Rick Denton: 0:05

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. Today I get the pleasure of talking with Mike Bartlett, originally from the UK, but now residing in Springfield, Missouri, USA, Mike and I came to know each other through a fellow CX colleague, Agatha Krakowska. Thanks, Agatha! I always welcome those fellow CX introductions as they are often great evaluators of CX wisdom. When I first got to talking with Mike, I found a really interesting path to his customer experience leadership, a film director, founder of a record label at age 16. hired to focus on customer experience for a school district. These are not traditional CX work histories. Now I find that when something isn't traditional, that's often the fountainhead of unique ideas. With Mike that is truly the case. Do you link Chess and customer experience? I didn't. But Mike did just that. It's going to be fun to hear Mike's ideas today, Mike, welcome to CX passport.

Mike Bartlett: 1:25

Hey, thank you, Rick. Thanks for having me today.

Rick Denton: 1:27

I am looking forward to it. So let's let's jump right in. They're talking about sort of that unique come at coming at the world of customer experience. I know that a lot of us come from different backgrounds, different lenses, but you certainly have a unique approach and looking at chess as that lens for thinking about CX, which is the inspiration of your most recent book, The Dark Side of CX, which a great title, by the way, but more about that approach to CX and chess, and how that all comes together?

Mike Bartlett: 1:54

Well, it stems from the fact that human beings tend to be pattern matching machines, maybe we're not all aware of it. But essentially, that's what we like to do. And unfortunately, some of us in society tend to take that a little too far. I'm one of those people. And so if I, to give you a quick example, because in addition to chess, I also have done a lot of work in the film business as well. And patents are very interesting to me for this reason. So when I was trying to learn how to write screenplays, and it's no different from architecting software or anything, when you put the vision together. One thing I always found with scream when people come to me and say, Hey, could you read my script, I'd always think, ah, you know, and it was like a real effort. And everybody feels that way. When I was shooting my latest film out in Missouri, and I gave people the script, they came back the next day. And they said, I'm going to be really honest, I wasn't expecting to read this in one sitting. But I did. And the reason that this sort of black magic that I found was a pattern that had already existed, it had been known, you know, in the early part of the century, and then people had sort of forgotten it. And the pattern was very simple, the pattern was that you would show a reel of film, and the reels of film would be 10 to 15 minutes long. And then you'd have to end the reel of film, and then have something to convince people to come back the next week when you hit the next rule of thumb. So we're talking really early days of cinema, right, right. And then of course, what happened is over time there at the real, you were able to, you know, piece them together and make it long enough so that people could watch an actual film in one setting. But that pattern was very interesting to me. So it would start off, and it would pose a question to the viewer, and very similar to how TV episodes work, and then it would have some kind of closure, but then there would be a little hook at the end of that closure, so that you would want to come back next week. And then what happened was, as the as film started to become, you know, like 90 minutes, 120 minutes long, people sort of lost that pattern. And so what ended up happening is we got this thing in the film business that we call the meandering second act, where the film would start off, you know, quite well structured, where there'd be a character thrown into a new world, they'd fight, they'd face a series of problems, and then he kind of meander around Philadelphia will get a bit bored, before it kind of remembered what it was supposed to be doing. And then the third acts finished the film. And so and I learned that pattern from from a really talented screenwriting teacher who actually has written books that have informed my customer experience approach as well. But I just was I remember my brain sort of lit up when I realized that this patent even existed, and that I could exploit it and then when I did exploit it, and other people actually were impressed and they were How did you do that? That was so interesting. And the really funny thing about Treehouse is the reviews of that film. There's it's very mixed. Some people love it. Some people hate it, but even the people that hate it always write things like God, I can't believe I sat through this whole thing. Because obviously there's this screenplay, you know, translated until the finished product and and I was clicking them every 15 minutes consistently. And so I realized these patterns are everywhere. And if you know how to exploit them, then you know, you can obviously turn a situation, maybe an unfavorable situation into a favorable situation. And that applies into chess, which obviously is a very pattern driven game, okay, as well as customer experience as well,

Rick Denton: 5:21

that idea of patterns. And that's the thing that I would love to unpack with you a little bit certainly, I know of chess, but my limit and limitations to chess are really watching the Queen's gambit and playing a little bit in high school, right, so, but I know that there are for those that understand the game, these patterns that you're describing, and those patterns and and how the pattern interacts with each other. And I think that may be something that sort of intrigued, maybe in customer experience, the same thing that you have those that are delivering the customer experience, the company, the employee, the frontline, the system, the digital, whatever it is, and then the customer themselves. And those patterns interact back and forth. Is that tell me a little bit about how that might play into customer experience in chess? Is that sort of the patterns that you're exploring?

