A New Feature Podcast: Espresso with the Experts featuring Laurie Guest CSP -- Customer Service Guru

Alright, hi everybody, welcome to something new. Uh, this is something new for everybody. As many of you know, I've been building out the YouTube channel for the last year with the pandemic break, and I feel like I've been talking entirely too much. So what I would like to do is bring in some of my friends from the professional speakers world to give you knowledge that goes beyond what I know. And with me today, I think I've picked an outstanding first person for this, Lori Guest, who would you say that customer service and I saw that you had like virtual shopping and things like that as part of your stuff. How would you quickly, what's your 60-second elevator speech, Lori?

Well, I teach people how to attract and keep new customers. So who doesn't want to do that? So with whatever aspect of that, that they need to have, Oh, we'll zero in on it. But customer service, I'd say, is my niche.

It's the niche. Now, I will also tell you though, and I'm not going to put any pressure on Lori here at all, she has also been an emcee at several events that I have attended, and she's just really good with the crowd. I'm just going to say that. She's, let's just say, she knows how to make the audience laugh. And do it in an impromptu manner. No pressure at all for today though.

Well, it's totally different though, Randy, in a virtual world. I tell people all the time, my superpower got taken away because there is no crowd to read. You know, that's the beauty of thinking on your feet is you got to read the crowd, and I have no crowd. I've got you and a little white dot on my webcam. That's not quite a crowd.

Yeah, no crowd. Although, you know, I was thinking maybe I should like install some of those laugh tracks or something, you know, to get that.

Exactly.

Stuff like that. So now what we called this Espresso for the Experts.

Love it.

And, uh, my little, my little hitch here, my little hook is I was hoping that they would bring a coffee cup.

I did.

To be fair, now real quick, I'm just gonna tell my, my viewers here, as you can see, this is a coffee cup that I got from one of my client events, which is my standard normal A-game coffee cup. It's a Yeti cup and it's awesome. It keeps the coffee warm for 2, 3 hours at a time. But this isn't about me. This is about Lori. So Lori, you got a coffee cup. I want to hear the story.

Well, you told me to bring my favorite coffee cup. So here it is with a very short story to go with it. When my daughter Ellie was about, I don't know, 4 years old, we went to Wisconsin Dells. And in the resort where we stay, there's a place where you can go and do your own ceramics. And it's the first time I'd ever seen it, many years ago. And you paint your ceramics and then they bake it for you. Well, when we got there, up along the top of the store were all of their favorites, the ones that they had taken pictures of, of best of show. Now, you know this about me, but your listeners probably don't. I'm competitive in nature. And as soon as I saw those best of show, I wanted to be on the wall of fame. Yeah. So what will I do? So I chose this oversized mug and I had all, every color that they have. I made a dot.. And then on this side, which I'm going to show you in just a second, I wanted to stencil out a phrase. So I chose a phrase I had just heard right before this: require more of yourself. And I thought, oh, that is just a good thing to start every day, like do better, be better, yada yada yada, right? Good for a motivational speaker. So I stencil require more of yourself and it gets baked and we go the next day to pick it up. And in my box is a request from the manager that I get a spot on the Hall of Fame, on the Wall of Fame. And I was so excited. Well, Ellie was an advanced reader by then, and she says, Mom, what does it mean when you say require more of your slef? If you look at the thing, I did a typo in the stencil. It says more of your slef, S-L-E-F. I transposed, and they thought it was Freudian. They thought I did it on purpose. That's how I ended up on the Wall of Fame in Wisconsin Dells Ceramic Shop, is because I had a stencil typo. So I drink out of this every morning to remind me that, yes, attention to detail also matters.

Attention to detail does matter.

That does— you know all about detail, you're the detail man.

Well, not really. I tend to be like that too. It reminds me of that old phrase, be alert, the world needs more alerts, you know. So That's fun. But well, that's a great story. And is it still up on their Hall of Fame?

Do you know? They took that shop down. I was very sad about that, but I will always have my mug.

Yeah, and, and you will always have the story that goes with the mug.

That's right.

And by the way, I just out of curiosity, what do you normally put in that mug? We said espresso, but you know, I'm sort of curious.

Yeah, I am a coffee, coffee gal. Heavy cream, heavy Splenda, the chemical that's probably killing me. But that's all right. At least it tastes nice and sweet. It's as close to a coffee shake as I can get it.

Ah, see, so you're like me. I like to have coffee-flavored milk and Truvia water.

Ah, there you go. Same idea.

