The CEX Episode
.
Streaming here
Let’s talk about CeX, baby. This week on Commerce Chefs Kyle and Tom dive into all things customer experience with Marina Parejo, Head of Ecommerce at O2 and formerly from Shopify Plus, Teresa Greiner who’s worked with the likes of Microsoft, Nike, and the Olympics, even bringing in Danielle Jeffery, a relationship psychotherapist, to work through each phase of a relationship. Relationships between brands and customers are ultimately just relationships between people. The brands of tomorrow need to step up and lead with empathy to create better solutions that keep customers happy and wanting more. Post-purchase may be a long term game, but it’s definitely worth the investment. And that’s CeXy.
Learn more about our guests:
Ep. 4 Transcript
Tom Hey, Kyle, can I share something with you, it's a look at something I've been wanting to talk about for a while.
Kyle Sure. What's what's on your mind?
Tom Well, I just don't feel the spark lately, you know?
Kyle Hmm. Yeah, OK, tell me more.
Tom I feel like we are constantly distanced and we've stopped listening to one another.
Kyle Well, I'm listening now.
Tom Our communication feels so one sided lately, like I'm the only one talking. And look, I just forgot to listen. Am I out of touch here?
Kyle No, I think you've been listening.
Tom This has me all feeling a bit disconnected, like I'm letting us down all the time. Don't get me started on the touch points. We are missing out huge on the real rewards of this relationship.
Kyle I mean, I didn't think we had a problem with the touch points, but I guess when you mention it, we haven't really hugged in over a year with the pandemic at all. And I mean, we even had a socially disanced hot tub, which and I didn't mention this at the time, was very intimately rewarding for me.
Tom What?
Kyle What?
Tom Do you think I was talking about you and me? No, no, no.
Tom So, you know, we're talking about doing better at staying connected with our customers customer experience. Right?
Kyle Right. On New Dell top shelf dude, bro. Customer experience, high five.
Kyle Welcome to Commerce Chefs, a quirky and thought-provoking show for a future focused commerce leaders. We're going to fit the world's most brilliant, inspiring and driven D2C visionaries, the commerce chefs with riveting questions to uncover their secret ingredients at the intersection of passion, performance and leadership and practice.
Tom For the past decade, we've led teams of designers, strategists and digital wizards at one of the leading eCom agencies in the country to help brave brands become enduring classics.
Kyle And we're here to indefinitely borrow the strategies and prototypes that make us all better leaders and make the brands we lead better too.
Tom Real. Hmm, your voice is like smooth, smooth jazz.
Kyle I knew you were talking about us before.
Tom Welcome to the CEX episode!
Kyle Tom, did we just put that in the title so people would listen?
Tom Absolutely. We are talking about C, E, X, baby customer experience.
Kyle All right. So we know that CEX that I do right now, it more specifically post purchase CEX represents an untapped, overlooked and massive opportunity for brands.
Tom And today's consumers aren't going to buy the first hot thing they see come around the block. They're shopping around, swiping right and looking for brands to make genuine connections with them.
Kyle Meanwhile, brands are still using the same old tactics and proverbial Tinder profiles, hoping they'll end up with the right customers. That may or may not stick around for Thanksgiving dinner.
Tom And let's be honest, if we're talking about Tinder, they definitely won't. So what shift needs to happen to change that? In your career how important has customer retention been?
Kyle I think it's been really important for I mean, for our own agency, PB&J but more specifically for a lot of the clients we work with, where you see customer retention is a big driver in the long game. And the kind of the old adage that, you know, it's far less expensive to retain someone that already knows, loves, trusts you than it is to get a new one, that barrier of getting them in the door. It becomes this really important tool for brands as they're growing to kind of get that lifetime value as we talk about up and up and up versus just seeing what's happening next quarter.
Tom And what role then has the post purchase experience played in that?
Kyle It's a big driver. I mean, there's lots of factors, but I think we talk about a lot that the purchase is just the beginning of the journey. And so many brands just see that transaction as a big end point and miss out on really that post purchase is when all the real fields come in for customers, that's when they're really starting to make some bigger kind of like loyalty and trust decisions that aren't just about making the first purchase. When you think about a lot of the products that people purchase, they're they're not always necessarily massive barriers to make even if it's one hundred or two hundred dollars, you can make that decision and decide to move away from the brand. Once you have a bad post purchase experience or inversely stick with them long term, like me buying yet another pair Allbirds Tom, even though I don't need one to get a bit deeper.
