Jon Picoult, bestselling author and CX thought leader was my first guest in 2022 when The Delighted Customers Podcast launched. He was gracious enough to come back for episode 100 to talk about his His landmark study on the ROI of customer experience is one of the most widely cited pieces of research in the industry.
Jon sheds light on the groundbreaking CX ROI study he initiated, which highlights the tangible and economic benefits of a great customer experience. We’ll explore the challenges CX leaders face, particularly in getting executive buy-in, and how Jon’s research demonstrates the outperformance of top-rated CX companies versus their lagging counterparts, even amid the pandemic’s impact.
If you’re a CX practitioner, you should have this study in your toolkit and understand the trends over the 16 years of research. Spoiler alert – CX leaders outperformed laggards by 5.4x over 16 years!
In this episode:
- What’s the purpose and methodology of the CX ROI study?
- What makes it different from other studies?
- How can CX leaders use it to make the business case for CX?
- What are the DO’s and DON’T of applying the findings?
- How should business leaders approach the use of AI when it comes to CX strategies
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Show Notes:
Meet Jon
Jon’s insights have been featured by dozens of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Forbes. His landmark study on the ROI of customer experience is one of the most widely cited pieces of research in the industry, referenced by firms such as McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, Forrester, SAP, and Oracle.
Jon is also the author of the Amazon bestseller, “From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans,” which was featured in The Wall Street Journal as a top reading pick, and has also earned praise from business luminaries such as Horst Schulze (co-founder of Ritz-Carlton Hotels), Hubert Joly (former CEO of Best Buy), and Marshall Goldsmith (world-renowned executive coach).
Prior to establishing Watermark, Jon held senior executive roles at Fortune 100 firms – leading service, operations, distribution, technology, sales and marketing. Early in his career, at the age of 29, Jon earned the distinction of becoming the youngest executive officer in the over 150-year history of a leading global financial services company.
Jon received his bachelor’s degree in cognitive science from Princeton University and his M.B.A. in general management from Duke University.
- Watermark’s Customer Experience ROI Study: http://www.watermarkconsult.net/cx-roi
- Watermark’s Website: http://www.watermarkconsult.net
- Jon Picoult’s Speaker Website: http://www.jonpicoult.com
Books: https://www.amazon.com/Impressed-Obsessed-Principles-Customers-Employees/dp/126425878X
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Transcript
Mark Slatin:
The number one challenge of any CX leader is getting executive buy-in. Without it, CX practices are destined to fail. If you’re a CX leader, then you’re a change leader, and you know the frustration when you don’t have the support you need. That’s why I developed the Trusted Guide Roadmap Masterclass. It’s unique because it’s live, interpersonal, hands-on, and we give you proven frameworks, tools, calculators, and resources to empower you to effectively lead change. Enrollment is now open for this quarter’s masterclass starting October 16th. Don’t miss your chance to join us. To learn more, visit empoweredcx.com. Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast, now part of the Agile Brand Podcast Network. I’m your host, Mark Slatin, and I’m thrilled to have you join us. My mission is to empower leaders to delight their customers. Each episode, I bring on guests from diverse backgrounds who share valuable insights, wisdom, and practical tips that you can apply right away. Well, this is a very special episode of the Delighted customers podcast today. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have my guest on the show, who was the very first guest of all my podcasts and this, that on episode one, and this is episode 100. Oh my gosh, a cool milestone. Uh, one that I, I had no idea would even happen. And let me tell you a little something special about my guest, who I don’t know how I convinced him to come on the first episode, having never even done a single episode before. But I guess I give myself some selling skills credit for doing that. Right. So my guest on the show is Jon Pico. And Jon is the author of the Amazon bestseller From Impressed to Obsessed, 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into lifelong fans. And that’s what we talked about on the first show. And that book was featured on the Wall Street Journal as a top reading pick, and it’s earned praise from business luminaries like Horst Schulze, who was on episode 90. If you haven’t listened to that, cool to listen to the guy who was a co-founder and former president of Ritz Carlton. But today we’re going to talk about something that really helped me early on. And I expressed this to John with gratitude in my early stages as a CX practitioner at Bank in the Mid-Atlantic. And that is the Watermark Consulting CX ROI study, which is really significant in the CX space, CX profession. Every CX professional should be aware of it. And today we’re going to dig into it because John has once again, issued an update of it. Jon Picoult, without further ado, welcome to episode 100.
