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[00:00:34] Jason S. Bradshaw: Lior Arussy was once an executive in inside a Fortune 500 company watching decisions being made that left customers frustrated and employees disengaged. Rather than complain, he chose to challenge the status quo, and that choice changed absolutely everything. He walked away from a prestigious career to ignite a movement. A movement that now spans over 200 brands across 21 countries from Mercedes-Benz to The Royal Caribbean. They all has helped companies turn apathy into empathy, process into purpose, and service into something that inspires loyalty for life.

[00:01:22] Jason S. Bradshaw: Lior, welcome.

[00:01:26] Jason S. Bradshaw: Absolute pleasure and congratulations on yet again being announced as one of the global thought leaders on customer experience. And that's not surprising considering the number of books that you've authored and the number of organizations that you've helped deliver sustained transformations in the way that they operate.

[00:01:55] Lior Arussy: Sure. Dare To Author was born based on a very interesting experience as part of our transformation work. We discovered very quickly that the cause of customer centricity, although understood by many others and many employees, somehow companies and organizations are failing to shift towards that behavior, and we're trying to understand what the issue is.

[00:02:58] Lior Arussy: So we found out that the real issue is really helping people connect the past to the future, in some kind of a cohesive story and write the next chapter. So we find ourselves oftentimes helping people, not act as victims toward change, which is their default reaction and choose to be the hero. Doing that is writing a new chapter in your book, respecting the previous chapter, building on the past chapter. But that is a skillset that most people don't possess. So what happens is change comes. You act as a default victim. You resist the change as opposed to rising up and saying, where's the opportunity here? And that's what the book is all about. It's calling people to recognize that when we do not author our own story, that story will be authored to us and will be the central victim of that story.

[00:03:49] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, I would like to start somewhere a little bit simpler for our audience. How would you explain customer experience to a 10-year-old?

[00:04:22] Lior Arussy: So very simple. Inspiration or desperation. If you are having struggles with getting customers and with deeper discounts, you are in desperation. Your product is not good enough. If you are having customers standing in line and asking for more, you're an inspiration. Very simple.

[00:04:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now, of course, your career didn't just happen overnight. Your success has been built over working in the trenches, doing the hard work that's delivered sustainable transformative change. Can you take us back to a moment when you realized that customer experience wasn't just a function, but rather a mission? What happened?

[00:05:27] Lior Arussy: I said, maybe you have a problem with your English? You meant the best. He said no, it's the worst. I said, there's no such an award. He said In Holland, there is. And I'm like.. What? You gotta be kidding me. I said, you know what? People will forget about it tomorrow. He said, no they won't. Because the magazine that awarded them this award plays a 10 piece orchestra in front of the office and they are playing funeral songs. I'm like, oh my gosh, I have to call my client and just check how he's doing. And I asked him, Jan, what happened? We just installed the latest technology. You are ahead of everybody else in Holland. You are absolutely advanced against everyone else. And he said to me, Lior, even a fool with a tool is still a fool. And I said, what? He said, I bought the technology, but I didn't do the work. I didn't do the homework. I didn't do the strategy. I didn't do the operation. I didn't do the cultural transformation. And I realized how many of them are buying technologies and thinking that technologies will service customers. Technologies does not service customers. People service customers. And that insight was echoing to me with other clients that I started to talk to. I'm selling them tools, but I'm fooling them because they're buying the shortcut without doing the hard work and actually committing to serving the customer. And the notion that the customer is really at the center of it is lost on people. They treat the customer as a means to an end, not the end game of the organization. That's when I realized it's much bigger than just customer service, taking calls and being kind , or solving problems faster or average handling time, or all these types. People just forgot that the purpose of an organization is to create and retain a customer.

[00:07:28] Jason S. Bradshaw: But at the end of the day, it is people wanting to be served to by people. They're wanting human experiences and human outcomes. Technology can enable us to do that in a more efficient way, but it can't replace us.

[00:07:42] Jason S. Bradshaw: Of course.

[00:07:59] Lior Arussy: We asked them what is their score of the value the bank provides to them before and after. So before, when they were serviced by a real human being, they scored it 8 out of 10. But when the bank shifted to self-service, they actually ranked it 5 out of 10. And the bank was shocked! And I said, there's nothing shocking here, guys, because there is a cardinal rule that will never change. The person who serves me will keep the margin. When you serve me, you keep the margin. When I serve myself, I expect you to reduce your price because you practically outsource your sales and service to me. And by the way, Jason, we do that in supermarkets today. I don't know if you were planning that as part of your career, but I'm now working in supermarkets. I'm bagging. I'm the cashier.

[00:08:58] Lior Arussy: People misplace this notion, and now we're talking about AI and chat bots and everything else. Guys, be aware of self-service. Self-service gives a lot of power to the customer, but the margins are shifting with them.

[00:09:18] Lior Arussy: Yeah.

