Stop Losing Customers: The WISER Way to Make Them Love Your Brand

What if the secret to standing out in a crowded market wasn't more ads, a cheaper price, or a fancier website, but a single unforgettable experience? Welcome back to Chats with Jason, where we unpack real strategies from real leaders to transform the experience and transform your business. Today I'm joined by someone who's called the Experience Maker for a very good reason, Dan gingis, former Fortune 100 exec and the author of the Experience Maker, a must read playbook for turning customers into loyal fans and loyal fans into walking billboards. He's led customer experience and social media programs at brands like McDonald's, Discover, and Humana. But what makes Dan different is his ability to turn ordinary moments into extraordinary marketing without spending a cent more on media. If you've ever asked yourself, how do I make my business more memorable? This episode is your answer. Get ready to discover the wiser method for creating shareable experiences, why being remarkable is better than being perfect, and how to out experience your competitors even if you can't outspend them. So grab your notebook, silence the distractions, and get ready to rethink what your brand really delivers. Let's dive in. Dan, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jason. Always fun to talk with you. I know that we are passionate about the same topics, so I'm sure it's going to be an enjoyable conversation.

Absolutely. And first of all, congratulations on achieving your CSP designation.

Thank you. That was really fun. That is that. Don't know. An earned recognition from the National Speakers association in the US I had to fill out a lot of paperwork. I had to go back to dozens of former clients and get testimonials, had to supply videos and other stuff. But it was worth it because it was, it was really an honor.

Fantastic and great stuff. So, Dan, you've said customer experience is the new marketing. Do you remember the first time that this truth really hit you personally, either as a customer or as a brand leader?

Yeah, 100%. It was when I was working for Discover Card, which is a credit card company in the US for our international viewers and listeners. They also own the Diners Club brand, which is big in certain parts of the world, not big in other parts of the world. But I was recruited from a marketing role into a customer experience role. And I had been doing marketing for my entire career. I literally got my start in direct mail and I had made my way through all the digital channels and social media and email, all that. And when I got recruited into this CX role, I did not know what CX Was I had to ask the person who recruited me, what are we talking about here? And I also had to ask him, why did he select me? And he told me something that really changed the whole path of my career. He said that he had been watching me in business meetings and that he always noticed that I had the customer hat on and that I interpreted business problems through the lens of the customer. And he wanted to start doing that on the digital side of the business. This was 2012. So he was definitely a visionary because he said that the digital experience and the customer experience were going to become one in the same. And the very first time I realized its power was I had a great partner in the customer service department, and we would review how many calls were coming in for different website problems. And I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but there was some page that was giving people issues. And this, my partner, this woman came to me with a chart that showed roughly 400 pretty consistent calls every week about this problem. And so I researched it, and we figured out how to fix it. And I went to it, and it was just a little thing. It wasn't like a big project. It was a couple lines of code. We fixed it, and immediately that chart went like this. And it went from 400 calls to almost zero. And we did the quick math, $7 a call per week. And it was like, oh, my gosh, we just saved the company thousands and thousands of dollars from one little tiny change. And that sort of struck me, because marketing, usually you don't get results that fast. It's not that inexpensive or easy to do. And all of a sudden, this thing just worked. And so I really enjoyed the power of that.

P.S.

We went and fixed about 99 other things after that, reducing phone calls to an unbelievable rate, but also, not coincidentally, winning the J.D. power Award for customer satisfaction for the first time, beating up a little company that I'm sure you all have heard of called American Express. So that was a really good feeling and a career highlight.

Yeah, fantastic stuff. And interesting that you took the. What I believe to be the important step of understanding the commercials of the impact of your work, because I think quite often in the CX profession, it's easy to get distracted by what makes people feel good. But we're in the business of making money, and we need to make sure that our work not only helps our customers, but has returned for our first client, which happens to be the shareholder of the business. So, great stuff, Dan, as I said, you've worked in some pretty phenomenal Brands. What's the one thing that is common across all of them when it comes to convincing the executive that customer experience matters?

