Episode 335: Customer Experience is the New Differentiator (Dan Gingiss)

In the promo industry, the competitive services we offer our customers have sort of flatlined. What I mean by that is every distributor is offering the same services. Everyone's doing shops, kitting, fulfillment, creative design, completely bespoke merch. The services we offer are no longer a key competitive advantage. So what's left in a world where all things are equal? Customer experience. On today's show, We're exploring how a remarkable customer experience is your strongest competitive advantage. Welcome to the SkewCast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space.

My name is Bobby LeHew.

I'm glad you're here. Dan Gingiss has led customer experience initiatives at some of the biggest brands in the world, including McDonald's and Discover. He's the author of the book The Experience Maker: How to Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can't Wait to Share and also the book "Winning at Social: Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media." And Dan is also our keynote speaker and workshop leader at our business bootcamp experience called SKU Camp, held September 7th through 10th in Scottsdale, Arizona. We just opened registration, and if you are needing a few days where you can roll up your sleeves and work strategically on your business while exploring ideas alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry, then you should join us. Now, we haven't released the topics yet, but I can give you a sneak peek. Come learn how one distributor grew their business from $6 million to nearly $40 million. Also learn how to actually develop an agency mindset. Plus, understand the current macroeconomic climate with economy expert Kyla Scanlon and hear from 3 of the industry's largest supplier CEOs. Now, more topics will be revealed soon, but SKU Camp sells out quickly. So if you're interested, Hop on over to skucamp.com to grab your spot today. Now on today's episode, the SkuCast is brought to you courtesy of us at Common Skew. Over 800 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume rely on Common Skew's connected workflow. Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales.

To learn how, visit commonskew.com.

Now here's my chat with Dan Gingiss.

You actually have some experience around promo, with promo. A lot of folks now have some experience, at least with the medium itself. You've worked with some distributors doing some consulting work. So let's kick this off with what's your perspective on the industry?

So I think it's a fascinating industry. My first job out of college was, I would say, peripheral to it. I worked in the collectibles business, so it wasn't quite promos, but okay, a lot of similarities in terms of product. Design and development and shipping from overseas and packaging, drop testing and all this sort of stuff. And, and then I've been involved as a customer for a long time at different companies that I worked for. And then also, as you mentioned, since becoming a full-time speaker and consultant, have worked with some organizations. I think what's interesting about your industry is it fits right in with one of the things that I talk about a lot, which is that it's very easy to fall into the trap of competing on price or product. And both of them are bad ideas. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. We just don't want to do that. And to be honest, most customers, I know this sounds counterintuitive, but most customers don't want the cheapest thing, right? Because the cheapest isn't always the best. And then competing on product is really tough because let's just be honest, if we go to, you know, 3 different promo vendors, they can probably all get us the same exact products. And so there's no differentiation there.

Yeah.

And so therefore what's left is competing on experience. And so it really fits into what I believe, which is that experience is the ultimate differentiator. It's the ultimate competitive advantage. And so my suggestion in your industry is that the, the companies that figure that out fastest will really create some space.

You're speaking to the heart, and I know you know this, but you're speaking to the heart of what I think is a big challenge in our industry. And I think the most savvy distributors and agencies have figured that out, and they are actually creating proactive customer experience strategies. That's why we invited you to Skoo Camp, because we know that that is the differentiator. You've had some tremendous experience. Like, you're saying all this because it's— you're sitting atop this really rich bank of experience with McDonald's and Discover. You worked on both the social media side as well as the customer experience side. If you had to run this through line through all of your work in the past, was there a common problem that you, that led you to your mission today to help create better customer experiences? 'Cause you were already working with some pretty cool brands.

Yeah, for sure. And, and I really enjoyed working for those brands, even though in the end, corporate America maybe wasn't for me or I wasn't for corporate America.

Right.

But, but yeah, I learned a lot. And I would say the thing that the through line that I've seen is that most companies look at customer experience as this multi-year, multimillion-dollar transformational project.

Yeah.

And the problem with that is that it ends up competing against other multi-year, multimillion-dollar transformational projects and is very difficult to rationalize. I look at customer experience completely differently. I look at it as a series of little things. Now it's an endless series, so you have to enjoy the journey because there really is no destination point. Yeah, I haven't found a single company yet that I would say has a perfect customer experience. So everybody still has opportunity. But if you look at the little things, it just becomes way more approachable. It's something we can do every day. It's something every employee can be involved in, no matter what their title is or their job description. And the little things really do add up to big things. Plus, if you talk to customers, B2B or B2C, and you ask them about the brands that they like and why they like them, you often get answers that revolve around something small that happened. Like, oh, I ordered a product and it arrived broken, but they were so easy to deal with on the return process. Okay, great. That's not like the biggest thing. And yet That's a reason why they're now saying this is their favorite brand.

