EE012 – Nicholas Webb – What Customers Crave

Tony: Exceeding expectations, Episode 12. Welcome to exceeding expectations, the show about creating exceptional experiences for your customers. The guests on the show typically have the mindset of loving to over deliver on their customers’ expectations, and are forever thinking of creative ways of how they can do that with each customer they work with. This results in great testimonials and positive word of mouth spreads about them, which I think is what we all strive for. Because then you spend less money on marketing and advertising less time on those activities. Customers want to work with you so there’s no persuasion required and price is far less relevant because people will always pay higher prices for great experience. Today’s episode is with the author of a book called “What Customers Crave.” The author is Nicholas Webb and this really is a fantastic book and Nicholas deliver some great value in today’s show. Before we get to that, here is a promo for a great podcast called the genuine chit chat podcast.Mike: Hi, I am Mike from the Genuine Chitchat Podcast where we have honest conversations with interesting people. I speak to a wide variety of guests, from travelers to musicians to those afflicted with mental or physical illnesses. There’s really no subject is off limits from movies to politics, and even controversial topics ranging from sex to drug reform the political correctness. If you still believe in the art of conversation are intrigued by healthy debates with different ideas, perspectives you may not have thought of, and what a podcast where every episode about something different with a variety of guests. Then this may be the podcast for you. You can hear us on YouTube and all your favorite podcast apps and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook so if you want to hang out and listen to honest conversations with interesting people, then come to genuine chit chat, where I’m your host, Mike Burton.Tony: Today’s edition of exceeding expectations. I am here with a man call Nicholas Webb, the author of “What Customers Crave.” How you Nicholas?Nicholas: Doing terrific. Thanks.Tony: We had a brief discussion before the recording started. You were telling me how well the customers crave it’s been quite high in the charts ever since it was released?Nicholas: Yeah, it is a tremendous honor. Anytime somebody accepts your body of work. I think that the approach that I try to take with this was very pragmatic. My goal was to deliver something that provided some real bread and butter actionable insights. I think right now if you go on to Amazon, it’s almost always number one or number two out of customer experience books out of some 50 to 60,000 search results. Yeah, very fun to see that kind of enthusiasm after two years.Tony: Yeah, there’s a lot of competition in that arena in that particular area of books.Nicholas: There truly is. The beautiful thing here is that all of the competitive authors are just incredibly bright, that bring all new kinds of interesting perspective. Unlike many other areas, there really is no competition; the books that are out there are really addictive. Also I think that the book has a lot to do with where you are on your customer experience journey. If you are XYZ Corporation, and you’re a Fortune 2000 company, you may have already reached a level of maturity, where a book like this may not even be relevant. Whereas if you are a very small enterprise, you may not even begun the process. I think a lot of it really does have to do with where they are in what we call the customer experience maturity cycle.Tony: What was it that made you decide to write this in the first place?Nicholas: Well, you know, I’ve written several books on innovation. Innovation is what I do. I’ve just been obsessed by the fact that the best brands in the world and the best innovations in the world, are no longer bright, shiny objects, these new innovations are really the way in which we architect exceptional human experiences. Uber being an example. Uber didn’t reinvent the physical taxi cab, they reinvented moments of movement. When you think about things like Netflix, they did not reinvent the Audi or the VCR when they destroyed blockbuster. They reinvented moments of movies. Right, so organizations that are able to reinvent these human moments across a range of customer personas, these organizations are really the innovation superstars. It’s just an incredible phenomenon that’s so fun to watch.Tony: What is it that you do for your job, you mentioned about sort of how you being involved in innovation and with different companies. What exactly is it that you do?Nicholas:  well that’s- it’s funny, my kids need a Wii g board and global positioning satellite to try to describe what their dad does for a living. So I guess the best way to describe that is I have three jobs, about a third of my time is dedicated to my role as the director for the Center for Innovation at Western U and Western U is one of the most, if not the most comprehensive medical schools in the world. We have actually nine medical colleges within our university. So I work as an adjunct professor there. I also work as the director for their Center for Innovation. We have a big shop, doing a lot of amazing things in the area of healthcare innovation. Then I spent about a third of my time traveling, speaking on the future customer experience, innovation and healthcare. I do about 75 or more events worldwide each year. Then the other third of my time I spend on my management consulting practice where we provide innovation and customer experience consulting