Why is customer experience a must for innovation in business | The AskAviArya Show

We're going to talk about what we call revolution. It is this R between brackets that is going to focus in two areas. One, transformation of businesses, and the other one is disruption. And you can see these X here are like the orders of magnitude of disruption that once happened. Besides the base, that is just digitalization.

Hey, guys, this is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. Welcome to my channel. So, jj, you know what? As a tradition, we talk about our hero introduction. Because I believe the shortest distance between two human hearts is always the story. You tell a perfect stranger a good story and you win a heart for life. So I'm going to tell you my short story and then we'll request you to tell us your story.

Go ahead.

Okay. So my name is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. This is my short story, but obviously the long story, you know, you and I know, but we would love for you to introduce your story to our audiences. It could be short, it could be long, however you want it. They would love to know who you are and what made jj.

Okay, so my name is Juan Jose La Torre. Very classic, long, long Spanish name. So this is why I get called as jj. I'm naturally from Chile, but I'm half Spaniard and half Chilean. I created my first startup around 22 years ago when I was still in college. I sold it and then I moved to Europe. What was just kind of like a summer trip to kind of like discover the old continent. Ended up in a 20 years, like traveling, working across Europe, Asia, America and the Middle East. I came back to my home country, Chile like two years ago to basically bring digital transformation to Latin America. I'm a father of three, two boys, one girl that was born in Chile, the other two were born in Dubai. I've traveled to more than 80 countries and live in around 22, including UAE, Spain, France, Portugal, Singapore. I have been a lot in the East, a lot in the West. I have founded two more startups which I also trade and sold, invested in 14. And I think I have kind of like a mentor and work with almost like you, like hundreds of entrepreneurs. I'm today at the board of 11 incubators and accelerators from Silicon Valley to Palestine. So really trying to give back and trying to keep connected, which I think is one of the most Important things that we can do. Okay, so let's go and let's see how we can build some disruption. And before we go to the let's talk about the how to. It's important that I want to share with you something that for me is a fundamental game changer when it comes to business or when it comes to even entrepreneur. But that is design and how actually we can use design. So design is something that is always present in our life. Every day we actually kind of like interact. We see, we experience and we use design. And if we see like the Wikipedia definition of design, it's something around these lines that talk about creativity, talk about projects, and it talks about useful and aesthetic. I don't like that definition much because I think it miss one fundamental component that is about the interaction. And I like something that you said like the interaction between humans is something that can be designed. So for me I craft a new definition of design that is the relation that actually governs interaction between people and entities. And it's something that can be designed and it's something that you can learn how to design. So once you understand the fundamentals, the next thing that you're able to do is like start putting this into practice and start designing these interactions. And it's about relation, it's about interaction and it's about people and objects. And this example is one of the best for me that illustrate the power of design. If you see that long table, if you go to a meeting like that, how do you feel like think about how you're going to be. You feel probably threatened, you feel immediately in a confrontational situation, immediately in, in a divisive situation. Whereas if you remove the object which is the table, you remove the chairs and you have a stand up meeting, the interaction even with the same people and with the same topic will be completely different. So the way on how we design our surroundings, it's how we are going to interact with them and between us that important is designed and why this today becomes so, so relevant. It's a new game. It's a new game that has been, you know, kind of really fuel and boosted by new realities that some of these guys, the Disruptor have, are the ones that are guilty about this. The Disruptor have all one single thing in common. Even if they don't do it by conscious or is by accident, or is by definition. They put extremely high focus on design, on creating something that we call an experience. And from that design they're able to actually engage with an audience, turn it into clients. Build relations and build interactions. So what these guys have actually do is actually put the word experience in the mouth, in the mindset of every single one. And why experience is so important and why it has dramatically changing and is dramatically changing today, the business landscape, because of this expression. You know, if you think about it, every interaction that you have that amaze you, that is something that you like, that is something wonderful very soon and almost immediately becomes almost hygienic. Think about the first time that you get into a plane and the plane has WI fi. Probably you were amazed. You know, you were surprised, you took a selfie, you actually went on social media, you chat with your friends, etc. You even tell everyone or some people about this amazing discovery. But the next time that you get into a plane, independent of the airline, your minimum expectations is like WI fi is there. It's no longer surprising, it's no longer a delightful thing. It's an hygienic component. So what we're suffering today as businesses, what we're experiencing as humans is like a constant redefinition of experience that I call liquid experience. Why liquid? Because you cannot hold it, you cannot grab it. It actually moves and evolves naturally. And experience is so important because if your customers are not having a great experience, they will not come back. And also because customers, even the ones with the lowest