March 21, 2025 • 32 mins
Dr. Joseph Michelli offers invaluable insights on balancing AI and human interaction in customer experience, drawing from his extensive research and work with renowned brands like Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, and Mercedes-Benz. His expertise in understanding the emotional drivers behind consumer decisions and the importance of self-reflection for business leaders makes this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in enhancing their customer experience strategy.
Excited to share insights from the latest episode of the Delighted Customers podcast featuring Dr. Joseph Michelli, internationally renowned speaker, author, and organizational consultant! Here are three intriguing questions addressed during our conversation:
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How should CEOs approach the incorporation of AI and its intersection with customer experience?
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What are some common missteps companies make when balancing technology and human experience?
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How can businesses effectively leverage both technology and human touch to enhance customer relationships?
Don't miss Dr. Michelli's upcoming book, All Business is Personal available now for pre-order!
Meet Dr. Joseph Michelli
Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D., C.S.P., is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and organizational consultant who transfers his knowledge of exceptional business practices in ways that develop joyful and productive workplaces with a focus on customer experience. His insights encourage leaders and frontline workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives.
Dr. Michelli is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Nielson BookScan, and New York Times' #1 bestselling author. His books include:
• Stronger Through Adversity: World-Class Leaders Share Pandemic-Tested Lessons on Thriving During the Toughest Challenges
• The Airbnb Way: 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth Through Loyalty, Community, and Belonging
• Driven to Delight: Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way
• Leading The Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting
with Your Customer, Your Products, and Your People
• The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire Engage and
WOW
• Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World-Class Customer Experience from UCLA Health System
• The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company
• The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary
• When Fish Fly: Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace co-authored with the owner of the "World- Famous" Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle
• Customer Magic: The Macquarie Way -How to reimagine customer experience to transform your business
Joseph:
• is a Visiting Professor of Service Excellence at Campbellsville University
• is the recipient of the Customer Experience Professional Association’s – Impact on the Customer Experience Profession award
• is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP)
• has been inducted into the Customer Experience Hall of Fame
• has been named one of the Top 5 Customer Experience thought leaders for six consecutive years by Global Gurus
• is on the founders' council of CustomerExperienceOne
• has served on the editorial board member for the Beryl Institute's Patient Experience Journal
• won the Asian Brand Excellence Award
• holds the Certified Speaking Professional (CFP) designation from the National Speakers
Association
• is a member of the Authors Guil
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Okay, well, my guest today on the Delighted customers podcast is Dr.
Joseph Michelli, who is an internationally sought after
speaker, author and organizational consultant. And
I first heard about Dr. Michelli by
reading a book called the Starbucks Experience
many years ago. It was my first introduction, really into
(00:22):
this world of customer experience management before I even entered
into it. And it was a fascinating book, well written, of course. And
since then he has written a number of other books. He
has a real knack for getting inside of a company and
distilling out some of the best practices and serving them up
for people like us business leaders, et cetera,
(00:45):
with a particular emphasis on the customer experience. Now,
let me just give you a couple of examples as we bring him
onto the show. The Starbucks Experience I mentioned. But he's also
written books in the same realm for the Ritz
Carlton, for UCLA Health System, for
Zappos, for Airbnb, and some general
(01:07):
print Mercedes and some general principles around leadership.
Just a brilliant mind. And I am just so honored
and privileged to have you on the show. Welcome, Joseph,
to the show. Well, my mother couldn't have written that better, so thank you, Mark.
I'm very grateful and it's about time because I'm a huge fan of yours and
I'm really excited that the Starbucks Experience didn't turn you away from this
(01:28):
field, because had it done that, we would really be missing out. So I'm really
glad you're to be a part of this today. So kind. Not only that, but
it got me drinking Starbucks, so they're, they're grateful. Well, I'm not responsible for
that. I will not take responsibility for that.
Well, so one of the other things we have in common is
our interest in academia and sharing thoughts and
(01:50):
education about this topic to the next generation of
leaders. I do it at Michigan State University. Tell us a little bit
about what you're doing where you teach. So I
was very involved in wanting to get the next generation even more
options. Michigan State has been the primary one, and it's an extraordinary program.
But there are some folks, I think, maybe a different place in their life
(02:12):
wanting to get this educational opportunity and in customer experience.
So I helped the president of Campbellsville University work with the
Customer Experience Professional association, develop a curriculum
that has been certified all online, much like Michigan State's is that
just avails even more people the opportunity to, I
think, balance out their work experience in CX with academic training
(02:35):
and trying to get the credential that may help them advance their career more
efficiently. Well, they've got someone with a Broad range
of knowledge. Who's helping guide the shift for them as well at
Campbellsville? Hey, I want to share with our audience, if you
don't mind sharing. You've done an incredible amount of research. What
is it that piques your curiosity when it comes to this?
(02:58):
Well, there's so many things, I mean, I think I'm a lifelong learner,
so the more we have happening in the field, the more curious I am.
Clearly now the balance between AI and human
delivery is what is the buzz about it? But it's
not unlike lots of challenges that I've seen over the course of this thing. How
does automation affect it? How does self service affect it? What about those
(03:20):
initial kiosks at the airport? Was anybody going to ever use those
when there were human service providers there? So it's a variation on
a theme, but I think big data does enable us to
see and personalize though I don't think create
personal connections with those that we serve. So that seems to be
the thing that's on my heart and mind now and it' what I write about
(03:42):
in my upcoming book and what I continue to struggle
with as I try to create presentations for audiences.
So today we're going to talk about this, what you alluded to, which is balancing
technology with the human experience, which is where so much
buzz around AI, AI and those of us in the CX
world probably have our antenna up and
(04:04):
have some fears around wondering how it's going to
impact cx. So from your standpoint, maybe we can level
set for the audience a little bit about what we're talking about. When
we talk about balancing technology and the human experience, what are we
talking about? Well, we're going to need both. I mean if you look at
most journeys that clients have with any brand or product, it's
(04:27):
typically a hybrid journey. There are times they're engaging technology
or self service. There are times they're engaging humans. There are
generations coming up that really would rather not have any interaction with
humans. So we hear and certainly so I see though when the
technology doesn't work, suddenly humans do have some relevance to their journey. So I
think even in the pure technology interfaced
(04:48):
brand relationship there are probably some opportunities where you have to
position humans in the stead. And then there are those of us old people
like me who have been raised to expect that there are going to be people
around at every turn and that we should be able to find a person.
