How To Delight Customers And Retain Top Employees With Jason Bradshaw

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

When it comes to business, the customer is always right. Sounds obvious but putting this into practice is a lot harder than it seems, especially when we direct it to employees, also known as the company’s first customer. Joining John Livesay in this episode is Jason Bradshaw, a global guru on customer service and author of It’s All About CEX! The Essential Guide to Customer & Employee Experience. Jason shares how putting customers and employees first ultimately leads to greater returns and better employee retention. Doing business is not just about selling a product; it’s about the experience.

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How To Delight Customers And Retain Top Employees With Jason Bradshaw

Our guest on the show is Jason Bradshaw, the expert on customer and employee engagement. He said, “If you get your customers’ and employees’ metrics, everything else follows. When you have a team of people, the way to get them to be engaged is to ask them to share their dreams. When you ask your employees for feedback, it’s not enough to just get the feedback. You must take action from it.” Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Jason Bradshaw, all the way from Australia. He created his first business at the young age of fourteen, where he was selling telecommunications and computer equipment in the Australian Regional City of Toowoomba. The lead-up to this was he was inspired by books like, The Pursuit of Wow by Tom Peters, which opened his eyes to the power of customer and employee experience. Jason tested and implemented strategies for improving the experience in a variety of sectors, including telecommunications, retail, media, finance and many more. He’s worked with companies like Target Australia and Volkswagen. A cornerstone of his career has been this unwavering commitment to improving the lives of customers and employees. Jason, welcome to the show.

It’s All About CEX! The Essential Guide to Customer & Employee Experience

It’s great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

It’s my pleasure. I always say, “Let’s start your story of origin and figure out where to start.” In your case, it makes me want to say, let’s please know the story of how in the world did you decide at fourteen that you wanted to start a business, and pick telecommunications and computers?

I know it sounds like I was on some great plan to conquer the world when it came to computers or telecommunications. It was simple. I like gadgets. I’m not fourteen anymore and I like more expensive gadgets. I needed to find a way to fund them. I decided instead of buying stuff at retail, I would buy it at wholesale, but I needed to be able to prove to suppliers that it wasn’t just for my bedroom. If you read a copy of my book, you’ll know that even before the age of fourteen, I was dabbling in different things. My parents and grandparents were all entrepreneurs. One of the many suits my father had was a gunsmith. I was sitting in the lounge room in our family home many times, bottling oil for people to clean their firearms and stuff with trade shows that would give me a small part of his display. I would sit there talking to anyone that came by, trying to pitch my oil to them.

You were encouraged at a very young age, which is not always the case. For myself, growing up, I didn’t even know what the word entrepreneur meant. They’re the ones who either worked for a company or owned a dry-cleaning or a plumbing business, but we still didn’t put an entrepreneur tag on that. Certainly, I didn’t know anybody inventing or starting anything from scratch. It’s fascinating that more young people are saying, “Hmm?” In your case, you saw it being modeled for you. Especially at fourteen, what’s there to lose? You might as well give it a shot. That’s a big part of why a lot of people are afraid to leave the security of a corporate job. The income is not steady and they’re not sure if their idea works. There are 100 reasons not to do it. If you get that out of your system at a young age and have some traction, I would imagine it encourages you to go, “I can do this.” How did you get from that into becoming this expert on helping people give their customers better experiences?

Life’s a wonderful journey, isn’t it? By the time I was 21, I had started three successful businesses. I went from telecommunications and computers into domestic and commercial cleaning. If you think about carpet cleaners and shop cleaners, I had the vans on the road. I had the telemarketers annoying you at dinner. I had an even crazier idea. I had what was perhaps a great learning lesson but I wouldn’t say that’s how I put the successful spin on it, but my third business was a video rental store. I’m dating myself now.

Like Blockbuster here.

