#115 From Speedometers to Engines: Transforming CX with Tom DeVries

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Delighted Customers Podcast with Mark Slatin

Episode #115: From Speedometers to Engines: Transforming CX with Tom DeVries
Release Date: December 19, 2024
Host: Mark Slatin
Guest: Tom DeVries (referred to as Tom Tifreeze in the transcript)

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1. Introduction

In Episode #115 of The Delighted Customers Podcast, host Mark Slatin welcomes listeners to a dynamic conversation with Tom DeVries, a seasoned expert in Customer Experience (CX). This episode delves deep into the intricacies of transforming CX from mere metrics into a driving engine for business growth.

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2. Guest Background

[00:27] Tom Tifreeze:
Mark introduces Tom DeVries, highlighting their first encounter at the CXM360 conference where Tom was a keynote speaker. Tom shares his journey into the world of CX, emphasizing his passion for the intersection of business, technology, and human behavior.

[01:18] Tom Tifreeze:
"I've been fortunate to spend the last almost 20 years... helping businesses identify and execute on growth opportunities where these forces collide."

Tom recounts his diverse career, from commercial sales in construction to entrepreneurship in Costa Rica and Panama, and eventually co-founding a design-led innovation firm focused on driving business growth through products, services, and brands.

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3. The Double-Edged Sword of CX Efforts

[02:52] Tom Tifreeze:
Tom uses a powerful metaphor to illustrate a common pitfall in CX initiatives:
"If CX was an automobile for most organizations, their effort is spent on creating speedometers and gas gauges. But there's no engine in the car, so it can't go anywhere." (02:52)

He explains that many organizations focus on measuring CX through surveys, measurement teams, and call centers without having the mechanisms to enact meaningful changes based on these measurements. This incomplete approach often relegates CX to a mere cost center rather than a strategic asset.

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4. Treating CX as a Revenue Driver

[04:09] Tom Tifreeze:
"What you need is the ability to alter a collection of touchpoints so they all deliver on the same customer proposition." (04:09)

Tom emphasizes that successful CX programs require the capability to modify various business activities and technology elements to enhance customer experiences. Without this ability, CX initiatives remain ineffective and unsustainable.

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5. The Importance of Verifying Customer Needs

[07:57] Tom Tifreeze:
Tom highlights a fundamental issue in CX:
"If you think you know what your customer needs or cares about, you do some sort of little body of work to verify that it's accurate." (07:57)

He warns against the pitfalls of assumptions in design thinking and human-centered design, stressing the necessity of validating customer needs through concrete research and testing to avoid building products and services based on false premises.

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6. From Industrial to Ecosystem Mindset

[16:00] Tom Tifreeze:
"Machines are complicated... But that's not the way our businesses work anymore. We're living in this world where business, technology, and humanity are all changing at breakneck speed. It works and behaves much more like a living ecosystem than it does a machine." (16:00)

Tom contrasts the traditional mechanical mindset, rooted in the industrial revolution and perpetuated by MBA programs, with the modern ecosystem approach. He argues that businesses today must adopt an adaptable, interconnected framework to thrive amidst rapid technological and societal changes.

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7. Brand as Behavior and Differentiation

[20:05] Tom Tifreeze:
"Brand is a behavior. It's how your business shows up in the world." (20:05)

Tom discusses the evolving role of brand, asserting that in a saturated market, differentiation hinges on how brands consistently deliver unique customer experiences aligned with their core values. He cites Patagonia as an example of a brand that successfully integrates purpose into every customer interaction, fostering deep trust and loyalty.

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8. Shifting Competitive Landscape

[23:32] Tom Tifreeze:
Tom elucidates the transformation of competitive dynamics:
"Everybody is competing for the customer relationship." (23:32)

Using the example of Home Depot, Lowe's, and appliance manufacturers like Ryobi, he explains that competition now extends beyond direct rivals to include suppliers and other industry players vying for customer relationships. This shift underscores the importance of building and maintaining strong, loyal customer connections.

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9. The Power of Customer Relationships

[27:02] CX Leader:
A CX leader summarizes the discussion:
"The importance of relationship... repeat purchases... emotional level of loyalty where they become advocates for your brand." (27:02)

Tom agrees, highlighting that nurturing emotional loyalty transforms customers into brand advocates who not only make repeat purchases but also defend and promote the brand, even in the face of mistakes.

