Your Passives and Non-Respondents Need More Attention!

Right. So, Adam Whiffam.

What.

What's in it for me? We learned it on the last podcast.

Oh, yeah. What's in it for you? Okay, listen, you big Cornish customer success Kahuna, you think you're a big will in this, but I have got the emperor of experience for you today, Maurice Fitzgerald. Now, you and I remember him because he was on the stage at our Monetize program in Amsterdam, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I've spoken to Maurice over the years. He's always got something exciting today, by the way, if you check his LinkedIn profile, he does a great, great newsletter every week that I always learn from. And even I've got a kind of distant connection with him because Maurice and I go back to a company called Digital Equipment back in the 90s. But without further ado, Dave, I'm going to introduce him. Hello, Maurice. Thanks for joining us today.

Well, thanks. Thanks a lot for inviting me, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here. Yes, I realized that we worked in the same building at the same time in Geneva with dec, and you were in workstations, I think I was. And I was a software guy, but I think there were 700 of us in Geneva at the time, so it's not too surprising that our paths never actually crossed.

But you stayed in the area, and we are now talking to you from the shores of Lake Geneva today.

That's absolutely right. I went through the mergers of Digital with Compaq, Compaq with hp, without ever changing from. It was digital moved me here 32 years ago. I had worked for four years in the Netherlands before that.

Well, we did a swap because today Dave and I are in the Netherlands now. Listen, just before we go any further, I just want to make sure that we give everyone that's listening an understanding of kind of the. The. The. The experience you bring to the table here. So, I mean, you were in charge of customer experience. One of the world's biggest IT companies, hp. And you know, and then before that, I understand that you were looking after strategy and customer experience. So you did a whole bunch of stuff. But not only that. Now after that, you've. You've written books with your brothers, and I see the cartoons out there. I mean, you've got a great portfolio career.

Yeah, well, I certainly had an entertaining time. I was never in charge of customer experience overall for HP. I was in charge for the 4 billion software division for the last few years, commuting between here and California, since I declined to actually move. So I was the best friend of every Airline on the planet, possibly. Yeah. So that was pretty, pretty exciting, which you've given it fairly accurately. I was chief of staff for HP in Europe, head of customer experience for Europe, Europe, Middle east and Africa. And I got there in kind of a weird way, and I should have learned the lesson more quickly than I did. It was one day when I'd been chief of staff for EMEA for, I don't know, perhaps nine months a year. I went to the head of emea, Francesco Serafini, at the time, and I said to him, hey, Francesco, I'm observing this around the way the customer experience work is doing, and really, I think that it's just not aligned with our strategy and we need to do it completely differently. He just looked at me and he said, okay, you're in charge. What, instead of my current job? Oh, no. As well, I did that and I made that mistake again later on when HP was integrating eds, which was subsequently separated, and asked them, look, I've got my years of project management and customer experience stuff, and I really think these three things are wrong with the way that it's being done now. And I think if we fix them, the integration will go a lot more smoothly. And he just looked at me and said, you know what I'm going to say now, right?

Be careful what you wish for. I think that the company at that stage was very much like that. You know, it's like, oh, you put your hand up for stuff, they were going to throw it for you. But let's drill that in. Let's drill into that a bit more because that's a wonderful way of introducing it. But you've really learned some things over the years and, you know, everyone who's listening, by the way, should completely follow your blog and read your books because there's so much in there. But one of the things I loved you talk about is, you know, about managing business relationships and perhaps you can tell us a little bit about some.

