SPEAKER_01 1:45

In this episode, we dive super deep into remarkable life-changing customer experiences that gets people to stay forever, that increases your lifetime value by more than all of your competitors. And we're gonna go pretty deep in this. And actually, to do this, I have brought on my uh director of client experience, which his entire role is curating epic experiences that are memorable and life-changing for our clients. And so we talk through the value of it, what it could look like in your business, and I post some really interesting questions that, if answered, could transform the trajectory of your business growth and of your profit, as long as well as giving tons of ideas on things that you could practically do a little bit toward the end of the podcast. So I do want to forewarn you, this podcast episode is a little bit longer. It's about an hour long, it's a little longer than what we normally do, but I think it's really worth listening to because this shift is a common trend in the massive brands out there that are absolutely crushing it. They get this piece right. And so enjoy the episode. If I could never spend another dollar on ads, if I could never spend another email send another email, or if I could not post on social media, like what would we do to get customers if that was the case? And it's a really weird question to ask, but I think that the right questions lead to the right answers, and you have to ask a lot of freaking questions. And that's how I look at customer experience. And because if we were able to make the experience so good that customers never left and they only bought from us for the category we're in, and they referred people to us, how much more would we grow? And so I think that's a really worthy question of asking. Uh, I'd be curious for you. What would you do? If if we couldn't spend any money on ads, no email, like no marketing was allowed, all we could do was get the next customer from the current customers. What do you think we would do differently? So it's like the ad apocalypse. Adpocalypse, ad apocalypse, which is we're living through right now the irony of this post or this uh podcast right now. The adpocalypse came along, the email apocalypse, the SMS apocalypse, the social media apocalypse, and the billboard apocalypse. You can't do a billboard either.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

What would you do? Well, Mizny would be in deep water there. That's an Ohio joke. Ohio people. It's one of those things where I think making customers into super fans and making them want to ultimately rave about you, making them your marketing probably makes the most sense where you just give some insane experience to them through the product, through the packaging, through whatever, and all they want to do is talk about you, talk about your brand, talk about your product to other people.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

It's what's something you bought from that was such a mind-blowing experience, it was like a life-changing experience almost like in a way that it was like so impactful from the pre-purchase and decision-making phase to buying the thing to risk to the shipping of the thing or whatever, and then receiving the thing, and then the experience post the thing, and then the entire communication and journey with the business. Is there anything that comes to mind for you?

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Hmm. Ooh, that's that's tough. I so I have an example just from last night. I didn't I didn't end up buying, but I likely will be a customer of this brand. Uh so I play bass very poorly, and I'm getting ads for bass lessons. And I came across a company last night that immediately put me into an assessment. And the assessment was so stinking cool because it walked me through what do you struggle with currently? How often do you practice? What kind of music do you want to play? Are you just trying to improve your speed, your uh finger strength, for your grooves, whatever? And it walked me through this whole assessment where it said, Hey, we're building this experience for you. And quite honestly, it was it was pretty impactful because now out of all the other programs I've looked at, I want to join just them because they it feels even though it's probably templated in a lot of ways, it feels so crafted just for me. Yeah, and so there obviously that's not like so much physical product, but it it did make a massive impact. That again, I I don't even know the price of this program, but I know I want it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

I think that personalization is a huge, huge thing because everybody is talking, like everyone's talking to everybody, but when suddenly like there's this personalized component to it, which is kind of hard to do, if you could figure out how to personalize it in any degree, it changes the experience. If what someone received was tailored entirely to their their preference, to their style, to their taste, to their whatever, it would be and it would make your life way better, and the experience would be so standout. Actually, while you just said that, I just brought up something. This is from a talk I gave two years ago, and I called the c I called the talk Be R Guest, or at Disney, of course. Uh there's a book called Be R Guest, which is fantastic. And I opened up with this. This was one of my, this is the opener of the session. I said, This is my script right here. I said, imagine walking into a hotel where every detail seemed to anticipate your needs. As you approach the entrance, the doors swing open effortlessly, and you're greeted by name as if they had been expecting you. The smell of freshly brewed coffee fills the air, and before you even ask, your favorite drink is ready, perfectly made for you the way you like it, and they're handing it to you. You glance around and notice that the space is spotless. Every corner thoughtfully designed to make you feel at ease. The music played softly in the background improves your mood, and every staff member you encounter makes you feel like you're the only person in the world that matters to them. And I wrote that because I I think what would happen if you could create that experience. It sounds impossible, it sounds crazy to engineer an experience like that. And then I rewrote this and I said, What if I reworked it? I said, Imagine shopping in an online store where every detail teams to anticipate your needs. As you approach each collection, the navigation menus open effortlessly, and you're greeted with precisely the right product, as if they've been expecting you all along. The smell of freshly brewed coffee fills the air. You can't get rid of that, right? Maybe you don't like coffee. Um, and before you even ask, your questions are answered with a great with great messaging clarity on the page. You glance around and you notice that there are thousands of reviews, every element thoughtfully designed to make you feel at ease. The ease of checking out improves your mood, and every communication leading up to the arrival of the product on your doorstep makes you feel like you're the only person in the world that matters. So it's like a thing on screen, and I just slice the things out and I put the new text in there to just give everyone perspective. And when I look at it, I I think of like what are the ways that you can sprinkle magic into your customers', in this case, sprinkle magic, in the or Pixie Dust, into your customer's experience that makes it so life-changing, which sounds strange, or like, hey, I just sell uh skincare or I just sell whatever pet products or t-shirts. How do I make someone's life change? When people experience a certain thing in their mind, it it makes their life better just in the experience. Maybe the thing doesn't give them joy or happiness of buying it. Maybe it does for a little while, but there's this experience that just makes their life better in the process of the thing. And so I uh it's funny you said that I just brought, I just quickly searched that. Yeah. And it's hard to do, it's really hard to do, and you have to be very creative in it.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Well, I think it's it's funny to think about this and think about how we we do it. And when you talk about like a pre-purchase part of someone, some customer's journey, something that I know you do is when Jake, when Jacob comes and says, Hey, there's this person considering our programs, you get on the phone, you send a video, you send a text, whatever it is, you send some kind of communication to this person before they've even bought. And I think how can how can maybe any kind of D2C e-com brand do that? And so, like through chat support or through just DMs on Instagram or wherever, where people have objections are saying, like, I don't know if this is the right thing, I don't know if this is the right color, the pattern, whatever. I don't know if this is for me. Imagine if the founder or customer support jumped on a video and said, Hey Jeff, thanks so much for reaching out. Yeah, I want to show you this thing real quick. Check this out here, here's why I think it would be awesome for you. It's crazy to think about because I have never seen that with e-commerce and I we didn't really say at the beginning of this, but talking through things that just don't make sense might just be the best things you could do. Yeah, and and we don't know until you try. And you know what?