to corporate clients.Tony: Out of the three is there- Do you equally enjoy all of them. Or is there one that you enjoy more than the others?Nicholas: They say the difference between a good life in a bad life is really a good life has more interesting problems. I think at the Center for Innovation, where I have such a big obligation to this amazing university, I think that’s the one that’s the most fulfilling, I have an amazing team there. I get to collaborate with these genius medical students and the professors and faculty that I get to learn from. I have to say that that is a special thing. I also of course, really love speaking because I get to share my enthusiasm about innovation in the future and enterprise. It’s kind of hard to say but I guess the university and then maybe speaking,Tony: In the book, what customers crave there were so many amazing stories of companies that have gone out of their way to deliver a great experience for their customers. Do you have any particular favorite stories from your book?Nicholas: The organizations that I’m fascinated by aren’t always necessarily big multinational organizations. one that I’m extremely fascinated by because it was formed in 1957, if my memory serves me, right, and that’s In and Out Burger. In and out burger is a fast food restaurant. It also happens to be the best restaurant in the world. By that, I mean that they have identified the range of customer personas that they serve. They have architected probably as perfect of an experience as you could possibly ask for, in the insanely competitive space of fast food. From the way in which you approach the building and the way that it looks, the physic- the visual elements of its cleanliness and its style is amazing across virtually all personas. That first touch point when you drive through to order your burger. Rather, they’re being 10,000 different items on the menu; there are really only four or five things that you can order. Every one of those are perfect. When you order there is a speaker that has been perfectly designed to provide a very clear and comfortable two-way dialogue with the order taker who is incredibly well trained. You drive through to this clear pane glass window where you’re watching them in this almost hospital-like cleanliness of their kitchen, making fresh French fries. People are smiling, it has a buoyancy to it, that’s really amazing. When you compare that to all of the other fast food, burger joints, it’s really pretty impressive that they’ve been able to scale and institutionalize that level of customer experience. That’s the kind of thing that really I love. Certainly, apples are good at their Apple retail stores are a good example of the scalability and institutionalization of great customer experiences. There are many examples. The interesting thing is, is the least expensive way to grow your business 89% of the top brands in the world are using customer experience design as the primary way that they’re going to grow and scale their profitability. I think it’s a really important body of work.Tony: Since writing the book, have you had many companies contact you to help them in those kinds of areas?Nicholas: Yeah, absolutely. Almost overwhelming. We have a consulting division that just does customer experience at whatcustomerscrave.com. Unfortunately, oftentimes, we don’t have the bandwidth, we have been almost overwhelmed. It’s slow down a little bit too where we’re almost caught up. Yeah, it’s been a real honor. When you put your research and your methods out there, and people love it, it’s just so gratifying. Yeah, we just really have been so blown away by the response.Interviewer Has there been any situations where a company has come to you and at first you thought, wow, this is going to be really difficult to change the situation they have here? Or is there been anything along those lines?Nicholas: Yeah we do a lot of work in healthcare and there was something that happened that I did not anticipate. We assume that most healthcare organization, hospitals and clinics would realize that their patients are consumers. We found that hospitals and clinics that were not willing to call their customers, consumers or patients consumers, that they don’t make very good clients. We have actually developed a range of questions to determine rather not spiritually, and psychologically, an organization is really ready to make the change. I mean, I think you have two types of people at reach out, you have one groups, that they’re going “Our customers hate us, we need to fix it to sell more stuff.” Then there’s another group that just says, “Hey, serving our customer, and delivering exquisite solutions to those customers, is part of our DNA. It’s what we stand for, it’s part of our mission that we’re really committed to.” Those are the customers that we love. The ones that can’t call their patients, consumers are the organizations that really can’t…- that don’t accept the fact that they have to deliver a highly consumerize product. We learned kind of the hard way they don’t. There isn’t much work we can do for them. Because at the end of the day, we can provide all the advice in the world. Unfortunately, they have to be willing to deploy the advice in order for it to get a good return for them.Tony: Do you get resistance from them when you give them advice sometimes?Nicholas: Absolutely. Yeah. Because I literally was just at a client last week, and I was brought into their board of trustees meeting because they wanted to ask their customer experience consultant, some hard hitting questions. One of the questions that came up in a very big and powerful way with one