Rick Denton (00:34)
Welcome back, CX Passport Travelers. Today's guest is Joe McCloud. Joe is our first guest from Sweden, which, you know, that gets me super excited. We get to help fill the map. He's also British by background, which gives him this interesting lens on how customer experience shows up across cultures and across systems. He's best known for his work on endings in customer experience, an area most organizations still avoid or just hand off to someone else entirely.

He's the author of two books focused on how products, services, and relationships end. And when Joe talks about endings in today's context, it may not mean exactly what you think it means. When Joe and I talked earlier, we also discovered, well, we share a similar family name, which led to a quick detour into Scottish tartans before we got back to talking about CX and customer behavior. And one note before we get started.

Joe's going to offer some discounts for CX Passport listeners at the end of the show, so stick around for that. Joe, welcome to CX Passport.

Joe Macleod (01:38)
Thanks a lot, Rick. Great to be here and been enjoying chatting already, but really enjoying and looking forward to this podcast as well.

Rick Denton (01:46)
Yeah, and that kind of fun. Sometimes the pre-record is a fun chat. However, I know that the active record is going to be a fun chat as well. I want to talk about that endings, that a lot of your work focuses on endings and customer experience, but not in this narrow way. We often talk about endings and things like the peak end theory. How do you define endings more broadly? And why do you think organizations struggle to engage with endings?

Joe Macleod (02:04)
Yeah.

Well, maybe it will help put in bit of context on how I got here as well, because I think most businesses, and I was there as a creator, as a designer, we have so much history about designing and creating the beginning of the customer engagement, whether that's through design or marketing and telling stories. ⁓ We do overlook that last part.

Rick Denton (02:23)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (02:38)
I encountered this by, I was doing some teaching years ago and I set a sort of cliche brief, I guess, in for the students of waste and matter in the world. And everyone went off and created more like marketing material about waste and matter in the world. And it was sort of really philosophically disruptive to me.

Rick Denton (02:38)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (03:00)
to the point where I didn't have an answer to what the right solution was. But it started that journey, that sort of question and that itch, know, that sort of intellectual itch that you have of creation. And so then rolling forward like nearly 20 years actually from that very early experience, I went off and done my career and stuff, but then came back and looked at the ending stuff through the first two books.

Rick Denton (03:11)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (03:27)
But what I found for most industries and businesses is that we don't even ask the question of how does this end? Not as a material thing or a cycling thing or a reporting thing or a legislation thing, but we don't ask the really key question of how does this end as an experience? And that's really what I'm about.

Rick Denton (03:36)
Mmm.

Hmm. That last part got me. Why? Why? mean, well, actually, the cliche is death and taxes, right? And so all of us have some sort of ending. We don't have to go to the darkness of death. But in a customer experience, there is a reasonable end. Why aren't companies focused on that?

Joe Macleod (04:11)
I actually use

that very quote, the death and taxes quote in the book at one of the beginning of the chapters. And it does cover a lot of bases. Humans actually have enormous vocabularies about endings and how we leave a thing, whether that be through death or transitions of age that you might change at a certain period in your life. And you say goodbye to being younger and hello to being older.

We've actually got enormous vocabularies around that in a sociological sense, in a theological sense. And what we've done is totally forget about that in terms of applying the emotions to the consumer life cycle. We've been too busy making sales and making products that we've left the end for someone else to clear up.

Rick Denton (04:44)
Mm-hmm.

we were talking about the other podcasts that I'm a part of, The Loud Quiet, and in there we have an episode about a phrase that has become a little bit popular in the US, Swedish death cleansing. And so I wonder if some of it is even just the culture in where you live and some of that aspect. I want to bring more of that idea of endings into this. And you mentioned sort of the religious aspect of it and the emotional aspect of it. You talked about this idea of shame.

Joe Macleod (05:30)
That's it.

yeah.

Rick Denton (05:55)
at the end of a customer journey, especially when we're talking about circularity and circular economy. Can you help me understand what do you mean by shame at the end and why is it the businesses tend to step away and treat this well, that's for an NGO to handle or it's a legislation and regulatory problem.

