RWL059 Transform Customer Experience into Profit with Jessica Noble’s Insights

Customer Experience Expert Jessica Noble

Speaker 1

0:00

Hello everybody from the Remote Work Lifebook community and elsewhere, wherever you may be in the world. Today I have with me yet another exceptional guest. I have Jessica Noble. Jessica Noble is a fractional CCO. I'm going to explain a bit more about that in a minute but Jessica's expertise is customer experience and she's a small business advisor. Not only that, she's also the author of five customer experience mistakes causing profit erosion.

Speaker 1

0:35

So if you feel like your customer experience isn't quite what it should be, or if you're in a situation where your customer experience has changed and you're feeling as though you need to brush up on one or two things where that's concerned, then Jessica is the person to speak to. She's a business owner herself and, following nearly 15 years in enterprise, business strategy and consulting for SMBs, she's worked with Fortune 100s, fortune 500 companies. She's got an MBA in global management. She's a certified customer experience professional, former project manager as well for 18 years keynote speaker and creator of the LEADER methodology for creating magnetic employee, customer and partner experiences. So, yeah, you're in the right place If you want to talk about customer experience. I'm telling you now. But, jessica, I want to say thank you so much for joining me today on the Remote Work Life podcast.

Speaker 2

1:38

Oh, happily, happily, that was a lot, yeah, no, I'm thrilled to be here.

Speaker 1

1:44

Well, jessica, you've got a lot to offer, so I mean, it's it's it's only right that I should put you out on the you know as as you deserve to be. So thank you so much, and I know you're pretty busy at the minute, aren't you? Because and it's it's a bit of an unusual time for you you're helping people with custom experience here, there and everywhere. Tell us, tell us a bit about how you came to be where you are now.

Speaker 2

2:07

Yeah. So I would love to tell you it was all super intentional, it was not.

Speaker 1

2:12

It really.

Speaker 2

2:13

actually I was very intentional. Early in my career I took some advice from my dad and he said start out in sales. Everybody should have to do sales for a little bit to know it's more than golf and fancy dinners. I did that up through Y2K and promptly exited sales after that and got into project and program management and my goal when I started in project and program management was to get experience in technology, program management, the industry of finance and or insurance and then consulting. At the time those were the three most difficult areas to get into.

Speaker 2

2:56

So, this is a while ago and I did exactly that. I started out in technology. And I did exactly that. I started out in technology, moved on and worked for Nationwide Insurance and then got into consulting, but it was at Nationwide. I was leading a program for agent experience and redesigning that.

Speaker 2

3:22

This was before customer experience was a term that people understood, before it was a discipline, and so we did that program and a lot of the things we did were pretty smart related to getting the customers input, focus groups, those types of things but that was really more smart people brainstorming together as opposed to the rigor that you can find now in terms of these are the best practices. And then, when I got into consulting, I did business strategy for a while and one day my boss came to me and said can you start a customer experience practice?

Speaker 1

3:54

Oh, that's nice of him or her.

Speaker 2

3:57

And I thought I don't even know what that is. I have to admit, I mean, it seems so obvious now, but at the time I'm like, yes, and I don't even know what it is. And that was the beginning of getting to where I am now. I started my own business ultimately because I wanted to focus on the small and mid-sized businesses. That's where I have fun, that's where we have the biggest impact, and I didn't have as much fun with the really large companies and the impact is it can be, it feels more diluted because of the politics and all of that, and it's not fun, which is really. My ultimate goal now is have fun, make an impact, work hard.

Speaker 1

4:41

I like that. I like that mantra, I like that. I like that mantra, I like it. I think it's um, yeah, I've been in a situation myself where you, you've been working, but it it feels quite painful and you're you're probably you're working with people who you don't necessarily feel comfortable working with or like working with. So, yeah, I have the same ethic as you is You're going to have fun along the way, because otherwise you'll just get burnt out. What's the point? No point in that. Yeah, no, thank you, thank you. So you didn't intend to start your own business. It was something that you were steered towards as well.