SPEAKER_01 10:16

I'm here's the other thing too. In the world of AI, this might get a little nerdy, there's so much production. Production is easy, the threshold has been lowered. Like you to make an ad previously a static ad could take you forever. Now you can pump out 20 or 30 to 1 ratio in the amount of time it takes to used to take one. So the the bar is being raised on content output, right? Content output is going up so much that eventually, and I mean, people are laggards, there are people that aren't adopting it yet. So we still have some time. It's not like happening right now, like this is not doom and gloom. But how do you separate yourself in a massive trust deficit economy in business world? Man, personalization, all that touch, all of the things that don't scale scale. And I think this is the problem because someone listening right now is gonna think, well, that doesn't scale. Me having someone touch base with someone doesn't scale. Me texting or calling or making a video, or or and we're gonna, by the way, we're gonna get into some ideas. I know I'm gonna have some really cool ideas we're gonna share with you guys that you could like steal and go use. But someone is thinking, because I think this, it doesn't scale. But you know what doesn't you know what does scale is when every customer that buys supplements only buys their supplements from you for their entire life. And they only refer people to you, that really scales. But when nobody ever leaves, that scales. When the LTV is 5x this industry standard and the category that you're in, that scales. And I think that we spend all of our money getting customers and we don't spend a lot of time or dollars acquiring and keeping and getting referrals from customers and getting those next purchases. And I think of like it's kind of like everything goes into ad spend, but how much goes into customer, customer support or customer service or whatever you want to call it. I don't like the word customer support because it implies it's reactive. We've never said customer support, we've always said like client success. We use clients because we don't work with, I guess we call our people clients, not customers. So like we have client success. So people spend minimum wage on customer success, but they spend all of their dollars on acquiring it. But what happened if you flipped that or you and you invested like five percent more into that? Like, what would actually happen? I think that's a worthy question to ask.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yeah, I I yeah, this this topic is so fun for me because like I do think about those some of those experiences that literally it didn't one one standout, one standout for me. I was getting to like beard oils and stuff like that. And Dollar Beard Club, that was the name of the company. They they're probably still around. And it was funny because man, even upon cancellation, I still had a great experience.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

And it was so it was so that's a good company when your cancellation policy you're like, oh, that's fucking great.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

And it was yeah, it was just so funny because the founder who was just this beautifully, beautifully bearded man, just massive, what everyone, everyone with a beard aspires to be. And he's just walking on the beach, just talking about the friendship we had together as bearded brothers, and how he will never forget me, and like literally just ends with him falling to his knees in the beach and just going, no, and oh, that's so good. That locked in my brain, and I haven't been a customer of theirs in years now, but it they are always on my mind that if I'm like if you ever go back, yeah, if you ever go back into that, yeah, it lets beard and yeah, talk about how it's just like you are, and that's obviously a subscription-based model, but you you think about that experience, like give an experience even beyond the customer being at a customer. And I it's I don't know, it's it's stuff like that that I think when people start really thinking, they can come up with some really creative stuff. So that's why I'm excited to share some things too with the listeners.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

I'm gonna give you an experience that I had with a software last month. It was it was like one of the most impressive onboardings I've ever had. It was $29 a month software. Actually, it's for organic social. Anyone who's ever heard of it, it's called Format Finder by One Peak Creative. And I think it's it's it's a it's a good, you know, skinned LLM. Like obviously, they just laid their frameworks on an LLM, which is fine. It's pretty good though. Like I still use it. And when I'm going in, it was really interesting, and I love it because this is where we're actually, which is what we're building for right now. And that is when when I became a customer of theirs and I was going through, there was an onboarding process. And what it did was it like walked me through and it leveraged AI to do so much, and it had like it opened up and it was like, tell us about you and has a microphone. It says, here's three questions, answer these in as much time as you can and make it very conversational. Don't even worry about thinking, just literally say everything that comes to mind about your business. I'm like, oh, okay, boom, here's who we serve, here's what we teach, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I talk for like two minutes. And then I stopped recording, and then it slides me to the next screen and said, This is what we heard. Is there anything is this correct? If not, hit the little edit button and edit any of the sections. So it like categorized all of my answers that it knew about me. Why? Well, because it's going to personalize my experience. And so it just walks me through. It said, How many videos are you doing per week now and how many do you want to do? So, like, this I went through this experience that was really interesting. And it's like curating all of your styles of content based. It said you have a conversational tone. You have so it analyze all of this, and it's like, here's you need to do a knowledge gap-based video, and here are five different hooks based on this and this and this and your past videos. It was a really cool experience. Another one that I onboarded with a long time ago that we don't use anymore was called Poppy. And Poppy was it's an AI tool as well. And uh Poppy, they were calling me relentlessly. I was in the tool, and I hadn't booked an onboarding call with them, and I paid for it. And they're and I didn't, I'm like, I'm so busy. I I just figure tools out. They were like calling me, texting me to try to do a one-on-one with me to like just train me on the tool for free. I'm like, what the heck? And then one day it was like, I'm in the tool, and then I get a text from me. He's like, Hey, I see you're hanging out in Poppy. You want to finally do your onboarding? I'm like, no way, yes, I will do it on. And I did an onboarding, and he's like, Great, let's schedule a seven-day check-in. I want to see how things go with our game plan. We just made for you to use the tool. I'm like, it was the crap, that was the best software onboarding. That was the most hands-on one. Format Finder was automated, less, less manual labor, right? That would scale. But Poppy went from zero to $500,000 a month as a software. I only know that because I know I've seen a lot of podcasts with them in less than a year because they were doing this. You can say, Well, it doesn't scale. Well, they become a six million dollar company at a year by literally just doing this massive hands-on-touch situation. And so those are just two software idea things that happened to me that were really great.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

I think it's crazy to think about $29 a month software. Because that if anyone thinks, like, oh, I I can't do this, or I I can't go that far to to really give an incredible experience or a very personalized one-on-one style support. You think about a $29 software because you may just cancel within a month or two. And so they made a whole 60 bucks on you, but they spent time with you and and they left an impact. Because I remember you've shared that story with some other people, and we shared Poppy with customers, and and it it's it was so good.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