Joe Macleod (06:13)
Exactly. we've dropped the, I'd say almost the empowerment. If you think of the empowerment of the individual and having agency as an individual, what we've done in consumerism, whether you're doing digital, physical or service sector products, we have been everything about encouraging, ⁓ thank you for becoming our customer. We've doing all of this encouragement, this emotional encouragement to...

And then we're creating these systems and interfaces to give people enormous amounts of agency to, ⁓ right at the beginning of the customer service, ⁓ the life cycle to investigate a product. So amazing empowerment to investigate. Say you're buying a car to investigate the enormous range of vehicles across different factors and then reviews and then going through the purchase experience. If you think about the purchase of clothes, for example,

Rick Denton (06:51)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (07:11)
how we pull people into a website and then give them the ability to measure things and then even try it on. And so at each of these stages, it's empowerment, it's encouragement, it's agency, and then you're into the interface of a powerful tool or something like that. So amazing experience for the consumer throughout that consumer life cycle. And then we get to the end and then a consumer will want to leave.

Rick Denton (07:32)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (07:39)
I say at the beginning of some of my talks, like I'm married that ends in one of two ways. And if your customers aren't going to leave you, you're insane. So the perception of one of the most important relationships I have in my life, I know ends in one of two ways. And I go into so many businesses and they haven't got any vocabulary about how it ends for the customer. So what we tend to do in business is to just leave that.

Rick Denton (07:46)
Yeah.

Joe Macleod (08:09)
or deny it. And we deny it through things like dark patterns, which so trying to send them down rabbit holes, collusion. And then also what we also do is to encourage them maybe to ring up a call center, use some sort of 18th century tool like a telephone and a human that we don't use in the rest of the consumer life cycle to onboard and facilitate many of our interactions in.

in the modern world, but we ask them to then ring someone up at the end, like they haven't really moved into digitization. And so then we also start to talk about a different thing entirely at the end. So at the last quadrant, the off-boarding, if you're in physical products, you'll start to talk about plastics. Plastics never turn up anywhere else in the customer lifecycle at the beginning.

Rick Denton (08:54)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (09:04)
So no one goes, I'm just popping down the road to buy some plastics. No one ever says that. But at the end, all of a sudden, I've got loads of different plastics and I need to think about what the chemical makeup is. I'm abandoned by the company. I'm on my own now. I'm an individual. I'm a member of society. I have to now separate materials into different sections. Or I've got to, for example, in the digital space, I've got to work out.

Rick Denton (09:20)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (09:32)
how long my relationship is with this company, how much data I have with them, how can I remove that? I've got to start managing that stuff myself. And so what we've ended up doing is creating this in experiential terms, a cliff edge where we've got agency, we've got emotion, we've got engagement, and they drop right off a cliff and the consumer's abandoned. In that abandonment, we don't instruct.

Rick Denton (09:40)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Joe Macleod (10:01)
We often shame and to come back to shame, the difference between guilt and shame is about your agency around the event that happened. So if, for example, I'd done something bad and I was caught, can then say, you know, or I acknowledge it, even if I was intending to do it or not, I can acknowledge it and say, I'm sorry about that. I feel guilty about that and I'm gonna...

⁓ correct it. But what we've done with the consumer is bamboozle them in this space of complexity, of legislation, of materials, of chemicals, to a space where they're totally dizzy with responsibility and we also create this sort of shame environment where we're all guilty because we've consumed.

And what we need to start doing is structure this place to a far better ⁓ level of understanding of instruction and bonding.

Rick Denton (11:03)
Okay.

I want to come back to that consuming element of it, because there's a shame element, there's a reward element of it, all of that sort of coming together in this ending that is not well understood and well explained. I have an example from my family that someone just in my family wrapped up a long-term relationship with a telecom provider, was the provider of an old way of delivering television service to their house.

Joe Macleod (11:16)
Yeah.

