Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

The Art of Customer-Centric Marketing: Learning from Expert Debbie Levitt

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 363

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Step into the future of digital marketing where customers reign supreme, and their journey is the map to your success. Join me as I unpack the power and necessity of customer-centric strategies with a special nod to the wisdom of Debbie Levitt, author of "Customers Know You Suck." Get ready to transform your marketing with insights into customer research, actionable strategies for a devoted customer base, and the vital role of AI and ChatGPT in reshaping your approach to efficiency and paid media.

Embrace the ecosystem of your customer's world! This episode takes you beyond mere demographics to understand the psychographics that truly drive your audience's behavior. Discover how to craft experiences that resonate deeply with your customers by avoiding stereotypes and focusing on the tasks they're trying to accomplish. Learn how businesses of all sizes can—and must—deliver exceptional customer experiences. I'll also share personal perspectives to underline why understanding the individual beyond the data point is essential for your marketing strategy.

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Speaker 1:

Is your digital marketing truly customer-centric or are you just assuming it's tailored to your audience's needs? Understanding your customers better than they understand themselves isn't just an art. It is a science and critical for your business success. This episode features Debbie Levitt, author of Customers Know you Suck, revealing groundbreaking strategies and mistakes to avoid in customer experience. We'll explore why deep customer research is a game changer and how you can transform insights in actionable strategies, nurturing a more loyal customer base. Curious about revolutionizing your approach to digital marketing? Learn all this, and more so. Stay tuned to this next episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 363 of this podcast. So the latest news I like to share when opening these podcast episodes, I guess we got two main things going on that I want to talk about today.

Speaker 1:

One is obviously OpenAI is, as I speak, announcing some major evolutionary changes to JetGPT, becoming a really a blend of speaking, listening, drawing, basically doing everything you want in terms of content creation from an AI tool. It was rumored, actually, that they were going to be releasing a full-on browser to compete with Google Chrome. It sounds like they didn't announce that today, but all eyes are on ChatGPT, openai and obviously, their APIs and how other companies are going to leverage that technology. As I mentioned in last episode, number 362, my 11 essential takeaways from the Content Entrepreneur Expo there is just more and more that AI can do. In fact, I went into Jasper, one of my favorite AI tools, for the first time in a few weeks to give it a new task, and I was literally floored by the results of what it gave me. So if you haven't looked at these tools in the last few months, you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially keeping an eye on ChatGPT's latest changes.

Speaker 1:

There is also a very, very interesting article. I subscribe to many interesting blogs and news sites on my inner reader, my chosen RSS reader, and one of them is Martech martechorg. They had a really interesting article about how Martech, or in other words, marketing technology, the cut out of the marketing budget fell to its lowest level in 10 years, from 2023, at 25.4% to this year's 23.8% Pretty significant 7, 8% drop. Now, what that means is that marketers or CMOs with marketing budgets are spending nearly a quarter of their budget on technology. So this is a quick check for you how much are you spending out of your marketing budget on technology is sort of the first thing that comes to mind. On the other hand, what is interesting is that paid media spending increased from 25.6% of the budget to 27.9%. In other words, paid media you know Google ads, facebook ads, tiktok ads, what have you? I guess for some organizations, maybe influencer marketing is part of that. That also took up a quarter of the budget Now, and it used to pretty much be on par with marketing technology. Now, the amount spent in paid media takes up 4% more of the budget than the technology. So you know why is there a decline in MarTech spending? Well, a few different things are talked about. One is that, with AI tools and other tools, it's now less about CMOs making the decision as to what is purchased and more about IT and other divisions. So a decrease in CMO influence over the technology and, in addition to the increase in paid media, signs also point to an increase in spending on AI just having greater efficiencies that impact the entire marketing technology stack. So I know you may not be a CMO listening to this podcast, but these are really really good data signals to give you a feel as to. Are you underspending, overspending? Are you already potentially seeing an impact on your marketing spend from the use of AI?

