Dan Gingiss: Becoming The Experience Maker

Jason S. Bradshaw: What if the secret to standing out in a crowded market wasn't more ads, a cheaper price or a fancier website, but a single unforgettable experience?

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Jason S. Bradshaw: Welcome back to Chats With Jason, where we unpack real strategies from real leaders to transform the experience and transform your business.

Today I'm joined by someone who's called The Experience Maker for a very good reason.

Dan Gingiss former Fortune 100 exec, and the author of the Experience Maker, a must read playbook for turning customers into loyal fans and loyal fans into walking billboards.

He's led customer experience and social media programs at brands like McDonald's, Discover and Humana.

But what makes Dan different is his ability to turn ordinary moments into extraordinary marketing without spending a cent more on media.

Get ready to discover the WISER method for creating shareable experiences. Why being remarkable is better than being perfect, and how to out experience your competitors even if you can't outspend them.

So grab your notebook, silence the distractions, and get ready to rethink what your brand really delivers.

Let's dive in. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Gingiss: Thank you Jason. Always fun to talk with you. I know that we are passionate about the same topic, so I'm sure it's gonna be an enjoyable conversation.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Absolutely, and first of all, congratulations on achieving your CSP designation.

Dan Gingiss: Thank you. That was really fun. That is for those that don't know, an earned recognition from the National Speakers Association in the US. I had to fill out a lot of paperwork. I had to go back to dozens of former clients and get testimonials. Had to supply videos and other stuff. But it was worth it, 'cause it was really an honor.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Fantastic and great stuff.

Dan Gingiss: Yeah, a hundred percent. It was when I was working for Discover Card which is a credit card company in the US. For our international viewers and listeners they also own the Diners Club brand, which is big in certain parts of the world, not big in other parts of the world. But I was recruited from a marketing role into a customer experience role, and I had been doing marketing for my entire career. I literally got my start in direct mail and I had made my way through all the digital channels and social media and email all that.

PS we went and fixed about 99 other things after that. Reducing phone calls to an unbelievable rate, but also not coincidentally winning the JD Power Award for customer satisfaction for the first time beating up a little company that I'm sure you all have heard of, called American Express.

So that was a really good feeling and a career highlight.

Dan, as I said, you've worked in some pretty phenomenal brands. What's the one thing that is common across all of them when it comes to convincing the executive that customer experience matters?

Dan Gingiss: You just nailed it. You just gave the answer before you gave the question, which is that it has to impact the bottom line.

Customer experience benefits you on the revenue side because customers want to work with brands that treat them well. It brings in new customers. Those people also stay longer, spend more, and most importantly, tell others about you. All of those things are trackable, especially if you know the lifetime value of a single customer. But [00:07:00] also, as I mentioned in the Discover example, it reduces costs - the other side of the profit equation by reducing your customer service inquiries, and that can be tons and tons of money depending on the size of the business.

If you have a perfect customer experience, which no company I have ever experienced does yet, you wouldn't need a call center because no one would ever call to complain 'cause it would be perfect. And so while that may not be practical, we definitely can track our path to getting there and we can see what happens when we improve the experience or remove pain points. We can see what happens to customer service complaints and they go way down.

Dan Gingiss: Yeah, that's a great question because I would say, when you say immediate, ROI, I would probably add the word trackable. 'cause usually there is ROI, but we can't put our finger on it. And so what I would say, I love to ask executives this very easy question. I say, what is the most valuable asset of your company? Then I wait for the answer. And if the answer is anything other than their customers, it's wrong. Because without our customers, we don't have a business. It is the only answer where that is true, right? We could lose all our employees and maybe still keep our business going. But if we all our customers, we wouldn't have a business. In that sense, doing right by your customer is something that you always wanna strive to do because if you don't do that, you won't have any customers anymore. And so that's why I said trackable, because ultimately, and there's a concept I [00:09:00] talk about in the book called a Leaky Bucket. And the leaky bucket is when we lose customers drip, and they don't tell us they're leaving. They don't leave in a ball of flames yelling and screaming at us. They leave silently. And those are the worst kinds because we don't even know what we did wrong. They didn't even tell us. They didn't complain. They just left. And what I would argue is most of the time when that happens, it is because we have irritated them over and over again. We've done these little things where we just poke at them. It's death by a thousand paper cuts, and eventually somebody says, that's it, I'm done. I'm gonna go to the competition. And unfortunately, the competition isn't usually better, but it makes us feel better as consumers to stick it to a company and go to their competitor.