[00:09:35] Lior Arussy: So I, I have to tell you, when I go to organizations, I have a very interesting measure, okay? And the measure is the cynicism level in the organization. Okay? And I remember sitting at a workshop conducting a workshop, and there was a very cynical vice president sitting there and I asked him to stand up and leave the room and not come back.

[00:10:48] Lior Arussy: Apathy, that's why in my book I talk about two positions. You're either a victim or you are a hero. A victim. You hide behind the process and you blame the process, and you blame the system and you blame what they won't let me do. Or, you rise up to the better version of yourself and say, I'm owning this. This is mine. There are the two modes of performance in organizations- mediocre and superpower or exceptional performance. And you know the difference between them? Mediocre is when I'm hiding behind the processes. Superpower or exceptional is when I choose... I choose to bring- creativity, empathy, smiling, caring, thinking outside of the box, owning- because there is no contract in any organization that can state that, Jason, you have to deliver 37 creative ideas in next month. It doesn't work that way. And no airline can force their flight attendants to smile sincerely. They can force 'em to smile, but not sincerely. Sincerely comes from the heart, and that's what organizations don't understand. That's my biggest struggle with CEOs, is when they come and tell me, I wanna be customer centric. And I have to say, I have to go back to Susie from accounting. And he's what?! Who's Susie from accounting? I said, she's in charge of your strategy. And he's... no, she's not. I have a VP of strategy. I said no. You don't understand. In a million ways, every phone call, every email, every meeting, every zoom session is an opportunity for exceptional performance or mediocre performance. And the gap there is what I need to activate, which is making Susie from accounting find a purpose and activate her intrinsic motivation. And that's the difference between those type of things.

[00:12:55] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. You're obviously a trusted advisor. Being in a position where you can say to CEOs from all walks of life that you shouldn't be in the room because you're not giving it the right attention and that maybe that VP isn't the person you need to talk to.

[00:13:30] Lior Arussy: I have a story for you. Because all of us in the customer experience business guys, you're in the change management business and change is tough and people are gonna resist. And people will be cynical. And people will say, it'll never happen here. I'm gonna tell you a story that is so extreme. But it's so telling.

[00:14:13] Lior Arussy: Day one. We're designing the study. The same guy for marketing, I remember his name still- David is telling me I need six languages. And I look at him, it's like, are you kidding me? I have an email from you saying that you need six, and you said no. He said, yeah, I know. I told you I only need English and now I need six. And I said, why did you do that? He said, because I don't want you here. And I knew you're gonna lose money on six languages, so you're gonna cancel the project. I want you out of here. So that's why I told you to do one language so you lose money and you'll get outta here and you won't do the job. He's saying that in front of my team. And he was instructed by the VP of marketing to do that because they have the most to lose by what we will find, and they knew it. So that is an extreme case where the guy admitted to my face that he'd done that. We have gone, lost some money on those six languages because I told my team, we do not show up at the finish line with excuses. We show up with results and then we'll settle scores or do whatever we need to. The CEO when he found out what happened on that day, he did two things. He fired David and he took 90% of the marketing budget and shifted it to sales and called it sales operation, in order to penalize the VP of marketing. But that was the most extreme case.

[00:16:08] Jason S. Bradshaw: Can you share perhaps a small moment or a gesture or a word, a detail, that you've seen make a massive impact on the customer's experience but, for many people, would just go unnoticed?

[00:16:36] Lior Arussy: I was working with... I won't expose the name, but a certain competitor who we identified is suffering from an inferiority complex against their bigger competitors, okay?

[00:17:59] Lior Arussy: And I think this is the part that companies miss the most. Customers buy you because of who you are, not because of your competitors. Be your authentic self. And I think this is the part that organizations miss. They love who you are, be the brand that you are, be authentic about it. And they keep on not realizing that at the end of the day, that authenticity, that human connection is what gets people connected. It's not the feature set. No product is perfect and nobody cares about market share.

[00:19:01] Lior Arussy: First of all the issue I have with NPS is that if you're willing to recommend, then give me the recommendation. They just gimme the referrals. Then I don't understand why people do not convert that, and I'm yet to see one program that follow on the NPS scores and say, oh, these people ranked us at 9 and 10. Let me ask them for that. I'll give them even an incentive. So, for me, it's not about customer perception, it's about customer actions. Very simple. And to counter the product centricity of the 4Ps-, product, placement, promotion, and price, we actually counter that with a model of the 5Ps of customer actions, which are: ( 1) strong preference for the product. That's the product that I want. I'm not RFP-ing that, or bids or whatever. (2) Premium price. Are you capable of commanding a premium price? (3) A portion of budget. Am I capturing the larger portion of the budget for this category? (4) Permanence of relationship. How long are you staying with me and (5) promotion to others. How many referrals do I actually receive?

