Using Customer Experience To Create A Strong Foundation For Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
MSP & B2B Professional Service Firm Marketing Consultant/Advisor | Fractional CMO | Build and manage your marketing engine to get where you want to go faster. | Remove Your Revenue Roadblocks
Customer experience is often overlooked, but it’s the cornerstone of sustainable business growth. So, in today’s episode, we’ll debunk the biggest misconception about customer experience and help you take the next steps to elevate it.
Join Tim Fitzpatrick ?and Melissa Hockenberry for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!
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Using Customer Experience To Create A Strong Foundation For Growth
Tim Fitzpatrick
Customer experience is often overlooked, but it's the cornerstone of sustainable business growth. In today's episode, we'll debunk the biggest misconception about customer experience and help you take the next steps to elevate it. Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in I am super excited to have Melissa Hockenberry with me today from First Things First Training and Consulting. Melissa, welcome, and thanks for being here.
Melissa Hockenberry
Thank you so much for the opportunity, Tim. Great to be here.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I'm excited to dig into this with you today. Before we jump into customer experience, I want to ask if you rapid fire, help us get to know you a little bit. Are you ready to jump in?
Melissa Hockenberry
Sure. Absolutely. Go ahead.
Tim Fitzpatrick
When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?
Melissa Hockenberry
With family, first and foremost. And then I'll say bike riding, but I want to say easy bike riding. I'm not like Denver, Colorado, mountain bike rider. I like rail, that thing. Really enjoy walking in nature, and I like reading.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. What's your hidden talent?
Melissa Hockenberry
I sing, which if you talk to people in my high school and college years, they'd be like, Of course, Melissa sings. But I haven't done it in so long. I at friends' weddings. I've sang at family weddings and that thing. But yeah, I'm a singer. That's my unknown talent.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Melissa Hockenberry
That came from a geometry teacher in probably 10th grade. I was going through a difficult time with my family. My parents were divorcing, and she, in a public school, bravely wrote 1 Peter 5:7, Cast all your anxieties on him, for he cares for you, on a paper, which in a public school was a pretty dangerous statement to do. But it still resides as the best piece of advice I've ever gotten from anyone. So I'm thankful she took that bold step.
Tim Fitzpatrick
What's one thing about you that surprises people?
Melissa Hockenberry
When I was six, I ate 42 Chips Ahoy cookies in one sitting.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Chips Ahoy. I haven't had Chips Ahoy in a long time.
Melissa Hockenberry
They have so many variations now, but the original, the Ogie Crunchy Chips Ahoy, was what I was.
Tim Fitzpatrick
And you were six?
Melissa Hockenberry
I was six, yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Is that multiple boxes of Chips Ahoy cookies? It is?
Melissa Hockenberry
I think it was probably only one package. I think probably. Everything's shrunk these days. I think I probably eat a package.
Tim Fitzpatrick
And you didn't get sick?
Melissa Hockenberry
I did. That's always the follow-up question. No, I did not. I think I stretched it out over a long period, and I was a bit of a sugar addict as a kid. So I think my body was really quite accustomed to the amount of sugar.
Tim Fitzpatrick
You had beefed up your tolerance before you decided to jump into that.
Melissa Hockenberry
Exactly. I do not try this at home without a proper training on this.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's right. What does success mean to you?
Melissa Hockenberry
Oh, wow. It is living out my purpose of helping others and while caring well for my family and myself.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Where's your happy place?
Melissa Hockenberry
State Park, camping with my family or in bed with a good book on a snowy Saturday morning.
Tim Fitzpatrick
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What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?
Melissa Hockenberry
Humility, integrity, and humor.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I like it. Tell us more about what you're doing at First Things First.