Yeah, coffee-flavored milk and Truvia water. So yeah, but that's why I like it.

Now, do you think they're sticking around? Are they still listening to us or have they all signed off going, "I don't care what this lady drinks"? Do you think they're still with us, Randy?

I think they're with us.

You do?

I think they are, yes.

Because there's so much good stuff coming, they'd be fools to turn us off.

Did you hear that, everyone? I think you would be foolish to turn it off, but I mean, how can you turn it off when you're hearing about the coffee cup? So, uh, let's dive into this though. You said that you want to talk about— now I think this is fascinating— disruption, which we haven't lived through at all in the last year, is a perfect time to reset your service levels. Yes, I think that is a fascinating topic, and actually As a little segue into this, I've actually looked at this pandemic as almost like a forced professional sabbatical.

Yes.

That's the way I've looked at it, saying I need to look at every aspect of my business and operation and say, what can I do to improve it, make it better, refine it, add services, et cetera? And it's interesting, when I saw that, I said, Ooh, I'm curious. I want to hear what you think that really means.

Yeah. What it really means to me is just like a financial planner tells you that anytime you have a major change in your family setup, you get married, you get divorced, you have a death in the family, any major shift in your family unit, you should be looking at your financial planning, right? We all know it. I don't know how many of us do it, but we know we should do it. That's a disruption. It's a reset that should go with it. And I think that disruption, and it can be disruption just in your own business that had nothing to do with the pandemic, or for at the time that we're making this recording, you know, we're just at the beginning of where we see light at the end of the tunnel. If not now, when? If you are not thinking now about what can we change, what can we do different? Simple things. I'll rattle off a few. When we get back to normal, are our hours going to be the same? Is our core product the same? Is our customer the same? Are their needs the same? Do we staff it differently? Do we service differently? How can we be more unique than we've ever been before? So for example, I just got done doing a library conference. All the people listening were executive directors of libraries. And I asked them, what is never going to be the same for you when we go back? Just like after 9/11, we all flew again, but it was never the same, right? You gotta do the shoes, you gotta do the liquid. I can't tell you goodbye at the gate anymore. We got to fly, but never the same. What's going to be different? And they all said that they do not think that curbside pickup will ever go away.

Yeah.

So for the rest of time, now think of all the times that you went to go get a book with a small kid in the car and you had to get the kid out of the car to go in and get your library book. Now that's gone. You can do curbside pickup. People with disabilities, it's very difficult for them to get in. They'll bring it to your car. This is a shift, a disruption that's caused a shift in service. That's a win, not a bad thing.

Randy Dean: Yeah, and it was fascinating. I read an article about, you know, what this is going to do to the workforce in that, you know, they're basically telling people that run brick-and-mortar operations, especially professional office environments, oh, good gosh, don't you sign a new lease, because you got to figure out how many of your people are actually going to be coming back into the office or staying online or in a hybrid mode some way. And I think it's going to fundamentally change the layout of workspaces and offices, and that people might have shared spaces because they're only going to be coming in 2, 3 days a week if their company allows it. And related to that, this is really interesting. If you don't allow it, are you going to be at a competitive disadvantage for bringing in your people?

Absolutely.

And then the domino effect. I'm curious to hear what you think about that.

Yeah. And then the domino effect, all these people are going to have to find what we call a third space. Now, you and I in the business that we're in, we have managed a third space for years. For those who are listening, don't know what I mean is when Randy and I are not in front of an audience and we don't want to be at home working, where do we go? Because most of us are home. Yeah, we have home offices, but there's times when we want to meet with somebody and we're not inviting them into our home to do that. So where do we meet up? The Starbucks of the world. It's noisy, it's crowded. And so this idea of a third place is going to be all the rage. You're seeing those businesses popping up all over. Where we have this communal third spot. And I think that's going to be all the rage moving forward.

Yeah, I know that downtown here there's an entrepreneurial center where one of the things you can do is sort of rent shared office space. But the most important thing is the— you can sign up and register for a professional meeting room.

Yes, exactly.

Meeting in an official space and there's somebody to greet you like it's a regular office environment when you, like me, work out of your basement office most of the time.

So Well, one of our buddies who's in the speaking profession is up in Minneapolis, and before all of this, he had taken me to his third spot. They even have a soda fountain that's open and included in your fee. Get as much pop as you want, and at 4 o'clock they switch it to a kegger. So people are there actually creating social environment, not turning it into a bar, but they're turning it in a place where professionals can commune. We need that, especially when we're in independent jobs. Now you have all these people that had cooler time around the cooler. Now they're going to need these places to share ideas and share energy.

