[00:00:05] Jason S. Bradshaw: What if your marketing was making promises your customer experience can't keep? And what if fixing it wasn't about spending more but rather responding faster?

[00:00:24] ​

[00:00:37] Jason S. Bradshaw: Jay doesn't just talk about loyalty. He builds it through data, speed and unforgettable stories. From Talk Triggers to Time To Win, Jay has helped global giants like Hilton and IBM, and today, he's going to help you.

[00:01:01] Jason S. Bradshaw: So grab your metaphorical lunchbox and let's dive in.

[00:01:06] Jay Baer: Jason, great to see you. I'm actually Jason C. Baer, but we'll go Jay Baer for convenience so it's not two Jason's on the same episode, which would be a real challenge for the listening audience.

[00:01:21] Jay Baer: Exactly.

[00:01:33] Jay Baer: I think it's all around us. Increasingly differentiators that we might have been able to hold onto and maintain in business in decades gone by. No longer can we protect them for long. It doesn't matter what your price is. It doesn't matter what your services are or the nature of your product. Very quickly now because of the nature of the world that we live in, those will be mimicked by competitors.

[00:02:24] Jay Baer: And you know this Jason, as well as anybody, executives identify this to be true. Like more than 80% of corporate executives say now that they compete primarily on the basis of experience. And so if it's their job to compete on that basis, then , I think we should listen to them.

[00:03:03] Jason S. Bradshaw: What myth is keeping companies you know, on this one intellectual side, they know that it matters. So is there some sort of myth or some deep-seated cultural norm that's keeping companies from creating truly remarkable customer experiences?

[00:04:57] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, and probably not out by the fact that most executives compensations are linked to those short term measures as opposed to long term sustainability.

[00:05:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I can remember decades ago being in a business where they were absolutely insist about net new customers, but what they were forgetting is the back door of customers that was just disappearing constantly and the amount of money it cost to try and win those customers back after you've spent all that money on marketing to get them in the first place.

[00:06:28] Jay Baer: So, there you go.

[00:06:33] Jay Baer: Exactly. Write a newsletter for people who are already paying us, intern.

[00:06:53] Jay Baer: Yeah, it's interesting. I wouldn't say it's a new obsession because all the books I've ever written have had at least a section on speed. And I finally wrote a book, The Time to Win, that's all about the relationship between responsiveness and revenue.

[00:08:05] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I think also if you're slower, you're giving the customer time to go and look at your competition.

[00:08:56] Jay Baer: So if you have an accountant, obviously you do. And you have a question for your accountant and you leave your accountant a voicemail. If you hear back from your accountant in three hours, you feel one way. If you hear back from your accountant in three days, you feel a different way. Nothing has changed. The accountant's expertise hasn't changed, your question hasn't changed. Their answer has not changed. The only thing that has changed is the time gap between the question and the answer, and that time gap has a literal impact on how you feel about that relationship. And then your likelihood to continue to be a client of that accountant in the future. It's a psychological game more so than an actual clock game, if that makes sense.

[00:10:08] Jay Baer: Yep.

[00:10:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: You pioneered this concept of talk triggers and the those word of mouth marketing moments that customers can't shut up about.

[00:10:31] Jay Baer: Thank you. By the way, I should also acknowledge my co-author on that project, Daniel Lemon, a good friend and a genius. He was a huge part of that project and continues to be.

[00:11:26] Jay Baer: Like if I go to an expensive steakhouse, the chances of me telling you about the steak are really low because I knew it was an expensive steakhouse. I assumed the steak would be good. That's what the money was for. But there is a restaurant- fancy Steakhouse in Los Angeles, and is at the top of the tallest building in downtown Los Angeles. It's called La Boucherie. Their talk trigger, their word of mouth generator is - they have a steak knife menu. So when you sit down you order a steak, the waiter comes out. In like a walnut box lined in black velvet, and inside that box, they open it up in front of you at the table. An angel sing, there's 11 different steak knives, right? They've got big ones, small ones. They got the French one, they got the Japanese carbon ones. They got the giant like Australian Crocodile Dundee steak knife, and everything in between. And you get to pick the knife that you're most interested in. Hey man, if you wanna use more than one knife, you wanna use one knife for half your steak, another knife for the half of the steak, it's on you. Everybody takes pictures of the knives, that becomes the word of mouth generator.

