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[00:00:28] Jason S.Bradshaw: Of course, I'm talking about the one and only Blake Morgan. Blake, welcome to the show.

[00:00:36] Jason S.Bradshaw: It is great to connect with you again and as I was mentioning before we started recording, I've been following your work for decades, it feels at least. And certainly recommending your books to friends and colleagues professional and otherwise. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to be with us today.

[00:00:58] Blake Morgan: It was one of those things where you're at the right place at the right time. I'll be honest, Jason, I was 21. You were saying you remember me living in New York. That was like a million years ago, but I wanted to live in New York. I wanted to stay in New York, so I really didn't want to lose my job. So it was just this wonderful kind of series of events that led me to falling into this job to take a conference company and help make it a digital company. So the conferences they produced were on customer management, and so they had me become the digital face of the brand when that was very early.

[00:02:35] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah. It's funny how sometimes we do just fall into what ends up being our passion, right? And, so often in corporates, we do take some things on at first that we're a little bit unsure about, but then it turns out to be the best decision we made. You mentioned that a lot of people find the topic of customer service or customer experience a bit dry or dull. Why? Why? Why don't people understand? In 2025, why do people not understand that customer experience, customer service, whatever word you wanna put around it.

[00:04:12] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah. I always love throwing the C-suite into the contact center just for even an hour. It's amazing how quickly their priorities change when they're at the cold face hearing what customers are actually saying and not just reading it in a report.

[00:04:48] Jason S.Bradshaw: What do you find is the biggest challenge organizations have when it comes to creating a customer-centric culture?

[00:05:40] Blake Morgan: And so that's why so many customer focused companies, they have a few things in common. They often have founder CEOs, where the founder of the company is still involved. They have customer-centric cultures, so a lot of the companies that are customer focused you can also find on the great place to work list. They have leaders that flip burgers next to employees like Lindsay Snyder, the president of In-N-Out Burger. And so I would say those are the common threads. The ability to focus on short term and long term at the same time. The ability to create a customer focused culture. The ability to move fast and break things, to be honest. And then really think about how are we gonna feel about this decision in the long term, rather than just what's going to make money tomorrow?

[00:06:35] Blake Morgan: Customer experience in the most simplest terms is the perception the customer has of your brand.

[00:06:50] Blake Morgan: There's a great podcast called Acquired. There was an episode about the origins of LVMH, of Louis Vuitton, which is owned by LVMH. And Louis Vuitton, what are they selling? They're selling a high end, very good quality bag, but in the podcast they talk about how Louis Vuitton doesn't just sell a bag. They're selling a dream because they really transport the customer into another world because it's not rational to purchase a bag that costs like $5,000 to $10,000. Why? You can get a bag for free at the grocery store. But it's how the bag makes the customer feel, and the way the brand does this- through the website, the mobile, the store, the signage, the quality of the product. Louis Vuitton bags don't go on sale. And so it's all of these things that make the product, the commodity, an actual brand. So really the experience is the brand. And if the experience is the brand, how would that change how we invest in traditional marketing?

[00:08:27] Blake Morgan: Customer experience is not a division at your company. It's not a discipline. You can't go to college for it. Customer experience is just a decision, but it's a decision you have to make every single day. And it's very hard for employees to make this decision every day, all day. Month after month. Year after year. Decade after decade. That's why so few companies do it well.

[00:09:15] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah, so why do you think that we don't spend so much time teaching customer experience fundamentals in academia? You go into a business degree, go and do your MBA. More often than not, customer experience will be a side topic as opposed to a core fundamental teaching. Why do you think that is?

[00:10:35] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely agree. I'm glad that we're aligned there we're aligned there.

[00:10:53] Blake Morgan: Yeah, employee experience and customer experience are linked. They are married. They go hand in hand, and that's why again, the most customer focused companies are on the great place to work list. And if you think about it, you can feel it when you go to a store, or let's say you're a patient in a hospital. When the staff don't wanna deal with you. When the nurses are in a bad mood. There's a very stark difference from, let's say you go to a hospital and the nurses are lovely. They're propping your pillow up. They're making you comfortable, well you can feel it as a customer. Does the person providing the experience, do they want to be there or not?

