Delivering Consistent On-Brand Customer Experiences Every Time Featuring Greg Tucker

Welcome to Amazing Business Radio with best-selling author and customer service and business expert Shep Hyken. Shep will talk with some of the smartest thinkers in business to help make you more successful in your professional and personal life. This is Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken. Hello everybody, it's Shep Hyken here back with another episode of Amazing Business Radio.

And today we're going to be talking with Greg Tucker, CEO of Tucker & Company. And he has a brand new book that just came out titled Frictionless Brand Experience. Now, there's a little bit of a difference between the customer experience and the general brand experience. You're going to learn about that.

We're also going to be talking about the six sources of friction that get in the way of delivering a great brand experience or a convenient experience. There's lots to unpack in this interview. Before we get into that, a quick announcement. I'd love for you to subscribe to my newsletter, The Shepherd Letter.

It is free. Just go to hyken.com, H-Y-K-E-N.com, and subscribe.

And while you're there, check out my annual research. That is also free. You don't even need to give me an email address for that. Just click on the research tab.

The PDF opens up. It is yours to download and keep and hopefully make great, good, or excellent customer-focused decisions. All right, everybody, time to get into our interview. Greg, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Shep. So I love the whole concept of your book, Frictionless Brand Experience. As you know, I wrote a book that's titled The Convenience Experience, or sorry, The Convenience Revolution, which is all about creating a convenient experience. I research it.

Every year we ask customers, what do you think of convenience? It always shows up at the top. And really, at the end of the day, convenience is about eliminating friction, which is what your new book is all about. Now, before we get into the new book, you've been consulting for many, many years.

You've worked with different companies, both as a consultant, as well as you actually worked for some major brands. Give us a little more background on yourself. Yeah, I started out in management consulting coming out of Stanford Business School, so did a lot of strategy work, and that kind of pivoted into kind of the process re-engineering and transformation revolution. And that's where I kind of learned how to take the friction out of internal processes, but it can never figure out exactly how to do that on the customer side until probably about 20 years ago.

And I was working at AAA and then at Copart, and we figured it out and the customer experience revolution was happening. So that's where we focused. Yeah, cool. Now you talk about customer experience is good, but brand experience is great.

So let's talk about the difference between the two, Because I think the brand experience is what's incorporating in the convenience and low or no friction. Yeah. So, you know, the power of a brand experience is great customer experience. And the power of a great customer experience is the employee experience.

We kind of explained that book. It's easy concepts. But we were doing research with a number of different CPG firms. And some of the friction people were right, customers were running into didn't kind of hit the classic example of what customer experience was.

Okay, so you think customer experience is a lot of, you know, like, you know, digital transactions and is there. It's also a lot of support or service delivery. That's there. Easy to use products.

I got it. But there's certain ways of people making decisions, you know, that is branding and messaging and imagery, which doesn't typically fall into the category of customer experience, but it impacts the customers the same way. So if you're a purist, you could say that all customer experience is the brand experience and they're right on top of each other. But there's some things that the customer experience world really doesn't have a lot of impact on, doesn't have a lot of decision rights on.

And that's why we called it the brand experience. But we were able to find that when you're able to deliver an on-brand experience as opposed to an off-brand experience, your numbers are just much, much better. And on is simply the commitment you making with the customer through marketing advertising whatever message you have It basically your brand promise Is that right That's exactly it. It is a brand promise.

What we found is that companies make the brand promise and it's nice. It's well-researched and all that. But at the end of the day, they're only delivering that 30%, 40% of the time to the customers. They promise.

So they're over-promising and under-delivering. They are. They are. And you can see it everywhere.

And so when we find it, part of how we ran into this is that we were just, you know, surveying customers about what was most important to them. And let's just say that there's three or four things that are really important. And that's the brand experience. But they weren't delivering it all the time.

And so when they were delivering those three or four things, their numbers were great. Customers are super happy. They're buying more. Their net promoter score is off the charts great.

Customer lifetime value is off the charts great. But when they're not, man, it's really bad. And so how do you deliver the on-brand experience consistently, you know, and at that level? And if you don't have it, you need to have one.

But if you have it, how do you deliver it all the time? Yeah, I get the feeling like we have great customer service. And then we talk to a company. No, they don't.