Speaker 1:

All right, my personal updates for this week. Well, I'm excited. Next week I will be speaking in Mexico City and I'll be previewing content from my book digital thread. So I'll be speaking at the Expo Publicitas 2024, which I understand is the biggest marketing conference in all of not just Mexico but Latin America. If you're in the area, I would love to hear from you. Make sure you ping me, but I'll be actually presenting three different presentations. One is going to be on what I consider the bridge between organic social media and external influencer marketing, in other words, leveraging influencers that you have no previous relationship with, and that is the leveraging of user-generated content and evolving that into a brand ambassador program. So I'm really excited.

Speaker 1:

Like I said, I have two dedicated chapters of this on my book. I teach about this subject. I've never really presented solely on this subject, so busy creating new content for that. I'm also going to be presenting on external influencer marketing. It's a term that I first heard, actually, when Analytica had their B2B Influencer Marketing Summit and they talked about internal influencers employees versus external influencers people outside of your organization.

Speaker 1:

But I take it one step further. You know I have that I introduced in the Age of Influences brand affinity model of influencer marketing, and anyone that is not in your brand affinity, let's consider them an external influencer. Everyone that is in your sphere of influence, let's consider them an external influencer. Everyone that is in your sphere of influence, let's convert them into becoming a brand ambassador. So that's the way that I paint it out in my book. And then I'll be speaking for the first time again on personal branding how to become an influencer. This will pretty much be a summary of the class that I'm teaching at UCLA.

Speaker 1:

The spring semester class actually started last Tuesday, so I'll be going on to UCLA again to teach that and that is going to be the subject of a future book that I hope to begin working on in the fall, but anyway, excited to be presenting and meeting fans and friends in Mexico City. Like I said, if you are located in Mexico City, I would love to hear from you and update on the book. I am finally, finally. I just need to do the final back matter and then I will be able to submit the files to a formatter and I will finally begin the process of sending out the advanced reading copy to influencers. So excited to finally be moving forward on that. The companion workbook is actually going to be done faster. I have now the final print and the final ebook versions, both of which I have with my formatter, and I am soon going to be making the paperback cover. I already have the cover image, the back cover, for that as well. So, man, it's a lot of project management. It takes a lot of time, but I'll be excited to share it all with you when it is finally done.

Speaker 1:

All right, today, a special interview with Debbie Levitt, the author of Customers. Know you Suck talking about customer experience and customer-centric marketing. In my days in B2B sales, we talked about customer-centric selling, so it's only natural that we should always be thinking about our customer and, in fact, at Content Entrepreneur Expo. That was a theme that was really woven throughout the entire two days. There is you need to understand your customer better and, in order to do that, ask them. It's that easy, but very few people do it, and even fewer companies do it. But I'll stop there. Let's go right into the interview with Debbie Levitt.

Speaker 2:

You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schafer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, neil Schafer here. Welcome to another live stream edition of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Today is going to be all about the customer. You know it's funny.

Speaker 1:

As you know, small business owners, marketers, entrepreneurs, creators all the different people, the different peeps in my audience we often get lost in the tactics of a social network or how do we build a product or how do we market something, and I often find, believe it or not, we forget about the person that is paying the bill, which is the customer. Now, I have a background in B2B sales and I've actually read, when I was in B2B sales, books on customer-centric selling. So, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing, it's just something that often we need to be reminded of so that we make sure we align what we do with what our customers need and want. Because if we can't do that, I think and I'm sure our guest today is going to talk more about this but a lot of CMOs, in a recent survey that I was able to get information from that hasn't been published their number one concern was this topic of customer experience, which obviously customer-centric selling and marketing is going to feed into. So today I can't think of anyone else but the expert, debbie Levitt, who wrote this book.

Speaker 1:

Customers Know you Suck, and as I ponder the title of my next book, I wonder if I should have a provocative title as well. So I'm looking forward to asking Debbie about that, but nevertheless, I want to bring her on stage, debbie Levitt, and then we can get into the deets. So, debbie, welcome to the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 3:

Hey, thank you, neil, and hello audience, on whatever platform you are. Thank you so much for including me.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you one-upped me there on the little animations there, so I'm going to have to up my game here, all righty.

