🎤Get the fix for your Digital Transformation in “The one with the digital irrelevance antidote” with Howard Tiersky CX Passport Episode 65🎧
🤨Does the term "Digital" matter anymore?
💉What is the Irrelevance Antidote?
🥥Why does a beach shack restaurant in Cozumel need to be Digital?
✅The 5 steps to thrive in a digital world?
😖A sad tale of a company with the antidote...but failed to use it
🏌️♀️What does a hole in one tell us about Voice of the Customer?
Episode resources:
Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance: winningdigitalcustomers.com/
Howard Tiersky: www.linkedin.com/in/tiersky
TRANSCRIPT
Rick Denton: 0:05
You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. When I read the most recent book from today's guest, I just kept dog tearing the pages, underlining passages and nodding furiously as I flip Chapter and Chapter. Today I'm joined by Howard Tiersky author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. Howard is the founder of two companies that enable large brands to win in the digital world FROM: the digital transformation agency, and innovation loft. We all know classic stories of corporate irrelevance working to ensure fewer and fewer companies. Right another story like those classic cases, Howard helped some of the world's most visible brands build their irrelevance antidote, this anecdote drives companies to create a customer experience that keeps customers coming back for more, along with best selling books and driving successful corporate reinventions, you'll find Howard frequently on stage sharing his wisdom at events worldwide. And of course, you know that along with discussing digital and CX with that type of worldwide travel, certainly, we'll get into some great travel stories as well. Howard, welcome to CX passport.
Howard Tiersky: 1:34
Thanks, Rick. That's awesome intro really appreciate it. I'm so happy to hear your copy of the book is dog eared. That's exactly how I like to see it. If I see it pristine on someone's shelf, I know it's not doing its job.
Rick Denton: 1:44
If you if we were using video for this, I'd turn around I'd grab it out of the cabinet here behind me and show you there are dog ears and underlines for sure. And and there was some of the comments almost right at the beginning of the book, then that's when I knew all right, I got something good here. You asked the question early on, do we even need this term digital anymore? And then you share a good dad joke about a conversation between two fish? It's a good question. Do we even need this term digital anymore? Does a business need to distinguish themselves as being digital?
Unknown: 2:11
Well, I think every business or 99.9% of businesses, which is good enough, need to be delivering an outstanding digital experience in order to be relevant to today's customers. And of course, exactly what that means is going to vary whether you're a restaurant or you're an accounting firm, or you're a travel company or what have you. But I think that's got to be a huge priority for every business, because it's a huge priority for customers today.
Rick Denton: 2:34
And that's something that you brought to bear in the book right off the bat. You're telling a story about a particular restaurant that you really enjoy and Cozmo Tell me about that restaurant, tell our listeners about that one.
Unknown: 2:44
See. And speaking of travel, I gotta get back there. So well. My wife and I are avid divers, and actually two of my kids now and to end growing because another one's about to get certified. So those that are divers know Cozumel, Mexico very well. It's an island not too far from Cancun, you can take a boat of Cancun, and that just has fantastic diving for whatever reason, the combination of the where the, the waves are and the reefs are and whatnot, fantastic place to die. And so I've been there many times, both on cruises, and as you know, go off for a week or so and land vacation. So there's one side of the island where sort of most of the hotels are but then a whole bunch of the island is very natural, like in its natural state, like beaches that are the same now as they were probably 10,000 years ago, just natural beaches. And so on that side of the island, there's a restaurant on one of those beaches that I love. It's called coconuts Bar and Grill. It's kind of a Jimmy Buffett esque kind of place. No power, no internet, that to speak of, I guess they have, you know, from the cellular Of course. And no running water. No, but they will fish out of the ocean. bring fresh avocados to make guacamole and of course tequila. Well, of course. And it's just fantastic sitting out there on the sand. And so
Rick Denton: 4:02
if a restaurant like that out in the middle of nowhere, you share that even they have found their way into the digital world taking because I don't carry cash. And so if I would wander up to coconuts, how would I possibly pay for something and you'd mentioned they've got squared, they've got the ability to actually take a digital transaction at a place like that. And so if coconuts in Cozumel, Mexico, is taking digital transactions, I've got assume that pretty much every company and you said 90 I bet it's 99 point then that string those nines out after that decimal point needs to as well. So how does a company get started? If they aren't there? Or even if they're kind of there, if they really want to think about it. What are those five steps to thrive in a digital world?
