The CEO of Wine Access, Inc., Joe Fisch, joins Bill Staikos on this week's episode of Be Customer Led. Through careful selection, engaging narratives, and impeccable provenance, Wine Access makes finding and enjoying the world's most inspiring wines simple. During this episode, Joe discusses a variety of the experiences, insights, and perspectives that he has gained throughout his time working in the wine industry. 

[02:37] Background –  Joe describes his professional career, including the steps that ultimately resulted in the launch of his company. 

[05:47] Wine Access –  How exactly does Wine Access cater to the needs of its customers? 

[09:09] NPS – NPS, CX, and the Wine Industry

[13:37] Personalization – Joe explains how quickly they swing into action when a customer is having a bad time with their service. On top of that, he details his company's usage of customization. 

[19:05] Customer Satisfaction -  We talk about how to strike a balance between maximizing profits and sales and providing a satisfying experience for customers.

[25:33] Guest’s Question: In response to the previous guest's question, Joe outlines his interest in philanthropy and donating.

Resources:

Connect with Joe:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joefisch/

Website: wineaccess.com/

App: apple.com/us/app/wine-access/id1642804318

Joe Fisch on How CEOs Can Focus on the Customer

[00:00:32] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B Customer led. This is your host, bill Staikos. I am so pumped for this week's guest, not only because I'm a bit of a self-proclaimed proclaimed wine snob. Uh, now you guys know something about me, but also our guest today has an amazing role. Joe Fish is the c e o of wine access, which wire cutter is named the number one wine.

In America. It is a really cool company and I'm excited to have Joe. Joe, thanks so much for being a guest on our show. We're gonna have a really cool conversation. I can't wait to get into

it.

[00:01:10] Bill Staikos: Absolutely. So, um, we'll have to talk about, actually, you know what, why don't, before we get into it, I always ask the first question, you know, tell us about your. What's your favorite one? Now I gotta ask. Oh, that's, that's, or maybe what's your favorite

And, and then Northern Row. I love the Northern Row. So, and now where's Northern Row? So places I like, like the best would probably be like coat rot. So it's gonna be like a little bit, it's gonna be south of, of Burgundy. So if you like, think of a map of, of, of France. Yeah. You like start at the top and you got champaign, then you go south to, to burgundy, and then you go a little bit farther south and then you hit the, you hit the round.

And then the northern part of the round is where you get mostly sirrah and big Sirrah fans. So it's like pure needs, black fruits, black pepper. It's like all the greatest things in the

My favorite region is, is she enough to pop it? Just like, I don't, like, I've had like one bad wine out of there out of like 20 years. Was lucky enough to go there and just kind of chill out and like visit some vineyards and, and enjoy some wine. But, um, that's when I'm number one. Number two though is a small region in France called pr.

And there's some solid, solid wines coming outta PR rot. So anyway, all right, we digress. Let's get back onto a show. We got an important thing to do here. So Joe, tell us about, you've got a pretty interesting background. Tell our listeners about your journey professional, like what were the big differentiators for you and, and how did you get to wine access?

So I started at a, one of the big accounting forum firms called pwc. And my very two, like, my two biggest clients were, uh, Jackson Family Wines, which everyone knows of, of Kendall Jackson, and then Fosters Wine Estates, which is now treasury. And it has big brands like, uh, Beringer and Meridian. Yep. And Pet Folds.

Wow. And I, I think I bought like six cases of it because I was like, this is gonna cost, like if I ever get kicked off this client, I don't think I was that good. Like, I'll, I'm not gonna have an opportunity to buy this again. And that's like really what like initially kind of gave me the wine. And then from there I moved into, uh, our consulting practice mostly doing buy side and sell side due diligence for private equity clients, but always stayed in sell consumer.

And specifically, I really liked food and beverage cause I can understand it, like I'm not smart enough to do software security or any SaaS company. But food and drink I can understand. Like you buy it, you eat it, you drink it. So spent some time there and then I later moved on to Garelli Chocolate Company to head up their corporate finance department.

So you'll see again, you'll see a theme. Yeah, see it, eat it, drink it. Like that's what I do. And then finally had continued to try to look how do I get back into wine? Or how do I get into wine somehow? I didn't necessarily wanna work at a winery per se. Mm-hmm. . Cause I wanna be able to touch multiple different products, like all over the world, as many products as you could with a winery.

You might be only talking about. You know, a couple different skews and then you're talking how the, you know, the new vintage each year. And that's when wine access came in and my predecessor brought me in to, to be the VP of Finance and have the finance group. Mm-hmm. . And then about a year or so later stepped into the CEO role.