Jon Picoult: Hello, Mark, it is glad to be I’m very happy to be back with you. And, you know, I have to say I knew you when you were just a wee lad dreaming of being a podcast celebrity and look how far you’ve come.
Mark Slatin: I don’t know if I’m a celebrity or a villain.
Jon Picoult: But well, anyway, congratulations on episode 100 and and all the great content that you’ve produced over what the last couple of years, I guess. I still I’m amazed that I was actually the first guest on the on the first episode. That just blows my mind. And I am honored to be invited back for number 100. So thank you.
Mark Slatin: You’re most welcome. And thank you. And today we’re going to share what I think is we’re going to give some context to and perspective to this CX ROI study because it has been a drumbeat, a mantra among those who are in the profession and those who are critical of the profession and why the profession hasn’t in some instances had more progress, more success. in corporations than it should because we haven’t proven the ROI for customer experience and customer experience management. And this study, what I love about it is both its simplicity and its elegance because sometimes we can get extremely sophisticated and complex. And while people could argue the merits of the veracity of the data that comes out We can easily lose people in the complexity of it. So I want you to share with us what, tell us about the origins of the study to begin with and what made you think to analyze customer experience ratings and in the context of shareholder returns.
Jon Picoult: Yeah, so when I was in corporate roles before I started Watermark Consulting, something that always bothered me was how boards of directors and C-suite executives They seem to harbor this sort of basic skepticism towards the value of customer experience differentiation. And that became even more challenging for me personally once I launched my own business, which was focused on customer experience advisory. Because if you can’t convince people that it’s actually worth investing in, then I wouldn’t have a business. And the thing that really got under my skin was that I saw boards of directors and top executives would routinely take a leap of faith on a whole array of really significant investments, but they never seemed comfortable doing that when it came to customer experience. When you start talking about customer experience improvements, everybody’s like, well, let’s get the pencil out, let’s sharpen it, make sure you show me how I’m gonna get every penny back. And just to illustrate what I mean by this, it’s actually, here’s a recent development that’s a good example. The hiring of Brian Nickel to be CEO of Starbucks. His pay package is potentially worth over $116 million in the first year alone. To me, that is a leap of faith that the board of directors is taking. When you hire a celebrity CEO and you pay $116 million potentially, there is nobody at Starbucks, I can guarantee you, who can actually provide you a detailed cost-benefit analysis that that bet is going to pan out. But why did they do it? Because they just felt intuitively this was the right person, like they’re going to get the value back. But if you had asked that company, hey,
Mark Slatin: That’s a lot of mocha latte frappuccinos.
Jon Picoult: It is. Imagine if a CX executive went to that company and said, hey, I want to spend $116 million on some new system that’s going to help us understand our customers better or better barista training or whatever it is. There’s probably going to be a deeper conversation that’s triggered. And this is a perfect example to me of this idea that people make a leap of faith. It’s like when companies make a big acquisition, it’s actually enshrined in even accounting rules. When you make a big acquisition and you’re going to pay more than the company you’re buying is worth, what happens? You chalk it up to what’s called goodwill. It’s an actual accounting line item, which basically is the intangible value of all the synergies that you expect to receive. It is a manifestation of a leap of faith. And so it always bothered me that like, why can’t people just take this leap of faith when it comes to customer experience? And that’s what it dawned on me. I was like, well, you know, you’ve got to add sort of a macroeconomic level, as you said, you know, in simple terms, you’ve got to show people There’s something there, that this isn’t soft and intangible, that it’s real and bankable. And I remember vividly, it was Christmas time of 2009. I started my business in 2009. And I said to myself, you know, what language do boards of directors and C-Suiters understand? And what I came to realize was the language that they understand is the universal business language of shareholder value. Whether you’re a public or a private company, like you get that because the idea in a for profit business is you’re trying to build value for your shareholders, you know, no matter who that is. And so I said to myself, hey, wouldn’t it be interesting to just take a look at the stock market performance of the top companies rated in customer experience versus the bottom? And that was it. I crunched the numbers, you know, that holiday time in 2009. And it was three years of data that I had at that time. And it came out showing that the CX leaders far outperformed the laggards. And the study has been updated, you know, every several years since then. But that’s really how it all began. Just, you know, my personal frustration with the fact that people wouldn’t take a leap of faith on this as they would with other investments.