Unknown: 4:45
Yeah, so Well, that's a great question. My book is all about trying to provide the answer to that question. So how do you get from where you are and many companies are already much farther along than then coconuts, but of course, they need to be much farther along than coconuts because they may have a bit Since much more complex than just, you know, a beach, a beach shack. But so many companies, the vast majority of large brands in particular, are not where they need to be, they're not caught up yet with the expectations of their customers, despite running hard and fast for many years to become more more digital. And so my book is really as a blueprint for a five step process to get from where you are to that point that you can truly stand toe to toe in the marketplace with any competitor and deserve the love of today's digitally centric customer. So the five steps, I'll just say what they are, and then we could talk about them in any way you like, Are you the first is to truly understand the customer. Because the goal of digital transformation to me, it's not just to jet transformation means change. So I guess in theory, any kind of change that is digitally related is digital transformation, doesn't mean it's going to do you any good though, the key is to change in a way that's going to make you more relevant to the customer. So in order to do that, the customer is your is your target, you have to be able to aim you have to understand what is the customer? What are their priorities, their concerns, you know, what is what is important to them, what are their unmet needs, that you have the opportunity to fulfill and, and make them so much more loyal. And the only way to know that really, is through the right kinds of customer research. And so I spent a fair amount of part of talking about that. And then once you understand the customer, or at least have a much better understanding the customer hard to ever 100% accomplish that. Then the next step is to map the journey to understand what is their real current journey? Because so often we at businesses, large companies, they have an idea of what the journey is supposed to be. But that's not necessarily what the journey actually is. We all know, but to make sure we really understand what what is the experience people are having. By the way, there's probably great things that's mappable to it's not all about, you know, but but also about looking ourselves in the mirror and really being real about what's the experience people have when they really walk into the store? How long does it take to get service? If they need help alone? Do they wait in line? How often are they not able to find what they're looking for? How often is the product on the shelf broken or missing or miss shelved or your app crashes or you know, whatever a wide range of different moments where we let the customer down. And on the one hand, it feels like not the most uplifting experience in the world. To make sure we've thoroughly inventoried all of our flaws and faults, I don't think I'd like if somebody did that. For me personally, it's like, well, you know, how are you a little overweight, your hair is thinning and stop, stop, right. But the truth is that if we're have a business, if our goal is for the business to improve, and what business doesn't want to improve, this is what our stockholders or shareholders would ever expect. You know, if everything was perfect, how would you improve, you'd be screwed if everything was perfect. So it's great news, when you can go out there and map all kinds of problems, because then you can say, look, despite all of these problems, customers are still giving us their money today, some hopefully a lot of customers are still happy or happy enough to come back, we have a successful business. And we have all these problems. Imagine if we got rid of these problems, I want
Rick Denton: 7:59
you to keep going to the the items after that. But you said something really important there. And that is you're mapping these improvement points. But it's also important that a moment that matters to a customer can be that delightful when and so it's knowing the ones that go well for the customer to so that we can amplify and repeat those and strengthen those, just like any athletic coach is looking for those great opportunities to strengthen the things that are great in their team, but also looking for those, where can we improve and find those development opportunities in the team? It's exactly that and that journey mapping? Absolutely. One of the most powerful ideas is you want to improve, build on what works. If you only focus on what's wrong, it's hard to get excited. But you look for those shining, you know, hopefully you have a lot of them. Some businesses have more than others. But which customers are you satisfying? Which touchpoints are really working, which parts of the journey do create a great experience. And there's always something there's always something good. Make sure you don't overlook that or just get too focused on the pain because very often, the next question is, well, how did we get that? Right? What did we do? And let's do more of that?
