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Work For Humans
Building a Customer Movement: How Companies Create Experiences That Work | Alain Thys, Revisited
01:15:30
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- [00:04]
A
If you want to deliver an experience, you have to get every aspect of that experience right. It's not just about making sure that whatever software you're using is user friendly. Everything has to be correct. It's like if you go to Disneyland, you know, everything is in the right spot, everybody's dressed in the right way in a business. It's nothing different. So it's actually looking at all the elements that enable the business to deliver an experience and actually making them all fit together, all the business components, human process systems, whatever it is, KPIs, and actually aligning those so that they can deliver what is intended.
- [00:48]
B
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. This conversation with Alain Thice is one I have often referred to in later episodes because it reinforced my belief that experiences are not just a surface thing, not frosting on the cake. They're not the last thing you think about. They're architectural, founded on deeper structures inside your business, not just the last yard of delivery. Creating delightful experiences is crucial for attracting the right people to your company. And Alain is a rare thing. He's an experienced architect and in that role he translates business vision into tops to bottom business designs that are able to generate the human centered and profit driving experiences to match the business vision. Working with top brands such as Adidas, ing, Mercedes, Toyota and Deloitte, Elan has positively impacted half a billion customers and over 350,000 employees worldwide. In this episode, Alain and I discuss the key principles and techniques for turning a company's vision into tangible experiences for both employees and customers, including the importance of creating both emotional and rational spaces and finding and attracting the right employees for your business. We also explore the challenges of using customer relationship management systems and the potential benefits of AI in addressing those challenges as well as the biggest mistakes in customer programs and how to anticipate and meet future customer needs as well as much more. Okay, when you enjoy this episode, subscribe. And now I bring you my conversation with Alan Tice. Elaine Tace. Welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:41]
A
Thank you.
- [02:41]
B
It's great being here on the show. We've had a couple of big thinkers. We've had Fred Reichelt, who is somebody who you have written about in your book.
- [02:53]
A
He actually trained me once.
- [02:55]
B
Oh, really?
- [02:55]
A
A long time ago. Yeah.
- [02:58]
B
And your book is called so you want to be customer centric. It's a pragmatic guide to customer experience management. So you start very much from the premise that he starts from which is the customer is absolutely central. Customer loyalty is super important. Recently we Had Joe Pyne on another person, you know, who talked about the experience economy. And you're an experienced architect. You are the natural bridge as a role between those big ideas and turning them into reality. And so I want to start by just saying, what is an experienced architect? And it's probably a frontier that we're developing. But how do you describe it?
- [03:41]
A
I would describe it as somebody who tries to take the business vision, which includes the purpose and what a business wants to achieve, and translates that into experiences that humans and whether they are customers, employees, that human beings can actually notice. So in other words, if you're saying we want to be the friendliest company on the planet, that's beautiful. Blah, blah, what an experienced architect. Or what I try to do is to then say, okay, so how can I bring that to life for customers in a very real way, not in PowerPoint slides, but that the people that the software, that everything that a company does kind of reflects that friendliness or sustainability or whatever it is that the business wants to go for in a profitable way. Because that last bit's not unimportant.
- [04:37]
B
The word architect, I think, is an important selection of word in your title. What's being architected? Why that word?
- [04:46]
A
It's almost what isn't being architected. If you want to deliver an experience, you have to get every aspect of that experience right. Which means that from a business perspective, it's not just about making sure that whatever software you're using is user friendly or that the people smile at the reception or whatever it is. Everything has to be correct. It's like if you go to Disneyland, everything is in the right spot, everybody's dressed in the right way. But in a business, it's nothing different in the sense that the business model may need architecting so that it supports what you're doing. If you say you want your staff to be friendly to customers, well, you cannot architect a smile. Yeah, you can have to create an environment which makes people want to be friendly. Because if I walk up to you and I say dart now, you have to smile. You might do it once or twice. I mean, you're doing it now, but sustainably. You know, I need to create that environment. So it's actually looking at all the elements that enable the business to deliver an experience and actually making them all fit together, which goes way beyond designing the experience. That's why I use the word architect, because it's creating that vision, but then also looking at all the business components, human process, systems, whatever it is, KPIs and actually aligning those so that they can deliver what is intended.
- [06:20]
B
It makes a ton of sense to me. It's super hard. My background is as a business architect. It's got kind of a different objective. You know, a business architect is very much about how information flows and how that informs the information systems. This is subtler. It's as broad. In other words, it's in the sense that it's. Everything has to work together, the whole system, to deliver this thing. And if you try to deliver it in pieces, it's not going to work that well. And you have to think through layers, right? Like in business architecture, there's the business view and then there's the operations view that supports it, and then there's the systems view that supports that. It must be hard, impossible to think about all the dimensions at the same time.
- [07:04]
A
It is impossible to think about them, about all of them. And this is actually the key to making great experiences work, is to actually not try and control everything. And this is where the human aspect comes in a lot, but to create an environment where the people in the organization just start doing the right thing of their own accord. And what you then do is you don't need to create all the aspects of the experience. You leave that to them, but you give them the tools and you give them the environment that they want to do it in the right way also, especially if you're looking at. Because I kind of tend to focus on what I call large and complex organizations. So basically, lots of countries, lots of people, all that sort of thing. There's no way you can control everything. So it's all about inspiring the people with kind of the right message and then giving them the skills and the tools to do it and allowing them to do it and let them get on with it. A friend of mine likes to say, light the fire and get out of the way. It is a little bit like that, but the trick is to light it in a smart way so you don't get wildfire, but that you're actually going in the direction you want.
- [08:18]
B
So let's say I'm a CEO. For people who haven't listened to the show for a very long time, the premise of this show is that employees are customers and that work is a product that we sell to them. So let's say I'm a CEO and I've come to that conclusion. I've decided that the people who work for my company are buying a product from me. It's this experience of work. But I've never really thought about it that way before this is going to be a fairly revolutionary change. How do I start?