Of the things you've done. I will. And you mentioned the books. It's one of my, I'm going to call it failures. The books surprised me and they continue to sell well. But the reason I wrote the books was I thought that I could do a mind dump from my brain onto pages and that then I wouldn't have to think about that stuff anymore. And I didn't care very much about whether they would sell well or not, but they did. And that meant that, hey, I got invited to monetize and I got all sorts of interesting encounters. But yes, I Think one of the most fundamentally interesting things that I learned in relationships is, well, I guess what I grown to think of as the marriage counseling approach to business relationships. I learned this primarily in B2B businesses, but I believe it applies to consumer businesses that work on the basis of annual contracts. And what happened was we were having a meeting of the Global Customer Experience Council, and one of the team came in and said, hey, we've just received this exciting new research that the deep the data analytics people in India have done for us, and the results are really surprising. And I looked at them and I said, wow, this is assuming it's all valid and that we can replicate it. This is the most unexpected result that I've ever seen in any type of customer experience research. I think, Adam, when I shared this with you the first time, you were surprised too. Yet it's going to seem intuitive. Off in a couple of minutes. We had this discussion on Valentine's Day, and in quite a lot of countries, Valentine's Day is the day where love and couples are celebrated. And it just flashed through my mind that what I saw in the data could be explained by three different types of relationships that we see in couples and couples of all types. Gay couples, straight couples, every type of couple that you can imagine. But couples who are in a romantic relationship, they fall into three categories. First, I think we all know couples who adore each other. They've been together for quite a while. When we want to refer to, or let's call it, recommend happy couples to our friends, we say, hey, look at them over there. You're just never going to see a happier couple. We should learn from them how all that stuff works. And they're like the promoters in nps. We all know couples like that fine. We also all know couples at the other end, and we know these are couples who fight, who bicker with each other. And we notice that they keep fighting and. And they keep bickering with each other. And when we think about it, and I'm sure you know couples like this, a lot of them even who do that, and they've been doing it for years and they're still together. Of course, there are some where it gets extreme and they break up, but there are plenty who've been bickering and appear to be fighting and not getting along with each other, who've been together for 10, 20, 30 years. And to me, these are like the detractors, especially in B2B, in NPS, what's going on? They're communicating with each other, right? And it's like a situation where, in B2B, especially where you're not entirely dependent on occasional surveys to find out what's going on, you know that there's a problem. Whether it be through surveys, through your operational data or otherwise, you reach out to the customers, it's far more likely that you're going to be trying to be doing loop closing. Now, the loop closing may destroy your margins with the customer and may take other types of value out of the relationship. When Meg Whitman was CEO of hp, she used to refer constantly to say to people, for our customers, the most important thing you can do is run to the fire. You see a fire, make sure you put maximum effort into putting out the fire. And that made perfect sense to me until the day that I saw this study.

Well, okay, I'm just going to like summarize what, where we're going so far because there's no visual aids here. So the first couple you've described are the people who are lovey dovey.

They're, you know, happy, happy couples.

They're talking, they're the promoters. Right.

It's, you know, Adam and Camilla I.

Was actually thinking about. It's a couple too. I don't want too much information. There is, you know, where people are, you know, there's a high intensity, you know, criticism or whatever's going on here. You know, now they're the detractors. Now surely common wisdom is if they're detractors, they, they're just going to flee through the door, right? You're going to lose them.

You know, you guys must all know some couples and maybe many where that just doesn't happen. And maybe you've been in relationships like that. Maybe you are in relationships like that. I don't know what goes on at home in your house, Adam. So. And I guess even the happy, happy couples probably go through their detractor recovery processes from time to time.

You said that there was a third couple, right?

So the third type of couple that we all know is what I call the couples who are in the deadly zone of mutual indifference. Right. And I've been divorced once a long time ago before moving to Switzerland. And it was, I guess I'd fallen into that pattern. It was I arrive home, my ex wife, who also worked full time, if she was there, I'd arrive home and say, she's not saying anything, everything must be fine, and then get on and do my thing. And all of your marriage guidance counselors or whoever will tell you that communication is what matters. Now, this group of people corresponds to the passives in nps. Now the catch when you relate this to the Valentine's Day and the marriage counseling thing is it's the couples without communication that break up.

Yeah.

I think and this is particularly where there's heavy investment in the couple where there's maybe there are children, maybe there's other factors that maybe they have a business together. The if there's no consequences to people leaving they can have one fight and it's over. Right. But where you've got. And that's kind of like the consumer business thing. You don't like your Tinder first date. Goodbye. The fact is that it's the absence of communication that causes people to break up.

That's interesting.