Speaker 3:

You're so competitive.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's sort of my nature. So customer-centric marketing. Customers know you suck customer experience. I'm assuming that when you were born you didn't tell your parents you wanted to become a customer experience expert. So my son plays high school soccer and they had senior night yesterday and all these seniors like what do you want to study in college? I just want to study business. What do you want to study in college? I just want to study business. So I'm just curious as to what led you in your career to customer experience and then, obviously, writing this book.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thanks for asking. So if we want to go back to year zero, I was the little kid who was the problem finder and the problem solver. I luckily came from a family of people who really supported critical thinking and wanted questions and wanted us to think about what could be the answer, what isn't the answer, what might be the answer. And so, no, it wasn't my dream to be a customer centricity person if that existed but I knew I wanted to understand people better and solve their problems. A lot of people when I was little thought I was going to be a lawyer or a psychologist and we could joke that I'm a fake both. So many years later I went into.

Speaker 3:

Originally, I started in websites, like I think many of us did in the mid 90s. We started in websites and how to build them and market them, and my specialty was helping other small businesses strategize their businesses and get themselves on the internet and go digital in the 90s into the 2000s and so on, and so that was where I started. With that kind of angle, I think my slogan at the time was like start, market and improve your small business, or something like that, and so that's what I was doing back in the year one and then after that I moved more formally into a lot of CX and UX strategy and tactical work, doing a lot of user research, interviews and observations, doing design though I don't come from an art background. Again, I come more from a psychology problem solving background. So I I come more from a psychology problem solving background, so I would say I'm that type of designer.

Speaker 1:

You know it's really fascinating. There are a lot of characters I'm thinking of Daryl Eves, who wrote the YouTube formula, ran Fishkin from Moz of a lot of people that began, like you did, in just websites in the early days of the internet and helping businesses that way, and everybody has gone on to really, really interesting paths. So let's talk about the term, and I think it's important to define the term customer-centric marketing, and I totally get when you said it's sort of part psychology, part lawyer. It's all about advising and, as you are so good at advising the customer, now you're working on advising us. To help us advise our customers, I guess, is the way it works. So how would you define customer-centric marketing to someone who has never, ever heard the term before, but yet they're a marketer?

Speaker 3:

Sure. So the way that I see customer-centricity would be how can we put users, customers, whoever's in your ecosystem at the center so your ecosystem could have partners, resellers? There's all kinds of humans, or sometimes non-humans, if you're making something for dogs or whatever but there's all sorts of people in your ecosystem and we're not always putting them at the center. Sometimes, as I say, they're in the periphery. We get customer peripheric and we go ah, what can we make these people do? And sometimes we see that in marketing, where we go, can't they just click this button more? Or I wish I could just push them to do this checkout, or I wish they would buy this extra thing Should I put it in their shopping cart?

Speaker 3:

And so we make decisions constantly, especially as small business owners which I am as well where we have to decide what should I do right now? Because sometimes what's best for my business isn't best for the customer. What's best for the customer might not be best for my business, but I think if we can get more customer centric and understand customers and users in that ecosystem better, we'll find the better balance and we won't be so, let's say, tempted to make the customer our pawn and we'll try to find a balance between the goals we have as a business and what your customers and users are coming into your ecosystem to get from you.

Speaker 1:

So it sounds like, based on that, it's this we think about customers but what is good for the customer, what is good for us, can we all live better together? And I suppose, then, that understanding what the customer wants better comes down to now understanding the customer.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's about making sure they're in every decision and not from the perspective of what can we make them do. And so we do have to know those customers better because otherwise, again, we run the risk of running with guesses or ideas and things that miss the mark and put yourself, I could say as a joke, put yourself in your own shoes right now. All day long, there's probably stuff you interact with that you want to throw out the window. Long, there's probably stuff you interact with that you want to throw out the window. You're angry at this phone app. You hate this website. You can't believe these people. You have to call customer support again.