- [08:48]
A
I think there's two places to start. I'd say one is a rational place and another one is a little bit of emotional introspective. I'd say the rational space, which is the easiest is to have conversations with your people, to listen what they care about. Don't go sending 7,000 surveys with 8,000 questions, but literally go and sit down and try and understand why they come to work. If you take the premise that nobody goes to work to move a KPI or to implement a strategy, but if you start thinking like why do I go to work? I go to work because I want to make a living. I want to meet some other people which are nice. Ideally, at the end of the day I'd like to know that I made some sort of a difference, that I can go home and I can kind of tell my kids or my family, listen, this is what I achieved. But actually starting to understand these things in a very human to human way is kind of the practical thing you can start doing. Secondly, and this is usually a little bit harder, is also to look within yourself and to realize that whatever perspective on life you have is wrong when it comes to thinking about your people. All of us are biased in one way or another. It's nothing bad, it's just the fact of being human. But actually understanding that the perspective of a CEO on a business is very different than the perspective of the employees and really coming to terms with that. Yeah. So it's not like just, yeah, I know. But like digging deep and really understanding that effectively is as important as the listening because it determines how you start listening. As I said before, my background is more customer. But if you look at employees as customer, the key thing in customer centricity, in focusing on the customer isn't about doing all the researches, etc. It's about realizing that your opinion as a seller is not the same as that of your customer. Yeah. And actually just having that mental click which is usually takes longer than doing the research just because it's like kind of self discovery exercise. But I'd say from a starting perspective, I'd say those two things. Listening, but listening, really listening. Having real conversations about why people show up and what they really get out of the work and also what they're missing maybe. And at the same time that look in the mirror to kind of know like, yes, I'm actually in a very unique and privileged position as a CEO and if I actually want to be able to connect to my employees, I have to let that go. I have to, or at least be aware of it and deal with that.
- [11:42]
B
I recently interviewed Marshall Goldsmith, who has coached 150 multimillionaires, and they're all CEOs. And he had a list of things that people care about from their work. And the list that he had looked completely different than the one that I have collected by interviewing people about what they want from work. And I was disturbed for a couple of different reasons. One reason was maybe my research was wrong. But the second reason was it just shows what you're talking about, which is that it may be that there is a very different, even value system about what's most important in different people. That's ultimately what I decided. I decided I was talking to different people and that I talked to everybody. And Marshall talks exclusively to CEOs. I mean, very high level people.
- [12:35]
A
It's a different audience, it's a different segment. And this understanding is actually the understanding of who are the real people you're working with. Yeah, because this is like, okay, there's also, if you go on Google, you can find all sorts of things that people care about. But if I would average that out, I would not end up with my wife, you know, like, so to say, you know, what does she care about? It's like she's a unique individual. The same with every employee. And I think having that clarity of what the people in the organization are looking for is kind of the very first step. Then you can start thinking about, what am I going to do about this? But just having that understanding, and not in general, but really specifically, even if necessary by team or department or whatever it is, depending on how big the business is, you need to manage that in different ways, but at least get to that understanding.
- [13:26]
B
I argue that it is down at the individual level and that that's what management is for. That management is in a position to provide a custom, you know, within constraints, experience for everybody on the team.
- [13:39]
A
Absolutely.
- [13:40]
B
So your third chapter, it's interesting. I've got your chapters in front of me. Your second chapter is Listen to the customer's voice. Your third chapter is build a platform for aligned action. What does that mean?
- [13:53]
A
What that means is that when you look at a topic like experience, it's deceptively simple as an idea. Because if I say, let's have a good employee experience, you, me, the listeners, we all kind of know what it means. And if I then start asking, now let's get specific dart, what is a good Employee experience. I'm sure you're going to come up with a great answer. And if I ask 10 other people, they're going to come up with great, 10 great answers as well. But the only thing we can be sure of that each of these answers is going to be different. Yeah, they're going to be slightly different. Yeah. Which means that if you're an organization and you want to implement whatever the experience is that that you're looking for, but we all have slightly different definitions, the bigger the organization gets, the more haywire the implementation goes, because we're all going to be doing things in a slightly different way, which means they're going to be disconnected and you're going to be approaching it one way, I'm going to be doing something else. So what we need first is to have a platform where we kind of agree together. Now, if this is what our employees are looking for, if this is what the customer is looking for, what are we going to deliver in return? What is that experience? Very clearly, and get very explicit about that. It's almost process way, but it's experientially driven so that we all have the same definition of what a good employee experience looks like, how to get there. We may all have different ways of achieving that, but that we have that same vision. So if, for instance, we want to create an environment, I'm going to make this up on the spot, so I hope it sticks. But if we want to create an environment where people feel like they can take initiative, that they can really take some risks because they can contribute to the betterment of whatever it is that we're working for as a business, then that goal needs to be clear. What exactly is that? Yeah. So that. Does that mean that people can do this every day? Or, you know, is there a specific moment in time? You know, do we have to allocate some time? What do we do with the money? How do we deal with mistakes because they will be made. And all of these topics you need to discuss first so that we have a clear picture of what it is that we are actually trying to achieve. So that as different managers in the business, we actually have a similar approach to it and we can deliver that experience. Does that make sense?
- [16:42]
B
It does. Can you describe an example of a company that has decided what that looks like and what it looks like on the regular customer side?
- [16:51]
A
On the regular customer side, for instance, with. I just finished a project with oriflame, which is a global beauty company, beauty care, they've got 2 million distributors. So it's kind of like a large organization if you want to implement an experience. And the platform that we all agreed to is that they want to be the friendly partner to everybody they do business with. Yeah. I mean, there's some internal stuff I cannot explain, but in short, it is about they want to be the company that treats every of their brand partners, so distributors and even end consumers as if they would treat a friend. Yeah, this is their brand promise. That has been translated into a number in a lot of detail. But the key platform is that this allows bringing it sales, marketing, everybody around the table to have a conversation and say, now what would we do to actually treat our customers like friends? It turned into the IT team started saying, oh, but maybe we need to change our interfaces in a way because they're not that friendly sometimes. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. The marketing team started saying, hey, we need to change the language a little bit that we use. The sales team started looking at some claims, procedures, etc. And effectively having a platform where everybody kind of agrees this is the goal we're going for is a very practical way then for everybody to align their activities towards that common goal.
- [18:24]
B
It seems like as you start to move toward making this real, you'd want to have a sense of what are the core reusable capabilities that the organization needs to have upon which we can build, I want to say custom solutions for each customer. So there's this idea that there's something core that enables the specific support of unique needs in customers.