When we go onto a website, we should be able to find the 800 and
be able to contact that human being waiting to service. So
(05:09):
the balance is figuring out for your brand and the desired relationship
you have. Dear customers. How do you create something that makes them
want to continue to choose you as opposed to seeing you just as a commodity,
which a lot of pure technology pathways can create? And then on the flip
side, how do you make sure that in a war for talent and
where people are not necessarily clamoring to deliver
(05:32):
service as their primary life purpose, how do you find the right
people, leverage the right technologies, identify who your
target audiences are, create multiple pathways for them
to get their needs met and particularly at high value touch points, ensure that
they have a choice to opt human or opt tech. And
so you see all these surveys about the interest
(05:54):
that CEOs have in this and it seems to be increasing. I'm
not sure. You know, it varies by industry, it varies by organization.
How should CEOs be thinking about
the incorporation of AI and the intersection between that
and customer experience? Well, I'm going to work backwards. I'm going to work for
myself, which is not the way I like to work. But I think in our
(06:16):
profession, a lot of consultants already have a bias for either technology
or for humans. Right. We're pitching, you know, always make sure you have
humans available at the ready. And others are just saying, hey, let's get your tech
stack as advanced as possible and as nimble as possible so you can
absorb human the learning that technology is doing.
I think as much as that may be the case for bias of us in
(06:37):
the consulting space, I think it is a bias within the C suite too. So
you're seeing a lot of people who think the solution for the future is
highly leveraging technology and minimizing the human factor
because it is certainly expensive. And if you can make the right
investments in a hugely expensive technology stack, then
you may be able to offset the longer term expenses of ongoing
(06:59):
payment to human beings. So I think as a leader, you have to first check
your bias. I mean, that's the thing. Are you open to let
the consumer guide you on this journey? And
if you are, if you really do say I'm here to learn,
which way are we going to go? It's going to be based on what the
consumer tells me. Then you have to start looking at what is your product and
(07:19):
service delivery offerings. What do you want your customers to
feel throughout their brand relationship? What's going to
increase the probability of them staying engaged with
you? Is it going to be the cool whiz bang technologies?
And for some brands who, who are high Tech forward. They need
all those technologies because that's what creates the emotional energy
(07:41):
between them and the consumer. For others, it is the humanity of your
brand and making sure that those people show up at the right
time to prove your human value
proposition. So I know it's a long winded answer, but it starts with self reflection
of your own bias. And then it starts to get to what is our brand
trying to achieve and what are we trying to. And how do we position
(08:03):
both humans and technology to enable us to do both?
Yeah, I love that self reflection of your own
bias. Because as much as emotion should
come into any decisions, you want to use as
much logic as possible. And
if you're heavily biased one way or another, you may be missing out on
(08:25):
something. What are some of the missteps that you think companies have
already made or probably will make in making this
journey? Well, first off, it's really inherent in what you just said,
right. The emotional value proposition is a big
misstep. So oftentimes leaders fail to
understand that most of the buying decisions are emotional
(08:46):
and they look at the benefits, attributes of their products or services. They
really try to figure out how do they maximize a spotlight on those benefits and
attributes and not understand the emotional decision making. That's
because as consumers we aren't aware of how much emotions
actually drive it. And when asked by some smart savvy
marketer, why did we buy X, Y or Z, we go to our
(09:08):
rationalization and our frontal lobes kick in and we describe all the
reasons, good reasons we bought it, not we wouldn't make any
emotionally rational decisions. Right. We're making it based on
saying cogent things and we can justify that to the cows come home. So for
me, the first thing is to truly understand that if you're using
technology or people to execute, you still have to
(09:30):
figure out what is the emotional drivers so that you can
maximize the degree to which your technology can leverage
those things. It's harder. Or you can get your people to try to
engage those elements, which is easier if
you have the right people. Because people can also really let
down that emotional value proposition in a huge way,
(09:51):
whereas technology at its worst just frustrates customers. So
I think there is a, there's this awareness factor that comes
into understanding emotional value. That is the biggest misstep of
all. Yeah, I think to double tap
on that, I just went through an experience with a technology
company yesterday and I'll leave the name
(10:13):
out for now because it's not as important as what happened
and maybe as it's relevant to what you just shared. So
they're a tool that can help with
podcast and other video training production.
And there is no
real way to speak to a human without buying the Super Duper
(10:36):
premium subscription. Now, I had just purchased this, so
I'm within the first week. And the first thing was to finger
point at the computer, my computer. And then the second piece
was working through some troubleshooting. And then at the end, when they couldn't resolve it,
they said, well, I'll get you in touch with our second level, which is
what asked for right away, but it will take one to two business days.
(10:59):
So I was trying to meet a deadline. I had something, I was trying to
get out and like two business days to get an answer on whether or not
your software will work on my computer. And I had already called Apple
and they said, you're fine. It's not us. It is
not okay. And I gave him the analogy. And maybe this,
maybe you can respond to this. For me, it was like,
(11:20):
okay, I just went shopping for a new car, went
to the dealership, picked out the car, signed the paperwork for the car,
got the keys and went to drive off the lot and the car
stalled and I couldn't get it started back up. I said, so
do you think one to two days would be a good turnaround for me to
get this thing fixed? How would you respond to that? Well, and
(11:42):
just the immense amount of work you had to do to call Apple and do
all these other things and troubleshoot your computer. I mean, it's ridiculous. Yeah. I'm going
to go with the car analogy. Having worked with Mercedes, I'll give you real
specifics of what I think happens in this space. We have humans who
don't necessarily know how to execute, or we tell them how to execute, but they
really don't get it. We haven't made an emotional appeal to them to get
(12:04):
it. I'll use Mercedes as an example. For the
longest time, we would go and talk about empathy to salespeople at
Mercedes dealerships and having more empathy for the customers
because we were getting JD Power scores that showed that customers didn't feel like the
salesperson really understood them or sometimes was judgmental toward
them. And we would do all this empathy training only to
(12:26):
realize that something on the order of 85% of the
people who sell Mercedes vehicles have never driven a Mercedes
beyond just test drives and certainly don't own one. And maybe
owning a Honda Civic over that. They park in the back lot that nobody can
see. And when they see Somebody come in and get a first
car for their kid for $140,000 in an S class and a 16
(12:48):
year old and you tell them be empathetic to this person, they're
rolling their eyes in not only the empathy training, but when that 16
year old takes the keys to $160,000 vehicle. So yeah,
we really went to a program called Drive a Star Home and we let them
drive the car more. And people started to appreciate that the dimensions of it that
make it wonderful are the safety features, the maneuverability. There's
(13:10):
a lot of reasons that you might want your 16 year old to be in
one if you were in the financial situation where you could do that.