And this is what was going on in the data in the deep analytics that were done for a business that I am allowed talk about. But that was. But I'm not allowed name what was it at the time. I'm going to say it was 25, 30 billion dollar business.

Surely the statute of limitations have passed and.

Well, I don't know particularly for a company that doesn't exist anymore. Perhaps if I could find. The catch is to try and find a lawyer who could give me an all clear on that. But I feel confident that the point will come where I could provide the full details. But what the data showed and we were fortunate enough since these were all large customers that there was a 100% coverage of relationship surveys. And we had been asking the recommendation question even before for many years even before the company standardized on NPS as the primary CX metric. So we were able to see since we had this 100% coverage what the customers actually did. And there was over an about three year period there'd been about a 15 point decline in NPS and the business did decline with a time lag that you would expect. I think the business you don't see immediate changes in B2B especially from when something from an NPS change to a change in revenue because contracts might be multi year contracts, they might be annual contracts. It takes time for that to go through. So we did see the expected decrease in revenue that we would have expected from our modeling based on a 15 point NPS decline. But guess what? The detractors all stayed. The revenue went up a bit with promoters, it was flat with detractors. The decline was 100% with the passives.

Well that's powerful stuff. I remember you saying that on stage. That was. You're right. It's intuitive after a while because it's.

That non communication that really correct and non commun. It's this assumption that we've got that hey, the people who love us, fine, we'll use them as references. We'll have, you know, we'll invite them to our fancy meetings and so on. The detractors will run to the fire and we don't need to do anything with the, with the passives. And in a world where you have no competitors, you might be right. But if you're not communicating with the other party, perhaps somebody else is and has just offered them flowers and they're gone.

Just on that point there, Maurice, I think with obviously when you guys had that 100% coverage on all of your respondents there and the passes where I guess we're communicating one way at least to you with a things are okay kind of score, but things weren't going back. What about in the worlds where you don't have the respondents like what we see a lot of customers saying I want a 30% response rate, I want a 40% response rate. Is that then 60% of even less?

Yeah, obviously. And I know some of the good people in charge of the, the setup at DHL and we see that what you've seen and what you guys have helped them to achieve in response rate there. The catch is you can't wait until the next survey and you can't hope that the people who aren't responding respond. And the science and the experience of Bain and Satmatrix has been that it's the people who have the most extreme views that are the most likely to respond respond. And passives may actually, because they don't care very much, they'll be underrepresented in a voluntary survey without getting into questions of Pareto curves where perhaps you do indeed have 20 customers that have 50% of the revenue and you may have full coverage. Well, you better have full coverage for them. Right. So it's the science that you guys have entered a little bit that OCX cognition. We've gone into it in far greater detail, which is you use the data that you've got, the operational and other data that you've got for the people who have responded to the surveys to understand the differences between the categories.

Yeah.

Does your salesforce data show you that the passives are actually have far less, say interactions recorded by salespeople for equivalent revenue than promoters do?

Well, I'm going to make sure that we get to that later. Fats.

Okay, sure.

It's a really exciting thing to do, but just want to talk about the relationship thing, I want to. I'm really going to get Dave to reflect on this. Dave, do you see what Maurice is talking about in your life? Because you deal with hundreds of customers all the time.

Oh, 100%. And I think in my, I won't say comparatively short, that's not very nice. But in my fairly short amount of time of working in the customer success space and customer experience space, the detractors open up a conversation. And sometimes it was my biggest challenge going into it was I don't want to see a detractor that feels bad in my heart. I don't want to see that that makes me feel bad straight away. But when you can get to the point and you realize actually some of our most challenging customers, some of our best customers will very difficult to get them up to a seven or an eight. They'll love to give us a five or a six and they'll let us know immediately when we need to do better and then we can do better. So those customers are also the ones that have taken us step by step towards improving so much.

I think it's very much. The other thing is it's about response. I mean, Maurice, you said that you get 100% response, that most people are not going to get 100% response, but they're not focused on the non responders. They get this, well, correct.

