Avoiding Customer Feedback Nightmares With BETTER Surveys

How are you getting feedback from your customers and your staff? Oh, oh, you're doing surveys. Businesses are spending a ton of money trying to understand their customers and their employees. But I hate to say it. Most of them are just flying blind. Traditional surveys like those tired star ratings or the NPS scores are barely scratching the surface of how and what people are feeling. Meanwhile, employee turnover and customer churn are draining your budgets faster than you can say profit margin. Is there a better way? Well, that's what we're talking about today on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode! This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs develop new skill sets to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. And I'm absolutely thrilled that you're here with me today because my guest today is the Experience Evangelist, Brian Boyette. And today, we're going to be diving into one of the most pressing challenges businesses face— capturing accurate customer and employee feedback to help them drive loyalty, help them drive engagement, and to help them make smarter decisions. If you've ever felt like you're making business choices in the dark, or you're frustrated with the outdated survey methods that are out there, the surveys that kind of miss the mark and don't do you any good, then this episode is for you. I do have one simple request. If there's somebody in your circle who could benefit from the insights that we're sharing today, do them a favor and pass along this episode. Pass along the link to this episode because that helps make them stronger. And we can do this as a community. I have to tell you, if you are a leader, you already know that your success hinges on your people, customers, employees. But if you're like most, you're likely leaving critical insights on the table because the tools that you're using to capture the feedback are stuck in the past. I don't know. But when I work my associations and stuff and I put out surveys, I get I'm so frustrated that I get less than 17% of the membership returning surveys. And even when they do, it's vague and it doesn't give me a lot of stuff to play on. So that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, how often do you actually hear from the people Who are just fine. Their silence could be costing you more than you realize, whether it's in lost customers, disengaged employees, or decisions based on incomplete data. And let's face it, we all know what fine means. I'd love for you to drop your thoughts and questions and any, oh my God, this is me moments in the comments below. We'd love to hear As I mentioned, joining us today is somebody who has spent a lifetime mastering the art and science of business improvements and human experience management. Brian Boyette is a true trailblazer in the world of process optimization and experience design. With over 2 decades as an aerospace engineer and the prestigious title of Lean Six Sigma Master, Sigma Master Black Belt under his belt. Brian has worked with some of the most renowned organizations from DuPont to Dominion Energy, helping them streamline operations and maximize efficiencies. But he didn't stop there. This underachiever, this huge, huge, huge underachiever has been the founder and the CEO of Raven CSI and Avier Group. Brian has dedicated his career to cracking the code on what makes people tick, employees, and customers alike. Brian, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here today.

Hey, thank you, Marc. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here and share some business insights with some great folks.

So, let's start off by how you serve your clients. Right now, you have Raven CSI. And can you talk a little bit about how you serve your clients and the services you provide?

Do you want me to start with a little of my background, Marc? Or would that help or not?

Sure. Sure.

Yeah, so like you— I think like you mentioned, I was an aerospace engineer for 21 years and I learned Lean Six Sigma or business process improvement techniques. While I was an engineer, one of the things we have to do is capture the voice of the customer, right? And that type of information. So I got an opportunity to work in healthcare and try to capture the voice of the patient at the time of service. And back then, they built wooden boxes and they put the sign, We Care, on the wooden box. And then patients were supposed to fill out paper surveys and stick them in the We Care box. It worked for about 4 months, Marc, and then it fell apart because the managers wouldn't go into the We Care box. So it became the We Don't Care box. And then they, the organization actually had a lawsuit against them because somebody gave some information. So the CEO asked me, he said, Brian, can you come up with a methodology of capturing the voice of the customer, which is our patients, at the time of service and alerting them if there's any issues that might arise? And so I set upon the journey of getting into the software business, which has been an exciting journey to truly capture the voice of the customer and then use those lean principles in order to enhance the ability of capturing that voice of the customer.

Yeah, lovely. You know, many organizations rely on the traditional surveys like I mentioned in the opening, right, where we send out surveys to our members or to our employees. Or we have star ratings or there's net promoter scores, NPS, which were once thought to be really groundbreaking. But why are these methods no longer enough to capture the true Yeah.