- [18:52]
A
Yes, with a little question mark in the sense of I always get nervous when I hear words like bespoke solutions for each customer because they, you know, it can get very complex very quickly. I think the key premise underlying before you even get to that point, because I do agree with the principle, it's just the implementation that sometimes goes wrong. Before you even go there, you need to be very clear on who is your customer. So who is the customer that we are serving. And when you are very clear on that, the number of personalization elements actually decreases dramatically. Yeah, it gets complex. If you have to be everything for everybody, it's much easier if you say this is our key customer, then you can say this is the experience we want to deliver. And then automatically the capabilities that you're talking about that are repeatable, they kind of become self apparent. So with the preface that you basically say we're clear about who is our customer in the case of employee experience, who are the employees that we want, that we want to attract, then I'm totally aligned.
- [20:01]
B
Oh, I like that. Very last thing you said was, we're not creating experiences for every employee in the world. We're creating experiences for the ones we want to attract and retain. And so there may be a lot of variation in there, but it's not infinite. How do you go about identifying who that customer is?
- [20:22]
A
There's a couple of elements in there. On the one hand, there's the commercial side, like, okay, who do we want to target? You know, and who can, in an employee context, who would give us most productivity? In a customer context, where's the highest profitability? The second element is also, and this is sometimes uncomfortable for organizations, but it's also just looking at yourself and saying, who do we want? What do we want to do? Which is very intuitive. Very, you know, sometimes not even. It doesn't fit in spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations. But just looking around the table, I've regularly had this that I just say, okay, let's now shift all the research aside here. As a senior leadership team sitting in a room, you can go for option A, B or C. Forget about the rational side. What does your heart tell you? What is the right direction for the business? And invariably, the moment you get them to their heart, they all say the same thing. And occasionally there's some discord and that gives some discussion. But at the end of the day, there's these two components, which is on the one hand, side, what does the business, what does the number, where's the market, what are the people we need to get, et cetera. But on the other hand, there's also this passion piece which is in the hearts, especially of the leadership team, because that's kind of where it starts when it comes to resource allocation. And my statement is always like, listen, go with your heart as much as with the numbers, because you got to run with that heart for a while. If you're running with your passion, it's just like it would work for any employee. It works for leaders. Shape your strategy as much around the who than all the other stuff. I mean, Simon Sinek always says, like, start with why. I like to start with who. You know, who are the people at the table? What are their values, what do they want and what's their why? And effectively combine these two. Then you kind of get to a profile. And this works for employee experience as well, where you then sit back and say, what are the people we want? What are the people which make us comfortable? They don't have to be all like us. That's not the point, but what is it that we want as a business? Just intuitively and also then a little bit of rational elements. Okay. We do need to recruit certain profiles because certain job need to get done. But again, there's a, you know, that balancing act.
- [22:48]
B
I want to test an idea because I've made this argument and I'm not sure it's true. You spoke about profitability and I argue that you should think about profitability right at that moment when you select your customer. That's a fine time to think about it. But after I've decided that you, Elaine, is the kind of person that I want to attract as a customer, I need to stop thinking about profitability and I need to start thinking about what you want. In other words, I've made my decision about who I'm attracting now let's be passionate about you.
- [23:20]
A
Totally. As long as I don't as a customer, I don't abuse that. So you want some guardrails just to make sure. But that's like for 10% of your customer base. But for the other 90% I would say yes, absolutely. Because if you've selected me correctly as a customer, because we're all in this assumption that customers need to be one and convinced, etc. But there's also an element of selection in there, like do you want to do business with me, whatever that may be. So if you've selected me correctly, then basically what you're saying is I want to develop a relationship. And in a relationship you go in and you don't look every five seconds. Does this relationship have a return? I mean, yes, at some point you may want to have a look at whether it's worthwhile continuing with a relationship. But effectively you're not going to look at it every five minutes. And I think this is where I see a lot of these customer programs. Very often if they get two numbers oriented go wrong. Because especially if you're a stock market listed company where you got every quarter you got to come up with the numbers, then everybody starts looking at these relationships and saying how can I get a quick win out of it? But that's not building a relationship anymore, then that's getting close to abuse. So I'd say yes with some guardrails. But build on that relationship, forget about the numbers in the short term, figure out what is it that I want as a business. Also be clear about what you want as a business. It's a two way street. And provide that it's very simple and very complex at the same time. It Sounds very simple. In implementation, it can be a nightmare. But it is about daring to let go and trusting in your own product that you're selling, in your own relationship, that it will generate the value. If you're not sure about that, then maybe you're not sure. It's not that you're not sure about me, but that you're not sure that the value proposition you've got is strong enough.
- [25:24]
B
What's really attractive to me about what you're saying is this idea that a business can become a broker between two customers. And the way you're talking about it, well, it reminds me a little bit of Fred Reichelt, which is this idea that there's hearts on both sides of this relationship and that we're winning the kinds of customers for our products and services that are going to bring the kind of work that the workforce wants to deliver and vice versa, that the workforce we're attracting the kind of workforce that can deliver that kind of experience on the other side. So there is a kindling of those two sides. And you can over rotate on the math.
- [26:09]
A
Yeah, but at the end of the day, it's about the sweet spot you described. It's about the. I mean, every successful transformation program I've ever been involved in has always had those two components. On the one hand, basically an analysis, a very clear picture of what the end customer wants. Yeah. And be very, very clear about that. But formulated in a way that gets the people in the organization out of bed. And that makes them go like, yes, I want to do that. Then there is still all the usual stuff that flies around in a corporation. But at the end of the day, the core is those two elements. Once they come together, that's when the
- [26:52]
B
flywheel starts working well and winning the kind of customers that bring the kind of work that people want to do.
- [27:00]
A
Yeah. Because you need to. I mean. And then it works. I mean, from a recruitment on both sides, it actually means then now we want more customers in that direction. Because I mean, in my experience, too many companies chase too many different customer types all the time. And I actually think that some companies would benefit by losing some customers, actually become more profitable in the long run. And at the same time then also recruiting the type of people who can deliver the type of experiences, whether that's digital, personal, whatever, that these customers are looking for. And it's basically making that match. And I kind of like the idea when you said a business is kind of like a broker, a matchmaker between these two groups, because as an organization, then what the job becomes is to understand what our customers looking for, what are the customers we want to target are looking for, what is the experience they want? And inversely, what would make the people that we attract want to deliver that experience and how do we keep that going?