I probably sent like 20 or 30 clients to Poppy, and they probably made like at least 20 grand off of me or 10 grand or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, and it's not like they can quantify that and say, oh, because we do these high touch point onboardings, we know that someone's gonna send us X amount of customers. Yeah, they have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah. I so what we kind of want to talk about today, and you're kind of starting to see here, is we want to talk about engineering unforgettable life-changing experiences for your customers. And most people don't think about this. We're gonna try to convince you. Hopefully, by the end, if you're convinced by the end of this, do me a really big favor. If you're watching on YouTube, drop a comment and say, I'm convinced that this is the thing that stood out to me that I'm gonna go do. Because we're gonna give you a list of ideas of what we're doing and we're gonna share how we think about customer experience. In fact, Isaac's full-time gig, he is our director of client experience. His entire role is creating incredible experiences for our clients. That's that's it. And in doing so, we have some of the lowest churn in our business and in our industry. We have some of the lowest churn in the industry. And it's I love whenever clients come in and they're like a month or a weekend, and they're just like, I don't know how anybody, they're like, you have to have the lowest. I someone told me this after they they were in for like a year and a half, and they had text me after the new thing that we did. Oh, when we launched the growth tracker for clients, after we launched that for clients, I had one of our one of our clients have been around for a long time. She texted me, she's like, You guys, I would be blown away if you don't have the lowest churn in the industry because literally, why would I ever want to leave? This is the craziest. You guys build the coolest experiences and things ever. And so, like when we launched the growth tracker that Isaac built, that we'll talk about in a little bit. But I look at it like this dollars, discounted dollars go down to zero. Like you could discount your way, but that goes down to zero. But value you add to your customers can go to infinity. Now I might have a tangible cost with some of it, but some of it can be automated, some of it is a little work, some of it is a lot of work, but value you add to your customers can go to infinity. And if you ask yourself the question, what would happen if every customer you ever acquired bought only from you for your category of products and referred all of their friends and family, how much faster would you grow? How much more profit would you have? How much more would you invest in product dev? How much more would you invest in improving the experience? How much more pride would your team have in knowing that they work for the best business in that category on the planet? How much more pride would they have in that? And so that's what we want to dive into today obsessive amounts of customer care and doing things that by all means are not scalable or don't make logical sense, but they do, they can change your entire business, which is what it's really done for us. All right. Before we get in, there are three books we want to recommend. I've read one and a half of these. Have you read all three of these? I'm still, I'm still working through the the one. Okay. So there's a book called Be Our Guest. It's fantastic. It's about Disney and and how they run the show. Like they have really a great systems around customer experience. Another one, I've not read this one. Unreasonable hospitality. That's what you have.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Yep. And then the third is never lose a customer. That's another really good one. So three books, put those on your list, go listen to them, audiobook them. Those are gonna just open your mind to holy cow, what can actually happen uh when you do this. I look at customer experience on a spectrum. So another company I was thinking about as a is Sweetwater. Sweetwater, if you guys aren't familiar with Sweetwater, speaking of basses, they sell instruments online. They're like they're the retail, it's like a not Guitar Center, Guitar Center went bankrupt. But Sweetwater sells instruments and audio gear, and anyone who's listening to this musician or in the audio and like they know who Sweetwater is. Sweetwater is like the largest company on the planet doing that right now. Multi-billion dollar company. I had I had the the founder of it, Chuck Surak. He was on my podcast a couple years ago. He took a podcast with us two years ago, and we had like no listeners. I was so grateful for that. This guy's sitting there, and I'm just like, I was like, Chuck, dude, thanks for even talking to me, man. You're like, your company's doing billions of dollars a year, and you're just sitting here for like 30, 45 minutes with me. It's like, oh yeah, I'm happy to help, man. Tells me a story, and it was great. So if you don't know Sweetwater, uh, Sweetwater, I'm gonna look at the spectrum. On the low-end uh spectrum of customer experience are things you could do that don't cost a lot or are very easy or even automated and cost you nothing but a little bit of setup in the beginning. One thing they do that costs them a little bit up front is they send candy with every single shipment. They send a little bag that says sweetwater and it has like three pieces of different random candy in it. It's like, okay, yeah, it's sweet water, it's kind of cool. Like uh, but you know what? Everyone starts to expect it, everyone's like, oh, candy, you know.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Is that a Tootsie roll? You know? I said I prefer the candy over any gear I buy. That's the I'm I'm hunting through all my I just had a package here just the other day, and I'm hunting for that candy, and I'm like, where's my lunch? It's kind of and it had like the Smarties and then the mint, and I was I was really absurd. Disappointed, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Oh man. So they send candy. That's the low end of the spectrum. On the high end of the spectrum, Sweetwater has a a uh a rep team that basically every customer that buys from them is assigned a rep. And and here's what happens on the entire in-between the spectrum. Every rep checks in with their customers. It's it's ridiculous. They'll they'll call, he'll go, uh Brian is the guy's name who works with me, and he'll call him. It was Trevor before that for like four years, and now it's Brian for the last five or six years. And Brian will call and check in, and he'll know, because I usually buy stuff for our church. He'll be like, hey, how's the church doing? Like, what do you guys work on? Any projects you have coming up that we can kind of serve you guys and help with? Like he'll email, he'll text or call, and then whenever I'm on Sweetwater's website, it knows that Brian is my rep if I'm logged into my account. So everywhere I go, there's a hey, chat with Brian and ask Brian a question. And then anything that's going on, Brian is everywhere. I place an order, I get a receipt from Sweetwater, and immediately there's this email that's automated. It comes from Brian. Hey, just want to let you know, here's a timeline, here's what you can expect. We should have a shipped out, you should see in the next two to three days, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then Brian will text me. He will call me and he will leave me a voicemail if he does if I because I never pick up my phone. He will call and leave a voicemail being like, Hey Josh, it's Brian, Manover Sweetwater. Just want to call. Saw you order come through for the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just want to say thank you. I always appreciate your business. Uh let me know if there's anything I could do. And also, by the way, I saw you order this. And I if you want. I know it's like right now, but I would I might recommend getting this with that because of the frequencies of whatever. Like he just knows the bandwidths of the frequencies of the different wireless mic pack, and he like suggests something different based on our need. And I'm like, yeah, sounds good. He's like, great, we'll just add it to your bill. It like so they're ex they have mastered from small spectrum to big spectrum decision making of sales reps.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

It's crazy. I love I gotta shout out mine, Kevin. He's a he's a G. He uh it's so funny because even when I buy like a $10 piece of equipment that Sweetwater is inevitably not making money on because of shipping, I still get a call. And like it's like, hey, appreciate you buying that cable. And then we'll talk for 30 minutes about something completely unrelated, whether it's like, hey, how's the church going or how's this install going? Whatever. Uh but we we got talking for like 30, 40 minutes one time just about cameras and video stuff. And he ended up like sending me this home video thing he just made where he actually composed all the music, and it was incredible. And like he'll just check it. Sometimes he'll check in and I'm like, oh hey man, thanks for talking, or asking about the gear, and he'd be like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so any new uh video projects or photo projects you're working on? And it's so completely unrelated. I've never bought a lick of photo video from Sweetwater, but that's all I talked to with my rep.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Yeah, and it's crazy. Like, imagine anyone listening or watching right now, if you called or texted everyone of your customers. I did this exercise, I did the no marketing allowed exercise years ago for a group of clients, and and I was just curious to see what they all came up with. And and there was one guy was like, I was like, let's share what's going on. One guy was like, hey, and he's doing like $150,000 a month selling like apparel-based products. And he said, Almost every customer that comes through, I'll film a Bonjuro. If you're not familiar with Bonjuro, you could literally just film a little video and then you can email to people. And so he'll literally be like, Hey Isaac, this is Bonnie. Saw you just picked up the ABC shirt. Just want to say thank you. I appreciate you, and just want to wish you a magical day. And that's it. Sends a thing, gets crazy responses, has a Facebook group with like a hundred thousand people in there. You get in the Facebook group, and then has he's a tribe of people that support him, building community. And it's like, you would say that doesn't scale. It's like, yeah, maybe not the founder's time. Like, do it at the beginning. Like, you could lead the way, you have to role model this level of obsessive customer care, and then it trickles down in the organization, and you have to like lead the way in that. And so if you're listening right now and you're like, I don't we don't do any of this stuff, just try this stuff for yourself as a starting point.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