[bctt tweet=”Make your customers and employees feel seen and heard. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

They say location is everything in real estate. Location is even more when it comes to video rental. I learned some lessons there. From there, I jumped into the corporate world. My entire career, whether it was a business that I was running or an organization I was working for, I was always the guy in the room saying, “What about the customer? What about the employee? Why do we need 300 steps in our process? It makes no sense to me. How do you think I’m going to delight the customer when I’m trying to follow steps 1 to 300?” Perhaps because of my readings as a young child, going to mom and dad’s place of work or their various ventures, I was always advocating for customers and employees. Naturally with that, as my corporate career took off, I continued to go up the corporate ladder, always with that customer and employee focus.

I haven’t always been the head of the customer and the chief customer officer. In fact, I worked for Australia’s largest government organization, the New South Wales Government Office of Procurement. I was the Director of Procurement Transformation. What’s the customer guy doing in an organization that’s designed to buy hospital beds, diesel, all things like that. Apart from changing processes, my job as a Senior Executive in the New South Wales government was to put the people of New South Wales back into the procurement process. As a government organization, we started thinking about our ultimate customer, as opposed to the agency down the road that needed to buy the hospital beds or diesel for the trains or whatever the case might be. I’ve always found a way in whatever job that I’m doing to bring that customer and employee lens into the fore. My experience is that if you take care of your employees and customers, all the other metrics follow. You sell more, make more money and have loyal customers.

It reminds me of the importance of storytelling, who’s in the story and what the focus is. If you’re in this government job, it’s easy to get caught up in the paperwork, not see the big picture and forget that you are serving the people who live in that country as the end-user, make them the hero of the story, and all of your actions from there as opposed to trying to get something done. This concept of, “If we take care of the customers and the employees, all the other metrics follow,” instead of being so focused myopically on, “What are the sales this quarter and this month?” If we go, “How can we delight the customer better?” That’s such an interesting insight. I want to know a little bit about your days as the Chief Customer and Marketing Officer. That would be a CCMO title instead of a CMO. It’s certainly a C-Suite level that you worked your way up to of doing Volkswagen in Australia. Obviously, it’s not from and in Germany. I worked with Lexus based in Southern California. There are Japanese companies in America like the luxury brands like Mercedes and BMW.

Everyone’s competing in an out-of-country environment. The thing that jumped out on your LinkedIn profile for me is that you have a loyalty program for cars. Most people think, “There are loyalty programs for airlines,” but I don’t think most people realize how important it is to get that repeat buyer or the person who’s leasing the car for two years to stay within the brand. Can you speak to what you did with customer loyalty as it relates to Volkswagen? I’m sure people can extrapolate for whatever industry they’re in and some ideas?

My role is Chief Customer Experience and Marketing Officer at Volkswagen Group Australia while focused on the Australian market. I did have the great privilege of working with my colleagues in North America. In Mexico, we republished the book that we wrote for the Mexican audience. It was great to work across both running a market but also to assist some colleagues in North America to understand the similarities more than what you might expect. One of those, as you alluded to, is the importance of the customer coming back during the lifetime of the ownership.

Retain Employees: Employees feel much more engaged with an organization if there is a continuous investment in them.

There’s this misconception out there. I certainly know I had it before I worked in the automotive industry that you go, buy your car, and the dealership has a 50% profit margin in the vehicle. I don’t know if that day ever existed but it certainly doesn’t exist now. The margins in an automotive dealership from the front end, the new vehicle out there are really small. Where dealers and automotive manufacturers make most of their money is in the service and accessories side of the business. It is extremely important for consumers to come back into the dealership to get the vehicle service.

If I put up my automotive hat, I’m going to tell you there’s a whole range of reasons why you should do that. The pure commercial reason is that’s where they make their money. From a customer lens, you should have a better product experience. I always think that when you buy a car, every single day when you hop in it, that product experience is what’s reminding you that you made the right or wrong decision. That service experience, getting the software updated, getting the oil changed and all the various other things that you do in the service, making sure customers get that completed by a trained professional should lead to a better daily product experience which should lead to loyalty. We launched in Australia a product called Service Packs or Volkswagen Care.