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10. Advice for Aspiring Leaders

[27:49] Tom Tifreeze:
Reflecting on his journey, Tom offers profound advice:
"The most important thing is to learn how to learn." (27:49)

He underscores the necessity of adaptability and continuous learning in a world where the pace of change is relentless. Tom encourages future leaders to cultivate the ability to quickly acquire and apply new knowledge to stay relevant and effective.

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11. Conclusion

Mark Slatin wraps up the episode by acknowledging Tom's invaluable insights and the critical role of adaptable leadership in the CX domain. Tom reciprocates the appreciation, emphasizing the podcast's role in sharing wisdom and fostering growth within the CX community.

Notable Final Quote:
"The work you're doing... is helping seasoned execs transition into this CX space very powerfully." (29:30)

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Key Takeaways

1. Holistic CX Approach: Successful customer experience initiatives require more than just metrics; they need integrated, actionable strategies that align with business objectives.

2. Verification Over Assumption: Validating customer needs through research is crucial to designing effective experiences.

3. Ecosystem Mindset: Modern businesses must operate with flexibility and adaptability, akin to living ecosystems, to navigate rapid changes.

4. Brand as Behavior: Differentiation in the marketplace is achieved through consistent, value-aligned customer interactions.

5. Relationship-Centric Competition: Competing for and nurturing customer relationships is paramount in today's saturated markets.

6. Continuous Learning: Leaders must prioritize learning agility to keep pace with evolving business landscapes.

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Final Thoughts

This episode provides a comprehensive exploration of transforming customer experience from a fragmented metric-driven approach into a cohesive, strategic engine for business growth. Tom DeVries' expertise underscores the importance of adaptability, authentic brand behavior, and deep customer relationships in navigating the complexities of modern markets.

For more insights and to stay updated with future episodes, visit empoweredcx.com and explore the Agile Brand Podcast Network at www.agilebrand.com.

Transcript

[Mark Slayton]

Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast, now part of the Agile Brand Podcast Network. I'm your host, Mark Slayton, 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.

[Tom Tifreeze]

On today's episode of the Delighted Customers Podcast, this one's going to be a little bit different. We're going to be off script today talking with a friend of mine who I had the good fortune of meeting while he was the keynote speaker on stage at Michigan State University's conference center at the latest CXM360 conference in East Lansing. And my guest is Tom Tifreeze. Tom, welcome to the show.

[Guest]

Thanks for having me Mark. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Tom Tifreeze]

If you don't mind, share with the audience kind of how you got into the world of CX and doing what you're doing and what makes your world go round and gets you up and excited in the morning to make a difference and particularly in the world of customers.

[Expert]

I'm fascinated by business and by technology and by human behavior. But in particular I'm fascinated by what happens where these three worlds or these three forces collide. So I've been fortunate to spend the last almost 20 years of my life helping businesses identify and execute on growth opportunities where these forces collide. I've been able to do that in a few environments. Early on in my career I worked in the construction industry as a commercial salesman, but selling stuff wasn't enough.

[Guest]

I couldn't ignore how much labor was.

[Expert]

Being wasted moving the stuff that I'd sold around job sites after it was delivered. So I created a staging service that saved my clients tons of labor by making it a bit more efficient for them to manage those materials on site after we delivered them. In exchange, I was often able to earn profit margins that were two to three times industry standards. Then I spent a few years in Costa Rica and Panama as an entrepreneur and eventually took a position building an innovation program for a large multinational corporation. Then about 12 years ago I co founded a design led innovation firm where we help businesses develop products, services, brands and businesses that drive growth. Now the last few years I've been experimenting, specifically experimenting in the customer experience space and it's proven to be a bit of a double edged sword.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Say more about why it's been a double edged sword.

[Expert]

More often than not, the way businesses are going about CX is just terribly incomplete. To use a metaphor. If CX was an automobile for most organizations. Their effort is spent on creating speedometers and gas cages. But there's no engine in the car, so it can't go anywhere. Ultimately, somebody has to have the ability to change how the parts of a business come together to show up in customers lives in a more meaningful, more impactful way or your CX program is going to fail.

[Guest]

The challenge of that is organizations that are doing CX with a survey function and some sort of measurement team and the call and contact center, which those three things for a lot of organization constitutes their CX effort. There's no ability for anyone in those organizations to proactively change or improve how the experiences show up in people's lives. And it's a big miss. It's a big miss because all three of those things are accounted for as cost center. They're just expenses.

