Creating Super Promoters For Your Brand

At the end of the day, as great as your product is, you will forget about it if the people behind it aren't good.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another.

Episode of the Account Experience podcast.

And this week, we have a casual conversation around the different levels of promoters you may have at your company. And I know what you're thinking, Ian. Promoters are promoters.

It doesn't matter.

There's no different level. Well, not exactly. Carrie and I get into the details and the benefits of creating super promoters for your company. So sit back, relax, and let's get.

Right into the episode.

But it's a responsibility the customer has. I mean, you can't expect a brand to stay good forever if you're not doing anything to help it stay good. And that's the problem with backseat customers. You know, they sit back and they're critical. I look at Apple, like, Apple's this great brand because people are giving feedback, and they were constantly saying, this sucks, or I wanted to do this, and they would do it. And people were like, yay. And a few people were pissed. Oh, it doesn't do this. And, all right, we'll think about that. Let's see if we can bake that up. But at a certain point, people stopped doing that, and they're like, all right, show me what you got, Apple. Nothing. Screw you. And it's. That's gotta shift. That's gotta change. You know, it's like Chipotle. You know, I'm a fan, but what have you done for me lately? I can't have that attitude. I have to. I have to fill out the survey. I have to call a manager over if somebody is not good. I know that sounds like I'm being a Karen. I get it, but I'm not going to yell and scream about it. I will do the same thing when you're good, too. Right. I'll give you positive feedback.

Yeah. But I think you're. You're like the. You're probably the. Except, like, you're a vocal person, right? So, like, you go. You are vocal on both sides of the coin where, like, if you're a promoter, you're an ardent promoter. You are, like, passionate. You, like, for us, for example, when you're a customer, like, literally, you were out there promoting us, doing conferences with us, talking us up at tables with prospects, and we didn't really, quote, unquote, ask you to do that, but I think that's just who you are. So, like, I could see why, you know. You know, when you're. You're pissed off it would go the other way. But I don't know if that's. It's almost like there's a study to be done about the degree, degree of promoter. Like, yeah, sure, it's nine or ten, but like, how active are you? Like, I'm guessing there's a lot of like silent promoters out there where it's literally like you could put it on a scale of 1 to 5, you're a 5 probably, or 4 or 5 active, and there's probably a promoter that's a 10, but is like more like a 1 or a 2.

That's interesting. It's almost an activation or an activity meter. It's a secondary metric to promoter. You know my feeling on that. Yeah, I feel detractors. I think detractors and promoters are separated by one number. Literally, I think they're the same person. I just think we've disappointed them where we've met the expectations of the promoter. That's the only difference between the two.

That's interesting.

But it's. Yeah. And so my question then is, can a company, is there something a company can do then to improve that or to help that type of person personality? Can we, can we activate a promoter? Realistically, is there a way to do that? Is, can we give them permission to be more outspoken? Can we give them a guidebook? Can we, you know, like, and I think that's where I'm coming from with this. Like, what is the customer's responsibility and good service? We always talk about the business's responsibility. And look, we've built an entire organization off of making companies better at customer service or account experience. But what's the customer's responsibility in that? You know, and it's not shelling money out. Let's get beyond that. Yes, you got to continue to invest financially. If it's good, spend the money. If not, you still have to invest. But what do you invest? Feedback, comments, whatever. I could think of five things on top of my list that good customers should do. Stay in touch with the news. Visit their website. Hey, if you're going to invest, this was the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me. If you're going to invest money, invest in companies that you're a fan of because you're buying from them, you believe in them. The minute you stop believing in them, take your money out of that investment. I mean, you saw something that upset you enough, you have an insight to that. I would never invest in cigars. I don't smoke cigars. I don't drink alcohol. I'D probably stay away from those investments.

It's true, though. That's actually funny that you said that. Like, that's kind of how I buy my stocks. Like, I own Sonos. Like I own Green Mountain Coffee Roasters because I drink a ton of their coffee back in the day. It makes total sense. Like, people promote by. They engage in a deeper level with the companies they love, and then it doesn't just stop at promoting. It's like. It kind of becomes like, all birds, right? I mean, same type of thing. Like, if I'm bought into everything they do. I'm not crazy about the looks of.

The shoes, but, yeah, I'm still. I'm still. The verdict's still out on their clothing line. I'm debating if it's.

Oh, my God, it looks terrible.

I know.

It looks a little too trendy for me. Like the shirts that just look like bags on you. Oh, my God.

Well, I just had a whole bad.

