The Model That Creates Lifelong Customers (and Revenue)

What is customer experience? It's not just satisfying the customer, it's seducing them. It's getting them to truly believe in you passionately about what you're doing. When I ever go to a restaurant, I always say, what do you recommend?

And if they say, well, I haven't tried anything on the menu, that's an epic fail on the restaurant. Yeah. They should be sampling everything and have a point of view. AI is a cost reduction opportunity in a lot of people's eyes.

I look at it as a cost expansion opportunity, a client expansion opportunity. How do you create revenue because of the AI, not reduce the cost? If the first impression does not need expectation, it's a 0% chance of them winning the deal. Wow.

About 20%, not 10%, no one's ever done it. So how is your brand creating that first impression with the customer base? The thing about friction is it never goes away 100%. There's always friction.

It's kind of like radiation is a half-life the radiation it never goes away. So I think we always have to consider being a friction hunter. What trend are you betting on that's not AI? Today's guest is John Bacuzzi Jr, the president of ISG Research and the author of the art of seducing your customer.

Is there an art seducing your customer? Well, John thinks there is, and today he shares his playbook and guide for how to do that very thing. John has the most popular TED Talk on YouTube for CX, where he talks about his experience as a customer purchasing glasses several years ago. This story set the tone for his career, and since then, he's been writing books, speaking, and advising companies on how to deliver an emotional customer experience, something that sticks with customers in a way that they will never forget it and they want to come back.

In today's conversation, John and I debate positive friction versus negative friction, where there might be room to add a little extra friction, but ultimately, why simplicity is the most deductive choice. John also shares why he thinks younger generations are going to be craving more analog human-driven experiences and how brands can prepare for that change. We talk about AI and what he's seen in research about how enterprises are successfully using AI. And he also shares a statistic that blew my mind about why the first impression with a brand is the most important.

We also get into employee empowerment. And when you think about it, your $20 an hour customer service rep is the one that's representing your company as the face of the brand most frequently. So how can you empower them to make the decisions that are going to actually lead to customer enjoyment and an emotional response that keeps them coming back? This is experts of experience, and I'm your host, Lacey Pease.

I absolutely love this conversation with John today, but before we dive in, please hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, and leave a comment below with your favorite takeaway from this episode. Here's John Bacuzzi Jr., the president of ISG Research and the author of the art of seducing your customer. John, welcome to the show.

Lacey, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I am so excited to talk with you today. I have been spending the last hours sort of doing a deep dive.

I watched your TED talk again. I looked through your book and I was like, oh, I cannot wait to have John on the podcast and ask all the questions that I've been burning to ask now that I've been reading some of your content. Thanks, Lacey. And look at your title of this podcast is perfect because I'm all about experience.

So thanks for inviting me. Yeah, yeah, of course. So I've asked guests in the past out the gate to define what CX is. And I would love to hear from you.

What is customer experience? This is a journey that's been over 30 years now for me and really figuring out that it's a critical component to success in business and your life in general. And I would say customer experience is about trust. It's about relationships.

It's about empathy. So as I think about customer experience, those are the three type of big words that I think about when I think about customer experience. So when that customer or that client is engaging with you, do they trust you? Do they understand that you empathize with the challenges they may be having?

Those are big important things for me. And that's how I think about the finding customer experience. What I love about that definition is it's very emotional based. It's like how, like if I were to summarize that, I would say that CX is all about how does my customer feel, right?

Yeah, how does my customer feel? And it doesn't mean they're always going to feel like you're always going to wow them, but do they get what they need it? That's kind of what we want to deliver, right? Is I wanted an ice cream?

I got an ice cream. That stands, you have to over-deliver, but you need a two-deliver. Yeah, it's cool to me that you're coming at it from this perspective of sort of that emotional experience of empathy, trust, right? Because you could have answered, you know, customer experience is these touch points that you have with your customer in sales and in marketing, right?

Like we could have gotten really into the business weeds of what is customer experience, but I think we lose touch so much with what is our customer actually going through if we think about it from this like very logistical perspective, instead of the emotional human side of, no, how do they feel? Do they trust me? Did they get what they wanted? Did I satisfy them?

And so it kind of brings me to your book, the art of seducing your customers, which is just a great title, like kudos to you for naming it that. That's fantastic. Tell me a little bit about the origin story of this book, and yeah, you're kind of like foray into this customer experience field. Yeah, sure.

So, look, I got it. I have to give my wife Cynthia a full credit for the book title and the TED Talk title. Oh, really? I thought it was far too provocative for the TED Talk.

And you said, no, John, you've got to do it. And so the TED Talk became the number one TED Talk on customer experience. And I think partially due to the title. So full credit to my wife, Cynthia, for that.

And really the journey started almost 30 years ago in New York City. I was, you know, just look at I was a sales professional inside of tech, out of startup. And I went to get a new pair of glasses. And, you know, back then, 30 years ago, there wasn't Google.

There were, you know, there was simpler things that we utilized to find brands and find stores and retail, et cetera, and do our research. And I walked downstairs, took a left hand turn, and there was 10-10 optics store for glasses. And I just couldn't see Lacey. That's as simple as it gets.

And, um, but that, that one experience with Ruth and the owner of that store. And her, the way she built confidence for me, um, changed my life and changed the perspective of how I thought about customer experience. Because that's why I utilize those words of trust and empathy. So certainly I went in there because I couldn't see.

But I left, and not only could I see, but I experienced life in a whole new way. And why that was is she convinced me to get a very, you know, wild pair of glasses, really outside of the realm of what I was used to. It had multiple colors. And I was more of a Michael J.