Mark Slatin: And so really smart and something, you know, we talk about all the time on the show and people who are guests talk about is just so important to talk in the language of the audience that you’re talking to. In this case, we’re talking about the language of the C-suite. And so astute of you to say, Hey, why go against the flow and make them make, have to make these connections and conjectures from NPS or customer satisfaction or some other data. Let’s speak their language. And so say more about the methodology that is involved in this study. So for what’s known as the cross-industry version of the study, which is looking at companies across multiple sectors as opposed to industry specific, what we do there is we take the top 10 rated companies and customer experience based on consumer surveys. Now, mind you, we’re not doing the survey, so it’s not like we’re stacking the deck. What we’ve used through the years are, we started off with Temkin Group’s CX ratings that eventually morphed into Forrester’s Customer Experience Index when Bruce Temkin moved there. And then when Temkin moved over to Qualtrics, we started using the Qualtrics XM Institute customer ratings. And that’s what we use to this day. And so basically, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the top 10 companies in those ratings, the bottom 10 companies in those ratings, and we’re going to create a model stock portfolio based on those two, equally weighted. So you assume you have like $100, you’re going to spread it equally among those 10 companies that are in the lead, and then another $100 spread among the 10 companies that are lagging. Now, one careful, important nuance here is we actually pretend that we’ve invested in the companies the year before they actually hit the rankings. Because one criticism you could have, if you did the model portfolios based on the following year’s stock performance, you could say, well, Maybe people are using the XM ratings to actually guide investments. And so that’s what’s, you know, pricing up the, you know, boosting the stock price of the leaders. So we basically, for example, you know, last year they came out with their ratings. That was 2023. So we pretended that we bought those stocks in 2022. And each year you liquidate the portfolio, you take whatever gains or losses, and then you reinvest it in the following year’s leaders and laggards. So that’s how we come up with sort of an average portfolio return for the leader and for the laggard portfolio.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. And let me just affirm the basis for the methodology from my own perspective is, so yeah, Bruce was at Forrester and then after that, and created this, which is based on success, effort, and emotion, which was based on facts based on a lot of research. And then Forrester called it the CXI. And then now XM Institute is using the same model, success, effort, and emotion where I worked for eight years. We used, we called it the C score, which is a basically a version of that, which is the C S success, effort, and emotion. And they are, They are as good as any of a methodology to say how do customers feel about you and your brand and their experience with your brand, right?
Jon Picoult: Yeah, and I think one thing to point out too, you know, why I have a lot of respect for those measures is I do think that they effectively straddle and balance the idea of the rational considerations that a customer has when they evaluate a customer experience, as well as the emotional considerations. Because those are two separate animals, and they both play a part in people you know, whether people walk away with a positive, memorable impression. And I think that those, the rating scheme accommodates, you know, both of those axes.
Mark Slatin: Okay, so you’ve got, you’ve got now sort of the top grouping of customer experience companies, based on the CXI or the XM Institutes ratings. And then you’ve got the bottom group based on, and we’re calling them CX leaders and CX laggards. And tell us, so from the time you started, I guess it was what, 13 years ago?
Jon Picoult: Yeah, so the first study was published in 2010, but it actually looked at data from three years prior to that. So I think we’re up to, yeah, 16 years of data now.