Experience with the whole shoe thing. Like, I ordered a color, it didn't fit. My size wasn't available even after it was. It was a little bit of a Dancing through hoops. And you think someone would have reached out and said, look, we've seen you bought three pairs from us already. We know you love us.

Sorry about that. You know, I'm not even looking for a discount. Just an acknowledgement that I was put through the ringer a little bit and now I'm a little bit, like, gun shy around Albert.

I'm like, yeah, I know.

It's kind of, like, made you a passive, right? At this point.

I wouldn't say passive detractor.

I don't.

I don't live in the passive world.

Interesting.

I'm not. I'm not. But I think passives are quiet.

I think passives go. I'm passive with certain things in my life. Trying to think of something that would be. I'd be passive on maybe the type of lemonade I buy.

I wouldn't say I'm overly passionate about it. It serves a need. Or sugar. I couldn't even tell you what brand of sugar I bought last. I don't know who makes it, but. Or milk. As long as it's not sour, I'll buy any milk on the shelf. I don't even consume that much. I'm passive.

So if it's.

Yeah, whatever's cheaper, I'll get it. On the flip side, I'm passionate about certain things, and my shoes is one of them. Right. I was an Allbirds fan there for a very long Time and felt a little. Now I'm almost a detractor now I'm like me.

Well, you got, you got a better deal out of them than I did. So I also had an experience. I didn't tell you this, but when I first bought my Mizzles, which are like the high top bull ones, the soul, so they use like the whole rubber reusable, rubber sole thing. And the soul, after two days, like was peeling off, like to the point where it wasn't like the full sole, but it was like the side where it meets the. I can't describe it very well, but.

Yeah, you're talking about where the soul meets the base or the shape of the shoe, whatever.

Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't like a big deal that affected like the usability or like the long term viability of the products, but it still pissed me off as a brand new pair of shoes. And it's like I had these little flaps from the sole that were like coming off already. And so I like made a stink and I did it and I thought a nice way, but I think all I got out of them was like $15 off my next shoe. So, like the fact that you got. Was that half off?

Yeah, they cut me a deal. But I'll tell you, my. My first experience was great and that's what won me over. Ian. The first shoe I got was too tight and I should have remembered that. But the second shoe I got fit perfectly on my normal size. So it was weird. It was like every time they come out with a new shoe, I don't. The consistency is not there. So that's one thing. But my first shoe didn't fit. And I told you, I boxed it, put the label on it. As soon as the shipper received it, they already had another pair coming out to me and I was like, wow, I could be sending them an empty box and they trust me. And I was like, that's a smooth move. That's really nice. And they offered me a discount and I got the runner, whatever that is. The. I always come up with fun names for them, but they're not right. And it's a, it's a comfortable shoe. It's nice. And I like, I like the. I like even what they do in social media and their messaging is great and then. But this last experience was a little bit tough pill for me to swallow. So.

Yeah. Reminds me of Sticky that just. Tony Saya.

Yeah.

CEO Zappos. You just died the other day, which is crazy.

I saw that 40, like 46 yeah.

House fire, which is ridiculously terrible. But have you ever read that book? Was it Delivering Happiness?

Yeah, we used it for something at areas. One of our VPs brought it in.

Yeah. But they did a lot of that where they trust the customer and ship out, like the existing new shoes before you get the other pair back type of thing. Apple does that now, too, with their iPhone. Trade in where they'll ship you the new phone and then they just send an empty box after the fact and have you send it in. I think that goes a long way. Yeah, just trust is like one of those things that if you treat people like humans and just assume they're good, it creates a decent feeling. Because like you said, that was probably one of the higher points in that experience for you.

Without a doubt. No, I think trust is huge because why do we make buying decisions you and I trust, Right?

Yeah.

Are we getting our money's worth? If something goes wrong, are they going to be there, back me up? And when I go to use this item for whatever I'm going to use it for, well, can I trust that it's going to do what they promised it would deliver, whatever that might be. I know, again, I have this tendency to really simplify, oversimplify these things. But are shoes going to be comfortable? Are computer parts going to work when I put them in my computer? And. And if I run into a problem, especially a problem that you created, I think that's the other piece. Too many companies don't own the mistakes they make. And it's hard. We're in a society now where nobody wants to admit fault. We're so scared to. I mean, I think we all have our natural defenses up with everything. I do it myself. I get it. I understand where it comes from because you can almost get attacked or knocked down because of it. But another thing. So going into last week, I have a secondary computer I use as a server and different things.

Look at you.

