CX Passport
👉Love customer experience and love travel? You’ve found the right podcast, a show about creating great customer experience, with a dash of travel talk. 🎤Each episode, we’ll talk with our guests about customer experience, travel, and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. Listen here or watch on YouTube youtube.com/@cxpassport 🗺️CX Passport is a podcast that purposely seeks out global Customer Experience voices to hear what's working well in CX, what are their challenges and to hear their Customer Experience stories. In addition, there's always a dash (or more!) of travel talk in each episode.🧳Hosted by Rick Denton, CX Passport will bring Customer Experience and industry leaders to get their best customer experience insights, stories and hear their tales from the road...whether it’s the one less traveled or the one on everyone’s summer trip list.
If you like CX Passport, I have 3 quick requests:
✅Subscribe to the CX Passport YouTube channel youtube.com/@cxpassport
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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport
Music: Funk In The Trunk by Shane Ivers
CX Passport is a podcast for customer experience professionals that focuses on the stories, strategies, and solutions needed to create and deliver meaningful customer experiences. It features guests from the world of CX, including executives, consultants, and authors, who discuss their own experiences, tips, and insights. The podcast is designed to help CX professionals learn from each other, stay on top of the latest trends, and develop their own strategies for success.
📖 Our book is here! Get your copy of The Loud Quiet – Love, Laughter and Life in the Empty Nest, here: https://amzn.to/4sC0EV7
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CX Passport
"The one where there is no one ideal customer" Elaine Lee E40
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What's on your mind? Let CX Passport know...
When you’ve been a part of the CX community for decades, you know what matters most. Today’s guest, Elaine Lee, shares her thoughts on how to really understand your customer. Stop treating them like averages, or ideal customers, and instead get to really know your customer.
👨🔬Don't average your customer out into an amorphous blob
🗣TALK to your customer...no really TALK to your customer
📞Contact centers are undervalued
🙉There's no hiding from the customer when you listen to them
👂The value of call listening sessions
🙅♀️There is NO such thing as an ideal customer
🎨Design a VOC program where a customer WANTS to give you their voice
🛴Be a traveler in your own city
🏡Staying with families on a trip Cuba
Hosted by Rick Denton, CX Passport guides you through a conversation on customer experience and travel.
Episode resources:
Elaine Lee: www.linkedin.com/in/elaine-lee-8080742
Website: www.reynoldsbusbylee.com
You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode well talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. I started my CX consulting company four years ago. Now while I've learned a ton, and I feel so much more seasoned than when I got started, I continue to lean on the wisdom of those who have gone before me. Those who have a wealth of experience those who have seen the good and the bad of CX. It really is a wonderful community filled with people willing to share and connect. And that's the beauty of today's guest. Today's guest Elaine Lee of Reynolds Busby Lee embodies that spirit. With 16 plus years of consulting she's seen just about everything. I've learned so much and CX and have been amply inspired to follow her model of connectivity. She's been so giving with her knowledge and introductions, and even an earlier podcast guest Gavin Scott, and I only know each other because of Elaine's introduction. As we head to the UK today to talk with Elaine, I'm eager to learn even more from her. She is a seasoned marketer with a particular passion for customer experience. Her experience weaves through commercial and charity and it isn't just Ivory Tower, she's done the work. Today is going to be great, Elaine, welcome to CX passport.
Elaine Lee:Hi Rick. I'm so pleased to be here.
Rick Denton:I am pleased as well. So all of us in the CX community talk about living in this outside in model, one that considers the customers perspective in our design and our decisions. Yet we know often we know often that we really aren't a replica of our customer. How do you approach looking outside in?
Elaine Lee:Well, you and I've had many conversations over the last few months. And you know that I'm slightly passionate about thinking from the customer. And the starting point for me is about knowing your customer, and not who you think they are, but find out who they really are. And there's going to be different cohorts of customers within the customer base. So they're not all the same, they don't look the same. They don't sound the same, their motivations purchase will be different. And so just average them out. Don't make them one big amorphous blob of customer and you assume that get it right for one, you put it right for them all. Now, none of the customers wants to think that average, would you want to be described as average Joe? Or do you want to be Rick Denton?