Fox kind of guy, you know, wire frames. And, um, and when I left the store with those frames on, feeling pretty not confident. And I felt a self, you know, was really, really doubting myself. A woman walked up to me and said, I love that, your frames.

And I, you know, I know who she was. And I figured, oh my God, Ruth was pretty smart. She has somebody outside ready to compliment you when you leave the store. But it was five compliments later on the train ride home.

And then my wife loving the pair of friends. And I knew that she had really made a difference in my life. And I shopped with her. I've shopped with her for the last 27 years.

I travel all in New York even though I don't work there anymore. And that really lacy inspired the whole tent talk. And the book is, it's not just satisfying the customer. It's seducing them.

It's getting them to truly believe in you passionately about what you're doing. Because I could buy frames anywhere, right? I could buy them online now. I could buy them at the local Optics Center.

But I go all the way to New York to get those frames. I can't believe that you fly to New York to do that. That's amazing. How do you told what's her name?

The owner of the shop. Ruth, have you told Ruth about this? Like that? Ruth and I, I mean, we've done selfies together.

I did a book signing at her store. You know, I'm a huge Ruth fan. In fact, I made a chapter after Ruth about the idea of hiring a team of Ruth's, right? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, we have a ton of... Shout out to Ruth. Oh, man. But I also love about your story.

And you share this in the Ted Talk is that she gave you three options, right? She gave you option A is sort of the generic version of what you already been doing. B is like a little bit more out there and C is what you ended up choosing, right? And she was strongly encouraging you to go see.

And I think just like the time that she took to curate here are the three options for you. And then the time that she gave you to explain which of these three are. And then she gave you the vision of like, you will walk around in the world as you are today if you choose option A. And if you choose option C, you'll get to walk around in a different world.

And like, how cool is it that she spent the time with you to do that and curate that experience for you? And then you got to live it out after you left the shop. So cool. Yeah, and at least again, option one was exactly the option I was going to pick.

No questions about it. But she really again, it becomes that empathy and that trust factor that said, hold the phone. I've just met this woman, but you know what? I trust her.

And she's taking that time like you said to kind of curate that experience. And it was a life changer for me. When I think it too is interesting about that is she sort of chose a little bit of like, I guess, conflict, right? She was like, I'm not going to give you the easy out.

Like she could have just been, oh, she's whatever, go with it, give me my money and you're out of the store, right? But she was like, no, I'm going to push you and kind of disagree with you and say that like, this one you don't want, you want this one. And I think that like friction actually builds a lot of trust whenever you have any kind of engagement with like customer service person or sales person. If you tell me like, hey, no, you don't want this.

And like this thing you actually do want, I automatically trust you more than if you just like smile and nod and go along with what I'm saying. So I'm curious if there's any like, I don't know, thoughts or guidelines there that you have for customer service folks that are working with customers on, you know, how can they creatively, but and authentically have that kind of friction built in. I like that you're thinking about it this way. I don't know if I necessarily call it friction, but almost a strength of point of view.

Yeah. Um, it is really having a point of view because look, I don't consider myself an expert in I wear or frames. But I went into an optic store just thinking I needed a pair of frames, but I met an expert. Yeah, and within 20 minutes, he convinced me of that.

So what I would say to, you know, firms about their companies, about their customer experience teams and their call center teams is, don't just hire because they're $18,000 an hour, do the interview process and dig a little deeper. Or so they have a POV about what they're doing. Okay, there's a point of view. I mean, Jack Blues, a great example when they first, you know, started that airline, their interview process, um, they asked a question.

Tell me about a time that you, um, help somebody. And most of the people they hired were former firemen or fire women. People that worked on ambulances. And the reason why is because if you could save a life or you could take somebody out of a burning building, you obviously can get them a customer a hot cup of coffee on time.

Yeah, yeah. And create a, create a cool experience. So I would say Lacey is, we get tend to get stuck on the cost center of experience rather than being a revenue generator. And I would look and say, don't look at it as a cost center, look at it as a revenue generator.

I want to get more into that. But first, I kind of like this idea around hiring. You know, you talked about JetBlue's strategy for finding good team members. And I believe you shared something that was long lines.

Like if you're hiring, you're hiring someone at $20 an hour to be the voice of your brand. Right? Like that's, that's powerful. And whenever I read that, I was like, oh, yeah, no kidding.

I'm, you know, one of the lower paid employees is actually representing my brand every single day. And so like, how can I ensure that they're empowered to represent me well and that they want to? So can you talk to me a little bit about that? Like, how do I actually empower frontline employees to be able to do like what Roost did for you?

Yeah, look, I've got a good example in the book. And there's, there's others that I've watched that pay attention to this so closely. But, you know, it's that ability one is point of view. So, you know, I always go, when I ever go to a restaurant, I always say, you know, what do you recommend?

And if they say, well, I haven't tried anything on the menu, that's an epic stale on the restaurant. Yeah, because they should be sampling everything and have a point of view. Not just, oh, get the lots because it's the most expensive thing on the menu, right? Or what, what the chef's pushing.

So I would say is as you think about your customer experience teams, make sure they're experiencing it. When I worked at edible arrangements and I ran the call center over 500 people during the, you know, Valentine's and Mother's Day, when they sure that those employees enjoy the taste of chocolate-covered strawberries and pineapple on a stick and apples dipped in caramel and chocolate. So they could say on the phone is my absolute favorite is, okay? And that's at different.