So, I mean, we've been using these things traditionally for, you know, over 25 years, right? There's been, you know, star ratings, like, and, you know, it's a Likert scale. You know, if you're a statistics guy like I am, it's a Likert scale or a discrete variable analysis. And it limits our ability to truly understand how people feel because a 2-star to you, Marc, is probably different than a 2-star to me. Right, or a 4-star. So, how do we truly capture human emotions when we're taking surveys? And, you know, just do people really want to take surveys? I personally don't necessarily want to take surveys. So, how do we make it fun and engaging and truly capture a lot more information for us to make informed decisions? So, we found Likert scales or star ratings really don't add a good advantage. Believe it or not, Net Promoter Scores, you know, a 1 to 10 ranking is difficult to truly capture human emotions. Right.

Like, what's the difference between a 5 and a 7?

Yeah, yeah. And it's when you analyze it, we don't even use the 7, right? We get rid of 6s, 7s, and 8s on an NPS and divide by the 9s and 10s, then the 1s through 5s. So, right, you know, basically throw away 20% of the data. And so, there's some difficulty there in truly understanding what customers need and want.

Yeah. Well, you know, and a lot of times I find that people filling out surveys is kind of like the people who leave reviews. It seems to me that we either hear from the people who are the most impressed with us or the people who are hard done by in some form or another. So, we get either kudos or we get complaints. The people in the middle don't say boo. So what does it mean to miss this silent majority of people when we're trying to make decisions?

Yeah, would it be helpful if I shared my screen to kind of interact that way?

Sure, absolutely. Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, can you—

all right, go ahead.

So, so here's my screen. Um, just like you said, Marc, there is a silent majority. What we found out is People really— the people that respond typically are the ones that are really happy and then the ones that are really upset. And what we need to do as an organization is find out what do the people in the middle want? What do they need and want? So, to revert back to the star ratings, how do people engage on star ratings? They don't really express themselves in numbers or stars. Right? So we really need to move them forward into another direction because rating scales like Likert, they're intent to recommend, you know, sentiment. What is the sentiment that we're getting from that information? And then what experience, what experience type? I mean, there's emojis, there's word choice, there's different things that we can do outside of the Likert scale or the star ratings, right? There's We call other types of rating questions like emoji rating questions. And then, what we found out, Marc, is that we make a lot of misinformed actions as a result of capturing that. So, I hope that answers your question. Did I lose you?

Sorry about that. It really helps out a lot because understanding that there's a whole bunch of people in the middle that we're not getting the voices from, I think can really handicap us. Are there some telltale signs that a company's current feedback methods are failing them?

Well, I think one of the things that you mentioned, Marc, was that you got a low response rate, right?

Yes, yeah.

People aren't interested. They're not giving you the information. And like you mentioned, we capture that silent majority, right? Or We don't capture the silent majority. Sorry. We capture the people that are on the ends.

Right.

And so, as a result of that, we're going to make some bad decisions, right? And so, we work together. So, personally, I work together with a group of PhD scientists out of South Carolina, behavioral scientists. And they said, internationally, what do we need to do in order to capture emotions and then the intensity of humans when when they're interacting and how do we capture that feedback. So, as a result of that, we came up with a new methodology. It's only been out for a few years to help us enhance capturing that information.

Now, I've had lots of discussions with entrepreneurs and business owners who say, oh, I deal with my customers face-to-face. I know what my customers want. I know what they feel. What do you say to them?

Well, I mean, you know, when you're small, you know, sometimes that's the best thing to do. That's all you can do, right? When you're trying to, you know, figure out product-market fit, as you know, you have to have conversations with the folks that are close to you or utilizing your services. But as you grow to scale, you're going to need to get information or Even from a marketing perspective, you can actually use surveys to capture data from a marketing perspective is what we found. So, I think when you're small, focus groups capturing information are all— they're actually better than surveys, believe it or not. But how do I capture some of those folks that you can't— you don't have the time to connect with? And that's when surveys might be helpful.

But is it fair to say that a lot of people who don't know anything about kind of managing data would fall back onto things like egometrics, where they'll say things like, oh, all my customers tell me my food is great. Or, all my customers say they love coming here. I don't know why my store is so dead.

Well, man, you just brought back a memory here, Marc. So, we worked with a local restaurant to Because we have a way to use QR codes, you know, just like you do for a menu in a restaurant. You can actually scan a QR code and take a survey about the experience.

Right.