Speaker 3:

All day long, we deal with stuff that we don't like and a lot of companies made those decisions, in some cases deliberately, and I remind you, we can do better. But that starts with how do we get to know our customers and make sure that we've removed our biases and our assumptions and our stereotypes and we're really looking at when we say what are their needs? Needs is very general. Let's say what are their tasks? What are they there to do? What are their decisions? Who else decides with them? Is there a collaborator? Who decides the budget? Who approves this Again. It's an ecosystem and we will make better, smarter decisions when we know the players better.

Speaker 1:

That's a really powerful way of looking at it as an ecosystem you together with your customer, because obviously it's their sales that generate your livelihood or your business's livelihood. So I suppose and I guess that's where this leads into being customer centric is a natural lead into customer experience, therefore. So you know, have you ever been in? Do you know Dan Gingas, for instance?

Speaker 3:

No, I must say, I don't.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so Dan, he's written Sorry.

Speaker 3:

Dan.

Speaker 1:

And no worries, no worries, dan's a good friend of mine. I mean, he's a Chicago Cub fan but I give him some slack but he's written some books. He's been on this podcast talking about customer experience and talking about one of the things and maybe you do for your customers as well is this concept of a customer experience audit, of actually being. It's almost like the mystery shopper back in the days for the Gen Xers and above that remember. But put yourself in your what are your customers experience? And it's interesting because, as I look around at what I do, for instance, I recently purchased a course and there was no onboarding, there was no thank you, and I'm still getting these automated emails trying to sell me additional VIP courses and the customer experience is terrible and I probably will not do any more business with that company. So I think, no matter, and that's just an entrepreneur with a ConvertKit sequence of emails.

Speaker 3:

Right the drip campaign.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we are all influencing what our customers think of us, and that's why I just want to urge those listening who may think, oh well, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a small business owner, that customer experience is just for enterprises, because, I'm sure you'd agree, it actually isn't. But I wanted to get to one of the things we were talking about before the conversation, which is in order to understand your customer. I think, going to a lot of conferences, this is something that comes up a lot, this shift away from demographics and I believe the term is psychographics. I'll let you discuss that, but it's something I'm hearing a lot about over the last 12 to 24 months. I'm sure you've been talking about it before then, but tell us more about the shift away from demographics in order to better understand our customer.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So when we think about traditional demographics, let's get personal a moment. What buckets would you put me in? You're going to say, well, debbie is a woman, and so we put her in the female bucket. Don't forget to send her emails with flowers in them and make things pink. And then you know, okay, debbie's 52. So we put her in the 45 to 54 bucket, or we put her in the 50 to 55 bucket and, wow, she's probably a mom of college kids, or she's a grandma, or she's going to be a grandma soon, or whatever. Put her in the grandma bucket, or put her in the older mom bucket, you know? Hey, debbie is, you know.

Speaker 3:

Now we think about what's Debbie need in her life and we make stuff up because nobody's researched with me, we just go by stereotypes. Oh, debbie, she's probably menopausal, you know. So what does she need? Oh, she needs skin cream and diet help, and you know. And so, basically, we try to boil people down to these things, based on things that are easy to grasp. It's easy to grasp that Debbie is a female, or white, or of a certain age, or married, or at least strongly connected to another human. And then we just say, well, look, these must be the things we can sell her, or this must be the way we should speak to her. And I always recommend that we shift away from that because I think many of us, especially those who are maybe getting a little older, we're in our forties or fifties or sixties and we say I don't know, you know, I don't feel like the 52 year old, I don't feel like these things. And and then especially for me, like I ride a motorcycle, I purposefully had no children. You know, there's a lot of things that I've done with my life that don't look like the what I call lazy buckets you put me into. So when people are marketing to me as if Debbie's a 52 year old woman, I go, wow, you don't see me the way I see me, that's not what I see. And so that's where we talk more about psychographics and we talk more about how do we understand someone's behaviors. So, for example, debbie is someone who shops for cool things for her motorcycle. Okay, maybe not where we would have dropped the average 52-year-old woman if we were being very demographic, lazy buckety. But you know, now I get put into buckets with lots of other people. Maybe I'm put into buckets with college-age guys or other women of other ages or locations. Now we're talking more about behaviors, and that's where I think a lot more winning stuff is.