Howard Tiersky: 9:02
Well, yeah, usually that's exactly yeah. And
Rick Denton: 9:05
well, I took you off the path there. So keep, keep giving me the rest of the five.
Unknown: 9:08
So the second was to map the journey, which means both the current and the vision of what is your Northstar? What should that customer journey be? So that you could unapologetically say to any digital customer, we are the best choice for you. And then the third step is to build the future, which is kind of a very broad idea. But in the book, we talk a lot about principles of design thinking and agile and other leading practices, to to figure out how to take that journey, which is still typically a fairly high level description of the overall overarching story of what the customer should experience and then break it down and say, okay, so it probably breaks down into a variety of different products. There's an app, there's a website, there's a chatbot, there's and some of them are back end products, right? There's a CRM system, there's a content management system, there's an email marketing system, etc. So how do we figure out what are all the parts and pieces that we do need to build or rebuild or improve or enhance or re integrator Whatever it is, and then start to move through these things one step at a time, because you know, you're not going to get it all done in a day or a week or a month. And within each of those discrete projects or products, go through the right steps to get the details, right, because it's possible to have the overarching customer journey, right, but still have, you know, a frustrating experience. I'll give you one small example, which I talked about in the book. And it's travel related. And it's funny because I had the same darn experience again, in the book, I talked about a trip I took to China, and I was trying to scan my passport, my daughter's passport, I was on United Airlines, and they have an app where if you want to check into an international flight, you can't do it on the website you have to do in the app, because you can use your camera, scan your passport, and the darn thing takes forever. You know, you're like trying to show it your passport and it doesn't work doesn't work, you try different angles, you know, and I don't know, it seems to take like five minutes of monkeying around in order to get this thing to work. And so I wrote about this in the book from an experience I had traveling to China before COVID. So I don't know when that was 2019, probably. So when was it? Six weeks ago, I went to Poland just before the war. And maybe was two months ago now. And so once again, I'm lying in the password. Once again, I made an Uber. And it's funny because I'm thinking to myself, I wrote about this in the book, but that was like three years ago, and I'm sure. Nope. Same darn experience. So I thought oh, that's that's, you know, Oh, well. So you know, and then I get to the airport. And so what did I wind up doing? I wound up just going to the kiosk and dealing with the person there who runs over and helps you and all that. But gosh, you know, what an opportunity to, you know, to fix a customer point of pain. And after all, your internet, international business class, I'm you know, relative to all the other customers, you'd think a priority, right? Just from a pure dollars and cents from a revenue perspective. Absolutely. Yeah. So well, anyway. So that's the, that's the kind of thing that you got to be constantly on the lookout for. And, you know, I have sympathy with United Airlines and with any large company, because there's so many facets to your customer experience, right. And so many different permutations, you know, we're working with one of the world's largest electronics companies right now, and just looking at how they sell products, right. But you know, like, product paid for a frigerator has different features and functions and customization tools than a product page for a flat screen TV than a product page for a massage chair or whatever else. So there's all this complexity and all these different pieces and parts that it's hard. You know, another another story I tell in the book is the very short version of it is starting with Dr. Once and he was talking to me about oh details about like, you know, the way that the blood is filtered through the liver and the kidneys and the heart, the lungs, and you know, all these things that have to happen. And he finally says to me, you know, given everything that has to happen, that has to go right, in the human body, it's amazing that any of us live for fine, has to be regulated, toxins need to be purged out we have to be hydrated properly. And you know, these digital experiences, they can be like that you can do so many things, right? And a couple of things can be wrong. And people like ah, this sucks. And this is the challenge.
Your CX Passport Captain: 13:07
This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.