of their main board members is “What is the business case? What is the reason we should be doing? Why should we care? We’re profitable now. We’re our leader in our marketplace. Why should we care?.” Of course, the answer is in a time of market disruption, and hyper con-summarization, the bar, as most people call it, we call it the baseline level of expectation. That bar is constantly moving up. The expectation that a customer has continues to increase. Although Yes, it’s true that organizations can be incidental with their customer experiences still be successful. It’s not sustainable at a time where they’re being trained by Apple and Amazon and others to get amazing solutions that are price transparent, and beautiful across well-defined touch points.Tony: I would imagine also, that when they do take on board or suggestions you’re making, that is there’s so many benefits, a lot of which they wouldn’t be able to see initially. I mean, obviously this the staff, I guess, would be happier. The customers are going to be happier, and so many other areas are going to all be affected by the changes that are made.Nicholas: Yeah, what’s interesting is.when I was doing the research on this book, I found some really interesting anomalies in some of the research. I started to notice that the organizations that had the highest glass door rating,- and if glass door course, is a rating system, where employees rate their employer in this very thoughtful platform. It turns out as much as 95% of millennial today, will not take a job until they have first looked on glass door to determine if the organization is a great place to work. What we found was is that the overall quality of work, life significantly improves when you institutionalize customer experience strategies. You have far better returns on strategies. In fact if you leverage technologies, like enterprise social networks, or collaborative networks, you can increase return on strategic initiatives by over 60%. Customer experience isn’t just about happy customers, it’s about improving the overall quality of work life, it’s about attracting and keeping great talent. I tell people, there are two types of employees out there potential employees, there are talented people, and then there are unemployed people. There are no unemployed talented people. if you want them, you have to have an exquisite reputation across the community of employees via glass door. The benefits in terms of reducing costs, increasing returns on strategy, getting better insights, to drive better innovation, to be able to get the one thing that we all want and this body of work provides. That is customer promotion, where our actual customers are serving as our marketing department. When you take a look at the enterprise benefits of customer experience design, it’s hard to find much that you can do out there that has more impact for the least amount of money than customer experience.Tony: Some of the companies that have been more resistant maybe to take it on board some of the suggestions you’ve made, They eventually have decided to go with it have any of them being really surprised by just how many benefits they received?Nicholas: Yeah, I had the great honor of working for a very prestigious, maybe the most prestigious neurological clinic in the country, Mayfield Brain and Spine. It’s easy for a brain surgeon to assume that the hallmark of their success is based on their clinical efficacy. The truth of the matter is, is that patients really are late. They don’t know enough about the science and about the clinical processes to be able to determine if somebody is clinically efficacious. The patients do know one thing for sure, and they know what the experience was like. I was asked to come to work for them to help them build out a customer experience strategy. The frustrating part for me in their particular situation is they were such a great organization. I usually like to find more broken things. They just wanted to fine tune the already great work that they were doing. And, We did that and I was- I think that they were amazed to see that there were many things that because- they were proud of the great work they did and for good reason. I think that they were surprised to see how much they missed in terms of the opportunity to provide more relevancy and more value in their digital properties, ways to change what the experience looks like in there waiting rooms, ways to change the way in which they handle patient throughput. That’s one of the problems. In fact, Bain did a study that was pretty interesting. They interviewed hundreds of CEOs.This is important, because this is the genesis of the problem. This is why most organizations do not do well and customer experience. They surveyed them and they asked them a simple question. Do you consider that your organization is delivering exceptional experiences to your customer? 89% of the CEO said yes, absolutely. If I’m remembering the numbers correctly? 