Speaker 3:

And when we look at the behaviors, then we take a step back to what's the task, and to me, that's the core of everything. Whether you're an accountant or a service of some sort, or you have a product or you have e-commerce or something else, whatever you do, people are coming to your website with a task. That task might be check these people out and compare them to someone else. That means they don't plan to buy today. You're going to complain they're a tire kicker. Oh, our numbers look so sad, but they're accomplishing kicker. Oh, our numbers look so sad, but they're accomplishing their task.

Speaker 3:

If you've made your website easy to understand what you offer, then you've made it easy for these people to understand your value proposition and compare you and complete that task.

Speaker 3:

Not every task is buy from you right now. So the more we can understand the larger picture of who people are, the less we will rely on these bizarre things like this person is this age, or the weird ones are when they try to bring in Myers-Briggs or what brands they like. Oh, she likes Starbucks. Well, not really only by accident. So they're in a lot of places, so I walk in the door. So I think that it's important to start really trying to look at who your customers are holistically and how they see themselves, rather than putting them in old, tired buckets of age or really the one show me sometimes like personas or segments or other types and they go this is our white person and this is our non-white person and I go that is racist in so many ways. I'm not even sure where to start. But yet people still do these things and they even think that's being diverse and open minded.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Well, we could go, man, we could have a whole separate podcast about that. So I guess then, obviously the key then is to better understand the psychographics. And I'm also curious this probably also leads into you were sort of hinting at your website and are you solving the task? The task might be research, it might be purchase, it might be who the heck is your company, but are you satisfying that? So I'm just curious then, because, as you mentioned, the demographics are sort of all over the place and they really don't define who the person is. I'm assuming that if we can nail the psychographics and I mentioned this because if you have broad demographics, how do you create one visual user interface that satisfies everyone needs? But if we shift the thought process to psychographics and their actual needs and wants, it actually makes us easier to design experiences, whether they're digital or physical, to meet those psychographic needs. I'm assuming that's sort of the direction that we need to go correct.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and that's why I'm a big proponent of a technique that we do as researchers, called task analysis. And that is what are people trying to do right now, what is their task? And their task changes. For example, we did a project a couple of years ago for a company that does like logo items, promotional items. Now we're marketing about marketing, but logo promotional items from cups to shirts, to tote bags, you name it and they said, gee, we really don't know that much about our customers other than some of them are B2B and some of them are B2C, but we really couldn't tell you too much else about them.

Speaker 3:

So we did a project where we met I think it was about 27 of them and we made sure to meet some B2B and B2C ones and by the end and basically we just said to I mean, first we did ask them questions. We learned more about when you're shopping for this type of item, what's usually going on, who else do you shop with, who's involved in decisions or approvals or budgeting or selecting what kind of item it will be, who does the artwork? So, as you can see, we're starting to map a little multiverse here where it's who's involved in this from A to Z and it was very different for very different types of people. Then we start breaking those people up into the typologies that we did, and then we also observed them. We had them share their screen and we said imagine you need 125 logo water bottles for the company picnic. You've got a thousand fake dollars Go and then we just watch and we act as detectives and then we've got some questions at the end.

Speaker 3:

But based on that, we were able to group people in six different buckets that really had a lot more to do with their role and their task. For example, we met a number of people who worked in like state organizations. They worked at a state organization or, you know, like the Department of Fisheries somewhere, or at a nonprofit, and those people tended to have similar behaviors. Now we're grouping people by their behaviors and their tasks, so these people tended to like really close personal connections with someone at the company, like having a salesperson. Some of them still wanted catalogs. Remember when we wanted catalogs of promotional items Whoa.