Unknown: 13:50
So we were just talking about the detailed building of it. And those are, that's kind of a three part sequential part, right, you're gonna you're gonna understand the customer create the higher level journey vision, and then you're going to start building all the parts. Now while those three things are happening. And of course, they overlap some, but they kind of it's kind of a sequential process, there's two more parts that happened that really should happen in parallel. So the first thing is to optimize the present. So while you're creating this ambitious Northstar vision of what your company needs to deliver to really set itself up for success in the coming decades, in our digital world, there are probably lots of it's going to take time, it's gonna take time to get there, right chord many quarters, maybe many years. Meanwhile, there are probably all kinds of ways we're letting you're letting your customer down right now, that could be fixed quickly. And so most successful transformations have this sort of two track process. One is the big future we're trying to build. And then the other is let's fix all this little stuff in the short term. Even if in the long run, all those little fixes are gonna get thrown away because you have some larger scale transformation. And so that's that's the fourth you As to continuously optimize the president of the book, I provide a whole bunch of tactics and techniques for finding little things that you can fix. And, you know, just having a continuous hygiene process. And the last is to lead the change. And that also is a parallel process. And of course, it's not you don't end with leadership, leadership is really where you need to begin. In the book, we talked about it last, because I believe that it's kind of helpful the first layout and everything that has to get done. And that's a lot. And then at the end, say, Now, what does it take to be a leader of all of this, because, you know, if you want to be a transformational leader, you're signing up for a much more difficult task than being a leader of a company that's essentially steady state trying to just, you know, climb the growth chart, trying to make incremental improvements. But that's, you're basically an operator of something that's already defined. And when you come in to be a transformational leader to move a company through digital transformation, you sign up for a much more difficult process. And companies like buy like human bodies, they have antibodies against the kind of change, which is probably necessary. And just like with medicine, where life saving tactics, the body will still fight. You can trigger antibodies against you hear this all the time, you know, people are getting an organ transplant and their body rejects it, and without Redux, but then they die. You know, hopefully not, hopefully, we get another one. But so this is also a common scenario with large companies, because they're not fundamentally typically built for change. And when you go to try to transform them, there's all kinds of points of resistance. So that's just one of many challenges. But that's what we talk about in the book in that section is what are all the challenges of leading change in this of this type. And and how do you how do you deal with that?
Rick Denton: 16:45
Yeah, and that organ transplant one actually resonates with that's a pretty interesting exam. But it makes a ton of sense that is vital. It's life giving, it's life saving, and yet the body may choose to reject. And we may come back to that one here in a little bit. But I want to go back all the way to your first step, because it really resonates with me, I'm very focused on Voice of the Customer tone of voice of the customer. And that term is often misunderstood or mis applied, if you will. And there was a story that you told about Guney Haskell and her very first golf experience. And it just the light bulb went off for me on how that affects this idea of customer invoice the customer. So how does her story apply to a company that is really wanting to understand what a customer wants in great experience?
Unknown: 17:28
Well, I came across the story of Unni Haskell, she sort of an internet meme, and it was a while ago, so some may not remember her anymore. But but she became famous because she was a woman living in Florida. I think she was in her 50s or something like that. And she'd never played golf. And she decided she wanted to learn to play golf. She was like, maybe retired or something like that. And so she she went to a local golf club and some friends signed her in, you know, and, and she, she'd never taken a lesson. She, she rented some clubs, you know, she went with some friends. They went on the first green, she put her fall down on the on the tee, someone showed her what a driver was, you know, so she even knew which which club and she swung at the ball. And it flew out like way farther than you'd ever think the first time golfer would do it hit the green amazingly, bounced a couple times and then rolled right into the the woman got a hole in one. I'm gonna very first hole of her very first game of golf without any lessons. Cheese. Oh, yeah. Right. And of course, probably play with plenty people are seething, right who played golf for it.
Rick Denton: 18:36
There's a lot of pounding of the dash right now, if they're listening to this in their car. Come on, right.