Rick Denton:Yeah. I'm not really a big fan of being meh. Or average. You're right. Yeah,
Elaine Lee:yeah. So as customers, we don't want to feel that we're the average customer, we want to feel as though we are on somebody's radar that they care about us. And within that they're interested in what we want, and how we want to interact with them. And then I think it's about so get to know the customers are and the best way to do that is to talk to your customers, spend time with them.
Rick Denton:Talk to a customer what, what what visions are these, Elaine but yes,
Elaine Lee:it's like, you know, Double, double toil in trouble. Joy, but it's very topical. But given the way we're approaching Halloween, it's, I think for me, it's you need to spend some time either physically with customers, if you're in a retail environment, get in the store, go and spend some time with them. If you're not and you have a you know, a distance selling business and your direct to consumer, then he'd sit in the contact center, get on the phone, go and talk to them try and have a go see if you can do the job of those call center agents and talk to the customer hear what they've got to say. If you ask them to fill in a survey, read the results and read all of the results. Not just the bits that you want have a look at social media, what are people saying? Google yourself see what people are saying but not tagging him? Because that can be quite insightful, too. Right? And you just got to hear their voices. So
Rick Denton:and you know, what's so both, I guess fascinating and frustrating about what you've just said there is? That's exactly right. Go live the life of the customer go experience it go sit in the contact center, just like you described. And it amazes me how that just doesn't happen that often. You've worked with companies. Why? Why are companies not living the life of the customer? Why in some cases, Martha even shopping their own product, right? So maybe that's a customer tell me tell me about that one. What do you see? What's the why here?
Elaine Lee:So there's a couple of reasons that I've come across in my many years doing this. And one is that contact centers are undervalued. Yeah. And it's simplified as a job. That's you know, that's how hard can that be. When you talk to your customers everyday and listen to them and hear them berating you for things that aren't your personal fault that can be quite tough or quite emotionally challenging if their customers are offloading all sorts of complexities at you all day. People are frightened about actually going and hearing it, because then there is no hiding from it to you. There's no excuse that can be made, if you can't explain it to the customer that you just can't get away from it. And also, well, you know, I've got somebody else to do that. For me. That's their job. Okay? Listen. If you don't hear that voice, you don't know which direction to go in. And you can make assumptions. And we all know.
Rick Denton:<laughing> Yeah. Don't make me have to put the explicit tag on it. Yes, we do know what the assumptions are. Yeah, I have found a lane. One of the most valuable tools that I've used in consulting, I imagine you've used the same exact thing in it is these call listening these customers listening sessions. So if I go into a company that is not actively doing like you're describing, then I'll sit the team down, whatever that team means leadership, team, executive team, whatever it looks like, and plop them down. And just play calls, I won't even have a lot of curated in the sense of, okay, it's not just a transactional call. But there's not a lot of surrounding, it's just, we're just gonna listen. And I want you to react to what you hear. And it is amazing to see the eyes get wide, or the hands go to the palm, or what it looks like when we actually listen to our customers.
Elaine Lee:Hmm, yeah, and I, you're right, I do do that. And I do that in training environments to where, you know, we sit, and we workshop through a call. So this is the call, and this is what happened the first time, so we're just gonna listen to it. And you're right there a heads in hands, and they're all printing going on. And then we work through it and sort of look at well, how could we have handled that section of the call? And what did the customer tell us without actually saying the words? You know, what, where were the deep pauses? Where were the the signs from the customer? Why did the agent overtook them? You know, the customer came on the phone for about three things to tell us and we only dealt with two of them. Why do we do that? That's because we got carried away and what we do. And the other thing we do, and it was an American bank that I came across who first did this move back in the late 90s. And every member of staff spends one hour a month on the fence, whether you are CEO, or financial director, or you are on social media manager, you go and spend an hour on the phones, or if you look at the database, and everybody's trying to be able to do it. And you have to spend an hour on the phone and talk to your customer. And I just think it's a brilliant philosophy because it makes you face up to your fear.