So, again, you know, $20 an hour, but you're asking that person to represent the overall brand. And so giving them a point of, making sure they have a point of view. And then giving them the permission to go outside of the box, right? Of course, we have scripts and everything else.

I remember at New York New York Hotel in Las Vegas. I came in after a terrible flight. It is what it is. You know, it happens when you travel.

I was tired. It was one in the morning. I had a 7 a.m.

meeting. So I'm only going to be in the hotel for a couple hours. And I walk up to the desk and the woman says, well, the New York. And I said, hold the phone.

I just left New York. Now I'm back in New York. I don't even know where I am. And I kind of had a little sense of humor left.

So I just wanted to, you know, I figured I had a little fun. And she said, well, sir, hold on one second. And she came back in like 30 seconds. And she said, sir, since you were in New York and now you're back in New York and you have no idea where you are, we've upgraded you to our largest suite.

Oh my gosh. And you know, look, she didn't, you know, like she has to go five levels up to get permission. The hotel room was already empty. It's six hours.

I was going to be there for six hours. It was one night's day. So she made this experience incredible by just quickly on her feet thinking about, okay, this customer's got a little bit of a sense of humor. I'm going to surprise and delight them, you know, and and and run with this.

And I give her a lot of credit. So and I give that brand a lot of credit for giving not only that, that employed the ability to have a point of view, but also the authority to kind of make some decisions, right? That room probably was three, four, five thousand dollars. But for them, there was no cost because it was empty.

It was going to be the cleaning charge, right? Yeah. And I don't think it's just authority, right? It's also knowledge.

Like, I know how to make it. So I can book this room for this customer. I've had some recent issues where I've called up customer service reps. And it feels like they don't even know how their systems work.

Like, oh, I don't know where this went. Oh, there's been a lot of blaming AI recently that I've noticed. Right? Call a customer service agent.

And they're like, oh, we have an AI algorithm that bets these things. And I don't really know how it works. And I can't really tell you if or when, you know, we'll be able to solve it. And it's like, what?

You know, it's not that person's fault that they don't know how it works. But it feels to me like there is a huge part of this that's education. So it's like, yes, giving people the autonomy to act. But if they don't even know how to act or what to act on or like how the systems work, then they can't do what, you know, you got to experience there in New York.

Yeah, I think this is critical. I think training is a big component. My son just went to go work for a health care technology firm, Epic. And the founder, it's a privately held firm.

So she was not to worry about, you know, the stock and shareholders and shareholder value, et cetera. Super successful. She's eight. I think she's 80 or 85 somewhere in that range.

She's had a business for 45 years. And now it's a multi-billion dollar business, but she still teaches courses on her own for new employees around how the firm acts, what they believe in. Wow. You know, so it is pretty powerful.

And so not only is my son having a great experience, but he's going to go into the workforce and go to customers all over the world, all over the country and be able to create a better client experience, customer experience, because he understands what the mission that business is. And he's been trained at all of this. And he has to take a test every week on different systems. So that investment, it sounds like, oh my god, again, a cost.

No, it's an investment in the future and profitability. She's the number one tax for health care. Yeah, it's because she does that training, in my opinion. Yeah, oh, for sure.

And it gives you the opportunity to really get your employees bought in, because the best experience that I'm going to get from an employee is if they actually believe what they're selling or doing or offering. And so that ability for your son to be able to have like front row seat with her, who's the founder, and be able to hear like, this is our story, this is why we do what we do. I think there's been a gap that I've seen recently in training where people just don't get that going back to emotions, that emotional investment as employees anymore, because they just go in, they do their job and they go back home, but you can't really deliver on a great customer experience if you aren't also emotionally invested as an employee.

Yeah, that's right. And I think they, I don't want to get it wrong, but so I might, and I apologize, but there's three edicts that they focus on. Loud customers have fun and make money. I love that.

And I think it's so simple, but no, I think you need all three. Listen, we're not charities. You have to make money to be able to allow customers. But first is about the customer, and then it's about having fun, because if that call center person and that team is having fun doing what they do, and they feel like they're contributing, it's a much different experience than some of you just again, they came in, they were breathing, so you gave them the job and the phone to, you know, to answer calls for your brand.

I thought that was a really simple, but easy way to understand business and what you should be trying to do. Yeah, oh yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, I want to get back a little bit back to this, this emotional, how emotions can drive repeat engagement is something that, you know, we've been talking about.

Your prime example of flying to New York, just still continue to buy from Ruth for your glasses, right? Did she pick out the ones that you have right now? Yeah, she picked these out. I mean, I really don't have any choice or option.

I come in, she gives me the good news and I depart. I actually get to drive, because I'm only in Connecticut, so I get to drive there, which is still a couple of hours. Yeah, no, no, but I think it's what's great is your, your repeating, is that repeat engagement? Like you're going to keep going back to her because of the emotional experience that you had the first time you interacted with her.

So my question for you is, how can brands create those types of emotional, emotionally resonant experiences, you know, especially at scale? Because I think about like one, one, one stop shop, like, you know, you get to work with the owner of the, the glasses place, but how can a bigger brand do this at scale? At scale. Yeah, look at it, at scale is tough, even a jet blue struggles with that, right?

As they grew as an airline, it's harder to find people that worked in EMS or a fire, or fire on firemen to come and work. Scaling is challenging. Starbox is struggling with it, right? You know, the briefs of 15 years ago was a different experience than potentially you're looking at today.

But the good news is brands like Starbox is a good example is they continue to retrench themselves and go back to the basics and then come back out. And they've done that a couple times, right? They got, they got, you know, mixed up in this idea of a lot of different menu items and hot foods and next thing, you know, you went in, you didn't smell coffee, kind of smelled an egg sandwich, etc. And they retrenched, figured out a new mechanism to be able to deliver the experience and with, you know, including the aroma of the sword and then came back out of it.