You just nailed it. You just gave the answer before you gave the question, which is that it has to impact the bottom line. And the parallel that I always think about is social media. So when social media burst onto the scene, I was fortunate enough to be there at the beginning and I ran a number of teams in social media and I kept hearing the same thing over and over again, which was that we couldn't calculate the roi. And I said, why? It's a marketing channel. We can calculate the ROI of every other marketing channel. So I realized pretty quickly this was just a lazy answer that we just, we weren't calculating. It's not that we couldn't calculate it. And I think that cx, especially in its infancy, suffered from a similar problem, which is that we'd go to our executives and hey, great news, we're going to increase our customer satisfaction scores. We, or we're going to win this award, or we're going to do this or that. And the executives rightly said, great. So what does it mean for me? What does it mean for the bottom line? And that's where we really had to start digging into the numbers. And I don't think this is that difficult. Customer experience benefits you on the revenue side because customers want to work with brands that treat them well, brings in new customers. Those people also stay longer, spend more, and most importantly, tell others about you. All of those things are trackable, especially if you know the lifetime value of a single customer. But also, as I mentioned in the Discover example, it reduces costs, the other side of the profit equation, by reducing your customer service inquiries. And that can be tons and tons of money, depending on the size of the business. If you have a perfect customer experience, which no company I have ever experienced does, yet, you wouldn't need a call center because no one would ever call to complain because it would be perfect. And so while that may not be practical, we definitely can track our path to getting and we can see what happens when we improve the experience or remove pain points. We can see what happens to customer service complaints and they go way down.

Yeah. So sometimes though, surely there's got to be the right thing to do by the customer that might have little to no economic benefit for the business. What's your key takeaway for someone listening today who's faced with that dilemma? They know it's the right thing to do for the customer long term. The right thing to do for the business, but there's no immediate roi. How do they convince their team to go forward with the project?

In a way, yeah, that's a great question. Because I would say, when you say immediate roi, I would probably add the word trackable, because usually there is roi, but we can't put our finger on. And so what I would say, I love to ask executives this very easy question. I say, what is the most valuable asset of your company? And then I wait for the answer. And if the answer is anything other than their customers, it's wrong. Because without our customers, we don't have a business. It is the only answer where that is true. Right. We could lose all our employees and maybe still keep our business going, but if we lost all our customers, we wouldn't have a business. In that sense, doing right by your customer is something that you always want to strive to do, because if you don't do that, you won't have any customers anymore. And so that's why I said trackable. Because ultimately, there's a concept I talk about in the book called a leaky bucket. And the leaky bucket is when we lose. Customers drip, and they don't tell us they're leaving. They don't leave in a ball of flames, yelling and screaming at us. They leave silently. And those are the worst kinds, because we don't even know what we did wrong. They didn't even tell us. They didn't complain. They just left. And what I would argue is, most of the time, when that happens, it is because we have irritated them over, over and over again. We've done these little things where we just poke at them. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. And eventually somebody says, that's it.

I'm done.

I'm going to go to the competition. And unfortunately, the competition isn't usually better, but it makes us feel better as consumers to stick it to a company and go to their competitor. And so that may or may not be trackable, But I have seen the leaky bucket happening at almost every business that I've worked with to some degree.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think every time we do that poke, we're giving the customer a permission slip, if you like, to check out the competitor. And the moment they start doing that, we've lost the race, you know, so much harder to rebuild that trust. So talking of your book, you talk about the wiser framework, which is absolutely brilliant. So simple, actionable, and sticky. For those who are new to the book and new to your work, can you walk us through it and explain how even a solo business owner can apply it today.