Speaker 2

5:18

Yeah, if you would have asked me, I don't know five years ago, are you going to start your own business? Well, I don't know five years ago. Are you going to start your own business? Well, I don't even have to speculate, I know what I would have said, because people did ask me and I'd say no way, never going to happen.

Speaker 2

5:32

And then, just through a series of roles, I realized that the way that I want to help businesses accomplish what they can accomplish, the way I want to do it I'm fairly unconventional would be an understatement and I want to be able to do it in the way that I am uniquely capable of doing it, without having to blend in, which I've never been very good at. And so I just finally decided okay, I'm going to dip my toe into starting a business. And what had kept me from doing it before is there's a lot of things I don't like to do. I don't want to manage the books, I don't want to, you know, do a lot of that tedious stuff. Well, nowadays it's really easy to find people to help you, even if you don't want to hire them full time. You know there's software, technology and then people that you can, you know, hire fractionally as contractors etc, and so it's a lot easier from that standpoint and that really made it a lot more appealing.

Speaker 1

6:37

Actually a bit of an aside question that I wanted to ask you. The word fractional is not something that I mean. I. On my LinkedIn profile, I put myself as a fractional internal recruiter. Fractional is that. Is that something that's a recognized word in the US, or is it more? Is it? Do people use the word freelance more?

Speaker 2

6:58

So typically where you would see the term fractional is around a fractional CFO or a fractional chief sales officer, and so it is a recognized term.

Enhancing Customer Experience for Profit

Speaker 2

7:10

You don't necessarily see it as much with regard to chief customer officers, but really what it means is that someone a company can bring you in even if they don't need someone full time. So maybe it's two days a week, three days a week For me when I do it it's typically it starts out at, you know, four or five days a week and then it stabilizes after we kind of stand up the basics to whether it's two or three days a week, and then my ultimate goal with the customer is actually to identify someone in their organization to develop into that role, because it's so much easier to take someone who understands their business and develop them into a chief customer officer or to at least carry those responsibilities, than it is to find a customer experience person and bring them in to fill that role. Because you need the ability to work cross-functionally and having those relationships internally already is a huge advantage okay, now that makes sense, makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1

8:15

And then, typically, when you're within this company for however many days it may be, is there is anything? What typically would you be doing with that person or that team of people?

Speaker 2

8:28

Yeah, so we start with the basics, you know, identifying vision, goals, objectives etc. But my principle with all of my advisory services is always to demonstrate value early and often, and not just so that people see the value in hiring me, but it helps them gain confidence that they can make a decision, get something done, see the value and building that momentum is really important. And so we'll go through and we'll do an assessment of what's going on right now. You know who are your customers. What types of feedback are you getting? Do you have a lot of credits or write-offs? Do you have a lot of complaints? You know what are the cases. If you have a customer service team, what does that look like?

Speaker 2

9:17

And then we'll do interviews with stakeholders, frontline employees and customers and once we've done that assessment, we go through a process of identifying opportunities, prioritizing and looking for low-hanging fruit, quick wins.

Speaker 2

9:31

What are the things that we can do quickly to alleviate pain for customers or to provide a gain, something that benefits customers, that's meaningful and valuable? But the quick things While we're doing that, then we're working on a longer term strategy to really define what do we want the experience to be, etc. But it's in tandem so that we don't have to say, okay, in a year or 18 months we'll see results. That's a long time and especially in the small and midsize space, nobody got time like that, and especially in the small and mid-sized space, nobody got time like that. If I'm going to spend money, I want to see that I'm getting returns, and then at some point I don't mind spending a little bit more and waiting a little bit longer. Spending a little bit more, waiting a little bit longer to get returns for those bigger initiatives that need to be accomplished and in terms of those real values, those real results for your customers.

Speaker 1

10:26

They can see those results on the bottom line, can't they? Or we'll eventually see those on the bottom line, right 100%.