segments of the population, are willing to pay more to have an experience. Nobody wants to purchase or do transactions, Nobody wants to do products or services. People want to enjoy experience. And this is the world into what we're getting today. Despite all this evidence, we see that 70% of the projects today fail because of lack of focus on experience, lack of focus on understanding really who is your customer and designing something for them. But on the other side, when you put focus on your customer, you get an ROI and you are entrepreneur. So you know what is an ROI? You get an ROI of 1 to 10 for every dollar that you invest on building an experience, on understanding your customer, on building for them and not for the company, you are actually getting $100 back. That powerful is this component. And we see amazing examples like the classic Mir from ge, designed for the doctors, created for the hospital nurse and hospital administration. But when he's an oncological hospital that cares about kids, how do you feel? How do you think kids will feel when they have to get into the mri, completely design it for the wrong customer? Completely not built around an experience and built around a product and services, built around features. And when you take that and apply the principles that I'm basically sharing with you today, you get to something like that. This is a Disney themed MRI designed for GE where when you get into the MRI you have an experience when you get there, you know, the nurse and the doctor are actually dressing like if you're in theme park, they have a play, they follow the play. And the most important thing is not only changing the customer experience, it's also changing the business model. Now GE's not selling you a machine, they're selling you an experience. So if you are a parent and you have to take, you know, God forgive, you have to take your kid to an mri, to which MRI you will take it to the product and service or to the experienced one. So who will win? Of course, experience will. And experience have the opportunity to take a dying industry like this one and turn it into something superb, something insightful, something that is full of tailored solutions and it's something that is in a singular experience for everyone. And again, experience will take these. There's a product, is a service, two wheels, a brake, old school. And when we start dissecting this product, we're going to end up having a discussion about price to something that is like this. It's an experience, it's priceless. You know, we'll never going to conclude in how much it costs. This it's an experience for someone will be infinitive. Value for other ones will be another value, independent. If you like the product or not. I'm now communicating to you, I'm now relating to you throughout a new channel. A channel that is about feelings, A challenge that is going to, you know, connect with your cortex, connect with those elements that the most intimate from you that are going to be the ones that are going to be great to build relations. So when it's all about experience, the next question is like how we can use these components to actually transform businesses. Today I give you like, I bring you kind of like a cockpit. And the first thing that that is important to say is like we're going to talk about what we call revolution. And it's this R between brackets that is going to focus in two areas. One, transformation of businesses and the other one is disruption. And you can see these X here are like the orders of magnitude of disruption that once happened. Besides the base, that is just digitalization. What is digitalization? You take any process that you have and then you basically optimize it, you improve it using technology. Then we have transformation that is actually evolving your business and disruption that is doing something completely new. Here we're going to have a combination of strange things. Strategy, creativity, innovation and technology to do digital disruption. So what and how we do it, now that we understand design, now that we understand that by understanding design we're able to craft and build experiences how we can build experiences that are going to help us to disrupt, to create transformation and create disruption. First of all, you need to make a choice. And it's pretty much like the matrix. When you have blue pill or red pill, you need to take a decision. Either you go for transformation or you go for disruption. Transformation is about the evolution of your core business. It's about building a new experience for your customers and your collaborator. It's about evolving your business model. It's about using leveraging data to actually create and amplify that business model that is the one that actually created the company or gave you whatever you were saying, disruption. On the other side, it's about creating something completely new, anticipating moving forward and doing something new by understanding or re understanding your assets. Both cases implies a revolution of your business DNA. It implies that you need to understand that we're in a focus about relationships. In a focus that is about insight, it's about empowerment and it's about neutralism. Not about competition anymore, not about collaboration, not about even cooperation. This is about multilism between organizations that we have to learn to relate in a different manner. So how we do this here I give you my little cocktail. The first is you need to focus on building experience. The second one is you need to focus about creating and caring about the entire relationship, not only the relationship, that is about the transaction. And the third one is you have the ability to leverage some specific drivers. It's like a backpack. A backpack with some specific tools that you can use. So let's go very quickly to see this. And then we go to the questions, guys. So create experience and how we do the experience, how we build experience. The first component is like we need to focus on the needs. And if you see these, this cap here, this cap is one of the most awarded caps. It has won many design awards. It's beautiful design, but it's completely useless. And a lot of time when we're working with value proposition, when we're designing, we get into this trap. Designing something that is so good, is so advanced, is so perfect from a design perspective that lose completely the