Tom We sat down with Marina Parejo, the director of ecommerce at O2. Coming from Shopify Plus, she took the leap over to O2 to help navigate a twenty four thousand percent catapult in their D2C sales over the pandemic.
Kyle Here's what she said about the opportunity in investing in relationships over this monolithic obsession the D2C space has with acquisition.
Marina The surface of the answer is acquisition is a lot more expensive than it used to be. So invest in retention strategies and retention marketing because it's cheaper, like that's super surface level. But I think the deeper and the more fundamental issue with the way that the industry has evolved is that people invested so much in advertising and have made advertising so intrusive and difficult for people to recognize and understand what is in ad you even have ads today that ask you questions and survey you. And it's difficult to to figure out or identify what is an ad. I don't know if you guys are fans of South Park, but there's a three part series on advertising. And I think the show is absolutely brilliant and it hits the nail on the head. It's like Wendy is an ad and Tim is the only one who can figure out or identify who is an ad and who's not an ad in their communities and the people around them. And I think it's so beautiful because it really shows you that people have lost trust in advertising, but that actually means that they've lost trust in brands. So when you look at it, I think I read a stat recently, I said something like, eighty four percent of millennials are more likely to take buying advice from a stranger online than to talk to a sales rep, or to believe anything that comes out of the brand's mouth directly. And I think that's an important thing for people who click on.
Kyle It's not surprising that today no one wants to be sold to.
Tom So how then as brands can we make genuine connections with our customers? Spoiler alert. It comes back to treating people like people, not data points. Go figure.
Kyle So, Tom, discuss the challenge of building long term relationships requires time, energy and money. What do you think?
Tom The biggest challenge in building a long term relationship is that it just flat out takes work. It takes energy and attention and a consistent decision to develop it. It's not maybe as exciting as as when you first meet somebody and you have all those questions that you want to ask them or things that you want to learn about them or tell them about you. You know, once you've covered once you've covered the basics, the building blocks, then it's time to really get to work.
Kyle And what do you think in terms of the contrast between building long term relationships with the butterflies, the adrenaline of getting that first customer the acquisition?
Tom Well, you know, I love me some butterflies. Look, the challenge of reconciling those two things is that the feeling is different. The butterflies, the adrenaline, the rush of that, the chase. That first connection is very different than than what you feel when you're building long term. So part of I think the contrast in this is knowing what game you're in, you know, playing the infinite game is a very different approach, requires a different strategy. It's trying to prepare for a marathon versus a sprint and understanding where you're at in that relationship. And more importantly, what you're trying to build with that relationship is going to make all the difference. Let's hear what Teresa Greiner from Journe Agency had to say about this. She's been a senior leader at Microsoft and has worked with the likes of AT&T, Wal-Mart, Sony, Starbucks, Nike, and a little event you might have heard of-.
Kyle The Olympics. It's the Olympics.
Tom Thanks, Kyle.
Teresa Human beings by nature, all just really want to feel loved and go back to your primary state of being as a child, right? Do we ever completely lose that? I don't think so. People always dreamed of going back to being those days, those good old days, and be it. If I'm working on a child's product for a company, I'm on the floor eye to eye with them. If I'm sitting with an elderly person, I am sitting again. If they're in a wheelchair, incapacitated, I am at their level and I am trying to do my best to feel their heartbeat and listen to them and be there. Really quickly. Best advice I think it was given a long time ago when I was a public speaker and I was like, I'm really scared. I don't want to get on stage. And I was told before you get on that stage, stop and tell yourself that you love these people so much, you would give the coat off your back to them. And it changed my entire interaction from that moment on with anybody I worked with in a really great way. People need to be felt. And I feel that, yes, there's the experience. Yes, there's the journey. We can all get in a car and a bus and not talk to each other and look out the windows. That's a journey. Or can we have that journey where we keep thinking back to it and wishing that we were there at that table again?
Kyle So what Teresa is really talking about here is empathy.
Tom Remembering that at the receiving end of all of our marketing tactics are real people. Do you agree with what Teresa said?
Kyle Absolutely. I think it's so easy for us to forget that there's humans on the other side of every transaction. It's all about understanding who on the other side is trying to solve a challenge in their life and trying to remember there's a real person that goes home and eats dinner and has a hard time getting to sleep or whatever it might be, and you're actually doing something to help them. And so I think empathy plays a massive role in really effective relationships, whether that's in business or not Tom, just like you and me. I love that. So if empathy based marketing is effective, I guess the question is also is it scalable?