So Awesome. Definitely did not have aspirations of leading a company, but sometimes you fall into it. Yeah. I

Tell our listeners a little bit about like what, what the organization is, where do you guys focus, because it, it is pretty awesome the way some of the things that you guys are doing too. Yeah,

And we will offer things from, you know, as low as that $15 value wine. To the $1,500. You know, first growth bordea, the little feats of the world and kind of everything in between. But, but no matter what we offer, we always, we always stand behind everything that we have. So when we think about the pillars of wine access, when you as a consumer are coming in as a customer saying, okay, I want X, Y, and Z wine.

There's four kind of pillars or ways that we go about it. So the first is cur. Have an absolutely amazing team, uh, master of wine on, on the team. Mm-hmm. , one of I think 430 in the world. Master Samm on the team. Again, similar numbers. One of, yeah, 420 in the world. Uh, foremost sake expert. He ran global Bev for Mo Emoto.

I mean, we're talking about like heavy hitters. Yeah.

[00:06:45] Joe Fisch: their real deal, dedicated their lives to the crowd. I mean, they know every single wine kind of inside and out. So they're, they're going all over the world and, and working with different wineries, different suppliers to make sure that they're bringing the best wines on, on a quality to price ratio for our consumer.

So that's the curation aspect of it. Then there's the content piece. So every wine that we put out, we have a 500 or a thousand word narrative describing the people behind the wine. Yeah. The place. Like why is this relevant too? Like what normally there's a fun story that comes with it. Yeah. And that's the content piece.

I mean, in addition to that, we have our own podcasts as well. We're trying to figure out different touchpoints that we can have for the customer so that like, that's always near and dear to us. So I always say that that's another one of those pillars. Perfect providence. So always making sure the wine is perfect when we send it to you.

So the same way that we taste it in the Chateau, we want to taste like that. When you're in your. That will include including ice packs, monitoring weather, so the wine's not compromised from the delivery of our distribution center all the way to your home. Mm-hmm. . And then lastly, just amazing customer service.

So always ensuring that, you know what we, we track NPS religiously, so our net promoter score ever dips below 80. I don't wanna say we freak out, but we say, all right, what went wrong with this? And how can we kind of continue to bring that up? So those, those are kind of the four pillars of the how we do it and then offering.

On a daily basis, whether it's through email marketing, through a traditional kind of e-commerce storefront mm-hmm. , or as you'd kinda mentioned before about being New York Times, uh, wire cutter's best, uh, wine club through our club itself. And we have a couple kind of cool club offerings as

You mentioned sort of the, the NPS score of 80 plus. Now. How did you guys settle on that? Were you in the seat already and you guys were already looking at nps, like, why did the bus, I always ask this question just cuz I'm a geek about this stuff and I've been in the, in the CX space for a long time. Like, why did you guys choose NPS versus something else?

Like, was it something about sort of the recommendation given the business you're in, like, you know, propensity recommend or was there something else in there and like how do you guys kind of treat it internally?

It tends to be recommendations from friends. Cause you go, you, you go to a grocery store. Let's just pretend like you're very early in your wine journey. You go to a grocery store and you see, all right, this bottle says burgundy. It's red. Like, I don't know what that is. Like, maybe it's Pinot Noir, maybe it's something else.

So I think you end up relying on. , your network of friends and hopefully you have one that's kind of the, the wine expert. And I think we all end up having one of those. Yeah, so the recommendation standpoint, I think, especially for wine and, and for most consumer products is super, super important. Two like.

It's an easier thing. It's kind of an easy question in, in a sense. Mm-hmm. , it's pretty, pretty straightforward. Like would you recommend it or isn't? Because I think, yeah, especially from a data integrity standpoint, if you have an open-ended question and you're trying to like quantify it, yeah. That's like, can be pretty tough and you can kind of manipulate the data Yeah.

However you want to with this. It's like you either did your job or you didn't. So it's kind of a low level of effort too, to accumulate the data. Mm-hmm. , we're always looking at kind of different things. I think there's one that we were looking at was like, how hard, I can't remember the name of it. It's like basically how hard do you make your customers work to get Yeah.

Customer effort. Yeah. Yeah. Customer effort. So I think there's things like that that we're evaluating. I mean, I'd love to hear what are the different ones that, that you've seen that you use? Cause we're always interested in saying like, okay. NPS has been around for a long time. We also don't want to become like the dinosaur of metrics when there's Yeah.