Right, right.

Rick Denton (11:31)
and they had

all of this equipment in the house, which in the past was, make sure it gets returned and all that. The email that they got from the company was like, We don't need it anymore. So here's a link to your state's recycling program. And that just left sort of kind of meh taste in my family member's mouth and mine as well of, wait, this is your stuff. And now it's my responsibility to dispose of it.

Joe Macleod (11:35)
yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Rick Denton (11:58)
If I chuck it in the garbage, I'll feel guilty and it wasn't even really my, air quote here, responsibility.

Joe Macleod (12:07)
there's loads of psychology around how damaging abandoning people in this placement are. And some of them go back to the way that you leave them in that last quadrant.

will trigger memories which are similar of cognitive load to earlier relationship sort of experiences earlier on in the relationship. So if you give somebody a bad off-boarding experience that will trigger memories which earlier in the relationship were more as negative so they have an equal sort of cadence. Bad experience at the end triggers bad experience in the middle. So you start to embed memories which are

Rick Denton (12:21)
⁓ yeah.

Joe Macleod (12:48)
more negative if you're not engaging at the end. So when you talked about the consumer at the end and to your friends' issue, your family members' issue, how that gets done, obviously maybe that's the best route for the material matter to go to the right facility, cetera, et cetera. But how that gets done is the key to how we're building experiences and we're not doing enough work in it.

Rick Denton (13:13)
yeah. Yeah.

No, we felt completely abandoned at 100%. And there is a totally different way to handle that. Now, I want to take a complete shift here, because I want to learn more about you and being in Sweden because you are our first guest from there. I know you're British by background, you've lived in Stockholm for years now. So when you look at customer experience and just consumer expectations,

Joe Macleod (13:19)
Yeah.

Sure.

Rick Denton (13:40)
What are the differences that stand out to you and where are you seeing similarities?

Joe Macleod (13:45)
So, I mean, these are very generalizations. We can't like organize a whole lecture into categorization. Yeah, but I'll have a crack at it for argument sake. So Swedes are really honorable and they're really thoughtful about things. so I found a really good example as a friend of mine. He was a project manager and he used to manage teams in Sweden and in the UK.

Rick Denton (13:50)
I want you to speak of the entire culture.

Joe Macleod (14:13)
And he said, when he managed teams in Sweden, it would take a long time for everyone to discuss everything that was going to happen about the project. And then they'll steadily move off and hit the deadline accurately and with purpose together. And what happens with the British, they all run off in different directions, realize they've got it wrong, and then come back together to build consensus. So I think that characterizes both societies. And I think...

Rick Denton (14:25)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (14:43)
when we misunderstand a lot of the Nordics as being slow, but what they're doing is really building consensus really well. And when you live here, you realize that how good the society is in terms of having consensus and understanding how systems work and building complexity over the long term, because they're not ⁓ fumbling in the short term, like I think the British do. So.

Rick Denton (14:53)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (15:10)
With that at the basis, what you end up with is really solid sort of products and quite well thought through products. They're a very big engineering background. They do lot of mining, forestry, and they've got a big history of building that and military stuff as well. And so they've got some really good products they've built. In terms of customer centric things, I think they, what I found really interesting is when you move here, you realize

Rick Denton (15:21)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (15:40)
Oh, I didn't know that was a Swedish company. They're really good at building companies which are totally ambiguous and could be from America, could be from another place in Europe. I didn't know. Yeah. So, so things like that are really funny. I mean, you've got classics like IKEA, but a lot of people don't realize Spotify is from Sweden. Like Electrolux is Swedish and they own lots of other brands like AEG and so

Rick Denton (15:59)
Hmm.

Right? Yeah.