That notwithstanding, we also had the other problem, which was this is a brand that
we tried to sell as Incredible Advanced Techn. For goodness sake, we're
the ones who created the automobile. So says Staimler. Right.
But then we weren't using technology in the sales process, so we
(13:32):
weren't using an iPad to show features that could not be demoed in a
test drive. We were leaving such value of the technology
on the table and we weren't using our technology to be able
to show these features visually to people in the sales
floor. And my point, I think here is that you have to
use the technology, you have to use the humans, but you have to understand
(13:54):
what is getting in the way of you delivering what people
need. So yes, you need to have a chatbot, you need to have chat
technology, but as soon as that doesn't work, you better have people
who have the skills to problem solve and
communicate effectively. And then leaving
the customer in a lurch. In a business process
(14:16):
calculation that says blame the customer, have the customer do
the work. If worse comes to worse, say something vaguely
helpful, but that's really not where it goes. And
unfortunately many brands are just there. There's so many human
experiences like what you're describing. The technology didn't get you there and the
humans didn't get you there and you're, you're doing all the work. Yeah. And to
(14:38):
me it seems like, you know, maybe hard to capture
the amount of churn that's related to this. Like on some
of the reporting, it may not be as visible. So you may be
losing business that you're not even aware of due to
something like this. You're absolutely right. Churn
calculations are easy in some industries and not so easy in
(14:59):
others. You know, like in the automotive industry. When am I going to buy a
car again? It's going to be years from now, so did I buy from the
same dealer? Did I buy the same brand? That churn is a huge
delay now. Maybe I can see it in. Did we transfer over
into the service department and are they continuing to receive service from us? And
if they do, that increases the probability they'll buy from us again. We can do
(15:20):
some inferential stuff, but I think we underestimate
how bad service churns out. And there's plenty of data that is
starkly frightening if you look at bad service experiences
in turn. But I still think we're missing a lot of the people who don't
even. There's no way we can know that they left us.
Yeah. So there's real risk, there's real business risk associated
(15:43):
with not getting this balance right and leaning into
our biases too much. Let's, let's
offer the audience, the listeners, some help here. What are some strategies
or some ways that we should think about balancing that
we could put into place? We're trying to balance technology and
customer experience. Simple repetitive tasks. Give me some
(16:05):
technology that I can self serve so I don't have to reach out to a
human being. I don't want to. As my first line of scope solution. If you
have a complex task, make sure you have humans ready to
backfill beyond whatever the technology is providing.
Make sure there are humans who are well trained to use the technology.
Spend time with humans, helping them see how that technology
(16:27):
is an enabler, not a competitor. A lot of people frightened
these days that their jobs are going to be taken away by all of this
technology. And some of them may be. And I would certainly think every
one of us has to think about what do we do uniquely different and how
do we build our skill sets up so that technology is. It's going to have
a harder time replacing us. Right. But we're all at
(16:48):
some risk and peril there. But help our people see that the tools that we
have selected for them enable them to be more effective at their
job. You know, there is already some evidence right now in the chat
GPT world that people are actually atrophying some
of their own skill sets because instead of doing the things that they know
how to do, they take the shortcut and, you know, just starts to
(17:10):
erode some of that. The other piece of this that
I think is important to realize is that all this technology
is great and fine, but we're hearing more and more people say that the technology
is interfering with their social relationships, it's decreasing their social
skills. I would say another key Step is that when you hire people
today, don't assume that they have the level of
(17:32):
sophistication of social skills as we might have before the pandemic, and
be ready to provide some of those supplemental skills on how to communicate
effectively, how to actively listen, how to do the
things that human beings can do to show great and authentic
gratitude to every single person you have the chance to interact with.
Because technology just can't do it. I've never felt that any
(17:54):
piece of technology has really cared about me. I think it cares
fundamentally for me in the sense of transactional
effectiveness, but doesn't care about me. A human can
demonstrate that you matter. And I think those are all things that we need to
think about in the way we structure our various options, be
they technological or human. Have you
(18:15):
seen any really good applications of the
use of technology in general or AI specifically
to both help the organization and improve the
customer experience? I mean, yes and no. I mean, in pockets,
you know, if you look at some of the, like, I
work a lot in food service, for example. I think the technology
(18:38):
that enables us to order, particularly for a younger demo,
using kiosks in restaurants right now is pretty well
received by consumers. There's certainly an increasing use of
them among younger demographics. They would prefer to build their own,
do all that stuff, not have to deal with a person in the ordering queue.
And then the key is, how is that handoff done by the
(19:01):
person? Because we're, you know, there are a few fully, I would say,
semi autonomous restaurants where the robots are also bringing out your
food and you're having minimal human contact. But for those of
us who still are going to these restaurants and we're ordering on
the kiosk, normally there's a human who does the handoff. So brands that
train well on that, I think are showing some
(19:23):
signs of your main job is just to hand this over, you know, put it
together and hand it over. The hand it over is big. And so I think
you're seeing some, some of that happening in a few brands. But I won't name
them because as soon as I do, you'll get 50 complaints of somebody who didn't
have it work well. And I noticed I'm doing
some work right now with a hospital system in New England
(19:45):
and patient care. And so I'm wondering, I know you did a lot of
work with UCLA and even wrote a book about it. What, what
do you think the application might be in the healthcare world?
And what do you think needs to stay human? Well, thank
you for throwing A softball over the plate, whether you meant to or not. So
my new book is called All Businesses Personal
(20:08):
and it is about Amazon health service company called
One Medical. So the leaders over at ucla, one of which
the chief operating officer went to Stanford for a while and then he ended up
over at One Medical as the CEO. So I've consulted for them at
ucla. I consulted for him over at One Medical. One Medical was an
early innovator medtech company born out of the
(20:30):
Silicon Valley. And they were developing apps early on to say
you don't need to call in to schedule your doctor's appointment, you can do it
on your app. You should not have to call in ever. We'll do the doctor's
appointment. Well, let's look at all the other pain points that have always been in
health care, in primary care delivery, and let's remove them both for the
provider and for the fourth
patient, the patient or member in their case, because they and ultimately
(20:53):
charged a membership fee just to have the use of the app and greater ease
of access to pay your insurance and your insurance has to pay for the visit.