Rick Denton:Oh, I love it face up to your fear he may have just give me the show title. But we'll see. We've got so much good nuggets, there was only the first or second question. And here we are with so much juice. I know that I don't video these. And so but if the audience could see me my neck is getting sore from nodding so aggressively with what Elena is saying it is brilliant. Elena want to go back to something you said kind of at the beginning you talked about we don't want to just lump everybody together and design for the average. But I think something else that's important is we often design for the quote, ideal customer. Well, then I think I know the answer to this question. Is there really such a thing? What are the pitfalls of designing for the ideal,
Elaine Lee:the ideal customer, as you'll see, you know, who thinks that that's how everybody behaves. And it's not true, because every one of us is unique. And we all have different motivations and different thought processes, different moods. And if you catch me on one day, I'll react like this and catch me 20 minutes later on, some things just happened, I'm in a totally different room. And I'll react very differently. There is no one ideal customer. Because actually, if you let customers be customers, they will teach us things about our business that we just didn't anticipate. And we'll learn from them about what they want. And it gives us ideas and directions to go in. And if we just come in at it with a blinkered view of the world saying this is the direction we're going. And this is what our ideal customer will do never learn and grow as a business. We don't hear about opportunities, and we don't hear what we do well, and we look so we should do more rather than we don't hear what we do badly wants to do less of. And we don't see the opportunity. So the ideal customer has. I've never met one. And I've met many customers in my life. But I've never met one of my probably certainly never been
Rick Denton:where we've never met the ideal customer. I like that. So, right, I've heard the word hurt here. I've heard Listen, see, so much of everything you're describing requires that we understand that voice of the customer that outside and approach requires voice of the customer. And we get that we certainly get that in the CX community. But something that at least I don't think we talk enough about is how do we design a voc program so that the customer wants to give us their voice? How do you go about that where it's not so much forced but the customer is wanting to give us that voice?
Elaine Lee:So often with companies I've come across some I've worked with in the past have set up for the program and it's kind of the people who want to tell you other people who either had a really terrible experience or a really great experience and the people in the middle who it was just okay. They don't really want to let you know what's the point of me telling you because we are It's no value to me. And it's about trying to find a way of getting under the skin of those customers. So knowing who they are, what are they? What motivates them? And actually just asking questions, not at all as one massive question or survey or fill in this 50 page questionnaire, and we'll give you 10 Pence off your next order, you know, you need to, what you want to do is ask them questions as they're navigating through the journey, just little pops of a question. And it looks kind of pulsing the experience as you go, what's it like? What's, you know, how's it going? And for me, it's around. Let's understand what's happening right now. And what do we want to happen? So what's our ideal journey for the customer? Not the company, who's the ideal customer? Cuz I can't create people. But I can create design journeys for them. Yeah. So what what have we got? What do we want to what do we think is happening? And then what's the gap? What's that? Big gap analysis that? And how do we get from here to here and make things better? But if unless you understand what the experience of the customer actually is, rather than what you think it is, you'll never get a proper gap analysis?
Rick Denton:It is. I mean, I'm chuckling just because, again, it's fascinating and frustrating all at once. Because what we're describing, this isn't like, this isn't a podcast around how do we design a rocket engine. So what we're describing are relatively simple concepts, and yet are so difficult. There's simple who was there was a guest that once said, it's it's simple, but it's not easy. And I think that's something that sticks in my head when we talk about this. Now, let's take a little pivot here, because I want to talk a little bit about travel. So someone, you and I both know, Sharon Boyd, and this is way back in episode two. So she was one of my early early guests, but she referred to the concept of eating your own dog food as a way to ensure that the design of your CX that your customers will want, right shop your own product. But I want to take a little different turn with you that applies to travel as well. You said to me when we were talking earlier that we often fail to be tourists in our own cities. And I know you've recently done that. So tell me about being eating your own dog food as a tourist in your own city?