And I have a company I go to. I guess I'll throw it out there. Newegg, They've always been pretty good. I can get a sales guy on the phone and he'll walk me through the components. And it's become a little more complicated now to buy a motherboard of CPU memory, so on and so forth. That all works together. And yeah, I can comb through websites for 2 hours, 3 hours, and get it all married. I have no problem doing that. But when I'm ready to spend my cash, a company should be happy to take it from me and provide that service. They have this new feature on their site called PC Builder. And you pick your CPU you want, and you pick your motherboard, and then you pick. But it gives you suggestions. Once you make your first selection, it filters the rest. So only things that work with what you pick go with it. Now, this seems pretty obvious, right? This is. This is not genius technology. You would hope, you know. So I picked out a processor. I thought, this is. This is a budget processor. I'm not spending a million bucks here. But, yeah, it suggested some motherboards. I grabbed the motherboard. Then it had memory. I said, look, I'll. I'll splurge on some good memory here. I need a case or whatever. So I pull some components together. I wanted it expedited. This was going to be my long weekend project to work on. And it arrives. I'm unpacking. I'm a kid. I'm a kid on Christmas morning, right? Opening all my stuff up. That's all laid out across the top of the motherboard box. It only has two processors in the world that won't work with this. And it's the one that the website suggested for me to buy with it.

Oh, no.

I paid for expedited shipping. I bought all the components. I used their tool to do it, thinking this would be easier. And now I'm left with a lump of coal, you know? And I was just kind of like. So I get on the phone, and it's all the things they couldn't do for me. It was all the things that, well, we don't take processors back. We can only give you the same item back. It's like, all right, I hate to do this. I hate to be this person. Can I talk to a supervisor? And the girl kept coming back and wouldn't put the supervisor on. I said, look, I'm not. I don't want my money back. Keep my money, and I'll even pay more. I guess what I'm asking here for what is easier. Do I send the motherboard back? Do I send the process? Tell me what's easier, and I'll do it. I just want to build a computer.

Please.

That's all. I just. It was so simple. And I went from being, like, this raving fan of Newegg, and actually, I would even spend a few dollars extra to throw business their way and talk about them. Now I'm on the other spectrum. It's like, here I am three weeks later, and I still don't have all my components.

Dave, this morning, actually, our director of CSM at CustomerGage had a great way to describe this concept, which is literally, you could be going to the best restaurant in the world. It's your spot. You know, you have a bad meal and all of a sudden you have second thoughts about going back. Or maybe it's the first time you've ever tried that restaurant. You have a bad meal. How many times do you go back to a place that has a bad meal on the first time around? Pretty rarely, right? If ever. And you're experiencing your running, your favorite spot, that you go and get your specific meal every time you had one bad meal, and now all of a sudden you're like, oh, man. Like, I don't know, maybe you got sick from that meal. And I don't know if I'd go back. I would maybe go back in a couple months. I would maybe have reservations. It does create that cognitive kind of block for that brand. I mean, that's a big thing.

And you stop to go to them for other solutions, too. So let's bring this into our world, right? We're helping people with getting their revenue uploaded so they can analyze that based on sentiment, getting feedback from customers so they can react quickly and close the loop. We're working on integrating systems so they can see everything in one place, right? We're a software company, guys. This is what we do. But what happens when we burn someone on the first thing? We don't want to go forward, but what happens if in that relationship, they've loved us on some things, but we let them down somewhere in that journey? If we don't own that letdown, we don't make it right when we can. The next time they have an opportunity or they need something, we're not going to be high on the list. And they'll go into everything with caution. And I just. We used to call this recovery in the restaurant world. We used to love recovery opportunities. I know it sounds crazy, but we used to love when something went wrong because this was our opportunity to shine. No one ever remembers when everything is good, when you roll into your favorite. Let's go back to your favorite restaurant. When you go into your favorite restaurant, you get your meal and it was hot. The kids got their french fries early because they were hungry and they got to nibble on those, right? You're smiling because you're a parent. You get that, right? They got their drinks in their sippy cups. They don't spill all over the place. I mean, all these considerations taking place, you just assume that this is expected, is why we keep coming Here. So your bar goes up and they have to maintain that. Now it's maintenance on that. And it gets even harder to exceed your expectations when something does go wrong. That's our opportunity to go in and recover even a really good customer. And you can look at these as like, boo boos, or, oh, my God, we screwed up, or we didn't keep them happy. Or you can look at them as like, this is my opportunity to shine. You know, like anyone can manage when things are smooth and there's nothing going on.