Yeah, and thank you for saying it's simple. In fact, one of the best compliments I get about the book itself is that it's a simple read. And that's very much intentional because I think customer experience should be simple. The more we complicate it, the more it is complicated to the customer. If you can focus on one thing, focus on being simple. And wiser does attempt to do that. So wiser is basically split into two parts. There's the wise part, which is about creating the kinds of experiences that customers want to talk about. And then there is the R, which makes you wiser than the competition. We'll get to what the R is in a second. But for wise, it starts with the W, which is witty. And witty is not about being humorous or telling jokes, is actually just about having fun, showing a personality and refusing to be boring. And there are some industries where they'll tell me, but I work in a boring industry. I'll say, you don't have to. It doesn't have to be boring. So when you think about boring things, you think about contracts and invoices and legal disclaimers and all this sort of stuff. And I'll show you examples of all of those that are super fun that you actually want to read because they're entertaining. They still click all the legal boxes and they're, they're going to be legally sound, but they don't have to be boring. And so witty is really about finding every single opportunity where you communicate with a prospect or a customer. This could be in any channel. It could be email, direct mail, telephone, your out of office messages. I've got examples where companies are putting some sort of humor on the wash. Tags of their shirts on the back. Anywhere where you are communicating in any way is. And you're using words, why not have fun with people? Because people remember that and it's easy and it's free. Right? If you are shipping your product to people in a box, chances are you're already printing something on the box. You've got your logo, you've got something else. Why not put a message on that box, somebody smile or that makes somebody take a picture of it. Doesn't cost you any more money, it just cost you a little bit of creativity. Now, immersive is different. Immersive is about trying to appeal to one of the five senses or trying to appeal to people's emotions, because that is the stuff that memories are made of. And if we do that if we can appeal to one of those things, we are more likely going to be memorable. When we're memorable, people will talk about. And so this does not have to be hard either. It's certainly easier if we have an in person relationship with the customer, if they walk into our store, for example. But we can even do it if we're an E commerce player, right? This could be as simple as there are companies that are known for including a little lollipop or something in the box that is just a little sort of thanks for being a customer reminder. Or maybe they include a little note that's signed by the person that built the box so, you know, there's a human being on the other side of it. These are all immersive examples. And then in person, of course, we can do a whole lot more, but it does not have to be big money. Shareable is about intentionally creating moments that we know people are going to pull out their phone and take a picture or a video. And this is where we really just have to put our consumer hat on and start thinking about when we do that ourselves, we all do it. We're experiencing life. We're walking down the street and we say, oh, we got. We reach into our purse or our pocket and we pull out our phone, we take a picture or a video. Well, what makes us do that? It's not somebody telling us to do it. It is that the moment presents itself and we realize this is a moment we want to capture. And so what I advise companies to do is figure out your moment. Figure out if you could design the Instagram post that everybody shares about you, what would it look like? And once you know what it looks like, you can create an experience around that so that people do it. And then extraordinary is the E. And extraordinary is the one where people get a little bit worried because they think it's. It sounds expensive. But really the definition of extraordinary is just better than ordinary. And the good news is that most experiences are ordinary. Or as the millennials call it, meh, or as the Gen Z call it, mid. It doesn't matter what you call it. It all means the same thing. We don't talk about those kinds of experiences. And that is the vast percentage of experiences that we have. They're just unmemorable. They're not great, they're not terrible, they're just unmemorable. And so the good news there is, is that the difference between ordinary and extraordinary isn't a ton. It's actually just a little bit. It's a Little nudge forward. One of my favorite examples from the book is a restaurant that instead of coming out for dessert with a slice of cake and a candle, they turn it into a sparkler. And I love that as a metaphor because the difference between a candle and a sparkler isn't much. It's not more expensive, it's not more operationally complex. It doesn't require technology or AI, but it's so much better because a sparkler is so much more photographable. A sparkler is so different compared to what we're used to seeing. It's way more shareable, and it's also more extraordinary. So once we do any of those four things, we increase the chances of people talking about us and when they talk about us, no matter where they do it, if it's on social media, if it's in person, if it's in chat, forums, review sites, whatever it is, we want to try to be part of that conversation. And that's the R which is being responsive. And you and I go way back on this. When social media first started, we were both real proponents of using it as a customer service tool, not just a marketing tool. So I always tell people, if you are going to market in any channel, you've got to be prepared to also provide service in that channel. Because when we put that Facebook post out and we tell everybody about our new product or service, it's going to remind somebody, it's going to cue somebody in their. In their feed that they have a complaint that they forgot to tell us about, and they're going to use that moment to tell us about it. So we want to be there to be responsive. And that goes also for compliments. I see every day people complimenting brands, and then you hear crickets. And it's like me getting off the stage after a triumphant keynote and somebody saying, damn, that was awesome, and me just continuing to walk and ignore them. Right. They would go immediately from thinking I was great to thinking I was a jerk. And yet brands do it almost every day, and that's being responsive.