Mark Slatin: So how has the data evolved between those groups?
Jon Picoult: Yeah, so if you look at the performance differential in terms of total shareholder return between the customer experience leaders and the customer experience laggards, early on, it was about a 2x differential. So the shareholder return of the leaders, about twice that of the laggards. It then grew about 10 years into doing the study, it grew to about 3x. Then it was about 3.5X right before COVID. And now with the most recent release of the study that was just published a couple of weeks ago, it’s actually at its highest gap ever, 5.4X. So the leaders outperforming the laggards by 5.4, by a ratio of 5.4, So it’s really expanded over time. I think that’s interesting. I’m not suggesting that it might not contract in the future, because it expands and contracts a bit. But I do think what it perhaps illustrates is kind of the flywheel effect of great customer experiences. The notion that once you get this working well, and you get momentum, and that flywheel starts to really spin, you become unstoppable to some degree and it just sort of widens your lead relative to other players. One thing I would also mention just because it’s worth noting this latest update to the study was the first one that incorporated data from during and after the pandemic. And so when you look at how we went from 3.4x to 5.4 in the span of a few years, this is pure theory on my part, but one thing that I do wonder is if There was a pandemic impact there in the sense that some of the companies in the leaders category, their return, their outsized return might have been amplified just by what was going on in the industry they were in. And specifically, I’m thinking about online retailers. You know, so Amazon, as an example, which is a perennial leader in these ratings, Online retailers did very well when COVID hit, given the nature of their business. So I do wonder if maybe the lead has expanded in part because of the dynamics around the pandemic. Conversely, if you look in the bottom 10, travel companies are some usual suspects in the bottom 10. And the travel industry, of course, was hit pretty hard due to the pandemic. So I feel like the problems of the laggards may have been exacerbated in the latest round of the study, given the dynamics of the pandemic, and some of the leaders gains may have been amplified. And maybe that’s one reason why we’ve seen this pretty significant expansion in the performance differential over the past few years.
Mark Slatin: Interesting. Did you notice anything unique based on a look at industries?
Jon Picoult: I don’t think so, no. There are what I’ll call some usual suspect industries that tend to appear in the top 10 and the bottom 10. But no, I don’t recall seeing any kind of significant shuffling of that. You know, like I said, the travel example, there are some travel companies that seem to always fall to the bottom. And just during pandemic time, I think that they got hit hard, not just by the poor customer experience, but just by the tide going out in general with that entire business.
Mark Slatin: OK, so so related to the study, you’re now breaking them down by industry in terms of CXROI. Do you have a favorite among these? And do any of them have any specific interesting results?
Jon Picoult: Yeah, so there is one of the industry studies that I really like and find particularly interesting. And that is the airline study. And let me explain why. First, the airline study, to kind of cut to the chase here, it’s 13 years of data. And the airlines that lead in customer experience are outperforming those that lag by 134 basis points. Okay, so pretty wide margin. But here’s what I really love about the airline study. First, the industry is really interesting because It’s a business that many would argue is highly commoditized. You’re basically shopping for price, and there’s very little differentiation that’s possible. So people might look at that industry and say, how could customer experience possibly matter? It is a business that is very monopolistic. The top four airline carriers account for 2 3rds of the market. and they’ve got a lock on a lot of gates within airports. So if an airline consistently disappoints you as a flyer, it can be hard to not fly that airline, right? Because you might not have any other choice, which again adds ammunition to this idea, how can customer experience matter? Because flyers don’t really have choice and they can’t really just boycott airlines. The last thing that I think is really interesting is that most all, of the airlines are public companies. If you think about the cross-industry study and the XM Institute ratings, there are a lot of companies in there that are private. And those immediately get thrown out of our analysis, right? Because they don’t have a shareholder return. And so the airline study is very pure in the sense that every player pretty much every player every major player certainly is a public company and their focus is on one thing only and that’s air travel and so the purity of that study i really like and the idea that there are so many forces competitive forces in that industry that would lead you to believe to say customer experience can’t make a difference here, highly commoditized, you know, not going to work. And yet, if you look at the data, the difference is pretty significant. Also worth noting, the laggards in the latest airline study actually have an overall negative return, which as far as I can remember, I think that is the first time in any study that we’ve done cross industry or industry specific, where the overall return for the years covered was negative. Hmm.