Yeah.

How do you manage? How do you lead when shit hits the fan? Right?

Yeah, that's true. And that's what people remember 100%. Like, I can already in my head, queue up like 10 instances of this happening at restaurants or like different areas that I've purchased things. And it's. You're 100% right, man. It's like I don't remember the everyday normal occurrences. I remember when something went wrong and how that feeling that I got based off the interaction. Right. And I think that's why it's so powerful, is because humans are emotional beings. That emotions and emotional triggers are some of the most powerful things that you can utilize, not only as a marketer, but as a human. Trying to get a human to do something else is emotional triggers are king. Always will be.

I'm sure you've heard this, the 99:1 rule. But we put so much attention on the 1 bad.

So if you look at all of.

Your responses, you get 99. Wonderful. You're great, terrific. Pats on back. We get you, we love you. And then there's this one that comes through that's just ugly. We put all of our attention and energy on that one, and it's just natural instinct for us to do. And we ruin our whole day, our whole week based on this one feedback. And we forget the 99. And unfortunately, it's just human nature is what we do. But we can't let the 1 outweigh the 99.

Address it, fix it. If it's an ongoing problem, don't let it happen. We talk about that every week, Ian, you and I, we constantly are telling people, close the loop, learn strategic. But there's a responsibility to all the 99 customers not to derail what you do so well based on that one. And this leads to something else I think you and I talked about weeks ago, like one of our first chats, empowering the front line, the decision makers.

Yeah.

You know, there's nothing worse than someone saying, like, looking, like, shocked. They Want, you know, they want to say the right thing, but they don't have permission. So they need to wander off and ask a manager. And I think that's why we default, like put your manager on, because you don't seem to be able to make this decision. It's not a hard decision to keep me happy.

No, it's so true.

And I think if more companies gave that power away. Trust. Back to the trust word. Right? So don't only trust your customer, but trust the person who's literally helping that customer to make the best decision.

You know what I think? I think we're stuck in the 80s and the 90s when it comes to customer service for the majority of businesses. Of course there's a couple of very shining examples of amazing customer service and experience companies. But our run of the mill, like you said, that person that you have to ask for the manager because you know they're just giving you their script of what they've been trained to do. When a customer has an issue and you know they're rolling through the Rolodex of like, all right, what's my rebuttal for this? And you can just tell. So I think what's happened is this works maybe back 20, 30 years ago when maybe consumers were dumber. I don't think that was even the case back then. But that's what the common accepted training program was, is give this Rolodex of rebuttals. I think people are way smarter now. They see through the bullshit. And the companies that shine exactly what you're saying, Kerry. They enable frontline staff to make on the fly decisions that are best for the customer. And that's where the dollars and cents are being made. And that's where transformative experience can shine. Is when you. I'll give you a B2B example because we're on the account experience program, right? The, the, the podcast, if you will. If you get a detractor, let's say you have a product pop up. So you're a SaaS company, you have a product pop up, you have a detractor and they give you the feedback in the app itself. How amazing would it be instead of three days later you get a follow up from the account executive or from the CSM saying, hey, I saw you were a detractor three days ago. When you're in the product, would love to talk to you about it. Can we set up some time and you make their life harder. How amazing would it be if in the app itself when that pop up Happens, and they select that detractor score. You set up a live chat that immediately hits them up in the app while they're using it and saying, hey, you're a detractor. What's going on? How can I help? I mean, that's when we talk about, like, next level experiences. That's. That's what are where I think we're going. It's real time. Exactly what you're saying. Troubleshooting, giving front laps, frontline staff the ability to solve problems. Give them the trust. And I think it works both internally for employees and externally for your customers. Like, if you just trust people to do their job, man is that powerful. And I know that's a really difficult thing for management to let go of sometimes, but amazing things happen when you hire the right people, but then trust them to do their jobs. And I think that's. I keep coming back to that concept, and it really is. Not to bring us full circle, but it's about trust again.

Yeah, but in trust, you owe it to the customer and to the employee. Again, we can talk about this all day. I'm sure we could. But there's that accountability piece too, though.

Yeah.

And I think that's the other part. To answer your question, I don't think the consumer was necessarily dumber. I just think that there was lack of accountability. So we tried to cookie cut our solutions, and this is the answer you should give if someone says this. This is what you can do if someone says this. So we tried to cookie cut this to make it scalable.

Sure.

And I think part of that is it's hard to get good people.

Hmm.