It was essentially a prepaid service package for your vehicle. You could pay for it upfront, package it in with your lease if you’d like, and every twelve months or whenever your vehicle was ready for a service, you’d come in and there’d be no more to pay. Interestingly enough, when we first package that product up, it didn’t sell and people weren’t interested. The sales teams in dealerships begrudgingly spoke about it. Why? There wasn’t value in it. We didn’t take a customer-centric view to create the product.

My team led a piece of research. We went out and asked her a range of people what they were looking for and what it would represent value for them in that post-buy purchase experience. We relaunched the product, renamed it and changed the inclusions. Interestingly enough, the price point didn’t change substantially. We had done some studies that showed that if we bring a prize to a particular point with these inclusions, it would maximize sales and retention. We made those changes all with the customer in mind. We had a 284% increase in sales instantly. Two and a half years on, that sales increased and that new sales run rate has maintained. I believe it’s simply because we created value from a customer lens.

If you don’t understand something, you’re not going to buy it. The confused mind always says no. If you make it hard for the salespeople to explain it or the customer to understand it, they’re like, “Do I want to increase my monthly lease?” No. Unless you frame it through their lens of convenience and not having to come up with the money. Do you have examples of brands that you as a consumer have experienced, not any place that you worked that did a poor job? You don’t have to name them. You can say it’s a hotel or a restaurant. We learn from both extremes. You described a great thing you did at Volkswagen, upping the consumer experience and customer experience of car owners or at least, people. What’s an example of somebody doing it wrong?

[bctt tweet=”Be sure you follow up with feedback your team gives you.” username=”John_Livesay”]

If I might, I’ll start with a B2B example. I’ve had senior roles in customer employee experience over many organizations. As a result, you tend to pitch multiple times for various solutions that you tried to create. As a result, sometimes you get to see the same people you hang with from company to company. I had this one company pitched to me four times in four different companies the exact same solution. They never once changed their pitch despite the fact that it was the same team pitching to me. The requirements were funny enough very similar, so I was leading it each time. After each pitch, I had given them feedback about why they didn’t win. Yet, the fourth time, they still hadn’t changed. I sat in the meeting going, “You’re here trying to tell me that you can help me with customer experience, yet you’re not listening to a potential customer.” It blows my mind away when people say, “This customer experience stuff is full B2C.” No, it’s B2Everyone.

Your book is It’s All About CEX!: The Essential Guide to Customer and Employee Experience. The fact that you’ve married the two, in other words, you can’t treat your employees badly and expect them to give customers a good experience. An example of a good company would be Starbucks, when Howard Schultz was giving his part-time employees health insurance here in the states way before other companies were. Those people felt seen, heard, valued and they would remember your drink order if you came in every morning at the same time. You can’t pay people to do that. Their job is to ask you what you want and give it to you but if they feel valued, “I’m getting healthcare and I’m only part-time, then I’m going to go the extra mile.” Those are the little details that a lot of people don’t see the ROI right away.

“Why would we do that for part-time? If we don’t have to, why would we ever give something to an employee?” That to me is an example of why you would do that. Let’s put on the hat of a manager, how important it is to keep top talent? We all know there are always the top performers, whether they’re in sales or whatever the department is. The line is that people don’t leave their job, they leave their boss. When you give keynotes to companies and you’re talking about not just how to delight the customer, what tips do you give them to keep their top talent?

There’s some research that’s come out that shows that 67% of employees feel that their company or manager asked them for feedback on their experience. That’s a pretty decent number. It could be higher but 67% is not a bad starting point. The alarming thing is that only 29% of employees feel that the company does anything with that feedback. The first thing that I say to managers in the board room is, “If you’re going to ask a question, be prepared to do something with the answer.”

Otherwise, you’re just blowing smoke and letting people talk. That’s more frustrating. You pretend to care and not care.