I so I remember him at our event a couple years ago, and it was funny because in between sessions, I remember you just see him recording videos, and it was so funny. He's just outside, and you see him on the patio, like, hey, thanks so much. And uh it's I think what's really funny, and something a bit of encouragement I have for anyone that may be listening or watching and saying, like, oh, but I'm just so terrible on camera, I'm just so bad on camera. It's like, dude, listen, you can only get better by doing it, and plus, bonus, people love the authenticity, they love the the stumbles. Hey, Jeff, thank you so much. Like, dude, so excited. Like, they love that because it feels real, it feels human. It's not this email that you perfectly typed or threw through your chat GPT and said, make this better. You know, it's it feels so personal, feels so authentic. And and people love that, especially in this digital world. It's the reason snail mail is coming back because it feels real, it feels tangible. And so when they see that person on video, it makes a world of a difference. And that I think that's such an easy thing to start doing.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

And if you don't want to be on camera, by the way, with Bon Juro and stuff, because we have other clients that do that. You could you could pick up the phone and call them. And when they don't pick up, you leave them a voicemail and you shoot them a text. And so, like, we do this right now. So if someone like downloads any of our free stuff, if they pay for one of our $17 courses, it's like Heather will pick up the phone and Heather be like, hey, so and so, this is Heather. We just want to thank you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so if you have any issues getting in, just feel free to call me back. I'm gonna shoot you text after this, uh, just let you know it's me. And she'll text and be like, Hey, this is Heather, just want to let you know I'm not an AI robot. You can just go ahead and hit me up if you have any issues, and blah, blah, blah. So, like, it doesn't have to be that. Any degree of doing something that's personal touch, something that is gonna go more than what you're doing, is worth trying. We have clients that have taken this to the next level. Like, they get a separate phone line. So they're blue bubbles, you know. So they'll get like a separate phone line, and they will literally, at the end of every day, they'll get in and just sh just one of them will templated, right? You're just texting all these people, or they'll have a team member texting all these people. And the problem is, two clients that come to mind that both have done that in the last year and a half since I recommended this. I did, I I forget what I recommended this in one workshop or something, something, sometime. And they did it, and both of them, I had checked in with them in the last month or two. I was talking to each of them about that. I said, Are you still able to do that? And one of them is like, he goes from like $60,000 a month or so, and he's doing like pushing half a million dollars a month. He's like, We literally cannot, I cannot even keep up. We have to figure out the next level of that because I was doing it all the way until about two or three hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. And I'm like, good for you. That's amazing, right? But like that's the level of what does scale is when customers only buy from you and they come back and their LTV is five times higher. And so I think that everybody has to really consider that. All right, let's go ahead and we've been talking about this for a while. Let's get to some nitty-gritty. What I'm thinking, Isaac, let's share just some funsy things that maybe we've done, and then let's share lots of ideas that people can do. And some of the things we've done, some of you can actually steal if you really want to. All right, so I'll start us out and then maybe you throw one in here. Is that all right? Yep. All right, cool. Let's do it. So something really unique that we do. I wrote this down. This is just this is super silly, but it's it's super rewarding and it makes a lot of sense. Uh, we will we observe, we like we obsess over the data we get on our clients. We we capture a lot of information, but we just pay attention. When we notice something, like a client win, or we notice the loss of a loved one, we send flowers. We literally have a bereavement budget. Like we will spend money on bereavement. We will send person, not just like flowers, like we will send personalized gifts. If we find out someone's in the hospital or someone loses a loved one, or they lose a pet or they or they have some massive win. I remember one of our clients named a manage. One day she had like a it was a $16,000 ROAS just because they had spent 51 cents in the day and she got an order. And it was just a she made a post, man, if I could just keep this, it was just a joke in the community. So we get this entire trophy made that says plaque a plaque made. It's like, congratulations on your 16k ROAS, and we ship it to her. And it's just like silly stuff like that is a lot of fun. When you just pay attention and you just do that kind of stuff for your customers, it's just an absolute blast.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Yeah, it's been fun. One of my favorites, not now, it's not fun and not my favorite when pets pass away, but one of my favorite types of gifts that we've done, these personalized kind of like watercolor portraits. It's so with technology now and our artists on Etsy, like there's also so many ways you can do this, but it's it has been really cool to create these customized pieces that people can remember their loved ones by. And it doesn't take a lot of time. It doesn't take a lot of time at all. But yeah, yeah, it it's fun. It's definitely fun. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Another thing you could do is text your highest value, lifetime value customers. Like just shoot them a text, like break them all out and say, anyone who's placed over 10 orders, that's gonna be a very select few. It's so small that you could just do this yourself. You could probably, unless you have over 100,000 customers, you probably can't. But like if you have a few thousand customers or less than 10,000, you probably the amount that have paid 10 gotten 10 orders or more are very, very few. They're your longtime customers. So, what would it mean if you picked up the phone and you called them after their next order and you thanked them for it and you said, Hey, John, just want to say thank you so much for this order. This is your 13th order with this. Did you know that? You're freaking awesome. Like, we're so grateful for you. Uh just let you know we're refunding that order, we're sending it anyway, and we're gonna send some additional goodies just to say thank you. What would happen if you did that to your top customers? Do you think we'll come back again? You know what I mean? The dogs are going crazy upstairs. If you guys can hear that in the microphone, they're like two, we have two office dogs and they're going ham up there. Okay, that's another fun thing. What else you got?

SPEAKER_00 32:02

I think as far as these are this this is a small idea, and I know you've seen it before. Have you ever gotten a product where it has an extra piece in it? Or even like a tool. And it's interesting to think about because uh I was assembling some some furniture at my house that was shipped in and assembling it, and then there's always a few pieces, or even better, even better example, Legos. We love Legos in our household, and there's always a few extra pieces of the small ones that you always lose. The kids inevitably lose lose. And there's a few extra pieces in the packaging, and it's so silly, especially when you think about Lego and the profit margin, it's insane. But that small act feels like they just served me because they said, Hey, listen, we already know you're gonna probably lose this, so let's hook you up with this, this, this extra piece here. Or even I bought a massive piece of equipment once for my event business and it had the tool to assemble it. And it sounds again sounds so dumb and so easy because we always get the little Allen wrenches with the the IKEA furniture or whatever. I don't do they actually actually do they include I don't know if they do, but regardless, some some furniture pieces, you may get an Allen wrench or the screwdriver, whatever. And it that small act makes a world of a difference. That it's not this high, high touch point, high resource element, but it's also the small idea that can work some serious wonders in the experience while it's just so so tangible.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