Elaine Lee:Well, for me, it started whilst I was at uni, so 420 years ago now. When I left, we were I knew I finished my exam term finished. I was the first of my friends to finish and it was like, Well, what should we do? And nobody really wants to go home. Just because we finish exams. It's like, well, you know what, we lived in this city for three years, we don't really know. We know where the pubs are. We know what the clubs are. We know where the parks are. But actually, I went to university in a city called hole which is in the North East of England. And it's got all sorts of kind of history to it in terms of slave trade. And it's got its own communication system. It's the only city outside in the UK that has its own telephone network. And it's like, Well, why is this what you know what goes on here, but we went for it. And we went for exploring, and we went to the Wilberforce, global thoughts house and we went out, and we just had a good night at Randall city. And we ended up in the Transport Museum. And my best friend and I, Kate, but there was we lived in a street that the university owned sort of the student owned house at students, student houses, and they were lots of different years or first, second and third years. And the group of us all went from across the year group. And we just have an absolute riot exploring what was going on under our noses. And it was like, God, why have we ever done this before. And so that kind of sparked this kind of, we need to be tourists in our own cities mentality. And now, you know, I grew up in Liverpool, left in 96, for work had to come to London. But when I go home, my city, my hometown has changed massively. It's had huge European funding investments. The city, you know, the shopping center is now what was the bus station, so I get lost in my own city, which is fantastic, because I get to discover things. And it's brilliant, because you kind of discover things that you knew nothing about. And then I you know, with the world in my pocket on my mobile phone, Google and see what's going on. And when I moved to London, I think there was another moment for me because you kind of when you go around London, you kind of follow the tube map and say, right, well, I've got to go from here to here. And it's only actually when you come above surface and you walk and there are T tube stations that are literally 100 yards from one another, and varying across an environment. And I can remember getting on the train and changing at some to go and banquet to get round to Charing Cross. And I came across surfaces to get a slap my forehead. Excellent. Well, if I don't, I could have walked it and I'd walked six miles underground. It's like I've got to explore my city and there's in London, you wander around and there's just loads of interesting things have gone on. It's city's been here for hundreds of years and I know very little about it. So I'm curious. So my family tell would tell you I'm a nosy I'll bet but I would like to describe myself Securing ourselves so I like to explore
Rick Denton:Elaine, what a brilliant talk about going and being a tourist in your own city, I imagine after discovering that you take it this incredible tube ride and only advanced 100 yards, and some of the other explorations, there were times that you wanted a nice rest. And so let's have that rest here. Why don't you join me here in the first class lounge? Let's have a little bit of fun here. I'd like to know a dream travel location from your past.
Elaine Lee:Well, firstly, it's very exciting that I get to go left on the plane rather than Ryan head right to the back seat. Yes. But oh my god, there are so many places in dream travel occasions from my past, I think the Maldives went there for my honeymoon. Less we sought out the environmental challenges are going to be there forever. A tiny, tiny weeny bit of Australia when we went and stayed. And we did a house swap and stoked on the Sunshine Coast. And then we did a little island and eco island on the bottom of the Barrier Reef, which was fantastic. Paris where my husband proposed to me, which was quite a romantic once you get down on one knee, that kindness, but I think I'm going to go with Cuba is my dream destination.
Rick Denton:Oh, jealousy. You know, as a as an American, I am extremely limited and really effectively prohibited from going there. Tell me more about Cuba.
Elaine Lee:So Cuba was one of the most fantastic places I've ever been. And we booked three weeks off work. And it's just vibrant. It's fast. It's exciting. There's loads going on. And when we went late 90s We had so this was pre kids days. So holidays could be fun and exploration. And we had to tell the authorities where we were staying on our first night. But from then on, we could kind of play the network. And one of the things about Cuba is that you families are allowed to supplement their income by having houseguests and then depending on the size of their property, they can have 1234 people. And so we've gone to the train station to buy tickets to go somewhere and ask this woman who was behind the desk. Well, how do we find out about where do we stay and she said, my family, you're going to stay with my family. All right. And it was brilliant. So we just moved around from her around her cousins and our aunties and uncles and stayed in all these fantastic houses. In the heart of Cuban towns and cities. We had the most amazing food. I never thought I'd say I was sick of lobster. But we had lobster every night for $5. And just this mantle of food would appear every night because they were keen, you know, it was cheap sets for them. But also, they wanted to impress the guests and make you stay. And I learned a little bit. Not enough but enough to get me through.
Rick Denton:Que magnifico Que Bueno. Oh, my gosh, that just sounds so delightful to hear all of those dream travel locations and jealousy. Right? Yeah. Massive jealousy hitting me right now as I listen to some of those places. Maldives, Cuba, some of the brilliant places you've been? This one may be tricky, then. Because what is a dream travel location? You've not been to yet.
