S. Rick, but here in the Netherlands, we have this very toxic trade that the best deals in telecommunications are for the new customers. And the existing ones, hey man, we're really glad you stay with us, but the deal is not so great for you. And if we talk about acquisition retention again, that sends a very wrong signal, right? Like it's kind of, imagine going to a party, ⁓

Rick Denton (11:05)
Yeah

We've-

Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (11:24)
to a club or let's say a restaurant where you're the guest who comes, let's say, basically every week. And they know you by name, they know what you eat, like everything. And then I come in and I'm the new customer and I get 50 % discount and the best table. You'd be pissed, rightfully so, right?

Rick Denton (11:36)
Yeah.

Right. Right. I love that. I

love that example. I can tell you this in the U S from our mobile industry, we've gotten better that the mobile companies are starting to recognize, okay, these deals are for everyone. It's our, our internet providers that are still ⁓ languishing in the past. Now a lot of it has to do with where's the competition and where is it not? I like that we're talking about the different countries there because you in your experience, you've got multiple countries under your belt. Even as you were talking about that first answer,

Daniel Granja Baltazar (12:01)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (12:14)
that some of the things are universal across countries and cultures. And then certainly there are things that are different, like we just described there. You did that internship in Paris. You had that exchange in Brazil. What did you notice about the differences in customer culture across those places, and how are you applying it today?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (12:33)
Yeah, I would even add to that. before joining Vodafone Sego three years ago, I was six years working at different digital agencies. And the last one, Depth is an international ⁓ one. So I also had customers in like the Benelux region, German speaking countries, ⁓ UK, Scandinavia. One thing I definitely noticed is for example, the German speaking countries, they care a lot about privacy.

Rick Denton (12:51)
So you're all over. Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (13:01)
What do you do with their data? What are you storing? What aren't you storing? It also has to do with the past. Like, especially if you look at Germany, like the Eastern half was on their communist regime where people were heavily surveillance ⁓ by the government. So there's kind of this distrust of like, okay, you're a company, you want my data. Like, what are you gonna do with it? That's very different compared to, for example, the Netherlands or...

Rick Denton (13:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (13:31)
Scandinavia or even what I saw in Brazil. I think if we look at markets in themselves like Latin America for example compared to Europe you can say that in the e-commerce part Latin America is lagging a bit behind which is not surprising because they started later also had less investments but they're catching up at a much faster rate.

So I would say the difference in like e-commerce maturity is quite big at the moment, but the gap is becoming considerably smaller in the coming years. And I'm really convinced that five to 10 years from now, if we go to conferences, which are vastly dominated by speakers from Europe, North America, and like Australia, New Zealand, I have a feeling that

Rick Denton (14:07)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (14:29)
Latin America is going to be much more represented on those stages in coming five to 10 years.

Rick Denton (14:42)
Daniel, I love this global talk. had long time listeners and viewers know I love talking about the globe and all of that,

especially when we're talking about all the European elements that you described, the Latin American and all that. We're talking about some massive distances here. And it can be nice when you're traveling those big distances to get access to the first-class lounge. And that's what we're going to do here. We're to stop off in the first-class lounge, move quickly here and we'll have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (15:08)
⁓ Recent past, I would say Vietnam. That was a country that I traveled to from north to south with my girlfriend. Amazing nature, ⁓ super friendly people, and delicious food everywhere.

Rick Denton (15:12)


Yeah.

I do love me some Vietnamese food and to have it there in Vietnam would be spectacular. What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (15:35)
⁓ One that I've not been to. There's a couple on my list but I would say I think the top one has to be Patagonia. Like the southern part, mountainous part of Chile and Argentina. That's really high on my list.

Rick Denton (15:46)
Yeah.

⁓ I'm with you there. That's one that is, I have this almost romantic vision of just the large vistas and the temperature and the mountains and the plain, all of that. So Patagonia is on my dream that I've not been to yet as well. Okay, you mentioned the food. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (16:06)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ that's a difficult one because there's a lot of things I like. ⁓ When I'm in Portugal to visit family and friends, like just having a grilled chicken with a piri piri hot sauce is like the best you can get. And you can get that basically everywhere. You just sit on a plastic chair, like all the money's literally going into the food. ⁓

Rick Denton (16:12)
Mm-hmm.