Yeah. I'm gonna go to the lower level of the spectrum. This is pre-purchase. Do more work on your website. Like make the messaging so clear. Like the if the goal is to give someone a great experience, it's not just when they become a customer, it's like, what's the experience leading up to it? Not like, oh, hey, when you become a customer, it's gonna be a great experience. It's like, no, no, no, no. Before that, we're gonna treat you like royalty and we're gonna make your life so easy that if you're the right fit for this product or this product's right fit for what you need, we're gonna make it so abundantly clear. Like we can show, hey, compatibility guides, we can show sizing guides, we can make sure that the messaging talks about the true pain that it solves. We could say what's included and even clarify what you'll need to buy additionally from this. So I would say that the front-end experience is important. It's not that, and this is the this is counter to what, you know, if we're in a coaching session teaching someone to like maximize conversion rate, I would not be saying or maximize that performance. I wouldn't say just go spend a lot of time on your website. So there's like a measurement of time you should spend on this, but it's not like all of the time in the world. But there is a difference when you're buying from something that feels branded, right? Where you feel like all the experience is really, really good. A brand, uh, a company that I really love uh buying from from like an experience standpoint is uh True Classic Tees. There, it's it they have videos that show the stretch. That's what I'm wearing actually right now, ironically. So like they show the stretch of the shirt, they have videos in there, they explain all the sizes, the package. Like it's an educational-based thing. It answers all the objections and the questions before they can become questions and objections. So on the lower end of this, there are things you can do one time and it will be done, but it will increase, it will help with conversion, but more importantly, it's gonna make this experience that makes people want to buy from you. And I'll give you one more crazy example. I forget the name of the company I just came across and I loved it. I was on their website and they're using an app, I believe, called Aliyah A-L-I-A, which is a pop-up tool. And for their welcome pop-up, instead of just popping up and saying, instead of popping up and saying, Hey, thanks for, you know, you want 15% off your first order, it popped up and it said, Gamble with us, and let's see if we can gamble, play some blackjack with us, and we'll see what kind of discounts you get. And it's funny, if you beat the house, you get a discount. And then it says double or nothing. So, like literally, you're on there and they're the house, and it's like, and it shows you the cards and it shows you the one card. It's like pick the next card. And I was like, and it threw it to mine, and then the house picks flips theirs. And then it's like, ah, you lost to the house. And then it's like, but you're still a winner of our eyes. We'll give you a little discount. But when you beat the house, then it then it the screen slides, and then it says, and then it's like double or nothing, and it's like throw one more card, the highest one loses. And so you like choose to flip the card or whatever, and then it flips it over and they flip theirs over, and then if so, you get uh you get a higher discount. It's really clever, and I'm like, this was a lot of fun. And then it could say play another hand, and then you could just keep playing with it. So, like, even that is just fun.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Now tell me if I'm wrong, does that help any kind of organic ranking on Google or anything? No idea. The amount of time you're spending on their site. Oh, that's an interesting idea. Random. But I don't know. I think here here's what's fun to think about and probably important to think about. I think when you sell a product that maybe is not extremely unique in the sense of there's like a highly saturated market, we use liquid death a lot. We've talked about magic spoon when you're trying to stand out in a cereal market and a water market. But more recently, we had someone join our program, Ian, with the energy drink, which is what I have right here on the table. We were talking, and and that was the one of the first things that came up was the website. Because you know, if you if you sell this product that again, someone can go to the store, someone can go to any other website and find a similar product, even if it's not the same flavor, same ingredients, same formula, whatever, you still got to create some kind of experience because you got to stand out in some way. That's not just saying we have this really unique thing, like jewelry, jewelry made from seashells in New Zealand. You don't have this really unique, if you don't have this really unique thing, you gotta stand out in some other way. And so I it's a I don't know. I'm with you on saying, like, hey, we do want to focus on ad performance, but man, there's gotta be some love, some effort in that website experience, even if it's just starting points.

SPEAKER_01 37:38

And I would say this this is the thing that sucks, is that the math has to still work, but it's not super quantifiable. That's the heart, that's the part that kills me as a marketer. I'm like, how do I quantify your salary and comp structure? You know, how do you because that's what your job is, right? And if anyone's listening to this, they're like, well, it's gonna take more time, and maybe someone eventually will do that full time, it'll be their thing. It's like, how do you quantify that? And it's like you almost don't, you have to just believe. It's kind of like you just have to believe that this will pay off in the long, long run. And and that's just, I just, I truly, I truly do, I truly do believe it. Same thing when we have done live events. Live events, we're like, we believe that this will bring our community together, even though the cost is great. And you know what's happened? We looked and we have a really high retention of people that attend our live events because they feel connected and they gain a lot of value and it's a ton of fun, and we get to hug them and spend time with them. And uh it's like there are bets that you take, and and and even if you're kind of nervous, take a smaller bet on just trying something. What happens if you personally text every customer and when they respond, you respond back? It's that kind of stuff. I'll give you another, I'm gonna go on the high, let's go higher spectrum, like more out there examples. And you were sharing some earlier this morning. I forget what they were, but they were the valet, like some of those are really interesting. There's like, I want you to think of like low spectrum, easy things to do, and then there's this spectrum of much larger things you could do that I believe you should just dream about and have no idea how to do it. And eventually you'll start to figure out some version of that or how to do it. But you were sharing some this morning, they were kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_00 39:21

From the Unreasonable Hospitality, which is that book that I absolutely love. Like I had the audiobook, I had the physical book, reading through it, listening to it, and it's it's a high-end restaurant, this this rest restauranteer, I think they call him. He manages restaurant, Will Gadera, I think. I don't know if I'm saying his name right, but great book. Everyone needs to listen to it, even if you're not in the restaurant business, because he wrote it for everyone. But he had this 95-5 rule, 95 slash five. And it was you running your you run your business on 95% penny to penny. Like you you make sure everything's appropriately spent and used and managed perfectly. That other last remaining five percent, you spend it foolishly on purpose. And so one of the examples absolutely loved, I think it's right at the beginning of the book he used it, when people would walk into his restaurant. This was a specific example, uh, you had to have reservations. It's like I think it's now a five-star Michelin restaurant. So you had to have reservations, plates were no less than $300, and people would walk in, they would already have their names, they would already the hostess would already know their names, their faces. They would LinkedIn search, Facebook search them, and every hostess knew every single person walking in through that door, and they knew the reason they were coming in. They may have special little trinkets and things at their actual table, just fun stuff. They did all kinds of fun stuff. Again, read the book, it's it's phenomenal. But one specific story stood out to me was this couple walked in a little disheveled, they couldn't find parking, and so they were they were walking downtown New York and they were they got to the restaurant for the reservation on time, and the hostess was like, Oh, you know, where did you park? You know, we want to be sure to validate your parking if we need to. And the couple was like, Ah, we couldn't find anything low nearby, so we had to park a couple blocks away. And so they get seated, get started with their wonderful dinner. In the meantime, the hostess got their keys, went and found their car, and reparked it in some valet parking nearby the restaurant, paid the bill, and then at the end of dinner, then told the the customer, hey, your car's been moved, here's your ticket, your valet ticket to go get it, retrieve it. And it's just crazy because again, you talk about quantifying, you talk about how do you how do you in your in your mathematical brain say, here's our budget, or here's what we're with. You can have a threshold, but like saying, here's what we're gonna spend, it's hard to do that sometimes because imagine that couple. Like they are all they're gonna rave about this restaurant, they're gonna rave about the service they got. Just one more, one more, because really quick one. A couple was there and it was their last day in New York City. They were at they were foreigners, or they just first time in New York. I can't remember the background there, but they Well, they're all foreign to New York if it's the first time. True. But they really wanted a New York hot dog and they never got it. So the hostess went out, found a new uh hot dog cart, bought hot dogs, brought it back to the chef in the restaurant. He dressed up the hot dogs and they got to enjoy New York style hot dogs before they left the city. And it's just, it's just again, who thinks of that? We're a restaurant, we're gonna bring in some random small little hot dog cart food in and serve that at our Michelin star restaurant. I mean, it's just it's just, I don't know, so so bizarre and just mind-opening.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