Yeah, interesting point there. I wonder how many companies actually train their teams on how to handle a compliment.

They don't. It's a great point. Think about a customer service training course, right? Or what they're used to doing. This is why when social media first came out, it was the marketing teams that were handling the positive ones and the service teams that were handling the complaints. And in all the companies I worked for, I really pushed them to move the compliments to customer service because I Wanted our agents to see and talk to happy customers also, not just upset customers. And I think that it made them better at handling the upset customers.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it brings some balance. If you had to explain the power of customer experience to a 10 year old using only what's in their lunchbox, how would you do it?

Man? Jason, this is such a you question. I love this. All right, I'm going to go off the cuff here and I'm going to say that it has the sweetness of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There is a nice note from mom in it that makes you smile and it is generally not just satisfying but fulfilling.

Look at that. I've not had a peanut and jelly Cassandra analogy before but I love it, I love it. I love the note from mom, I love the note from mum. The, the bit that I was thinking that you were going to end on was that you had a reputation for your lunchbox being so great that everyone was trying to get a piece of it.

But I wanted to maybe share it with somebody or you know, what have you, but I wasn't fully prepared.

You definitely want the real life live unscripted reactions here on the show. But the purpose of the question is really just to remind the listener how simple customer experience is. We don't have to complicate it. If a 10 year old can understand it then surely us busy educated adult can understand it and work in.

I always try to remind people, as far as I know there's no advanced degree in customer experience. I certainly never got one. I went to business school. I don't think they had even any courses on customer experience. But we are all customers in our real lives. No matter what we do for a living, we are customers in our real lives and we know what we like and we know what we don't like. And one of my favorite examples to share and I won't tell you which company it was, but it was one of the companies that I worked for. I, I noticed that we had a pop up ad on our website and I started asking around why and what I heard was it's our best performing ad. And I said okay, really, how well does it perform? And they said we get a 7% click through rate and typically we would get a 2 or 3%. I said all right, have you thought about the fact that you're annoying 93% of our customers in order to get that 7% rate? Now how did I think of that? Because I hate pop up ads. And so when I saw one on our own Website, I said, wait a second, I would hate it if you did that to me. And yet we're doing it to our customers. Why do we do that? For some reason, it is difficult for people to disassociate their own personal experience with their business. That compliment that my boss gave me that said I wear the customer hat, everybody should wear the customer hat. We should always ask what are our customers going to think when we do this. And if the answer is we're going to tick off 93% of them, there's got to be a better way to get that 7% click through.

Yeah, yeah. Not to mention the fact that if they're already on your website, they've already got an intent to do business with you. So your best performing ad happens to be on your own website. I think the metrics we got to.

Cross sell them and upsell them and get them to spend more and all the things they don't actually want, but that we want them to know.

Yeah, yeah. Makes total sense. So what's one small, low cost CX tactic that most businesses overlook, but when done right, creates massive impact and loyalty?