Speaker 2

10:33

If we can't. I mean part of it is what's the goal and how are we going to measure it? There are things that we'll choose to do that aren't as tangible, but those need to be tied in really tightly to the things that are tangible. So it's are you going to improve revenue or are you going to reduce costs? So our big term is we're going to plug the money leaks. When you're a company that's growing and scaling, you're going to have a ton of them and you probably are blind to most of them, as I would be in a company, because it's what you're used to. So it's that forest from the trees, it's easier from an outsider standpoint to spot them nice.

Speaker 1

11:14

I mean, I can imagine right now that there's lots of um lots of businesses of all all kinds that are having issues with their customer experience, and then that's trickling into their bottom line. Is that the case?

Speaker 2

11:30

It is. More typically, they notice the effects on their bottom line before they realize that it is caused by the experience, partly because and I'll just use COVID as an example, but you could choose any point in time the experience that you provided when you were, let's say, 100 people is going to be different than you provide at 500 people, unless you're very intentional about keeping that the same and the same, pre-COVID, post-COVID, whatever those big changes are and we don't realize how it changes because it happens so slowly you introduce a new system, you hire more people. All of those take it. They have an impact on the experience, for good or for bad, and the changes are so small. Small customers know it and they're usually telling the company, but a lot of times it's really easy to discount their feedback because we feel like we know what the experience is. And you did a year ago, two years ago and what typical?

Speaker 1

12:40

what are those things then? That those smaller things, or not even the smaller things, but the typical things that you're seeing that are causing those I don't know those impacts?

Speaker 2

12:55

The pain points.

Speaker 1

12:56

Yes.

Speaker 2

12:57

A lot of times it is as you grow you get more advanced systems or you hire more people, and with more people you're going to have more complexity. And so before I may have been the leader of, let's say, sales and marketing when we were small. Now I'm the leader of sales, so I don't necessarily have the same visibility into marketing, and so if there's an issue that isn't just sales, it isn't just marketing, who's going to spot it and how are we going to resolve it? Because you have more people looking at a smaller slice of the business and so, for example, systems can really actually hurt an experience if you don't think about it in a bigger context. A perfect example is a CRM, a customer relationship management system. I'm a fan, I'm a big fan, but I tell people, if it's not integrated into your other systems, don't bother, and I've started a lot of fights for that.

Speaker 2

14:01

But, the reason I say that is if it's its own repository of information, then customers are inherently going to get different answers depending on who they call in the company, for example, when they call into accounting about an invoice, that information isn't going to be connected, so you're going to have different customer records. Now you've got duplicates, but then I changed my address in one, but I didn't know I needed to call four people in your company to change that information. Nor am I interested in calling four people in your company to do that. And so you get this disjointedness. And there's a great quote that I love by I think it's Kendra Schimmel, but basically those types of pains behind the scenes, silos, systems three times to get the answer that they need or whatnot, because we don't even realize it's happening. We should, but we don't.

Speaker 1

15:12

I suppose the time that people realize it's, like you said, when they realize it's happening is when the CFO looks at the bottom line and figures out that they're losing churn or they're losing customers here, there and everywhere. I guess.

Speaker 2

15:29

And then the question is why? And so then going in to figure out where is the pain, what's causing it, and likely it's not just one thing, and so it's a very detailed diagnostic to get down to the root cause, things that are easy to fix and huge returns in the small and mid-sized space. It's different when you're in the Fortune 50, 100, 500 space, but that's what makes it fun for small and mid-sized businesses is inevitably. I mean, I can guarantee we will find quick wins. In several of them It'll be a 10 times return because it doesn't take much to fix it and it's going to alleviate a lot of pain. And I wouldn't say that if it was something much, much bigger. I'm not the person who's like, okay, give me a dollar and I'm going to make you 3 million, um, but in this case it is pretty easy to get 10 times return for that small investment of time and effort wow, that's.

Speaker 1

16:35

That's pretty good. That's pretty good. And I mean I know we I don't necessarily like talking about covid and all this kind of thing, but we can't really avoid it coming in where, where it's related to business, and the next big thing now is people are talking about the economic recovery and all this kind of thing. But I suppose what covid has brought is is kind of like a focus on the fact that we're living in uncertain times and you can't necessarily plan too far ahead and you have to have contingency plans as far as possible. I mean mean, I was reading an interesting post on your website and you can check out Jessica's website at magneticexperiencescom. I'll put that in the show notes too, along with this article I'm referring to.