Speaker 1:

I still do.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, some of them wanted to be able to fax in an order and this research was two years ago. A lot of them wanted a lot of remember when they would send you camera ready, art, you know, preview. They were a little bit old school because that's the way their departments and organizations ran Heavy on paperwork, heavy on back and forth, heavy on paperwork, heavy on back and forth. And so people who say, oh, give them a great e-commerce site and let them go running, did not take into account that you might have a segment or typology or whatever you want to call it I care less about what we call it that still wants that kind of high personal touch, that old school personal touch, that doesn't want to just shop on an e-commerce site and hope that it comes out right. The other end, they want the PDF previews and the color samples and all that stuff. And if we don't build what that customer needs from the point of view of the website or the logistics or the customer interactions, we might alienate that audience. That audience might say, oh, neil's logo shop didn't give me what I needed there. I'm gonna have to get my stuff from somebody else because I I can't get done what I'm trying to get done the way I like to do it. You can't always make somebody change their task or change how they want to get it done, especially if there's an aspect of it that is driven by their business policies, and so that's an example.

Speaker 3:

But we also met Girl Scout moms, and the Girl Scout moms lived in a whole different world. Where it was, you know, this is going to be a Girl Scout or school band fundraiser. How cheap can we make this? How fast can we get it? Because we make crappy last minute decisions, because we're just a loose bunch of moms and dads and others.

Speaker 3:

And you know they had very different tasks, concerns, confusions what's a Pantone color? What do I need to know about a Pantone color? And so they had a different set of stuff. So again, the more you're going after these audiences, the more you have to really understand them. What's their task, who else is involved and how much knowledge do they have? Because you know, for those of you who might be a little familiar with this stuff, a Pantone color is usually a number, and there was a box on the website that said what's your Pantone or PMS color? And someone wrote Navy. So you know that's not the right answer, but that shows that they had a limited amount of knowledge, which means if your website is not facilitating the do-it-yourselfer who doesn't know the lingo, that's another audience you might alienate.

Speaker 1:

Right, and I you know, I think, and I want to go a little bit deeper into this and give some advice to the listeners. So I myself recently did a survey of my own list of the people that are most engaged on my list and basically you know the questions I asked them. I got some really, really interesting answers. The topic that I'm writing a book on that's going to come out in a few months is not the number one or even number two topic that they're interested in learning about. So anyway, that's a whole other story. But another one was should I develop courses? Have you ever taken a course?

Speaker 1:

Everyone's saying oh, content creators, you know, authors, you need to have courses. Well, two thirds of my audience have either never taken a course in their life or have only taken one. So that's not, probably not the best way to engage with them. Maybe they're book readers, maybe you know whatever that is, and I think that sort of hints at what you're talking about, not just from the user interface of a website, but actually like product development, right. So I'm curious for those that are listening. You mentioned that you should do more research and testing with current and sort of these. I won't call them avatars, but potential customers, and I'm assuming that a survey like that, obviously hiring Delta, cx and Debbie's team to do it, is the easy way to do it, thank you. Thank you If they wanted to try to DIY this. Is it a collection of surveys? Is it like the old user focus groups and, you know, like Procter and Gamble did in the nineties, or what is the best way to go about doing it?

Speaker 3:

So, because you said the best way, look, we know we can run a survey, we know that we can run a focus group, but unfortunately there are times where those are just not done very well. We've all received surveys where we were like, are you effing kidding me? You're asking me what you know? I got a survey recently. I swear it was 40 minutes long. So of course I noped out in the middle, but it was like do you use this type of service? Are you happy with the service you're getting from someone else? And I was like what are they even going to do with this? It's a freaking fire hose.

Speaker 3:

So, while you can run a survey or you can run a focus group, I like to remind people, get a personality like mine and your focus group is toast the end. You know, the focus groups obviously are unfortunately easily messy. So in the UX world in which I tend to live, we do a lot of observational and interview research. The upside of that is it's going to give you amazing information that you didn't have. The downside of that is it's usually not the best for DIY, because very often it takes us years to get good at it. Does that mean you can't try it? No, you can try it. Does that mean you might mess it up, unfortunately, you know. Try it. Does that mean you might mess it up, unfortunately, you know, as I like to say, I can cut your hair, but you might not be happy. I did so we have to just be. You know, sometimes you got to hire a pro to do something lawyer, accountant, outside marketing help, et cetera. So this is one of those things where you can try it yourself. But if you feel, you know, I like to say, if you're hearing too much of what you expected to hear or what you hoped to hear, you've probably skewed this a bit, accidentally or on purpose, because really we do like to hear what we hope to hear, but now is a time when we need to hear what we're not expecting to hear and we didn't want to hear.