So it's not like your membership fee is true concierge medicine. It's just giving
you the ease of use of these, these technologies. But they remove
things like, you know, having to wait in the waiting room and then, you know,
sit and wait in an exam room. They have your provider come out to pick
(21:15):
you up in the waiting room and walk you back. They, they've decided that,
you know, you don't have to weigh in every time unless that's a relevant issue
for you. So they kind of take away some of these pain points. They're on
time 97% of the time. They're seeing you within three minutes. Like all of these
variables are both a function of the app and a function
of the way the human service provider is trained. So I
(21:37):
think that book, which I tend not to pitch my books too much because if
you do go ahead and go to the library, I don't care that you buy
the book. But I think the beauty of this particular thing, this all
businesses personal book, is it really does show how those two things
coexist together. Well, really quality, you
know, providers of care and technology that enables those
(21:57):
providers to do their job. So those providers are also having a great
medical record that they can use easily. They're using AI,
you know, with the permission of their patients to be able to
capture information during the visits so that that
physician or physician's assistant or whoever is working with you isn't in
their pajamas at night trying to get their notes caught up,
(22:20):
causing more and more of them to defect from, from the
career of primary care. Yeah. And I
know that, you know, whether it's doctors, nurses, there's a lot of burnout
that exists now and churn and maybe leaving one place for another
in hopes of a better, finer pasture. And that's very
expensive to healthcare organizations, right? Yeah.
(22:41):
Recruitment is incredibly expensive and by the time you've trained them up
and then they've churned out to somewhere else and you're going back through that cycle,
it is, it's wicked. And there's real humans waiting to be cared for
in that scenario. You know, it's not as though you have a trainee that
could fill into a position if somebody falls out. You're. You've got
patients who've developed a relationship with somebody that now have to deal with the churn
(23:04):
as well. Well, I can't think of a, you know, a customer experience in this
case, maybe patient experience. We're more aware of and sensitive about what's
going on when it comes to our, our own health. And that was a great
illustration. A double tap. I like to pull out gems when our guest
shares them on the show. And what a great illust finding
the things that customers would rather
(23:25):
have automated and digital and
double click on those and keeping those
things that need to be human. Human, absolutely.
And you know, I think the future for that brand is going to be interesting
because Amazon's strength is in its ability to create all those operational
efficiencies and leverage technology and manage products, mostly
(23:46):
products or cloud based services. They're not, I mean Whole Foods
is probably their other acquisition that is highly human interact. But even
that's a lot about supply chain. This is really the predominant service is
a provider to a patient and the technology
enables it. And clearly we do a lot of virtual care now and that'll
happen in the pandemic that was happening for one medical in advance of the pandemic.
(24:08):
But even that there are times we need to go in and see
somebody and we need to make sure that the Amazon
approach, which is super strong in the tech, doesn't overshadow now
the human piece, which is culturally part of what one medical has
always been. Yeah. So if you're listening,
there's some words of wisdom there. I just heard about how to balance
(24:31):
attack and it goes back to what you said at the
top, which is about be aware of your own biases
when thinking about these things. And I think just remember the Difference between
personalization and personal. Technology can help you with personalization because it
has huge data and it knows it. I remember early working with Starbucks because we
had such a captive database in the loyalty program. We would know a
(24:54):
lot about your purchase behavior because you're probably using, you know,
loyalty recognition. What would end up happening is we could target you
with if you're drinking non fat lattes, we're not going to send you the most
caloric messages about new products that are coming out that are highly caloric. Maybe
once in a while we'll sample one of those just to see if you catch
a flyer. But for the most part, we're not going to bomb you with messages
like that as opposed to messages that are consistent with your purchase patterns.
(25:16):
That's personalization and messaging. It's not personal.
Personal is when you come in and I say, mark, it's good to see you
today. Thanks for coming back to Starbucks. How's the kids? What's going
on? When are you traveling again? That's personal. And I think helping us to
realize that we need to leverage technology for personalization, but
we also need to have humans who take a personal interest in Mark.
(25:40):
It's a great point. Personalizations versus personal.
Yeah. Might we get a taste of that in the new
book? I hope so. Or else. I wrote a few chapters
that are. Totally worthless, 100% on board
with that. That is such a critical point. And
I think that's the lens that leaders should be thinking through
(26:02):
when they're designing experiences for their customers.
Yeah. And I think that's the key is designing. Right. A lot of
experiences happen by default. They just have been that way all
along. We may iterate them, we keep iterating them. And before, you know, I
liken it to just adding rooms to a trailer. I mean you can keep adding
rooms there, but sometimes you can't even get from one place to the other. And
(26:23):
so the design sometimes really means blowing up what you have and what
has always been because what is optimized for your current customer
is something fundamentally different because customer preferences have changed
or your consumer base has shifted. So really knowing what your
customers value, where they spend their time, what they're looking for from you,
where they find friction in your current experiences, that all enables you to
(26:46):
really use design principles to solve real human
problems. Excellent stuff. Really ton of gems here. It is,
unfortunately, time for us to land the plane. But before we do, let
me ask you the same question I asked my guests at the
end of the show, which is what delights you as a customer. I'm
delighted when people actually give a damn. And I mean that
(27:08):
in a forceful way. There is a fundamental difference between
treating me as a transaction and really caring that I
succeed. And I know the difference. And we all know the difference. There
are people who are just doing what is needed to check
the box that they fulfilled the transaction expectation. And there are
other people that care. I'll give you the simplest example. At Zappos
(27:31):
we used to do this. We used to say to people,
look, I know you haven't returned the shoes yet and you
have, you know, you said you were going to get them to us last week.
I'll tell you what, I'm still going to give you a credit for the shoes
because I know you're going to send them back. People were
just amazed that we cared enough to give them that assumption. Now we can
(27:52):
go back and credit, you know, charge our credit card again if they never ever
sent them. We always have that. But we extended a trust to human
beings that that person doesn't always think they deserved. And people
tended to live into that trust. And I love when people
instill trust me and try their
dangest to make sure that I get what I need before they leave
me. Unlike your example earlier.