And so that may or may not be trackable, but I have seen the leaky bucket happening at almost every business that I've worked with, to some degree.

So talking of your book, you talk about the WISER framework, which is absolutely brilliant. So simple, actionable, and sticky. For those who are new to the book and new to your work, can you walk us through it and explain how even a solo business owner can apply it today?

Dan Gingiss: Yeah. And thank you for saying it's simple. In fact, one of the best compliments I get about the book itself is that it's a simple read, and that's very much intentional because I think customer experience should be simple. The more we complicate it, the more it is complicated to the customer. If you can focus on one thing, focus on being simple and WISER, does attempt to do that.

But for WISE, it starts with the W, which is witty. Witty is not about being humorous or telling jokes. It is actually just about having fun, showing a personality and refusing to be boring. And there are some industries where they'll tell me, but I work in a boring industry. I'll say, you don't have to, it doesn't have to be boring. So when you think about boring things, you think about contracts, and invoices, and legal disclaimers, and all this sort of stuff, and I'll show you examples of all of those that are super fun that you actually want to read because they're entertaining. They still click all the legal boxes and they're gonna be legally sound, but they don't have to be boring. And so witty is really about finding every single opportunity where you communicate with a prospect or a customer. This could be in any channel, it could be email, direct mail, telephone you're out of office messages. I've got examples where [00:12:00] companies are putting some sort of humor on the wash tags of their shirts on the back. Anywhere where you are communicating in any way and you're using words, why not have fun with people? Because people remember that, and it's easy and it's free, right? If you are shipping your product to people in a box, chances are you're already printing something on the box. You've got your logo, you've got something else. Why not put a message on that box that makes somebody smile or that makes somebody take a picture of it doesn't cost you any more money, it just costs you a little bit of creativity.

Shareable is about intentionally creating moments that we know people are gonna pull out their phone and take a picture or a video. And this is where we really just have to put our consumer hat on and start thinking about when we do that ourselves. We all do it. We're experiencing life. We're walking down the street and we say, oh, we gotta we reach into our purse or our pocket and we pull out our phone, we take a picture or a video. What makes us do that? It's not somebody telling us to do it. It is that the moment [00:14:00] presents itself and we realize this is a moment we wanna capture. So what I advice companies to do is figure out your moment. Figure out if you could design the Instagram post that everybody shares about you, what would it look like? And once you know what it looks like, you can create an experience around that so that people do it.

And then extraordinary is the E, and extraordinary is the one where people get a little bit worried 'cause they think it sounds expensive, but really the definition of extraordinary is just better than ordinary. And the good news is that most experiences are ordinary, or as the millennials call it meh, or as the Gen Z call it mid. It doesn't matter what you call it. It all means the same thing. We don't talk about those kinds of experiences. And that is the vast percentage of experiences that we have. They're just unmemorable. They're not great. They're not terrible. They're just unmemorable.

And so the good news there is that the difference between ordinary and extraordinary isn't a ton, it's actually just a little bit, it's a little nudge forward.

So once we do any of those four things, we increase the chances of people talking about us and when they talk about us, no matter where they do it - if it's on social media, if it's in person, if it's in chat forums, review sites, whatever it is - we wanna try to be part of that conversation. And that's the R which is being responsive.

And that goes also for compliments. I see every day people complimenting brands, and then you hear crickets, and it's like me getting off the stage after a triumphant keynote and somebody saying, damn, that was awesome. And me just continuing to walk and ignore that, right? They would go immediately from thinking I was great to thinking I was a jerk, and yet brands do it almost every day. So that's being responsive.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, interesting point there. I wonder how many companies actually train their teams on how to handle a compliment.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. I think it brings some balance.

If you had to explain the power of customer experience to a 10-year-old using only what's in their lunchbox, how would you do it?

Dan Gingiss: Man, Jason, this is such a you question. I love this.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Look at that. I've not had peanut and jelly sandwich analogy before, but I love it. I love it. I love the note from mom. I love the note from mom. The bit that I was thinking that you were going to end on was you had a reputation for your lunchbox being so great that everyone was trying to get a piece of it.