Mike Bartlett: 6:00

Yeah, so the book looks what I call the most common prelims. So a premium is a concept I learned in 2014, from an author named Andy psaltis. And it turns out this is been something that's very widely known in the Russian chess world. And in premium is a chess pattern, that not only is a pattern where you know, once you've learned it, and you can identify it when it appears on the board. But it also has coupled with it and associated maneuver. So if I see this pattern, then I do this. And then this realizes me an advantage. And the more of these pre ohms that you know, the better chess player you become because you see the pattern, you don't have to think where maybe your opponent does. And you can you can move very, very quickly on the board, especially in blitz chess, or speech, chess, and people completely confused as to how you can do it. And it's just because you've built up these patterns. Also, there's other there's other ways these patterns can work. So Eddie's also wrote a book called The wisest things ever said about chess. And in that book, he gave an example where there's like best practices. So one of the things that you typically do in a game of chess is you look at where your opponent's queen is, and you place your rook on the same file. So it's aiming at the Queen, okay, most of the time, there's gonna be a whole bunch of other things in the way between the two of them. But as the game trans continues to move forwards, eventually what will happen is, you might end up in a situation where the rook being on that fall causes the Queen a lot of problems and helps you actually bring bring the position to an advantage. And it looks to somebody that doesn't know anything about chess, like, wow, you know, you saw like, 20 moves ahead. We didn't see too many moves ahead, you just made a move that set you up for potential success and a number of potential futures. Okay, so I'm sorry, you're going to experience?

Rick Denton: 7:49

Yeah, you're getting me all excited. Here. I'm starting to see how that goes to CX. So pivot me into CX there? Because you're right, when I see again, going back to Queens Gambit, or anybody that I see, that's good at it, you think that they have played out 17 moves in advance, but what you're saying is there's these patterns that are identifiable ahead of time, how does that apply to customer experience.

Mike Bartlett: 8:07

So I figured it probably would apply the customer experience. And that's kind of what formed the basis of writing this book. So I decided to do some research in 2019. Because the great thing about the way the world works is, patterns are everywhere, and patterns are very revealing about what created them as well. So in systems thinking, normally the the, there's a there's an event and the event normally happens one or more times, it normally tends to be part of a pattern. The pattern is normally driven by some kind of an organizational structure. And that structure is normally driven by mindsets within the organization. And that's why being put on hold for a very long amount of time or forced to wait in a queue for a very long amount of time is something that happens everywhere, not just in England or America, it's in Japan, you name it, it's a clear pattern that all humans not only recognize, but it really frustrates them as well. I basically went ahead and did some research to try and find, you know, and it wasn't scientific research. I mean, I literally Googled most common bad customer experiences most bad customer service. And then I had a big whiteboard, I started telling them as I was, as I was going through, and of course, adding new ones where I hadn't seen them before. And I found a collection of cameras like 17 or 18 core patterns that, you know, just seem to be the most common ones that you would see anytime that there was a you read a review or someone was angry about a customer experience. And then I thought, well, you know, what tends to have a, you know, a causation behind it. patterns in customer experience are part of a complex system. So this is where we get into Dave. So this idea of complexity versus complicatedness. So, a complicated system our best, the best way to describe that would be like a car engine. So it's very complicated. You need experts to help you understand it. But if you are an expert, you can get to a point where I know that if I pull this lever, or if I do X, I'm going to get this output, okay? It's very doable, it might be hard to figure out the cause and effect, but it is it is you can figure it out. It's predictable. Complex Systems are very different. And that normally, when human beings are involved in the feedback loops of a complex system, that's what makes it complex, right? We do tend to miss things up as humans don't wait. Exactly, exactly. It's not predictable in any way, shape, or form. So by using, by trying to understand complexity through the lens of customer experience, you can use these patterns to try and figure out the best ways to solve problems. So I find that certain patterns tend to have certain causations. Yeah, and if you go and you address those causations, it tends to fix those root causes.