- [28:05]
B
I remember Zappos stopped posting jobs, and instead what they did was they had a social platform where they were watching people talk about their shoes, and they just opened it up to everybody and they looked for the people who were the most passionate and who were the most really into shoes. And they recruited them cold and said, hey, do you want to come and be a part of the service team at Zappos? And so that's an interesting kind. It's not like, what are your skills? What can you give me? What are your passions? Clearly, if you have those passions, you're brilliant about shoes.
- [28:45]
A
Exactly. And this is. This is what I see quite often with companies that get the recruitment side aligned to the customer side. There's this hotel chain, I think they've got a couple of hotels in the US now as well. It's called CitizenM. It's like an upmarket boutique chain, but very funky, very casual in their style. And the way they recruit is. They call it castings. You don't need to have any hotel experience to join. Yeah, they. They have all sorts of little things that they do, but actually what they're really looking for is who are the people in here who behave like our hotel guests. So it's not about who are the. Who are the best, who's got the best service or who knows the best wines or whatever. You know, they don't really care about that. It's like, who are the people who behave and connect most to the people that we are trying to service? Not from a financial perspective or demographic perspective, just from a style, how they talk, how to behave, how they dress. And as they're a very casual chain, what they want is casual people who are very helpful, who start helping each other. They recruit whole teams at once. If there's five people in a recruitment session who get along well, they basically recruit all five of them in one go and put them in the same team so that they actually reinforce that atmosphere. And, I mean, there's this one liner, higher for personality or higher for attitude. And the skills can come. But what I really see with the companies who get that right, just like Zappos, is that they just look for who are the people who are already attuned to what we're trying to achieve with CitizenM, that's about being casual, being helpful. In other companies, it's different things, but effectively, who are those people? And let's bring them in. Yeah, and all the rest. Skills you can train as much as you need. That'll come.
- [30:46]
B
You know what it kind of leads to is the idea in this conversation about employees as customers, the idea that you might fire customers on the other side.
- [30:56]
A
And it's not necessarily just for the financial reasons. I mean, usually if you run the numbers, these customers are actually much less profitable than you think. So there is actually a business case. But also very often they suck the enthusiasm out of the business. If you're dealing with customer. I mean, we've all worked with customers that give us wings and we've all had customers which kind of pull us down. And at the end of the day, if you've spoken to customers who pull you down over and over again, your energy the next day is going to be much lower even for the ones who give you wings. So as a business, there is actually a case to, on the one hand, recruit the right customers, but also say goodbye to the customers who don't really fit. Whether financially, but also just energy wise. I mean, it sounds a little bit esoteric, but it's actually got real business implications.
- [31:50]
B
Yeah, as usual, probably 20% of the customers cost 80% of the work. It's a good example of how we can see the money they bring that's tangible, but we can't necessarily see the experience they bring to the workforce. So there's a visibility mismatch there. So chapter five Future proof your distribution. What does that mean?
- [32:17]
A
It basically means that whenever you're designing an experience, you work with the information you have today. That's a fact of life because you cannot work with the information you haven't got. The only problem is by the time that experience has been implemented, you may be one, two, three years down the road, depending on how big your transformation or your program is, by which time the expectations and the situation have already changed the technology. I mean, if you're looking at what's happening these days with technology and AI, it changes every week. Or at least that's what they want to make us believe. But also from a customer perspective, expectations will be quite different. X time into the future. So when it comes to future proofing the experience, it's about not just sitting down and saying, what do customers want today? Or in the context of this conversation, what do employees want today? But also look ahead and kind of like make a hypothesis at least of what they will want. Tomorrow and make that the basis for your experience design. So very practically, I mean, right now I just, I just had a claim with Uber was €6, so it wasn't really a lot of money, but I was like, this money is due to me, so I'm going to have it. I was ready for a big fight and all that sort of thing, but then it took me literally seven minutes to get the claim approved and paid out into my account. Now suddenly, yesterday I would have said, a 24 hour thing is a good experience. Yeah. Today I'm like, no, seven minutes is a good experience. Yeah. Because somebody just did it. And this is going to happen to every aspect of the experience you design today. Somebody's going to come up with some new thing for employees or for customers that are going to shift their expectations and by the time you've actually implemented whatever you've designed, it's going to be outdated. So what I mean with future proofing is actually imagining what will be the needs of tomorrow, imagining what should be the experience of tomorrow, and actually start building towards that, rather than just sticking with whatever journey maps or whatever stuff you come up with today.
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B
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, which is be a leader in the experience by predicting it.
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A
Correct. Because otherwise you're always going to be lagging.
- [34:55]
B
Yeah. And I can also see that there's sort of a bell curve of expectations in the population. And if I'm constantly looking at the sort of the demanding end of the bell curve, that might be the place where I find the future.
- [35:10]
A
This is exactly the way we do it in the sense that we basically say whatever the industry is, we look at what globally across industries, what's the latest of the latest in experience that's being offered? We assume that if somebody is doing it today, if somebody in Korea has come up with a way to, to help women find the ultimate lipstick, then that is today. But in three years that'll be in New York, that'll be everywhere, Sao Paulo, et cetera. And effectively that means you have to design for that. So what you kind of need to do is figure out what are those outliers, what are the anomalies. But in a positive sense that are happening, judge them a little bit, because it's not because somebody comes up with a crazy idea that every has to do it, but what are the expectation changes that could trigger from now on? Why do I need to choose out of 10 lipsticks if I can have the perfect one and then start building towards that straight away and just skip all the Intermediate steps because you're going to be playing catch up all along.
- [36:16]
B
You mentioned at one point that business models might need to change. Can you describe an example of how a business model has needed to change to create a better experience?