But you. We'll come back to how you achieve 100% predictive NPS through other means. But the main observation, and I'm an engineer, I like to fix things. So my thing will, my reaction is always going to be, oh, this new CX data, where's the problems? I need to fix the problems. But if you're a business and it's very common to have 30 or 40% passives in a business and if your attitude is don't care about them, well, that's the whole situation that the customer success approach was born out of. Because what does customer success do? It. The main thing is it helps the goal of customer success. And I consider Nick Mehta to be the number one guru and consider Nick a friend. It's to ensure that the customer is getting the ROI that they expect from the software and having no response and just from the customer is what you're trying to address and you're trying to make certain that everybody goes through onboarding and that everybody is using the software and knows the different features and that people aren't saying, oh well, you know, I'd really use this more if only it did this. But Actually, it already does this, but they've. They've not found out how that works. That's also part of why I feel very strongly that customer success people should not have sales goals. Because what happens in when you do that is they only become. Well, it's the same. You recreate the same problem that led to customer success being implemented in the first place, which is nobody pays attention to the customer until it's, say, three months before the contract renewal, by which time your competitor may already have given them flowers and they may already have signed with somebody else. So it's. Customer success was introduced first in the software industry because the software industry had more margin than others. But I've worked with, very superficially with the world's, I believe, world's largest commercial real estate firm, helping them introduce customer success because they were getting surprised by people not renewing either commercial leases or other things like security services that they were offering without saying anything. But you didn't complain. Yeah, but meanwhile, the Securitas people have given me a better offer.

It's interesting. The software business has probably pioneered it most partly because of the, you know, the enormous money that's poured into it and the valuations that have gone alongside it to do with the growth of accounts. I actually think this is now starting in other businesses as well. So I think this, what do you call it, Customer success or customer retention, that's what we most.

Right, right. I mean, I certainly have grown to think about customer experience management as an obsolete terminology and that really it's about customer retention management. Right. But I would say a message to any and all listeners would be if you're getting continuously surprised by losing customers, you've probably got a whole bunch of them in your deadly zone of mutual indifference.

Yeah, I think that's. So before we leave the relationship metaphor, I really think that's a strong way of thinking about how business people are in. I mean, we all know about relationships. If you look at our parents or our children or our own, you know, situation, and relating that to business, I think is a really interesting point of view. And I'm reminded by, you know, some of the counseling that I've done with the Gottman Institute, for example, they're very good on relationships and they talk about couples who, if they argue the whole time, are most successful if they're able to do repairs. You know, it's about coming back from that conflict because you recognize that there's a mutual goal of success if you're together, it doesn't matter how you get there. Sometimes it's really important and challenging to do that. So that's, that's how shared goals and repairs.

And it's true, I guess I've not ever tried to work what I'm about to say into the couple's metaphor. But in B2B it's quite common if there are large contracts that the person who has chosen you as a vendor may have bet their career on that choice.

Yeah.

So they may just desperately need you to be successful.

Yeah, I agree. And their reputation, personal reputation is at stake and that can be vicious when they, you know, you're there to support them, but they can. There's nothing, nothing worse than somebody who's being disappointed. Why don't we go back a little bit, Maurice, because this is great that you got this learning. I mean, how did you start out in the career like this? Was there a light bulb moment that went off?

Yeah, there was. And before moving into high tech, I worked for seven years in the clothing industry with what was called formerly bluebell Apparel, which was the parent company of the Wrangler jeans brand and a few other minor brands, Mavericks, Hedgefield, and was eventually merged with H.D. lee. After my time and I graduated as an industrial engineer. I started my career with the stopwatch in my hand and so on. But quite quickly I moved into distribution, warehouse automation, that type of thing. And at one point I was the so called engineer for distribution in France, the Benelux and Italy. And I got extremely interested in learning about what we would call now, what is it that the different customers would want us to improve? The customers at the time there were no large chains. We had a very violent policy of not selling to any supermarkets and that type of thing. So Walmart wouldn't have had anything or Walmart equivalents in, in that geography. And we just paid the antitrust fines. That was just our policy, it wasn't legal. But the fines were low, so.

And the margins are high in the economy.

So you got it.