Tom I think if you frame that in terms of how traditional or typical marketing tactics and I'm putting that in quotes, you can't see it. But how we typically approach marketing, probably the first gut reaction would be no, it's not scalable, but maybe scale really isn't the thing that we should be looking at if empathy's important, what I would say is this that is at the root of just being human. So is humanity scalable? Absolutely. We look at every interaction that we take. You know, you are able to connect with people over and over again, people that you know very well with relationships you've had for a long time. Also with new people on a daily basis, you come into contact with the depth of those relationships may vary, but the ability to connect with somebody else absolutely is scalable.
Kyle But as nice as empathy based marketing sounds in all, marketing is based in empathy, but this is a deeper level, empathy based marketing. You still need to get those basics of the customers in the door need. You need to attract them.
Tom Marina had an interesting take on this, actually, when it comes to big brands versus smaller brands, she mentioned that the system really doesn't reward the smaller players. So oftentimes just getting started is the hardest part.
Marina It's not an easy thing for you to build or create, especially for brands that are starting out, and that's why it's easy for brands to, like, invest in other components because the templates are out there. And I don't mean to sound like terribly cynical, but it's like advertising is like a trillion dollar business. Right. And it supports all of these other platforms and it supports the big guys in every way. And then it leaves the smaller brands and advertisers like we can call them merchants, advertisers in this space trying to connect with people. It leaves it so that we we're having to kind of foot the bill on these experiences. But if you think about it, if you stopped contributing, if you stopped spending your dollars on the other side of it, how much more could you spend and dedicate to figuring out what these experiences need to be, what your community is actually asking for, what would benefit them? And so it becomes a business problem. But if if we were to for a moment, ignore the best practices and the way that everyone's always done it, can we take those dollars and convert them into into an experience that is unique and customized? But I think there are also other strategies that, you know, when you look at content creators and the way that they have been able to communicate with their audiences and tap into those communities and sell them products, I mean, they're outpacing the biggest and baddest of retailers because they tap into audience extension strategies. They've figured out ways to share their networks with one another in order to grow their organic audiences and then in turn sell products and create experiences that are really great for their communities specifically. So I think there's just this big shift that needs to happen in the way that we think about advertising dollars or creating reach.
Kyle And now we're going to play a little variation on spin the bottle.
Tom Never mind then. All right. Let's get the audience involved in this one Kyle. If you're listening, grab a drink, whatever's closest to you, and join us in a round of never have I ever commerce edition about kombucha.
Tom I said Sambuca.
Kyle Yep. Not hearing the difference there anyway.
Tom Rules of the game. If you don't already know, we're going to say something. Never have I ever. And if you have done that, you take a drink. OK, let's do it. Kyle, you're up first.
Kyle Never have I ever drove directly to a liquor store after a tough meeting.
Tom I mean, I'd like to say no, but. But I have.
Kyle Yeah, I wrote this. Guilty
Tom Right, looking back on the last 10 months or so, never have I ever forgotten to leave my house for a full week.
Kyle Guilty. Very guilty.
Tom OK, Kyle, this is going out to you. Never have I ever forgotten to wear pants on a Zoom= call.
Kyle Guilty.
Tom Guilty.
Kyle It's a lifestyle, though. It's not even forgetting now. Never have I ever gone hungry listening to someone talk about apps only to realize they weren't talking about the food.
Tom Every day.
Kyle Never have I ever left a review on my own product. Final answer.
Tom Guilty as charged.
Kyle It's an honest review though, and that's what matters.
Tom Didn't you leave like ten on our own podcast?
Kyle Yeah. Yeah, that was me.
Tom So let's take a count here, how how's everybody feeling a little a little tipsy? Kyle, how are you?
Kyle I feel great! It's kombucha!
Tom There you go.
Kyle I think I won though.
Tom Did you just break your glass again?
Kyle Yeah.
Tom And we're back.
Kyle OK, so we've talked about why it's important to build a long term customer relationship and why it's often difficult to do so.
Tom But how do you actually go about creating that bond with your customer?
Kyle To get to the nitty gritty? We consulted Danielle Jefferey, a registered psychotherapist that specializes in relationships. She has a Masters in counselling psychology and has been practicing for over 15 years.