89%.Then they went and they asked their customers of these companies the very same question, do you feel like this organization is in fact 89% of the time delivering exceptional experiences, and only 7% of those customers agreed with the companies. There’s a sense of customer experience dysphonia, there is a there is this delusional sense that they’re much better than they are. Because at the end of the day, they don’t really have good consumer insights. They’re running their business much as they had in a time prior to digital ubiquity and to high levels of customer experience and to digital rating systems there. They were operating at a level that was way below just the baseline level of expectation. I think the biggest problem is most people never really start on this. Because they already, unfortunately falsely believe that they’re pretty good.Tony: If a company asks you to come in to help them out. How would you go about devising a strategy? Do you have to sort of study them for a period of time and many other people coming into? I mean, how would you go about something like that?Nicholas: Maybe because of my background and all the work we do in healthcare, we sort of take a sequential approach that’s very much like a diagnostic pathway and a treatment pathway that you would see in healthcare. We do a thing that we call a CX readiness assessment, where we look at about 56 different areas within the organization. we look at the culture, we look at the technology stacks, and the software that they use to engage patients, our customers, depending on the kind of organization it is, we take a look at their current state of training, we take a look at how much they -what do they have punitive policies? We take a – we do a thing called ethnography, where we look at the digital footprint of what the social web is saying about the organization, We go through what we call it, customer experience readiness assessment. That assessment creates these 50 some scorecards, and the scorecard say, you know, here’s what you should be. And here’s where you are in terms of, say training, or in terms of way in which- they handle inbound telemarketing, or whatever it may be, we look at all. Then during that dialogue with the client, we basically find out what their appetite is, because this is important. We know how to fix them, what we find is sometimes they don’t have the appetite, sometimes its budget, but most often is really appetite like but, “Gee, you mean, we’re going to have to higher four more people to reduce wait times on our inbound calls, or we’re going to have to spend X amount of money on training and do I really interested in that?” Right, so it’s, kind of a negotiation, once you present them the scorecards, and then they we kind of agree what they have the appetite for. Then from there, the second process is building out the roadmap, the CX roadmap. Then once we build that out, we may build the infrastructure for them to create to fill those gaps that we identified. Then oftentimes, they keep us around for a few months to help them in the final deployment. It’s a diagnostic, a treatment plan in the form of a roadmap. Then there’s a deployment phase. Usually, the entire process is between six and 12 months, depending on the size of the enterprise.Tony: Then once they actually- they start to implement all the changes that you suggested, and they find that they’re getting a much better experience for the customers are getting a much better experience. I presume that for they’re getting much better reviews. I mean, do profits increase, what is the situation than that side of things?Nicholas: Yeah, so part of the assessment phase is we identified baselines. How we identify current baselines? We also look very thoughtfully, about what they want to do in terms of driving new revenue and scalable growth. It’s very much a sales and marketing discussion as part of this body of work. Then we build out a pre-agreed matrix some people they want to measure, I mean, you know, a lot of organizations like I believe it’s Accenture that has the Net Promoter scores. Different people have different ways, I think I would be where of the consulting firm bringing their own success metrics, I think you’re better off saying, like, Here is a list of the different ways in which we can measure success based on your goals, help us select the one that you feel that really, honestly does the best job to determine the impact that your cx initiative is having on you. That can oftentimes it can be revenue, it can be cross-marketing, it can be customer complaints, it can be wait times, typically, in an engagement, there’s 8 to 20 different things that we like to measure, and very routine, it’s very predictable, that we see meaningful improvements on whatever matrix we build out.Tony: You mentioned that you’re often working with sort of medical related companies do you do a lot of different types of industries?Nicholas: we worked- I’ve worked with… in food and beverage, in… Much in hospitality, in technology companies. It is true, about half of what we do is in healthcare work- banking, credit unions, pretty much any industry that has a very customer-centric requirement for success. Obviously, that’s going to be hospitality, food and beverage, banking, finance, those are the areas that we tend to get a big amount of work from.Tony: Would that be mostly kind of major corporations are also smaller companies?Nicholas: We tend to work with mid to large sized organizations. Usually real large organizations. They don’t feel comfortable working with what they consider to be a boutique practice. Because it’s a lot less risky for them from their perspective to work with a with a big firm, like an Accenture, Deloitte, whatever. I find that our practice, we do a lot of mop up, we do a lot of sort of hazmat mopping up on of over some of the larger consulting firms, because oftentimes, what I find, at least in my own experience is -we’re brought in after they’ve already taken a shot at this. Rarely do we get to come in from scratch, almost always, we’re coming in to mop up after an initiative that failed. which is unfortunate, because if you do a customer experience initiative and you do the right internal branding and messaging, you’re going to get people on board, and these people are going to trust you and