Joe Macleod (16:10)
there's stacks of those things which I think are really good at and because it's a small country with a small language or small language speaking they're great at using stuff in British and creating English language products so yeah I think they've got lots of things where they're really good at and so it's been interesting living here and working with them

Rick Denton (16:42)
Well, Joe, know that the trip from England to Sweden is not the longest, but if I were to go to Sweden, or England for that matter, from the US, it's a pretty long trip and it's nice to have a first class lounge to stop off in. So I'm going to invite you to do that today with me. Let's stop off in the first class lounge. We'll quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Joe Macleod (16:56)
yeah.

We recently went to Norway down the fjords canoeing and we were really lucky with the weather even though it was September the weather was absolutely amazing and just being in a little boat at the bottom of a fjord with you know thousand and thousand meter mountains right next to you.

Rick Denton (17:19)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (17:26)
it is absolutely mind-blowing because it's such a scale thing and it was so quiet as well we're super weird it was lovely

Rick Denton (17:31)
Yeah.

That's

awesome. That's one of those that feels like we see the pictures. I can see the fjords. And I imagine being there, it's one of those that's the classic, it just is not the same in the picture. Being there is a totally different experience. What about going forward? What's a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Joe Macleod (17:41)
Yeah.

No, no.

I've done the Far East a few times in different places, I there's some places I'd like to do Vietnam and actually I haven't done Thailand. My wife's done Thailand. I'd like to do that. I'd actually really like to see some ⁓ icebergs and and like that type of thing. We've done the Arctic.

Rick Denton (17:59)
yeah.

Mmm.

Joe Macleod (18:14)
We went up to the Arctic because Sweden obviously have some parts in the Arctic. We went on Arctic in the winter with minus 20 and then we've done the Arctic this summer and it's super strange going to the Arctic in the summer. Not right up obviously into the poles but within the Arctic Circle because it's 100 % sun and you're up in the middle of the night and it looks it's daytime.

Rick Denton (18:19)
Right.

Right. Suddenly you've been up for three days and you're thinking,

wait, I probably should get some sleep, but there's no environmental clue that says go to bed. You mentioned Thailand and it's one of my favorite places. And one of the reasons is because of the food. Now not to push you towards Thai food here, but what is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Joe Macleod (18:46)
Yeah. ⁓

I had some Spanish really good versions of the olive where they put the olive and the fish next to one another in a little cocktail stick. It tastes amazing when it's done right. That's a really little favourite. And langoustines when they're barbecued. Yeah, basically like small bits of seafood are really good.

Rick Denton (19:19)
Mm.

Oh,

I bet so. I bet so. That does sound nice. Well, I'm to take you the other direction. What is something you were forced to eat growing up, but you hated as a kid?

Joe Macleod (19:32)
I still hate it now because I was forced to. In fact, there's two. I'm coming back to the Scottish thing, my grandfather ⁓ on my father's side was the Scottish. I'm called to Scottish with the McLeod name and we used to stay over there, but he'd eat porridge with salt in it and they'd push us to finish our breakfast. And you know when you're sometimes and there's be this massive bowl of

Rick Denton (19:45)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (20:01)
almost salted porridge and that just made me put me off porridge forever and also bad liver as well

Rick Denton (20:08)
yeah, well, yeah. Is there such a thing as good liver for that matter?

have no love for the liver when it comes to food. Well, that's interesting. The Scottish influence there. Joe, it's time for us to leave the first class lounge. What is one travel item, not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home?

Joe Macleod (20:27)
My Kindle actually, I've recently got a new Kindle and I love it because it's not hasn't got like, you know, it you can just about buy something from their very rudimentary system. But basically, you can't browse the Internet. No one can get you. No one can message you and

Rick Denton (20:39)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (20:47)
So it's just amazing, I love it. And I love the, ⁓ just the capability now is so good on the screens and feels like a really good reading experience. it's so light as well, love it.

Rick Denton (21:08)
Joe, it's been a while since I was a Kindle user. I have found myself migrating towards, I want that tangible book in my hand. However, man, there's something to having that just slim device that allows you to read anything you want, anytime. And you call that something that I don't often think about. You're not connected to anything else. So you are able to read it without interruption. And I love that.

Joe Macleod (21:29)
No.