So I would say is, look, when you're doing things at scale, you've got to constantly have to come back to the basics and the core and then come back out and say, I had a role from that. What tends to happen is you have this unique experience up front and then you lose it as you go on because as you scale, you can't keep that mechanism. You know, the cost of the training is too much. You know, the ability to have a location to bring people together and teach a course is not efficient.

You got to get rid of all that. No, it worked for you. So continue. Figure out a way to do it.

You know, again, I don't want to spend too much time on Epic. But, you know, look at 16,000 employees, largest share. I think that 80% of US consumers utilize their technology. It's not because it's the best technology maybe it is, but it's probably because of the darn experience that they give the hospitals and their patients.

So I think it's critical and she's been able to do that at scale. So I think you have to look at it and figure out how are you going to achieve that core. And there may be costs associated with it, but the value is there. You know, AI is a cost reduction opportunity in a lot of people's eyes.

I look at it as a cost expansion opportunity, right? A client expansion opportunity. Yeah, how do you create revenue because of the AI, not reduce the cost? So I would say is make sure you understand what was the core.

Another good example of someone that does it really well is chewy.com. You know, they have continued to blow me away on how they train their teams and create an autonomy for those employees. Quick little story here if I can is I obviously wrote the book and didn't tell them about it, but the book is out.

And I wrote a blog, a LinkedIn post, about my cat getting this great treat from chewy.com. Two weeks later, my book shows up at my house from chewy.com.

I'm like, well, I already have this book. I wrote it. I don't need to copy. Yeah, I don't need to copy.

I'm good, but I open up the cover and inside the book is a portrait of my cat painted. Oh, wow. Now, they go through multiple levels to get that done. A customer care person inside of their experience team figured out that was the right thing to do to wow me.

And created it, got it done, shipped it out, found the book, by the way. So how did you even find that you had to go on LinkedIn, you had to go on Amazon, think about a public sponsor. So that's lacy. That's the opportunity is, are you seriously caring about your client, your customer, whatever you call them?

Because some people call clients, some people call customers. But are you really thinking about what they're looking for or is it's just a transaction? Yeah, yeah. I do want to go back to something that you mentioned in that about how people are often thinking about cost reduction versus cost expansion, right?

And I think that's so true. I mean, this is a mental issue that we all get into, well, like a mental game in our own heads, even personally, with finance, where we're like, oh, I'm feeling stressed about money. So I'm going to try to save and suck away $100. Like, oh, my gosh, I got to save my $100, right?

Versus, how can I make $100 more dollars instead of like trying to lower how I live or whatever it is? So I think at a business scale, the same thing starts to occur, where we're like, okay, we've got to reduce costs. This thing is starting to cost too much money versus, oh, can we use these tools to actually grow cost? And so I think it's actually important reframe, especially as we get into the AI conversation around like, oh, there's so many things that we can automate.

These like, we could quote unquote, lower job count, or we could do this. And I think the people that I've talked to that I've been the most inspired by are the ones that are not talking about how do we reduce headcount, but how do we take the headcount we have and augment them so they can have more fulfilling careers and do the work that they want to do and not have to do this boring stuff that, of course, we can use technology to help automate. So I would kind of like to go into AI since it is such a hot topic.

What's your initial take in thoughts on adding AI into the mix as it relates to customer experience? Yeah, look, I am thrilled. I'm having so much fun even personally with AI, agentic AI, all these, the ability to kind of almost really utilize it as a co-worker. So my personal experience has been incredible.

And ISG, where I am now as a president of research, we're tracking well over a thousand use cases of it being leveraged everywhere from customer experience through in different industries. And again, it's augmenting the work and allowing people to do a higher level skill, you know, where a human is required rather than doing some of the backend work. And so I think there's a huge, huge opportunity for AI to create some efficiencies, optimization, and better experiences. Now, again, always when things are coming about, you've got to be careful about how fast you launch.

And I've seen some cost reduction options, you know, go daddy. One of my favorite customer care experiences until about two years ago, when they off-shored their customer care. And they saved, you know, 10, 15, 20 percent by, you know, off-shoring it. But for me as a customer, the experience was horrendous.

And I can already see now as I call them. And I almost dropped them, really, because it just, again, it's just so frustrating. And I can see they're making a pivot back. And that's going to be important.

A good example of where I saw somebody off-shoring in a different way was Otto's a large service provider out of France. That was on the phone with an executive, literally just yesterday, great conversation catching up. And he mentioned, you know, we opened up this center of 1,000 people in the Canary Islands. Now, the Canary Islands are Spanish.

And they're just off the coast of Africa. I'm like, you've got to tell me more. Why would you have done that? That just seems like an odd thing.

Why not Asia, Philippines, you know, India, all these other places where you see this outsourcing. He says, the reason why is because a huge number of Europeans from all over Europe end up retiring at a very early age, 45, 50, in the Canary Islands. And then they want to do something and add value and guess what? They see four to six languages.

Wow. Okay. And so they're adept to being able to handle all these different calls. And they love the idea of coming in and being part of something and then going back and enjoying the beaches of the Canary Islands.

So I just thought that was a unique approach to saying, can we, instead of just offshoring, what's the best place to offshore? So I like this idea. You can do these things. You can utilize AI, but in a thoughtful way.