Yeah, that's fascinating. And I'm just seeing all of these, you know, like you said, it'll never be the same. There's going to be what we call now a new normal.

That's right.

And that new normal is going to affect everything in our business operations, our service operations, our customer operations. All of this is going to change because of what's happened here. One of the things I was thinking, there might be a once in a generation life, um, opportunity right now for people to start new businesses as the vaccinations go up, because people are going to be craving service industry type, uh, services again too. So I'd be curious to hear what you think about that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's all kinds of shifts happening. People that lost jobs that see that was the push to start my own business. There's gonna be some people in that situation. There's gonna be others that couldn't get a new job, so they were forced. There's gonna be all this shifting that's going on. And I think the most important thing is for us to remain focused on the hopeful side of things as best that we can. What do you see out there that could happen? Or for those who are listening that have no intentions of changing their business model, how can your business model ramp up? How can we lift up to the next level? Because when people come back, patients, patrons, customers, and clients, when those people start coming back in your doors, they're going to be different too. They have spent a big portion of a year being maybe secluded. They're gonna be a little raw, a little, emotions are gonna be a little open. And I always say that fear and anger are cousin emotions to each other. We don't like to show fear. So instead, I'm gonna show you anger. So I talk a lot about armoring up our teams, getting them ready not to go into battle, but to be prepared with every resource we can give them to have the right words, the right actions, the the right thought pattern to be able to handle this change.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Um, you know, it's like giving them armor to be able to take the hit and respond to it appropriately and not in a, in a way that can damage the operation. Realizing that, like you said, you know, you mentioned, um, 9/11, that was another time where for a while after that people were very raw, very exposed. Um, and, and I think like you said, there's going to be like that again. You know, my 14-year-old noticed the other night, she goes, I was watching this TV show and they were all getting close to each other and it was making me really stressed, you know, because it was pre-pandemic, you know. And I'm like, yeah, it's going to take us a while to reset our mentality coming out of this. Yeah.

And we're not out of this. Two big things that I don't think we'll ever see again during our lifetime— I can't say forever, but in your and my lifetime— the two things I don't think we'll see very much of is handshaking and blowing out birthday candles. I think those are behind us now because the thing's going away. Yeah, it's going away. I wanted to invent something that was like a squirt gun, but air comes out. Wouldn't a little kid think that's great? And you squirt the flame and it— not with water, but with air. I mean, there has to be— there will be inventions of new things that take the place of what we used to do, whether that be the elbow bump, the hand— what— there'll be a different thing that becomes the standard. And so those are shifts we're going to make. Now, these are small examples I'm giving, but think about some of the major examples that are going to be different. Are people going to continue to have 500-person weddings? I don't know. I think we're a ways away from that.

Yeah.

And so these are all shifts in our society and how we do it.

Like you, you know, um, before this was all happening, I'm on the road 150, 200 days a year, uh, and I was flying and everything. I think my big change coming out of this, I'm gonna wear a mask. I don't care, right? And even if when they say it's over, I'll probably still wear a mask just because, and I think that's going to be one of those changes. Now, the question is what— some people are going to be upset about that, I could see, you know.

Right, right. And it all depends. I mean, geography-wise, values-wise, or opinion-wise, all that comes into play of what we do and don't do. Here's where it circles back to our business leaders that might be listening is how does it apply inside your walls? What rules are you going to enforce? What boundaries are you giving to the people who work there? All these decisions have to be made as we head into this post-pandemic time.

Yeah, and for a while there's going to be this sort of odd hybrid time too.

Yes.

Where, you know, it's still out there, you still got to have a little bit of caution, but we're moving back toward normal. Do you have different strategies for, you know, right now versus that hybrid time that's probably beginning in several places versus when we go back to full normal? And, you know, is there going to be real changes in the competitive and customer service dynamics once we go through each of these phases?