And the restaurateur was very excited about it and said, I want to hear from the people. And we started collecting the information and they said, the food is always cold. And I told them, I said, the food is cold, right? It's Mexican food. place, right? And they always have heated plates. And this particular restaurant, they didn't have heated plates. But the data told them that the food was cold, and they didn't change. So, you're right. I think the ego or there's something that they're not listening to the information or changing or I guess in business, we call it pivoting. Every now and then, you need to pivot, right? You're not connecting.

Mm-hmm.

So, when do we pivot? And They needed to pivot. And sadly to say, they actually went out of business. I don't know if it was because of the food. There's probably other underlying reasons. But they wouldn't listen to the data. So, that ties back to your egocentric things.

Yeah, it's amazing that that keeps happening over and over and over again when I deal with— because my background is in hospitality. So, when I talk to hoteliers and they're getting low room rebookings, and that sort of thing. Like people are coming in but they're never booking again. And they're like, I don't understand why. We have the best service. We have the best this. We have the best this and blah, blah, blah. And yet, when you talk to the customers, you find out what the real reason is. And then, you go back to the management and they go, oh, that's crazy. That's just crazy. That's not right. It's like, but it's coming from a customer perspective. So yeah, it's a tool I think that we need to use better. But somehow, how do we shake ourselves out of that ego metric? And I have a sneaking suspicion that when we are able to do something that is objective rather than subjective. So, it's not necessarily the hearsay of the secret shopper. But it comes more consistently through our customers. Then maybe they'll perk up.

Yeah, I think— yeah, I believe mystery shopping is probably a good thing. But that's expensive, right? To set up a mystery shopper so you can get information. Like I said, focus groups are good. But, you know, but there's got to be ways for us to capture information, you know, a little easier.

So, right.

And then, and so, and then what's one thing I wanted to say? I'm sorry, Marc.

No, please.

From a cost perspective. So, a lot of times when you actually get the feedback, your management team— this might tie back to the leader or something— will not agree, or nor will they pay, right? Because some things do cost a little bit of money to fix. I mean, first of all, you want to look at things that don't cost money. that we can address. But then, you need to have the organization champion the effort to make a difference or to pivot. So, that's very important. When I've surveyed like, I've actually had conversations about 156 different people on the phone. And they say, I just don't have budget. And I go, and that mostly from the HR side. And I go, well, that needs to change. So—

Yeah, yeah. How important is it? How important is the data to you? So, when we come back, I'd like to explore your solutions and what you've created for the world to make sure that we get the best feedback without wasting the time, the money, and the energy. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! I am speaking with the Experience Evangelist Brian Boyette. And we are having this great discussion about the application of surveying and being able to get real authentic feedback from our customers and our employees. Brian, if organizations are making decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate feedback, what long-term risks are they exposing themselves to?

Well, I mean, ultimately, it's going to affect revenue, right? Costs. And it could affect your business overall, right? If you don't truly listen to the voice of the customer, Or the employee and take actions. With employees, you want to retain them, right? Because you retain top talent, it makes training costs go down. You know, your cost of acquisition from a marketing perspective goes down. So, the failure to take action or to make changes in a business is very— it impacts it tremendously.

So, would it be fair to say that the That by not listening to the people who are giving us the feedback could help us become more innovative and see things a little more clearly if we just stop for a second and get our heads out of our behinds and start listening to the people who matter.

Yeah, I agree. Recently, I actually listened to somebody I was talking to, have a conversation with someone. They said, You need this feature on your product. It would truly make a difference. You know, it was something like voice-to-text capability, or, you know, can I do like a quick video? And I go, man, what a great idea. So I think, I mean, you can spawn some fantastic ideas from some of the comments. I mean, first of all, you got to get the comments, right? It's what I found out with like star ratings. People just click through and they don't want to give comments. So, something's got to drive them to give you more information that you can just make decisions from.

Right, right. And that's probably a time dynamic because people will invest their time if it means something to them, right? I do know that when I've worked for municipalities and stuff, when we've gone out and done surveys and we've done community engagement, one of the number one things that people are frustrated with is, I gave my voice for it but nothing happened.

Yeah, that's— yeah, you need to give people the results. So the— I think, Marc, you said at one of your podcasts previously, people don't care how much you know until they know— I mean, they care how much— people don't— if I can say it, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Right.

And people's time— time is our most valuable asset on this earth.

Yeah.

Right? So if they're going to give you time, to take a survey or to talk to you, you need to give them something back.