Yeah.

You know, think about that. The little things make a huge difference. And so that's the biggest learning. And that's what I have been trying to educate people on since I left corporate America is don't get stuck in this big slog of feeling like you have to invest millions of dollars and tons of technology and, you know, all this operational complexity, because at the end of the day, operational complexity is seen by your customers, which means that it isn't.

That's a really great point.

It's often the reverse.

It's a great point. The interesting thing about your message and why it resonates so well with our audience is because we are champions of the little things, right? From employee onboarding kits to gifts to brand new customer gifts to anniversary gifts, all those little things. We're sitting in the, in the best seat for this kind of experience. Now, since you're leading an entire workshop on this at SKU Camp, we're not going to take away from the entire workshop, but may— I may ask you to tease out a few things. There were two topics in particular that we could talk about today that are part of your strategy with building a solid customer experience. One was witty and the other was immersive. And since they both tend so well to the promo industry, you highlighted one company, Schwartz, Schwartz, I think, a street sweeping company, which is fascinating. What did you learn from— in the witty category, what did you learn from their have it from them or other brands?

Sure. So let me first define witty for you. What it isn't is it isn't being hilarious. It isn't, you know, working with humor because we know that humor can be dangerous. Something that one person finds funny, another person might find offensive.

Right.

So it's not about being funny, but it is about having fun. And that's a big distinction. And so it's about being clever and using language to our advantage, understanding that every time we communicate with a customer or a client, it's an opportunity to create an experience. And that includes not just your typical communication channels like email, direct mail, but your contracts, your invoices, even your product packaging. All this stuff are places where we can create experiences. We just have to focus on them. And so I'm always sharing examples and I will at the workshop as well. I have literally hundreds of examples of companies that have done this. You're referring to a company, uh, that I posted recently on social media, 'cause I met somebody there from Schwarz and they are a street sweeping company. They make street sweepers, right? These big massive machines that go down your street and, and clean it. And you're thinking, well, okay, well there's nothing funny or fun about that, right? Right. Their ad that they put out was really, really funny. It was really clever and was, you know, in a moment made them stand out from other street sweeping companies, right? Yeah. And so I find that there are so many examples of this. I'll give you just one that I love that is usually in my presentation. So it's a little bit of a teaser, but have you heard of the apparel company TravisMathew?

Yes.

So for those that don't know, they're like a golf shirt kind of a company. And, and somebody brought this to my attention that if you look at the laundry tag inside, the one that tells you the washing instructions, there's a secret message at the top of it. And the one that I saw first said, "People actually read these tags?" And it was in the same capital letters. It looks exact, you know, if you, if you weren't really reading it, you wouldn't even notice it. And then I started, I, I found a TravisMathew display at a, at a resort that I was at. And I went and looked at some other shirts and I noticed that every shirt has a different message on it and they're hilarious. One of them says, you know, washing me will help you make friends. And it's just these little clever things. And so what I love about that is this doesn't cost them any extra money. They already have to sew the tag into the shirt. So there is no additional money. It's not any more operational complexity either because they haven't changed, you know, how they insert the tag. It does not require any technology. So it is literally free other than it, maybe somebody spent a little time coming up with the, the, the funny words. I also love that the person who sort of figures this out and who sees this wash tag is probably by themselves. Like at their closet, right? Where there's this moment where they don't actually think they're gonna be interacting with the brand. And then they have this moment, they smile. And my guess is the next thought that goes through their heads is, I need to get me some more TravisMathew shirts. 'Cause that's exactly the thought that went through my head.

Yeah.

And so it's a perfect example of how you can be witty without spending money, without really doing anything difficult, just leveraging what you already have around you. I'll give you a different example and it's from my own business.

Yeah.