Speaker 1

17:27

But you were saying there are seven key things to really ready your company for persistent uncertainty, because we have to be ready for that uncertainty um, one of those things that you mentioned. I'm just going to go through a couple of them and just just take your your point of view on it. On a couple of those points, you mentioned increasing organizational um agility and adaptability. What was your thinking around that?

Speaker 2

17:54

yes. So one of the most important things and this even predates covid, but covid really puts a magnifying glass on it is how quickly can you change when market conditions change? And so I'll pick on or I will choose restaurants. Um, as an example, restaurants and hairstylists are two of my all time heroes for this COVID event agility in terms of responding to not just market conditions but all of the different regulations that vary by state.

Speaker 2

18:39

So if you think about a restaurant chain that's in multiple states, the criteria are different, and so I have family in Colorado and for a while they could have restaurants at half capacity. Well, I'm in California and it was 25% capacity. Well, I'm in California and it was 25% capacity. Now, it's nothing indoors and it must be outdoors, and all of these variables really impact their business, not just because of seats but staffing, et cetera, and so they're getting really creative, whether it's outdoor seating, takeout. Some of them have kind of turned into mini bodegas where they're selling specialty groceries, and so those types of things. To be able to pivot is not the right word. It's really more of this like bend in flow, because it's not a one timetime pivot to move in a different direction exactly being able to adjust as needed.

Speaker 2

19:37

That said, my heart goes out to restaurants absolutely hairstylists yeah, and the, the ones that weren't able to survive, I there's.

Speaker 1

19:45

Just I have no words because that doesn't mean that they weren't um agile, it just market conditions and regulations and all of that were beyond tough no, no, no, you mean it's, it's uh, it is beyond tough and it's like you said, that there is a certain amount of this agility has been forced, I suppose and that this adaptability, not everybody is able to do that as quickly as is required anyway, and if you're losing customers, then that's the lifeblood of your business anyway. They may not be able to, even though they are agile and they do adapt. They may not know and be able to entice those customers back, because customers, I guess they go, go if they see something and it's not, it's not. It's there one day and not there the next. They need what they need now.

Speaker 2

20:38

They're more like to shop elsewhere, I guess yeah, there's so many factors that we're working against restaurants and those types of companies that if they didn't have a deep enough pockets to kind of the storm, then all the creativity in the world and just so many factors like that that make it really really really heartbreaking. Um, but the ones that did have those things in their favor, that had more, um, flexibility financially, et cetera, and also showed agility, um are really cementing themselves in their neighborhoods. As you know, a part of the community.

Keys to Company Improvement and Diversity

Speaker 1

21:20

Absolutely. Another thing you mentioned in as part of your article which we're talking about now, which is the fact that we're living in uncertain times and keys. There are seven keys. We're not going to go through all of them, but there's just a few of them that we're living in in certain times and keys. There are seven keys. We're not going to go through all of them, but there's just a few of them. You mentioned operationalized continuous improvement efforts. What was your thoughts around that?

Speaker 2

21:48

Yes, so every company should have a process of ongoing improvement, and so a very common example although still not embedded in all organizations would be customer service, where you are on a regular basis looking at the types of cases you're getting, which ones are most common, how can you prevent them and or how can you solve them better, faster, cheaper. So that's one example, but that should be occurring throughout your organization. Another area would be invoices. How often are you doing credits, write-offs or getting disputes? What's the root cause? Where can you, upstream, cut that off so that you don't have them? For example, I have a client right now, and because I had worked with a similar client years ago, I asked a question that kind of seemed like it came from left field and just said do you get a lot of invoice disputes? And they all kind of got into an uproar because that's a massive pain for them.