[Expert]

But what you need is the ability to alter a collection of touch points so they all deliver on the same customer proposition. A lot of organizations are doing CX without that capability. And that's really what you need to turn CX into a revenue driver. What I've seen is that for every.

[Guest]

10 or so organizations that are actively.

[Expert]

Working on CX, about two have the ability to change business activities and technology elements to improve customers experiences. And the other eight or so are kind of destined to be defined as unnecessary expenses and probably sooner than later won't be around.

[Tom Tifreeze]

So is it fair to say that CX can't succeed if it doesn't change the way it operates, the way it functions, Moving away from cost center mentality and moving toward either revenue generation or innovation?

[Guest]

I would say that's true.

[Expert]

I would say if you're just collecting.

[Guest]

Information, what's the point, right? A speedometer doesn't do you any good if you don't have an engine that goes, you're going zero. So why would you measure it? All you're left with is the cost to create the speedometer. The simplest way I've done it is to say what's the business problem that you're encountering? And then you say, okay, let's take our top 10 statements that really package that. Let's write a customer problem statement associated with each of those. Because we have this business problem. What do we believe the problem is that the customer is experiencing? And so it's almost like a fraction, right? There's almost like a numerator and a denominator. And you're trying to figure out the relationship between these two numbers. And then you can start to open a conversation of was it better to solve this from the business side and if we solved it, what would the impact on the customer be? Or is it better to solve this from the customer side? And if we did, what would have to be true about how we put that experience into the world and how we do business operationally? Who would have to be involved? What business processes would need to change? What tech stack alterations would we have to make? Organizations will be more successful if they have the ability to start there, but no ability to measure everything is always this relationship around. If there's a customer problem, there's a business problem and vice versa. So start there and then once you feel traction, figure out how to go into the data you have, get a baseline, then measure improvement from there. Because lots of organizations are building the measurement function with no capacity to change anything.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Yeah. So. And if we could back up a step when you, when you started to, when we put this proposition together, where I said earlier, can't succeed if it doesn't change the mindset and thinking around this. The reality is that we're seeing CX programs or CX disciplines practices fail, CX leaders out of work, CX departments being absorbed into the organization. And yet the customer experience doesn't go anywhere. The customers are still experiencing your product or service each and every day. So there's a, there's a gap that, that it is created between, I guess the goal of a company if it recognizes customers who pay the bills and ultimately drive the revenue and the experience they receive. If we start doing away with. And it's because they become ineffective in what they're doing. Correct.

[Guest]

I think you're spot on. So I'm going to pull back for a minute.

[Expert]

You can ask almost any single human being on the face of the planet. A 10 year old kid from Topeka, Kansas or a 90 year old woman from Hong Kong. What does the term customer experience mean? And most of them will say, what are you talking about?

[Guest]

But if you ask them to tell.

[Expert]

You a story about a time they had a great customer experience or a time they had a terrible one, almost every single one of them will instantly go into a story about how a series of moments or encounters that they had with a company either added up to a positive or a negative experience, they're usually telling you an emotional story rather than just a functional one. What's amazing to me is that everybody understands intuitively what a great customer experience is and they value them. But making them is another story. You can ask business executives the same question and they'll tell you a great customer experience story and a terrible customer experience story. But when it comes to actually knowing how to make them or improve them, they freeze. It's just too complex. They don't know how. They don't understand how everything fits together to result in a customer experience. In fact, they often can't even answer simple questions like what experiences do you offer? Or what is any given experience made of? An example would be the out of box experience. When you buy a phone, a mobile.

[Guest]

Phone, what is that experience made of? A box. Well, that's true, but what else? There was a retail environment or an online purchase. How are instructions delivered? Do the instructions happen in paper? Do they happen on the screen? Are they even necessary? Or is the phone intuitive? These are all experiential elements that need to be considered. But what happens when business people start having a conversation about customer experience is everyone says we need a good one, but we don't often make it tangible enough. We got to get back to basic questions. What experiences do you make? What is that experience made of? How does it make your customer feel? And then how does that relate back into some sort of business performance? And the thing we have to get our head around is many dimensions of a good customer experience will not be directly monetizable. Typically you have one, one interaction that all the money is yielded through. But you won't get as many people doing that transaction unless you get all all these other interaction reinforcing the same proposition.