A couple months ago, we had a client that had lost her grandpa. She lost one or two of her pets in a two-month period of time. She was going through a really, really tough time. She's just bad headspace. She ended up having to get like this surgery that was not planned, which made she had been practicing to like try out for like this musical that she had she wanted to go play, she wanted to be in. And it's like just the perfect storm of everything going wrong. And uh, I caught wind of it, and then I I I looked at Rob. Rob's our director of commute coaching community, and I was like, You want to go drive to New York because they're like five hours away in New York. I was like, You want to go to New York and just surprise them and spend a day with them? And he's like, dude, heck yeah. So we literally hop in the car a few days later, and it and I timed it on a day where I had a one-on-one scheduled with them. And so we're doing this one-on-one session, and literally, so Rob's, I'm like, Rob is like driving in the car and I'm on my laptop, and I was like, hey guys, sorry, I'm I'm like, I'm on the road, so I have to do a little coaching on the go here, if that's okay. I'm like, no, no, that's totally fine. And and so we're doing it, and so we're there, and I'm like, I pick up my laptop and I'm like, yeah, yeah, hold on a second. Sorry if my my wife gets a little choppy here. And then I literally go in there, like, is that our driveway? Are you at our house? You know, and then like, of course, it's this whole special thing, and then we go to dinner with them, we spend the whole next day, and then I do like this. I spend we spend the next day with them. So it's like stuff like that makes no sense. I'm like, quantify that, no idea how. All I know is that client is I want that client for life. I want to grow with them forever, and they're amazing. And and and any client listening that's like, hey, can you fly out and hang with me for a day? I don't want to set the precedent. That's all that we do. But I just those are things that come to our minds. We had a we had a group here, and this is where, by the way, you have to be the one that leads the way on noticing the small things and then going above and beyond to curate and engineer experiences for your customers. And and if you do it, it trickles down to your team. And so a good example of this is we've been doing this so long, we've started obsessing over this so much that we had a few months ago, we held a mastermind here. We had our second floor renovated, brand new offices and stuff. And we're like, we're gonna host our first mastermind here ever. We had like 20 something people here. It's really special. But the closing night, we're like, we want to host this closing dinner. Let's do something really unique. And so Isaac and Bree, who's my executive assistant, they get together and they built this really cool experience. And I'm gonna walk everyone through it. This is probably makes no sense. None of you are probably gonna end up doing this. I'm just trying to give a spectrum of like how crazy these ideas can come like be in your mind and then become reality. So, what happened was all of the clients that were attending this event two weeks prior, they all received a postcard, right? They all got like a postcard. Actually, I'll I'll let you walk through it. You're the one you and Brie built it out. Walk walk through this experience. This was just crazy.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

It it's funny because it's actually started just with inspiration of the venue and then just went off the off the rails from there. Because the the venue is this really cool third floor of a restaurant that just got renovated, feels like a speakeasy kind of vibe. The cool velvet tall booths and a little stage or dimlet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a very cool almost 20s, 30s vibe. And so that's where it started. And we said, well, what if we did a really fun themed dinner where we actually encouraged people to dress the part, which, because of timing, not everyone got the memo, which was unfortunate because they felt bummed. But it almost everyone did it. Almost everyone did. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:08

And so it started there and said, okay, well, how do we create a really fun experience from the start of the invite? So we had this physical card that had some kind of like riddle, like ominous thing that said, just call this number. And so we set up we set up a phone number in our system that was just for this event. They called it and they immediately get introed with this 1920s voice that's like setting the stage for this event and says, Ashlin, 1922. Here, and then it just goes on in this fair classic voice. Yeah. And and then as soon as that phone hangs up, it automatically hung up on the phone.

SPEAKER_01 46:41

The voicemail says details are soon to follow. And then it's like and it clicks it. And then you hear a little bit of ominous music in the background, and then it hangs up.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

Yep, it hangs up after it ends. And then as soon as it ends, they got a text message that said, follow this link. And so it's just leading them down this trail where they really had to work for it and if they wanted to show up. No, that it led them down a trail, and so they opened up a website that then had an even more experience where it was like it just showed a door with the little people. They could open the people and look inside, and it actually showed a picture of the restaurant. And so they had to enter their name, which then by the way.

SPEAKER_01 47:13

And then once they enter their name, it was like you enter the name, and then the people went and it opened and you could see in. Oh, and by the way, when you're outside the door, you just hear mumble talking. You hear mumble on the audio. It says, it says, Oh, turn your speakers on. There's a 10-second countdown when they go to the website. Said sound on for a more enhanced experience or something.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

Yep. Yep. Yeah. So it they enter their name, so then it allows us to further personalize the experience of the webpage. And so then from that point on, it had their name sprinkled in throughout the website just for them. So like it was a blast. We we themed the page. We added stupid little stuff like a little light switch that it says poll for for ambience, and you just it's like a little poll chain, and then it like literally just made a little glow at the top of the website. So random, so unnecessary, so silly. But it just made for a really fun experience. And I think you ended up sharing it with the rest of our clients.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

I told all our clients, I'm like, no, not just these 20-something. Everybody needs to see this. So I'm like, everybody call this number. So like everyone got to call it. It's just a it was an incredibly curated experience. And then you we you even had here's the attire for the night, here's the location, and the whole theme is like this dark speakeasy vibe of a site. Yeah. And you even pre-shopped, you guys pre-shopped like a dozen different Amazon outfits that were all under $50 for everybody that for the men and the ladies to be able to just click and buy to make it easy. And then everybody came prepared. And then you guys did like you did like photos of everyone, like individuals, couples, group. Like it was so that was one of the most memorable tailored experiences we built. And the the crazy part crazy idea.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

Yeah, and the and the crazy part too is that it genuinely was maybe an afternoon or two afternoons of of true like work where it it didn't take long in general. Like it's with the with the use of AI now, it's just insane what is possible. And so I guess I think the inspiration behind this is to to really open and and think like start start with the vision first. Again, for us, it was the venue. So we saw that and it built from there, but start with the vision of like what what's this impossible crazy thing that I would love to do and then work backwards and don't think of like how do I do something cool? It's say, what do I want to do that's cool? And then let me figure out how to get there. Because it's it's just it's just so fun, just how limitless it really, really is. I mean how far you can truly take it.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

Yeah, I think people will you ever hear the the saying like they'll forget what you said, but they'll never forget what you made how you made them feel. You ever hear that? Yep.