What do you try to accomplish? If it's just saving 20%, you're probably going at it the wrong way. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like, save a penny and then lose your customer trust forever. I mean, you almost lost. They go to Adi almost lost you, right? Because of this, right?

And I've been seeing that with some of the AI stumbles is like, oh, we're going to completely automate this thing or you're going to call. And now I have to go through so many hoops to actually get a human on the phone. And then, and then whenever I get them on the phone, they actually don't even know what I need, even though I just explained it to this thing. Like, there are so many, and then I've had the opposite experience where I've communicated with the AI chatbot and it's been great.

And then I do need to level it up to a human. And they have all the context that they need. And the human is like, oh, you don't even need to repeat anything. I got it all, don't worry.

And here's how we're going to fix it. And it's like a 60-second, two-minute phone conversation with them and it's resolved. And I feel great. So it's like, I've seen both sides of it where it's used poorly and used really, really well.

And I think, yeah, companies just need to be kind of cautious and thoughtful, as you say, about how they roll it out. Like, how's this going to actually impact customer experience and customer trust in the long haul? Because if I roll this out and it does fumble, like, it's going to take a lot to get it back. Like, we're talking about cost centers.

I think rolling out AI and it bumbling will actually be more of a cost increase than a cost reduction. Well, yeah, you need to have that, Lacey. And I'll give you a good example. Claire Knaught is a buy now K-later system in Sweden.

And in 2022, 23 somewhere that reached early AI. Early AI. They said they were going to reduce their staff by 700 leveraging AI. I remember this.

I actually remember this. Yeah. I know it's a total train wreck, a total train wreck. And in 2025, they said we're reverting back.

And don't get a happy mix, have some AI, et cetera. Good examples are Sephora leveraging AI to figure out skin tone and what to wear. Like, that's really cool. So I think we're in the early days.

I think some brands will figure it out faster. Again, we're at ISC. Our whole job is trying to help firms figure out what's a practical approach to leveraging technology. And clearly, everywhere we're talking now, it's about AI.

But it's got to be done in a set format to make sure you accomplish it correctly. Is there anything else you guys are seeing in all the research that you have been doing? Whether it's around AI or just trends in general, that you think are important for business leaders to be thinking about going forward? I'll give you something that I think would shock your audience, and it's pretty impactful.

So we do a lot of research on our own deal flow. We do about 20 billion a year for large firms, everything from the Marriots and Carnivals of the World to the American Express as Bank of America. And one of the things that we found as a data point that was pretty shocking to me is first impressions and how important they are. So when a service provider is presenting to our client, whoever that might be the end client, enterprise client, if the first impression does not meet expectation, it's a zero percent chance of them winning the deal.

Wow. It's not like 20%, not 10%. No one's ever done it. I look at this, Lacey, and I don't think it just relates to large deals.

These deals are $25 million to a billion dollars, but in tech, but at least this is the same for brands. Somebody that's even a loyal brand person, there's other data out there, and I might have the number a little off, but I think it was PWC, but 30% of the time if a loyal customer has a bad experience, they'll leave that brand. Yeah. So not only first impressions, but long-term impressions, our options today, Lacey, I can buy change anywhere.

I can buy frames anywhere. So if you don't get a good experience, I'll just go somewhere else, it's not a problem. I won't even tell you about it, okay? So I think there's this opportunity and the research that we see for ourselves in our deal flow is first impressions, 100% matter and have a huge impact.

So how is your brand creating that first impression with the customer base and the process base? Huge, that would be a huge thing to look at. That is really interesting that even from an enterprise level, that matters so much, because I would think from a consumer level of, I can literally go buy shoes or glasses anywhere, like of course it makes sense, like by what I waste my time with you, but from an enterprise level, you only have so many options, especially when it comes to certain types of software that you can purchase from.

So it's interesting to me that even at that level, the impression matters so much that it's like a complete no in my head. And it's just how human brains work, right? Like from a psychology standpoint, like the first thing I hear is likely the thing I'm gonna believe for the rest of my life, even if it's wrong, and even if you tell me it's wrong, thousand times over, it's just the way our brains are wired, which is the reason why misinformation is so bad, is because if I read that first, then I'm predispositioned to think that thing, but like from a brand's perspective, understanding what do people actually think about when they see us?

And that comes back to everything we've been talking about, and like the marketing and sales influence. Like if my first experience of you is some sort of marketing campaign, it's not even like that I've spoken to you, but I see something, and that's a bad first impression that I'm not even gonna engage with you at a further step. So I think that's really interesting. Yeah, and customers walk out.

I mean, I was at the beach this weekend with my family up in West really Rhode Island, and we walked in for the first time to a cafe. I was super excited because I always like to find, I'm a foodie, so I like to find new places. New cafes. But we went in, the floor was kind of a little slit.

People were talking behind the counter, not talking to the customers. I walked out, we didn't buy a thing. Yep, yeah. You know, so first impression.

John, I had a conversation yesterday, actually with another John. So another John that we were interviewing. And he was talking about how in this like future where I'm doing most of my research on, you know, LLM. So I'm going to chat GPT to be like, where can I find glasses?

Or what's the best brand to get jeans from? Or if I'm an enterprise, you know, what's the best, you know, B2B SaaS tool you name it that I'm looking for, right? Yep. So a lot of the research is being done now on these tools, and I may never actually end up on your brand's website.

Like I may never, ever click through and actually see your brand. I might just make that just that buying decision. Like after I've compared ABC option on chat GPT, I'm like, oh, I know I want to do that. I'm ready to go buy it, sales call, that's it, right?