Speaker 2

22:47

And they get so many invoice disputes and it's a huge drain because a lot of them they end up having to provide a credit or write it off, because it's very time-consuming to defend what they've invoiced even though it's entirely valid, because the quote didn't match the invoice. But why? Because the customer changed. Because the customer changed and it's so, like in shipping, if I say I'm going to ship a 10 pound box but I drop off a 15 pound box.

Speaker 2

23:22

Clearly it's going to cost more, yeah, but I but I didn't stick around for you to weigh it price and I just said use my card. And then I get a bill and I'm like what, yeah, and when that's happening over and over, I mean that adds up fast. And I've actually had two clients that I can think of, and one of them the reason they reached out to me was their freight charges were $4 million larger than they had been the year before and they didn't know why $4 million, $4 million more, and they didn't know why they were losing that $4 million, yeah, four million, four million more.

Speaker 2

24:02

And they didn't know why they were losing that four million, yeah, and it ended up being I don't want to say so obvious. Um, because it would have been difficult for them to see it, but they had added, they were had started. They used to sell to big company, to companies, fitness centers and gyms. Then they decided to go direct and sell to consumers as a customer experience. They were a very customer-centric company. If the company wanted to do a return, they ate the return freight, no problem. But what they were selling were several hundred pound pieces of equipment fitness equipment. Well, they spun up an online e-commerce site and now they're selling these same pieces to people like you and me. So not only do you have a novice going online and ordering it, when the fitness centers are ordering it from a salesperson. I don't really know. Is it the right size? Is it exactly what I want? So the returns are spiking.

Speaker 1

24:56

Right.

Speaker 2

24:57

And it's not always just a return. A lot of times it's an exchange, and now I'm eating the freight every time some person orders online the wrong thing.

Speaker 1

25:05

Whereas before you had more control, because they're working with a salesperson who can ask the right questions and you have a more sophisticated buyer, and so returns are, or exchanges are, much less common so they have to operate, operationalize I can't say that word that process in order, so that that, um, that four million or plus ever dollars how much it was didn't actually were they able to do that successfully then, and sort of eradicate, or at least reduce that problem?

Speaker 2

25:34

yeah, you can put into place the policies procedures. There's things you can do up front to make sure the customer's ordering the right thing. Processes behind the scenes. For a human to review online orders a lot of things to prevent that once you identify. This is what's happening, and it's because they're online and they are end consumers that don't have the same rigor around what they're ordering, thus more exchanges like business sales marketing, getting more customers.

Speaker 1

26:14

everything sometimes looks a bit I don't know, not necessarily blurred, but if you see it from somebody else, or somebody else sees it from the outside, like yourself, they can actually cast their eye over what's going on and see something immediately that you probably didn't when you're working inside the business, right?

Speaker 2

26:34

Yeah, and again it comes down to the complexity of the person. Who is managing the salespeople who are selling directly to businesses is different than the person who's managing e-commerce orders, and so you don't have the benefit of someone saying, wow, the shipping and returns are so much higher over here than they are over here. Now you can. Now that you know it's an issue, you can easily pull that data and compare it. But before you know, this leader never thought to say hey, what are your return numbers like and you know what's the percentage? Because when you're a midsize business, you have a great idea and you implement it Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2

27:16

And you don't necessarily account for all the complexity that it's going to introduce.

Speaker 1

27:21

And another one on the list here in terms of the seven we're not going through all seven, but seven keys to ready your company for persistent uncertainty. Another one you mentioned is let's just go over two more. So make listening, knowing and understanding your people, your customers and your customers' customers the job of everyone in leadership. I guess that kind of speaks for itself in many ways, doesn't it?

Speaker 2

27:48

It does, and yet there's so many companies that don't do it. And one of the classic examples is I typically make a recommendation at some point with my clients that every person in the C-suite or senior leadership needs to be calling a certain number of customers every quarter. So that includes back office leaders, that the CFO, the CIO, and the reason is there is nothing more motivational than hearing from the customer the pain that they are feeling firsthand. If I hear it and then relay it, that's not the same. And so to operationalize that every quarter they're having these calls and then meeting to review it, then they can have a team that goes and does the deeper root cause assessment etc. But hearing that firsthand and it is not okay to say, well, I talked to customers two years ago or to say I see them all the time we play golf, we go to events that is not the same thing. You are not having the same type of conversation. You need to have some of this type of conversation to really suss out how they perceive the experience they're receiving.