[CX Leader]

So I'm a CX leader and I'm listening and I'm like, how do you get my executive team to understand the concept that it's a holistic set of experiences, not just where we open the cash register and ring it?

[Guest]

That's a great question. I always like to deal in building a little case study inside of a business as cheap, fast and, and easy as possible. And maybe that case study is doing a body of work to say can we run a test or a pilot on this to see if it, if it matters? If we adjust it in these ways, then you've got a story to tell. Internally, you're demonstrating action. You've made an intangible thing tangible and people, business people, value tangibility. The other way is just to do this little activity of saying that's the business problem. I referenced this earlier. What is the customer problem on the other side? What do we think that is? And then how would we verify that what we think that customer problem is is actually the customer problem or constraint that they're trying to work through. I came from the world of human centered design, and one of the problems with the world of human centered design that's happened over the last decade is as that field has democratized and become fairly commonplace in the business world, there's a lot of positives that have happened there. But one of the negatives is a lot of organizations started believing that as long as they're thinking about their customers, then they're doing design thinking or human centered design. And it couldn't be further from the truth, because organizations inherently have misconceptions about how their customers think and behave. And so it's very, very important that if you think you know what your customer needs or cares about that you do some sort of little body of work to verify that it's accurate. Because otherwise the net impact of design thinking and human centered design is you're convincing everyone inside of the building of false assumptions about the customer. And then you're executing with conviction based on misconceptions. And we've seen a lot of that happen. So it's not enough to think about your customers. And it's essential to verify that what your assumptions are are actually valid. Otherwise you're building products, services, and experiences based on false assumptions, which pretty much guarantees that they will not be commercially successful.

[Tom Tifreeze]

So another strategy I'm hearing is make sure before you go out and make these changes that you've asked the customers, is this an impact is important to you? Do you care about this part of your journey?

[Expert]

Yeah.

[Guest]

And there I would say semantic detail that I want to adjust. Don't ask them. I mean, we've all heard this narrative of customers don't know what they want. And I believe that that's absolutely true. Let me think through a basic example here. If I were going to try to look at a futuristic soda can, we would take the standard soda can that exists today, and then we would create three different versions of that soda can in addition to it. And then we would take a very specific context, right, because you're looking at packaging, you'd put a customer, at least in a simulated environment. And then you'd lay probably the three new options on the table in front of them and be like, here's your situation. Which of these are you most interested in and why? Now, if you would ask them what they want, they wouldn't be able to tell you. And we would say, here are three ways that it could work in the future. Which would you choose and why? And you're uncovering and confirming or altering your perception or your understanding of their needs through what they're saying, you're getting.

[Expert]

A really deep understanding instead of a trivial understanding of how the customer thinks and how they would behave.

[Guest]

So, absolutely, this is a challenge that is part of cx and it's amplified in the world of customer experience. But it really exists everywhere in business for, I don't know, a hundred years. When was the MBA born? In the early days of the industrial revolution. The first MBA program, I believe, was Harvard in the nineteen teens or something like that. Check my data on that. It's probably not perfectly accurate, but it's pretty close. And everything in that world was about running a business, you know, running a manufacturing assembly line like a machine. So we build machines and then this gear is powered, and then that gear drives this gear, which isn't powered, drives this gear, drives this gear, drives this gear, drives this gear, drives this gear. And that's how we manufactured stuff. And then what the MBA did is it took this industrial mindset of building machines that make things, and it applied it to white collar work. And it said, when we go from making stuff to having departments like marketing and sales and HR&R& D and operations, those are like gears in a machine, right? And that's how we've done business. But the way that they get connected is fundamentally flawed based on the world that we live in today. Machines are complicated. What that means is you can take all the parts of a machine, you can lay them out on the ground, and you could pull one part out, you could copy it, you could replace that part and put all the pieces back together the same way they were. But that's not the way our businesses work anymore. We're living in this world where business, technology, and humanity are all changing at breakneck speed. It works and behaves much more like a living ecosystem than it does a machine. So the way we run our organizations needs to be based on an ecosystem mindset and structure, as opposed to a mechanical mindset and structure. And the MBA is still teaching mechanical deployment of business. But customers live in a really messy world where all this stuff is coming at them. And we're now, even inside of businesses, small things can have big impact. And in a mechanical world, there's proportional implications. But now you're seeing businesses run into circumstances where a tiny little thing happens out there and it has a massive impact on your business.