they’re going to follow you and they want it turns out that especially millennial talent, they want to be involved in a mission that matters. They’re very mission-driven, and they love missions that have to do with humans, right, they love the idea of making an experience better for a human. They’re less interested in missions that are about sales and about cost reduction. They love missions that a humanistic. If you launch an initiative half-baked and it fails, which it often does . unfortunately, now you are way below zero, because now you have to get those great people that believed you and trusted you that you were committed to an initiative, you’ve got to get them to take another swipe at it. Oftentimes that’s tough, you get a certain amount of resistance and next time around.Tony: Have there been times when you and your team has made suggestions, and it hasn’t gone the way that was expected because of various reasons.Nicholas: Oh, sure. I mean we, to a certain extent, if you want to do CX, right, it’s an innovation activity. Innovation is researching development and that means that we try stuff, and sometimes the stuff we try doesn’t work. We take a pretty bold approach and so let’s try it- we recently did a project, we said, let’s build out a customer Council for you. We’ve done this very successfully in the past, where we bring in a range of customers to participate there incentivize in various ways to participate in giving us feedback on how that the experience could be better. This the one that we did recently, virtually every piece of recommendation we got from these councils over a period of four months was really either non actionable, or we tried some of them and they failed miserably. Unfortunately, I think if you want to do this right, you have to encourage courage, you have to be brave, and you have to be willing to do things knowing that there is a possibility that they are not going to work out.Tony: Yeah. One of the things I often talk about on this podcast in previous session episode, is how I try to encourage people to- you can listen to someone from a completely different industry from you, and hear some ideas or things that they’re doing in their industry and you can implement it into your industry and make something really unique. I would imagine in some of the situations you’ve been in… You’ve – because of the experiences that you’ve had you’ve been able to go and talk to company, and give them some completely different ideas from anyone else in their industry.Nicholas: Absolutely. That’s a great point and we learn every time we do an engagement, we learn some interesting new tricks that we add to our toolbox. We’ve seen things that have been done in the restaurant industry and other areas that we’ve applied into healthcare successfully. Really vice versa. We recently developed a program for a client where when the client checks out their last touch point, they have an iPod to answer few questions. This is something we developed in the healthcare industry, but we tried it out in a small chain of, of sort of upscale…sort of lodges. we found that it worked very successfully what it was, It was a way for them to quickly in real time, why they were there? Take an iPod, and they gave them a discount on their loan for filling this thing out, which literally took less than a minute. What we found is that about 18% of the people gave them- they have these smiley faces, right, we have the red frowsy face of the worst rating, these were all very iconic. What we’re able to do is that sent off an alert where a CX specialist comes out. Now, if they wouldn’t have done that those people would have been on their way to Trip Advisor and Trip Advisor can make or break a hotel chain. They will were able to intervene, make the people happy. Because it turns out for every person that complains about how bad their experience was, there’s about 330 that were equally mad, but they didn’t bother to tell you, they just went on to a social channel and started blasting you. We did that in healthcare, we applied it to hospitality and it works really well because we were able to intervene and keep these ratings from going up. There’s the thing that we talked about digital deflection, that most organizations have about 30% of their sales opportunities are deflected, because of some comments are some rating that is online. Online ratings for most, especially customer experience sensitive industries are really, really important. Most do 98% of customers begin their journey with what Google calls micro mobile moments. they begin at digitally. If they see battery-they may be looking to get directions to your car live. They know your rating about the way somebody was treated in a diverse them to a different car dealer. They can be-it’s interesting to see how much the impact of bad digital ratings are. Again, yeah, we call it cross-pollination, and it works very well.Tony: Have there been any industries or companies that have approached you for help that has really surprised you? maybe because of their reputation, or just because they did something completely different than you’d ever come across before?Nicholas: Yeah, the problem I have is, we have these NDAs where we’re not even allowed to mention the name of some of our big clients. They see getting help from a consulting firm like us as possibly a brand-damaging – it could be looking like they have a problem. I can’t mention them all by name. I will say, we’ve definitely -I don’t not sure I can mention their name. I will tell you there is one very large company that did approach us because they knew that their reputation was being destroyed, they