purpose of what has been created. Second, a lot of the time we focus, you know, on the company and not in our clients. Ketchup is a perfect example. On one side, you know, we have to tilt the bottle to have to smash it back to get ketchup in the other one just press it. One is focused on the company, the other one is focused on the end user. Third, we need to understand that this is an iterative process. We're not going to get it right from the first one. And this is something that we need to understand. And besides sounds very obvious and simple. You know, every time that you try something new, most likely you fail. And you are going to fail. The important is like fail, fast learn and retry, retry, retry, learn from the feedback and evolve. But this is one of the things that most organizations, in particular the big ones are not yet prepared to actually adopt. Big companies when they start projects, they aim for success immediately. They don't aim for failure, they don't aim or they are not prepared to fail. But if you are prepared to fail in the process of success and evolution, that's a completely different game. 4. It's a holistic component design. Design is about putting the elements together and sticking them together. If not, you get the same example as we see in the picture where one component is designed for one purpose, open the door, the other one is designed for another purpose, evacuate the building, one is next to the other. If you miss one and press the other one, big problems. Number five, Simple. It has to be simple. And we go back and back on the same concept. When we talk about product managers, when we talk about doing things, we tend to overcomplicate the things, we tend to actually make and put more features, more elements and start to forgetting about what is the real element that we're trying to solve. Second element on our cocktail is think about and focus on the entire relationship. And this goes from planning your experience, experiencing it and remembering you need to focus on entire thing. And now throughout this pandemic and with COVID all around us, it becomes even more important. You need to be able to actually like do like an inception on the need of your customer, understand it and help them to plan the process of experiencing your product, experiencing brand, experiencing your service, to then follow through to a remembering it's a complicated world where you know, kind of like we're going to have to live between physical and digital work where omnichannel multi channel is no longer the fabric dancer. We talk about that symbiotic evolution where you're going to entertain on a physical world when it really has meaning for those value added components. We need to see how the interaction will go. We need to understand the ways of interacting with the customer. We need to see how the customer will go into this process to be able to learn about the free concepts and more important, to be able to actually have some feedback around what's going on. And the third component in the cocktail, it's about this backpack full of tools that I was mentioning. I have six great tools that you can leverage. First of all, you think about the business model. You think about your existing business model and decouple it, break it, tear it apart, then build it back, reconstruct it, tear the bar again. And by really understanding your business model, you can reinterpret the assets that are part of that business model. Second, it's about a playbook of experience because we're treating channels in a different manner, because we're interacting different across channels. Forget about Omni channel, forget about multi channel. Focus on giving the right channel, the right way to interact with your customers independently. But create something like an umbrella that is called a playbook experience that actually will give meaning and cohesion to everything. Data needs to be turned into actionable insights. Data is completely useless if you're not able to actually grab it and take into an action. Loyalty and loyalty schemes are back and are back in the form of leveraging data with the playbook experience with a new business model. So it's something that actually will have all the elements together, your digital channels. Be very meticulous on how you're going to use them and for what. Not all the channels, not all the time. Be selective and do the right choices here. And a wow factor. We do need a wow factor to really surprise our customers with these. And in order to evolve, you need to do something that it's very difficult to actually execute that is about detaching. It's about to leave in whatever you are today to get into a more humble position and to be able to evolve. It's very difficult to continue growing and evolving without having a detachment. And detachment will go both ways from a business perspective, from a personal perspective. And I love the example of John Leguerre, one of the most successful CEOs in our history. On the left side you can see John Leguerre as an executive of AT&T. On the right side you see John LeGuerre, the CEO of T Mobile. To be able to incarnate the transformation of T Mobile, to be able to disrupt the telecom business, to be able to create a complete new experience, a complete new business proposition. First of all, John Leguer needed to detach about who he was, what were the values that he was focusing, what are the things that he was bringing to business to rethink and be able to shape something completely different. So the invitation is like that this revolution will be something that it's iterative. It's a process that will need to fail in the trial and we need to move on. And if we're able to start from our client, on our collaborator, our closest employees, and we focus on design to create wonderful experience based on data and monetize on an untraditional shape, you will be not only on the path of transformation, but very soon into disruption. I just want to end with, with just final remark that in my opinion, this has never been a better moment to innovate, evolve, transform and disrupt them. Now technology experiences and even the evolution of regulatory components and the market is allowing us to actually being able to not only innovate, but actually innovate successfully with this. My question for you is like, are you ready for digital revolution and ready to open to any questions?