That's awesome.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (16:37)
If I'm not in Portugal, like for example, in the Netherlands, there's a lot of Surname's ⁓ restaurants. Also my girlfriend's have Surname's. They have this dish called roti, which is kind of like a pancake with chicken, ⁓ beans and an egg. And it's like all boiled. Well, the pancake set aside, but it's like all boiled in the same pan. And it has kind of a curry.

kind of sauce and you can make it as spicy as you want like we like spicy food So we do it spicy, but when she also makes it for my parents or other people she makes it less spicy So it's it's it's more mild. Yeah

Rick Denton (17:18)
And dials it back a bit. Well, everything

you described in there sounds absolutely awesome. What about the other way? What is something growing up you were forced to eat, but you hated as a kid?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (17:29)
As a kid, yeah, Brussels sprouts. That's something as a kid I really, really hated. Like literally seeing my mom make that in the kitchen, was already, damn, I need to eat Brussels sprouts. But then somehow I think when I turned into a teenager, like my taste started to change. And nowadays I, it's not my favorite thing, but I don't bother about it anymore. Like if it's in a dish, like.

Rick Denton (17:32)
Yes!

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (17:57)
I'll eat it perfectly fine.

Rick Denton (17:57)
Yeah,

I'm not a picky eater. There are some categories and that's one of them though. Nope won't touch them hated them then hate them now don't understand how anybody can put that into their belly. But clearly people do. Sadly, it is time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item not including your phone and not including your passport that you will not leave home without.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (18:09)
Yeah.

That's a very easy one. For me, it's a watch. I always have a watch on. I'm also, for the people who know me, a watch guy, interested in watches, also built them myself and sell them myself for the past three years. I've been selling personalized watches. It's kind of a side business that started out as a small hobby for friends and family and it became a little bit bigger than that now.

Rick Denton (18:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Daniel, may be the watch. may not be the most unique, but then the explanation of why the watch may be one of the more unique answers I've had to that question on the loud quiet. We may have to get a little link to the side business in the show notes so that folks can get to know a little bit more about that side business. I like that a lot. So let's go back to talking about, you know, CRO and just the overall kind of experience. We've got this stereotype. I know I do.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (19:08)
I'll share it.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (19:21)
that sales

success is all about aggressively converting strangers into customers. You've found that reality to be completely different than that stereotype. Tell me what you've learned there.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (19:34)
I think the sales stereotype also comes a bit from movies and TV shows that we see. think one of the most well-known movies regarding the sales stereotype is The Wolf of Wall Street. ⁓ I've binged it a couple of times. Really great movie, but that's not how sales works in reality. maybe, I don't know, maybe that was like the script that worked in the 80s.

Rick Denton (19:39)
Sure.

Right?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (20:04)
But as with everything, like things evolve, right? So there was also a time and place where people thought the marketing funnel was a real thing. And now we are figuring out like, wait, the reality is way more messy and way less controlled than we think it is. Exactly. And with sales, what I found out, I'd done ⁓ a sales job when I was a student, but my first actual sales job was right after my bachelor's degree, when I started working as a

Rick Denton (20:17)
Not as clean as that.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (20:33)
a recruiter and you kind of have this Wolf of Wall Street image that if you have this magic script, then you're going to turn every no into a yes. but what we found out, say we like me and other rookies starting out, ⁓ in the first two weeks of training is that it's really about asking the right questions, asking open questions, listening, summarizing, asking follow-up questions. So

Rick Denton (20:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (21:02)
Even though I only did a job for slightly over a year, the art of interviewing, listening, asking questions, ⁓ and following up with questions that, that you hadn't prepared before, just based on, of what you hear in the conversation. That's something that I've applied onto this day.

Rick Denton (21:17)
Mm-hmm.