Elaine Lee:So Oh, okay. So I want to go to Venice. I want to go to Venice, beautiful, beautiful city. And why haven't I been it's on my doorstep. It's in Europe, it's probably a couple of hours playing dry rides, but I'm torn between being part of the tourist problem. And not. But I'm really want to see it. So I might have to wait until I don't take the kids and then I'll backfill. So this,
Rick Denton:I gotta tell you, I think you should go just don't take a cruise ship. Right. And so if anyone listening is part of the cruise industry, I apologize. But I feel like that's a real issue in Venice. And, and just like you said, the Maldives, who knows, if we don't resolve this climate, climate concerns, then my gosh, we're not gonna have the Maldives, and we're not going to have Venice. And so I took the we took our family there a little while a few years ago, and pre pandemic. And we're even saying to the kids, you know, we don't know if you'll be able to see the city when you're an adult. So there's a little bit of that, but just try to go as low footprint as you possibly can get local guides, support the local economy, and it'll it'll make you feel good. Venice is a spectacular place. One of the things I loved about Venice was the food and that's true of any sort of traveling. So I want to ask you what is a favorite thing for you to eat?
Elaine Lee:Oh, this is like asking me what's my death row meal?
Rick Denton:Yes. A little less dark, but sure.
Elaine Lee:And I played that game many times. But oh, I would have always said I mean kind of food. I'm a great steak would be my kind of favorite thing to eat. But I ran the customer acquisition program for an online butcher for three years, and I probably overdid it. So I'm going to go Probably fish are going to be really really boring and just a fish but that could be lobster crab. Crayfish prestar but all fish and chips here in the good relationships. You can't beat but I won't eat jellied eels. Whether I live in London or not, no.
Rick Denton:Then what is that? I? Oh,
Elaine Lee:it's like frog spawn in a pot. Now. It's, it's eel.
Rick Denton:Okay,
Unknown:it kind of jelly that you might get in a pork pie. Let's say I'm pulling faces and you can't see me.
Rick Denton:But I've never heard of this before.
Unknown:Okay, you need to Google jellied eels.
Rick Denton:But I will definitely do so. jellied eels that may be my next exploit exploratory meal. So who knows? This will be interesting. I doubt this is your answer the next question, but let's see what is the thing your parents forced you to eat, but you hate it as a kid.
Elaine Lee:So my parents were pretty good. We had a very simple Northern England English diets. So it really forced me to eat many things that I didn't like. The one thing I really hated as a kid, and I think it's one of the things I say to my kids all the time is that you're supposed to try things at least 10 times before you write it off and say I can't eat it because your taste buds change all the time. Right? And as you grow and mature you learn to like things. But as a kid I hated them and I hated them. It was the seeds on the table just doing nasty things. Why would you put seeds and things. But now you give me a fresh tomato and like the smell of a really ripe fresh tomato and I'll be dribbling I love them there. Yeah, so we myself into eating them by I would take the skin off and I would eat the flesh but I wouldn't need to save them then I taught myself to eat skin as well as the flesh and now I can eat seeds. Well,
Rick Denton:what an interesting your your what is this a tomato experience journey maybe we've come up with a new new new discipline here. I have heard quite a bit from guests that what they disliked as a kid now they like today I have some things that changed for me as well. And there are some things that have stayed definitely in my do not eat category. But tomatoes have evolved for you. That's good. Back to travel, what is and it can't be your phone, it can't be your passport, what is one travel item you will not leave home without.
Elaine Lee:Okay, so I've mulled this one over. Because obviously my phone would be fine, short choice because it's music and photographs and all sorts of stuff. And I'm tired toyed between my driving license because if you can draw if you can get and go and explore off the beaten track like this. But then I came back to my love of books. I'm a real lover of books. And I love the feel of paper and smell of paper and the joy of being transported somewhere else in my mind. So even if I'm on a really boring train journey, where do we go Delhi to Calcutta, which was about three and a half years, as far as I remember. It was probably I think it was a full 24 hour journey. But you just bring a book out and suddenly to be somewhere else. So I would take my Kindle. And as much as I love real books, I can get millions of zillions of them on a Kindle. And so I would take my book, and therefore I would be wherever I wanted.