I have a contract that, that, that I sign with, with people when they hire me to speak and it's got some standard language and among the, the standard paragraphs, there's something about payment methods. And so for the longest time I had in there that you could pay me via a wire transfer or an ACH bank transfer, a check or credit card. And on a whim a couple of weeks ago, I just decided I was sending out a new, a contract and I said, I'm just going to add a bag of nickels as another option to pay, right? Daring somebody, right? Because if somebody wants to pay me in a bag of nickels, I'll take it. I'm telling you not 10 minutes after I sent this contract, the client called me and she said, I was falling off my chair laughing. And I'm like, awesome, because this is a contract. Right? Now, how many times do you hear somebody say, I was falling off my chair laughing when I read your contract. So now I'm going back and actually revising the rest of the contract to just be fun throughout. It doesn't mean it's not legally strong. It will be, right? The things that we need to agree to will still be in there, but we can still have fun while we're doing it. So again, does this cost me any money? No. Does it require technology? Absolutely not. It's just gonna take a little time. Maybe some help from my friends at ChatGPT to just create a little bit of whimsy at a moment when people don't expect it. And then that creates connection because they're like, I like this guy. I, I feel good about hiring this.

That's awesome. We have one of our great supplier partners in the industry provides TravisMathews. SanMar is such a great partner with everybody. So there's lots of TravisMathews fans here. And your thing about language is so true. We use the phrase surprise and delight a lot in our industry because we have the opportunity to do that. Just like with TravisMathews. These shirts or the product that we sell. And how do you do this? Like, this is, this is something I think a lot of entrepreneurs and agency leaders are listening to and they know and they're creative by nature, but then baking that across the organization or at least helping your team embrace this sort of more fun approach to business.

Yeah.

Is, is it, is it impossible to systemize? Is it hard? Like, how do you do that? I know it's a big question.

No, I don't think it's impossible at all. And in fact, this is why I do the workshops that we're gonna do at SKU Camp is that I find that in most businesses, and yours is a little bit of an exception because it is a pretty creative industry to begin with, but in most business roles, there isn't a whole lot of ability to be creative. It's not asked of us very often. And so we get sort of stuck in the mundane, day-to-day, or we're in a role like, let's say, in the finance department or the legal department, where just creativity is not something that is part of the job description, right? Because it's very regimented. I have done a workshop with a room full of lawyers, and I can tell you they were some of the most creative people I've ever done the workshop with. And I learned that day that the challenge is they're never allowed to be creative. And so once you like unleash this and you let them be creative. It was amazing what they came up with. And so I believe it is about empowering your employees. I always say that every employee is in the customer experience business, whether they know it or not. So if you're in the finance department and you never even talk to customers, you're still in the customer experience business because you're making decisions every day that are, that impact the customers, including payment methods, right? Which is definitely part of the experience. You know, just as a side note, a lot of people ask me, why do you accept credit cards? Because, you know, I'm selling a fairly high-priced service. And so, you know, yeah, I have to pay a credit card fee. You know why I do it? Because I know the person on the other end probably wants those credit card points or those credit card miles, and that makes them happier with me because I was able to— I enabled that. Great. It's, it's worth it for me to pay a little bit of a cost of business, which is a little bit of a fee. Most people don't do it. A few a year do it. It's fine. You know, I'd rather offer it as an option and make a few people happy. It's kind of like I was talking with somebody recently in the, a fast food business. We were talking about catering and how the key to getting catering contracts is not through the CEO of the company, it's through the administrative assistant, 'cause that's the person who orders the stuff, right?

Right.

And What a lot of companies do is they encourage the administrative assistant to sign up for the rewards program and have them earn rewards on all of these purchases personally, right? And they do that because they know that that is incentive for them to come back and choose them versus somebody else.

The other thing I want to ask you about, and again, you're unpacking more of these strategies. You can see why Dan's the experience maker, because what you're forcing us to do is consider all of these little touchpoints within our business from, from beginning to end. And something I love what you said earlier was it's never-ending thing. Like, it's not like we can go, okay, we finished our customer experience plan. It's ongoing. One thing that you talk about a lot is being— is the immersive experience. Can you speak a little bit more to that? What do you mean by that?

Every employee is in the customer experience business. So first, we need to make sure they understand that, but then we need to empower them, which means that we want to be an organization that welcomes ideas from everywhere in the organization. It's not just the customer experience department. That is in charge of figuring all of this stuff out. It's empowering every employee at every level to be thinking about it. And one of the ways I always suggest to do this is to, is to make a company policy that says you will never get in trouble for doing right by a customer. So if a customer has a problem, we want you to fix it and just fix it the best way that you can. Now, we may come back to you later and say, You know, Bobby, we love that you fixed that for the customer. Next time, we'd like to find a way to do it for less than $5,000.

Yeah.

And here's some ideas, right? But we, your heart was in the right place. You, we're all good. We're not mad at you.

Yeah.