Unknown: 18:41
And I actually have to tell a new story, which will just take one second, which is the new version of that Unni Haskell story that actually happened to me. And so I was in what's it called that Sanibel Island, one of the islands on the, on the, on the west coast of Florida. I'm blanking on the name of the island. But anyway, so we were staying there. And for a few days, my eldest daughter who's a college and my wife and we decided to go on a boat trip. These have these like Everglades like, eco tourism, boat trips for the day. And one of the things they do is they take your shelling, right? So they take you to like an island. I've hardly call it an island, like a small whatever you call it, tiny island with nothing on it, you know, in the middle of the Everglades, you know, where the mangroves are, and whatnot. But one of them that for whatever reason about the tides, a lot of shells collect their, you know, sea shells. So we go there is another travel story for you. And so we go there, and you know, your walk on this beach, and it's literally you're like knee deep and shots, right? There's so many shells, you're just walking, crunch, crunch, crunch all these shells, and so you were collecting shells, so I know nothing about shells. Neither does my daughter, my wife, but we have our little mesh bags and like Google pretty shell, you know, collectio so a lot of them are like small conch shells, stuff like that. Okay, so we're collecting these shells. Were there for I don't know. 3040 minutes And I see one of the shells. I see I picked up and I said to my daughter, Oh, do you like this one isn't this but it was a little different than any of the others I've seen. She's like, Oh, yeah, cool. I'm like, What do you want? And she's like, sure, sure, I'll take it. It's just one of the shells we collected, right? So we get back on the boat. And there's maybe 2030 other people on the boat and the people who are running the tour, and the woman who's running the tour is some kind of like scientist, eco eco expert, or whatever else. So Rachel's laying Rachel's my eldest daughter, she's laying her shells out. And she's got this one shot. And I go over to the wall to just look because there's a bunch of shells, like mounted on like, wood to show you and I'm like, Oh, I wonder what kind of shells we collected just to see oh, look, this is this kind. And so this one shell, I'd have to look it up. But it's, uh, turns out, it says, Oh, this shell, which is the one that I had given my daughter is an is a rare shell and is highly prized by Shell collectors. And I'm like, Oh, I'm like, Hey, Rachel. You know, we found a rare shell. Oh, I'm sorry. I just had to google it. It's called a junonia. Shell. I don't know if you've ever heard of this new I certainly have not. But now I had never heard of the junonia. Nor did the name. Stay with me. So. So anyway, I'm like, oh, it's rare. So then the woman who was running the group, sees my daughter laying out her shells. And she goes, you found a junonia? And we're like, oh, yeah, she's like, I've been looking 25 years for one of those. And I've never found one, you know, and we're like, what she's like, I've been running these chips for years, decades. And every time I'm on the beach, all I do is look for junonia. And I've never found one, you know, and of course, we felt I felt terrible. I know, anyway, and then everybody else was freaking out. And she posted in our Facebook group. And like all these people who are shellers, you know, who are like lifelong people who look for shells. They're all like freaking out online. Somehow, we found this extremely webshop. Apparently, we could sell it for like, $700.
Rick Denton: 21:54
Good. Gravy.
Howard Tiersky: 21:55
I know. That's right. All right.Anyway, so the point is, how on earth did we do that? And how can you reproduce my success finding a junonia. It's the same strategy that any Haskell used, dumb luck, just dumb luck, nothing more than that. And the reason that has anything at all to do with what we're talking about here is that it's the strategy that some companies use to try to create products that their customers will love. Instead of spending time with customers, understanding customer needs, and creating products in response to their customers, they just dream up things, you know, in conference rooms, that they think they would like, and then release them into the market. And the thing is, once in a while, that works, it's one that works, and, but it's not predictable at all, or are reproducible and so but the occasions when it works, become apocryphal, you know, people saying, oh, you know, Steve Jobs never did any research, or, you know, Henry Ford said, You can have any color you want, as long as it's black, you know, there are these, and of course, even those stories have more nuance behind them than the mean would suggest. But, you know, the bottom line point is that, you know, the opportunity that so many brands, product teams companies would have you miss is that, when you do the right kinds of research with the customer, this is your opportunity to aim. This is how you produce predictable results in terms of the customer's response. And after all, isn't that what it's all about? I mean, if you're creating something that's customer facing, if you're creating something it's employee facing, it's about the employees response. But whoever's the user of whatever you're creating, almost surely the success or failure of what you're building is going to be determined by their level of adoption, willingness to use it, satisfaction with it, etc. And yet, so many products are created without extensive customer research, and sometimes with no customer research. And it's just continues to mystify me because it's relatively inexpensive. It's relatively quick. And it makes such a difference in terms of the results you get. And yet, it's just not. It's not that nobody does it. But it's not that common, not nearly as universal as it really ought to be.