Rick Denton: 10:45

I like that because there's there's something about what you're saying there that instead of, you know, describing it as almost like a process manual or something like that, where it's this, you know, if this, then that happens. But it's, there's still more of that kind of art, as you understand, and you see the pattern. But yet, you can still kind of provide sort of a non scripted solution to that pattern, or either in the moment, or as you're thinking about your delivery of customer experience over time, and how you might look to improve it. It does seem to be this idea of like, I'm looking for patterns. But I'm not necessarily looking for prescriptive solutions, but rather the patterns that help influence what that solution is. I think there's something in that kind of that pattern and psychology that you sort of inspired me to think about. And I know you have talked about this point where you've said, we need to spend more time talking about the psychology of experience. So we talked about the patterns, but the psychology of experience, and it's in that vein, what makes a bad experience, really a bad experience? Why is that a case? What's the psychology of that?

Mike Bartlett: 11:48

Yeah, so I had some I wanted to write about this, because I didn't feel it was explored enough. I see a few things here and CX space, people talk about emotions, people talking about memories. But very often the customer experience stuff always tends to be more around the customer rather than the experience. Right? So I did some research into this. And I started at the very, the very base, what are our human drives? And then what are the things that can affect those human drives and upset us? And why do they upset us. And essentially, it comes from a concept called Aloe stasis. So Aloe stasis essentially is where our body tries to predict what's going to happen in the environment, and then change our bodily state to deal with it. And that's because the most successful animals that existed and therefore able to reproduce, were the ones that predicted the environment correctly, or more accurately, shall we say, than all the others in the in the population. And so when we think something bad's gonna happen, you know, you see some rustling in the bushes, if you will, then your body immediately gets the adrenaline going, you go into a heightened state of awareness. Because if you're, if something does leap out, and you're able to get away from it, then you survive versus the, you know, the animal that didn't adapt. Okay, so this onsies essentially, what expectations so anytime that you get ready to engage in a customer experience, you're doing some mental accounting, you're predicting in a way, what's going to happen. And you know, if you get into a line to wait, you predicting how long it's going to take, if you stand in front of a customer service representative, who you've been watching deal with other people and seems really friendly, you're expecting a friendly experience. And so as soon as things start to deviate from the expectations, that's where you get either a good experience or a bad experience. And the bad experiences tend to be things that infringe upon, you know, those core needs. And in the book, I've basically been able to just simplify it for practitioners and say, Look, ultimately, there's just two categories, right? So there's Gulf friction. So that's something gets in the way of you trying to perform your goal. Okay, how long you thought it would take, you know, the effort that it would take. And then there's social friction, and that's where signals in the environment, let you know that you know, you're not valued, or that the people that you thought you could trust aren't trustworthy. And that sends alarm bells through because obviously, we've grown up as a very social animal. And we're always very heightened and aware of our status in society, and how we interrelate with others.

Rick Denton: 14:14

So you can see I know the listeners won't be able to see this but my brow kind of furrowing and my brain sort of thinking this through goal, and social, those are really interesting. I don't think I've ever heard it categorized that way. And it makes a ton of sense if I'm expecting to achieve a certain outcome and I'm disappointed great. Or if I feel disrespected, or let's go back to your whole time example, that it is my perception that the company does not value me enough to care about the, in some cases, hour plus time that I might sit on hold to get an experience with. That's really now what can someone do with that, like what can a company do when they understand those elements of psychology? How do they then pivot that into action and helping solve for the experiences that they want to solve for

Mike Bartlett: 15:00

So the best thing is when you're auditing your experiences, however you do that I know some people do journey mapping, yeah, other people just get out into the field and talk to people. But ultimately, when you're auditing your experiences, you're looking at your voice of customer data, you want to look for those signals that either there's some goal frictional, there's some social friction, social friction signals are really easy to spot, because normally, you know, on a survey or be someone saying something like, I can't believe I was treated that way. Right? You know, those kinds of things? Yeah. And then you, you basically have to start digging into well, what is the pattern that caused this because all of these patterns that I've documented in my book, and they by no means exhaustive, you know, I'm sure there are other patterns out there that get more specific depending on what vertical you're in. But you need to then do the research. So you need to say, Okay, here's the pattern that occurred, you know, what are the structures that caused this, you go talk to people talk to as many different lenses around this problem as you can, there's a really good book actually called upstream and upstream, talks about certain problems like and we're talking about big complex problems, like hurricanes, like the hurricane that hit New Orleans, and what was the other one? It talks about homelessness? Okay, how do we solve these problems? Have there been examples where these problems have been solved? It's one of the reasons why I'm such a big fan of the state's model in the US, because you can think of each of those as 50 little experiments. And if one of them wants to go off and do something crazy, and everyone else is laughing at them, and they succeed, well, guess what they say, if they failed, they failed on their own dime. But if they succeeded, they've now produced a little model that the rest of us can use as well. And that comes from that comes from the natural world of innovation where both in business and in the customer experience as well always have people looking in strange, random directions, because you never know what insights they may uncover.