Rick Denton:Elaine, I was thinking about something you said when we talked earlier. And it was you know, knowing that the customer should influence how we approach voc voice of the customer. You know, I know it makes sense on the surface. But would you unpack it a little bit it take us kind of beyond the pithy phrase of knowing the customer should influence how you approach voc but really, how does knowing the customer influence how you approach voice of the customer?
Elaine Lee:Oh, okay. So voice of the customer for me is like the heartbeat of your activity. So that heartbeat has to pump day in day out. This is not a you know, we do it and then we stop and then we learn the results from it. Because if the heartbeat is not going, you're not learning so it has to be an on going continuous activity. And I think you have to listen, I came back to coming keep coming back to listening and we want to Covey Stephen Covey's seven principles is around listening and listening, not to prepare your answer, which is what most of us do. Most of us are listening to respond. And actually this is about listening to hear, understand. And so I think, you know, you have to drop all your assumptions, and you have to come at it with a fresh pair of eyes and a clean mind. No preconceptions, no assumptions, what are the customers going to tell me? And so the only way Well, we found that the best way of doing that is to actually have the customer as much as possible or in the room. And so get their voices get their opinions. And if you I don't actually I don't mean physically dragging them into the room, although many of them will be tempted to come and tell you if they've had a good or bad experience, but the ones in the middle. So what we how we approach that is to try and capture those in the moment customer experiences. So if we are doing an what we call an experience audit, it sounds terribly clipboard ish. But it's not. It's about trying to capture those moments as the customer goes through their journey. And so we might use video and when they might record what they're doing, but actually, we're not recording their faces, we're recording the activities they're doing and their voice track along the way. So they can be where the hell's this button? What do you mean, I haven't put my password in properly? Why are you telling me I've got it wrong, I haven't even understand yet. You know, come on. And you gather all that insight. And then we take that into the boardroom and show. And that's how it helps people understand why when I say it's frustrating when they're being asked to enter a password, and we tell them, we've got it wrong. Because you can't deny somebody who's voiced an opinion. And when you hear it, yeah, that's why it's the voice of the customer is so important. You know, it's, it's not a missing understanding, because you can hear the emotion, not just the words.
Rick Denton:Yeah, there's, there's so much to that. I think, you know, we talked about the it's a cliche at this point, but the empty chair that Amazon uses at its meetings, and I've used a similar approach at other clients, but really just how can we bring that customer's actual voice into the room to remind people that are disconnected from the actual customer, just because either hierarchy or role to this is what the customer is actually saying? I'm glad you brought us there. Well, let's, we talked a lot about companies that need to do better about listening and that sort of thing. But I want to talk about a business that really knows their customer, not a specific business. But I know you've talked about companies that they should be able to identify customers who are in distress, and reach out proactively to address concerns not wait for the customer to reach out with a concern or complaint and issue, but rather, heck even reach out the customer before even the customer knows there's an issue. Tell me more about that approach.