Rick Denton (21:33)
There's the.

Joe Macleod (21:33)
It's also

as you get older, it becomes more of an issue with the holding thing. And I can start to feel the sort of crunchy in my hand as a,

Rick Denton (21:40)
well, yeah, no. Yeah,

I don't want to admit that, however, it's very true as well, and I have felt that as well. Well, let's let's get back to talking about endings and customer experience. And you have spent a lot of time thinking about consumer history, industrial history and even religion. We've talked about that a little bit. When you ask questions like what the industrial revolution might have looked like.

Joe Macleod (22:03)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (22:10)
Well, if it emerged from a Buddhist or a Shinto tradition instead of out of a Western tradition, what does that help us understand about consumption today?

Joe Macleod (22:18)
So in terms of reflection about the end and looking towards the end of life, different religions have different relationships to it. Many religions, whether you're Muslim or Christian or all sorts of religions really.

have an aspect to looking at beyond life after death to a place which is abundant and all about consumption, unwielding consumption, know, just endless consumption. And so very deep in our psychology, we've got this programmed relationship with our arc of life, which is about one day I'll be able to.

Rick Denton (22:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (23:02)
indulge myself without any question. And so I think it's super and then rolling back from that the heaven thing we look into different religions and we can see for example between the Protestant and the Catholic version of Christianity

Rick Denton (23:06)
huh.

Joe Macleod (23:22)
In the Catholic route, can often like get forgiveness as you guide yourself towards the end of life. So I sinned, I feel sorry about the sin and renouncing that, know, stuff like that. So get forgiveness on the on God. In the Protestant religion, you don't get any opportunity to get judged at the end of end of life and the polygates. That's a I'm simplifying it just for the the for the discussion.

But sort of like we've got lots of stuff around the end of life and how we move towards that end in our deeper sociological theological relationship with how we live in life.

the opposite, not really the opposite, a religion which looks, and many of these other religions don't look at products as being having life in them, but in Shinto Buddhism you look at objects of having a life, there's an animism in that object, and with that you also die and you can also say thank you to the object and so ⁓

Rick Denton (24:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (24:33)
good example which I write about in the first book, the end book, is the tailor's union in Japan. They go to the Shinto Buddhist temple and they take their needles and with the needle they say goodbye to the needle and because the needle's done such hard work they put it into a piece of tofu and you can imagine how soft that is into the tofu and there's such symbolism in that and then they take these

Rick Denton (24:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Macleod (25:02)
bit needles and tofu and then they process that in a religious sense in the temple to say goodbye to the needles and respect the needles work. And there's also now, know, more roll forward hundreds of years. You've got Barbie dolls get processed tens of thousands in a place outside ⁓ Tokyo and different, different temples do different things as it were. So amazing. So if you think about that respect to the end and the

Rick Denton (25:08)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (25:31)
sense of vocabulary about the end of a product and the richness and meaning around that. We don't have that in the West. Imagine if we had grown up with the Industrial Revolution with such a lot of respect about the meaning of the end in a sense of how we now talk about circularity in such a simplistic, cold-hearted way with chemistry and materials and recycling and legislation.

Rick Denton (25:47)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (25:59)
And you think of the absence of that vocabulary of meaning and motion, which we could have if potentially the Industrial Revolution started in a Buddhist Shinto society.

Rick Denton (26:12)
Hmm. It's one to sit on for a little bit. the idea of this... Well, certainly it's always kind of fun to think about all history paths, right? What would that... Just forget the topic. It's always interesting to think about that. that idea... Because as you pointed out, consumption is the reward, as you were describing, you know, in a lot of our... ⁓ And forget, like, yes, in the religious faith system and just in life.

Joe Macleod (26:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick Denton (26:38)
Hey, if you work hard, you get to go buy your boat and go water skiing on the weekend, which I love water skiing. So not that that's inherently bad, but that is kind of the consumption is the reward. And I think what you're describing is a lot of companies view that consumption as the reward, but then they don't think about that end story of it. Like if I'm talking to someone about their product, I'm going to get incredible detail and passion about the product.

