Why Customers Leave

David Avrin?is one of the most in-demand customer experience speakers in the world. He shares his high-energy and content-rich presentations with audiences across North America and the world, including presentations in Singapore, Monte Carlo, London, and Dubai.

He’s the author of five books, including the acclaimed,?It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows YOU!,?Visibility Marketing,?and?Why Customers Leave (and How To Win Them Back). He’s a former CEO Group Leader with Vistage International and a marketing firm owner. He’s also the Chairman of the Legacy Board.

David, let’s start with your own story before you became a customer experience expert and speaker. We can go back to childhood, high school, or college.

It was interesting. I’m the second oldest of six and maybe it’s an issue of trying to stand out in a crowded field of competitors for that last slice of pizza, but I was involved in the performance. I did theater and music. I went to college on a full-ride theater scholarship and realized about halfway through that, “At some point, I’m going to have to be able to support a wife and kids.” I didn’t want to see myself doing community theater in God’s Wrath, Iowa when I’m 50 years old. Apologies to those who live in God’s Wrath, Iowa.

Now, playing the father and Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, David.

In with 42 seats in the back of a converted movie house. I went to college and changed my major halfway. I gave up my scholarship and went into Broadcast Journalism. When you got a deep voice people are like, “You should be on the radio.” I did radio for a while and I studied Journalism. When I came out, I have lots of friends in the press. I did PR for several years and they said, “I went to the dark side,” and I became a PR flack.

It was PR and marketing for much of my career as you do. Talk about how we describe what we do in a way that is persuasive, whether it’s for sales, helping politicians with constituents, or corporations better manage their image. It’s how we describe ourselves and communicate that. It was a big part of my career for years.

In recent years, I’ve come to the recognition that while what we say about ourselves is important, it is less powerful now than what other people say about us. I have made a pretty profound shift in my business, research, and books to talking to organizations about how we provide an experience that creates true differentiation. Now, I speak and consult on customer experience.

With the pandemic and all the complaints, the post-pandemic of shortage of staff makes the service go down. There’s the unspoken second part of it that I wanted your expertise on. If the majority of people in business have any interaction with the public, whether it’s an airline, a restaurant, you name it, or have new people because of turnover, then what happens to all those people’s first day on the job?

You make a lot of mistakes. You leave the restaurant and think you have your order right, and it’s not. Not only is there a shortage of staff causing planes to be canceled or restaurants saying, “We can’t take a reservation,” but when you do get the service, it’s not usually very good because they’re new and that’s another reason to leave. I’m sure you’re seeing that as a speaker. People are going, “Can you help us in this situation?”

We’re seeing it a lot. What’s interesting is customer experience is evolved into a separate discipline, even from customer service. We’ve been talking about customer service for years. If you don’t know how to be nice to people, you’ve got bigger issues in your business. The experience has changed in so many significant ways how we engage with businesses. It’s not just that straight retail transaction.

In 1968, walking into an appliance store and having some old guy or teenager explain the features of a refrigerator. Now, how we communicate, buy, complain, and have products and services delivered to us have changed in profound ways. Back to your point, there are so many mechanisms we can put in place and safeguards that should help to make those situations better, but they don’t. Part of it is because we’ve become a little bit rigid.

Businesses have become wary of so many external forces they cannot control. We can’t control the internet, governments, pandemics, Amazon, or anyone else. We try to control what we can. We create this customer journey. “Here’s how they’re going to learn about us and reach out, contact, communicate, buy, modify or customize, pay, and deliver. All of that works and we tweak it. It works for us if we’re in business. Where it doesn’t, we fix or tweak it. If we can have greater predictability of our customer’s behavior, then we can plan and budget for that.

The problem is your customers haven’t read your employee manual. They don’t know how they’re supposed to do it, but what they are learning is that they can do it faster, cheaper, and more conveniently through so many other retailers that the patience is down to zero. People are getting annoyed very fast. When mistakes happen, we have so many vehicles at our disposal to complain about. We have Yelp, Tripadvisor, Rotten Tomatoes, and Glassdoor, and that social proof has become a primary drive in all of those.

There are all of these things that are converging at the same time that make it very challenging for businesses to compete and keep people happy. That said, here’s my response. “What are you going to do about it?” The nice thing is there are so many great new mechanisms for helping people replicate in some ways of things that Amazon and Apple are doing with being able to track merchandise when you order something when you know it’s coming. “I’ve got furniture delivery coming sometime in the next 45 minutes or so, and it will show up on my phone. They will be at the door.” I don’t know if I’m answering the question, but it is a challenging environment.