Rick Denton: 24:18
So Howard, clearly, there's some travel. You mentioned Poland, you mentioned China, you mentioned Florida, you've got some travel under your belt, and I know that if you're like me, sometimes that travels enjoyable, but sometimes you need a little rest. You need a little break, little change of pace. So I'd ask that you join me here in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly here and hopefully have a little bit of fun here. What is the dream travel location from your past? Bali? Oh, yeah. Bali comes up a lot. Or does it? It does. It makes me jealous every episode because I have not been there. So it just sounds wonderful.
Unknown: 24:50
Well, I was there so long ago. It's been was before the tragedy that happened in the nightclub there. So whenever that was, I was there a few years before that, so it was quite a long time ago. Oh, and I was there really only briefly, I was only there a few days. And I couldn't dive, because by the time I got there, and it was like, you can't dive 24 hours per flight. And I really want to get back to because I did snorkel and there's amazing ocean life there. But so I want to get back to another time. But it is very, very far, it's really appropriate, mostly if you happen to be in that part of the world, which I have been several subsequent times, but not with enough time to stop.
Rick Denton: 25:25
So I've had the luxury of having guests from either Southeast Asia or Australia or New Zealand, and they'll talk about, you know, dipping over to Bali and it just makes me jealous.
Unknown: 25:34
If you're in Australia or someplace or Singapore,
Rick Denton: 25:36
it's a very short one. So what is a dream travel vacation? You've not been to yet?
Unknown: 25:41
Well, I'll tell you. I mean, many, there's so many. But one that I'm planning right now is the Philippines. Speaking of Southeast Asia, I actually have a team now in the Philippines, which over the last year has built up to about 3035 people and I keep meaning to go visit them. Not only because, you know, I mean? But it's kind of a good combo reason to like well go visit the team in the Philippines, but you know, it's beautiful there and also a great diving location. So most of the places that I want to go are usually water related. I'd love to go to the Galapagos. I'd love to go to New Zealand. I've never been there. I've never gone to the Great Barrier Reef. I've been to Australia but not to that part of Australia.
Rick Denton: 26:18
Sadly, you better hurry to as you know the way that is sadly, changing. So watered certainly is a recurring theme for you. I definitely hear it. Switching it up here a bit. What's a favorite thing for you to eat?
Unknown: 26:30
Ah, let's see. I like cheese soup quite a lot. Especially if you have like the right bread with it. Different machines to you know, even Panera cheese soup, which is obviously not high, high dining. But you know, it's not very good for me. I know. .
Rick Denton: 26:44
But oh yeah, that is a good one for cheese. You haven't had that one before. You're right. That's a That's a good one to have as a favorite. What is on the other side, though, a thing that your parents forced you to eat, but you hate it as a kid?
Howard Tiersky: 26:54
Well, for some reason I'm thinking about soups, we always had tomato soup. I was never that big a fan. You know, like Campbell's tomato soup. It's never that big of a fan of the tomato soup. But I don't know that I hated hate something that you know, I'm sure I can think of something that I was ever forced to eat that I truly hated.
Rick Denton: 27:11
That's good. That's and I've had guests say the same thing. Right? You know, I actually eat it all. But then I also hear the other stories of you know, I had to sit at that table until I finished X. And I sat at that table for a long time that what my parents were like that. Yeah, that's good. That is good. And hopefully you've carried that forward. So back to the travel. What is one travel item and of course not including your phone that you will not leave home without.