Mark Slatin: Would you, would you, two things come to mind relative to that. One is how much of that would be attributed to COVID and or how much of that would be attributed to a specific, I mean, what comes to mind for me is Southwest having so many problems around the Christmas holidays in 2022, I think it was.
Jon Picoult: Yeah, I can’t remember what Southwest’s stock performance was in the year prior to that. But the COVID comment, I think that is right on. Again, this is an industry like we were talking about with travel that got hit hard by COVID. So that might actually be a legitimate reason why this time around we’re seeing a negative return from some of those laggards just because the whole industry kind of got pulled down together and the tide went out. So that is possible. But nevertheless, even before COVID, we were seeing this differential in the airline study. And it just kind of is an interesting industry to say, wow, customer experience even makes a difference there. You know, even though a flyer may not be able to boycott an airline, they can say unkind things about that airline to others and perhaps influence others, uh, you know, um, uh, inclination to fly that airline. So, um, yeah, the airline study I think is, is a fascinating one.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. Yeah. So is the takeaway from the CXROI study that if you wow your customers, then Money’s just going to roll in and your business is going to be successful?
Jon Picoult: Wouldn’t we like to think so? But that is a really important point. And I’m glad that you bring that up because the answer is not quite. That’s never what the study was meant to suggest. It’s certainly what I never purported when communicating about the study. The CXROI study, you know, never suggested that customer experience was the only driver to business success. You know, I’ve actually been very vocal reminding organizational leaders that even with an exceptional customer experience, there are a whole host of reasons why your business might still fail. So I think the key takeaway from the CXROI study is that a great customer experience is a necessary but not sufficient component for fueling business success. And two examples I love to use to drill this point home You know what i like to put out there before any critic can put it out is the two thousand eleven bankruptcy of borders books which just months before had been ranked number one in customer experience by far star. And so you look at that and you say, the number one ranked customer experience company went bankrupt. And then you also could look more recently in 2023 at First Republic Bank, which was long admired in the financial services industry for its customer experience and its stratospheric NPS of 80. And so you look at these two companies and you say, well, John, how could you argue that customer experience like puts wind in your sails for a business when you’ve got those two examples? And the answer is, if you look at why those companies failed, they failed for reasons that had nothing to do with their customer experience. They failed due to other really important management missteps. And that’s what I mean when I say customer experience has no guarantee of success. There are a whole host of ways that you could scuttle your business that have nothing to do with customer experience. And so I think the CXROI study basically says, yeah, you need to get this right if you want to be successful over the long term. But it alone doesn’t guarantee success because you’ve got to run your business effectively in other ways as well.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. So, John, do you know who Dave Ramsey is?
Jon Picoult: Yes.
Mark Slatin: Yeah, so Dave Ramsey would say, CX can’t fix stupid.
Jon Picoult: Yeah, it’s true. I mean, the soundbite I would use to characterize it is customer love is a great thing. It’s just not the only thing. And I think that’s really important for any CX practitioner to appreciate when they are conversing with executives that they’re trying to influence around this.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. And I think about, you think about things like Red Lobster, like, you know, giving away shrimp, all you can eat shrimp, whatever. And it’s, you know, it’s, it’s gone, you’ve gone too far with… Right.
Jon Picoult: Or MoviePass. Remember MoviePass? You know, great customer experience. What, for 10 bucks, I could see as many movies as I want in the course of a month. Right. They went out of business because there are other fundamentals that they just didn’t get right.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. So based on your experience sharing this study with your clients and what’s going out there in public, and you’ve gotten some exposure, I’ve shared on my LinkedIn posts, I always love to support your studies. How would you recommend CX practitioners use this information?