It's hard to get good customers, and it's hard to get good employees. How many interviews do we do a.

Year, Ian, you and I, between the whole. Just in our industry, in our company. Right, right. So can you imagine a company on a scale of thousands, how many people they have to get through?

And if I were to ask a.

CEO right now, who would you put, you know, as your top or your. What's the percentage of great employees you have?

It's hard. It's hard to find good people. It's hard to hold on to good people. You know what they want? They want to be held accountable. They want to be held accountable. I love companies that come back and go, hey, you bought this? Are you using it? Hey, you haven't logged in in a few weeks. What the hell? Like, you're giving me money, but, you know, it's like, I'm not gonna scare them off. What I'm going to do is say, you're right, I did spend money on that and it was a good idea at the time, but now it's not. So make it a good idea for me again. It's the same way with our people. So yeah, I do think there's a lot of responsibility we have to make customers better. And I think your analogy of employees is the same thing. I think you're spot on. We gotta stop cookie cuttering. If that's a word, let's make it a word. It's official. But I also think we, we owe that accountability. You can't expect a good employee to stay good if you don't circle back around with them and give them feedback. If you don't give them that accountability of, hey, I trusted you, this is what you had to do, great job or all right, wasn't that great? Let's talk about this. Let's pick it apart and put it back together again. And I think that's where we've lost the skillset. I think a lot of companies have lost the ability to mentor, to train, to develop. I think a lot of companies have moved into managing. We just manage to get by. We manage to put a body out there. You know, we don't necessarily go out and think in our brains that that person's success is directly tied to my success and I can give everything I have to that person and if I don't have enough, get more for them. I think it's a lot like customers. I think what we do is we go out and we just get new employees. Oh, they didn't work, let's just get a new one. And it's that rotation of warm bodies. So I think it's, I think it's two handed, right? Do you have the right person? Hold them accountable and accountability might be saying goodbye and I'll let you in on a secret. You do say goodbye to some customers too.

For sure.

Companies should seriously look at their portfolio and go, that's not my business. I can't change my business to serve you. But it's the same with employees. You're not my employee anymore. You don't match the needs of the business. I did this, this and this. I did everything I could to help you, but it's just not working. And you got to part ways. And that's what accountability should come down to, right?

One bad fit customer can completely throw off your business plan for the year. Especially if they're big, right? Like the worst case scenario is you have a Big customer that's let's say 60 to 80% of your revenue and they become a bad fit customer just based off of ideological standpoints as far as like approach on something or you know, requirements within the system that, you know, you're not going to custom develop something for them. We've experienced it here, I've experienced it at other companies. It's not isolated to SaaS either. There's always going to be those companies that just trans. They start great and then they kind of eventually get into the bad fit territory which then drags down your entire org from a resource standpoint, but also like it's a morale thing. At some point it becomes like a morale issue where you have people that are just dealing with, I hate to say it but like once it gets bad, it gets bad, right? Like you have attitudes and you have just a difficult time managing the personality sometimes is a very politically correct way to put it.

But I always say resentful.

I think that's what I was going at.

Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, just because if they're cutting you a big check and they make out a majority of your business, you're bending over backwards, you're dancing, you're throwing every resource you add. But this guy will never have that kind of bank, let's be honest. Or will never excite you as much as that does. But why are we trying to find a way to solve those problems for this customer also? And you know, would you rather have one big bad customer or 30, 40 smaller great customers? Well, it seems like an obvious equation, but you're right, we get blinded. Sometimes that dollar amount and that scalability.

Thing clash and you can see, like, just to get a little detailed on this, it can go off the rails. So like if you have a bunch of bad fit customers, like if you're early stage SaaS and you're just taking a bunch of clients on because you just need the revenue and then they turn out to be 80% bad fit and then your CSM team is scrambling to serve these guys. It's really difficult to survive or grow at that point. And that's why, I mean, plug for marketing here. I think it's marketing sales issue really. So like, are you targeting the right people? Do you know who the right people are? But it's a different conversation. But you can tell how like these things are all interrelated and it's very much a delicate ecosystem. If one thing over here goes off, the other things are going to be affected. 3:10x down the line, it's difficult. That's why this is hard. And you know, SaaS in general, it's. You gotta do certain things the correct way to scale it properly. But anyways, off topic there. But I think your point, Kerry, of like, you know, things change your experience at Allbirds, you were a promoter, now you're, in your opinion, a detractor. Which is really interesting. I love that, that feedback of like, you know, I'm not really ever a passive. I'm either a promoter or detractor. But I think it speaks to like you're, you're on that scale of like a five out of active, you know, promoter detractor. Like if you are a promoter, you're a full blown promoter that is very active. If you are a detractor, you're a very active detractor that will talk to the manager. I mean, that's, I think it's like almost like a personality type or something that it's important though, because there are things that you would serve a very different purpose for a business if you were a promoter versus somebody that's on this like the one scale of the activity scale. Like that person would be a promoter, but they wouldn't actively do anything for your business, probably, which is a different need. But it's still great to have them. But I would take five of you over 10 of them any day. I think even if you are a detractor for a short period of time.