Unknown: 27:35
Well of course noise cancelling headphones or earbuds from the airplanes I don't like I don't use the big ones. But I use like you know, these air pods or I also have ones I have several pair because that one's a plugin because if I'm listening to something that the all that the the time the airplane system of course you have to you can't use your Bluetooth although I keep seeing the ads that they're going to be enabling more of the planes to use Bluetooth headphones with the entertainment systems but I've not actually been on any planes that do that yet. So I guess it's coming or slowly being rolled out but till then you gotta carry two sets of them with you because one forever I'm using my iPad and whatnot and one for the plugging in. But yeah, that's for sure. A necessity
Rick Denton: 28:20
Howard, you may want to go back and listen to past episode, I actually had Corinne Strichert. And she was talking about inflight entertainment. That's her whole business is advising companies on inflight entertainment. They've been doing it for decades. So you may need to talk to her about when that Bluetooth solution is coming on board and maybe help influence that into other airlines.
Unknown: 28:40
I did a live cast not too long ago about things that I believe are going away over the next 10-15 years things like credit cards, a substantial decline in street signs, I'm anticipating things like that due to technology. One of them was the airplane in flight energy. Yeah,
Rick Denton: 28:56
we did talk about that. It's interesting how it's it hasn't disappeared yet. But then in some airlines, if you fly southwest domestically here in the US or internationally as well, that there is not a device in the back of that seat. But other airlines have even put it into their new product anyway. So I'm doing a repeat of carenza episode here. But no, let's, uh, I want to go back to your book, actually. And there's so many, there's actually a ton of other areas I'd want to explore. But I'm cheating. I'm looking at the clock. And we're not gonna be able to go into all the depth of them. But there's one that I do want to spend some time on. And that is that idea of culture. You talked about leadership, and that there's this idea of change, and how leadership culture and all of that drives a transformation via digital or otherwise forward. And you've got so many examples of companies that have had the right tactics. They've had the right ideas, but they've still failed. And I'm curious what some of the examples that you've seen where company they've had that right solution, they've even had that irrelevance antidote that you talk about in their hand, but that resistance to change Doom to them?
Unknown: 29:56
Well, you know, one that I talked about in the book is my work with blockbuster. I saw that one firsthand. So I was hired as a high price consultant at Blockbuster, when they were I want to say just past their peak, I forget the numbers of how many stores they had. But they were still the big blockbuster. And this was when Netflix was, you know, just doing DVDs by mail, they didn't have their streaming service live yet. And blockbuster was sort of trying to compete with that some may remember that blockbuster launch kind of a Netflix copycat type solution I wasn't involved with that. What I was involved with was the streaming vision for blockbuster. And so we worked on prototyping and doing all kinds of customer research to create a vision for what would be blockbuster at home, what would it be like when you could just turn on your TV and stream any, you know, any movie ever made, like that old commercial, they used to have no. Right to write your home. And of course, that today is how we all experienced a huge portion anyway, of our films, entertainment, right on demand in our home. And we worked with super smart people there who saw had a vision of the future and hired us and we were collaborating with them. And it's not like we told them, they hired us knowing that to work on this idea of a vision of streaming to the home. And yet, even though there were people there who were super smart, who had that vision, then and you know, sort of like an organization like that likes the idea that there's these r&d projects going on thinking about the future, you know, but when we started to move it into a production alized solution that we were actually going to sell to customers, huge resistance from the organization. And simple I'm simplifying a little bit. But, you know, I think Tony Robbins says something that I think about almost every day, which is that the strongest force in the Human personality is the need to stay consistent with our own identity, our own conception of who we are. And blockbuster from my perception having, you know, been there for I don't know, how long did it work to maybe nine months or something like that. They saw themselves as a retailer, they were in the retail stores business, the people at the top of that company, you know, before they worked for blockbuster, they'd work for other huge, successful retail chains. And so when you started to talk about a vision of the future, the company that fundamentally wasn't about stores, it was still about the fundamental value proposition of delivering film entertainment to people's homes, but it bypassed the store. I think there were just for a lot of people that just did not compute. And that was just not the identity of who they were, it was not the identity of a blockbuster was all about if they were going to innovate. And they were innovating, how can we create a better store? What's the Store of the Future? And we kept saying the Store of the Future is no store that but the other factions that ultimately won out at the time said, no, no, we can make a better store a store with different displays and bigger screens in the store and you know, more bigger candy displays and whatnot. Because in their mind, they were a store company. And I think that's to me, I like a really classic example of a company that just people, some people there could see where they needed to go, but they couldn't get the rest of the organization to come along for the ride.