Melissa Hockenberry
Well, First Things First came out of 18 years of working with the managed service providers, MSPs or IT companies, as probably easiest known. And it came from finding so many people who were so passionate about technology and having the opportunity to work with them through a company called Autotask and helping them make their business better through software and technology. We're realizing here are these great passionate people who don't necessarily connect instantly with other other humans easily. They were brilliant in their technology and their knowledge, but their business acumen, sometimes they were just a tech who was like, I'm tired filling out at this rate and getting paid this rate, so I'm going to go out and do my own thing often. Those were the customers I worked with. And while, again, brilliance, not necessarily... I tended to yin and yang well for them. Their strengths were not my strengths. My strengths were not their strengths. And so naturally connected for a while and then felt very called to be out on my own. Never actually, I'm the reluctant entrepreneur, never was like, someday I'm going to own my own business and take over the world. That was never on the docket for me. I was like, someday I'm going to retire with a W2 and a nice pension. But it Instead, I looked at things in, probably the seed was planted in 2012, and I spent another 10 years coming to terms with it, and then got a very clear indication I was supposed to step out and do this thing. And so now I'm focused on helping those people retain customers and revenue by improving your customer experience.
What is Customer Experience?
Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. So before we dig into this, I want to talk about one of the biggest misconceptions about customer experience. But How do you define or think about customer experience?
Melissa Hockenberry
That is the thing that I think why I became so passionate of it. I actually started to look at customer experience way back in 2010. I became the customer experience director for Autotask, and And I started to study it more because it was actually a really new concept then. And what I think people go wrong with defining it is they keep it way too small. They use it synonymously with customer service or digital experience or user experience. They literally put all those things in the same bucket as being the same thing. And experience is about... It actually starts before people even know that they might need you. And it goes the whole all the way through to when they're off boarded by you, if they no longer fit. So that is the experience. And I think that's one of the misconceptions is the definition of it. What does it mean? It's so much bigger than service or success, which people like to use interchangeably.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Thank you for that. Because I've always thought about customer experience spans the entire customer journey. In marketing, we talk about the customer journey. And the way I think about it is the marketing hour glass, which is from John Jantsch over at DuctTape Marketing, where he talks about the seven stages, know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. The customer experience starts, like you said, before they even actually buy from us. It's when those seeds are being planted of, Gosh, I think I might need to do this. And they start to go down that path of, Who can help me? How can they help me solve it? That's where it starts, right? The seeds are being planted at that point. And so we've got to look at the full life cycle. Otherwise, we're going to have gaps.
Melissa Hockenberry
A hundred %. And because you're a marketing professional, you get that concept, right? That it's that big because you get the whole wealth of it. Nicolas Webb wrote a book, What Customers Crave, that does a great job for small businesses to break down how do I look at that journey? Because that can be overwhelming for a small business. But he puts it into five stages. But one of the first stages, I think, is actually called pre-touch. So it's not even connected, right? And I always say to people, that That's when I talk to my clients about it. I talk about, what do you look like in the marketplace? What do your techs look like when they go out and order lunch with your branded shirt on? What do they look like when they're driving down the highway? That's all stuff that somebody who doesn't even know they might need you is forming an opinion of your brand and who you are at that point. And also, I think another misconception is that customer experience is the marketers side of things, right? That people put it that synonymous, as I stated before, with digital experience or user experience. No, it's everybody plays into this. Your invoice plays into customer experience. Your billing person plays into customer experience. Obviously, your tech does. But so does your procurement person, right? Like of how they're dealing. Everybody is involved in this. But having someone who focuses on it, I think, is really key that the companies don't think about. And I also think people believe that experience can only be solved by software that's like a quarter of a million dollars. It can be improved that way. Granted, if you're Amazon and those... Yes, that's a great way to start to get in touch with it. But there are ways to improve experience at a much lower budget than I think sometimes the industry wants you to believe it's true.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. We don't have to overcomplicate it.