Speaker 3:

So we typically do observational research, like I talked about. You know, can we shadow people doing stuff? It's almost like that old mystery shopper. Can we shadow people doing stuff? Can we watch them in their environment?

Speaker 3:

Some people say I'm going to make them come into my office and I'm going to hand them an iPad and I'm going to have them do something. Not their iPad, not their home. No crying baby, no barking dog, no blipping internet. So you've taken them out of their element. So it's not going to be as realistic a perspective. You almost have to be junior anthropologists. We're really trying to see people in their natural habitat and environment doing the thing. So that's usually the way that we conduct that research. Some of it is best done in person in some fashion, and some of it can happen online and digitally through video calls, where we want to watch people use a website in a certain way or an online tool or system or something on their phone and we can share that screen and we can see it. But that would be some of the key ways that we get that data. It's kind of being mini detective.

Speaker 1:

I get it so you can look at heat maps on websites. You can conduct surveys, but unless you're looking for the right things and analyze it in the right way with the right audience, you're probably going to get a result that might lead you a different direction than you need to go.

Speaker 3:

So I think that became very clear.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you very much.

Speaker 3:

No, thank you.

Speaker 1:

So I want to go then into, obviously, the book. So all this, I'm assuming, led you to write. Customers Know you Suck, and there we go, oh, a hardcover Like it.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, Sorry, I call it my library quality hardcover and it's color printed.

Speaker 1:

Nice. So how did all this lead into, I'm assuming that the work you do? There's a little bit of evangelizing, because people just don't know what they don't know. So there's this need to sort of educate the public, and I'm assuming that's why you wrote the book. But can you tell us a little bit more about the book and who should read it? I'm assuming anyone that's interested in learning more about this topic should read it, but any other sort of background you could give us would be great.

Speaker 3:

Sure Thanks. So Customers Know you Suck can be found at cxccto slash ckys. I've got both free versions of the book and paid versions of the book available. So you are absolutely welcome to consume it for free if that works better for you. In some way. We've got paper and digital and audio book narrated by me. So however you like to consume a book, it's there.

Speaker 3:

And the book kind of grew out of some consulting work I had been doing for companies who were trying to get me to come in and they were saying you know, fix our stuff, find what's broken and fix it. Help us be more customer centric, help us achieve our business goals better through better serving customers. And I just started seeing a lot of that carnage more close up and I started seeing how resistant some of the companies were to changing, even when they were paying me decent money to come in as a change agent and it was like holy cats. I think I want to kind of scale what I'm doing here and kind of have a platform for the kind of change I'm trying to make to see if I can empower. So basically the idea of the book was you can work in any sort of role, it's not just for CX people or marketing people or product managers or any. You know, it's not for one role. It basically assumes that you've got little or no background in CX or UX. We're going to explain things to you and it's really a look at how to strategically and tactically improve what you're doing.

Speaker 3:

Now some of the book assumes that you're a big company. They assume it assumes you're working in these larger organizations with development teams and agile methodologies and you might say, okay, that's not me. I'm really more of a smaller business or entrepreneur. Feel free to skip that chapter. It was also written for people to cherry pick a little bit and to skip around. So if you feel like, hey, this really isn't aimed at me, feel free to say we're. We're not Agile, we're not coding software. You can certainly skip the two chapters on Agile. But other than that, it's aimed at everybody. There's no prerequisites, there's nothing you need to know going into it, other than stuff isn't going as well as we hope, we're not attracting and satisfying and retaining customers as much as we wish we did, and how did we get here and how do we get out of it?