SPEAKER_00 49:44

I feel the same exact way. I and it's that's one of the things that stood out to me in the BR Guest book was talking about how Walt Disney said that people should be able to feel the uh what I forget the truth quote, but feel through the soles of their feet. And so that's where like well all the parks are with their different themes, you actually see a change in the concrete and the like across the like a transition.

SPEAKER_01 50:07

Yeah. Yeah. As you so in the BR guest, like as Walt Disney was walking between, I forget where he was in Tomorrowland, he's walking between them, and the pavement was like smooth the whole way through both. And he walked in and he walked back and he walked and he walked back, and the Magineer was like, What are you what are you doing, Walt? And he's like, People can people can sense the people can tell where they are through the soles of their shoes. We need to have different texture when they enter a new, when they enter a new land. And so they, I mean, so they cross-dissolved thing. I mean, it's that level. It sounds crazy, right? But Disney parks are the most attended parks in the entire world, subpart of none. I mean, because of the experience, we're walking around Cedar Point, which is a thrills, epic roller coaster park, about an hour north of us. We all have season passes there. And we're walking through through it, and it's like dusty and dirty and cobwebby and disgusting and chipped paint and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 50:57

Hold on, hold on. It's Halloween season. Oh, there we go. That's always been the joke. It's like we walk around and see cobwebs and we're like, oh, nice, they decorated. They did very thorough.

SPEAKER_01 51:06

So like we walk around there and their season passes for a whole year $115. In Disney, it's $1,500 for a ticket. One person. And so, like, when you compare those, it's like, man, did when people more people go to Disney than ever before. We were there on the opening hollow weekends, which is like a big thing for Cedar Point, and I was walking onto roller coasters. I'm like, Disney opens up the first day after they decorate for Christmas. That place is packed, you know. So it's kind of like you may not feel the wins now, but if you can compound this experience in your customers and you make them feel a certain way, they will never want to leave and they will offer a lot of people to you.

SPEAKER_00 51:45

There, there's some ideas on this that are very small that are I think pretty pretty attainable, in my opinion. In in the actual packaging of the product you ship, there I've had some experiences where I have this is this one is extremely scalable and probably the smallest on the spectrum, in my opinion. The packers name. Hey, this product was right. So simple. That's so simple. But how do we take it a step further? I had a product that was actually had a signed card from the founder that's even had my name on it. Hey Isaac, thank you so much for ordering this. We appreciate you so much. How simple and stupid. Like it incredibly simple. But then you could take it when we talk about Disney-esque, you can even audit the sound of the tape ripping on your package. And I this is this one blows my mind because I think about I think about those packages I get. Apple is phenomenal. I know Apple's always uses as examples for for business and products, but think about the Apple product experience, their tape where you just you just rip the tiny little and has it. Oh my gosh, yes. You know what I mean? And so, like, what are those things you're doing? Have you shopped for tape, or did you just find the tape that made sense?

SPEAKER_01 52:53

Oh, dude, that's so good. I never thought of that. That makes a big difference. I can't stand it when I'm like, oh, I gotta rip half the cardboard off with the tape.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Yeah, that matters. And and then one more with this, just in the in the sense of packaging and delivery, this experience when they're opening before they've even touched your product after buying it. What does it smell like? And I know that sounds so silly, but how easy like I bought I just bought a freshener for my car or for my truck, and it it's potent. I mean, this thing, I'm not saying this is what people throw in their packages, but it's wild how potent you you can get like an air freshener. But imagine just if you had this is this is just crazy thinking. I've never seen this, but if you had some kind of spray that you sprayed in a box before you shipped it, you had a signature scent or something that you always and that just like sweetwater candy, people look forward to opening your packages because like, man, that's a I it's maybe some cool leather good or wood thing or product that feels woodsy and you you have a scent that comes with pine or you know, oak, cedar.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

I don't know. There's science there's science behind it. So like even Disney does that. When you walk onto Main Street, it's like they pump certain smells into the all the crunchy moms are gonna hate this. Uh they pump smells in there, it smells like like a bakery or whatever. I forget what the different scents are throughout the year, but they they pump scents into Main Street when you're walking in uh to Disney World because it makes you feel a certain thing. A Nordstrom, there's a whole test on this. Nordstrom learned that when people smelled a certain smell when they were shopping, they bought more. Yeah. So you know what? Nordstrom smell a certain way. And so I think there's something to it. Now, this is post-purchase, but maybe it makes them feel a different way and it like uh associates it with it. I want to give another couple small things here. Uh, let's rapid fire some of these. Is that okay? Rapid fire a couple more. I know this is a really long podcast, and I told Isaac, when we get down here, this thing is gonna probably be the longest one we've done in a little while because I'm so passionate about this. Obsessive care for your customers, it scales. I'm I promise it does. It's hard to imagine it does. Greg Lavecchia, from the founder of Bloom, does a great, great job of this. He was on the podcast. I had him on like two years ago or something, and he was doing like 140 million a year, now he's doing like over a billion a year or something like that. It's pretty crazy. So, Greg, they do the they're obsessed about tribe and culture of customers and team and the pop-up events they do and stuff like that. So, like they do a great job of all of this, and I'm telling you guys, it's important because even the big br the big brands are doing this, and they got a lot of them got there and have raving advocates because they did this stuff in the beginning. Let me give some small things here. Uh, number one, when a customer gives you feedback on something, or a few of them give you feedback on something, and then you actually fix or change something because of them, go back and let them know and thank them. It's so simple. When we make changes to our programs and there are people that had great influence on that change because of that, I go and say, hey, just want to let you know this piece of feedback was so valuable, we made this change, and we just want to say thank you. Yeah, that's it. It's as simple as doing that. Another one, this happened on Monday. Honor expired discounts if someone misses the misses it. Like we have people to come in and they'll take they'll like opt into the welcome, and then they will just buy full full rate. And then they'll go to their email and say, like, oh, I forgot. Yeah, I don't know if I did that. I bought a suit for this. I bought a I bought a suit, like a Thomas Selby suit from uh Peaky Blinders. I bought this suit online for this event that we hosted, the 1922 event. And you know what? I opted another 15% off, and then I forgot to use it because I was like sizing myself, and then I bought it, and I was like, oh, 15% is a good chunk. I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna email them and say, hey guys, I got it. I forgot to use a discount. Like, no problem, we refunded it.

SPEAKER_00 56:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:28

And so they did. I'm like, thank goodness. Because we do the same thing. Someone forgot to use their discount earlier this week. We're like, yeah, no problem. We're just we'll we'll just go ahead and credit it back to you.