That's the New York Yankees method, isn't it?

Yeah, there you go. So anyway, these were generally either small boutiques with big amounts of money, relatively small compared to a huge supermarket, and so on, and clothing stores. So what I did was I asked the sales leader to identify the 10 most important ones in Paris. And I went and I spoke to them face to face. But what I did first was because we were in a matrix reporting environment and I reported to someone in Brussels and in where the European headquarters was and in Greensboro, North Carolina. And I said, this is what I want to do. And I was told in no uncertain terms, don't do it. We already know everything about what the customers want. They want the rivets to stay on the pockets. They want the stitching to be strong. And we just introduced stonewashing into the, into the market, which our laundry provider managed to copyright before we got it onto the market. And we had to call it Rockwash at the start. Then we bought him out. So I went in, I spoke to them. I knew what my leaders told me the customers cared about. And all I did was sort of nps, like I said, went into the people and said, what would you like us to improve? And I won't go into what they actually said. I'll just say the top three things that they said and that were practically universal weren't on my boss's lists at all. It was. Well, I mentioned the number one. Number one was if you say you're going to deliver us on Thursday morning, you must deliver us on Thursday morning. Because I'll have organized either my family or my friends or people from other stores to come over and help me unload the truck so that we've got the stuff for the weekend and say, well, but what about if the delivery is wrong? I don't care. I need the stuff on the shelves for the weekend. If it turns out to be the wrong stuff, I'll try to sell it and if it's not right, then I'll return it to you after the weekend. So it was full of stuff like that. But the key learning was unless you have actually gone out and asked, you're going to get surprises. You think you know what they, what they want.

This is a danger of assumptions. Right?

Right. You know, Mr. X Dell guy. Oh yeah. They want the soldering to be really tight on the PCBs there. I'm sure somebody in Texas was saying that while you were at Dell.

But we see this the whole time. Often it's the, you know, it's the N minus 1 of sales that goes, we know everything about what the customer says. We don't need to know.

Yeah. And I have to say to ask them. And it's really my, my favorite technique because my, I feel that for most CX leaders, especially in B2B, the most important relationship they can have is with the sales leaders. Because, and at the risk of being controversial, the worst possible place for a CX to report is to marketing because marketing is measured on demand gen and sales support. And that means that CX work gets viewed as entertaining. Market research but there are no PMs, there is no funding to work on the improvements where the sales people, if CX work is successful and you implement the improvements you've identified, guess what? Win rates improve, retention improves. Who's measured on that? The salespeople.

You're talking our language. I mean the research we just did shows that only 26% of all the companies out there have got their programs tied to revenue.

I've read through your report in detail. So again, no surprises.

And it's like, you know, this is things are not changing fast enough, but the weather is strongly linked. I completely agree with you, Maurice.

And you're also correct that in my experience, the sales people, particularly for large accounts, are often the main people who don't want the research done. They say already know everything and if you go in there, you'll probably screw up the big deal that I'm working on. So the way that I've found is effective for getting around that is by starting if you're new in a sales team with win loss analysis. And the way to do it is you asked the sales and pre sales people who were involved in a deal to give their ratings of us and that particularly if we lost and the competitor on a series of factors. And then you go to the customer and you ask the decision makers at the customer ends the same questions. The experience that I've had is the two never give the same answers. What you've got is. And with all due respect to all my sales buddies, yes, I am talking about you and the many sales teams that I've worked with. Once a deal is lost, the salespeople always explain it by factors that are outside their control. Once the deal is won, they always explain it with by factors that are 100% inside their control.

Through the window or looking in the mirror.

Right? Yeah, so, and that's human. And the, the way of balancing that out and giving surprises to the salespeople is by asking the customers and then addressing the points where the things are different. And I found sales teams are universally extremely receptive to that approach. And you only have to do one to persuade them because you will get the surprises and the disconnect in the first one. You do, because it's just, it's always there.

Love to hear that. Hey Maurice, that's great to hear about how you got to this stage. How about we turn it around and hear about what you think about the future? I mean you're quite strident about using metrics. What's next?