Rick Denton: 16:47

And that's what I like kind of as you introduce this new concept of goal and expectation, sorry, goal and social expectations, that's just a new way of thinking a new lens. I did kind of chuckle there when you were admiring our state's model. Here it is in 2022. And, you know, we're sort of struggling with some of that here in the US as we will not go into as this is not that type of pie. There are some challenges with the uniqueness that does exist across our land. But I do appreciate that perspective. Michael, I've never thought of it as a, hey, let's look at this as an innovation experiment.

Mike Bartlett: 17:17

Oh, it really is. Yeah, when you come from a country like I do, where, you know, like one person says, we're going to all jump off the cliff and everyone jumps off the cliff, you can see how that could easily result in extinction. But when you live in a model, where some people say we'll jump off a cliff, some people say, we're not going to jump off the cliff, maybe jumping off the cliff is a really good idea. Actually, the ones left on the top of the cliff will starve because the food's at the bottom of it, or it's just a great way. So it's just a very innovative approach. And it can be very painful, of course, but tends to work out in the long run. And that's the most important thing.

Rick Denton: 17:53

Michael, having had the opportunity to travel the 50 states, and certainly the globe and be around there, there's a time that that travel gets a little bit exhausting. So seeing all those innovation experiments, or just even just simply traveling, it's nice to have a little rest. So Michael, come join me here in the first class lounge, we will move quickly here and hopefully have some fun, what is a dream travel location from your past?

Mike Bartlett: 18:15

From my past, it would be the Kent downs, because like most English people, we have castles literally in our backyards, and we appreciate them because it's just part of the background noise. And then when you move to somewhere like America, you really think oh my god, I can't believe I didn't take advantage of all that beauty. And I went to the Kent downs once and it was just one of the most beautiful experiences just just as far as the eye could see just you know, fields and hills and you can just go walking for the day if you want for miles. So I went if I ever go back to England, I'd like to go back to the Kent downs.

Rick Denton: 18:50

That sounds really nice. And one of the things that I really love about doing this podcast is the uniqueness of the answer to that question. No one has ever said Kent downs before and I love it. And now I've got this visual, and I can't wait to put that on my list. Unfortunately, list keeps getting longer and longer. have weird cosi but that sounds wonderful. Now, let's talk about your list. What is a dream travel location? You've not been to yet.

Mike Bartlett: 19:12

Willoughby.

Rick Denton: 19:14

Tell me about that. I don't think I even know what that is. Willoughby

Mike Bartlett: 19:17

only viewers who are familiar with the Twilight Zone will know what will it be? Yes. So okay, Google, wait and investigate it. And then everyone will want to travel there.

Rick Denton: 19:27

So you're keeping it mysterious. I like that. What is a favorite thing to eat?

Mike Bartlett: 19:32

Oh, I love Indian food. I mean, my father was Indian. So I grew up eating all the time and I just love a good curry.

Rick Denton: 19:40

You know, that's a later in life exposure for me. I was not as exposed to Indian food. Growing up. I had a reasonably cultural multicultural growing up my parents we love to travel those sorts of things. So I saw lots of things. Indian food, something I only discovered kinda in my 40s And yes, I'm with you. Well, when you find really good Indian, it's really really good. gateway, Gateway meals to get you into some of the deeper Indian cuisine that are fantastic. You talked about Indian food is something you really love. But what is the thing your parents forced you to eat but you hated as a kid.

Mike Bartlett: 20:14

It was an Indian dish. But man, it was grocers called darlin rice. And I remember my dad trying to reason with me to take one final spoon, and I and I'm sure it didn't happen this way. But my memory of this is that I was sweating. And I was like, punch drunk, and I can't do it. I just can't do it. And they went from reasoning to threatening and so the last spoon was shoved in my mouth. And yeah, it threw up everywhere. So that was a really horrible experience.