You know, what's going on there? And I think that's the off-brand experience. But once you buy into the brand experience, and to me, the brand, a brand promise or a brand is a promise. And ideally, it's a promise that's delivered to the expectation.

At the end of the day, the customer gets to determine whether or not you met that expectation and you met the promise. But if we do, I think that's the first start of it all. Let's talk about the six key sources of friction that get in the way of delivering the brand promise. You have six of them listed here.

And I know we only have a short period of time, but let's take a minute or so on each one of these. Yeah. You know, we ran through, we pulled out 50 case studies and we said, like, what's causing the gap between, we would identify what the friction points were and we would monetize the value of that. And we found $25 billion worth of value in doing it.

But it's not the value, it's what's underneath it. So we started listing them out there. And it's like, you know, we got 30 some, you know, if you talk to 10 more people, you probably have 50. some, but we put them into categories.

And one is digital friction, which is every e-com system, you know, like there's a bunch of abandoned shopping carts and there's user experience and user interface and drop-offs and bad product data, you know, like, and people are showing pictures of the wrong product because it's got uploaded incorrectly. You get all those things and that causes problems. And everyone goes, yeah, I kind of get it. And I put it that way, that's kind of digital experience.

That's customer experience stuff. Yeah, and if they're making it wrong there, where are they going to make it wrong elsewhere? I know. Well, you know, they say, well, you know, you can call one of our salespeople.

They'll get it right for you. And it's like, is that, well, that's friction all on its own. There's another step I have to go through. Exactly.

And we always said at AAA, we want the same great service whether you call, click, or visit. Okay. And so how do you make it consistent so everyone's seeing the same thing? The second one is brand friction.

And this is how you're communicating what your brand promise is, how consistently you're delivering that. But it's also to the degree to which you're driving the right level of awareness, consideration, evaluation, selection. There's some people who need your product and they're not aware of it. And it's causing them friction to go find that.

Make it easy for them. And if they're considering it, does it really fit for me? It's like, well, make it easy for them. And if they're evaluating, it's like, make it easy for them to evaluate it.

Make it easy to select it. Like when you kind of march down that path, it kind of gets a little bit easier. So those are areas of brand friction. There's also decision friction.

We send people into, we survey people as they're shopping for deodorant, okay? And it's whole body deodorant. And they walked in. The decision friction that was going on in their minds was screeching okay They just couldn find what they needed and they were nervous about it They want the solution make it easy for them to get it And so they weren communicating it very well Pitches weren right So those are things We have product friction.

This is classic stuff. Products not easy to use. In software, that's a big deal. Some others, sometimes it's too expensive or the maintenance costs are too high.

And any of those things kind of fall into the product friction. And then you've got operational friction, which is, this is classic stuff. You know, it's supposed to get shipped out on time and it gets shipped late. You're supposed to, you know, it's supposed to be delivered on time and it gets delivered late even if it got shipped on time.

This is bad service. It's customer support. It's a million things. That's in the classic sense of customer experience, but those are things.

And we see a lot of friction there. There's organizational friction, which is, you know, different silos competing. Sales says one thing, marketing says another, product guys say something else. You get passed off, you know, from one group to another.

That just makes customers crazy. Organizational silos get in the way of those things. And our final friction is cultural friction. This is where the mental mindset of the company just really doesn't help the customers get, you know, deliver on the brand.

And so we see some incentives that are misaligned, which is sales is paid one way, marketing is paid another way. They're, you know, they're making, you know, anyone who, when a customer support group goes out and says, hey, you know, they pitch a customer on a sale and marketing tries to take credit for it. It's like, who really made the sale? The answer is the company did.

Just pay the money. So there's plenty of those things and leadership behaviors fall into that category. You know, so we categorize all of them. All of them impact different things at different times.

Yeah, I just wrote an article, and you mentioned decision friction a moment ago. I wrote an article about the whole idea about the confused customer is not going to buy. And it started with some stats that were sent to me in a PR pitch where somebody was at a fast food or quick serve restaurant, depending on what you call them. And they're looking at the sign, and it's an overwhelming number of options.

And they're freaking out because the people behind them are going, come on, what's going on? The other day I was at Starbucks, nothing against Starbucks, but the customer before me, I've never seen a person take so long to order a cup of coffee in a croissant sandwich. The questions they ask. And then they used an app which told me they've been here before.