[00:12:47] Jay Baer: So there's a number of different ways that small businesses or large businesses can implement them. But the first thing you gotta figure out is what can we do that people don't expect? Because if they expect it, they're a lot less likely to talk about it.

[00:13:38] Jay Baer: Yeah. Or they would do it- and this does happen- they'll do it in a way that's watered down. So yes, DoubleTree Hotels by Hilton makes somewhere around 75,000 chocolate chip cookies a day, which is a lot of cookies. Like, I don't know if you stack those up. I don't know how big that is, but it's a lot of cookies. And it's a really good cookie. But the key is they make 'em there. So every hotel has a cookie oven, like behind the front desk. They make them on site. They're warm. They take them out of the oven. They put them in a paper sleeve, and then they hand them to you. The hand-to-hand pass is brand standard because then you can smell it. You can see it obviously, but you can feel it. It becomes a tactile sensation as warm. And then obviously you can taste it, eventually or right then in the moment if you want. Now, there are other cookies in other hotels. I have been given cookies by other hotels literally. But, Jason, it's a pile of cookies under a glass dome sitting on a counter and somebody says, oh, would you like a cookie? That's not the same thing, right? That's not going to trigger all your senses. And why do they do it that way? Because it's super expensive and complicated to put a cookie oven in, like, you know, a thousand hotels. But that's sometimes what it takes, to get it right.

[00:14:59] Jay Baer: That's right. Yeah. People try and create conversations by doing a thing 5% better and they'd be much better off doing a thing 50% different.

[00:15:13] Jason S. Bradshaw: If you had to explain customer experience to a 10-year-old using only things in their lunchbox, how would you do it?

[00:15:22] Jay Baer: Okay, so, let's say you've got a milk in your lunchbox and you go to drink the milk and it's sour. What would you do about that? Maybe I would send a message to the milk company and complain about that, and see if I can get my money back for the milk. That's customer service.

[00:15:59] Jason S. Bradshaw: What an excellent way to explain customer experience.

[00:16:27] Jay Baer: I'll go back to what we talked about with talk triggers, because it is the one that is perhaps most universal. This idea, this pervasive idea that word mouth is rooted in quality. I hear it every single time, in every single industry. We're the best, or we have really good, or we do excellent at this, and it doesn't matter. This is why if you look at the distribution analysis, Jason, you don't see a lot of three star reviews because there's not a reason to write one? So I bought a thing and I got pretty much what I expected. Three stars. Like the only people who craft those reviews are that about 10% of people who just like they have to document everything they purchase, and I've done the analysis on that. There is a cohort like that. But everybody else is gonna write what? A one star review - warning. Or a five star review - holy cow! I didn't see that coming.

[00:18:07] Jay Baer: Customer experience and marketing is really a psychology contest more than anything else.

[00:18:32] Jay Baer: Like a one.

[00:18:37] Jay Baer: I agree, but you obviously have, a higher standard being a professional in the category. But it is funny. I did an analysis on this as well at one point. I actually worked with Yelp on it, and Google Reviews is largely the same, right? If you look at the average score, it's rare to see a business in the threes. It's rare. It happens, but it's rare.

[00:19:32] Jay Baer: And so to your point about Uber, it's exactly right. If you get an Uber driver that has a 4.6. You're like this is probably kind of a shady Uber driver, right? In a lot of other categories, 4.6 - that's pretty solid. But you never see an Uber driver lower than 4.3 because they take 'em off the platform, they de platform them, right?

[00:20:06] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I'd love to know some of the conversations going on internally when they're like, oh, look, we've got another five. And they said it was ordinary.

[00:20:39] Jay Baer: I think one begets the other. So I always think about there's two types of experience optimization.

[00:20:58] Jay Baer: And then you have experience optimization that's designed to create word of mouth and get new customers to turn your current customers into volunteer marketers. And that's where it's more creative and different and not consistent every time. it can't be right. I think you've gotta get the first one right first 'cause there's no sense having a really terrific word of mouth talk trigger if you can't do the basics well. Because all you're gonna do is get customers and then disappoint them, and then they leave and you gotta do it all over again.

[00:21:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, and it's that layering on top that creates that loyalty and repeat business ' cause if we go back to the cookie example, I'm pretty sure that DoubleTree by Hilton gets that they need to have a clean room, a comfortable bed, and a functioning bathroom. They need to deliver on that constantly, but it's the talk trigger that they lay on top that gets people to talk about them and come back.