Joe Macleod (26:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Rick Denton (27:04)
But if I say, all right, so what's the end of that product look like? They're going to look at me blankly like, why? Let me talk about it. Why does that happen? then what does that mean? What does that lack of awareness really mean if we're not appreciating the end?

Joe Macleod (27:09)
second

So

in monetary terms, I find it really interesting because when I go into places and offer my services, they talk and say like, so what's the sort of, for example, the ROI of endings, what does that mean? Or if I spend loads of money, ⁓ for example, getting compliance around greenhouse gas emissions, what does that mean?

Rick Denton (27:41)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (27:42)
So we've monetized the end in terms of values and feedback and we've data driven it. And what I find fascinating is the damage we do to brands in that space. And so when you look at different companies and we're now getting to the point, and if you put in legislation around data and digital products with GDPR, CCPA or something, you're into the hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to defend those things.

Rick Denton (28:10)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (28:11)
If you're asking questions about how much we're spending at the end of product life because of our reporting or because of our legislation or stuff like that, I want you to then ask how much money are we losing because we drop people off a cliff at the end in terms of a brand. How much money does it take us to then regain that customer? And I'm not talking about retention things because often they do more damage than they...

Rick Denton (28:27)
Mmm.

Joe Macleod (28:39)
but really create an ending which has meaning and emotion and values that experience without it having to become another experience to then fulfill that thing. But it's that brand equity loss at the end, which is worth hundreds of thousands, even millions to businesses, which we haven't had a vocabulary about.

Rick Denton (28:59)
Hmm. I kind of like the idea, like I'm visualizing, you know, my Western mindset doesn't have the ability to come up with an example that quickly, but the idea of whatever experience that I'm doing, but then it ends in some sort of Shinto temple type experience that, okay, well, I'm done with this product and now it has that sort of ending. Joe, is, well, you know what? I'm kind of glad this is going to be the 250th episode because this one's kind of milestoney. It's different. We went on different directions here.

Joe Macleod (29:16)
Yeah.

Rick Denton (29:27)
Joe, this is one of those that I think folks are gonna want to know a little bit more about you, get in touch with you, and you mentioned an offer. Tell me, how can folks get to know a little bit more about you?

Joe Macleod (29:36)
Cool, so you can go to the business website which is called andend.co and there's loads of stuff on there about me and the business and what I do. ⁓ Get me on LinkedIn, I'm always on there. ⁓ Look at the books, they're on Amazon. The Ends book, ⁓ that's the sort of foundational book that started me on this journey.

Rick Denton (30:00)
Mm-hmm.

Joe Macleod (30:01)
That's on there and that will talk to you about the history, you're interested in the history and the psychology and the theology of it all that I found that fun really inspiring and that's what started me on the journey. If you're into the practice of endings there's the endoneering book and that's also on Amazon both are available as digital books so you can get them on your Amazon Kindles

then you can also become an engineer. So that's the training program I offer. There's a introduction to engineering, which I'm going to give you the discount codes to put them on the show notes. And then there's the advanced one. If you're a business looking at like engaging in this space more, then you can ⁓ look at the advanced one and you can find out more about that on the website.

Rick Denton (30:32)
Perfect.

That's awesome. Yes, absolutely. I'll get all that in the show notes. It will be a click or a code that you'll then have available to you there and you'll be able to head over and get to know Joe and get to know a little bit more about his programs. Joe, I'm not being a blowing sunshine up your Fanny here. I plan to go out and get that ends book because the conversation today has me mighty intrigued and I'm looking forward to that. I mean, I think about our conversation today. It involves things like.

know, customer experience, peak end, but it also had sin and forgiveness and, environmental issues. So this was a wonderfully delightfully wide ranging conversation today, Joe, thank you for being on CX Passport.

Joe Macleod (31:20)
Thank you very much, Rick. And it was a pleasure chatting to you. Thanks very much.