- [36:29]
A
What's happening right now in automotive, Almost every automotive brand is a conversation about changing business models from I sell you a car to I sell you mobility. Yeah. Now this is something which is customer led. I mean, this part of it is industry led, but most of it is customer led in the sense that a lot of people are saying, listen, I need to get from point A to point B. That's the service you're selling to me. Whether that's with a car or you make me materialize on the other side, I don't really care that much. I may have some preferences, but just get me from A to B and give me that mobility to do it whenever I want to be able to deliver that experience. Suddenly I cannot charge you 30, $40,000 for a piece of metal. A, you're going to say, do I really need it? B, the math just doesn't work anymore. So what is now going on is that every, every automotive brand is calculating how can we move to whether it's a subscription model, which seemed to be pretty much up and coming these days. But where you get like, is it a subscription model for one car? Is it a subscription model like BMW does where you take one car but then you know, you can have a small car for most of the year, but if you want to go on holiday, you can get one of their big X whatevers. Do they need to have little bicycles included? What is the deal? But basically the business model, if you want to change the experience, so to say, from I sell you a car and a driving experience to I sell you mobility, effectively, the way you calculate that needs to change. Because suddenly you know, who's the owner of the car? Oh, that means that I as a brand stay the owner maybe, and I'm giving you the use of that car. So that whole financial model changes, but it also changes the experience and the commercial side of the experience, which has to evolve. Because now suddenly, instead of selling you a car, which is a one off thing. Yeah. Because if I sell you a car, I just need to be a smooth salesperson, have a good car and, you know, get everything done, suddenly, now I have to keep you happy month after month after month. Because suddenly you're in a subscription model. If you buy the car, you're paying it off. There's nowhere you can go In a subscription model, there's cancellation clauses and if I've invested in buying the car for you to drive, and after six months you say, bye, bye, Alan, I've got a financial problem. So all of these numbers need to be reworked before you're even able to deliver that experience in a profitable way. It's easy to do as an experiment, but at scale, it needs a different model.
- [39:17]
B
That's a perfect example of when you hire a business architect, by the way, which is the business architect comes in and says, look, we have a new route to market and what are all the capabilities that need to change across the company? And this is a perfect example. Well, we're going to have to pay salespeople differently. We used to pay them based upon a single sale, but now how do you value the sale of a subscription at the beginning and then how do you incent that? And there's. I know from experience that out of 280 categories of work, when you go from a point of single point of sale to subscription, 65 categories of work need to change. Because I've gone through that, I've led that transformation before. And it's a lot, right? It's a lot. And if they don't all change at the same time, basically one of your feet is going to be nailed to the ground.
- [40:06]
A
It is a matter of getting everything aligned again, getting to that plat. I mean, it always goes back to that platform where everybody knows where they want to go, have that experience clear, and then just translate into what does this mean in this case for the business model, the financials and how the salespeople get compensated.
- [40:25]
B
Let's talk about building a customer movement. What does it mean?
- [40:29]
A
First of all, building a customer movement basically means that you create a movement in the organization that wants to prioritize the customer so that the people in the organization basically say themselves, I want to do what is right for the customer without necessarily having managers chasing them all the time to do that. And the way you achieve that is actually, as I said, it's simple and complex at the same time. It's very simple. On the one hand, if you accept that most people go to work to do a decent job and nobody gets out of bed with the deliberate intention to annoy customers every single day. If you basically accept that premise, you have a willing population in your organization, you have people who want to do the right thing. Now, the challenge is usually that there is a culture in the organization that prevents them to do that, that there are processes that prevents them. There's all sorts of stuff that gets in the way to do what is right for the customer. We call that management, we call that management theory. We call that, you know, all the stuff we've learned in business school. But in their hearts they still know, they still want to do the right thing. So what building a customer movement is about is something very simple, that is to tap into that knowledge. This goes back to our conversation earlier of actually giving people the feeling that they're doing something worthwhile for customers that are worth doing something for, tapping into that and as step one, identifying the people in the organization who are already displaying that behavior. I don't believe in change management and convincing everybody. I like the easier route, which is like, let's start with the people who are already behaving in the way that we hoped that everybody would behave and effectively starting to support them, to celebrate them, putting the spotlight on them and not doing anything negative towards the rest of the organization. Because probably you're talking about 3 to 4% of people, but still you don't put the spotlight on the rest. You just put it on that small group. And what naturally starts happening is that some of the people who actually are also in that same mindset but didn't dare to act or didn't dare to take a step or whatever, they want to join that group. So you make it easy for them. You set up little info sessions, join the customer movement or whatever it is you want to call it, and they'll start showing up. It's almost like building a grassroots political movement or whatever it is, but you just do it around the customer. And gradually what starts happening is that. And it's like in a playground, you know, if 10 kids are having fun in a corner, suddenly the whole playground moves over there. This is exactly what happens in organizations if you keep the spotlight on the people that basically say, you know, we are behaving in a customer centric manner, we want to care about the customer and you support them, you support them in their mistakes as well. And because that's a very big one, is they have to take risks. Then more and more people are going to join that movement until you reach a tipping point that you don't really need to fan the fire anymore because it just starts rolling and at the end you then still have, let's say maybe 10% of the population who really doesn't want to play that game. That's where you then have the tougher conversation. But that's for me, always a two year down the road conversation. The Movement kind of can build itself because what you then do is you. This is why I like the approach so much, is that you work with the positivity that's already in the people and let them take initiatives about what is right for the customer. Obviously, you need to give them information, you need to train them, you need to give them support, but you work with that and gradually let everybody convince each other rather than have this big management program which kind of says, here's what you need to do.
- [44:46]
B
You said something interesting. There was a phrase in there. It sounds like a great title for an article, by the way, which is Business School versus Customers.
- [44:55]
A
Yeah.
- [44:57]
B
You didn't quite say it that way, but do you see that there's a disconnect there?
- [45:04]
A
Let me phrase it positively in the sense that most of what I've learned in business school I could have done without. Yes. I mean, reading a P and L and the legal elements, you need to know. But there is an overload on models. Basically, what happens in business schools. No offense to anyone, but what happens is that because they need to condense information, they try to fit everything into models. And by definition, a model is not a representation of reality. It's an average. My favorite one is you mentioned the bell curve earlier. If you're smack in the middle, those are actually the most anomalous people of them all. Because they're normal. Yeah. The rest isn't normal. Yeah. So it's like it's only 1% of that whole curve that's actually normal. And basically business schools, because they need to simplify as well. I get why it happens. They keep working towards these common denominators. This is the model that can work. This is how you need to make decisions. This is how life works. What happens is that sometimes then if you've been indoctrinated like me, because it took me 20 years to get rid of that indoctrination, you start looking at the world that way, but you start giving priority to the model over actually having a conversation, actually just going with the flow. And that is effectively, if you look at what the great entrepreneurs do, if you look at what the great businesses do, in a way, yes, they've got. I mean, you need some models and machinery. I'm not saying that that doesn't make sense, but they go with the flow. They go with. Where is the customer moving. They tap into emotions. You talked about Zappos earlier. Yeah. They tapped into what is passion. These elements, they don't necessarily come up in management literature except in nice little Graphs again, where they kind of lose that. But that's kind of personal opinion. So I hope I'm not going to get the angry letters from professors or whatever.