Yeah.

Right? And you need to give them the results back in an expeditious manner. You can't wait 3 days, right? If there's a way to give them immediate feedback or show the summary of the results at the time that they take the survey, that makes them feel good that their information was usable, right? But then, you have to take action against it and then actually make some change happen. And then somehow communicate that back to them that a difference was made.

Yes.

Yeah, with respect to employees, you got to give them, you know, as a result of this, we found out that we had a gap in our benefits capability, right? And then we added this feature in order to enhance that and tie it back to the survey and the vision of the organization. So, I think that's very important for the leader to connect all those All those elements.

Yeah, yeah. And I know that my last nonprofit organization, I realized very quickly within the first— we had about 6 weeks to run a survey. And within the first 2.5 weeks, the uptake was so small, so low. So then, what I started doing, it was a national organization. So, what I started doing was I started kind of doing like a lead graph of which chapters were the most influential in filling out the the survey. And the minute we started gamifying it and putting in daily kind of— and I almost made them like sports broadcaster posts, right? It was like, oh, Atlantic Canada is way ahead of the— right? And we just started putting in all these different aspects to it. And all of a sudden, engagement went up and people started participating. And because of that, we actually ended up with an 86% response rate, which was unprecedented Because the last survey that they did back in 2019, they only had 16%. So, part of the challenge I guess in the execution of getting feedback is how do we strategize this so we get more people involved?

Yeah, I think I like your acting capability and your vision there, Marc. I think that's very important. And to get that energy and excitement behind it because you have to engage people, right? So, there's got to be something to pull them through. Like, people are active on games, right? Why do they, you know, play Testra or whatever they call it?

Tetris or whatever. Yeah.

Tetris. Yeah, I almost said it. Anyway, yeah, I mean, so there's got to be a game or something in it that draws them in. And like I said, we got to give them feedback, right? Yeah.

So, tell us a little bit about Raven CSI. This is a software that you created to do surveys. You want to tell us a little bit about it?

Yeah.

So, and then near the end of this, Marc, maybe we share the screen. Okay. And then I'll walk them through what's unique or different about Raven.

Sure.

Okay. So yeah, Raven was created, like I said, using the Lean techniques because I want to be able to develop and publish a survey in 120 seconds. So, make the user interface really easy to use. Also have all the question types or capabilities that some of the competitors like Qualtrics, Medallia, Alchemer have, right? And but make it super simple and then make the information readily available, like the, you know, create graphics that's, you know, pretty much immediate once they take the survey and information. So we kind of just pulled the pages back and just said, let's redesign something that's easy to use, functional, and can capture the voice of the employer or voice of the customer.

Yeah. So, do you want to share the screen? Do you want to take us through some of them?

Yeah, let me share my screen.

Here we go.

Yeah.

There you go.

So, one of the question types within Raven CSI is a Morphe. Okay? So, meet Morphe. And Morphe is not just an emoji face, but it It changes its facial expression based on how you feel, right? So, give me a moment here and I'll actually show you how that works. So, we work, like I said, we work with this group of PhD scientists out of North Carolina or— yeah, South Carolina, sorry. Out of South Carolina. And what they said is, we need to get an active reflection of our experience, right? So, how do we feel about a certain thing? Like, how do you feel about our brand? Or how was your latest service experience, right? And once you click on the face that you want, like I was delighted, I was, you know, kind of in the middle, I was frustrated, right? You move the slider bar and it changes its facial expression. And as a result of that, not only, you know, you can capture a Likert on maybe the face type, but we also capture the intensity of that emotion, right? So if I was frustrated, I was really frustrated or I was barely frustrated. Right? So, and that's patented technology. And as a result of that, we're able to truly capture this middle layer, right? That middle organization. So, Marc mentioned what he did in order to increase service level or response requirements. What we've done at a 5-star resort out of Pennsylvania is they went from 21% to 83% because of of this particular emoji actually connecting with them. So, when we measure this—

So, it's not just that you're doing maybe 5 faces. But within each one, you can put the degree by which somebody's choosing that rating.

Yep, absolutely.

That's awesome.