Here's maybe some feedback, right? But it, it is encouraging people to say, look, if a customer has a problem, I'm gonna fix it because I know that's what my bosses want me to do, and I'm just gonna take care of it versus The, you know, what often happens is we pass the buck around. Oh, that's not my problem. That's a different department, whatever. And we make it worse for the customer when we could have just solved it and create so much complexity.

I had a customer, we had a customer shop experience, and so we, we provided branded merch for this large franchise company, and our customer service department was constantly getting, having to fix problems. And we finally had to just say, if you need overnight things with no charge for freight, we'll figure it out later, but let's fix their problem now, and we can always address it later. It unlocks It, it, it stopped all the chaos of approvals and all these systems and things. It's almost like you're, you're in business. Sometimes you feel like you're, you're in a bumper car, right? You're just moving around and you're giving them freedom. That was, that was bang back to the question then. That was sort of how do you bake this into the organization? That's a real good idea. Now talk a little bit about immersive. When you use the phrase immersive in your book, what do you mean by that?

So immersive experiences are ones that we feel in our bones, and that's what makes them memorable. And usually immersive experiences either appeal to one or more of the five senses or they appeal to one of our emotions. So if you think back to, you know, some of your best childhood memories, usually there is one or more of the five senses that are included, like, like remembering the smell of mom's chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven or something like that. And oftentimes there's some emotion there, which could be happiness, sadness, scared, frustrated, angry, whatever it was. But those are the things that sort of cement memories. And so we can use this to our advantage by intentionally creating experiences that appeal to one of the five senses or to people's emotions or both, and to cement in that memory for them as well. Because when we have Experiences like that, these are the ones that we not only remember, but we tell other people about. Yeah. And really the end game for customer experience, in my opinion, is to generate word of mouth marketing. Great experiences cause your customers, your clients to tell other people about you. And that is the fastest and best way to grow any business. Yeah. They don't have to tell a million people on social media. You know, think about a promo company that has a major client that orders from them, you know, 5, 6 times a year. If that person refers one other company, that's a big deal, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, if every one of your clients referred one other company, you've just doubled the size of your business. Yeah. So to me, experience is the way to get there. And a lot of B2Bs get stuck in this whole rigmarole of like trying to find case studies and trying to find testimonials. And the problem is, is when you do, when you're looking at it that way, You are asking your client to help you at no benefit to them.

Right.

When you create a remarkable experience for them, yeah, they actually start by getting the benefit.

Yeah.

What you're gonna find is they're gonna proactively talk about you instead of having to respond to some marketing guy saying like, yeah, we need to create a case study. They're gonna actually do the case study themselves and just tell somebody else. And that is so much more powerful.

Yeah, we have seen this happen with our own eyes because we, as even though we're a SaaS company, we come from within the promo merch industry. So we're, we're promo software created by promo pros and we know the business. And so our merch is so highly valued and they love that we connect with them on that level. We get so many responses when we engage our audience with merch, the medium they work in all the time. The other thing that you really, this audience, we, we're sitting on a goldmine. Like we work with food manufacturers. I mean, we have the opportunity to delight people all the time. I'm curious, as we have our last few minutes here with you, Dan, is there a brand or two that you follow with admiration on how they build exceptional customer experiences?

You know, it's funny, I get asked a lot for my favorite brands and for the brands that are doing it really well. And I'll tell you, there are so many of them. And you'll see even in, in, you know, the time that we have at SKU Camp, I'm gonna probably share a dozen or more that do this really well. I would say one that stands out quite a bit is Chewy, the, the online pet supplies company.

Yeah.

Chewy is, has long been known for being super easy to deal with, super easy for returns. And then the thing that they, that really stands out, they do a couple of surprise and delight things. One is that they will often out of the blue, send customers a hand-drawn either painting or, or drawing of some sort of their pet. So if they can figure out, if they can get a picture of their pet, they will turn it into a gift. But the other thing they do that is absolutely amazing is one of the things unfortunately that happens with pet owners at some point is their pet dies. And this is where Chewy springs into action in a way that I've never seen any other company do. They will often send flowers and a condolence card. They will immediately stop your, you know, subscriptions and, and tell you to, you know, keep whatever you already have or donate it to a local shelter. They're so caring and understanding. And what I think is fascinating about this is that they're doing this literally at a moment where the customer, in theory, has just stopped being a customer. Yeah. What Chewy knows and what all pet owners know is eventually we're getting another pet. Like it's gonna, it's gonna come back at some point. And Chewy knows this very well, which is why even though somebody that just lost a pet and might be out and going out the door gets treated really, really well because they're pretty sure most of those people are coming back.

Yeah.