Danielle So there's a few different models of relationship development, but one that I think pairs well with the customer and brand relationship would be Dr. Mark Knapp's relational model. So first stages, this is loud me, this is the spread of your feathers. Show me who you are. The next stage, the intensifying and integrating. This is where you get to know me, remembering that there is a little bit of risk here. So I need to feel that that sense of the emotional security. So if the first couple of stages are you showing me who you are, the next couple of stages, are you getting to know me? Then the fifth is a bonding. This is I need to feel close to you. But again, remember, there's that little bit of disorientation. So while I need to feel close to you and celebrate this bond that we have, I also need a little bit of space to adjust. So the next is differentiating. So I need to feel that sense of independence within my commitment. I need the space to explore, to rediscover myself. OK, so the next one is circumscribing. What is my need. So this is where communication starts to break down. You could start to lose your partner. So in this stage, I need you to help me communicate. In the circumscribing stage where there is conflict, my need our needs when we're in relationships is to really foster that emotional security where there's a safe space to be able to reflect on the emotions that we're experiencing and to be able to communicate them. And when I'm not communicating them right that I'm forgiven and given the space to learn how to communicate them better, I need defenses to go down where I'm not seeing conflict as the dissolution and impending doom in the relationship. But I'm seeing this as an opportunity. And it's a tool for greater intimacy, for greater commitment. Out of that conflict can come a whole new understanding of our partner, where we understand each other more, where we appreciate each other more, where we respect each other more. And I think if anyone were to take anything out of this talk of whether it be for personal relationships or for business relationships, that would be it to see that conflict and not as a threat, but as an opportunity.
Tom Danielle laid out a great model to understand the stages of a relationship. Now you're already likely correlating how these stages can frame customer relationship and the various tactics and approaches that could be important at each stage.
Kyle Teresa had some great points along these lines too.
Teresa When you build relationships long term, that love never goes away, and for the people who aren't saying, OK, Teresa, this is all kind of really, really cheesy, right? Loyalty, loyalty to your company, loyalty to your product, if you are manipulating it, if you are pretending it, if you are faking it. Congratulations. Gen Z has new glasses and their lenses are like BBBBB. They know right away you ain't telling the truth. If you are telling the truth. Empathy is so incredibly important. It's not saying I like you. Hey, nice to meet you. Oh, I think that person is really nice. I'll probably never see them again. Or wow, I want to get to know that person who was that? I actually have this happen once in my life where I ran into somebody I had met a long, long time ago through a group of friends. We ran into each other at a restaurant. We ended up talking for a little while. We ended up staying late and having a cocktail at work three days later, a bouquet of flowers shows up and everybody's like, woo hoo, you lose the guy. And I'm like, I don't know, but I'm going to give this one a chance. And I flip the card and it says, Wow, I'm so glad we reconnected, Natalie. I still remember that moment. That's crazy, that's solidified a friendship for a long time. Also when things didn't go well in that relationship, did it give me an extra bandwidth of forgiveness? Mmm mmm. Forgave a lot. Not a lot, she's awesome. But it's the relevance of the empathy and understanding, again, the human truths of who we are. And it's so simple. But we have spent so much of our lives wearing masks, trying to be everything we're supposed to be on the streets on these calls, all these recordings, everything that we're doing, we're trying to be something that we think other people will really love because we're afraid. And the crazy thing is, if you just hear yourself, wow, the right people come to you. Same thing with companies and products. Be yourself. The right people will come to you. If they are not, sit down and look at your product. Are you targeting it wrong? Do you need to create a different product? Again, don't try to sell a 10 year old kid car tires. Why? Why? That's just rude.
Tom So you, I think, are somebody you like to talk about this a lot. So I'll put this question to you, Kyle. How can brands get more vulnerable with their customers? Sending flowers to somebody? It's a pretty vulnerable thing. What if I got the wrong color? What if they're going to sneeze? Who knows?
Kyle I mean, other than deferring this entire question to Britney Brown, which is my answer. I will try to answer it. And I think to your point is you've got to be OK with taking chances and thoughtful risks. Putting yourself out there as a brand is that first step. You have to take a step. You can't just talk about being vulnerable without actually being it. And I think other aspects of it are are listening. And we talked about empathy a lot and listening to feedback and understanding that conflict or negative feedback or positive. But it's typically that like negative stuff that's actually an opportunity to be vulnerable, to say, hey, how could we get it right or what what's really the challenge that you're having with this experience or with the product and being curious about it? I think that kind of listening is a very vulnerable place for a lot of brands to turn into. And I guess finally would be just to not pretend that you've got it all together. And when you don't get something right to say that you didn't get it right and be OK, that, you know, this is a journey that you're on, that you're trying to solve some sort of problem in the world, that you're trying to bring something meaningful to the world. But you haven't arrived. And that kind of vulnerability of accepting that this is a journey for you too, I think is a helpful way to create that environment of vulnerability for customers to share their journey back with you. But even with that layer of vulnerability, Danielle mentioned that there's one thing that matters above all else in a successful long term relationship.