Yeah, well, you've Hit the real problem. And I think you guys have taken methodological approaches to improving response rates just about as far as they can go. We're at a stage where we're highlighting perfection and thinking of 60% as perfection.

Oh, hold on, hold on. 60% contact rate. Now when we think about B2B, you're talking account response rate. That's where we go. We want to get 100% response. Anyway, I didn't want to interrupt you trying to.

Okay, yes, you're. You're correct. I accept what you're saying. And of course the, the catch is that you may not get the.

Exactly.

And the correct people and it's impossible.

To cover everybody you want anyway.

And think about, think about this. Let's suppose you're doing outsourcing and it doesn't matter what you're doing outsourcing of. Let's suppose you sell outsourcing of something. I know more about outsourcing of it than anything else. The only people that matter at the customer end for your contract being renewed are the CFO and the procurement manager. Nobody else matters. And yet you will find surveys being done where neither of those two respond. And to me that's. I don't care if you've got 20 other people responded from the account. The people, they're doing it. People do outsourcing because they want a 20% cost savings. And it's. Normally the CFO is doing it over the dead body of the CIO who doesn't want to do the outsourcing, but they're trying to do it for the, they're trying to do it for cost savings. So it's getting the correct people. And if you can't, you know, how are you going to do this? So surveys are certainly not going to go away and they're absolutely necessary for building and calibrating models. But you can reverse engineer it if you like, meaning you can understand what is it that's different between the promoters, passives and detractors from an operational perspective. Are you, for example, delivering. If you're a product company, are you delivering. Do tractors have significantly more deliveries that are partials or miss their delivery dates? Just to pick obvious things. Some of the stuff is obvious and some of this stuff won't be. But they'll turn out to be very high correlations. And you've got to work out the causality between, like I mentioned earlier, things going on in Salesforce and contract renewals happening later on down the path or win rate changes with particularly categories of customers or upselling. And cross selling success or failure. So yes, it can be done. And if you're confident that you've got those attributes for for 100 that you've got those attributes well understood for the customers who have responded, then why wouldn't you assume that everybody who's experiencing those things is in the same NPS category? In one German e commerce company I had some contact with what was happening was and a big one, not Zalando, but a big one. And what they were having was they found in their data they had 26% response rate I think and over 2. I think it was 2 million survey responses that had never been looked at. The analytics showed that one attribute of detractors was that they had been able to pay by 15 or 30 day invoice and that that had stopped working for them and that they'd not that they then had to pay upfront by credit card with no explanation and they knew that it wasn't because something had gone wrong with their credit or that it wasn't because they'd not paid on time and they would just disappear and stop buying. They were extremely proud of finding this, addressing it aggressively and trying to recover as many of those detractor people as possible, giving them vouchers to order again and so on, and apologizing profusely. But the catch is the data in the system showed that many thousands of other customers who hadn't responded to the surveys had had the same Right. And it seems legitimate to me to operate under the assumption that they would be detractors if we had if they had responded to a survey. So let's do the loop closing the way that we would with any other detractor.

Right.

So it's. You're using traditional surveys to calibrate, but you don't have surveys on a daily basis from every B2B customer. But you do have operational data, operational financial and other data from the customers on a daily and weekly basis. Which also gives you the great privilege that's so hard to achieve in cx which is your reporting cycle can match the financial reporting cycle of your company. If you're producing weekly reports, you can have weekly CX content in it, which you can't normally. Yeah, right.

I really love that. I think taking up not just sit. I think one thing that we all are guilty of falling into and one thing I want to definitely take forward from this conversation is don't sit round and wait for a response. If you've got a response from one you can act on. All right.

And I Think, Maurice, this is what you're working on at the moment with OCX Cognition, isn't there?

Correct. That we've got. It is a startup. We've got the first. Is it seven or eight customers at the moment and using the software and it's been, let's say the, what we call predictive nps, meaning we're predicting what would the NPS be had they answered a survey. It's proving to be far more accurate than I expected for the ones where you're predicting it. And then they actually eventually do answer a survey and within that subset, that predictive value is doing far better than I had expected. So pleasant surprise on that.