- [47:21]
B
Hey everybody. I just want to announce a few upcoming speaking events. On March 20, I'll be speaking at PX Live in London. Luke Omani and his remarkable community of PX leaders are getting together for a one day event. If you're striving to deliver an extraordinary people experience, this is the single best opportunity to meet kindred leaders. So that's PX Live in London. Also on April 7th in Boston, I'll be speaking at the Future Talent Forum. It's an event focused on how organizations can translate AI innovation into sustained business value. All right, that's all for now, but watch this space for future announcements about events in Stockholm, Ann Arbor and Cape Town. Yeah, there's something there about how a school can only teach what can be taught. And there's a whole bunch of things that maybe can't be, but we anchor on the, the very legible thing that can be taught.
- [48:23]
A
I think that's a better way to describe it than what I just did in the sense that there is. I mean, how do humans learn? In the end of the day, we learn through experience. That's the way, the way our brain is wired and because we're learning a lot through the written word. Yeah, I mean, this is how schools are organized. You have to capture all of the knowledge into written words. But they're not experiences yet, no matter how good you are. I mean, a great teacher can make you live certain things in your mind, which makes them a great teacher. But if you look at it, some things you can only experience by doing them. I had one professor who was amazing because he kicked us out, out of the classroom. He basically said, go into the streets and look at stores. And I still remember lessons from that. But effectively it's like that kind of reality is it's not an either or, but it needs to be there as well.
- [49:28]
B
When I taught writing, I used to bring in three kinds of fruit. Raspberries, blueberries, strawberries. And I'd have different people eat different ones. And then I'd say write down three adjectives that describe what you just ate. And then we would look at the adjectives and we'd say, okay, I'm going to hold up a card. You tell me which berry this was. So I'd read the berry and it would say sweet, tart something. And I'd say, okay, which berry? All the berries. If you looked at the words that described them. All of the berries were described exactly the same way. There was no distinction between them. And so what it was showing is the gap between what we can say about something and what we experience about something. It's a super powerful.
- [50:13]
A
I'm actually going to steal that from you.
- [50:15]
B
It's really interesting. And you say, well, wait a second, are you saying that actually these taste the same? And everybody says, no, they don't taste the same. You say, okay, take three blackberries, eat each one. How are they different? So not only are blackberries different from strawberries, blackberries are different from blackberries. In terms of experience, we're very sensitive to that. Let's talk about CRMs for a second. Customer Relationship Management systems. What are the challenges? And then I'm going to ask what might that look like for the workforce if we were going to point it the other direction?
- [50:53]
A
Well, I think that they're probably twice the same topic in the sense of. With CRM, there's all the usual challenges. How do I get to one source of customer truth in a company which has built 75 legacy systems which won't talk to each other? With one client we worked with, we literally had 48 different CRM systems which were all not connected to each other and bringing them together was a nightmare. So, effectively, this one customer truth, I mean, there's technical solutions for it these days, but, you know, they still are a bit clunky. So literally getting whoever is dealing with the customer the right information to look at is, I would still say it was the biggest challenge about 15, 20 years ago. It's still the biggest challenge. And in spite of all the technological progress, it's getting better, but it's not there.
- [51:54]
B
What does a good CRM tell me about you as a customer? What are the sort of things I might see there?
- [52:00]
A
It tells me factual information. So what has been our business relationship so that, you know, what I have done? Secondly, it contains the key conversations I've had with the business so that I don't. I don't need to repeat myself. Yeah. So if I've spoken to a colleague of yours on Topic xyz, or I've been on the. On the chatbot or whatever it was, and I didn't find the information that you can actually say, hey, this is the conversation that this customer is having with us, so I can continue the conversation through whatever channel that may be. And thirdly, as a bonus, who is Alan? What kind of person is he? Is he more of a give me the facts and get out of my way. Or is he the chatty person? Does he like to do everything online? So actually imagine if we're human to human in a contact center. Do I want to get rid of him as quickly as possible because he actually prefers to do everything online, or do I need to chat with him? And effectively, I'd say those three elements, I mean, there's some subsets, but those three, like what's our business relationship, what were our conversations, and who am I? Are actually kind of the key elements. And they can then drive. Whether that's a human touch point or a digital touch point depends on the scenario, but effectively they can drive what happens there.
- [53:27]
B
What came out of that for me was interesting, is the idea that this is something AIs would be really good at. One of the things challenges I've seen with CRMs in general is that the record of the experience that that person has had is too long to read and it's very detailed. And AI could summarize that and say, you know what, Elaine likes this, and we've talked with him last, you know, and he was unhappy three of the times, or something like that.
- [53:56]
A
I can see very big opportunity there if it's done right. To actually both on the, let's say, understanding Alain, who am I and what have I done and what were our conversations summarizing, et cetera, but also in recommending again, digitally or in person, what is the best next step to take, either based on Alan's personal profile or okay, Alan, you may feel like you're unique, but we've got another 20,000 of you out there. And typically, you know, if we make these responses based on all the contact center conversations or contact center communication we've had, there's a high likelihood that the following response will make me happy. And I think those are two elements where if especially companies who are currently sitting on internal data, you know, everybody who's been taping and logging every contact center conversation, chatbot conversation, etc. This is where you want to feed that into AI and actually turn that into kind of like an internal and external recommendation engine. So to say, towards the customer to actually make life easier, but also to the people in the organization, regardless of the touch point they're working on, to actually help them do a better job at that touch point.