Melissa Hockenberry
No, no. I mean, it can be. And amazingly, I mean, I don't even remember where the story came from, but I remember a story of somebody complaining about their hot dog in one of the major stadiums and posting it on social. And the software they had was so amazing that they could figure out where that ticket holder was, and they delivered a new hot dog to them in 10 minutes after a social post. That's an amazing story and phenomenal. But we don't need go to that perfection. That's where I've said to so many people, truly perfect is the enemy of good. So many business owners don't even want to start because they think, Well, I'd stop right there. There's no way I could get to that level. It's like, Right, but could you just put out a listening post, a simple piece of paper in your retail shop that says, What would you like to see us improve? Literally a notebook. It could start with a notebook. Mine did when I was a retail manager. Started with a notebook. It doesn't have to be so intense. You can't just throw up your hands and say, I can't do it because of the complexity of it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So what's the biggest misconception about customer service? And I don't know if we already touched on that.
Melissa Hockenberry
Yeah, I think it is in the definition of it, right? I think it's in the definition and the complexity of it. Yeah, 100 %. That's where I would say my experience is that rests.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Okay. So it's really the biggest misconception is that it's just customer service.
Melissa Hockenberry
Yes. Yeah. That they're synonymous. If you ask somebody, I'll say to people, I'm focused on customer experience. It's actually one of the reasons that I've stopped that conversation in when I talk about my business. I say to people, I'm focused on retaining revenue and customers. Because if I talk about customer experience, they're like, oh, she works with the service side or she works with this. It pigeon holes you or gives a misconception that those services are not going to be valuable or can't be obtained by smaller companies. But where my focus is. So I think it's the definition is the biggest misconception. And the companies that own it, that do really well in the software, which I will not name any of them, so as to not be seen as slandering them, but that are truly defining it. And that does happen, right? And I worked in the software industry for 18 years and still work in the technology industry. And if you're doing your job right, you do define the industry. But it's frustrating because if you look up experience, you're going to land on one of a couple sites. And it's going to be some software company that's going to cost you way more money than you could ever imagine. And it's probably not for your market. And they're defining the industry. And that's one of my little pet peeves with it. So my goal is to be that little town crier to say. Yes, that's part of it. But you can do it as a smaller company.
Tim Fitzpatrick
So we want people to think more broadly when it comes to customer experience and how it touches the business.
Melissa Hockenberry
And when you think about it, understand the breadth, but don't try to address the breadth of it. That's why you need to look at surveys and things like that to start to understand where you can best influence and improve the experience.
Tools to Improve Customer Experience
Tim Fitzpatrick
So surveys, one of the tools people can use, is there a most important tool needed to improve customer experience? It reads.
Melissa Hockenberry
Yes. Surveys are definitely one of the tools. But I think what people overlook is their own people. And that's not to say, get better people so they give you a better experience. Certainly, that's part of it. But listening first internally. I took on a client this spring, and one of the things I did first was interview each one of his employees that were front line, that were doing the majority of the work for the company. And there were so many underlying themes that were repeated in those interviews of how they could improve experience. I think that's where people first go, because, again, you say survey to some people and they're like, I have to get a tool for that. You know what? Just sit down or hire someone to sit down with your employees, because sometimes your employees are not going to be 100 % honest. They'd like to anonymize their feedback. Hire someone or sit down if you have that rapport. And and don't assume you have that report because every owner thinks that, oh, yeah, my people are completely honest with me. And maybe just even have an anonymous survey somehow that they can they can complete and see how honest they've been with you. But have that conversation with your employees. And one of my favorite questions, and it was one that a boss gave me years ago, was like, if you had a magic wand, what would you fix first? So that it eliminates the, oh, I couldn't fix it, so I won't mention it. It's like, no, if you had complete control, where would you start first? And getting that conversation going with your team, I think is really, really important. When I was a retail manager in the past life for a Fortune 500 company, one of the things I would go in and do almost immediately was try to connect with my employees because they'd get moved around. And so when I take over a department, I'd be like, okay, so tell me what you're hearing. Tell me what you think. And I mentioned listening posts. Like, literally one team, I was like, okay, so we're just going to have a three-ring pointer underneath here. And when you hear a customer request something, write down. And then if you hear recurring things, we're just going to tally mark that. Absolutely archaic way of doing it. But at times, saw 100 % growth, 200 % growth, 300 % growth on listening to the employees and, of course, listening to the customers. But I think that's one of the biggest things is you miss, I like to call them internal customers as opposed to employees. Obviously, it's still referenced on this employees. But I think we miss the wealth of the knowledge they have. And sometimes we also avoid talking with the difficult ones. And those difficult employees are sometimes some of the best source of information because they