Speaker 1

29:06

Asking the right questions and being intentional and being vested in understanding, like you said. Sometimes I suppose, I guess that people can be quite afraid of asking questions that may give them negative feedback, I guess.

Speaker 2

29:20

Maybe I mean as a human. I don't tend to ask the questions I don't want the answer to.

Speaker 1

29:26

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2

29:27

Yeah, I'm pretty purposeful about that. So, yeah, you have to go into it with the mindset that it's all intended to give you opportunity to grow and improve as a company.

Speaker 1

29:39

Let's just go over one more on this list, cause I was fascinated by this list, but this one be intentional about diversity. Who's at the table every table, every time? Do they look like you, think like you, agree with you, make decisions like you, evaluate risks like you? If yes, find different people. Yeah, yeah, I like that one.

Speaker 2

30:00

I do like that one, yeah I, I think, um, I have this dream and I have no idea how to make it happen, but I would love it if you could capture all of the dimensions of diversity you you know, people with kids, without kids, gender, race, et cetera, neurodiversity and then look at your org just to see where on this spectrum do we have a heavy concentration and where do we not.

Speaker 2

30:32

So it might be you know what we are really really good at diversity in terms of gender Fantastic. We may be great about diversity around level of education Fantastic. But it might be that we have people who are all very neurotypical. Okay, how do we improve that? How do we develop that aspect so that then you end up being able to see this beautiful, whatever the view is of this that we have a diversity all over and it's not, oh, we hired this person because you're only. You're maybe looking at one or two facets of diversity. That's maybe. That's not what you even need on that team. Yeah, maybe on that team you need I don't know, but a different type of diversity, so being able to just see your organization and what are the pockets and what does it look like, um big picture, and then look for for the types of people who could help balance out and um generate diversity in all of the different um aspects of it no, I love that idea.

Speaker 1

31:48

I love it. Maybe somebody could develop some sort of like I don't know um help scout. They. They, um, they track different aspects not all of the aspects that you mentioned, but they track different aspects not all of the aspects that you mentioned, but they track who's within the company and they actually put that out in the open.

Speaker 1

32:02

I think there's a part of their website where you can look at their metrics and they're very conscious, I think, and it's a hard thing to, it's a difficult thing. So I mean, recruiting for diversity is a challenge, I guess, in many aspects, because there are just some areas of uh work where people are just so underrepresented and just difficult to to find. But I think at least if, um, it's like you said, you you can find a way of tracking it and in some, in some ways, kind of at least showing that you're trying to improve and actively trying to improve, you can. I think it can, it can contribute to because obviously, customers I would say customer experience is all about understanding people and understanding yeah, so that's why you this one is so important for this list, right.

Speaker 2

32:55

Yeah, I mean, if you don't look like your customers in terms of all of the facets of diversity, how are you going to possibly be able to meet their needs? And so not necessarily even at the role level for hiring, but at the organizational macro level, how are you doing at building a team that doesn't look like you? And it's so easy to fall into the trap of hiring people that are similar? And there was somebody used the term the clonal effect.

Speaker 2

33:27

I'm inherently going to feel like for culture fit, the more you're like me, you're going to be a great culture fit. And let me tell you, nobody wants a company that is full of me. One of me is plenty. But it's so easy that the more different someone is than us, the less likely we're going to say that's what we need.

Speaker 1

33:52

Yeah, it's all about comfort, isn't it? I suppose when people are starting out recruiting, they feel comfortable recruiting and I suppose when you you talk about founding sort of teams, they tend to it tends to be something that probably they've known from from business school or one of their friends or somebody they've met who had a similar idea. But when it comes to the growing side of things, it's it's. It takes a certain amount of um. I suppose you have to have people who are inward looking but also kind of look, have a good picture of what's going on in the world and brave in some aspects, because it's easy to recruit people who are just like you, isn't it?