(28:15):
Yeah, what a great story. Imagine that. Just. Just care
about me. Just show me that you care. Yeah,
great. I know you're closing, but a quick other example from
Zappos is that if we do not see, if we do not have your
product in our inventory, we were trained, at least we trained the
teams to be able to say, let me go onto our competitors website, see if
(28:37):
they have it and then I'll direct you to them and we'll send you a
bounce back coupon that says sorry, we didn't have what you had today. And the
redemption rate on that was like 70%, which is much higher than any bounce back
coupon. So why would I go into my refrigerator, take the milk out,
determine it's spoiled and put it back in for another day to drink? That's kind
of the way it is. We failed you in terms of not having your product,
(28:59):
but you still come back to us because why we cared more about your success
than we cared about our sale today. Yeah,
great story. Zappos did and does
it well? Yeah, I think so. I hope so. Well,
thank you so much for being a guest on the show. Dr.
Joseph Micelle. Dr. Joseph, how might
(29:21):
folks best get a hold of you? I'm mercilessly everywhere in the
Internet under my name, just JosephMichelli.com
JosephMichelli on LinkedIn yeah, if you know how to spell it,
you'll find me. Yeah. And
the book when is All Businesses personal available?
It's May 13th, but it's order. You can order immediately. Like it's
(29:43):
available for pre ordering right now and it'll get to you as soon as it
comes out. Excellent, excellent. Dr. Joseph
Micelli, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it.
Okay, well, my guest today on the Delighted customers podcast is Dr.
Joseph Michelli, who is an internationally sought after
speaker, author and organizational consultant. And
I first heard about Dr. Michelli by
reading a book called the Starbucks Experience
many years ago. It was my first introduction, really into
(00:22):
this world of customer experience management before I even entered
into it. And it was a fascinating book, well written, of course. And
since then he has written a number of other books. He
has a real knack for getting inside of a company and
distilling out some of the best practices and serving them up
for people like us business leaders, et cetera,
(00:45):
with a particular emphasis on the customer experience. Now,
let me just give you a couple of examples as we bring him
onto the show. The Starbucks Experience I mentioned. But he's also
written books in the same realm for the Ritz
Carlton, for UCLA Health System, for
Zappos, for Airbnb, and some general
(01:07):
print Mercedes and some general principles around leadership.
Just a brilliant mind. And I am just so honored
and privileged to have you on the show. Welcome, Joseph,
to the show. Well, my mother couldn't have written that better, so thank you, Mark.
I'm very grateful and it's about time because I'm a huge fan of yours and
I'm really excited that the Starbucks Experience didn't turn you away from this
(01:28):
field, because had it done that, we would really be missing out. So I'm really
glad you're to be a part of this today. So kind. Not only that, but
it got me drinking Starbucks, so they're, they're grateful. Well, I'm not responsible for
that. I will not take responsibility for that.
Well, so one of the other things we have in common is
our interest in academia and sharing thoughts and
(01:50):
education about this topic to the next generation of
leaders. I do it at Michigan State University. Tell us a little bit
about what you're doing where you teach. So I
was very involved in wanting to get the next generation even more
options. Michigan State has been the primary one, and it's an extraordinary program.
But there are some folks, I think, maybe a different place in their life
(02:12):
wanting to get this educational opportunity and in customer experience.
So I helped the president of Campbellsville University work with the
Customer Experience Professional association, develop a curriculum
that has been certified all online, much like Michigan State's is that
just avails even more people the opportunity to, I
think, balance out their work experience in CX with academic training
(02:35):
and trying to get the credential that may help them advance their career more
efficiently. Well, they've got someone with a Broad range
of knowledge. Who's helping guide the shift for them as well at
Campbellsville? Hey, I want to share with our audience, if you
don't mind sharing. You've done an incredible amount of research. What
is it that piques your curiosity when it comes to this?
(02:58):
Well, there's so many things, I mean, I think I'm a lifelong learner,
so the more we have happening in the field, the more curious I am.
Clearly now the balance between AI and human
delivery is what is the buzz about it? But it's
not unlike lots of challenges that I've seen over the course of this thing. How
does automation affect it? How does self service affect it? What about those
(03:20):
initial kiosks at the airport? Was anybody going to ever use those
when there were human service providers there? So it's a variation on
a theme, but I think big data does enable us to
see and personalize though I don't think create
personal connections with those that we serve. So that seems to be
the thing that's on my heart and mind now and it' what I write about
(03:42):
in my upcoming book and what I continue to struggle
with as I try to create presentations for audiences.
So today we're going to talk about this, what you alluded to, which is balancing
technology with the human experience, which is where so much
buzz around AI, AI and those of us in the CX
world probably have our antenna up and
(04:04):
have some fears around wondering how it's going to
impact cx. So from your standpoint, maybe we can level
set for the audience a little bit about what we're talking about. When
we talk about balancing technology and the human experience, what are we
talking about? Well, we're going to need both. I mean if you look at
most journeys that clients have with any brand or product, it's
(04:27):
typically a hybrid journey. There are times they're engaging technology
or self service. There are times they're engaging humans. There are
generations coming up that really would rather not have any interaction with
humans. So we hear and certainly so I see though when the
technology doesn't work, suddenly humans do have some relevance to their journey. So I
think even in the pure technology interfaced
(04:48):
brand relationship there are probably some opportunities where you have to
position humans in the stead. And then there are those of us old people
like me who have been raised to expect that there are going to be people
around at every turn and that we should be able to find a person.
When we go onto a website, we should be able to find the 800 and
be able to contact that human being waiting to service. So
(05:09):
the balance is figuring out for your brand and the desired relationship
you have. Dear customers. How do you create something that makes them
want to continue to choose you as opposed to seeing you just as a commodity,
which a lot of pure technology pathways can create? And then on the flip
side, how do you make sure that in a war for talent and
where people are not necessarily clamoring to deliver
(05:32):
service as their primary life purpose, how do you find the right
people, leverage the right technologies, identify who your
target audiences are, create multiple pathways for them
to get their needs met and particularly at high value touch points, ensure that
they have a choice to opt human or opt tech. And
so you see all these surveys about the interest
(05:54):
that CEOs have in this and it seems to be increasing. I'm
not sure. You know, it varies by industry, it varies by organization.
How should CEOs be thinking about
the incorporation of AI and the intersection between that
and customer experience? Well, I'm going to work backwards. I'm going to work for
myself, which is not the way I like to work. But I think in our
(06:16):
profession, a lot of consultants already have a bias for either technology
or for humans. Right. We're pitching, you know, always make sure you have
humans available at the ready. And others are just saying, hey, let's get your tech
stack as advanced as possible and as nimble as possible so you can
absorb human the learning that technology is doing.