Quite often, when I say that people came back to me and said, “What if they ask for something that we can’t afford to do?” I’m not saying you have to do everything they asked for. I’m saying that you have to address their concerns. That might be saying no to something but explaining why it’s a no. It might be trying to find the middle ground in some instances. It’s not about doing everything at once. A focus on being a little bit better every single day is much better than spending six years trying to launch a new program for your employees to keep them only to have six years of people walking out while you say you’re working on something. People like to see progress. When it comes to experience, I don’t think there is a finish line.

Think about the number one selling motor vehicle in 1970 in America, it didn’t have airbags and seatbelts but the expectation of customers now is that there’s more than seatbelts and airbags. It’s the same with employees. That journey is a never-ending one that’s why it’s important to crystallize what is it that I promise to you as an employee. What am I going to deliver every time? In Starbucks, that’s things like healthcare and tuition assistance. For other organizations, that could be something smaller or bigger. That doesn’t matter what it is, but if you say you’re going to do it, you need to do it.

You need to ask for that feedback, be open and honest and say, “We’re not going to fix everything or we’re not going to agree with everything, but here are the three things that you told us that make you want to jump onto LinkedIn or Indeed job site. We’re going to focus on those over the next 90 days or over the next year. Every month, we’re going to communicate with you around what we’re doing on that journey.” That way, people don’t go, “I left some feedback but their companies not listening.” Often, their company has listened and done stuff but hasn’t told anyone.

Retain Employees: There’s a lot more learning that happens in the commission of getting it wrong than in the celebration of getting it right.

You’re not letting them in behind the scenes. I’ve heard from a lot of clients when they bring me to train their team on how to become better storytellers. Not only does it help them close more sales but they also feel like the company cares about their career. They’re learning a skill, in this case, storytelling, that is going to help them, whether they stay at 1 or 10 years or leave tomorrow. They’re getting something from that company that’s empowering them to be better at their job but also maybe better people. Have you seen this happening? Is there research that backs any of that up that you’ve seen?

There’s no doubt to suggest that employees feel much more engaged with an organization if there is a continuous investment in them. I want to make sure that we differentiate creating a website that people can go and do a whole pile of self-case studies. Some organizations have that these days. It’s nice to have but that only works for the employee that is a go-getter that’s a self-motivated learner. Certainly, across the board, there is research that shows, “If my boss understands that our biggest challenge is not being able to sell storytelling. He or she goes and sets up some training for us around storytelling, that shows that they care and importantly, they’re investing in my success.”

The worst thing you can do as a manager is to say, “The target this month is $1 million. I’ll see you on the 31st.” If it was that simple, sales leaders wouldn’t exist. As people leaders, our job is not to solve their problems but guide our people so that when we see that there’s a collective problem, we can bring in some help to fix that. At the end of the day, as a leader, our job is to help our teams be successful. Through this success, we become successful.

The other thing that you talk about in some of your keynotes is crisis leadership. You’re once accused of castrating the men of Australia when you were head of the customer experience with a major retail group? That begs me to know that story.

It’s not something that I ever expected to read. When I was working for Target, we decided to take off sale the game GTA 5, the Gran Turismo 5. It’s a PlayStation and Xbox game. For various reasons, we decided to stop selling it. There was a petition for us to stop selling it, and there was a petition for us to start selling it. In between, while letters were coming to me saying things like I was castrating the men of Australia because that was prohibiting the sale of GTA 5. The reality is in almost every location, you could have walked across the whole of the mall and bought it at another store. It wasn’t our store. I don’t have that power. It was certainly interesting to see how emotional people came about the perception that they couldn’t buy a product.

You could have bought it from us, but you could buy it anywhere else. We weren’t making a judgment about you or your product. Certainly, people felt that they were. While I was at Target, I also got called all things like killing babies. Discount department stores’ big box retail is full of stories. You could speak to any leader in a big box retailer and you’ll get everything. I remember a colleague of mine in the US. She said, “I used to hate getting the 2:00 AM phone calls about a fire in the store. Now, I got a 2:00 AM call because some cashier accidentally left off her rifle or a pistol.” Castrating the men of Australia was certainly one for the storybooks. Ultimately, we didn’t change our position. We took it off sale and left it off sale to this day. Target doesn’t have it on sale.