were being taken out by a new competitor; they just brought in a new president. What was interesting is we decided not to get involved with them because they were trying to check a box and we knew that we could not win with them. Because they were not really interested in committing and I watched them every day their stock every day. I’m not even sure if this large organization makes it. It literally is their lack of commitment to fixing the problem that they have. It’s sad, because it’s totally fixable but for some reason you could- from our two scoping, the sessions could determine that they were not committed,Tony: I get the feeling that this is a really rewarding what you’re doing here of all the different companies and how you are able to kind of turn them around in and then give so many people a better experience that customers, the staff and so on.Nicholas: You know why it is-I mean, it’s hard to do this kind of work and not see the philosophy in it all right and what’s interesting about it is that as I mentioned the overwhelming majority of corporate CEOs think they’re great. When they compare that to what their customers think there is that dysphonia, right, they’re delusional. What I love is that most of the time people that reach out to us are very lucid and they’re already good, I have to say that we have the great honor of almost always working with great organizations, and I think Mayfield Brain and Spine and Cincinnati is a good example, because they were such a great organization and for them to even question how great they were based on their reputation was a little surprising to me, because in the neurology space, they’re rock stars, people fly from all around the world to go to them. What I love is being able to work with great people that want to be superstars and that is really gratifying.Tony: That is so often the case, though, isn’t it in so many different areas in sports entertainment in corporate, the people who are the best, realize that they need more help to get even further, whereas the people down the bottom, just stay fit and they’re doing great.Nicholas: Absolutely. I mean, even in my speaking business every year I’ll hire another speaking coach and a comedy coach, I’ll hire an acting coach, I live at a sustained level of paranoia that I’m not as good as I could be. I think, to get to be really good, where you’re serving customers, you have to be- I think, first of all you have to be really self-aware. I think that’s the cost of the problem. Most of them are not very self-aware. There, I think emotionally able to ask the kind of basic questions about their current state of value, not just in our experience, but the technologies that they bring and it kills them. I mean, look at Go-Pro. Go-pro company that I love and admire a great deal. Everybody wants Go-Pro to put in an audio mic input, that’s just a technological thing. If you Google audio input on Go-Pro, this massive company that could easily fix this, their community is screaming at them, please fix this, we love you, we want to buy from you literally I just watched a video that said that very thing this morning. Here they are on the hero seven, no audio input. You got to be willing to listen to your community of customers act upon reasonable request swiftly and do what Disney has taught us and that is to 10 exit make it 10 times better than what they want. When you can institutionalize that mindset into your business. It’s incredible the amount of prosperity and growth you enjoy.Tony: When we were talking before we started recording, you mentioned about you’ve got a couple more books on the way, Do you want to mention those?Nicholas: Yeah, sure. I think the one that’s in the near earth, it’s probably because that the other ones a little ways album mentioned in both. I have a book that I put a lot of love into and a lot of five. It’s, gosh, it’s been such an exciting thing to work on this project. We live in a time of massive disruption, things are changing quickly. we hear the term disruption all the time. Really, what disruption means is the speed and the depth of innovation. If that’s true, and it is, then we need to be far better innovators, we need to find opportunities to transmute options, innovations into value to our enterprise and to our customers. I wrote a book called “The innovation mandate”, because I believe it is. I believe innovation today is a mandate for every organization, it doesn’t matter if you’re a multinational corporation, or a muffler shop, you absolutely have to have innovation as part of your enterprise DNA. The book is done in the can, as we say, and it’s in its way and to production and it will be available in bookstores worldwide in fall of 2019. Then in the fall of 2020, I have a leadership book that really talks about sort of the dysfunctional archetypes of leaders, and how we can get just a little bit better. The impact of being just a little bit better. The name of the book is “One Step Ahead.” What was fascinating about that book is it turns out if you can be 5% better, as a leader, and as an enterprise, the impact that you can have on the financial dynamics of your enterprise, the way in which you grow and serve customers is incredible. That one is a little bit farther out. The books actually already done and likely, publication date would also be fall 2020.Tony: I could imagine a situation but you said that the book is already written, but it’s not going to be released for another two years.Nicholas: Yeah.Tony: In between now, certainly the next 12 months, you’re probably going to have loads more ideas of how that book could be improved, would not be sort of