I think as much as that may be the case for bias of us in
(06:37):
the consulting space, I think it is a bias within the C suite too. So
you're seeing a lot of people who think the solution for the future is
highly leveraging technology and minimizing the human factor
because it is certainly expensive. And if you can make the right
investments in a hugely expensive technology stack, then
you may be able to offset the longer term expenses of ongoing
(06:59):
payment to human beings. So I think as a leader, you have to first check
your bias. I mean, that's the thing. Are you open to let
the consumer guide you on this journey? And
if you are, if you really do say I'm here to learn,
which way are we going to go? It's going to be based on what the
consumer tells me. Then you have to start looking at what is your product and
(07:19):
service delivery offerings. What do you want your customers to
feel throughout their brand relationship? What's going to
increase the probability of them staying engaged with
you? Is it going to be the cool whiz bang technologies?
And for some brands who, who are high Tech forward. They need
all those technologies because that's what creates the emotional energy
(07:41):
between them and the consumer. For others, it is the humanity of your
brand and making sure that those people show up at the right
time to prove your human value
proposition. So I know it's a long winded answer, but it starts with self reflection
of your own bias. And then it starts to get to what is our brand
trying to achieve and what are we trying to. And how do we position
(08:03):
both humans and technology to enable us to do both?
Yeah, I love that self reflection of your own
bias. Because as much as emotion should
come into any decisions, you want to use as
much logic as possible. And
if you're heavily biased one way or another, you may be missing out on
(08:25):
something. What are some of the missteps that you think companies have
already made or probably will make in making this
journey? Well, first off, it's really inherent in what you just said,
right. The emotional value proposition is a big
misstep. So oftentimes leaders fail to
understand that most of the buying decisions are emotional
(08:46):
and they look at the benefits, attributes of their products or services. They
really try to figure out how do they maximize a spotlight on those benefits and
attributes and not understand the emotional decision making. That's
because as consumers we aren't aware of how much emotions
actually drive it. And when asked by some smart savvy
marketer, why did we buy X, Y or Z, we go to our
(09:08):
rationalization and our frontal lobes kick in and we describe all the
reasons, good reasons we bought it, not we wouldn't make any
emotionally rational decisions. Right. We're making it based on
saying cogent things and we can justify that to the cows come home. So for
me, the first thing is to truly understand that if you're using
technology or people to execute, you still have to
(09:30):
figure out what is the emotional drivers so that you can
maximize the degree to which your technology can leverage
those things. It's harder. Or you can get your people to try to
engage those elements, which is easier if
you have the right people. Because people can also really let
down that emotional value proposition in a huge way,
(09:51):
whereas technology at its worst just frustrates customers. So
I think there is a, there's this awareness factor that comes
into understanding emotional value. That is the biggest misstep of
all. Yeah, I think to double tap
on that, I just went through an experience with a technology
company yesterday and I'll leave the name
(10:13):
out for now because it's not as important as what happened
and maybe as it's relevant to what you just shared. So
they're a tool that can help with
podcast and other video training production.
And there is no
real way to speak to a human without buying the Super Duper
(10:36):
premium subscription. Now, I had just purchased this, so
I'm within the first week. And the first thing was to finger
point at the computer, my computer. And then the second piece
was working through some troubleshooting. And then at the end, when they couldn't resolve it,
they said, well, I'll get you in touch with our second level, which is
what asked for right away, but it will take one to two business days.
(10:59):
So I was trying to meet a deadline. I had something, I was trying to
get out and like two business days to get an answer on whether or not
your software will work on my computer. And I had already called Apple
and they said, you're fine. It's not us. It is
not okay. And I gave him the analogy. And maybe this,
maybe you can respond to this. For me, it was like,
(11:20):
okay, I just went shopping for a new car, went
to the dealership, picked out the car, signed the paperwork for the car,
got the keys and went to drive off the lot and the car
stalled and I couldn't get it started back up. I said, so
do you think one to two days would be a good turnaround for me to
get this thing fixed? How would you respond to that? Well, and
(11:42):
just the immense amount of work you had to do to call Apple and do
all these other things and troubleshoot your computer. I mean, it's ridiculous. Yeah. I'm going
to go with the car analogy. Having worked with Mercedes, I'll give you real
specifics of what I think happens in this space. We have humans who
don't necessarily know how to execute, or we tell them how to execute, but they
really don't get it. We haven't made an emotional appeal to them to get
(12:04):
it. I'll use Mercedes as an example. For the
longest time, we would go and talk about empathy to salespeople at
Mercedes dealerships and having more empathy for the customers
because we were getting JD Power scores that showed that customers didn't feel like the
salesperson really understood them or sometimes was judgmental toward
them. And we would do all this empathy training only to
(12:26):
realize that something on the order of 85% of the
people who sell Mercedes vehicles have never driven a Mercedes
beyond just test drives and certainly don't own one. And maybe
owning a Honda Civic over that. They park in the back lot that nobody can
see. And when they see Somebody come in and get a first
car for their kid for $140,000 in an S class and a 16
(12:48):
year old and you tell them be empathetic to this person, they're
rolling their eyes in not only the empathy training, but when that 16
year old takes the keys to $160,000 vehicle. So yeah,
we really went to a program called Drive a Star Home and we let them
drive the car more. And people started to appreciate that the dimensions of it that
make it wonderful are the safety features, the maneuverability. There's
(13:10):
a lot of reasons that you might want your 16 year old to be in
one if you were in the financial situation where you could do that.
That notwithstanding, we also had the other problem, which was this is a brand that
we tried to sell as Incredible Advanced Techn. For goodness sake, we're
the ones who created the automobile. So says Staimler. Right.