SPEAKER_00 56:35

Yep. Or give them store credit. I think of sometimes for those that have I don't there, I'm sure other stores have this, but grocery stores, we have Aldi, big prominent in our area. They have what's called the twice as nice guarantee. It's on all of their Aldi packaging. And it says, Literally, hey, if you if you don't like this product, maybe it's expired, maybe it's a weird texture or something. We will not only refund you, but we'll also replace it. And it's so it's twice as nice guarantee. And I think it's just one of those things that doesn't make sense financially, it doesn't make sense, but you now feel really equipped as a customer that I can buy this with confidence. And I love that. Another one I'll I'll fire off. And I'm sure a lot of people probably see this in their algorithms. Anytime someone local buys from you and the founder hand delivers it because they see they see an address that's local to their area and they hand deliver it within a 20-minute drive or something. And crazy. You can obviously get content bonus points, but imagine that. Like, can you imagine like you buy something and all of a sudden you have the founder knocking on your door? I saw an artist do that, like a music artist. He went and they couldn't believe that he was at their door. He's they live 20 minutes away from him. So I think that's that's a really fun one. But I'm also thinking my brain's kind of going to some of those, even the recovery things, like what you said with your suit. How thinking through, like, there's so many, so many parts of the customer experience that you can really hit. And and it it's it's pretty, pretty cool. I mean, I think ultimately we should never, when there's mistakes that happen, because inevitably it does, uh, never to blame it on someone else, like the weather, the carrier, or checkout issues, website developer issues, etc. But just to just own it and be like, hey, we're gonna go ahead and refund that. We're gonna get you a new one. Something breaks, you send a product and it breaks, you just go ahead and ship a new one before you even get back the old one. There's a lot of, and again, this is for everyone to really cater and craft for themselves and what their product margin, all that good stuff. But you can be smart about it and you can do some wild stuff, even even in the recovery period of saying, I want to keep this customer.

SPEAKER_01 58:31

Yeah. Another way you can also spin it, by the way, when something goes wrong, uh, that's a huge one, by the way. This is a big barrier for a lot of people struggle with the idea of having a refund somebody. It's like that's a really, really hard one. Something you need to do is create a minimum threshold of empowerment for your team to make decisions on. So it's like, hey, if this didn't cost less than 100 bucks, just go do the thing. Don't ask permission to do the thing, just do the thing. If you if it's more than that and you ri and it's like, or it's above X threshold, then we have a conversation about it. But if it's below that, you're better to just do it. That's we learned this from Amazon. Amazon, you're like, issue with my thing. They're like, okay, refunded. And you get to keep the product. I'm like, oh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:10

Okay. That's always a treat when you get to keep it.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

All of my 400 packages last year. Now I'm just kidding. So, like, so we do the same, we we do the same thing for like all of our low-ticket products people buy. If someone like says, I accidentally took $300 in upsells and got access to everything and went through it all. They don't tell us this. And we see they went through all of this stuff and then they're just trying to literally get the money back. We don't get personal about it. We're like, well, we see that you went through all this stuff and you're trying to take advantage of us. We say, no problem, everything's refunded. We appreciate your business. Yeah. You know, like create those minimum thresholds of decision making to do that is is is super smart. I will say, uh, giving instructions on how things work or checking in if you can on certain things, like I'll say the suit company missed opportunity for me. They didn't tell me that you have to hem the pants, maybe in the small text somewhere. So I had to get the pants hemmed in the nick of time, literally the day of the event. Um, because these came in the day before. I'm like, uh, so I'm getting them hemmed the day of the event and getting them delivered. It's like they didn't tell me that was gonna have to happen. Yeah, uh, also they never checked in on the sizing. They never the if someone literally called me and said, Hey, just want to check in. I would be if I had that level, I would be like, any suit I buy, I'm buying from you guys. But I didn't get that. So I'm like, uh, you didn't even tell me that I'd like hem and you didn't ask about sizing, you didn't check in on anything, you didn't give any installation, any instructions or advice. Like, I'm like, okay, meh, it was a meh experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

I it reminds me because I had one suit experience that was similar but better, and it was a custom suit you buy online, you send in your measurements. It was a great buying experience in general. But the one part that stood out to me was the after the fact. So they say you can have like two or three alterations after you get your suit and you actually wear it. Now, all you have to do is come to our showroom. Now we are majority online e-com, but you can come to our showroom and it's free. If a showroom is inaccessible to you, we will refund you a tailor or a seamstress's bill.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:07

Oh, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:08

Yeah. So that's what I did because I'm like, I don't want to drive. It was the closest one was like an hour and a half away, and I'm like, I don't want to do that. I hate driving. And so I literally just went to someone that was in our town, got the bill, 70 bucks or whatever it was, and submitted the receipt to the company, and they just literally refunded me, paid me back. I mean, it was just it stood out to me. And I'm like, that's incredible. What an incredible. Obviously, it cost them more than having their staff do it, but man, I I have I have recommended that I recommended them to an entire wedding because I'm like, hey, all your grooms have been in the groom, go to this company because they're phenomenal. And so just that one experience, I've only been a one-time customer, but that one experience made me a raving fan. And so, I mean, yeah, so good.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:48

Well, this podcast probably long enough. So we're gonna we're gonna close it down here. I hope you got the idea that like if you ask the question, what would happen if every customer could only, you can only get customers by your current customers referring to other people? What would you do differently about the way your customer experience is? How much more would you improve that? But as a result, if you did that, how much more would people buy? How much more profit would you have? What if it became a growth lever for you, not this reactive lever that you were pulling, but rather intentional proactivity in trying to curate and engineer experiences that change people's lives in a good way, even if the experience is not some we're curing some disease of theirs, but rather they they gain so much joy from the process with you that they're telling people and now they get to have a talking piece to somebody else and be the point of conversation because the experience they had with you was so great. And then they come back and they refer other people to you. What would happen to your business if that's how you treated customer experience and customer success, not customer support or customer service? I hate those terms. It's like, oh, that's reactionary. I'm proactive. I'm trying to help all my customers succeed. I'm trying to give them the best experience as possible, which is why you're the director of client experience, not client support. Probably wouldn't be a fun role if it was just client support.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:03

Well, and just imagine the difference of naming your client support, even if like your Brian at Sweetwater, my Kevin at Sweetwater. Yeah. Having a name to the person you're talking to even changes the experience. As simple as that is, not just the title, but having a person's name behind it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:19

Yeah. Change the game. All right. Hey, we appreciate you listening to this podcast. We know it's a little bit long. If you enjoyed it, please go ahead, drop a comment on YouTube. If there's something that stuck out to you, that you're like, hey, I'm gonna go try this, or I have some ideas, just let us know. Are you sold on it? Is this something you think is worthwhile for you? And if you're listening on Apple or you're listening on Spotify, please go ahead and give us a little rating. It means the world to us as we are on a quest to become the number one e commerce podcast on the planet. We'll see you in the next episode.