Awesome. Jj, that was just fantastic. That was fantastic. I loved what you said about how John legare completely. So the change begins within to be able to see it outside. Is that what it meant?

Exactly, Exactly. It's like it's very difficult to incarnate transformation or revolution or disruption if you don't change. And when we see organizations fail and around 90% of the transformation efforts fail, it's because their leaders buy into the concept, but don't buy into the concept as an evolution for themselves. So we talk about agility, we talk about the importance of design, we talk about doing things in a different manner, but we don't apply it starting from us. We apply it to the organization when we're not able to actually leave some things behind. And really kind of like, as the case of John Leguer, like, think about what is needed from us to be able to lead the transformation and evolution. It's just on paper. As every consultant know, paper can hold whatever you want to put on it.

How do you educate blue collar staff on the idea and experience?

I think you need to show them and you need to talk blue collar on what's in for them. I think that this is something that we forget about most of the time. Even it's blue color or white collars, and believe me, white colors. You also need to tell them what it's in for them, what they are going to gain of it. What is the benefit? Again, like, you know, as human beings, if you go back to the basic of who we are, you know, we move for understanding what is, you know, the element that is going to make us move. So you need to make it explicit is like what's the value there and why need to go through the process or why they need to collaborate or why they need to rethink.

How do you convert a product into a best user experience?

Okay, so first of all you forget about the product and you go back to whoever is your client or your target client or you think you know the person that that product was intended to and you actually understand them. And when unempathize with them. When I say understanding is like understand what are their problems, what are their concerns, what are their motivations, what moves in them in life. Once you're able to have that deep understanding, then you can go back and look your product and see, okay, what I can leverage from what I have to connect with the opportunities and the challenges that this person has. And then you start putting those things together with a knot. You tie it and then you build.

Experience while creating disruption and future of a company or a product. How to visualize the future correctly. Is there any system or method to think?

Yeah, we use free methods to actually think. We use design thinking, which is something that start from empathizing with the end user or the collaborators, understanding what are the problems from that actually drawing value propositions or hypothesis of value that will allow you to actually build an end into a value proposition. Then we take this valuable position, we use Design Sprint, that is a method created by Google Ventures where you're able in a very short period of time, actually one week, take an idea that is our value proposition into a concept and test it with users and iterate in that process. So we take the value proposition that we created with design thinking, we build it into a mock up that we can try with the Design Sprint. And once we have iterated, we go and we build it using Agile.