frustrated in some ways.?Nicholas: Well, the good news is, in fact, after this call, I have a production meeting with Harper Collins, my publisher for the innovation mandate. The beauty is that we’re in production and working that manuscript all the way into late spring, maybe summer. So the good news is, is that a great publisher, like a Harper Collins, they actually take a good book and they make it exceptional, I would be nothing without great editors and great production people, they take my shoe box and turn it into something that’s really good. We get the advantage fact, I’ve already added. I think I’ve added 18,000 words, that I’m going to lay on them today during the meeting  yeah, it’s a great point and it should be evolutionary, right. Tony: Yeah.Nicholas: I think you should also have a format to be able to adapt podcasts that are associated with your book, and we’re launching a podcast for the book and in spring of this year, We’ll always be able to provide updated information.Tony: Fantastic. We’re almost coming to the end. On the subject of exceeding expectations. I mean, do you have any general thoughts on the whole area?Nicholas: Well, I think that at the end of the day, it is not particularly expensive to be awesome. In fact, it’s really profitable to be awesome. The problem is, is that there are two problems. One is that most organizations don’t know what exceptional is, as it relates to their customers expectation, as you may recall in the book. I talked about the baseline level of expectation. Most people think if they know they’re delivering a plate of food at a restaurant at a fair price, then they’re in good shape. That’s not where superstardom lives. Superstardom is where you’re constantly inventing new ways to blow their mind. Not just their mind, you’re blowing the minds of many different types of customers. Some customers are really sensitive about the environment, some it’s all about the food, some of it is all about the atmosphere in the way in which they’re humanly engaged. If we can break down our customers into well-defined love-hate personas, as I talked about it (inaudible) in the book, and deliver beautiful experiences that are not fractional meaning that the pre-touch, the first touch, the core experience, the last touch and the way in which we stay in touch with them. if we can architect that it’s inexpensive to do but the dividends are future readiness, great quality of work life, profitability, and ultimately happy customers that love what we’re delivering.Tony: Well, Nicholas, it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you. If people want to find out more about you and your books and so on, where would they go?Nicholas: Nickwebb.com with two B’s is my speaking site, which is kind of my catch-all site, that’s a good place to reach out. And a specific to customer experience. We also have a website called whatcustomerscrave.com. That provides a little more information about the range of work that we do specific to customer experience.Tony: Okay, well, I’ll put links to all of that in the in the show notes. And I’m sure our listeners are going to get so much, there’s so much value they’re going to get from what up just talking about over the last half hour or so. I’ve really enjoyed having you on Nicholas. I love your book. It’s superb.Nicholas: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.Tony: Hope you enjoyed that interview with Nicholas Webb, and on next week’s episode, we have another author, Jay Baer. He’s done some really good books including talk triggers, which was released a few weeks ago. Hug your haters. I’ve recently read both of those books and then there’s some really good material that he goes over in those books and some angles that you may not have thought about. That’s something to look forward to in next week’s episode. As always, I would love you to leave a review, please go to the iTunes Store and leave a review and subscribe to the podcast. We have the Facebook group, so do join that you can just search for exceeding expectations on Facebook. Right now is a promo for a podcast called the genuine chit chat podcast.Mike: Hi, I’m Mike from the genuine chitchat podcast where we have honest conversations with interesting people. I speak to a wide variety of guests, from travelers to musicians to those afflicted with mental or physical illnesses. There’s really no subject that’s off limits from movies to politics, and even controversial topics ranging from sex to drug reform the political practice. If you still believe in the art of conversation or intrigued by healthy debates with different ideas and perspectives you may not have thought of, and what a podcast where every episode about something different with a variety of guests and this may be the podcast for you. You can hear us on YouTube and all your favorite podcast apps and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. If you want to hang out and listen to honest conversations with interesting people then come to genuine chit chat. Well, I’m your host, Mike Burton.    Tony: Just before we finish once again, we have the Facebook group for exceeding expectations. Do go on there, start some conversations about some points you’ve heard on this episode or for many other episodes. Maybe tell a story about a time when you receive an amazing experience that you didn’t expect. If you want, you can nominate someone that you would like to hear interviewed for this show. If you’ve read a book on customer service, maybe write a book review a book about customer service and over delivering etc. I look forward to speaking with you next week and have a great week.