So as we get to this place where like more and more of this research is being done off the brand's website in a place that you don't really control as a business, how like important do you think actual brand experience is going to matter? And you know what I mean? Like if I, when I do land on your website, how important is it that I'm actually very interested in what is appearing? Or if I do walk into your store, how important is that in-person experience now that I have no other touch points with you besides that experience?

It's going to be crucial, and this goes to the ideas of, you know, what are brands going to need to do to stay relevant and up-to-date? And, you know, because remember, the seed at which brands go out is astonishing, right? Before, it might take two decades before, you know, the buggy whip person, the sold whips, got it went out of business because of cars. But today, you know, blockbuster was out in, you know, less than two years because of Netflix and other challenges.

And then Netflix was almost out because of Hulu. And then they've, you know, they saved themselves pretty quickly. So the seed in which things are happening, I think is crucial to keep up with. What you want to do is you want to create that, again, that trust factor and how you make them feel a great mentor to me, Irene Mark.

He was the CEO, former CEO of Bergdorf Goodman. And he started out as a dormant way back in the day and ended up becoming the CEO of Bergdorf Goodman. Wow. And took the brand.

I was such a great mentor. I feel very lucky that I was fortunate to know him for many, many years. But he only said, he says, John, it's how you make your customers feel because they can buy genes. They can buy the dress anywhere.

But how do I make them feel in the store? How do I make them feel after, right? Just think about Ruth and I should maybe feel in the store and then afterwards with my glasses. So now, the sudden, I can go think about buying that pair of jeans.

But in my head, I'm like, I'm going to go to Bergdorf's because I know the experience is going to be great. I'll give a good example. I'm wearing this headset that I actually love. But I get all the research utilizing AI.

And then once I found out which one was the best headset, where did I go? I went to Best Buy because I trust Best Buy and I want to buy it from Best Buy. So I think Lacey is creating that awareness and that brand trusts and that empathy for me is a consumer that I know that's where I'm going to go shop. I'm going to shop at Best Buy.

So I think you've got to do that. Or I could have bought it anywhere, right? I'm sure I'm going to go on the Amazon, you know? Or directly to the brand's website and bought it there.

But they've created something with me that is now sick-y. So how do you create that with your customers, OK? Airlines, same thing. I have lots of options to fly with ISG, but I always lean towards Delta because I know experience-wise, it's spectacular.

Yep, yep. There's something that you also shared in your book about simplicity. And so getting into that as part of our decision-making process, like the reason why you might go to a Best Buy is you know exactly what you're going to expect. Like, I can walk in.

I know, but to find it easily, someone will help me. I can buy it. We're done, right? It's not going to be a complicated process.

So could you tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on how important simplicity is in the customer experience? We don't need to always, a word that seems to be overused in customer experience is delight. That's a word it's like, you know, what does it really mean? Of course, we're going to delay our customers.

All customers are really actually after is the cause and effect. I need a headset, get all the friction out possible to make it as easy as possible to get to the final result. So I don't think we have to overcomplicate things. I think it's a very cause and effect type of mechanism, right?

It's a consumer as a need. You have an item that will help satisfy that need. What is the simplest way to get that need met with your brand or your solution? And we all sometimes the over-engineer that whole process, that whole experience in itself and it's a distraction for the consumer, frankly.

You know, I have a point of, I wouldn't say disagreement, but I would like to hear thoughts on this. We interviewed someone who was sharing about how good friction can be in the sense that it makes the customer feel like I've accomplished something and it gives them a little extra little mental juice of like, I'm the hero of this story, right, of, I got to choose. So like giving people a little bit of options. Like, by definition, that is a little bit of friction because it's not just like I can click and buy, but now that I have optionality to some extent, not overwhelmingly so, I feel like I'm putting myself into this decision a little bit more.

And so it is like, and maybe we just have different definitions of friction, but I think there is some good friction that actually makes people a little bit more invested in what they're doing and maybe more likely to share. I mean, going back to your example of buying your first pair of glasses with Ruth, there was some friction in that in the sense that she kind of like pushed back on you, she gave you some options and it could have been as simple as you go and grab what you want and leave.

So I, I just wonder if there is a place for some, some complexity in order to make someone have that emotional response. I love that you're challenging this and as a chapter in my book about being a friction hunter, the thing about friction is it never goes away 100%. There's always friction, it's kind of like radiation is a half-life, it's a radiation, it never goes away, right, it just, and this is the same thing as the key is is what components of friction and I'll give you good examples, it's Amazon.

The thing about how frictionless the process is. Now, your point is, even when I say, oh, I want to buy something, it gives me, this is the best choice, most popular, this is the one with the most stars and then these are all the others, et cetera. So I still, to your point, have a choice to make. I guess I would define that to your point as friction, but the process of getting to the end result and the seed at which I can get that item is they took a lot of friction out of the process.

To remember, before, if somebody here remembers Sears Robux, the Amazon of the past, they think you could buy a house from Sears Robux, right? Well, yeah, you could, I mean, so, but think about what the process was, you got the Christmas catalog, it was 700 pages long. As a kid, I used to open it up and go through and circle all the toys, lots of friction because I couldn't get the toy, I had to circle them and everything else. Then I had to go to a location that was miles away, not a driver, so I had to get my parents and convince them to take me there.

And then I had to see if it was in stock, et cetera, lots of friction. Why Sears troubled was they didn't pay attention to that friction. There were choices, great, that's the friction I would want maybe. But Amazon came along and said, hey, hold the phone.