Or when you feel burnt out, like in your year, you have so much on your plate, J.J. and you still look so fit and young and happy and so willing to share information and you know, coming forward for an interview like this, I mean, I really, really appreciate every minute of your time. How do you prioritize? Do you like put in forced vacations in your year? Like how do you reward yourself to stay so committed to.

Well, I think that you need to have some discipline there. I mean in a process of building this business. Since I came back to Chile, so I have not had kind of like park big holidays, but I have time for me, which I think is very important. I think sport is something that I try to do almost two or three times a week. Weekends are kind of sacred. So weekends I try not to work or do anything and devoted to family or whatever I want to do. And it's really about enjoying the process. I think that this is the most important component because I don't have any goal, like as a set goal that I want to reach there. I'm focusing on the process and I'm focusing on making the process something that makes me happy. And rather than suffering in the process to actually achieve certain goal, then you achieve certain goal and then you say, okay, what's next? You know, I did, I went through all this pain. I hated what I have been doing. And now you know that, what's next? So I always have the same conversation because I have some friends that actually they have. They do either marathons or kind of like things that involve a lot of suffering, in my opinion, and they hate it, but they have the goal to actually go to the Boston Marathon. I said, for what? You wake up every day training at 6 in the morning to run that you hate to. What are you going to do after you go to Boston? Go have some Guinness and then what? So in that case, I consider myself a very privileged one because I do what I like and I enjoy doing it. But of course, I get burnout, of course. And the same way that you need to actually do preservation from a business perspective, you need to do preservation for yourself. And I think one of the things that have helped me a lot, I set aside time to think. And as entrepreneurs, most of our time is devoted to execution. Once we actually set what we want to do. For me, like almost every two weeks, I have kind of like one day that is mostly for me. I try not to have meetings, but where I think, I think, what are we doing, what is working, what we have learned and what we can iterate or change.

Can you explain with an example how I can detach to reinvent?

Oh, really? Yes. Just look into the mirror and leave your ego behind. This is the most difficult part. Once you said, well, I will start by, by opening really my ears and opening, you know, kind of like to listen and hearing and opening my heart to actually be able to welcome feedback. That's a big detachment component. And once you're able to internalize that feedback into what needs to be evolved, that's the biggest detachment.

What would be your advice to entrepreneurs who are starting up?

Pick up a very, very good team for me. And that's a subject for another session. But I kind of created my own method to evaluate startups or ventures, and it's called tnt. And the first component of the first t is called team. And it's about who is the founding team, what are the values, what are they seeking? They want to get millionaire in the next 18 months. They want to change the world. They want to build a great product. Build a great team is the best choice that you can do. Because at the end, most ideas are evolutions or reinvention or reinterpretations, Things that already exist and still are very successful and it still goes, you know, get, get, get millions of dollars in funding, et cetera. What makes the difference is like that you have a team that is well packed, that is how is single focus, and it shares something. You need to share some values, and then you need to share the same vision. Most of the teams and most of the startups that doesn't make it is not because the product for me, the product comes. Comes at the end. It's because, you know, the team has different visions on where they wanted to get, how they wanted to get there.

Wow, that is. That is fantastic. We've come to the end of the hour that we asked you for. But, jj, this has been multiple bulb on moments for all of us and everything from your experience to the 20,000 things that you have on your plate, and you still managed to keep that happy smile on your face and be as fit as possible. Thank you so much. Thank you once again.

Thanks to you. Thanks to everyone that was today with us. Thanks for the questions also and just, you know, keep disrupting, keep transforming and keep pushing whatever you're doing.

Awesome. Thank you very much, jj. Bye. Bye.

You'll find me loser set me free.

You make me win everywhere way you showed me how to spread my way.