Elaine Lee:So I'm, I learned this in my early days when I worked for a wine company mailorder wine company, and we had a customer who was a relatively new customer, but he bought a few bottles of wine, and he really liked what we had to offer. And he thought he was getting married. So he organized. He said I want to buy the wine. We've got the venue, we're having it in the barn in the farm or wherever the road, and I want to buy my wine from you. And it was a big order. And it was a big day for him and our competitor contact center watch that order. Every every inch of its journey to make sure it left the warehouse as it was she went down and supervised the patch. She made sure she did spot checks on the bottles. And she kept track with the careers. And you know, I arrived and it was going in a depo to be sorted and distributed out the next morning, and it got lost. So it arrived at the Depo. But it never left the Depo. And we didn't know where it went. So she was like, okay, okay, so she was because she proactively been watching it. She knew it. So she went down to the warehouse, she found the cow, repack the order, got an a black cab and drove up to the wedding venue, taxi full of wine and arrived and said to the guy who said, I've just had a message to say, I'm not getting my wine. And yet you're here. And she said, Because I knew it was a problem. So I brought it up for you and I will recover the rest of it from wherever it's gone. That's not your problem. Your focus for today is to have a fantastic experience enjoy your daughter's wedding. He couldn't have been happier. Of course, yeah, it was about. But it was about building a relationship with a potential customer because he was going to be a customer who would have wandered off and disappeared into the without having ruined his daughter's wedding, maybe wants to get married with their wine. But then she solved that problem. And it really struck a chord with me about actually, they have to be proactive. And if you are a new business owner and you've got your first business, you care about that you would watch everybody would hand packet you would give them a big kiss on the cheek or whatever you might do to say thank you. And that's how we should treat every customer. We should look after them all because you never know whether they're going to be a big or a small customer. And I had another example having been through that working with a charity. And we were handling donations from an appeal. The donor had called in and was going to make a two pound 50 donation. And it was my my training has been around let's focus on that journey and to plan 50 for there might be an enormous amount of money. It's not for me for lots of us, but for that donor and we need to sound grateful. And they have this fantastic conversation with the donor. And the team leader was going to consume we're taking so long on this call. It's only for 250 and he's like no but this you know, yeah, just be just be grateful the chat wants to have a chat. Three weeks later he found she sold his house and he donated a quarter million pounds, all of that Conversation. Wow. Because he felt warm, he felt welcomed, he wasn't in a position to give more than two pound 50 because he was worried about where his money was going. But he'd sold his hands for a lot more money than he thought he could. And he'd been so impressed by the agent giving him time information. And just being really genuinely grateful that he found a medical familiar.
Rick Denton:Wow, boy that just never know. You never know. And what I'm hearing in the answer to that question is this idea of pay attention to your customers, right? And it is not in situation one, it was like this as a high potential customer, we're going to watch this order very tightly. In scenario two, it's just treat every customer regardless of where they are, and that high potential or whatever with heart and concern, and who knows where they may be. And I realized that the first story that you have is not scalable without tools, but there are tools out there to even do that. As long as a company chooses to build that pre emptive strike approach of I'm going to pay attention before the customer knows that it's time to pay attention. And there are tools out there. Ido Cohen, let's see, he was a few episodes ago, maybe Episode 3034, or something like that talked about that same thing of contacting customer before they even call in when a shipment is late, or those sorts of things. So
Elaine Lee:yeah, send your customer knows that you really are interested in them and their product or their purchase because you've proactively been watching it.
Rick Denton:It's amazing what happens when you deliver some heart to the customer, right?
Elaine Lee:Yeah. Be in the moment with your estimation and living feeling. How would you feel if your delivery didn't arrive? And if it was your daughter's wedding, or it was
Rick Denton:really angry, I might be driving down that lane. This conversations been brilliant. I've enjoyed it. I love to talking about so much about voice of the customer. I loved hearing about the heart for the customer. And you know me, I loved hearing your travel stories. And yes, I'm still jealous that you got to go to Cuba. But hopefully someday the political realities will be resolved. And I'll be able to experience something similar. I do want to let folks know, how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about you, your company and how you do things.
Elaine Lee:So I have a website and always a long and complicated name, but it's actually three surnames or slam together. So we are Reynolds, Busbee, Lee, so, surnames, rentals, Billy, and it's a.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. And where else can you find me generally anywhere and everywhere Facebook.
Rick Denton:I'll make sure that the website and LinkedIn get into the show notes. So if you're listening to this and you want to see that complex, the three names wedge together. So if you reach out to Layne, just head over the show notes and you'll get a link there. Elaine enjoyed every bit of it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me on CX passport today. I do hope that you have a great rest of your day and get out there on the road soon.
Elaine Lee:Thank you it's been great Rick. It always is. love talking to you take
Rick Denton:Thanks for joinin us this week on CX Passport Make sure to visit our websit cxpassport.com where you can hit subscribe so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, you can check out the rest of the EX4CX website. If you' e looking to get real about cust mer experience, EX4CX is availa le to help you increase evenue by starting to listen to your customers and create gr at experiences for every cus omer every time. Thanks fo listening to CX Passport nd be sure to tune in for our n xt episode. Until next time, I'm Rick Denton, and I believe the est meals are served outs de and require a passport.
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