Right. And in here, I'm just showing you on the distribution. They're mad. They're not engaged. They're kind of in the middle. And then, on the high end, we're going to get emotions that, you know, they're confused, they need clarification. So this has kind of given us actions that we're going to need to take as a result of once we analyze the data, right? As a result of that, this question type over here on the right, I don't know if you can see it, it's— you will click the face, you'll pick like you're confused, and then you move the slider bar in order to capture that information. Right, and capture that experience. And then, as a result of that, we're going to measure those results. So, and then one thing that we had— That's a good point. Yeah. And then one thing we added, Marc, is real-time alerts. Remember when I was telling you about working with that hospital? The managers need to know if there's an issue that they need to address right away, either with the patients or the employees. So, we have a way to put alerts in there, like somebody's frustrated or really upset, it'll send a text or an email to a manager within 3 seconds.

Interesting. And so, you could be doing this kind of almost like a real-time customer touchpoint assessment.

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Yeah, so in the case of the member of the restaurant that I mentioned, that's Mexican food restaurant. But in the case of them, it would alert They would say, the person would say, I'm at table 16. It would alert the manager and the manager could come over to table 16 and talk to the customer, right? Yeah.

Well, so good. And so, it's making it not necessarily just a post-event or post-transaction survey. It could be in the midst of transactions that people could actually implement this.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you can take action, you know, at the time of service or you can delay it, right? In the case of a marketing company utilizing it, they say, would you like to save 20% on your medical billing? I didn't realize you could use this product for that. And if they answer yes, we collect their email and their phone number, right? Because they said yes, I'd like to save 20%. And then it sends an alert to the sales team. So the sales team now knows that within a minute or something that somebody's interested in saving 20%. And that's an outcome I did not expect from this particular product.

Right. It's really interesting because part of the challenge I think with survey as well is that people don't necessarily know how to interpret the data that they're getting, right? They don't necessarily know like when somebody says on a regular Likert scale, it's a 4 or 5. They don't understand what that difference is. And unless people take the time to actually type out I've always found that in all my surveys, I do put a star rating or something. But to me, the one aspect that I absolutely will rely on is when people actually type something in. The star rating can be down. But I want to know what the emotion, what the context of what their rating is. And I find that we get more valuable feedback when somebody takes the time out to actually write something within the confines of the, or within the context of that particular question. How do we encourage people to take that time?

Yeah, so I think it goes back to what you mentioned before is that people need to feel engaged or engaged with the product, right, or the survey. What we found with Morphe, what happens is when they pick the face and then they move that slider bar based on their emotion and their intensity, they're more likely to give us additional feedback. So, In our data and our analysis, we get 2 to 4x more actual commentary, right? People are actually writing in, the slides were difficult to read, or, I couldn't understand the instructor, or, you know, the visuals are not very effective, or, you know, I'm just using those as examples, right? And once we get all that data and information, we use AI to analyze it. Remember when we used to use word cloud, Marc?

Yep. Yep, I still do. I still do. Yeah, I still do.

Oh man, I can't use it anymore. I just, because I remember getting all those people in the room and say, okay, what's the most repeated word? And then, and then say, what's the theme around that? And how do we drive it? But now we have AI tools that can just basically give you the top 5 themes, the sentiment, and give you recommended actions. But the first part is getting that commentary. Right?

Yes. So, how does the integration of AI within your system enhance feedback analysis and decision-making for leaders?

Yeah, so one of the— in our Raven VX, we call it Raven VX or Raven Visualization. One of the tools in there is it actually counts how many comments you have. And you just basically at a click of a button, it will actually look at all the information look at what's out there in the marketplace and LLMs, right, large language models, and it comes back with themes and sentiments based on that and based on those comments.

So you got to, you got to let people know how to get in touch with you, Brian, because I'm sure people are watching going, this sounds too good to be true. I have to say, I have to test it out.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, it's easy. I mean, it's I don't know if it's easy to get a hold of me, but— Okay. How do they get a hold of you? Yeah, yeah, you can look me up on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest way. Brian Boyette. And you'll see my name out there on LinkedIn. Just please message me. If you want to email me, my email is brianb@ravencsi.com. And please visit our website. That would work too.

Excellent! So, in your experience, how quickly do companies kind of see the tangible results after implementing these kinds of tools?