One of the things you have on your website that is a great soundbite is customers are changing, and so if you wanted to stay competitive, you need to change as well. When I spoke at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit, I met the CMO of Domino’s Pizza. I said, “I love your app because it’s so specific. Sally put the pizza in the oven. George is going to deliver it. It will be there in ten minutes. You will have a sense of where things are and who the people are.” He said, “That’s our marketing challenge is to get tech people to come work here.”

For me, that was a big a-ha because I always think of marketing in terms of, “How do we get more customers?” They have to use marketing to get tech people to go there instead of Amazon. That is another way of how things have changed so much that getting the messaging, not just for customers, but also for the right employees to come.

Reputation is important. They call that EX for employee experience. There’s CX for customer experience and then UX for the user experience. Can you do it with facial recognition? If you put in your username and your password and one letter’s wrong in the password, you have to put your username back in, which is so frustrating. That said, a problem in the mind of your customer is a problem.

These tech teams that you’re talking about are trying to shave quarter seconds off the process. Smart companies are simplifying the process. I interviewed somebody on my show who was talking about how the rules and the regulations seem to grow organizations every year. “Here’s a new policy. Here’s a new procedure.” The reality is we should be reducing them every year. We should be putting leaders in a room. “How can we simplify the process? How can we shorten the timeframe? How can we expedite contact, delivery, communication, and complaint resolution?” Smart companies are the ones who are putting a mind toward that customer journey and becoming more customer-centric.

We’re looking to shave microseconds off that transaction so that people can get what they want quickly or get resolution faster. They can get communication, delivery, and all of those things. The reality is people won’t wait. It’s not that they’re getting furious. They are, but we can bolt a transaction like that. We have all gotten the email, “You left something in your shopping cart.” There was a reason. Something frustrated us. Something wasn’t intuitive or overly complicated. We know that the next choice is one click away.

For organizations looking to be competitive, walk your customer’s journey and simplify that process. Eliminate hassle, time delays, and frustrations. This is interesting because several years ago, who had the most clever jingle made you more memorable. Now, everybody’s good. I speak across the country and around the world and they argue with me about that all the time. “We’re better at this.” “You might be, but sometimes good enough at a better price point is a better choice. The reality is everybody’s at least good enough because if you weren’t, you would be outed quickly on social media, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and all the above.”

There’s been this universal leveling. The bad players are weeded out pretty quickly. What’s left is a marketplace replete with quality choices. The words are important because we have to be able to clarify and educate our people, get that pitch, get the description and the benefits clear. What people say about you is more meaningful, oftentimes than what we say about ourselves because we trust the preponderance of the evidence. There was some article about Yelp that as much as a third of the reviews are fake. Nobody’s surprised by that, but it starts with the recognition that the world has changed. That’s a real opportunity for a lot of entrepreneurial companies.

Going back to the Domino’s Pizza CMO, he said, “From the time someone has a thought, ‘I want a pizza,’ we want to shorten that time to when they have a pizza at their door and in their mouth.” It’s the same thing with Amazon. I happen to live here in Austin, Texas near one of their distribution centers, and the first time I got something on the same day I ordered it, I looked outside for the drone. I was like, “What?”?That’s a whole another level of fast.

We’re getting that stuff all the time. I saw a story on the news and I was talking to my wife about this. We were watching TV and I’m one of those annoyingly interactive with the TV, “That’s crap.” She nods her head, “Yes, dear.” There was a story about Bed Bath & Beyond. There was a representative from Bed Bath & Beyond that was trying to explain that their revenues had dropped significantly for the last couple of quarters. The person said, “We’ve had supply chain issues. People are frustrated and haven’t been able to find some of the things.”

I looked at my wife and I said, “That’s a complete pile of garbage.” They aren’t down because people couldn’t find what they were looking for at Bed Bath & Beyond. They’re down because people bought their stuff on Amazon. They didn’t go to some other store and say, “I can’t find it. I better go to Amazon.” They go straight to Amazon because it’s that fast. Sometimes it’s the same day. Sometimes it’s the next day. Even retailers are having to think about where their competitive advantage is. “Are they a showroom for the online retailers? Can they be a showroom for their own online presence?”

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