Rick Denton: 20:43

What is it about? Yeah, I may have been guilty of certainly over encouraging, let's use that word, certain foods on my my kids, and I guarantee if they're sitting on a podcast, or whatever podcasts are 2030 years from now. And there'll be talking about certain foods. Why do we do that, as parents, eventually the kid will either discovered or they won't. But it is funny how those memories linger with us. Going back to travel, what is one travel item, not including your phone, that you will not leave home without?

Mike Bartlett: 21:13

Well, thanks to post traumatic syndrome. There has to be a toothbrush, because when I used to be a consultant, I had about three or four incidents where I forgot my toothbrush, and then the week that I was on the client, so I felt absolutely miserable. So yeah, I will definitely don't do that anymore.

Rick Denton: 21:39

Michael, when we were talking about you in the introduction here, I mentioned that you worked for a school district. And I find that to be particularly intriguing. I just don't think of customer experience in school districts that often I don't think a lot of folks do. And it just wouldn't be it. You don't see books about it. You don't see writing about it nearly as much. But I would love for you to tell me about that role. Tell me about what you did there. But then I'm also curious, why did the district choose to focus on customer experience? And what were some of the impacts by choosing to focus on it?

Mike Bartlett: 22:10

So the school districts had, they started off with really good intentions. Okay. So they, they went all in on design thinking, they trade all of their staff up, and how to use design thinking they created innovation department in a brand new building. And then the director of it just decided he needed a User Experience Manager. So he hired me, okay. And then I, when I joined, I realized the role wasn't really user experience. And we it was very technology heavy, but it was definitely more of a CX role. But the problem, and this is kind of why I'm not having the euphoric reaction that everybody else is to the announcement recently that the government's gonna really start taking CX seriously is, I know how government works, because

Rick Denton: 22:55

I've got an eyebrow raised on that one, too, right? Yeah, huh.

Mike Bartlett: 22:58

And, you know, obviously, I hope they prove me wrong, I want them to. But if any, if any of your listeners are familiar with something called the competing values framework, it's so it's a way to assess culture, it's probably the most empirically verified framework on culture. And governments typically fall into the what's known as the command and control quadrant. So everything is very process driven, is very hard to get anything done. And the resource allocation is very strange in government as well, because we were very, we were spread very thin, there weren't enough employees to do what needed to be done. But then they would throw hundreds of 1000s of dollars at certain pieces of software. And you say, Wow, that's a bit strange. And so that that was kind of good, though, because it made the CH role more challenging, because when you've got less to work with, and I know this from low budget filmmaking, you have to get creative. But what happened in my role is like the first time I ever went to do and do some ethnography, ethnographic work, I went to a library and the director of it, so I want you to just, you know, get to know the library and watch what she does talk to her, you know, just get a feel for what's going on. And then maybe you can see where some of the problems might be. They needed a system bill, and they knew that I used to program I used to code. So then I was asked to do this coding role for the district as well. And even though it wasn't my job title, actually ended up being one of the best things that ever happened because I built their first ever Voice of Customer system. So we have Chromebooks. We give Chromebooks out to the kids. Okay, no one knows what half these Chromebooks are, they're circulating around somewhere. And each library has a different system for tracking them, right. And so I built an end to end system across the districts so that whenever a Chromebook was damaged, all they had to do was pull my system up, press a button on the screen scan the serial number of the Chromebook that the student had brought back there was damaged scammers the serial number of the loaner, and then our IT department immediately knew they had to be picked up. And then there was a button there saying give feedback and it was click it bring up a pop up And then they get their feedback. Like, it would be nice if we could have this or could you do this? What the staff didn't know is that as soon as they did that, I had a screen on my on my desktop that had a database, and then I would see the results come in. And most of the time, the feedback from these libraries was awesome. So I would implement it, release the code. And then the next day, I would tell them, hey, remember that update that you are? So I've done it. places I couldn't believe the speed at which we could adapt and change because they weren't used to that. And when I left the district, one of the last pieces of feedback I had it was when they demo the system to the librarians. And it's, it makes me feel really good. But it's very sad as well. The feedback was, wow, it's like someone finally listened to us. Yeah. And I don't I think that should be like the minimum level of a good CX. And it was a shame that that ended up being an amazing CX for them.