Well, so far they've been pretty much immediate. Okay. What I suggest though is with any survey tool and stuff, don't do it alone. Work with a professional like myself. I mean, I would be more than willing to help any of the folks that attend your podcast, Marc, personally, and walk 'em through how to do this work, okay? Don't do this alone. But as soon as we formulate, and we also have bulk email capability, or, you know, set up a campaign via email or SMS. So that's included in the product. So we can email a list and then have 'em complete the survey. But when you build a survey, start with the end in mind. What reports do you want to look at? I mean, I want to be able to analyze the data as such, right? I want to be able to subgroup on location. I want to be able to subgroup on department. I want to be able to filter by different information. So, start with the report that you want to see or how you want to analyze the results. And then, we'll build that. We'll design the survey for that, for the end.

For the outcome.

I see so many— yeah, for the outcome. Thank you, buddy. Yeah, I see so many people just starting with, oh, let's just ask these questions. And I go, well, what do you want to learn from that? And they miss the point, right?

So, well, when we come back, I'd like to talk about some cautionaries and pitfalls that we should be aware of as we try to uncover this new tool and new ways of being able to implement it. And we'll get to that right after this.

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Welcome back! We are having a great discussion. I hope you're getting tons of value from it. As evidenced from our discussion today, you can tell that Brian and I are deeply dedicated to supporting business leaders like you. So, if you're in the middle of planning a leadership retreat, an industry conference, you're looking for some amazing content, or you're just needing some help and some expert guidance, we're just a message away. Feel free to reach out to us. Our contact information is in the show notes. Brian, as you were talking, I was I'm just like giddy about some opportunities of how to learn how to apply this because I got some opportunities coming up that I think that this could be really a game changer for being able to analyze true emotions rather than just again, the Likert scale. What are some common obstacles businesses face when they're trying to implement this, a new feedback model like this? You mentioned one was that they just think, oh, I have to ask these questions. But without asking kind of what they want to get as far as the answer is concerned, that can be challenging. Are there any other obstacles?

Well, a lot of times, Marc, I hear about how do I integrate this with something I've already got, right? Or some platform or my CRM, right? Or what are the different locations where I could post this? Could I put this on a website, right? So, at the end of a training session, they can click on it and actually take a survey. That takes a little bit of IT help on the user end, as well as, you know, how we integrate that using what we call iframe technology. So, here, a lot of information about, you know, how do we connect this with other things that we're doing? And then, some guidance. There's literally people out there that will do survey work and help connect it to your vision, goals, and objectives of the organization. As long as you have a leadership team that's committed to make change happen within the organization and use the information. And a lot of times, that seems to be a gap. And some coaching is really helpful in that situation.

Yeah, I've seen plenty of times where people have asked questions but then they don't know how to respond or how to be able to put programs in to counter kind of the challenges. I know that with my national association, after we did the survey, putting through all the survey results and stuff, and then people are going to be, but I, you know, they're telling us it's a problem. But we just don't know how to make this happen, especially since we are like 100% volunteer-based. What people are asking for is like a major time investment for programs and services that would be of service. And so, I know that at some point, we have to then turn around to somebody and say, Help us build a strategy that'll work.

Yeah, and that's where you come into play, Marc. You and your capabilities and some of the folks that are subscribers to your organization, you need that help and that assistance if, you know, once you're ready, you know, to connect all of those dots. This is just one tool or mechanism of capturing the information that's very unique and state-of-the-art technology. as well as reporting mechanisms. But it's a tool. You're going to need some coaching in order to connect all those dots and then make those pivot points or make those changes, right? Right.

It really can. When we're talking to our customers and our employees, it can really be like the best early warning system to issues happening, right? Especially when we're thinking a lot of times, we have so much change happening in our industries. We're bringing new leaders in. We're promoting new leaders. We have shifts in the marketplaces and so on. And to me, this is like the best way of being able to get basically free advice on where to go next.

Yeah, especially, well, I'm a little older of course. But as we go down in the age groups, it seems like everybody wants to do everything on their phone, Marc. So, utilizing that capability. So, I found out that QR codes are very effective, right? And like, if you're frustrated at work or you have an issue or something, we can have basically like a QR code and something where they can just scan it and just fill out a survey and then get it to leadership right away. And if it's a big issue, it would trigger an alert, right?