There's a word as you were saying that that came to mind when we were talking about, you know, listening and asking questions, it's curiosity. That's the one that hit my head as you were saying that is it's not about being aggressive and converting strangers. It's about being curious and well, I guess I almost hate to say this, but converting those strangers into colleagues or relationships and understanding these people. So you mentioned

Daniel Granja Baltazar (21:27)
Yeah.

I would,

I would even say Rick, like the common demeanor for sales, marketing, customer service, like customer experience in general, I think is empathy. Like you should literally want to understand the other person's point of view and try to put yourself in his or her shoes. I think the best people in sales, marketing, but also customer service, they know how to do that because that's how you figure out like what the problem is and how you can fix that problem.

Rick Denton (21:58)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm

And I like that you didn't just say the word, you kind of explained it, because that's a word that gets thrown around quite a bit. But the point of what it is, rather than it's just a poster that's hung inside of a customer experience team's office cubicle conference room, but rather, you know, this is really what it means to try to understand it and get into their shoes there. You mentioned those three groups. You mentioned the sales, you mentioned marketing, you talked about customer service and experience overall.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (22:19)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Rick Denton (22:37)
I have, and I believe you have frequently seen those as siloed worlds, especially inside of a corporate structure. How have you in your past actually brought those worlds together to drive both customer and ultimately business results?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (22:56)
I think there's like several key ingredients, I would say, in order to be able to successfully build those bridges and collaborate between those departments. ⁓ What you indeed notice, the bigger a company is, the more floors they have in a building, sales sits together on one floor, marketing on the other, finance in the other, and then customer service somewhere in the corner with cubicles. ⁓ And yeah, the bigger the company,

The bigger, literally the bigger the distances become between those departments and the less they communicate with each other. Not because they don't like each other, but they have other meetings and other stuff that they have their hands full with. So I think the most important part is in order to connect with these departments, you should understand what are their goals? What are their objectives? Like literally their team, what are they working towards to?

Rick Denton (23:52)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (23:53)
Once you know that, you can kind of start to think about common demeanors that will benefit all of them. So I mean, obviously, right, is looking at getting more deals in, but more deals is not just simply about using a script and converting people you talk to. There's a very important play with marketing there. If marketing has campaigns that resonate with potential customers, potential customers will become aware of your

Rick Denton (24:05)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (24:22)
your product and service, and they're more likely to reach out to sales. So that's kind of already a natural bridge. if we focusing more on the retention part, but I would even say it's also a bit acquisition. Customer service speaks to a ton of customers on a daily basis and they get, they get all the tea. They know what's not working because everything that is working, you're not calling customer service for it. You're only calling them once you tried several routes, you failed.

Rick Denton (24:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (24:52)
And this your last resort. think once you add customer service into the mix and you start to understand like, Hey, ⁓ what are people calling about? And I'll even give a practical example. did this in February of this year. I'm responsible for optimizing the Vodafone business website. And one of the things that stood out is that quite a few people were visiting the support pages. On the support pages, you have the phone numbers to reach out to the customer service department.

And our head office in Netherlands is located centrally in Utrecht. And the customer service center for business customers is located in Maastricht in the southern part of the country. It's like a two hour train ride. So that's not something you're going to visit on a daily basis.

Rick Denton (25:40)
Right, you

can't just go, hey, I need to talk to you by the coffee machine kind of thing. Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (25:44)
Exactly.

What I said is, Hey, we see based on the data that quite a lot of people are visiting those support pages. We also know based on the data that the customer service agency Maastricht get quite a lot of phone calls from entrepreneurs. We want to understand why are they calling? What are the main problems they're facing? So I went there with some people, with few people from my team. ⁓

Rick Denton (26:04)
you

Daniel Granja Baltazar (26:13)
We could actually listen in with actual phone calls, take notes, also after some calls, ask some follow-up questions to the agents so we could better understand the problems and what's going on.