think differently than we do. They look at things differently than we do. And oftentimes, sometimes they're difficult because they don't feel like they're being heard. So it was this benefit to it. So I would say listening is a major tool of it. And then obviously, yes, surveying. And surveying can be really simple. It can be a Microsoft form or a Google form or something of that sort. Obviously, there's lots of software out there that can do it. And there's some that are very focused on small business, so it's feasible to do. And as you know from a customer journey map, the ideal is a full breadth survey to your clients so that you can understand where the touch points are and what touch point can be most improved and the best way to do it. But again, I think we can get caught up in the this feels overwhelming. And I think sometimes you can just sit down with your and say, what do you think we have the biggest bump in the road for our customer journey? And that's the best thing I've ever heard. I can't even give credit to the gentleman because it was so long ago. I don't remember, but he likened the journey to truly driving on a road. And he said, You've got to think about the fact that you just need to level up the road sometimes. Because if you've got an Autobahn experience in your sales team, but then you end up on a dirt road the moment you hand them off to services, that dissonance, right? That was the best analogy. I'm like, oh, no kidding. And so I like to say to my clients, you might be putting Autobahn type investment over here, but we're going to need to take some from that to fill the dirt road and maybe put some asphalt on it. So it's not a matter of just spending more money. It's actually reallocating. Because if I can't make everything autobahn, the bouncing back and forth is where this trust. I say this with... I actually was a guest lecturer at a college once, and I said something about, if you are dating someone and trying to understand them, and they are consistently one way, and then all of a sudden, they drop off and are totally different, what happens. And they're like, I'm skeptical. I'm like, right, how have you lost? And they're like, trust. Exactly. Same thing happens with your clients. If you can't give consistent, even if it's not perfect, it's not out of the whole way. It's interstate or it's appropriate, secondary road, whatever you want to call it. But it's consistent and you set expectations. And I think that's the really key part of getting started with experience and using the tools you have to get a feel for what that looks like.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you feel with surveys, I'm curious what you think about this, because on the marketing side, when people ask about surveys, I always recommend keeping them as short and simple as possible. The example I always give people is, and I can't even remember what company it was, and I wouldn't name it if I did. But I remember getting... I was working with them and it's like, Hey, you're a valued customer. We love your feedback. Take this short survey. I start to take it and realize it's a 20 minutes survey, and I'm like, Nope, goodbye. What are your thoughts on that? How do we balance getting enough information while also not being so intrusive that it impacts the data that we're able to actually collect?
Melissa Hockenberry
Absolutely. I think we always have to first say there's always people that are never taking a survey. You just have to go into it with that. You've got to understand there's a bias here that you have survey taking people taking the survey. And that's why listening posts and having other ways to collect data is important. But I fully agree with the short and sweet. I think I learned years that if I'm going to ask for something, I need to know what I'm going to do with it. Because there's a ton of stuff that people put in a survey that you're like, oh, that's a nice to know, but what are you doing with that? And I think when you think down, when you get your action plan of what you would fix or whatever, you can almost go backwards. Like, Hey, we want to pick three things that we think we want to focus on. Okay, then let's find three questions that are going to help us narrow that down or maybe two questions each. But I think you're right. The shorter, the better. The other thing I always tell people, and I presented on it at a conference over a decade ago, but your survey effort should be an effort at first that you can respond to. Those customers or those clients that think that I'm going to go survey my customers and I'm going to survey all 50 or 100 of them, and I'm a team of six. And I say, well, what are you going to do if you get 12 people, if you're lucky, it's only that many, that are angry? How are you going to be able to respond fast enough to that issue? I always say that you've got to respond within 24 hours if somebody tells you something they don't like. And if you survey 100 people, and even if you get 50 to respond and you get 10 % of that isn't happy, do you have the people to have an in-depth conversation in the next 24 hours with the people to give you bad feedback? Because that's really what has to happen. I always say it's like, now we have it called ding, ding, dash. It's that whole concept of like, I'm coming up, I'm ringing your doorbell, I'm asking you how you feel. And the moment you start to answer me, I'm running away. And you'll hear from me in a couple of days. So that's an aspect of surveying. I think people will think about. Totally agree with short. I actually agree with a small subset. Try to do a random sampling, whatever. I mean, maybe it's only 10 clients if you have 100. And that may mean... But then you can write personal email that tells them, hey, we're looking to improve on things. And would you give us and take the survey, know how long it takes. Don't just throw it around the number. Be like, here's our six questions survey that we need less than three minutes. Would you give us that time or something of that sort? I think that's an effort to get some more. And then you can expand that, certainly. But the worst thing you can do is ask for response and feedback and then get bad We got bad feedback and do nothing with it for two, three business days. You really have to be on top of that stuff.