Dan Gingiss: Well, I wanted to get into maybe sharing it with somebody or what have you. But I wasn't fully prepared.

Jason S. Bradshaw: You definitely want the real life live unscripted reactions here on the show.

But the purpose of the question is really just to remind the listener how simple customer experience is, we don't have to complicate it. If a 10-year-old can understand it, then surely us busy, educated adults can understand it, and work.

And one of my favorite examples to share and I won't tell you which company it was, but it was one of the companies that I worked for. I noticed that we had a popup ad on our website and I started asking around why? And what I heard was it's our best performing ad . And I said, okay, really? How well does it perform? And they said we get a 7% click through rate and typically we would get a two or 3%. I said, alright, have you thought about the fact that you're annoying 93% of our customers in order to get that 7% rate? Now, how did I think of that? Because I hate pop-up ads. And so when I saw one on our own website, I said, wait a second. I would hate it if you did that to me [00:20:00] and yet we're doing it to our customers. Why do we do that? For some reason it is difficult for people to disassociate their own personal experience with their business hat. And that compliment that my boss gave me that said, I wear the customer hat, everybody should wear the customer hat. We should always ask what are our customers gonna think when we do this? And if the answer is we're gonna tick off 93% of 'em, there's gotta be a better way to get that 7% click through rate.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, and not to mention the fact that if they're already on your website, they've already got an intent to do business with you so your best performing ad happens to be on your own website. I think the metrics broken...

Dan Gingiss: We gotta cross sell 'em, and upsell 'em, and get 'em to spend more and, all the all the things actually want, but that we want them to do.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, makes total sense.

So what's one small low cost CX tactic that most businesses overlook, but when done right, creates massive impact on loyalty?

And so when we do that, when we behave as a customer, we see things from exactly the opposite angle that we see them from our desks.

When I got to Discover, they offered me an employee card. And I said, I don't want an employee card because I know that you're gonna treat the employee card differently. I don't wanna be treated differently. I wanna see what everybody else sees.

And no matter what your business is, even if you're in a B2B business selling a SaaS platform. Open up a version of your SaaS platform. Try to sign up. Try to add users. Try to do the things that are in your training videos. Watch your training videos and see if they make any sense to you.

Do all of the things that you're asking your clients to do, and you will immediately find dozens, if not more things where you'll be like, you'll think, gosh, that was more complicated than it had to be. Or, what if we did this instead of this? It comes up all the time.

It's so easy though, for senior leaders, busy executives, the C-Suite, to get caught up in the "I just need it now. I'm so busy. I can't go through that customer lens." How do we encourage them to actually stop for a moment and take that customer approach that you talk of?

And I understand that as an executive you gotta be focused on earnings and it's this quarter, over this quarter and all that sort of stuff. But if you fix the core issue, which is that your customers aren't happy, all of the rest of that stuff flows into place. And again, I'll go back to customer experience brings you more customers who spend more, stay longer and tell others about you. Every company wants that.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, makes sense. Now I think I know how you're gonna answer this question, and we've covered it in different ways, but I wanna ask it nonetheless.

What do you believe they need instead of a viral moment? Is it a talkable moment? Is it consistency? Is it brand trust? What do you think trumps a viral moment?

Dan Gingiss: So I was speaking to a bunch of people in the roofing industry and I was talking about being shareable. And I said to them - and these are like local roofers, right? So I said to them, listen, you may not be interested in a viral moment. You may not be interested in people sharing on Instagram. But what if every one of your customers just told the neighbor to the left and the neighbor to the right, and that's it. What would that do for your business? It would double or triple the size of your business, right? So I think the focus is on how do we create an experience that your customer will tell at least one person about.

I'll give you a different example of this. I have two teenagers, 19 and 17. Every once in a while, I'd say every month or so, they're singing a song from like the '70s. I'm like, why are you singing that? How do you even know that song? Oh it went viral on TikTok. How the heck did that song go viral on TikTok 50 years after it was created? I have no idea. I cannot explain that, and it's certainly not predictable. And focus on getting, depending on what your organization is and how you grow, but even if you're the world's largest fast food company like I worked for, if we can get every one of our customers to tell one other person, it's a pretty big deal for the business.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense.

What do you think is a popular myth about customer experience that holds businesses back right now?