Rick Denton: 25:54

Yeah, Michael, that's actually I hear you saying, you know, it's disappointed that that's the baseline. But even when I talk to clients, when I talk to companies, it surprises me. How many companies aren't there that listen, or they're they think they're listening. But then they're not acting? I think you you, you mentioned, listen, but also you acted. And I think that's a key element of a total Voice of the Customer approach. Is one having that mechanism to listen, that's obviously you. If you don't know, if you're not listening, then you don't know. But then acting upon it. I think that was so important there. I think. I think that may actually kind of segue into sort of this last question. We're out of time, I'm looking at the clock. But there's something that I wanted to talk to you about. And I'm thinking about that listen, and act and how one feels when somebody is taking care of me there. Even some of the stories that you've told, I know, we started with chess, very analytical, massive focus on logic. But I want to go to the other end of the spectrum storytelling and emotion I'm sure your film directing and story writing, and all of that plays into this. Why is storytelling, so vital to creating an inspiring customer experience?

Mike Bartlett: 26:58

Well, the main reason is just because unfortunately, human beings through their evolution just aren't very good at just absorbing large amounts of data. Even small data, I'm looking at a book called on my shelf now the influential mind. Very interesting book, she talks about a debate that she saw between, and this is chapter one of the book between two politicians. I won't say who they were, but one of them was basically talking about, you know, here's the data, here's the science, here's how it works. And then the other one was coming up with these visuals that were really terrifying and not really based in reality. And it was she said, it was amazing, because this particular subject they were arguing about, I already knew the science behind it. And yet, I felt myself being swayed by the guy that was going with all the crazy visuals. And I started panicking about, and it was a real sensitive issue, really, to the people's children. And she said, I just couldn't believe it. And so yeah, hitting the emotions, hitting those stories, just resonates. And the reason is, and this is all to do with culture. So the real key was understanding, well, what's the actual biological mechanisms that drove it in the first place so we can understand the fundamentals, then we can understand culture better. And so by looking at culture, what I found was that essentially, all it is, it's pre packaged behaviors that have worked for us in the long run. And so there's a really interesting book that just came out from Brett Weinstein, called a hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century. And I've used a quote from, from his book in my book to talk about what culture is. And he's essentially says that culture is very noisy, because it can be passed sideways, not just down through generations, as well. So that makes it faster. It also makes it more noisy, which is great experiment stuff that we talked about earlier on, you know, some there'll be some cultures that emerged with crazy ideas, and they'll burn themselves out. And then maybe there'll be some other cultures that emerge with crazy ideas. But those crazy ideas are key to the survival to the innovation of the species. And so once I understood that, I thought, okay, now I now I get where the storytelling comes from, because all you're doing with storytelling, is you are moving the culture from one place to another. So really, that's why it's so useful. And the reason that we care about it is because stories mainly tend to be signals on how to survive and what the right behaviors are. And we pay hyper attention to that, because we know that in the old days, that meant the difference between death and survival. And whilst we're not dealing with that kind of thing, in this day and age, the wiring that underpins it's still there. So that's why we are hyper aware when someone tells a story, and it's almost like our brains are wired to just absorb that information better. So that's why stories are a better way to convey information than just regular data.

Rick Denton: 29:45

I have never heard it described that way. So you know, I've heard I look at it hits at the heart and these are the kind of words I use as an absolutely non scientist. It it's at the heart. It kind of is easier to remember it's engaging, those kinds of things, but How you take it into that evolutionary space and take it into sort of our survival of the species. And why that is a reason for story is something I've never thought of before. And I find that particularly insightful. And I would describe this entire conversation almost in that category that you've hit me with several different. I mean, we've been kind of all over the place about chess, we talked about goal versus social expectations. We've talked about school districts and film directing all of that, Michael, it's been really interesting hearing what you've had to say in all those spaces. I would want to quickly tell me, how can folks get in touch with you? And where can they find your book? Tell me a little bit about that.

Mike Bartlett: 30:33

So the book will be on Amazon and they can find me on LinkedIn is normally the best place to get me.

Rick Denton: 30:38

So I'll get all that into the show notes. Michael, thank you so much for talking with me today. Thank you for poking at my brain is how I want to describe it because it just makes me feel like alright, I've learned something different today. And I really enjoy that. So Michael, thank you for taking the time to have this conversation with you. Thank you for joining me on CX passport.

Mike Bartlett: 30:54

You too. Thank you so much, Rick, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you.

Rick Denton: 31:00

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. Make sure to visit our website 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're looking to get real about customer experience, EX4CX is available to help you increase revenue by starting to listen to your customers and create great experiences for every customer every time. Thanks for listening to CX Passport and be sure to tune in for our next episode. Until next time, I'm Rick Denton, and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.