Tim Fitzpatrick
The other thing that you mentioned, too, that I will second is you touched on, Hey, interview, sit down, have a conversation with your employees. But you also said there's a benefit in having somebody like you come in and do it. I see the same thing on the marketing side When we do client interviews, when we do ideal client interviews, no matter how good of a relationship you have, their guard is up a little bit. They may not want to offend you. When you have a third party come in, their walls go down, and it's just, Hey, just tell us your thoughts, right? And the other thing, too, is when you do this on a more regular basis, you know what questions to ask. You also know how to dig below the surface, because sometimes you get very surface-level answers that aren't really very helpful. And if you don't do this on a regular basis, it's very easy to gloss over those things and not get as much value from the conversation as you could otherwise.
Melissa Hockenberry
Yes. I mean, people always teach service people. So your tech people have always been taught, good tech people have been taught, never answer the first question, right? So it's the same thing when you're interviewing someone, never accept the first answer. It should be something... I love the phrase that I learned, the tell me more. Tell me more is such a phenomenal phrase, right? You know it's a little bit... There's a little bit more to it, so tell me more. Or just knowing, like you said, knowing how to dig in and ask additional information or get additional information. One of my favorite phrases, people who know me are already saying it. They're like, Melissa is going to say, what questions do you have? That is a phenomenal phrase because it does pull out questions from people for the reason that, do you have any questions? Has it? And tone to it that's like, could you possibly have questions? Because I just explained that really well. But what questions do you have? Has an assumed, you have questions because I just gave you a lot of information. I would expect you have questions. And it's amazing the difference in But when you're interviewing, it's that thing. So you set up that tone of, well, what additional information do you have on that? Or what other experiences have you had with that? Or what way would you see we should fix? The what seems to lead into better questions, and people don't always think to ask those. But when you're doing it over and over and over again, and you can see the power of certain questions, and then you can dive into it. I think you're right. It is just there's insight to be had by having a third party, and there's just insight to be had by having somebody who's done it a lot more often with a wide variety of clients and employees and that thing. And I think owners just have to, in my world, I always want to say, there's just things that work better because you bring in somebody that does it all the time that can focus. We all say that focus is good, but there's certain things work better for that. It doesn't mean they have to be a forever thing, but they're going to bring you greater return on that investment of time.
How to Improve Customer Experience
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So Melissa, if people like what we've been talking about here and they want to take those next steps to start improving customer experience, what do they do?