And I kind of like that. I do realize that people tend to be quite like they jump into based on their emotion. They'll jump to action on something. And so, I do know that if you were to put a QR code, let's say in the bathroom where somebody's just had a bad experience with something, they run to the bathroom to cry, or to shout, or to scream, or whatever. You put a QR code there. The results itself might be skewed by the high emotion. But then, what the data allows us to do is it allows leaders to be aware of it so they can have a conversation. Because what people tell us maybe at that time is going to be skewed to the emotion and the hurt feelings and everything else. But a really good leader I think would be able to look at a data point like that and say, hey John, I just noticed that you posted something. It seems like you're having a hard time.

Can we go and Well, and that's where you got to be really careful. A lot of times when you take surveys, and I think the audience will recognize this, is they didn't want to be anonymous, right? So, how do we protect the anonymity of the individual that's taken the survey? So, if it's an employee, they might feel threatened. So, we got to be real careful with that.

Yes.

So, we have a way to hide the data. So, The person that's managing the survey can't see the names, right? So, in that case, I would suggest you pawn it off to like a third party to help you with that.

Yeah. And so, that's the other point is if people don't know that it's anonymous, if people aren't or they're not sure, they don't trust that it's anonymous, then they just won't do it, right?

Correct.

Yep.

Yeah, they'll definitely shut you down.

So, What other advice would you give business owners to avoid some more common pitfalls?

Oh, trying to think. Yeah, you have to promote it. I mean, there's— I think, Marc, you shared some ideas about how do you engage people to actually feel better because they're actually seeing the results.

Right.

So, I would suggest, as we build a survey and we produce it, that there's a link in there they can click on and actually see the results, a summary of the results, but not the detail. The details behind the scenes. So keep that behind the scenes. And then some other pitfalls. Take action. I mean, I—

Right? It's like, take action. They fed you, they took the time to give you the data. Do something.

But it's— I'm mostly from— I feel it. I feel the energy from most of the HR folks, right? They're trying to make a difference within their organization and capture the voice of their customers, which are their employees. And it's very— they don't get the support from the leadership team, right? I got to do this work. Let's just get it done, right? Just make it happen. And then they get frustrated. themselves because they don't have the support they need.

Right. Because human resources is not just a checkbox on somebody's strategic plan. It's bigger than that.

Yeah.

Brian, this has been— Yeah, go ahead.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, please.

Tie it together to the strategic vision and goals and objectives of the organization, as well as the metrics that you're measuring. They need to measure revenue growth. They need to measure retention rates. Whatever you're doing, make sure that once you get the results, you connect those dots. Share that with senior leadership to show them that the cost of acquisition is going to go through the roof if we don't retain our customers.

Right, right, right. Brian, this has been such a great conversation. We talked about a myriad of things around your product and the concepts of service. Do you have any last thoughts about what we've talked about today?

I'm just excited to work with leaders and help them progress in their businesses. I'm a small business owner. I've ran 2— I still own 2 companies, right? Avior Group and Raven CSI. And I just love the energy and passion of entrepreneurs and utilize these services to help you move the needle forward and make the right decisions.

Love it. Could you remind everybody one more time how they can get a hold of you?

Yeah, just brianb@ravencsi.com. You can go to our website ravencsi.com and there's contact info there. Or just look me up, Brian Boyette, on LinkedIn. I wish I had more connections there for you, but that's it.

That's good enough. All the links are in the show notes anyway. So, we'll make that people have full access to you. And you also have a 30-minute discovery call for free if people want to explore this with you, don't you?

Absolutely, yeah.

Brian, thank you so much.

Yeah, you're welcome, Marc.

Thank you. I really appreciate you kind of serving your— kind of sharing your passion and your expertise. It's been brilliant. Thank you so much for doing this with us today.

Appreciate you, Marc. Thank you, sir. And dare to be the exception, Marc.

I always do. I always do. Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to kind of brainstorm your business, we get you and your team together. Feel free to book time on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes. It's the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine. MarcHaine.com. Pretty awesome, isn't it? Meetwith.MarcHaine.com. Don't know how I came up with that. Something, I don't know. It would be my absolute honor to be of service to you. And while you're at it, why don't you go ahead and leave a comment or review about this episode? I'd love to get your feedback. Was this of value to you? Maybe we're going to put a survey link in the show notes. Maybe you could try and it'll give you a choice. Maybe I'll ask Brian to do a little survey thing and to put into the show notes. And of course, if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you are subscribed to this podcast. Once you're subscribed, you'll get notifications whenever I bring you fresh new content each and every week. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and of course, I hope you dare to be the exception.