There's a good chance that people in the business might be more prepared to even follow up on that, you know, being prompted by a sort of an AI bot rather than direct feedback, which can be quite confronting. I think there's a really good, you know, correct as well.

It's being implemented with, well, initially iOS and soon Android client feedback. So people like sales leaders or whatever group, whatever stage of the customer journey is relevant are getting automatic alerts to things that they should be aware of. Obviously not a trillion alerts. You don't want to have the situation which you get in hospital emergency rooms, which is, I think there was one study I saw that said that for the average patient there are eight alarms ringing simultaneously, with the result that the staff actually doesn't pay any attention to the alarms. They act on their experience and intuition about what they need to get done.

I think that's probably a typical day in the life of a CS person as well.

Dave so you can't overdo the alerts, I think.

I think that's a wonderful way to sort of to bring it home to think about the patience and, you know, really relate the stuff back to the relationships. Maurice I think that's a, you know, if you think about the way that business relationships are, if everybody's like lovey dovey, they're promoters, that's great. Although maybe you don't really know what's going under the hood. The people that are not communicating, they're the ones to really worry about. The ones who appear to be detractors, the people who are constantly at each other's throats might be your best ally. They're just challenging and just got to figure out a way of doing that. And if I've got this right, surveys are a great way of calibrating that big mass of data that you've got. And it's the predictive analytics that are really going to solve some of the problems.

Well, I hope so. I think that's a fair summary.

Fantastic. Maurice, it's been great to talk to you again. You're always highly entertaining. Now people want to follow you. What's the best way they can get in? They can get in touch with you or follow you on social.

On LinkedIn is the easiest. I've got my own personal website, customerstrategy.net but I don't do much with it. There's a lot of. And in the archive there. I do all of my new postings on LinkedIn. And yeah, I've subscribed to the newsletter. I generally do at least one, maybe two blog light things a week. The newsletter is every second Monday at the moment. I'm using that as a cycle. Part of that is I'm determined not to be like every other newsletter that I've seen on LinkedIn, which is. It's actually a blog called a newsletter. But I've got multi section things covering a variety of subjects.

I want to thank you for bringing that stuff. There's always entertaining stuff and I definitely recommend it. Maurice, thank you once again for being a guest on the Account Experience podcast. It's been a great pleasure. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens with OCX cognition as well and the future in that. Yep.

Adam, thank you. Thank you guys.

No worries.

Well, Dave, you asked with him, did you get anything out of that?

I actually, I really did, Adam. I really did. I think in my, in my particular role at Customer Gauge is always areas for learning. And I think one really great thing I took out of that was, and we see it with all of our, you know, with a lot of our customers and we're probably guilty of it ourselves, of someone's not responding. They're probably fine. That'll be all right. Or let's concentrate on these detractors. These detractors are having this problem. Let's just fix it for them. When really it's almost certain. If one customer is giving you a score of, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 and having certain problem, you should really close the loop on that with all your customers, make sure that no one else is having that issue and really get ahead of those kind of things before they do complain or that or they do go elsewhere.

You know, that's a really valuable reflection because we always tell people, go after your detractors first, solve those problems. And yeah, it's the detract, it's the passive. So maybe you need to go and.

The non respondents even as well close the room with people that haven't responded yet.

The other thing I took out of it, and this is also a real valuable nugget, is that the person that you are connected with in a B2B relationship, Maurice said that person's probably bet their career on it. And I might be putting it a bit too strongly, but you know that we've done that with some of our clients that they've been really successful with what we've done, we've made their career, they go on to do something else, you know, 100%.

And all we want to know is if we don't have CFO and procurement, what have we got?

And finally, I thought Maurice's judgment on the worst place to be here in CX was reporting to marketing. Of course, reporting to sales is the right thing.

It's the journey.

Dave, thank you for being with me on this one today. It was great to hear from you and Maurice catch up with you for the next Account Experience podcast. And by the way, if you're listening and you like what you're listening to, please don't forget to subscribe, rate it and pass it on to your other people in the business. Thanks very much.

Cheers, Adam.