Danielle So I would say a long term successful relationship would be based on emotional security. So this is a concept that was developed through a therapeutic approach called emotion focused therapy by Dr. Sue Jonathan, I feel safe to express myself, but when I do express myself, my partner is going to meet me with comfort and understanding as opposed to judgment. I also think of someone who is dependable. There's a constancy, there predictability. And someone that I can trust, someone who has integrity, someone who will forgive me when I mess up, someone is going to meet me with warmth and kindness, someone who celebrates me. I feel loved and desired by them. It's this safe, safe place for me to exist in the relationship, but then also gives me the confidence to go out and explore the world. So Dr. Sue Johnson talks about how emotional security depends on our perception of our partner's responsiveness to us. So it's how responsive is my partner to I think this is the most critical for the longevity of a relationship and the health of a relationship.
Tom And one of the biggest takeaways that Danielle mentions is consistency. Brands need to show up for their customers in every part of their journey, regardless of where they are.
Kyle Teresa had a great point about this, too.
Teresa When you do customer journey and experience, right, you're using primary, secondary, your heart to your brain, primary is your heart. If you are doing work like the world does today, you're using your brain, you're pulling out analytics data, lots of data. Right. Humanity is being taken out of the equation. And believe it or not, there are companies saying we are going to put analytics together that analyze humanity. not working, not working. Not happening. Not yet. I have a wonderful mentor out there who talks with a lot of very big companies all over the world. And he himself called me up and said, you know, this pandemic is the best thing that's ever happened for customer journey and customer experience because it's making people sit still, sadly, in the way that it is, my family members who've survived it. So wouldn't wish that on anybody. But it's made us sit still for a moment and sometimes it's uncomfortable. But now we're starting to listen. So humanity seeing people as human beings versus like you're saying, earlier transaction. Good luck. What do you do in that transaction leaves. Because now there's a lot of choices and you can beg them back. They're not coming back.
Tom So in case you haven't caught on by now or you've just skip to the end to get all the juicy goods, we've shamelessly used cheap wordplay to liken sex to CX. Sex sells, but so does CX for the long run. No gimmicks, no cheap tricks.
Kyle It still needs to be said. The sale is not the end of the journey. It's the start. And it touches everything from return frequency and support costs to churn and lifetime value.
Tom Speaking of touching everything, each touch should further real emotional connection and value while balancing, yes, good conversion rates and next month's KPIs.
Kyle You might not see it as a sexy thing yet, but our bets are on customer experience being the golden goose for your brand's future. And that is sexy AF. Stop investing everything into your brand's proverbial Tinder profile and start investing into a relationship that you'd be proud to bring home to an awkward family dinner.
Tom And there it is. If we start with the customer relationship in mind, rather than thinking about scale first, then being a smaller mid-market brand means you can do what the big guys can't and you can be better for it. We all can.
Kyle And like every relationship counselor will tell you, no matter how long you've been together, keep your CEX life alive and well. True attraction grows and deepens with time and consistency.
Tom Everything that you put up as a face to your brand, your your story purpose reviews, features and benefits, quality, you name it. Everything falls at the feet of CX. It's the mainstay for what will keep brands sexy and appealing in the years to come.
Kyle There you have it, that's episode four of Commerce Chefs, thanks so much for listening.
Tom We hope that you learned all the reasons why you need to put more focus on your CX life.
Kyle Good save.
Tom Thank you.
Kyle If you're looking for more, make sure to join the Commerce Chefs community by following us on social media at Commerce Chefs. Ask us questions, send us requests. We want to hear from you.
Tom We're currently cooking up the next episode of Commerce Chefs, so tune in on March 4th.
Kyle Lastly, if you like this episode, it won't support us. Make sure to hit the subscribe button and give us a five star rating and review. Until next time, this has been a pinch of Kyle.
Tom And a dash of Tom. We'll be cooking with you in two weeks. Stay sexy, everyone.
Kyle Do you think it's better to stick to a specific niche? No, I can't say niche apparently, OK.
Tom I have a I have two nieces and a nephew.