And then at the end of the day, we also had a session together with the agents where we shared our observations and we basically also want to see like, did we miss anything? Are there any other problems that maybe didn't occur today, but do occur on a frequent basis? ⁓ And then you actually see that some of the issues are easy to solve, but nobody ate their own dog food. Nobody put themselves in the customer's shoes, went through the whole process.

Rick Denton (26:52)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (26:53)
And didn't find a problem. So an example of this was we have ⁓ a cloud telephony solution. It means we can easily also configure a new phone number, set up different phone numbers for your sales department, your marketing department, et cetera. But as you can figure out, this is a highly sensitive.

Rick Denton (27:06)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (27:13)
product or service, like if a hacker could get into this and they change your phone numbers, you have a really big problem. So IT security thought, okay, you know what? This is such a sensitive product that we reset the customer password every 90 days. Fine. Nothing going wrong there. The mistake that was made is that customers were not receiving a reminder email when they're

Rick Denton (27:18)
Right. Right.

Hehehe.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (27:41)
password was about to expire. So a lot of calls were coming in about from customers that were locked out of their accounts after 90 days. Just by sharing these kinds of insights,

Rick Denton (27:42)
No! ⁓ no.

Yeah.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (27:52)
with senior management, the team responsible for this implemented a password reminder email in the flow, which already took away a lot of unnecessary phone calls.

Rick Denton (27:59)
Yeah.

And you're talking about something so simple. And that's what I love about those kind of, those process improvement elements that have been triggered by the insights that the customer support organization can provide. Let's close out with that actually. I mentioned you were talking about the quantitative data and the qualitative data and

Daniel Granja Baltazar (28:19)
This is...

Rick Denton (28:29)
In that aspect, we know that we live in a world, especially a corporate world that's obsessed with data. Companies are usually pretty good at that quantitative, but take the example you just described, the qualitative, the storytelling, not so good. How can companies get better at that qualitative side of customer insight?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (28:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'm going to say something provocative on purpose. If you're, if you're working in marketing experimentation, CRO or CXO, and you don't talk to customers or potential customers on a monthly or at least a quarterly basis, then you're doing it all wrong. Then you're basically just making assumptions about your work. That new marketing campaign is based on a big assumption.

Rick Denton (28:51)
⁓ Everybody sit down for this.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (29:19)
that new sales plays based on a big assumption, that AB test is based on big assumptions. Like if you're not talking, like actually listening to potential customers, you don't know what kind of pain points they have. And more importantly, how we could potentially solve them.

Figure out what it is that you could improve and how you could improve it and start the process.

Rick Denton (29:45)
That's it. I'm so glad we ended there. I love the provocative nature of that as well. And you know, it's interesting as I listened to that, I think it's both provocative and also just sort of a yes, of course, kind of element. Of course you should be doing that. And yet so many companies aren't. And I love that you have zeroed in on this is what you need to be doing. Daniel, I love what I got to learn from you today.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (29:46)
You

You

Rick Denton (30:10)
not just about CRO, but about how sales and marketing and experience all that weave together. I love the cultural conversation that we had around all of your elements around the globe. And heck, I even found out something new about you and your watchmaking. If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, Daniel, and your approach to these things, what's the best way for them to find out more?

Daniel Granja Baltazar (30:12)
You

⁓ So for the watches, I'll supply you ⁓ with the link so you can put it in the show notes. ⁓ If they want to know how to use quantitative qualitative research to improve their business, just follow me on LinkedIn. I ⁓ post weekly, ⁓ some personal posts and some posts where literally share knowledge. ⁓ And these kinds of projects are examples of where I show not only what you should do, but more importantly, shown step by step.

Rick Denton (30:41)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (31:00)
how you can turn it into reality.

Rick Denton (31:04)
That's awesome. Daniel, certainly listeners and viewers, know, it's in the show notes. Scroll down. You've got it. Click it and off you will go there. Daniel, it was a treat today. I really enjoyed it. I learned a ton and well, I also just kind of enjoyed it as well. So thank you for being on CX Passport.

Daniel Granja Baltazar (31:18)
Thanks for the invite, Rick.

Thanks a lot. Have great day.


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