It’s fair for organizations to make a decision but it comes down to communication. In the GTA example, there were 40,000 social media comments about our decision to take GTA 5 off sale. Some organizations would have just told their teams to ignore those comments, don’t comment on them. I insisted that our social media team follow up on every single comment. There were some canned pre-scripted responses, but whether you were for or against it, you were engaging with the brand. I wanted you, the customer, to feel heard. The customer that wrote to me about being castrated, my response was dry compared to his letter. It’s important that during a crisis that you communicate, you help your employees and your customers when you’re next going to have some use for them so that you take away some of that unknown. A crisis is all about the unknown.

[bctt tweet=”If you take care of your employees and customers, all the other metrics will follow. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

I remember, at Target, we took off sale or recalled a range of denim products because the production process of denim included the use of a dye called an azo dye. There was some research that suggested that it could cause cancer in extremely rare situations. Their company wasn’t breaking any rules. The Australian guidelines were all being met. We weren’t the only ones doing it, that’s everyone’s excuse, but it was fairly commonplace to use this azo dye in denim products. The company made a decision boldly to take it off the shelves and to recall the product.

The advice that we were getting was changing and being updated by the hour. We bunkered down with the teams and said, “Every hour we’re going to give you an update.” To our consumers, we were saying, “Every day at 9:00 AM, we’re going to publish an update.” You still had people asking questions in between but you had a large number of people that said, “The company said at 9:00 AM. As long as they meet that commitment at 9:00 AM, that’s fine. I won’t engage.” Whether it’s being accused of castrating people, giving children cancer, the list goes on. In any crisis, the very first job as a leader is to create some milestones where people can start to get some certainty of comfort.

That’s been seen time and again if your plane is delayed. If they communicate how long it’s going to be, what the update is, versus leaving people sitting there hours on end with no information, how agitated they get. Let’s leave on a happier note. You also help people discover employees’ untapped potential. What is a tip you can give someone to either discover their own potential or someone on their team’s potential?

I’m a big believer in creating space for team members to share their dreams with me. If someone came into my office and said, “One day, I want to stand on a stage and deliver a keynote,” I might say they’re crazy but I would get them to tell me the story about why that’s important for them. I would find ways to incorporate experiential elements into their job so that they can learn that skill. I had a colleague of mine who moved to a new job and she was speaking to me. She’s like, “I am drawing on everything I’ve learned over the six years of working for you.” I said, “That’s fantastic. I’m glad that the job is going well for you. I knew you could do it.” She’s like, “Sometimes you gave me a task and said, ‘Get it done.’”

The tip would be this. Show your team members that you trust them to do the unexpected and what they haven’t done before. You know in your teams the people that no matter what, they are going to find a way to make things happen. You also know people in your team that are the shrinking violets, the solid achievers. It’s our job as leaders to give them permission to try. Importantly, if they don’t succeed, that might be okay as well. As long as they haven’t gone against your wishes, there’s a lot more learning that happens in that commission of getting it wrong than in the celebration of getting it right. I always encourage, “Give your people the chance to try new things. If they get it wrong, turn that into a teachable moment, not a, ‘You’re on my naughty list and I’m never going to let you do anything else again.’”

If someone wants to find out how to work with you as a speaker or consultant, what should they do and where should they go?

The easiest way to reach out to me is at JasonSBradshaw.com and on all the social channels, @JasonSBradshaw. It is important that you don’t forget the S in the middle. Otherwise, you’ll be buying yourself some real estate in California.

Thank you for coming on and inspiring us to have our team members share their dreams and remembering the importance of following up with feedback once we get it whether it’s from a customer or an employee.

Thanks very much, John. I appreciate it.

Important Links

• Jason Bradshaw
• The Pursuit of Wow
• LinkedIn – Jason Bradshaw
• It’s All About CEX!: The Essential Guide to Customer and Employee Experience
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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