But then we weren't using technology in the sales process, so we
(13:32):
weren't using an iPad to show features that could not be demoed in a
test drive. We were leaving such value of the technology
on the table and we weren't using our technology to be able
to show these features visually to people in the sales
floor. And my point, I think here is that you have to
use the technology, you have to use the humans, but you have to understand
(13:54):
what is getting in the way of you delivering what people
need. So yes, you need to have a chatbot, you need to have chat
technology, but as soon as that doesn't work, you better have people
who have the skills to problem solve and
communicate effectively. And then leaving
the customer in a lurch. In a business process
(14:16):
calculation that says blame the customer, have the customer do
the work. If worse comes to worse, say something vaguely
helpful, but that's really not where it goes. And
unfortunately many brands are just there. There's so many human
experiences like what you're describing. The technology didn't get you there and the
humans didn't get you there and you're, you're doing all the work. Yeah. And to
(14:38):
me it seems like, you know, maybe hard to capture
the amount of churn that's related to this. Like on some
of the reporting, it may not be as visible. So you may be
losing business that you're not even aware of due to
something like this. You're absolutely right. Churn
calculations are easy in some industries and not so easy in
(14:59):
others. You know, like in the automotive industry. When am I going to buy a
car again? It's going to be years from now, so did I buy from the
same dealer? Did I buy the same brand? That churn is a huge
delay now. Maybe I can see it in. Did we transfer over
into the service department and are they continuing to receive service from us? And
if they do, that increases the probability they'll buy from us again. We can do
(15:20):
some inferential stuff, but I think we underestimate
how bad service churns out. And there's plenty of data that is
starkly frightening if you look at bad service experiences
in turn. But I still think we're missing a lot of the people who don't
even. There's no way we can know that they left us.
Yeah. So there's real risk, there's real business risk associated
(15:43):
with not getting this balance right and leaning into
our biases too much. Let's, let's
offer the audience, the listeners, some help here. What are some strategies
or some ways that we should think about balancing that
we could put into place? We're trying to balance technology and
customer experience. Simple repetitive tasks. Give me some
(16:05):
technology that I can self serve so I don't have to reach out to a
human being. I don't want to. As my first line of scope solution. If you
have a complex task, make sure you have humans ready to
backfill beyond whatever the technology is providing.
Make sure there are humans who are well trained to use the technology.
Spend time with humans, helping them see how that technology
(16:27):
is an enabler, not a competitor. A lot of people frightened
these days that their jobs are going to be taken away by all of this
technology. And some of them may be. And I would certainly think every
one of us has to think about what do we do uniquely different and how
do we build our skill sets up so that technology is. It's going to have
a harder time replacing us. Right. But we're all at
(16:48):
some risk and peril there. But help our people see that the tools that we
have selected for them enable them to be more effective at their
job. You know, there is already some evidence right now in the chat
GPT world that people are actually atrophying some
of their own skill sets because instead of doing the things that they know
how to do, they take the shortcut and, you know, just starts to
(17:10):
erode some of that. The other piece of this that
I think is important to realize is that all this technology
is great and fine, but we're hearing more and more people say that the technology
is interfering with their social relationships, it's decreasing their social
skills. I would say another key Step is that when you hire people
today, don't assume that they have the level of
(17:32):
sophistication of social skills as we might have before the pandemic, and
be ready to provide some of those supplemental skills on how to communicate
effectively, how to actively listen, how to do the
things that human beings can do to show great and authentic
gratitude to every single person you have the chance to interact with.
Because technology just can't do it. I've never felt that any
(17:54):
piece of technology has really cared about me. I think it cares
fundamentally for me in the sense of transactional
effectiveness, but doesn't care about me. A human can
demonstrate that you matter. And I think those are all things that we need to
think about in the way we structure our various options, be
they technological or human. Have you
(18:15):
seen any really good applications of the
use of technology in general or AI specifically
to both help the organization and improve the
customer experience? I mean, yes and no. I mean, in pockets,
you know, if you look at some of the, like, I
work a lot in food service, for example. I think the technology
(18:38):
that enables us to order, particularly for a younger demo,
using kiosks in restaurants right now is pretty well
received by consumers. There's certainly an increasing use of
them among younger demographics. They would prefer to build their own,
do all that stuff, not have to deal with a person in the ordering queue.
And then the key is, how is that handoff done by the
(19:01):
person? Because we're, you know, there are a few fully, I would say,
semi autonomous restaurants where the robots are also bringing out your
food and you're having minimal human contact. But for those of
us who still are going to these restaurants and we're ordering on
the kiosk, normally there's a human who does the handoff. So brands that
train well on that, I think are showing some
(19:23):
signs of your main job is just to hand this over, you know, put it
together and hand it over. The hand it over is big. And so I think
you're seeing some, some of that happening in a few brands. But I won't name
them because as soon as I do, you'll get 50 complaints of somebody who didn't
have it work well. And I noticed I'm doing
some work right now with a hospital system in New England
(19:45):
and patient care. And so I'm wondering, I know you did a lot of
work with UCLA and even wrote a book about it. What, what
do you think the application might be in the healthcare world?
And what do you think needs to stay human? Well, thank
you for throwing A softball over the plate, whether you meant to or not. So
my new book is called All Businesses Personal
(20:08):
and it is about Amazon health service company called
One Medical. So the leaders over at ucla, one of which
the chief operating officer went to Stanford for a while and then he ended up
over at One Medical as the CEO. So I've consulted for them at
ucla. I consulted for him over at One Medical. One Medical was an
early innovator medtech company born out of the
(20:30):
Silicon Valley. And they were developing apps early on to say
you don't need to call in to schedule your doctor's appointment, you can do it
on your app. You should not have to call in ever. We'll do the doctor's
appointment. Well, let's look at all the other pain points that have always been in
health care, in primary care delivery, and let's remove them both for the
provider and for the fourth
patient, the patient or member in their case, because they and ultimately
(20:53):
charged a membership fee just to have the use of the app and greater ease
of access to pay your insurance and your insurance has to pay for the visit.
So it's not like your membership fee is true concierge medicine. It's just giving
you the ease of use of these, these technologies. But they remove
things like, you know, having to wait in the waiting room and then, you know,
sit and wait in an exam room. They have your provider come out to pick
(21:15):
you up in the waiting room and walk you back. They, they've decided that,
you know, you don't have to weigh in every time unless that's a relevant issue
for you. So they kind of take away some of these pain points. They're on
time 97% of the time. They're seeing you within three minutes. Like all of these
variables are both a function of the app and a function
of the way the human service provider is trained. So I
(21:37):
think that book, which I tend not to pitch my books too much because if
you do go ahead and go to the library, I don't care that you buy
the book. But I think the beauty of this particular thing, this all
businesses personal book, is it really does show how those two things
coexist together. Well, really quality, you
know, providers of care and technology that enables those
(21:57):
providers to do their job. So those providers are also having a great
medical record that they can use easily. They're using AI,
you know, with the permission of their patients to be able to
capture information during the visits so that that
physician or physician's assistant or whoever is working with you isn't in
their pajamas at night trying to get their notes caught up,
(22:20):
causing more and more of them to defect from, from the
career of primary care. Yeah. And I
know that, you know, whether it's doctors, nurses, there's a lot of burnout
that exists now and churn and maybe leaving one place for another
in hopes of a better, finer pasture. And that's very
expensive to healthcare organizations, right? Yeah.