Dan Gingiss: I definitely think it's that it's too expensive. And so what happens especially in large organizations, customer experience gets wrapped up as a major multi-year, multi-million dollar transformational project.

Remember when we were all doing digital transformation? That's how we treat customer experience. It's this huge, massive, monolithic thing. And the problem is it then gets prioritized against 10 other projects that are also massive in scale, and it's hard to pick. It's hard to pick from them, right? You wanna do all of them. But oftentimes customer experience initiatives lose that way.

So the myth is that this has to be big and expensive. And as soon as you can get past that and you can start working on the little things, I promise you the little things add up to big things.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, and you've been a part of a lot of those transformations for some amazing brands. What's a key strategy that you take to make that customer-centric thinking stick in an organization and not to just be this month's billboard?

I believe salespeople are very much in the customer experience business. Finance people, behind the scenes rarely talk to anybody, and yet they're making decisions about pricing, about payment methods, about payment terms about all sorts of things that have a direct impact on the customer experience. But go talk to a finance person and ask them if their job is customer experience, and they're gonna tell you no.

And so I do believe, and I could do this for every department in a business, and I believe that each one of those people, once we can convince them that CX is part of their job, now we've got a customer centric culture.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, makes perfect sense.

You know, we hear a lot of talk about AI automation and chatbots still to this day. And quite often the thought is this is going to reduce our cost to serve. We're going to reduce our headcount. We're gonna serve more customers. They're going to be happier. And the great thing is we will need less people to do it so it's a win-win. And I have some very strong views on that. But I'm wondering in this world where there is so much discussion around AI and automation. What does human look like in the future customer experience?

As we look at AI, and look, I am amazed at AI. Every day I'm learning something new and I just, my mind explodes every day... that mind exploding emoji. I feel like I use that one every day. But as we think about AI, we gotta ask the same questions and make sure that we're asking the right question. The right question is, how can we use AI to improve our customer's experience? The wrong question is, how can we use AI to save money? And at the end of the day, if you do the first one, you will end up with a second one, right? Because again, better customer experience, lower customer service costs, you will already save money. But if you start with only saving money, usually the customer gets squeezed outta that.

Now, 20 years from now, it might be just completely expected and it might be a fine answer. I've been meaning to go back and re-read Ready Player One because that sort of envisions a world in which everything is AI and everything is not IRL, and not in real life. And maybe we eventually get there, but that book is now a reasonable number of years old and we're not there yet.

So as long as we continue to keep asking the question of how do we help it make it better, then, I think we can do amazing things with AI. Think about some of the early uses of like virtual reality and, like a paint company that now allows you to envision the paint on the wall without having to put different splotches up on your wall. Really cool. And as a customer, that improves my experience in so many different ways and makes me want to buy from you.

And that's how I think about AI... is the power is there. Now let's just use it for good and not for evil.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, let's use it for good.

Dan, you've been an absolute hoot to have on the show. I really appreciate your generosity. We'll leave in the show notes links to your website and your books so people can follow your work, and get in touch with you.

Dan Gingiss: Probably to call me, but other than that... sorry, you teed me up for that one.

And the last thing I'll leave you with is I remember I always used to tell my teams in corporate America that there were really only two wrong answers you could ever give me to any question. The first was, because we've always done it that way. I hated that answer. That was my number one least favorite answer. The other answer that I didn't like was because everybody else does it that way. And so as you are focused on your experience, wherever you see something where you're like, man, this is how we've always done it. We've always done it that way. Or we must do it this way because everybody else does it that way, you can pretty much guarantee that's a point in your experience that needs improving. At a minimum, it's ordinary and not extraordinary. That's the minimum, but it is probably a point in which you can safely assume we gotta do better.

Fantastic chatting Dan, as always. Appreciate your time.

Dan Gingiss: My pleasure. Good to see you, Jason.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So what Dan has just reminded us of is something far too many leaders forget. Customers don't remember transactions. They remember how you make them feel. And when you design experiences worth sharing, your customers become the loudest and most loyal marketers there are.

Whether it's Dan's WISER framework, creating conversations, or just making one moment a little bit more meaningful today, the experience is the brand.

If this episode sparked an idea or made you rethink the customer journey, I'd love to hear about it. Tag me. Tag Dan, and share it with someone who needs to hear this.

And don't forget to subscribe for more conversations like this because the next one might just be the one thing that changes everything.