If you've got the internet or a phone, I'm going to allow you to pick what you want. I've got the same millions of items that Sears has, but if you want tomorrow, I can actually get it to you tomorrow. And that is a friction hunter, so it's implicitly blockbuster. Having to go to the store, remembering to rewind, all these inconveniences, all this friction.

And Netflix says, no, we're going to mail you the CDs. Remember, that's how it started Netflix. They would mail you the CDs in the mail, then you would return them and get a new one right away. And then obviously, the friction was still too much, so they reduced it because of Hulu and made it streaming.

So I think we always have to consider being a friction hunter. I'm not sure choice would be something we'd want to take out necessarily. I think you're right. You want the hero of the story to be the customer, but you want it to be a great experience.

You want them to feel satisfied. You wanted to make it feel easy that they made that choice. Does that make sense? Or can we agree on a friction hunter?

Love that, love that. Yeah, absolutely. Now my greatest friction with Netflix is what to watch. That is called choice overload.

It's like, there's too much. What do I do? It's a little overwhelming. It's a little overwhelming.

I kind of like they give me the choices up front, or you watch this so you might like these. That's helping me a little bit. Yeah. I don't even then though.

I'm like, I can just keep scrolling. Like I can't, I've lost count of the amount of hours I've spent just like looking for something to watch. And then I decide, eh, and I just turn off the TV because I'm too overwhelmed with the options. That's crazy.

Oh, see they don't work to do. Yeah, apparently I just need the spoon for me like five options. And that's it. Well, John, I want to go into personalization a little bit because I know this is something that you have some thought on.

As we get into this future with way more technology support, I think there's opportunities for brands to really create more personalized experiences. But I also like sort of question that. Because I'm like, if you get too personalized, do we like lose the brand feel? Like am I having a totally different experience than even my husband when I experience this brand and does that lose something about what the brand is?

So I'm just curious on your thoughts on personalization, especially as it relates to like the next 12 months of what people are going to be sort of investing in when looking at personalization is a slippery slope. You have to be careful because it can get creepy if you get too personalized. Like, hey, I saw you were looking at these five websites. So you might like this.

You've got to kind of be careful about that because we want to have our own security and personal feel. Jack Mitchell, the owner of Mitchell, another mentor of mine, he owns clothing stores, very high end, very high end clothing stores. And he wrote a book called Hug Your Customer. And one of the things he did from a personalization perspective and this is going back 30, 40 years is he made sure his sales teams knew those customers and then wrote notes before there was Salesforce or a real true CRM system.

He built a CRM system with an IBM mainframe. I know it sounds crazy, but it was 35, 40 years ago. And when I walked into the store at Jack's store, somebody would approach me and say, John, welcome back. How are you?

How Sabrina your daughter? And it was this engagement because they had those notes there. I really love that personalization. I felt like they took time to get to know me.

They knew what size my clothing was. They knew the colors I liked. They knew that I couldn't really, I didn't really want to spend $1,000 on a blazer. So they knew there was a $500 set of blazers that I would enjoy.

I think you've got as a brand. And again, this comes back to scale, right? How do you scale something like this? You've got to find ways to leveraging technology to help create that personalization.

And then that human interaction, if it's required, if it's in a store like Sephora, let me use AI to find the tone. But maybe then I need an associate to create that unique experience. It makes me want to come back. So where is it going to go in the next 12 months?

AI is going to have a huge impact. The acceleration of AI in the marketplace, where it was even just 12 months prior to this. So if you think about the speed at which it's going, 12 months from now, you're going to see some really sophisticated, some really useful tools inside of AI creating airline reservations. Imagine when I go to look for a marry out hotel, I know where my meetings are.

Imagine if AI was able to start to help me say, pick this hotel because it's the least traffic to get to your destination that you're going there for. These are the things I'm going to see coming from a personalization perspective coming, moving forward is just that extra little step that I'm doing as a human. And again, remember it's related to reducing that friction component, that personalization gets me to my answer faster, right? Gets me to where I wanted to get you quicker.

Does that hopefully that helps? Yeah, well, and I think about personal AI assistants because what you're describing there with my meetings in this location, find me a hotel. That is something that a chat GPT could feasibly do really well right now. So I'm just curious how brands are going to be able to tie in what they have to offer to these tools.

So that way, because I am going to be using probably a personal AI system, some former fashion, I feel like in the next year or two years, I'll have something that's for me, like whether it's GPT or some other AI tool out there, that just orders my groceries and they show up to my door and I don't even think about it. And I mean, there's going to be a lot of these personal assistants, AI assistants out there. But those are like separate companies than the actual like HEP that I'm ordering it from.

So I'm curious how these companies are going to play together with these tools, like how are we going to be able to do some data sharing. Again, I was talking to a gentleman yesterday about this and he was saying that like, how, you know, if I go into a, let's say like American Eagles website or whatever, like name your closing brands website and they know that I have choice fatigue. Like I was just sharing with you with Netflix, right? If I have too many choices, I'm not going to get anything.

I'm just going to leave. If they knew that about me because of my way that I interact with and engage with an LLM, then they might present a different website to me specifically. But it's like, how do we get to that point where there is that kind of data sharing? That's just like a big question mark in my head.

So look, no different than 5G and the technology around 5G. When 5G first came out, you know, my big statement was, hey, listen, all 5G's going to do is allow bad ideas to move quicker. If you don't, if you don't get it right at the core, just bad things will happen faster. And now with technology and an agentic AI and where things are going, without a core foundation of that data, bad decisions will now move faster.