Jon Picoult: Yeah, so you know, one thing I think is important, as we just discussed, I think you’ve got to be clear eyed about what the study does and does not say. And you’ve got to be willing to put all those cards on the table. You know, you don’t want to you want to be transparent. But I think ultimately, what the CXROI study is good at is it’s a conversation starter. It is meant to get people’s attention particularly skeptics it is meant to peak their interest by showing them that the benefits of a great customer experience are not soft and intangible but rather are very real and very bankable. And it offers then a springboard for a deeper dialogue about that macroeconomic case for customer experience. The idea that there’s a loyalty lift to be earned here where you would get higher revenues, better controlled if not reduced expenses and improve profitability as a result. And then hopefully once you’ve got people’s attention, Then you can sort of advance the discussion and you can start quantifying the potential economic impact to your specific organization. Getting the board of directors, getting the C-suite to think, for example, what would a 10 basis point improvement in retention rates mean to our bottom line? What would a 1% increase in referral rates mean? What would a 10% reduction in post-sales service inquiries mean? What would a 5% reduction in product return rates mean? That’s when you start to dig a little deeper and show the economics at a company level. But it has to begin by getting people’s attention. And as you said up front, Mark, this study was designed very deliberately to be easy to understand, simple, straightforward, top 10, bottom 10. Look at the results. And the idea is you’ve got to peak people’s attention, particularly since so many executives harbor deep-seated skepticism towards the idea that customer experience really pays off in the long run.
Mark Slatin: Yeah, so well said. And let me just double click on that for a minute as a former CX practitioner myself to validate what you’re saying. And what I would say is some context around it is, you know, when you’re starting off in an organization, if there’s not a lot of data already built around your own internal metrics, what are you gonna, you’re gonna wait till you have them? You know, you’ve got some macro data here that any logical person who says, gee, does it make sense that if we treat our customers well and they have a great experience with us, that we’re going to see financial benefit? Of course it does. Well, now here’s something tangible that I can look at. And so as a CX leader, I say this in the masterclass, you’re a change leader. You’re a cultural transformist, right? That is the main part of your job. It’s not a tactician or a technology person. You’ve got to be able to do all these other things. But remember, your job is changing from the current state to some future state that involves a better experience for your customers. And so you need to continually beat the drum of CX and the Y for different constituent groups. And I will say, John, and I’m sure you know this, but from my personal experience, it’s not just the C-suite. One of the beauty, beautiful aspects of the simplicity and elegance of your study is that this communicates at all levels. We have 18 year old tellers coming into the bank where I worked who haven’t been to community college yet, and they get the concept of it. And it helps us to, what we’re trying to do is embed CX into the culture rather than just have it as a bolt on. And that means people have to believe in the mission.
Jon Picoult: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a really good point that this message has relevance throughout the entire organization. You might need to convince the board and the C-suite in order to really get the company to invest significantly in it. But It is a the missionary work has to be done at all levels of the organization, from from the C suite to the front line. And, and yeah, I think that you’re right that the way the study is designed and the simplicity of it, it can foster that conversation with any constituency that you’re trying to influence.
Mark Slatin: Excellent. Well, John, I could talk to you all day.
Jon Picoult: We’ll have to wait to what, episode 1000?
Mark Slatin: I’d like you to hold a spot for episode 200, if you’re okay with that.
Jon Picoult: I absolutely will.
Mark Slatin: It’d be my pleasure. I’m honored. But I do want to ask, because where we were two years ago is very different than where we are today in the world of business, because these two letters have entered into our world in a big way. And people in the CX world, the other two letters I’m talking about are AI. and are trying to contemplate, navigate, think about how they should, how they fit in as CX leaders and how AI should fit into CX and how it’s being used in many ways is in some ways antithetical to CX. So tell us from your perspective how companies should be thinking about applying AI into their organization.