Speaker 1:

So I'm assuming that obviously we talked a lot about the user experience digitally on the website, but the book really deals with it holistically and would be a really, really good primary to get people started and businesses started on that path towards understanding the customer experience better and really becoming more customer-centric. Would that be a good summary.

Speaker 3:

A bit. Yeah, I would say. A lot of the book assumes you're doing something digitally, whether it's the website or more of a digital product, and so it's not tremendously about physical products. If your company is making giant cups, I'm not necessarily addressing a lot of the physical product universe, but I still think there's a lot of advice in there that is definitely translatable, because it's really about, in many ways Okay, maybe not all of Neil's listeners, but a lot of companies suck in one way or another. There's stuff we're getting wrong, there's stuff I'm getting wrong. There's always a way to be better. And what? How can we recognize some of the places where we might be going wrong could be an over-reliance on some wacky surveys, and how can we make some changes so that we are more in tune with our customers and that we're able to satisfy our business goals by better delivering to them what they need and expect from us?

Speaker 1:

Awesome, debbie, this has been great. Obviously, as you mentioned, maybe not as relevant for physical product, unless they obviously have an e-commerce website, in which I'm assuming, that it's really the e-commerce.

Speaker 3:

Still relevant-ish.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, understood? Well, I think anybody. Hopefully that the short interview gave you a peek into the world of customer experience. But from this very, very specific customer-centric lens, half Glass of Water is very full, not empty, and obviously I think for anyone listening that's interested in the subject, I can never do this right. Customers Know you Suck obviously is a no-brainer read that you should pick up.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Go to the link. I know that we have the short link, but I couldn't get it in StreamYard, so it's deltaCXmedia and I think if you go there you'll be able to find it. Nevertheless, the link will be in the show notes. So, debbie, thank you so much. Is there any sort of last bits of wisdom or advice that maybe we didn't cover, that we should have, that you'd like to impart with our listeners before we end our interview?

Speaker 3:

That's a great question. I would probably say don't be afraid to be wrong or surprised. This is going to be a great way to grow. Don't be afraid if if some research that you do or you hire someone to do says the opposite of what you thought your customers were or needed. It's important to keep challenging ourselves and keep getting better. It's not a failure if you find out customers needed something from you that you haven't really been delivering. It's the success of finally finding that out and being able to take action on it. And other than that, I just want to remind listeners that I love to make myself available to people who've heard me on a podcast, happy to answer some questions. Get yourself in my calendar, you know, no charge for certainly an initial conversation and just to see if I can help at all.

Speaker 1:

This has been great, debbie, and you know there's always a way to improve things. Nothing is ever perfect, and I think that you listening to this show proves that you understand that we can always be improving. Right, we can always be reading more books, we can always be listening to more podcast episodes. So, yeah, and I will tell you, I have read more books at the beginning of this year than I read probably all the last year. So I am doubling down on this At the end of the day and, debbie, I think that your service at Delta CX and just in your book is a testament to that of this holistically I won't say intellectual, but intelligent way of really trying to analyze, to get to this truth that then you can leverage for your business.

Speaker 1:

So I thank you for your contributions. Thank you, niamh. I hope that everyone will reach out to you. You can get the book there at cxccto slash ckys or just go to delta cxcom. We'll have all this in the show notes. But, debbie, thank you so much for your time today. I wish you the best of luck and hopefully our paths will cross at a marketing conference sometime in the future.

Speaker 3:

I hope so, thanks to you. Good luck to listeners and catch everybody soon.

Speaker 1:

I hope you found that interview to be as fascinating and insightful as I did and I hope to get to know more of you as well, because you are also my customers of this podcast in my audience, and for that reason did you know that I have a weekly newsletter? You can go to neilschafercom slash newsletter to sign up and stay abreast of where I'm speaking. I share lots of industry news, like I do at the beginning of this podcast, and, yes, you'll be able to be the first to know when I launch the Kickstarter for my next book. And that is it for another hopefully insightful episode of the your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, neal Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links go to podcastnealschafercom. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafercom to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.