(22:41):
Recruitment is incredibly expensive and by the time you've trained them up
and then they've churned out to somewhere else and you're going back through that cycle,
it is, it's wicked. And there's real humans waiting to be cared for
in that scenario. You know, it's not as though you have a trainee that
could fill into a position if somebody falls out. You're. You've got
patients who've developed a relationship with somebody that now have to deal with the churn
(23:04):
as well. Well, I can't think of a, you know, a customer experience in this
case, maybe patient experience. We're more aware of and sensitive about what's
going on when it comes to our, our own health. And that was a great
illustration. A double tap. I like to pull out gems when our guest
shares them on the show. And what a great illust finding
the things that customers would rather
(23:25):
have automated and digital and
double click on those and keeping those
things that need to be human. Human, absolutely.
And you know, I think the future for that brand is going to be interesting
because Amazon's strength is in its ability to create all those operational
efficiencies and leverage technology and manage products, mostly
(23:46):
products or cloud based services. They're not, I mean Whole Foods
is probably their other acquisition that is highly human interact. But even
that's a lot about supply chain. This is really the predominant service is
a provider to a patient and the technology
enables it. And clearly we do a lot of virtual care now and that'll
happen in the pandemic that was happening for one medical in advance of the pandemic.
(24:08):
But even that there are times we need to go in and see
somebody and we need to make sure that the Amazon
approach, which is super strong in the tech, doesn't overshadow now
the human piece, which is culturally part of what one medical has
always been. Yeah. So if you're listening,
there's some words of wisdom there. I just heard about how to balance
(24:31):
attack and it goes back to what you said at the
top, which is about be aware of your own biases
when thinking about these things. And I think just remember the Difference between
personalization and personal. Technology can help you with personalization because it
has huge data and it knows it. I remember early working with Starbucks because we
had such a captive database in the loyalty program. We would know a
(24:54):
lot about your purchase behavior because you're probably using, you know,
loyalty recognition. What would end up happening is we could target you
with if you're drinking non fat lattes, we're not going to send you the most
caloric messages about new products that are coming out that are highly caloric. Maybe
once in a while we'll sample one of those just to see if you catch
a flyer. But for the most part, we're not going to bomb you with messages
like that as opposed to messages that are consistent with your purchase patterns.
(25:16):
That's personalization and messaging. It's not personal.
Personal is when you come in and I say, mark, it's good to see you
today. Thanks for coming back to Starbucks. How's the kids? What's going
on? When are you traveling again? That's personal. And I think helping us to
realize that we need to leverage technology for personalization, but
we also need to have humans who take a personal interest in Mark.
(25:40):
It's a great point. Personalizations versus personal.
Yeah. Might we get a taste of that in the new
book? I hope so. Or else. I wrote a few chapters
that are. Totally worthless, 100% on board
with that. That is such a critical point. And
I think that's the lens that leaders should be thinking through
(26:02):
when they're designing experiences for their customers.
Yeah. And I think that's the key is designing. Right. A lot of
experiences happen by default. They just have been that way all
along. We may iterate them, we keep iterating them. And before, you know, I
liken it to just adding rooms to a trailer. I mean you can keep adding
rooms there, but sometimes you can't even get from one place to the other. And
(26:23):
so the design sometimes really means blowing up what you have and what
has always been because what is optimized for your current customer
is something fundamentally different because customer preferences have changed
or your consumer base has shifted. So really knowing what your
customers value, where they spend their time, what they're looking for from you,
where they find friction in your current experiences, that all enables you to
(26:46):
really use design principles to solve real human
problems. Excellent stuff. Really ton of gems here. It is,
unfortunately, time for us to land the plane. But before we do, let
me ask you the same question I asked my guests at the
end of the show, which is what delights you as a customer. I'm
delighted when people actually give a damn. And I mean that
(27:08):
in a forceful way. There is a fundamental difference between
treating me as a transaction and really caring that I
succeed. And I know the difference. And we all know the difference. There
are people who are just doing what is needed to check
the box that they fulfilled the transaction expectation. And there are
other people that care. I'll give you the simplest example. At Zappos
(27:31):
we used to do this. We used to say to people,
look, I know you haven't returned the shoes yet and you
have, you know, you said you were going to get them to us last week.
I'll tell you what, I'm still going to give you a credit for the shoes
because I know you're going to send them back. People were
just amazed that we cared enough to give them that assumption. Now we can
(27:52):
go back and credit, you know, charge our credit card again if they never ever
sent them. We always have that. But we extended a trust to human
beings that that person doesn't always think they deserved. And people
tended to live into that trust. And I love when people
instill trust me and try their
dangest to make sure that I get what I need before they leave
me. Unlike your example earlier.
(28:15):
Yeah, what a great story. Imagine that. Just. Just care
about me. Just show me that you care. Yeah,
great. I know you're closing, but a quick other example from
Zappos is that if we do not see, if we do not have your
product in our inventory, we were trained, at least we trained the
teams to be able to say, let me go onto our competitors website, see if
(28:37):
they have it and then I'll direct you to them and we'll send you a
bounce back coupon that says sorry, we didn't have what you had today. And the
redemption rate on that was like 70%, which is much higher than any bounce back
coupon. So why would I go into my refrigerator, take the milk out,
determine it's spoiled and put it back in for another day to drink? That's kind
of the way it is. We failed you in terms of not having your product,
(28:59):
but you still come back to us because why we cared more about your success
than we cared about our sale today. Yeah,
great story. Zappos did and does
it well? Yeah, I think so. I hope so. Well,
thank you so much for being a guest on the show. Dr.
Joseph Micelle. Dr. Joseph, how might
(29:21):
folks best get a hold of you? I'm mercilessly everywhere in the
Internet under my name, just JosephMichelli.com
JosephMichelli on LinkedIn yeah, if you know how to spell it,
you'll find me. Yeah. And
the book when is All Businesses personal available?
It's May 13th, but it's order. You can order immediately. Like it's
(29:43):
available for pre ordering right now and it'll get to you as soon as it
comes out. Excellent, excellent. Dr. Joseph
Micelli, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it.
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