Well, my answer to the question is I think good service always rules in any situation. So before the pandemic, if we're comparing two businesses and I get better service at B than I do at A, I'm making the shift. But here's a couple interesting things about right now at the time that we're doing this recording. I found this statistic very interesting. 54% of consumers did business with a new vendor to them during the pandemic. They tried somebody new for a variety of reasons. But here's the scary part. Out of that 54%, 89% will never go back to their old provider. So I'm one of those. I've wanted to— I've wanted to change my medical doctor for quite a few years for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with. But I hadn't made the change. I just hadn't gotten around to it. I kept thinking, you know how that is, we think about it, but we don't take the action. It's just easier to keep that 6-month appointment than cancel it. But then when the the pandemic hit, they bumped me and they said, we'll just wait and you can reschedule at a later time. And I got put into limbo. I'm not complaining about that. That was the right answer at the time. But that open door was enough to shove me through. And I thought, now is the perfect time, right? You hear me using that same phrase over, over and over. Disruption was put on me. So now is the perfect time to go to a different doctor. So I tried a different doctor and I love him. I like him so much. I've referred him to 3 people. I've even had my husband switch over. To the new guy. I will never go back to my old doctor. So I fit into this category, and the only reason I changed was because the disruption presented itself. Is that true for you? Is there anything that you have done or done business with that you've never had before?

Yeah, I'll tell you the example. It's real straightforward. And, um, you know, I used to drive to, uh, one of our dogs has food allergies And so we have to find him usually better quality foods, better than what you can often get at the local grocery. So I was driving out of my way to go to a, you know, more higher-end pet food store on the other side of town. And then the pandemic hit, and I didn't even feel safe doing that. My wife started using an online pet food delivery service. It just shows up, and it shows up without even having to order. It's on It's basically, she's got it dialed in so that it shows— the box shows up like 2 days before we run out of their food every time. Why would I go against it? Yeah, why, why would I go against that? And it actually made me think, uh, it's funny that you bring this up. Are you an investor? Yes. Watch for those companies. Yeah, because that's the place where I think there is a huge opportunity for investment because You know, it's a new— it's a completely new economy coming out of this.

Absolutely. Our research told us that the 3 things that people— we believe that people will care the most about when it comes to service post-pandemic. You're interested in hearing about that?

Oh, absolutely.

Post-pandemic trends, the 3 things: transparency, automation, and the human touch human connection with a personal touch. So let me break that down a little bit. Transparency. With transparency, with truth comes trust. Yeah, right. So if I can put out about my company, here's how things have changed, here's how we're taking care of you, you know, accurate information. Everybody listening should be looking at their websites and making sure, do the links work? Is there updated information? Does it still talk about your Christmas specials? Are you not paying any attention to the billboard that you're putting out in the world? You got to be transparent with what's going on to gain that trust. So transparency makes sense. The automation is just what you got done talking about. And the same thing happened to us, exactly what you described. Our vet did not want people coming in and buying food. They didn't want the foot traffic. So they must— I'm making this up now, but I mean, it's an assumption on my part. They struck a deal somehow so that now I buy online, but I tag my vet. So I'm guessing the tag, the vet's probably getting a spiff of some kind for this, but it's the same thing. I gave them my credit card and it's amazing. We figured out how much, how often the dog needs new food. It shows up on my doorstep, completely automated. They charge my card. Why would you and I ever go back to a big box store and buy our dog food again? We won't. So the automation to make our lives easier and think for us in some cases is gonna be really important. That's why we see so many chatbots and, and, and places where people can help us by the sound of our voice rather than a human person, or a person, I should say. But what I think is very interesting is the third piece is the human connection. Now, that's really interesting. I just got done saying we want automation. But then I come back with human touch. What does that mean? To me, the way I've debriefed it is we want to do it on our own until we don't. As soon as I have a question or a problem, I want a human on the other end to walk me through how to do this. I'm an auditory learner. So it's the same way as the big benefits I've gotten from your work. And I've gotten so much benefit from your work. Yeah, I could read your links. I could read the book, but I like to just watch a video. You provide so many good videos. I like to watch your video or better yet, call you up. Hey, how do I do this? And you verbally will tell me, do this, this, this, and I can make it all better. So to me, that's— I want to do it all by myself. I don't want to hear from you until all of a sudden I want to hear from you. And that's what we need to be thinking about.

Yeah, no. And that's, that's great. It seems like a really good way to maybe sort of button up the discussion is, you know, when you're thinking about how all of this comes together and those 3 points of, you know, how that's going to work, how that could just fundamentally, you know, at the highest levels within the organization, but also in an organic way down at the bottom of the organization, how do you make all this come together realizing that new normal is coming? And if you try to go back to old normal, you're going to put yourself at competitive risk. I strongly believe that. You know, I think there's a great opportunity coming, but there's also a big risk coming right now for people that don't look at it the right way. Yeah.