15 other things we actually should be looking at. So I'd always love to hear, you know, what, what you see.

I think for, in a retail context, and especially in your type of business, I think it's like a great question. Because even if your effort is high on the website or whatever, you're not gonna recommend, right? Like you're, you might even say, Hey, I was on Wine's website. Like, you know, they were recommended by, you know, wire cutter New York Times.

Like, and I went there and I just didn't have a great experience. Like, they'll talk about that. Those people are detractors, right? So I like it, you know, but at the end of the day, like I always tell people, , you know, don't get hung up on the metric. Get hung up on like what you're doing with it. And it sounds like, you know, you guys are actually doing something about it, like internally as well.

If it, if it falls for whatever reason, you're not, you know, you're an operation at the end of the day. You can't be a hundred percent every time. Mm-hmm. , it's about what you do with someone giving you like a one or a zero on that scale at the end of the day. And it's not so much about, Hey, our number's up, you know, up or down.

That's always been my council, but I love that you guys are using it. I, in your business, I would always. This is probably the metric that you guys should be using, so, yeah. Okay.

We saw more complaints about pricing being high and we made sure to adjust that. It was still like, again, when you're an 80, it's very few people who are doing it. Yeah, but that being said, we're still trying to optimize for that last, you know, that. Whatever, it would've been very few detractors, like 5% or something like that.

Or it could be like time from, whether it's shipment to hitting my door or the personalization was off. So we can, each month we can basically look and often say, okay, this is where we're off. These are where the comments were coming in. It wasn't just like recommend or not, but we can see like very specific categories.

Yeah. And that will help kind of guide, uh, guide us in course.

I'm hearing like the tw, like there's basically nothing for 2022. Like it's not gonna come out next year. It might be a shortage of wine. I don't know if you guys are seeing that or hearing that too, but. , you know, that might impact your scores at the end of the day. How do, but how do you guys like mobilize?

Can you give us an example of like how you mobilize if someone isn't having a good experience and do you engage that customer directly? Do you guys look at your processes and say, did you know where can we improve? Like, like how do you guys think

We, anyone who reaches out and is essentially a detractor or if they rate a wine low, uh, if they have a low rated wine, our customer service team will reach out to them directly. Like we wanna get more feedback from it. Cuz I think sometimes you could say, Hey, the time lag from when I ordered to when I got the wine was not quick enough.

There could be a couple of interpretations of that. It could have been, okay, was this a carrier delay and it was beyond our . It was beyond our control. Was it because the customer ordered a pre-arrival wine and they didn't notice it was a pre-arrival? Right. Which then means like that right there you have two very distinct.

Like different paths that you go. One is, hey, we're gonna be working with our logistics provider, and one might be we need to actually change our website and be more clear that this is a pre-arrival. So I think, yeah, it's really kind of dissecting where does this actually land? , is this indicative of a bigger problem or is this a smaller blip?

And then from there, you know, mobile, we're not a very big team . We have, I think 35 of us. So then figuring out, okay, quickly like what are the resources that we wanna put against this? Is this something that like one person can knock out real quick and gets fixed in the next dev release? Or is this something where we need to say, we need to rework this process Because we're seeing that in Florida for things that we put on a line haul truck.

It's not getting. In a quick enough fashion, we need to be looking at kind of two day air options or, or things like that. Yeah. And get that got a little bit granular, but like it's important, like for us, when you're dealing at the consumer level, you kind of have to have to do that. I think look,

My guess is, I'm gonna ballpark this, right, but you know, probably 60% of the companies out there that actually track NPS as a metric don't do anything with it. So like right off the bat, you guys are in the minority cuz you're actually doing something with it. Like you're not just following a metric and report.

You're actually saying we wanna understand like what's happening for our business, what's happening for our customers? And you guys are driving change. Joe, you mentioned personalization before, like how do you guys think about that? Because particularly in, in a direct consumer kind of business, right?

Like personalization is so key. So how do, and and one, I love the stories. I was kind of perusing a lot. I was actually perusing pi rats and, and, and she, but how do you guys. Think about personalization in your business and what are some of the ways that you guys try and drive

And then there, like, to be honest, there is like a, there is a marketing aspect of it. Mm-hmm. . And I think that like, there are pieces where people like, like expensive wine tastes better because people paid more money for expensive wine. We try to help show that, hey, there's different values out there that you can get and we think this, if you're this cab drinker, we think you should try this.

You know, this sort of. . But all that being said, you know, the more data that we get from people raid wines or looking at wines or having an affinity towards certain wines will help determine how do we push it into, how do we push it to different segments? So if you have an affinity for Verio, we may say, well, you should also try X, Y, and Z wine.