[00:11:57] Blake Morgan: So I think that's why you see that there's a very clear link between employee experience and customer experience.

[00:12:12] Jason S.Bradshaw: I think that happy employees will translate to happy customers.

[00:12:23] Blake Morgan: So I'm not talking about hot yoga at work or free granola in the snack room. I'm talking about do employees have what they need to do their jobs? These are very basic things. Employees often don't have. They're not onboarded. They're not given support systems. They don't have what they need. They don't get their laptop on day one of work. These are big missteps. And so I think if you have to choose, you should first invest in your employees, and that will trickle down and benefit your customers.

[00:12:59] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah, it makes perfect sense and it alarms me that still in 2025, there are employees out there starting on day one without the basic tools they need to be successful. And yet the manager will turn around and say, why aren't you achieving your goals? So it, it's a constant battle for CX professionals like ourselves.

[00:13:37] Jason S.Bradshaw: What, as a leader in that sort of organization, other than getting up and leaving, can I do to positively impact the people that I lead?

[00:13:57] Blake Morgan: Sometimes people call it, this sounds terrible, but kid gloves. But these days, like you have to be careful with people. You have to think about the implications of how you speak and what you say. And you have to just have open communication as well. So I'm a big fan of communication. I think most problems, most things break down because of a breakdown in communication. So just constantly understanding where your employees are at. And don't be a robot. Get on the phone with employees and ask them about their day. Like, how are their kids doing? Their kids in camp this summer? What do they eat for breakfast? Don't treat people just like transactions. You're gonna get so much more out of your teams if you actually are more of a coach than a manager, 'cause anybody can be a boss, but that doesn't mean that the employees will want to follow that boss. You have to earn that through being a caring manager.

[00:14:59] Jason S.Bradshaw: I'm wondering you've mentioned couple of brands already, but who would you say is the leader in delivering a consistent customer experience at the moment in the U.S.?

[00:15:36] Blake Morgan: Amazon just surpassed Walmart and quarterly revenue this last quarter, and it just goes to show that they're just so smart in how not only they innovate, but how they've diversified their portfolio and then their reputation for their say/do ratio. They do what they say they're going to do and they don't pull the wool over customer's eyes.

[00:16:10] Jason S.Bradshaw: And probably have built out the processes and systems which help support that customer experience. Even when things aren't necessarily going right in other parts of the business, the processes keep things moving, at least in the right direction.

[00:16:47] Blake Morgan: I think they're a first mover with tech in order to deliver on the customer promise. I just can't think of a brand that has impacted more American consumers and even global consumers. I always talk about being a working mom. I'm real busy. I don't even go to the store anymore. Everything is delivered to my home. And that's thanks to Amazon. It helps me live my best life.

[00:17:49] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah. They've combined convenience, consistency and that technology layer to really deliver.

[00:18:17] Jason S.Bradshaw: How is that shaping the future of customers or the future customer, I should say?

[00:18:34] Blake Morgan: And I thought that was a really interesting concept. I don't think we're there yet, but the whole point is to take the minutia, the tedious stuff we don't wanna do and take it away so humans can actually enjoy work and enjoy life. I personally do not like calling and making appointments and all this. I can't stand any of that stuff, so I'm totally happy to have an AI do that for me. It's really about thinking about the human experience and how we can make human life easier and better. But I prefer humans. I like going to my local grocery store, Trader Joe's when I can and having some chitchat with the cashier. They know me. The guy, the cashier I like, he knows I have a podcast 'cause he's a writer. We've talked about it like they actually ask customers like, how's your day going? What are you doing with this Indian spice that you're purchasing? How are you gonna use this? Or any fun weekend plans? And they talk to customers. And that small interaction, it really makes you feel happy. So I think studies show that in the future, customers don't want more technology. They want more human interaction. I just want nice human interactions. I don't wanna waste time and making appointments for a haircut. I'd rather have an actual genuine interaction.