I think we got a bunch of them. How many times in the office a topic comes up about something and then we all need to get our voices heard on why we love it or hate it. You know, there's the Chipotle Qdoba. I can go down the list of different things that when they come up, it's crap or oh, I love it. There's nothing better. You know. And it could be that small food truck that we visit on Thursdays.

Yeah.

To really big brands that we really rally behind and we want to see be successful. Because it does feel like there's a mutual. Like if they do well, I mean, it's almost like secretly it feels like I do well too. Like I was waiting for my Sonos email, you know, all weekend because I want that one more speaker to add to my set. And it came and I was excited. I knew it was coming, but I wasn't a Sonos fan. Like that two years ago, you know, you gave me my first one, you know, and now, now I'm just like you. I'm a raving fan. So I think promoters rub off on other. What do we call these persons? We got to come up with a name of this. But whatever. This. This I think.

Malcolm Gladwell calls him. What does he call him? Oh, God. He's got a really good book on it. Got them completely blanking. But I think they're called mavens. Yeah, mavens. So basically people that are influencers or like, if you're. If you like something, Carrie, you're gonna try to get everybody else around you to like it too? Something like that.

Yeah. We did the whole LinkedIn campaign earlier. That's right. Okay.

Right.

So, yeah, so it's like I want other people to be as excited as I am. Why? I don't want the brand to go away. I want them to be successful.

Yeah.

It's almost counterintuitive in some ways because they're going to make a lot of money and forget me. Right. People are going to outspend me and I'm not going to be as important to them anymore. But I kind of feel like I'm doing my role to make them stick around and be successful and I'm willing to put my reputation on the line. But, yeah, I like celebrating when something's really good. On the flip side, I wouldn't say. I normally trash, but I would speak out and say, we don't want to do that. That's not a smart decision.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's interesting.

I love these. We're gonna call them everyday experiences where you literally. We talk shop. We just wrap on a couple common things that have happened to us in our lives. I mean, it's so amazing too, like, how wide reaching these things are because we deal with, like, B2B vendors that we're buying software from or services from. I could give you a hundred stories about, like, great experiences with those guys or bad experiences with them. Same thing on the B2C side. We're all consumers. Right. I mean, there are certain brands that I love and there are certain brands that are very popular that I just. I've had terrible experiences with and I won't go back to them. So, yeah, it's interesting. And I think everybody has a different experience too, which is. Which is kind of the really unique piece is that it just goes to show that a lot of these companies don't really have a solidified plan in place or they're just kind of winging it, which is interesting. You'd expect more from some of these bigger ones, but you never know.

And will you boil it down to it's people doing it though. As automated as we're becoming, as much as we try to put systems in place that will emulate or simulate what you and I would do as human beings, we're still not going to ever be at a place where it's going to replace that human touch of getting on and listening, speaking to, showing empathy. I've yet to see a chatbot do empathy really well. You know, if it did, I'd spend a lot more time with it, you know. But the reality is, you know, I don't think humans are going to be replaced. I think if we leverage the technology, if we leverage the automation, the artificial intelligence, well, then we can spend more time going back to doing what was important and developing and fostering really strong relationships and really taking in feedback, doing things about that. This might be a whole nother AI technology conversation that we might need to have. But I don't think they're coming for us. I don't think they're coming to take over our jobs. We just need to find a healthy way to use them. They can't be a replacement for what's made companies good over the years. And at the end of the day, as great as your product is, you will forget about it if the people behind it aren't good.

Boom. We're ending on that. That's a mic drock moment. I think so. So, yeah, thanks for listening guys. I mean, we're going to probably do these a couple times every other month or so just to kind of talk about something we've encountered in our daily life. We'll try to relate it to B2B the best we can. But yeah, thanks for listening. This has been the Account Experience podcast and please like and share with your friends and we'll talk soon. This episode of The Account Experience PO.

Is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to.

Your experience data in real time to.

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