This was an easy one. I can't believe how rare it is. And it is become a customer of your own company and not just as an executive. Every employee. So if you work for a credit card company like I did, you, you apply for a card, you go through the process, you put it in your wallet, you try to use it places, you see what people say when you pull it out, you set up autopay, you do all the things that you ask your customers to do. By the way, my favorite one is always forget your password and go through that process because not a single company on earth has made that process any fun. And so when we do that, when we behave as a customer, we see things from exactly the opposite angle that we see them from our desks. And I remember at one company, again, I'll keep it nameless. But one company that I worked for, the CEO used to talk about how he had a special phone number that he got to call that would bypass customer service and get him to a supervisor. And I was like, that's exactly the opposite of what you should do. Because if you're sitting there irritated that you're waiting on hold, what do you think our customers are doing? But there's this feeling, oh, he's the CEO, so you know, we got to treat him special. When I got to discover they offered me an employee card and I said, I don't want an employee card. Because I know that you're going to treat the employee card differently. I don't want to be treated differently. I want to see what everybody else sees. And no matter what your business is, even if you're in a B2B business selling a SaaS platform, open up a version of your SaaS platform, try to sign up, try to add users, try to do the things that are in your training videos. Watch your training videos and see if they make any sense to you. Do all of the things that you're asking your clients to do, and you will immediately find dozens, if not more things where you'll be like, you'll think, gosh, that was more complicated than it had to be. Or, what if we did this instead of this? It comes up all the time.

Yeah, I love that example about the CEO having a special phone number. So obviously he got so frustrated that he didn't want to be on hold. He had a new phone number created, but didn't share it with the rest of the customers. It's. It's so easy, though, for senior leaders, busy executives, the C suite, to get caught up in the. I just need it now, I'm so busy, I can't go through that customer lens. How do we encourage them to actually stop for a moment and take that customer approach that you talk of?

Again, to me, and I don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but to me, it keeps coming back to, if we don't have customers, we don't have a business, so why wouldn't we put our customers first? This doesn't mean you give away the farm. This doesn't mean that all your products should be free, because that's what customers would prefer. But it is about looking at every step of the customer journey and asking, are we easy to do business with? Are we pleasant to do business with, or are we really annoying? Because we can all come up with, let's just say, a telecommunications or cable company or airline or some industry that people love to hate. And we can explain very clearly why we don't like doing business with them. And yet then we walk into work and we do the exact same things to our customer. And so to me, it's just befuddling. And I understand that as an executive, you gotta be focused on earnings, and it's this quarter over this quarter, and all that sort of stuff. But if you fix the core issue, which is that your customers aren't happy, all of the rest of that stuff flows into place. And again, I'll go back to customer experience. Brings you more customers who spend more, stay longer and tell others about you. Every company wants.

Yeah, makes sense. Now, I think I know how you're going to answer this question. We've covered it in different ways, but I want to ask it nonetheless. Many business owners think that they need a viral moment, especially in those early days of social media, and I would say even now more so. They think it's a way to connect with the next generation. What do you believe they need instead of a viral moment? Is it a talkable moment? Is it consistency? Is it brand trust? What do you think trumps a viral moment?

So I was speaking to a bunch of people in the roofing industry and I was talking about being shareable and I said to them, and these are like local roofers, right? So I said to them, listen, you may not be interested in a viral moment, you may not be interested in people sharing on Instagram, but what if every one of your customers just told the neighbor to the left and the neighbor to the right and that's it? What would that do for your business? It would double or triple the size of your business, right? So I think the focus is on how do we create an experience that your customer will tell at least one person about. Now if you happen to have a customer that's got 10 million followers on social media and you can get them to talk about it, fantastic. That's great. If you could happen to create a viral moment, fantastic. That's great. The number of CMOs that used to that have asked me in my work history to try to create a viral video, Folks, if I knew how to do that, I wouldn't be doing this, right? And so the whole idea of virality is that it's really hard to predict. I'll give you a different example of this. I have two teenagers, 19 and 17. Every once in a while I'd say every month or so they're singing a song from like the 70s. Like, why are you saying that? How do you even know that song? Oh, it went viral on TikTok. How the heck did that song go viral on TikTok 50 years after it was created? I have no idea. I cannot explain that. And it's certainly not predictable. And focus on getting depending on what your organization is and how you grow. But even if you're the world's largest fast food company like I worked for, if we can get every one of our customers to tell one other person, a pretty big deal for the business, so I wouldn't focus on virality. I don't think it's a. It is a big deal. But getting people to talk about you is the big deal.

Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. What do you think is a popular myth about customer experience that holds businesses back?

