Why Customer Experience Is Your Best Sales & Marketing Strategy – in Just 7 Minutes with Dan Gingiss

Related Links and Resources:

I have a new resource that is entitled "Four Things that Every Marketer Must Know about Customer Experience", you can get it on my website at www.dangingiss.com/4-things-marketers-must-know-about-cx/ will bring it right into that free download.

Summary:

Dan Gingiss is an international keynote speaker and customer experience coach who believes that a remarkable customer experience can be your best marketing. His 20-year professional career consistently focused on delighting customers, spanning multiple disciplines including customer experience, marketing, social media and customer service. He held leadership positions at three Fortune 300 companies – McDonald’s, Discover and Humana.

Dan is the author of the book, Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media, a host of the Experience This! Show podcast and a regular contributor to Forbes.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:53 Dan’s ideal Client: My ideal clients sit in either the marketing or the customer service/experience side of the business. And nowadays, it's becoming a little bit 'muddier' because those teams are finally starting to work together which is great. Usually I'm talking to a Director or above, probably a VP Executive level in the customer service or marketing area. Somebody who is really looking to 'supercharge' the customer experience in their organization and get more people talking about their brand.

2:41 Problem Dan helps solve: The big problem is that so many companies are focused on acquiring new customers and getting new sales, and they're putting all their money there. What they're ignoring is that there's customers walking out the back door. I like to refer to this as the 'leaky bucket' and every company has a leaky bucket. The customers that are walking out the back door are very dangerous; because A: they're usually doing it so silently, they're not telling you why they're leaving and B: they're usually going to your competition. So, if we can stop the leaky bucket, if we can plug it up and keep the customers that we have, we actually take pressure off of our sales team and the marketing team because they don't have to constantly have these increasing goals every year. It gets harder and harder because we're literally swimming against the stream.

3:57 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Dan: Well, I would say a few things. The first is, if you have a retention rate that you're not happy with, if people are leaving again, either telling you or not, and you don't know why. That's a big indicator that something is wrong. If your sales and marketing team are so stressed out every year because you keep on increasing the goals just to keep up, that's a pretty good sign. I worked for a startup once where in order to net a million dollars in sales, the sales team had to sell 1.4 million dollars. That was just to make up for the sales they were losing on the back end.  Think about the stress that you put to people to chase that. The other thing is, if you're looking over to fence it on your competition, and you're saying "man, they're really doing some cool things and experiences, and I wish my company could do that. I wish we could create memorable experiences for our customers" that's the time to call Dan Gingiss.

5:14 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Dan and his solution: Usually the biggest mistake is not understanding your customer. In some companies, in some organizations, we are our own customers or we are our target audience and so it's easier to relate to the customer. In other organizations it's completely not true. One of my consulting clients right now is in the dentist supply business. I don't know a whole lot about dentistry, so if I want to help them, I need to talk to a dentist. I have to get in there and understand what's plaguing the dentist so that I'll learn how to help them. I think the biggest mistake is not truly understanding your customer but thinking you understand them because you're sitting at your desk and reading the report.

6:15 Dan’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): This may not be a surprising answer but it is to become a customer of your own company. No matter what business you are in, it should be possible to some degree. If you require customers to sign up online, you should go and try to sign up as a new customer online, see what it's like. By the way, try forgetting your password and go to the 'forgotten password' sequence. Call your own customer service, don't call from the office or home phone, and experience it for yourself. If you have physical presence, walk-in into your store, your restaurant, your building, whatever it is. Look around as if it's the first time that you're seeing it. When you are a customer of your own company, you start to see things that again you don't see from behind your desk. You get a welcome letter in the email and you look at it and you go "man, this paper is really cheap!" Well, that's because you cut costs last year and you have to put it on cheap paper. You don't actually know it unless you are being a part of it.

7:37 Dan’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): I have a new resource that is entitled "Four Things that Every Marketer Must Know about Customer Experience", as you pointed out my background is actually marketing and it evolved into customer experience. So, I like to play into that intersection because I do believe that CX (Customer Experience) is the best way to do marketing. I would much rather create a customer experience that's remarkable than another email campaign or another Facebook campaign, they just don’t work as well. This guide talks about 4 things that aim at marketers and what do you need to know about customer experience. You can get it on my website at dangingiss.com/4-things-marketers-must-know-about-cx/ it will bring you right into that download, it's a free download.

8:41 What makes you different from all of the other 'customer experience talking heads' out there that are speakers and authors and podcasters like you? I think the thing that makes me different is that I spent 20 years in corporate America, I've been in the trenches; I've done the work. One of the things that I love when I'm on stage is looking into the audience and seeing people nod their heads at me because they know that I get that. Because I have actually been in their chairs doing their job. And there's nothing against career consultants or career speakers but there's something of having been there and understanding that what I'm suggesting to you, the lawyers are going to be ok with because I had to go through that process of getting legal approval at a company. So, I know what you're about to do. I think it gives me a lot of credibility and it helps me relate to people.