So, you know, we're going to make really bad decisions based on inadequate data from the, from the core. So I agree, Lisa, I think, and it's funny how things never really changed. This has been the problem for 30 years, is when I was in consumer packaged goods and technology for category management, the big issue was the spirit data sets and normalizing them. Well, here we are 40 years later, 35 years later, and what's, what are we trying to do normalize the spirit data sets?

Yeah. So, so it's the same age old problem. The challenge now, the opportunity now is that the ability to normalize data and it's gotten a little easier. Cloud is going to help us out, obviously.

But there's, there's still work to be done. And without that core, I don't know if we'll 100% satisfy that piece in 12 months, but we're going to get certainly get better. But that, that is going to be the, the linchpin here is the, the normalization of those spirit data sets that allows that, that full decision making process up at the top. Without that, you're still just getting, you know, almost the right answer.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, John, I know that we're coming up here to the end of our conversation. And I would like to talk about some advice or trends that you're seeing for leaders. So one thing that I wanted to ask you is what's a misconception that you think people have about CX that you would like to, you know, throw out there and say, no, like I think this opposite thing.

Customer experience isn't a cost center. That's what I'll say first. So don't treat it as a cost center. We've talked about that already.

Just stay away from words like the light. Stay away from, instead of focusing on NPS scores and CSAT scores, okay? Yeah. You know, numbers focus on customer effort scores.

What does the effort it takes for a customer to engage with your brand? That is far more interesting and compelling to me. But not only as a consumer, but somebody in technology is, if I could really understand utilizing AI or other technology, how to create less effort for that customer to engage with my brand to your point, Lacey, engaging with that American Eagles a site and helping me make decisions. Yeah.

So I would focus less on NPS, CSAT scores and more on that customer effort score. Yeah. Oh, that's great. And then what trend are you betting on that's not AI, not AI for the next year?

That's really interesting. Okay. So I would say, look, there's always a backlash on trends. You know, it's the parents are super techy then the next generation wants to do something on this.

I think we're getting back to this next spending generation group where the wealth will be, is going to look for authentic engagement. And I think it's going to be in person. My son's got rid of Instagram, okay? My daughter, even though she's in PR, she doesn't spend a lot of time there, okay?

No Facebook whatsoever, no social links. She's not trying to live a FOMO experience. She's trying to live authentic experiences by going to trivia night. You know, and it's not just her, but it's this group of friends.

So if I was a brand I'm thinking about this is, think about Trader Joe's, right? The least technical experience you can come up with, you know, using markers to create their sides, but look at the audience in that room that are shopping there, okay? So I think you're going to see a trend towards coming back to authentic experiences and that needs in-person experiences. This group grew up with COVID.

They were on flat screens for two years plus. So they're ready to get together in person. Yeah, yeah. And I think this extends beyond just the younger generation too.

I think everyone is a little bit hungry for these more authentic human engagements, especially as we start to see LinkedIn posts after LinkedIn posts written by AI, which I don't mind AI supporting with copywriting and editing, but if your ideas are just generated that way, you know, I think a lot of people are getting burnt out on the generative AI scene. And I definitely agree with you that in the next couple months, year to years, like people are going to be just hungry and starving for like, I know that this idea that you have is truly your idea.

And I think people are going to start listening to more conversations like this, you know, long form podcasts. We've already seen that grow in the last several years. And like, my brother is 24 and he spends more time listening to like a Rogan interview than he would ever like binge watching TV or engaging with something online. So I think people are just going to continue to like look for more content that is, you can't fake that.

Like we can't fake this conversation we're having right now. Yeah, yeah. I think the authentic personalization, the real conversations, the real post, the last post, one of the last post like, it was me crossing the street in Bangalore two weeks ago. And in India, and the lessons I learned about business, having some fun with it, 21,000 people engaged with the post, you know, and it's a reason why, because it was authentic, it wasn't, you know, hey, look at me at my birthday, it's perfect.

It was an authentic conversation about, you know, the complexity of street crossing. Yeah, yeah, I know, I love that. Well, is there any final advice you would like to leave our audience with? That's a big one.

I would say, look at, again, going back to Ira, one of the big things he always talked about was never start with no. So as you think about customer experience, how do you train your teams to not start with no and really have that empathy? Yeah. I think that's not just for customer experience, but that's employee experience as general life experience.

You know, somebody says, hey, I want to take a trip around the world, don't start with no. Ask questions, be curious. So I would say don't start with no, be curious. Ted Lasso, you know, not judgmental.

I would say those would probably be my lessons. They're not authentic, because those are from irony mark and from Ted Lasso, but those would be the lessons I would say I would leave you with. Now, life is so much more fun if you think about it from like, how can I make this happen? How can I do that and like make it way more playful than no, no, we can't do that, no, we don't offer that.

I mean, definitely a totally different frame of mind to live in. I love that. Thank you, John. Well, if people want to follow you, they're like, hey, I was so interested in what John had to share.

Where should they find you and or ISG research? Like, oh, and definitely your book, like let them know where they can find your book. Yeah. So you can find the book on Amazon, obviously.

So that's on Amazon easy to find there. You can track us, track me personally on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect with people. I love hearing other people's ideas and stories.

I'm passionate about customer experience. Those are probably be the two best areas. And of course, certainly, if you're a large enterprise and you really want to dig into this a little more deeply and on the tech side and understand where you're going next, then certainly reach out to ISG, me at ISG. And I'm certainly happy to get you to the right people in our firm.

Awesome, amazing. Well, everyone listening, we're dropping that link to his book in the show notes. And John's LinkedIn will also be linked up there. So please DM him and let him know how you like this episode.

Thanks so much, John, for joining. Thanks, Lizzy. Bye-bye.