- [55:18]
B
Yeah, and this is something that's, as far as I know, just doesn't exist for employees, which is most of our systems are looking at employees as the same way you would use a procurement system, which is it's about inventory. It's not about the richer kind of information that you, that I would need to know to work with you as an employee. And a lot of it's held in managers heads. But the truth is managers change, so we're really starting from scratch. It seems to me, if I was going to say having the idea of a CRM toward employees, which is also
- [55:56]
A
an opportunity because there's not the hassle with all the legacy systems that you want to bring together. But I kind of like the idea. I never thought about it that way, but I like the idea of a CRM for employees in the sense of again, having those same elements even as for customers that I just described that you basically say what have been the transactions, so to say. But you know, also with other companies, where have I been all the factual stuff. Secondly, kind of like what is the conversation that's going on? And conversations can also be projects I'm working on, etc. So you'd have to rethink that a little bit within a corporate context. But that there's also that feeling that if tomorrow I go to HR because Dart doesn't like me and he's my boss, that they're aware of the conversation or some of the conversations we've been having or at least have access to that with the right permissions, et cetera. And thirdly, who am I? You know what gets me out of bed in the morning? Because it's different for every individual. I mean this. Depending on which research you take, there's about between 6 and 25 human drivers. But what are they? And how can you actually create challenges and opportunities? For me I used to work with chief people who had this great idea. It was a very large organization. His vision was actually to say, I want to give people a lifetime of gigs. I cannot promise them a career because I'm sorry, I can't. We're a very large organization so I can promise that there will always be opportunities, if not with us, with our suppliers. And his vision was to actually create a database of talent. In his way kind of builds towards what you're saying, but actually to say listen, and what are people's strengths, what are their ambition levels? And over the years I can help them move through our ecosystem and if they move out, hopefully I can make them move back. But effectively based on what are they looking for, what are their skills, what are their contributions, their projects, etc. And capturing something like that in a CRM system would make it. Yeah, okay, if that gentleman would leave that the next person would. Could continue that work.
- [58:14]
B
Let me ask the question that I ask. I normally ask it right at the end of the episode, but I think it's the sort of thing that we would want to capture to put in a CRM for the workforce, which is, I usually ask at the end of the show, what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [58:34]
A
What job do I hire my job to do for you? A sense of wonder. Getting a sense of wonder. And what I mean by that is, and whether that sits in the aspirational jobs to be done or. I mean, you can debate about it, but effectively every project I do, I say this even to my clients. I literally don't know what I'm doing. Because it's Greenfield, because that's the only way to approach it. But at the same time, that offers me, apart from the business benefits, it offers me a continuous discovery of new things. Humans are magically chaotic, complex, weird, and beautiful. And there's always something new to be learned, especially when you're looking at it from the experience perspective, because then you have to have real conversations, look at real things. So that's kind of the job I'm looking for.
- [59:36]
B
What's an example of an experience you had that was the peak experience of that kind?
- [59:44]
A
I worked on a death care project, which went really deep, but it probably was the most sad, satisfying, in a weird way, experience that I had. Because what the project was about was to reimagine funerals. Yeah. So Western funerals, in other words. Western funerals are. It's no secret. They're a process affair. Yeah. I mean, you die, you go in, you know, and then there's a process that gets kicks into motion, which effectively disregards the real needs of especially the people who stay behind, because there's not enough time to grieve. There is. I mean, there's plenty. There's 20 things that get ignored. And for me, that was really. I mean, it was rough, but it was really enriching because in the course of that project, I spoke to, I think, about between 50 and 100 grieving people who just lost somebody about what their experience was about, because that was the only way to do it. And I looked at different cultures, I looked at everything around death care, and basically it showed me two things. And this is because you say, what was the peak in there? The peak in there is the one thing is that on the one hand that we discovered through this project and by talking to people that funerals, which are. I mean, we can't make them Fun, but you can make them magical and they can be beautiful as moments where people actually grow. It's like you stay behind, but you stay behind a more beautiful person than you were before if you do it right. And the second thing, which I took away personally, is that life's awesome. You only get that by looking at death so closely, and we've shoved it away in our minds. I mean, how often do we talk about death? But actually by opening up about that again, there's this whole world that opens up of, as I say, how life is awesome and how you can enjoy it every day. Sorry. I hope that wasn't too heavy.
- [61:50]
B
No, no, it's not. No, it's exactly this sort of thing. Right. If I were going to capture that in my CRM, a part of the way I would do it is to know that you love unexplored places that are very human. And the sort of place where you can go into that space and you can empathize or feel compassion or experience differences in people and deep things in people. Now, I could find work for you like that. I mean, I could know when I see it, I could say, that's work for Alan.
- [62:28]
A
And I think that's the key in the sense that. Because what I just described. Okay, I mean, if I would summarize it, I mean, I'm all about autonomy and exploration and human connection. Tick, tick, tick. Don't put me in the accounting department checking invoices. It's going to be a disaster. I'm going to be bad at the job, etc. Do put me on that crazy project where you go, like, okay, now go explore whether there's a business there or whether there's an opportunity there by talking to a lot of people and getting creative. Creative and getting some people going. And if you do that, now, this is me as an individual. But if you do that for all of your people, you will very quickly see clusters, just like you would with any other customer base of what people are looking for. And matching that, matching that to the experiences that you can offer these people, which is not just their job description, but also the way they can work. I mean, as I said, I'm about autonomy, so don't call me up every day. Alan, what have you done today? You know, let's have a weekly call and summarize it and just let me get on with it. The same somebody else might want continue. You know, somebody who's more security oriented may actually want that reinforcement almost on a daily basis. If you do that, you can probably end up with about half a dozen clusters, maybe maybe 10, but definitely not more within the organization where you can sort of start saying, okay, now this is what these people are looking for. So if we want to make them feel great about their job and also effective in their job, because it's got to be a two way street, we got to create experiences for them that allow them to meet whatever it is that they're looking for, but in a way that it delivers value to the business and make that connection. And then as a business, the challenge is to come up with these things also when the talent is not needed for a moment because it's like businesses go left and right, but what is not relevant today may be very relevant tomorrow and vice versa. So effectively that becomes the job of the business.
- [64:43]
B
There's then two things in there. First of all, you mentioned job descriptions. Job descriptions describe job what the company's going to use you for. It doesn't describe anything about what you like. And in fact the word employee means one who is used. And so that's what that job description is, is the utility. And then it's what ingredients do you have to have to be able to provide that utility. So it's nothing like a record in a customer relationship management system. Another thing that came along as you were talking is that there are people who tell me they hire their job to tidy messes and they're the sort of person you might put in an accounting department, which is. No, I like things orderly.
- [65:24]
A
Exactly. I mean my wife is exactly that profile.
- [65:28]
B
Yep.
- [65:28]
A
You know, she likes everything organized and will work for three, four hours and feel very happy at the end when everything's organized. Brilliant. We make a great pair.