Jon Picoult: You know, the first thing that comes to my mind, and this isn’t directly answering your question, but I’ll get to that in a minute, but I think that the first thing you need to be thinking about is the risk of how you proceed. And what I mean by that is I feel it is so easy for companies to get intoxicated by this technology. You know, and it’s not unique to AI. I mean, you could go back to any technology innovation in the past decade, two decades. And it’s just, you know, it’s human nature. It’s shiny object syndrome, we gravitate to the neat new thing. And we throw money at it. And we want to make sure we’re on the leading edge. The fact of the matter is, if you look through the annals of corporate history, You could make a strong argument that it’s not important to always be the first mover with new technology, that actually the fast follower is the one that gets it right. The reason I lead with that is because something that really concerns me is when I see companies that are getting on the AI bandwagon, and it’s at the expense of other fundamentals in their customer experience. You roll out that newfangled AI-powered chatbot, and you’re promoting it and everything, and you’re super excited about it. First it doesn’t work the way the customer like wants it to work but even beyond that let’s say it actually works well you just got customers who they want to talk to a person and they’ve got a complex issue and i don’t want to have to navigate through the gauntlet of the chatbot and what you’re doing there is you’re sowing the seeds for frustration and that’s gonna sap loyalty and So if you look at the long-term trend of customer experience quality as measured by some of the marquee studies out there, it’s kind of like flatlined if you look over 30, 40 years. And you say to yourself, with all of those technological innovations, AI and otherwise, why haven’t we moved the needle? And my opinion is, I think that In many cases we haven’t moved the needle because people are forgetting just some of the basics, the fundamentals, the idea of being responsive to your customer, demonstrating advocacy for them, making them feel better after they have interacted with you as compared to before. And so I think you’ve got to be careful getting drunk on the AI technology and AI washing everything. Because I just think that’s, that’s not going to lead to good things. Now, with that said, if I if I answer specifically where I think the greatest short term opportunity is, in my view, I think it’s AI as an enabler for the people that are actually interacting with your customers. And I’ll give you sort of, you know, what I think would be a classic example here of people that are working in a contact center that are either fielding incoming customer chat requests or calls. One of the things that people, I’m sure you know this Mark, having the roles that you’ve worked in the past, one of the things that people on the frontline hate, whether you’re in sales or service, is documenting what went on with that customer in that conversation. Because to me, it feels like it’s a waste of my time But the fact is, it’s an aid in the long run, because when the whole organization has a full picture of everything that’s gone on with that customer, it means the next time they call in, the next time they speak to a salesperson, you could create a more personalized experience, a more efficient experience, the technology.
Mark Slatin: Don’t get intoxicated. John, I want to ask you how people can best get a hold of you and get information about this study. But before we do, let me end with a question that’s a little different than I asked you two years ago, because you answered that, which is what advice would you give to your 20 year old self? I’m going to ask you a different question, which is who in your life was the biggest influence on your life and why?
Jon Picoult: Wow, well, I would say my parents. And if I had to pick one, I mean, they were both, right? This is like, which is your favorite child? But one thing I’d have to say is about my dad, who was in business himself. And I think one thing that he taught me, and this sort of carries into the CXROI study, was that business communication, written or verbal, need not be boring. and that there are ways to make it engaging. You know, he was a great writer, and he was actually a securities analyst, you know, on Wall Street. And that’s something that I learned from him was the idea that you can inject personality into how you communicate in a business setting. And that can actually help amplify your message and help you to help people to take your message more seriously and to really absorb it. So I give him credit for that, and that certainly helped shape my approach in the business world going forward.
Mark Slatin: Beautiful. Thanks, Dad. Hey, John, how might people get a hold of the study and reach you if they want to?
Jon Picoult: Yep. So, you know, the best way to get ahold of the study is if you go to Watermark’s website, which is watermarkconsult.net. And you can also learn more about me and my other work at jonpicoult.com, J-O-N-P-I-C-O-U-L-T.com. And we’ll include those links, I’m sure, in your show notes. And yeah, people can dig into the study for themselves. It’s free to see the full report.