And so I think that's a company that I look at a lot in terms of amazing things. You know, I also love, I know people either love or love to hate Amazon, and I don't want to get into the politics of Amazon, but one of the things that I think is admirable about them as a company is that, and it's interesting, in my corporate career, I mostly worked for smaller follower brands, except for when I went to McDonald's. It was the only time that I ever worked at a number one leader brand. And I'll tell you, it's a very different experience to work for a number one versus to work for a follower. Most number ones sit on their laurels and they just know they're number one and they're like, come on, come and get me. Right. I think one of the things that Amazon's done so well is it has continued to outdo itself. So it is always trying to get better within itself. And I, I wrote about this extensively in the second edition of my book, which is if you look at just their return policy and the return procedure over the years, it has gotten easier and easier and easier and easier.

True.

Every year. And there's no reason they have to do that, right? They're already the number one. Right. So, but they are working, they're continuing to improve themselves. And so I think that's a learning for any company, which is so good. Can't let rest on our laurels. There's always more that we can do. And it is, and given that experience is one of the best ways to stand out, it's the right place to put emphasis on continued innovation.

Yeah. Customer experience. We cannot wait for your talk at SCU Camp, my friend. It's going to be a fantastic workshop. Can you give us a little sneak peek? You're updating your book. You've updated your book and you're going to unveil this at SCU Camp. Can you give us a little teaser to what else we can expect in Scottsdale?

So it, well, oh, in Scottsdale at the workshop.

Yes. Yes.

So the workshop is going to be very hands-on. You're going to sort of get part keynote, part workshop. So you're going to hear from me and you'll learn about the WISE methodology. You'll get lots of real-life examples from me that are across industries, because I will tell you upfront, I am not an expert in the promo industry. I've, as we talked earlier, I've got some peripheral involvement. But if you wanted an expert in the promo industry, you'd bring somebody else to speak. And I know What I am an expert in is in customer experience and how lots of companies across industries execute it in a really amazing way. And what I find is that too often we spend all of our time looking within our industry, and sometimes it's hard to, to find inspiration there. So I'm gonna talk to you about everything from restaurants to amusement parks to bookstores and movie theaters and beyond. And what I hope happens and what I kind of know is gonna happen is it's gonna inspire your audience to think a little bit differently about the promo industry. Yeah. Because we can always learn from other industries and apply it to ours. And then the workshop portion is very hands-on, roll up your sleeves, let's get to work. Uh, let's start brainstorming. And what people will be amazed at is, is in just a short period of time, how many amazing ideas we can come up with. And this gets back to the empowerment piece and the creativity piece is that if we never provide a venue for our, for our employees to brainstorm ideas, then nothing ever happens, right? Then we're never actually doing anything new. But when we do that, you will find the creativity is amazing. I wanna give a, I'll leave you with a quick example. So I just did a similar workshop with a, a fast food franchise recently. And so this was a, a franchisee that owned, uh, about 40 restaurants.. And so it was all of their top managers.

Yeah.

And, and so we were doing this workshop and we were actually talking about shareable, which is the S in the WISE methodology. Shareable briefly is about creating experiences to get people to pull out their phones and take a picture or a, or a video. And so one of the women in the audience who is a store, a restaurant manager said, I've got a shareable idea. I said, great, what is it? She says, I think once an hour at a ti— at a randomized time, we should just start playing music and all of the employees behind the counter should start dancing. And I was like, you mean like a flash mob? And she's like, exactly. Like, that is an amazing idea. Can you imagine being a customer in a fast food restaurant and all of a sudden there's music and lights and everybody's dancing? Like, Yeah, it's crazy and it doesn't cost any money and it just, it's fun. It was a brilliant idea. Yeah. And you know, and so even I, you know, who I feel like I study this all the time, whatever, I get surprised quite often in these workshops that just people are so brilliantly creative when you give 'em a chance. I really hope this franchise executes on that cuz I wanna see the video. Yes.

That's awesome.

But that's kind of the, the, the type of stuff when you really just, when there's no wrong answers, when this is not the time where we say, oh, it's going to be too expensive, or legal won't allow it, or here's this barrier. No, no, no, we don't do any of that. It's just free your mind and come up with some wacky stuff. We can always reel it in, but let's have fun.

I love it.

Thank you, Dan.

We look forward to seeing you in September in Scottsdale and to unpack all this goodness. And we're going to have a lot of folks there that are ready for this, I assure you of that. Thanks for joining us. And all the links to Dan's book and his website and everything will be in the show notes. And We'll see you in September.

Awesome. Can't wait for it, Bobby. Thank you.