- [65:39]
B
And you're like, nope, I want to go into a human jungle. And with my machete in the air. Yeah, like that. It seems like a really good CRM for a workforce. Might be something we built together, which is if I were a manager and you were on my team, it wouldn't be just me capturing a description of you. It'd be something that we'd work on together that was a mutual description, the way that you want to be represented so that the right kind of work comes to you.
- [66:10]
A
Yeah. It's something together and something that I can even populate as an employee. And it can be done in. We've got to think beyond the classical fill out this form, think self discovery quizzes, think fun things to do. I mean, we've talked about lots of data earlier where you kind of build on behavioral data, where you kind of build on. I mean, you have a real conversation about what am I looking for, but sometimes I don't even know what I'm looking for. So help me figure that out. And effectively, a CRM system, that kind of employee CRM, if you want to call it that way, could actually combine, let's say, your views as my manager, my own views, our conversations and stuff we haven't even talked about, but got captured along the way because we suddenly noticed. I mean, in the US it's easier to work with biofeedback than here in Europe because you get all the unions on your head. But if I agree to share my data and you see I'm very happy if I'm doing a certain type of work, then that might even feed into that profile. But effectively, kind of like half this, it's almost like an employee ID card, but with the personality on it, like if that makes any sense.
- [67:32]
B
And this is a perfect example where. So the way I do it is I ask my team what job they are, their job to do for them. We have this, basically this conversation. But it's very tempting to go into sort of this data model idea, which is I'm going to come up with a list of things that I can categorize people into. And so first of all, that's a problem because the truth is people want from work stuff because of their situation, not because of who they are. And their situation changes over time. But. And on the other side, you're going to have to have some ability to see what kind of work. Like, I need to be able to recognize the wander into the human jungle and find the lost pyramid kind of work that you like. And so it's probably just better to leave that open. Just say, look, let's be aware of both of these things. Let's not try to structure it.
- [68:23]
A
For me, it's always about two layers. Now I'm going to jump to regular customer world for a second in the sense of I've had the privilege of doing the architecting Lexis experience three times, and effectively the core of the Lexus experience and works the same as Zappos that you mentioned earlier, is that whoever is in the front line, whoever is actually talking to the customer, has massive autonomy to deal with whatever information they get so they can react to that in whatever way. In the back, there is a very structured approach to support these people with even thinking models. And basically based on our data, we have these profiles of customers. So this is questions you can ask to easily recognize them at Time the same. I would basically say if you're in a large organization that works the same. The only difference is that they're, you know, the customer. If. If the employee is the customer, then the line manager of that employee is actually the frontline service provider, so to say. And as an organization, that still allows you to build some structure into the data. Because if you have like 20,000 people, you cannot do 20,000 totally bespoke conversations all the time. You'd go crazy. However, you can build some structure around that, but then still leave it to the line manager to actually navigate that, to do what's right for Dart, for Alain, for whoever. At an individual level. Yeah, because my situation. Because even as an individual and situational, as you said, because today I may be different than next week.
- [70:16]
B
The thing you said with Lexus was a little bit of what I was thinking when I was thinking of the idea that there's a platform upon which we create. Not completely bespoke. I agree, a range of experiences. And Lexus is a good one because it probably has a very specific customer that it's attracting. And so it's able to focus very much on that kind of customer.
- [70:38]
A
Very specific. Psychographic. Very. I mean, they look for very different things than a BMW buyer or a Mercedes buyer.
- [70:45]
B
Psychographics. You know, I've heard of psychographics, but I've never dealt with them. What are they and are they useful?
- [70:56]
A
They are. I mean, and then the third question. Are they dangerous? I'd say, what are they? It's basically a picture of what you are looking for as a customer. Forget about age and income and all that sort of stuff because they're just labels. But I'm looking for. I mean, when I go traveling, I'm a mindset of a. Take everything away from me. Yeah. So I'm prepared to pay a little bit more. I travel less if I can, but I pay a little bit more. Take care of everything for me. So that's kind of like my mindset. And with it comes a whole way of traveling and behaving. And basically, if you take that whole picture and you make a picture of me on the wall with some data and everything, some underlying elements that would be kind of the Allen Tice psychographic. But if you go looking out there, there's probably X percent of the population. Population which has the majority of the same mental makeup when it comes to traveling. That's kind of where that is. Are they useful? Yes, they can be very useful because they. They allow visualizing the priorities of a Customer to the rest of the organization where we started our conversation is, I am not my customer. I am not my employee. By definition, I don't understand their reality. It is a basis to say, okay, I can now visualize to everybody, this is who Alan is. I could even push it all the way and let people like we did at Lexus, where we took them actually to luxury hotels, luxury restaurants, to experience what it is to have a luxury lifestyle so that people actually realize that. So that's why they're very useful. The third point, are they dangerous? They become dangerous if you then start assuming that the model you created, that the picture you created, is an actual representation of every individual customer, which is where sometimes it goes wrong. Because if processes take over, you know, you want to be efficient, and then you start treating everybody the same again. And that's where they can be dangerous, because it's just a representation. It's just a model again, rather than a reality.
- [73:20]
B
What's the state of your discipline experience architecture?
- [73:26]
A
It's in an interesting place in the sense that most work in customer experience is starting to look the same in every business, everywhere, because everybody uses the same data and the same models, which means that customers are getting, basically, everything's getting bland again. Even though it's bland at a higher level, it's still bland. Which means that for me, the next level, which is what I'm focusing on really hard, is to now start looking at what I call the real experience designers. So the people who create art, the people who create immersive theater, the people who, who, who are out there and bring in their expertise to start really creating experiences. You mentioned Joe Pine earlier. I'm very much into this. You know, let's design for time well spent thinking. And I think that's where the market's moving. But that's a little, you know, that's just a small group of us. The majority of the market is actually kind of going around in circles at the moment, producing more of the same.
- [74:33]
B
Fascinating. Where can people learn more about you?
- [74:37]
A
On my website? That's probably the easiest place. Or on LinkedIn. My website's alanti.com and I'm also on LinkedIn. I'll connect with everybody who doesn't want to sell me something straight away.
- [74:49]
B
And just so everybody knows, that's a L A I n t h y s.com Correct. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Delightful conversation. Really, really great.
- [75:03]
A
I thought so, too. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.
- [75:09]
B
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.