Cause we knew that, you know, this buyer of of Verio actually really loves, I mean, it could be, you know, super tuscans or it could be something that's like from a completely different country. We're pretty early on in our personalization and we're just kind of continuing to refine it. And it can be different weights where we will weight it 80% based off of ratings, 20% off of what you're looking at.

And I think there's gonna be a, hopefully a next step where when we profile each wine, if we profile wine, you're consistently raiding wines that have, you know, a four out of four on fruit. There's probably like a high likelihood that you're not gonna like delicate white wines. You may. Yeah. Yeah. But I think there's, I think there's those aspects as we start to really get into the guts of the wine, but right now it's, it, it's pretty much done at like a price varietal level based off of your affinity for wines that you have purchased in the past.

Right? How do you guys think about, or how, even as like a ceo, like how do you think about giving customers control, whether that's self-serving, not just in a, from a purchase or buying experience, but also maybe from a, from a service or customer service experience? Like how do you guys think about that and kind of bring that into wine access?

We've, you know, most of our customers right now have said, We really want a lot more control in the account center for selecting the wines that we like for personalization, for receiving updates. So from NPS scores or from comments. Those will help also kind of dictate our, our, our product roadmap. I mean, I think there are certain things that are gonna be best practices that we know that we wanna potentially put in front.

So, We use that for, from our customers to dictate and to tell us like, what do you really like? What's most important for you? I can say like, right now, we hear all the time, they're like, I just, I want simple access to like, when is my wine getting delivered? And you like from ups, so like all this other stuff, like if it's canceling a wine club or switching it, you guys are so fast when we write in that like that's not a big deal.

But actually being able to track orders is a big deal. So I think those are the, there's always a million things that you can add to your product, , to your product roadmap, and, and we adjust them kind of as we see the data come in and tell us where, where, where customers like, what they really want.

So that, like trade-offs is so critical. And I mean, as c e O I'm sure, like you're, you're making a lot of tradeoffs for the organization or at least you're kind of, you know, calling tradeoffs, um, and helping prioritize. You know, I think it's a, like your background from an audit perspective as well as from a consulting perspective really puts you in a great position.

But like in customer experience and the discipline broadly, there's this really big conversation around do you kind of, you know, there's one camp that's like, just love your customers, hug them tight, and the the money will come, right? Others are like, no, no, no, no. Take the discipline, the tool. And point it to in a direction of like driving revenue in a customer friendly way, but help it drive revenue, help it, you know, find efficiencies in the business, et cetera.

How do you strike the, or how do you think about maybe that balance one given kind of your background? , you know, in audit, in finance versus sort of like that, you know, balancing profitability and revenue from an exp versus delivering that great experience. Cause sometimes delivering a great experience can be costly, right?

And I've actually seen businesses run themselves into the ground, literally go bankrupt because it was like everything had to be a wow moment. Right? But like, how do you think about that given from your seat? Because I think that is, that's something our listeners would. Be really interested to, to learn, cuz that kind of helps them think, okay, how do I frame the conversation with my c e o maybe.

My, my hope is no matter if you're building the right organization, you're gonna have kind of a, a, a customer, a customer-centric, obsessed with your customer sort of experience. That being said, you're gonna have a hard time serving your customer. If the example that you just said you run out of. And like you end up, you're not pro, like you don't have a viable business model because I do think being, like having a profitable company, like being able, like you can use that to reinvest into your employees.

Yeah. If you're running, if you're running completely like completely to the bone, like at some point like something's gonna break, it may not be like, it may not be cash, but maybe it's like your employee base or maybe it's you're beating up your suppliers so much that they don't wanna work with you. So I think.

Like, you know, it's a beautiful non-answer that I'm giving. I get it. It's like it's, it is like, I feel like a lot of times it's just like juggling. It's like, okay, what ball is about? The drop and the like, let's make sure if you're juggling perfectly, like everything is, you know, Above the waist and you're keeping it up and, but sometimes stuff gets really close to dropping and hitting to the floor, and you wanna make sure you're not letting something fall and hit the floor because then it, then, then the cycle breaks.

I

I think it's a great answer because, You need to appreciate that that ceo, e o, like the customer, even though I've never met a CEO that has never said, including yourself, like the customer's not important, but they're one of a hundred different things that they're dealing with on any given day. And you need to appreciate that context when you're going to engage that CEO e to talk about sort of how do you improve the experience for your customers or even for your employees or the business for that matter.