[Expert]

But we're also seeing positive cases where you make a tiny little tweak to your business and has a massive impact both to your customers and to your business.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Yeah, well, well said. I like the way you broke that down. And. And it makes me think about change management a lot and the importance of, you know, if we're trying to create one unified system, working together to produce an output that is valued most by, I would argue, our best customers. Right. Then we need to bring everybody along with us, bring tangibility to it. If that's just common sense or if it's a business case or, you know, maybe I'll let you add on to that part of it.

[Guest]

There's a lot of discussion in CX right now about delivering roi. That's very reasonable. The lesser story, and the one that needs to be paired with, is sometimes you got to tell a story about human or marketplace impact, and it doesn't need to be a number doing something progressive, being leading edge, and that the importance of those stories typically are tied to the brand of the organization. Some organizations want to tell a story about how they were a fast follower on something, and other brands want to tell a story about how they were. The first. First thing you have to do is write the story in form of the current state. So you're writing a nonfiction story and figuring out how does that play out right now? Then the next thing you do, once you figure out what you're solving for, is you have to write a fictional story about the way the world should work. The third thing is you have to look at the mechanics of how your business is organized and your technology is organized, and you have to build a transition plan that takes the nonfiction story that's currently true and migrate it to alter the future so that the fictional story you wrote becomes true. The pieces you're moving in between are your departmental functions, your technology services, and the stack that you have. And they're the enablement platforms by which you change the experience.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Yeah. So if you. If you say that your organization is the speediest. Right. Then the organization is going to be built and the innovations are about how we can become the speediest in the different elements of the experience. If we're the easiest, we're figuring out how to reduce friction at every possible interaction customers have with us, or at least prioritizing which ones are going to have the biggest impact and which sequence. And that's kind of where you're headed with this. We're in full alignment with the brand promise.

[Guest]

Absolutely. And that's where we're entering an era where that's becoming increasingly important. Because the reality is we are living in the most competitive marketplace in human history. If everybody just steps away from their business rule for a second and think about the last time you went online to try to buy something like a mattress, or the last time you walked down the grocery aisle and looked at all the stuff there over and over again. In every industry, we're walking around as human beings and we're surrounded by more options than ever, but we can't tell the difference. There's no or very little meaningful difference between the options we have available. This thing called capitalism has come into a state of maturity where our ability to produce things has become so prevalent that we're buried in options. And people are actually feeling anxiety because there are so many options and they can't tell the difference between them. So they just continue to shop for things because they don't. They feel like they're buying the wrong thing. So the reason this matters, in terms of customer experience, brand is becoming how your business behaves, not just what it communicates. Brand is a behavior. It's how your business shows up in the world. So how does every experience that you put into the world, much less every product, show up in a unique way? So I've worked with organizations that. That will try to innovate by creating new stuff that's almost invention. And there's a place for that, right? There's a place for invention out there. But I think innovation is becoming more and more about differentiation. You have to accept that there's going to be a whole bunch of organizations that do almost exactly what you do, but what your organization stands for. And it has a distinct difference in how every product, every service, every interaction you put into the world stands out from the rest. In a world filled with competition, where it's harder than ever to stand out, you have to get good at not just designing an experience or a journey map. The only thing that matters is how is your journey map different from every other competitor in your industry? Give you a tangible example. Just started working with a client in the construction industry 10 years ago. We would have started by creating a customer journey map, and it would have taken a couple of weeks. Last week I went on Claude AI two hours of work. I had an industry model that was pretty accurate. But the thing is, a lot of organizations are still producing these journey models as generic resources in the world we live in. That's this competitive. Your journey model doesn't matter until you figure out how you're going to make it a unique expression of your brand, because that's the only way you're going to stand out. Otherwise, you're just going to blend in, you're going to be ordinary and you're going to just disappear. So even though you do the same things as everybody else, you have to figure out what you care about and what you represent. If you express that through your products and your services and your offering, then it draws the right people in.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Would it be fair to say then, Tom, that because the world is rapidly changing and because so many industries have become commoditized, if they're not commoditized today, they can be tomorrow, that really what's going to make a difference is how you deliver the experience, how your customers perceive your experience as different than the next guy?