[00:20:00] Blake Morgan: Yeah, there's a store- Reformation in Texas, and it's like an art gallery. It's a clothing store. And you just go and on the tablet, pick out what clothes you want, even though you're looking at them. And then someone brings everything to you, to your dressing room where there's also a computer tablet. You can change the lighting. You can on the tablet, ask for different sizes. And it's interesting because the in-store and the digital are married really beautifully, and I we'll just see more of that. And as we don't need physical retail stores anymore, I think the physical experiences will get much better because they're not necessary. So when we actually do get customers in person, we're teaching them, we're helping them, we're styling them, we're helping them with their groceries, with their health. And so I think it's a really interesting time to be in customer experience and we'll only see more excitement and innovation coming our way.

[00:20:53] Jason S.Bradshaw: Yeah, a great example of how you can fuse the two together. And I think with same day delivery technologies, it becomes even more beneficial for the consumer. The store doesn't have to have a big, stock room at the back. It's about creating that experience in store and then potentially even just shipping the purchased good directly to the consumer's home so they don't have to worry about lugging things around.

[00:21:35] Jason S.Bradshaw: If there are more people focusing on the customer experience, why don't we see that reflected in the overall national metrics?

[00:21:57] Blake Morgan: At certain point they got burned out. They were tired of it and they didn't wanna spend. So that's what we saw then. Then in America and all over the world, there was inflation. The economy was not really doing well in the last two years. And so when the economy suffers, customer service is the first to go because it you don't necessarily need customer service. You can just create bare bones customer service. It is seen traditionally as a cost center. And so a lot of companies stripped back investments in customer service. But I think that as the experience economy continues to grow as buying habits change. As Gen Z gets more purchasing power, I think you'll see even more of a focus on experiences. But great experience doesn't just have to be like a going to a rock concert or a cooking class or an Airbnb. It can be just a really great experience that is seamless and zero friction, like buying something on my phone on Amazon. They call this in my book, we talk about the pendulum switching back from experiences to efficiencies. In a bad economy, companies tend to shrink. They get scared and they start focusing on efficiencies and stripping experiences down to the bare bones, and I see as the economy gets better. I'm optimistic 2025 is gonna be a better year and we'll see even more fun and investments in customer experience.

[00:23:41] Jason S.Bradshaw: So Blake, you mentioned earlier in the show that you have a podcast. We're going to share the link to it in the show notes, of course. But what's the podcast called? And what's the sort of things that you talk about on your show?

[00:24:23] Jason S.Bradshaw: Fantastic. I'll be sure to share the link to it. And it is a great podcast. I've listened to many an episode.

[00:24:44] Jason S.Bradshaw: So I'm just starting to wonder, if I'm a leader or I own a business, am I gonna have to spend years to get started at improving the customer experience or is it something that I can start doing much sooner?

[00:25:05] Blake Morgan: And if you don't know, can ask your. Frontline employees. So just start small. Take one thing. Begin to chip away at it, and you don't have to boil the ocean.

[00:25:33] Jason S.Bradshaw: I love that, taking accountability and taking action or e even small action every single day to improve the customer experience.

[00:25:50] Blake Morgan: So I believe in the customer experience mindset. I believe it's a way of life. It's a servant. It's a service oriented, and servant leadership style of life. And so you have to do things that get you in the mood to want to be generous with others, to give to others, to smile at work. And whatever gives you that energy for influencing change, then energy for your day so you have enough to give to those around you who need you, you have to do that. So maybe that's walking your dog or petting your dog's head, doing yoga, listening to music, dancing in the shower. I'm a big fitness fanatic. I love exercise. It gets my head right. Meditation. There's so many great ways to get your healthy chemicals flowing, your serotonin, and then you feel like your heart is full and you have energy to give to others.

[00:26:52] Blake Morgan: Thank you, Jason.