Right now, I definitely think that it's too expensive. And so what happens, especially in large organizations, customer experience gets wrapped up as a major, multi year, multimillion dollar transformational project. Remember when we were all doing digital transformation? That's how we treat customer experience. It's this huge, massive, monolithic thing. And the problem is it then gets prioritized against 10 other projects that are also massive in scale. And it's hard to pick. It's hard to pick them from them.

Right.

You want to do all of them. But oftentimes customer experience initiatives lose that way. And this is why I have spent all of my time focusing on the simplicity of customer experience, the day to day aspect of it. The fact that every employee, no matter what your title or your job description, every employee is in the customer experience business. Even if you never speak to a customer and you're in the back office, I guarantee you're doing things and making decisions every day that impact the customer. And if so, if you're wearing the customer hat, the customers will feel it. And so the myth is that this has to be big and expensive. And as soon as you can get past that and you can start working on the little things, promise you the little things add up to big things.

Yeah. And you've been a part of a lot of those transformations for some amazing brands. What's a key strategy that you take to make that customer centric thinking stick in an organization and not just be this month's Billboard.

Yeah, it really is convincing every employee that CX should be part of their job description. If you're in sales, you are. The experience before the experience is what I like to call it. Why do people buy from certain salespeople? They buy from people they like. Why are the best salespeople so likable? Because that's what their job is. And so salespeople are creating experiences every day. They just don't think of it that way. They think of it as them selling. But find me somebody that wants to be sold to not very many people. Find me somebody that wants a great experience, everybody. And so I believe salespeople are very much in the customer experience business. Finance people behind the scenes rarely talk to anybody, and yet they're making decisions about pricing, about payment methods, about payment terms, about all sorts of things. That have a direct impact on, on the customer experience. But go talk to a finance person and ask them if their job is customer experience and they're going to tell you no. And so I do believe in, I could do this for every department in a business. And I believe that each one of those people, once we can convince them that CX is part of their job. Now we've got a customer centric culture. And it's funny because sometimes I get asked, should we have a customer experience department led by a leader like a cxo or is customer experience everyone's job? And my answer is yes, you should do both of those things. You need that department because you need somebody who has the 30,000 foot view or sorry, 30,000 meter view. I can't convert feet to meters, my apologies. But somebody's got to have that really high up from the airplane view and be able to see the entire journey. Because everybody else in the organization is siloed and they're only focused on their own part. But we also have to convince everybody that they play a part, that they play a role, that this isn't just the team's job. And in that sense it's unique compared to anything else. Because if you're in finance, for example, you're not also in the marketing business. If you are in marketing, you're not also in the customer service business. If you're in customer service, you're not also in the risk business. And yet everybody has a role to play in customer experience. And I think once we get people bought into that and when you start to see the most successful companies at this, you see that everyone really does believe that and they see what their role is.

Yeah, makes perfect sense. You know, we hear a lot of talk about AI, automation and chatbots still to this day. And quite often the thought is this is going to reduce our cost to serve, we're going to reduce our headcount, we're going to serve more customers, they're going to be happier. And the great thing is we will need less people to do it. So it's a win win. And I have some very strong views on that. But I'm wondering, in this world where there is so much discussion around AI and automation, what does human look like in the future customer experience?