And anyway, obviously, they weren't affected by that chaos, but anxiety or analysis paralysis, which is what that friction creates. And it was pretty funny, you know, the decision friction. Anyway, I digress. No, no.

Decision friction is a real deal. We worked with one of the fast food chains. We put eye tracking glasses on some of their customers going through the drive. Interesting.

Yeah. And we put biometric devices to measure their anxiety level. And, you know, to say where are they most anxious during the process, they had changed their menus. It confused everybody.

Somebody behind them is honking. It's rush hour. And then they're worried about whether or not they're going to get the right ingredients, the right order right. Like, when are they going to check it before they drive home?

There's a lot of anxiety out there. And if you can take that away, you're going to, you know, our estimate is you're going to double your sales with those folks. And so. Double your sales by eliminating friction.

That's a big statement. It's, you know, it's not just a big statement. We have the facts. In the book, we talk about brand switching as a result of friction.

And, you know, there's always a base level of brand switching that might go on because people are just considering different things or they want to try something new. But when you run into friction, brand switching doubles. And if it's severe friction, it goes up 4X to 5X. Wow, wow.

So it's a big deal and you can quantify it. Yep. The frictionless brand experience is the title of the book Uncovering the friction How do you suggest we find the points that the customer and by the way I know you talking you said CPG consumer products has been the focus but I think this really applies to every type of business. But how do you uncover where the friction is?

Yeah, there's, you know, this is, it's not hard. There's, you know, we advocate in the book two ways. One is the inside out and the outside in. The inside out is easy.

You ask the employees who have some type of interaction with the process, and they'll tell you. It's like, what frustrates you? You know, where do you think? You know, where do you get stuck?

You know, where do you have some extra rework? Where are the handoffs? They will point you to the direction, and, you know, and it's easy as pie. That will tell you where to improve, but doesn't, you know, doesn't have as much impact.

The flip side is outside in, which is talk to the customers. You know, what are you trying to do when you're going through the buying journey, the purchase process, the path to purchase, whatever you want to call it? Where are their points of friction? Tell us about it.

And then you're going to get the outside in. And then you actually see the impact it's going to have on their buying decisions. Well, let me share a few stats and facts from our annual research before we wrap up with the final question. And that is that 85% of customers say a convenient experience, in other words, no friction, is important to them.

That's 85%. That's an eight to nine out of 10 customers. 82% say they're likely to recommend the company if they provide convenience and the experience. Half of them, 52%, just over half actually, would pay more if they knew that experience would be more convenient.

In other words, eliminate the friction. And finally, 65% say that it's even more important, a frictionless or convenient experience, more important than general friendly customer service. In other words, treat me like dirt, but just make it easy. Well, that's an over-exaggeration, of course.

But imagine if you did both. All right, to wrap this all up, one final question, and I warned you it was coming. You've got a great book here. And by the way, the book is officially out as of this podcast that we're, if you're listening to it now, go to Amazon.

You can get it. The Frictionalist Brand Experience. And Greg, one more nugget from the book that you want to share that's going to make us want to go out and buy it right now. Yeah, the power of the brand experience is really, you know when you run into a brand experience and it's smooth and effortless, how great it is.

And Apple's great at this. Amazon's great at this. A lot of people think, well, it's going to take a long time to get the benefits if you're an executive. The benefits are huge.

The benefits can be immediate. And the benefits are measurable. So this isn't soft and fuzzy. This is hard-nosed data.

This can be delivered in a week or a month or a quarter. So it's not a long-term thing. And we're talking about 10, 20, 30, 40% improvements in revenue or doubling. We found several examples where people doubled the revenue from this.

So it's the possibility. So take all that. This is going to take a long time. It's soft and fuzzy.

And maybe I'll get something out of it, but probably not much. Take that out of your mind. Those are the myths that we have to break on this one. In other words, I'm just going to take two words, be convenient, you know, no friction.

Yeah. Those are it. By the way, I think I actually have the URL beconvenient.com just because I thought, well, that's a good thing to be.

Well, Greg, thanks so much for sharing insights from your book and insights from just in general, how to create a better experience, both customer experience and brand experience. This is great. Really appreciate you. Thanks, Chef.

Thanks for being on top of this for decades. All right, everybody, that wraps it up. Another episode of Amazing Business Radio. We'll be back next week with another interview.

Until that time, this is Shep Hyken reminding you to always be amazing. This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suiteradio.com.