Rick Denton: 33:13
I like how you brought that to identity. Yeah, and there's the element of you know, people just are resistant to change, because it's different or that but that that specific element in the case of blockbuster, others that it was just outside of their identity. And we see some of the greatest transformations are those that are willing to take that identity and go somewhere completely different with it to take the the blockbuster example, the who defeated them, right, or at least as perceived as having to feed them Netflix, which I guarantee my kids don't realize this, that Netflix was a DVD by mail at its origin, right? It was it was the red box in your mailbox type idea. And it was it, they had to successfully go through that identity transformation, and be able to be successful coming out of that, man, Howard, there's so much more that I want to ask you, but we are out of time. But for listeners, I would tell you this, go get the book. And I'm not there's no promo behind this. I just am telling you, this was a good book and I really got something out of it. I guarantee you're gonna want to know the Bob Newhart Stop it story that's in there, because we're talking about big things here. But there's some quick hits that you can do. And Howard provided a framework for that. But Howard, I do want to ask you this, if people wanted to get in touch with you learn a little bit more maybe advance their own digital transformation. How can they go about doing so?
Unknown: 34:28
Sure. Absolutely. Well, if you're interested learning more about the book, there's a website for the book, it's winningdigitalcustomers.com, obviously, all one word, you can actually download the first chapter of the book for free. And it has links to all the places you can buy. You can buy the book on the website or Amazon, all the usual places you'd buy, of course, and it also I'm very prolific on LinkedIn, I published almost every day videos, document posts, other articles and things like that. I have a weekly newsletter on LinkedIn. So if you find me on LinkedIn, you can just look me up putting on my last name, T i e r s ky I wouldn't urge you to follow me there because there's stuff coming out constantly including all about a Mother's Day post today all about the women who are the mothers of our digital age, the women who don't get enough credit, who are really the people who were many of the pioneers of the digital world, people like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and others.
Rick Denton: 35:19
Well, I haven't been on LinkedIn yet today, I've just been too occupied. I'm gonna go search that out right after we finished recording this, I'd love to see that one. And heck, that could even be an entire topic for another podcast in the future. But Howard, I'll get everything you just said there into the show notes. So you don't even have to go look it up, just scroll down and you'll be able to see how you can get in touch with Howard and grab his book. Our thanks so much for taking the time today. It was fascinating hearing about the five stages hearing those great stories. I do hope that you get to both barley and coconut sometime in the very near term future. And truly, thank you for sharing your wisdom with me today on CX passport.
Howard Tiersky: 35:52
Well, thank you so much for having me, Rick. It's been a pleasure.
Rick Denton: 35:58
Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. Make sure to visit our website cxpassport.com where you can hit subscribe so you'll never miss a show. While you're at it, you can check out the rest of the EX4CX website. If you're looking to get real about customer experience, EX4CX is available to help you increase revenue by starting to listen to your customers and create great experiences for every customer every time. Thanks for listening to CX Passport and be sure to tune in for our next episode. Until next time, I'm Rick Denton, and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.
Host - Rick Denton
Rick believes the best meals are served outside and require a passport.
A sought after keynote speaker and CX leader, Rick transforms CX and VOC programs from Survey & Score to Listen and Act.
After a successful corporate career, Rick launched EX4CX - Execution for Customer Experience to bring CX victories to a wide client base.
Rick combines these loves by hosting the CX Passport podcast, a weekly talk with guests about customer experience and travel.