[Guest]

I think that's absolutely correct. Different doesn't get you there. It has to be uniquely you. It has to be unique to the attributes of your brand and what it cares about. Seeing younger generations care more about purpose, a big part of that is people don't just want to do transactions with companies anymore. They want to be in relationships with them. Businesses are making sense of this. Patagonia is great at this. They stand for something and the right people are drawn to them. And there are die hard Patagonia folks who won't dare buy anything else in the mountaineering space. They'll take your old stuff back and recycle the materials and give you a partial credit for it. These are all experiences that add up to some sort of purpose and it creates consistency and trust because everything they put into the world is on point with exactly what they say they believe in and care about. And that's the basis of a relationship. As soon as you do something that is different than what you say, that is different than what you claimed to care about, all of a sudden everybody's going to sit back and say, I don't trust you now. That doesn't mean I'll never buy from you again. You might be cheap, so I might do a transaction with you here or there, but I won't engage in a relationship with you. Which is really what companies want. Everybody is competing for the customer relationship. Competitive landscape is fundamentally shifting. There's a battle happening where Home Depot and Lowe's and Menards, they're not necessarily looking left and looking right at each other anymore. In terms of competitive landscape, they're looking at who are the appliance manufacturers and how long until we make our own appliances. They've already done it with lawnmowers. Ryobi is Home Depot's brand now. They're capturing wholesale and retail margins by selling Ryobi in their store. And what do you see them feature, go to Home Depot or Lowe's and in the lawnmower section see what has the premium real estate. Everybody is competing for the customer relationship. So in that context, Home Depot or Lowe's sells you a refrigerator. And the battle that starts at that moment is the battle for the relationship with the customer. If you're Home Depot, Lowe's is no longer your competitor. LG or Whirlpool is now you're completely different competitive landscape. Now you won the transaction. The transaction was a battle with Lowe's. The relationship is a battle with your supplier because the battle is for customer relationship.

[CX Leader]

Yeah, that's a great place to end. Tom, is the importance of relationship. And it manifests itself not just in one time purchases, but repeat purchases. Where, heck, you talk about different levels of loyalty, this emotional level of loyalty where they become advocates for your brand and they're willing to forgive you and they're even willing to tell their friends. Not only will they tell their friends, they're willing to forgive you, they're willing to defend you even when you mess up.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Right.

[CX Leader]

So this has been fascinating. I've got to have you back on the show because we just don't have enough time. If you're willing, I'd be happy to. But let me finish by asking you the same question I ask all my guests at the end of the show, which is what advice would you give to your 20 year old self?

[Guest]

Oh man, my 20 year old self was quite a fool. In a sentence, it would probably be that the most important thing is to learn how to learn. We're living in a world where the pace of change in every dimension imaginable is accelerating. So the shelf life of knowing anything is getting shorter. I think we're teaching our kids about things, but. But the most important thing is that we teach our kids how to learn about anything and apply it quickly. And somehow I think we're missing that and the world we're moving into. The thing that is absolutely true is we have to get good at learning about anything and contextualizing it faster than ever.

[CX Leader]

Great advice, Tom. Thank you so much for this wisdom. So many great insights. I so appreciate having you on the show.

[Guest]

Mark, thank you. Thank you for all the work you're doing in the CX space. In particular, we have a huge deficit in leaders that are coming into the CX space who are experienced leaders in adjacent spaces. They maybe came up through marketing or came up through some other position and they end up in a leadership role and they're told that they have to take customer experience. And very few people grew up in the CX world or came up in the CX world. So the work you're doing, the particular value that I see is you're helping seasoned execs transition into this CX space very powerfully, and we just don't have enough good resources and ways for people to make that jump of a different kind of leadership and a different function. And the work you're doing in that space is just fantastic. So thank you.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Well, it's very kind of you to say, and I think the podcast as a collection has been a big part of my giving back for all the years I've been in cx, and it's because of great guests like you who share wisdom like you just did. So thank you again.

[Guest]

Thanks, Mark.

[Mark Slayton]

Thanks for listening to the delighted Customers podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode or any of my other ones, hit, subscribe or follow. I've got a lot of other great guests that are coming up and a lot of other great content. I don't want you to miss anything. You can find any links or references on the show in the show notes and you can find those at my [e-mail] that's e m p o w e r e d cx.com also make sure to check out the other shows in the Agile Brand Podcast Network by going to www.agilebrand.

[Tom Tifreeze]

Brandguide. Com.

[Expert]

The Agile brand.