Melissa Hockenberry
The first thing they can do is brain dump what they believe their challenges are, and gather that thing from their team, even. Where do you think our biggest challenges are? Because I'm speaking more to owners because that tends to be who I work with more. But as an owner of a business, You believe you have all that under your belt and you get it. But chances are if you open that up to your team, you get a bigger picture. So have the conversation of how do you think we could best improve where we're going? And again, if you have an open team, try to have that. If not, you can sometimes bring someone else. Sometimes it can just be literally just a friend and be like, Hey, you're at a point where you're like, This is great, but I can't spend the money. Bring a friend in to ask them questions, or again, do a survey, do a forum where they can be a little bit more open and you don't ask them to gather specific details about them. But gather information first. I think that's the first thing, and don't assume you know the biggest challenge is. And then take a look at them, and hopefully you have a vision and a mission for your company, and you can align the challenges with that mission and vision and say, okay, if these are really our... And some goals, so those in there as well, and objectives. Basically cross those look for things over top of each other. Look for the overlap in that Venn diagram of things and say, okay, where is the sweet spot where it's a challenge and it's a focus for us, and we know that it's going to produce revenue if we need it, and it's going to help us achieve our goals. So it's not just this is irritating to me and I want to fix it. That's a very egocentric form of how you go about proving things. Instead, it should be, I know that the result of this thing is going to help me achieve my goals, produce revenue, improve the experience. It's going to have a multi-layer benefit if we do these things. And that can all be done on a piece of paper or in a OneNote or whatever. But it's overlapping where you think your issues are with where your mission goals and objectives are. And then could some of those be wrong? They could because you could see things that those issues could start to really form into some specific areas that you're like, oh, well, this is an Our objective of ours. But man, five out of our 10 issues actually have nothing to do with that. And maybe that's something that's holding back our objectives, right? Maybe we have the wrong goal if we're doing that. So you always have to think about it in a smart way. But I think overlapping what you think are the challenges with where you believe in the company you're headed, that gives you better focus to get started.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that. One of my mentors said, Success starts with a list, right? And so we're getting all these thoughts down on paper. And then from there, we can start to sift through it and really craft a plan around it.
Melissa Hockenberry
Absolutely. I meet so many people who don't... When I ask them a simple question like, what are you looking to achieve? I often hear the statement, I just want to make money. That's incredibly specific. I'm certain you're going to be successful. No, give me more. And I think those lists are that. What are your goals? There's the list, right? What are your objectives to get there? There's the list. What is in your brain floating around that you think could potentially be? I had a very good friend say to me earlier this year, have you done a brain dump recently? I'm like, No. So opened up a one note, added the four or five categories that my brain was running through, and just dumped everything in there that I thought to be possible. And actually this morning just revisited that and went, Oh, I got some of Oh, I totally forgot about that. You're right. I 100 % agree that that's how good people get going is that list. And then putting it through different filters to determine the priorities. The list starts And then the priorities come and then the objectives happen and then the action takes place and just keep walking it the whole way through.
Conclusion
Tim Fitzpatrick
Any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with before we wrap things up?
Melissa Hockenberry
I hope people are encouraged that if they're struggling right now and if they're looking at the future and saying, I'm not getting new logos, I don't know where I'm going, that they understand that there's power within their own entity, their own company, to improve on some things. To retain customers, to look at something like experience that they are not helpless on something that is customer experience. There's ways that they can get started and ways that they can see success, even in a time where there may not be a huge increase flux of sales, they can build the rapport and thus the relationship and the revenue within their own base.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Thank you so much, Melissa. I really appreciate it. Where can people learn more about you?
Melissa Hockenberry
They can certainly check out my LinkedIn profile. That is one of the best places I post weekly. Some thoughts, sometimes random, sometimes about the TSA, sometimes about just straight business. But there's a new video pretty much every week, and they can certainly visit my site. It's just first things first training and consulting. It's the first letter of each of those, FTFTAC.com , if they want to check out more about the company.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. So we'll make sure those are both in the show notes. But if you search Melissa Hockenberry on LinkedIn, she will come up or head on over to our website. If you're looking to grow and you want to focus on customer experience, reach out to Melissa. I've had the pleasure of connecting now a few times. So I appreciate you. Those of you that are watching and listening, I appreciate you as well. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com . You can also identify which of the nine revenue roadblocks are slowing down your growth at revenueroadblockscorecard.com . Takes less than five minutes, so head on over there as well. And until next time, take care.
Helping Managed Service Providers improve customer & revenue retention by improving customer experience.
3 周Tim, Thank you so much for this opportunity. I enjoyed working with you before, during, and after this conversation. Your process results in valuable insights.