Yeah, fantastic thought provoking question. And here's what I would say as we look at AI and look, I am amazed at AI Every day I'm learning something new and I just, my mind explodes every day. That mind exploding emoji. I feel like I use that one every day. But as we think about AI, we gotta ask the same question and make sure that we're asking the right question. The right question is how can we use AI to improve our customers experience? The wrong question is how can we use AI to save money? And at the end of the day, if you do the first one, you will end up with the second one, right? Because again, better customer experience, lower customer service costs, you will already save money. But if you start with only saving money, usually the customer gets squeezed out of that. And are we going to ever get to a point where we as customers don't ever deal with humans and we only deal with AI? Maybe. But I can tell you pretty confidently that customers are ready for that right now and that's not what they want. And so therefore that's a bad answer. Now, 20 years from now it might be just completely expected and it might be a finance. I've been meaning to go back and reread Ready Player one because that sort of envisions a world in which everything is AI and everything is not, not irl, not in real life. And maybe we eventually get there, but that book is now a reasonable number of years old and we're not there yet. So as long as we continue to keep asking the question of how do we help it make it better, then I think we can do amazing things with AI. Think about some of the early uses of like virtual reality and like a paint company that now allows you to envision the paint on the wall without having to put different splotches up on your wall. Really cool. And as a customer, that improves my experience in so many different ways and makes me want to buy from you. One of the mind blowing moments I had was I was researching Netflix and I think everybody understands that Netflix is using an algorithm to recommend shows to you. But the thing that blew my mind was that if you and I are recommended the exact same show and you have shown a proclivity to like romantic comedies and I have showed a proclivity to like action films, it will show a different thumbnail of the same show to you and to me based on what it knows that we like to watch. Like wow, incredible. If it knows that you tend to watch shows from 7 to 10pm and all of a sudden you're logged in at 2 in the morning, it's going to show you programming of a shorter duration because it understands that you're up in the middle of the night, you're probably not watching a three hour movie, right? So these are all things that make the experience great because we as customers are like, how did Netflix know that I wanted to watch this? That's using AI with the goal of improved customer experience. And then the other number that absolutely blew my mind was that 80% of all video watched on Netflix is due to some form of a recommendation that Netflix has made. 80%. So our entire experience has been framed by AI and yet everybody loves Netflix. It's one of the best performing stocks of all time. It's an incredibly successful company. It's a game changer. It's up there among the game changers of our lifetime. And that's how I think about AI Is the power is there. Now let's just use it for good and not for evil.

Yeah. Yeah, let's use it for good. Dan, you've been an absolute hoot to have on the show. I really appreciate your generosity. We'll leave in the show notes links to your website and your book so people can follow your work and get in touch with you. But before I let you go, I have one last question. If someone listening or watching today is ready to stop competing on price and to start competing on experience, what's the very first step they should take after this episode?

I mean, probably to call me, but other than that. Sorry, you teed me up for that one. But other than that, I would say to take a look at your existing customer journey. Do not worry about mapping every single element of it. Just be more literal about it. And this is where I would go back to become a customer of your own company and just start from the beginning. How do we attract new customers? Oh, we place a Facebook ad, and when they click on the ad, it takes them here. So then go there and look at that storefront and say, boy, does this get me to want to do business with us. If not, then improve it. If so, then go to the next step. Go to try and place an order. Oh, was this easy to place an order? If yes, go to the next step. If no, fix it. And I promise you, you will immediately start to find things that you'll say, I can't believe we do this to people. I can't believe this has been like this. The last thing I'll leave you with is, I remember I always used to tell my teams in corporate America that there were really only two wrong answers you could ever give me to any question. The first was because we've always done it that way. Okay, I hated that answer. That was my number one, least favorite answer. The other answer that I didn't like was because everybody else does it that way. And so as you are focused on your experience, wherever you see something where you're like, man, this is how we've always done it. We've always done it that way, or we must do it this way because everybody else does it that way, you can pretty much guarantee that's a point in your experience that needs improving at a minimum. It's ordinary and not extraordinary. That's the minimum. But it is probably a point in which you can safely assume we got to do that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's a follow up question to someone saying, you know, we do that because everyone does it. Why does everyone do it? Is it a customer driven reason for doing it or is it a compliance reason? Is this the best version of what we're doing? Fantastic chatting, Dan, as always. Appreciate your time.

My pleasure. Good to see you, Jason.

So what Dan has just reminded us of is something far too many leaders forget. Customers don't remember transactions. They remember how you make them feel. And when you design experiences worth sharing, your customers become the loudest and most loyal marketers there are. Whether it's Dan's wiser framework, creating conversations, or just making one moment a little bit more meaningful, today, the experience is the brand. If this episode sparked an idea or made you rethink the customer journey, I'd love to hear about it. Tag me, tag Dan, and share it with someone who needs to hear this. And don't forget to subscribe for more conversations like this, because the next one might just be the one thing that changes everything. Until next time, transform the experience. Transform your business.

Sa.