[00:20:17] Lior Arussy: I can tell you two main drivers that we find to be very important. The first one is what we call the money that we leave on the table. When you're product centric, you're celebrating the one sell that you've done. You're not celebrating the full potential. So for example, I worked with a baby products company. You cannot take a baby out of a hospital without a car seat. So you have to buy a car seat, and that was their average sale, a car seat. For about $150 or something like that. But when I look at their complete product line, for parents over a three year period, they really had $3,000 worth of merchandise to sell to them. And let's face it, parents don't get to return their baby if they don't like it. They're stuck with it for the next three years. So I said, stop looking at the customer as $150 transaction. This is a $3,000 opportunity. How are you leveraging that? So the first measure that I look at is, can I move the needle within the full potential of the customer? That's for me, if I got them to buy the next one, the next accessory, the cross sell, the upsell, it tells me that I've done something right here and I can move. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is longevity. If this is my average longevity, can I take it one year more? Which is very valuable. So these are the two things that I can attach directly to the quality of the customer experience. And I can tell you that we've done specific, for example, the cell phone business, we've done specific measurements that showed that if a certain transaction on a call center, on a customer service have resulted with a certain NPS, I can see a spike in usage versus a drop in usage. And so on and so forth. So we have done research. It can show us specifically the correlation to customer actions. And I think a lot of the CX professionals are either too attached to their customer perception measures or are afraid to own the real hard numbers. And therefore, when they come and ask for a budget and the VP of sales come and ask for a budget, he will win every day because he's committing to real hard numbers and that committing to soft numbers. And the C-Suite will say, I'll take the hard numbers over the soft numbers every day.

[00:22:32] Jason S. Bradshaw: Would you say that moving the C-Suite from a transaction to an opportunity mindset, is the biggest mind shift change you've had to help C-Suite leaders make, or is it something else?

[00:23:03] Lior Arussy: The C-suite is going with couple of other challenges. The first one is you look at the C-suite many of them came from operational finance, which means their career was paved with Excel sheets, spreadsheets pie charts, graphs. They don't look at customers as individuals. They're afraid to look at them. They think that they're anomaly because their pie charts are telling them the story. And they don't understand that the moment it's aggregated the pie chart, it's too late. So problem number one, skillset not really aligned with humanity, and so on, so forth. Problem number two, again, short-term thinking allows them to go and think in terms of transactions and think that they'll catch up later, but nobody show them that the two are actually connected and they are actually causing damage for the next quarter or the next year. So, by not applying the economics of customer experience, we are not educating them correctly. They get a lot of stories. Disney have done that. The Ritz Carlton story, and they look at that, they scratch their heads and they're saying, we're a B2B widgets company, we were not born that way. Maybe customer experience is just for people who born that way and have Mickey Mouse and we are not one of those. And I think that created a counter effect as opposed to encouraging them it actually discouraged them.

[00:25:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, it makes perfect sense and I think it's so important for leaders to celebrate the successes from a number of angles and not just rolling out soft results, but also linking those soft results to the hardcore business results that at the end of the day, the shareholders are expecting... the bank wants, that you can take to the bank, so to speak.

[00:25:58] Lior Arussy: I will tell you a story. I had a CEO who approached me and he said, I wanna ask you a question. Why didn't you fire us? We were a difficult client. We were kicking and screaming all the way. We were giving you a hard time. We were questioning everything you do. We could tell it wasn't fun. And I said to him, first, are you happy with the outcome? He said, oh, my people are performing at level that I've never expected them. I did not know they're capable of doing that. I said, great. So we finished that. And I said to him, look, for you this transformation was a first time experience. For me it's a journey I've been in for quite some time. I'm like the Sherpa that's helping you on the Everest. I've done this many times. So what was for you an existential threat, for me was a milestone. And unlike you, I knew what's coming at the end of this journey, so I knew it was worth it and I knew how to handle those milestones and that's the first thing.

[00:27:12] Lior Arussy: That's what I would love to leave behind. That's the kind of feedback that we are getting from people that the notion of, wow!

[00:28:12] Jason S. Bradshaw: Fantastic. Now for those listening who watching along at home we're going to leave in the show notes all the links to get Dare To Author, Lior Arussy's latest book, and of course how to follow his work.

[00:28:50] Lior Arussy: In every situation, in every request you get, there are two paths. The power you don't have and the power you do have. Make a choice to use the power you do have. And maybe the power you do have is just to smile and say, I understand. But choose the power you have. You were not brought into this situation to tell me what you cannot do. This revolution starts when people make the choice to focus on the power they do have and to activate it as opposed to hide behind like a victim, behind the power that they don't have. And everyone in the organization, including the CEO have power that they have and power that they don't have. They just need to decide to activate the power that they have.

[00:29:38] Jason S. Bradshaw: Today, we've had the absolute pleasure of having Li or Arussy with us. He's reminded us that customer experience isn't a department. It's a decision one that starts with empathy and ends with impact.

[00:29:59] Jason S. Bradshaw: And remember when you transform the experience, you transform your business and the world around you.