So I, I don't think it's an answer at all. I think it's actually. A good, authentic, honest answer and one that I'm hoping our listeners actually take to heart and just say, okay, I'm one of X number of things. Like how do I approach this? One to achieve my goals as a, as a CX leader to improve the experience, but also think about it from their perspective and how do I make this an easy decision for them, right?

Mm-hmm. relative to the hundred other things they're thinking about and juggling. So, no, I think it's a great answer. Alright, Joe, I ask each guest. to ask a question of my next guest. I joke and say, I always say like, it's not cuz I'm a lazy podcaster, or I, you know, I need another question. And the question said I do it because I started this at the top of the year and frankly the questions that I get from guests, I mean, one, I get to talk to a lot of smart folks like you with the questions I get are super interesting.

But there was a, a San Francisco based founder, his question, and I'll pose it to you. , how do you f and this is a tough one, so forgive me, , but how do you focus on philanthropy and giving? Is that something that, and this person actually founded a company that's focused on that, so that's, you know, he's coming from that place.

How do you think about, or what's your philosophy on giving generally? And you could answer that in, in any context, personally, professionally, like how do you guys, how do you think about that?

We're growing, we have all these great partnerships, and I think that's like really easy to hang your hat on. Hmm. But back in 2020, we started. A diversity and wine scholarship, um, with one of our partners is an NBA player, Josh Hart. Cool. To basically figure out like, how do we bring more inclusivity into the wine space?

And we're not a big company. It's not like we're gonna be, it's not like we're gonna be like ox and be able to say We're for millions and tens of millions of dollars at, at things. So we said, well, what we do really well is we're extremely connected within the Napa. , we are able, we're storytellers. We have an amazing wine team who are some of the most brilliant wines in the world.

How can we bring in people who traditionally would not have access to the Napa Valley or, or to this sort of talent and, and really help kind of promote that class or promote that those students of wine. So what we ended up doing is in launching the scholarship, We gave a scholarship to the wine and spirits education level one classes.

So to give wine education to a hundred, uh, students, or I should say, I say students, but they're over 21 Yeah. To a hundred, uh, individuals, uh, persons of color to basically get their foot in the door in wine, and then from there, We took another set and, and took them to the next level. And then we actually, for, I think it was like four students, we actually brought them to the Napa Valley.

Had them meet with different, different components of, of the wine industry, whether it was sales and marketing, whether it was production, whether it was hospitality, and putting 'em in front of like really impressive, putting in front of really impressive people that they would've had, it would've taken a lifetime to try to get into.

Yeah, so for us, that was like a big component of what we do. It was a very successful program. And I've always said the real measure of it is like, what does it look like five or 10 years from now? Yeah. Because I think we, we saw a lot of companies during. during the George Floyd incident that, you know, they put the, you know, the black placard on on Instagram and Yeah.

Showed support there and I said like, we can do that. But like what really matters is like, what does this program look like 10 years from now? Do we have thousands of thousands of like wine enthusiasts that we have now given an opportunity and we've actually. Put them in the place to, to be successful.

So that's where we've been really passionate about it. And we're, we're going on year two now, or I guess it'd be year three. So that's how we've kind of looked at, I guess giving, so to say, or charitable, or however you wanna phrase it. I

They're, you know, showing solidarity, showing support is really important. I'm not taking anything away from that. . You know, once organizations decide they're going to take action in their own way, whatever that is, but there's real action behind it to create diversity and equity in a, in a certain space by, by creating sort of this, this vehicle for inclusiveness.

I think that that is just awesome. All right. Uh, Joe, I'm gonna turn the table to you. What question do you have for my next guest? So

And like, and what, or who do you turn to for this? Very cool

I know you're super busy. Where do you go for inspiration? What fills up your tires?

So, so that's it. Pretty good one. Too

What's the website? What's the best way to get in touch?

[00:28:59] Bill Staikos: Awesome. Joe, thanks so much for being on the show, man.

It's been great to get to know you a little bit and thank you. Dropping some knowledge on us and giving you your perspective. I know the CEO's perspective is always something. Listeners are always on me about, Hey, I want more leaders in a, in the C-suite coming in the show. And I'm, I'm grateful for you to, uh, to give us the gift of your time for this, uh,

Well, thank you for having me. I, I really appreciate. This is a fun one.

[00:29:24] Joe Fisch: listening to be customer led with Bill Stagos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com.

For more episodes, leave us feedback on how we're doing, or tell us what you want to hear more about. Until next time, we're out.