In the past, when I've worked with people to want to raise their customer service levels, you can imagine the biggest pushback I always got was, we don't have time. We're busy making the stuff, putting, fulfilling the orders, making sure everybody's needs are met. We don't have time for this. And now my pushback is, you were given a whole bunch of time and you still have a little block of time. In my opinion, it doesn't take long to gear everybody up, but it's gotta be the height the height of your priority. And it might be one half-day meeting that you're shut down for, and you pull everybody together and you get everybody on the same page. Um, Francis Ford Coppola has a favorite, uh, a fa— uh, a well-known quote. He's the director of the Godfather series.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

He was asked once what was the secret to his success. And this has always stayed with me. He said, the first thing I do is make sure that everybody on set is making the same movie. And that's really what we wanna do here. We need to get everybody internally together. To make the same movie so that when our customers show up, they're getting the same message. And you can't put it off. Now is the time.

Yeah. And it is the time. It's, you know, the old Chinese symbol for, you remember, part of it is—

Yeah, the yin and yang thing.

Yin and yang. And part of it is, you know, danger, but the other part is opportunity.

Yes.

And, and they're sort of fused together in this symbiosis. And I, I think that that's what we're heading into right now. It's going to be a different world. In many ways, it might be a better world. I think one thing, you know, that I would encourage anybody watching this is think very much right now about what opportunities might be there that wouldn't have been there before this. You know, and, you know, I think about the service industry, which has been just crushed by this. There's going to be needs for those services again. And we know a lot of our friends in the service industry, many of them didn't make it through this because their revenue sources dried up. There's going to be a need for a lot of these revenue streams and revenue sources and service services again.

So I think we're going to be very eager to hit the road, as we say, whether it's to go out for dinner or enjoy a Broadway show, the theater again. All the things that we maybe took for granted before. I think when people feel comfortable, we're going to feel this huge push to get out. And then those service industries, they have to be ready to rock and roll. So this is the little narrow window they have. If predictions are correct, they've got the next 3 to 4 months to get armored up, get geared up, and then be thrilled when this influx of customers come and they're ready to service them to the best of their ability.

You know what I told my wife the other day? I said the thing I fear most about the end of the pandemic, the wait lines at the restaurants. Yeah, that's what I fear most, you know, because I think we're all going to be like, oh, let's go out and get dinner. It's been so long. So yeah, well, that's wonderful. I think this is great, Laurie. Um, anything else you want to add here? And while I'm asking you that, I'm going to switch back in to give everybody your, uh, contact information here.

Absolutely. Well, we'll make sure that we put— we'll make sure that we put some of my free resources in the link in the description of this that people can access. And then there'll be a link where they can go if there's things that they want to purchase from me. There's books, and we have an online customer service portal that might service some people. But most importantly, we want to get the information in the hands of the people who desperately want to elevate their service, but they're just— they just don't know where to start. We're going to get them off to a good start with the resources I'll give Sounds great.

And one thing you mentioned a little bit ago, you were talking about, you know, getting all the people together to have that, you know, uh, meeting about the change in operations and strategy because of all of this. That's the kind of thing you do, right? You can help facilitate stuff like that, right?

I do that, yes, um, for very select industries. Generally, most of the time what I do is give you the tools to conduct that meeting on your own, and that's what makes it affordable for almost any company. So, give them the tools they need. That's what you and I are both about.

All right. Well, you can see on the screen, here's Lori's professional info, and she made her website difficult like mine.

Yeah.

LoriGuess.com, RandyDean.com. But go check out her information. She's outstanding, as you can tell, and just wonderful to listen to. So, you know, definitely recommend her when you have upcoming events. And if you're looking for a very talented and engaging speaker, for your live audience situations, both webinar and when we get back in front of the big rooms again, you know, definitely there too.

So thanks for the kind words, Randy, and we'll see you on the road.

Okay, sounds good. Looking forward to it. Now I'm going to finish this up with just a little bit of information. For those of you that know, I'm Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. There you are, see me moving around. If you'd like more info, go check out my website, randaldean.com. If you like these videos, please consider liking the video, subscribing to the video, maybe leave me a comment or two on the topics that you might be interested in, because I want to bring a whole bunch of people like this and to my channel so that we can start sharing this kind of information that I think is super valuable. And I always finish with my little productivity PDF tip sheet offer. You want some tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google app usage, smartphone and tablet usage, better managing your distractions, send me an email, randy@randaldean.com, and I will send you my YouTube PDF. Awesome. All right, thanks everybody. We're going to end this now, and, uh, have yourself a wonderful day.