Speaker 2

34:29

it's just so easy yeah so, and it's that some people do have a unique talent for being able to spot talented people that are totally outside what they what would be considered typical for their organization. I worked with one man and he knew how to hire the perfect complement for a team and you'd be like, well, that a kind of. At first you'd be like hmm, and then you would see the magic of what it did to the team, and so I think it's a skill everybody can get better at, but if you can find someone who's got that skill, who they are really just naturally so gifted at it it's gonna take advantage of it and it's gonna hit your bottom line.

Expert Insights on Customer Experience

Speaker 1

35:15

It's gonna affect your bottom line. It's gonna affect your bottom line. And, yeah, I love this conversation. Maybe we should have a follow-up one after this, this show, yes, and talk about this, because it's a big theme at the moment. But, jessica, it's been really insightful listening to you and uh, yeah, I mean, there's one other thing your book. You also have a book. I mentioned that at the top of the of the show. Was that also, um, by accident or did you intend to write that that book?

Speaker 2

35:42

it was by accident that was also by accident uh not not by accident, but if you had asked me if I was going to write a book, I would also. I said I have no interest. No, and the only reason I wrote a book was because I kept finding myself repeating the same things over and over and over again to most of my clients and to other people. And so I'm like, okay, how do I get out of my brain this stuff that is so valuable for small and mid-sized businesses that they can do themselves? Now it may be easier to have somebody from the outside come in and help them get that momentum, but I have. I actually didn't even think I had my book here, but I do. It's 60 pages. I did not.

Speaker 2

36:33

This is not the verbose book. That's really long. They should be able to go in here and say, ok, it says, take these steps to do this. I mean, it's very much a guidebook that you can go and do yourself. There's a workbook that goes with it, so it's very practical, which is how I am. I don't really have a need to write, to hear myself write or to have new theories. This is, let me put together kind of all the how-to blogs it's not how I wrote it, but into one spot so that they can really go and protect their profit margins from this erosion. That is so, so typical, and I love the midsize space and anything I can do to help them, even if I don't directly interact with them. I want to do and so that's really why I did it um is to be able to help more people, um, faster, um.

Speaker 1

37:36

Yeah, give them that no, I, I could just feel your passion for it and I love that. I, I can, I can feel it, and the book is called I mentioned at the top of the show, but it's called um five customer experience mistakes causing profit erosion. And yeah, you can get that book, I'm sure, on amazon, um, or any any good online bookstore or offline bookstore for that matter. So, jessica, it's been great speaking with you and, like I said, the more you've kind of answered my questions is the more I think to myself that's another podcast. That's another podcast. So hopefully, if you've got time and are you busy at the moment, uh, with new clients, hopefully at some point we can get you back on the show and uh talk a bit more. But, um, let's do it. What? Any plans, any immediate plans for the future other than um work that we should find interesting coming up for for your business?

Speaker 1

38:30

um that you can tell us?

Speaker 2

38:31

about. There's always fun plans, um, but really right now we're helping a client who acquired five companies and they need to roll them up and then rebrand and do a launch, and so we're helping them with that. It's a pretty complicated, messy project but it's very exciting at what it's going to do for their company. So that's our focus now. I'm sure next year we'll do more fun things. I know we've got some blogs in the works that we're co-creating with other people and always doing fun new stuff, but part of it is we haven't over-planned, because next year I think we're just going to see more and more of this, the uncertainty being more obvious. Times have always been uncertain, but now it's more obvious that they're uncertain, and so not over planning, but just being prepared to capitalize on situations where you can add value in new and different ways.

Connecting Through Podcast

Speaker 1

39:30

That's what it's all about, I think, and, jessica, we will certainly be looking out for what you're doing. As I said, I'll share the book via the show notes. We'll keep in touch with you as well, and I just want to wish you all the best and thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

Speaker 2

39:46

Oh, my pleasure, Alex. Thanks so much, it was fun.

Speaker 1

39:48

It was. It was Speak with you soon.