[00:22:27] Jay Baer: And in fact, it's a funny story. You may remember, I don't know how long ago it was now, 15 years, maybe, something like that. Westin Hotels at that point, part of Starwood now part of Marriott Bonvoy rolled out those whole program called The Heavenly Bed. So they literally went down this avenue of talk triggers - of a meaningful strategic word of mouth generating differentiator. And their whole deal was gonna be - look, you spend a lot of time in bed in a hotel, in fact, most of your time. We're gonna have truly the most comfortable bed. The best bed! Which good on you. Yeah, makes perfect sense. The problem was, and they spent a bunch of money rolling this out and promoting it and all that. The problem was you can't defend that. We talked earlier about, people copying, usually you're right that if somebody else did a chocolate chip cookie, like, bro... DoubleTree's got that one on lock. But a bed is so foundational to a hotel that Marriott's like, no, bro... we got the new super comfortable bed. I forget what they called it. It wasn't The Heavenly Bed, but it was like the super good bed. And then Hilton was like, nah, bro. We also got really comfortable mattresses now too. And everybody kind of jumped into the breach so much so that Westin couldn't hold it and they had to back out of it as a differentiator. So that doesn't happen very often, but it can happen. It just doesn't happen a lot.

[00:23:53] Jay Baer: Yep.

[00:24:18] Jason S. Bradshaw: So your product, whatever it is, can be commoditized is the message. It's how what you layer on top.

[00:24:50] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. So you once said that content is fire, social media is gasoline. What's your new version of that quote in the age of AI, short form video and TikTok fatigue?

[00:25:35] Jay Baer: And so that veracity, the trust level of a human being making a recommendation to another human being, that is going to take on greater and greater and greater importance because it's the one thing that's ours, it will never be the robot's.

[00:25:55] Jason S. Bradshaw: If a CEO, CXO or a business owner had only one metric to track customer experience and marketing success with this quarter, what should it be and why?

[00:26:12] Jason S. Bradshaw: Or a year?

[00:26:13] Jason S. Bradshaw: I'll take either timeframe.

[00:26:29] Jay Baer: And they are changing because this idea of doing a customer satisfaction survey, or net promoter score, or whatever... all that takes a while. And now a lot of the AI tools can do predictive satisfaction, right? And actually say we don't even need to ask people what they think. We can tell you what they think without asking them. Or, the one concept that I'm really bullish on is the digital twin of customer. Things that people are doing where they're building a whole AI powered database, which is a lookalike, essentially a ghost of your customers. And so if you're gonna roll out a new product feature or a talk trigger, you don't have to do a survey of your actual customers. You can do a survey of the ghosts and they'll tell you what they think as if they were real people. Like that kind of stuff blows my mind, right? It is truly extraordinary.

[00:28:11] Jason S. Bradshaw: I think it also opens up another question around which moments is it appropriate to building brand loyalty to automate, to use AI, versus those moments that a human actually is the best outcome in the moment, but also for the long term, repeat and referral business metrics.

[00:28:42] Jay Baer: So, customers have to experience it to have an attitude about it that's accurate.

[00:29:10] Jay Baer: Like today, a lot of times if you're talking to an AI driven fake person, there's like that little bit of uncanny valley where you can tell... sounds like a person, but I know it's not because of the pausing, or the phrasing, or there's just a little bit of frosting that's wrong, but that's gonna get fixed quick.

[00:29:33] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, the one thing about the AI bot is they've been to communication school. They follow the rules constantly, whereas us as humans, doesn't matter how much training we do, we suddenly get it wrong.

[00:29:49] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, smashes the computer keyboard when it's not working.

[00:30:09] Jay Baer: As you know, listeners may not know my side business is I'm the number two tequila, influencer in the world. So I reach hundreds of thousands of people every week, with tequila recommendations. I spend an unbelievable amount of time every night answering questions about tequila on direct messages.

[00:30:46] Jay Baer: That's the experiment I want to create to see whether that would be efficacious and believable. I just might have to do it.

[00:31:00] Jay Baer: I change your mind on that, my friend?

[00:31:09] Jason S. Bradshaw: Jay, been a pleasure as always.

[00:31:20] Jason S. Bradshaw: Jay Baer just reminded us that great brands aren't built by ads alone. They're built by moments that matter, delivered faster than expected, and more memorable than promised.

[00:31:44] Jason S. Bradshaw: And as always, remember when you transform the experience, you transform your business and the world around you. See you next time.