what we really need to understand is Market Salt human emotional needs do I want to be treated like some Anonymous humanoid or would I prefer to do business with somebody who knows speech and you get all these layers between you and your customers if you think of an organization of the planet and the customers are kind of floating around the outside and the people on the front
line of the organization they're kind of on the surface of the planet and then the more scenery you get the more inside the planet you are and it's very difficult to get somebody to understand something that they think they already know so they're always trying to do the right thing but they just don't realize they're disconnected we're in this
epidemic of feedback certainly but the problem is that this information goes into organizations and it convinces leaders that they're close to what matters to customers and all this data coming in conversely if making organizations Less close to customers rather than closer but it convinces people they are closer because we've lost that emotional experience so to get
that back you need to start to reconnect with customer it's natural it's a natural human bias you need to be observing the world you need to be open to the world and you need to be kind of making the most different occasion well hello everyone it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another episode of infinite Loops today I have a very special guest that I've been really
looking forward to after my friend Rory Sutherland told me don't be Daft read this book and have John on your bloody podcast and so I always do what Rory tells me to do my guest today is John Sills the author of The Human Experience how to make life better for your customers and create a more successful organization he's also the managing director of the foundation and works
closely with young Enterprise which is a charity that helps young adults become the next generation of entrepreneurs and and the thing that I love John is 25 years ago you say you started your career in the Stalls of Essex in the UK tell me about that and welcome yeah thank you thanks Jim thanks for having me on the on the show I can't promise to
be quite as engaging as Rory is because he's a master Storyteller but I will I will try and nonetheless but yeah I I you know 25 years ago I was on a market stool in Essex I was 14 years old I uh I got up I went to church at the time and a lady ran a local Haberdashery Market still when she asked if I go along and work there for a pound an hour and that's all we I could do in a little bit
of extra pocket money so I I started my career as I as I see it back then age 14 on the market still and he just learned so much you know even now I think back to that time because you just learned so much from being in front of real people you know trying to understand what matters to people trying to understand what a good experience is like trying to
sell things to them as well and I was telling things I had no idea about a 14 year old boy telling Haberdashery I still don't really know what it is it's just a lot of kind of threads and needles as far as I could see but it was a great grounding in life and I think that's really stayed with me throughout my whole career so yeah 25 years ago it's a lot longer ago than I wish it was
but it's still it still stays with me what what are the things that I loved about reading that is so I had a job uh my first real job was actually doing professional magic uh which was which was a lot of fun but then I had a job at a service station and I was really struck by the idea that you know so much has changed right now back then people
would come in literally we'd shoot the [ __ ] you know how you doing what's going on good to see you Jim we actually knew each other all of the customers who would come in like we always Reserve time to just sit and chat one of your central uh ideas in the book which I really agree with is that we've lost that human element talk a bit about that and another thing
that I loved with you you said uh of all the things that you've uh that done being a bank manager uh during a financial crisis not fun but then I I love where you go up to visit strangers houses and ask them very personal questions very very fun yeah tell me about it fast that is a lot of fun I should say that they're all consenting they know that I'm going to be going to
the house and to ask them or almost I mean I think I think you're right you know through through all of certainly the early part of my career it was front facing directly with customers this is how it was it yeah I was a I started my life in a bank HSBC and then was the bank manager in the financial crisis and there's so many stories and people from
that kind of stay with me you know I remember one time we had this idea that we were gonna become the first bank in the UK to have a radio station like could up until then it Banks were just completely silent and uh we had this radio and it was a guy called Bruno Brooks he was a big DJ in the UK in the 1980s and it was his radio station and I remember this customer came in he was a
business customer he used to come in every day to pay in his money and he came up and sort me out because he knew I was the manager and he tore strips off me he was like this is ruined my banking experience I used to come in this was my bit of peace and quiets of the day now I've got this awful music playing and he was really going for it
and I said to him I said what kind of music do you like and he said classical music and I said well look it not the new I understand you're really angry but just so you know there is a classical section at 9 30 and 2 30 every day on the radio just just in case you're interested anyway in the next few days it starts coming in at 2 30 rather than at lunchtime
and after about a week he comes up to me and he says John I love it this is the best thing I come in here I get to listen to this amazing music it's fantastic and it was it was really interesting this kind of story and there's all these kind of stories that stay with me of as soon as you get into head office you start uh you know a more senior organization you get all these
layers between you and your customers and we call it inside out thinking I talk a bit about this in in the book you can't help it it's natural it's a natural human bias because he's surrounded by your own business your own colleague your own industry your own regulators and even if you think you're close to your company you can't be so having these kind of stories and this
kind of connection is what enables me and us as an organization and I think generally with businesses that do this well they're the people they're the businesses and the leaders that find ways to stay close to what matters the customers and that's what brings me to the me going in to hang out with strangers in their houses because what we do as a business is try and get
clients get our clients get asked to get CEOs and CMOS that we work with we're going to go to customers houses we go shopping with them and there's a whole load of other stories I can tell you about that later on but that's at the heart I guess of what what I'm trying to look at because of the book it's called as you say The Human Experience the
point is over the last 20 years we've really affected the functional experience doing more things in more ways more quickly than ever before but in doing that I mean customers are no more satisfied in fact in America they're less satisfied as a Wall Street journalist study I saw recently it's because we've lost that emotional experience we've lost that emotional
connection and that's actually the thing that people really enjoy whether they know it or not and there's a lot of examples of how that's happening so to get that back you need to start to reconnect with customers otherwise you end up with organizations full of humans and just aren't allowed to act in a human way you know there's a great book that I
recommend often called the Genius of the Beast a radical revision of capitalism by Howard Loop and that's his case in the book his entire case is uh guides we have so over emphasized all of the process all of the procedural all of the numeric and what we really need to understand is Market Salt human emotional needs and he has some great passages in there and I just find myself
wondering like what why is this so [ __ ] hard to understand like uh how do I want to be treated right do I want to be treated like some Anonymous uh humanoid or or would I prefer to do business with somebody who knows me it's like before we started recording we we did what human beings do we had a chat and you told me about your lovely uh
vacations with your sons and I told you one of my grandkids that's what human beings do What's blocking that yeah I think and I think this is this is the fascinating questions I mean in the book I talk about these three myths that I think kind of start to get in the way partly it's a question about efficiency yeah no organizations and people in
organizations believe they have to work in a certain way there's this kind of odd hierarchy that exists there and this inside out thinking that stops people realizing they're not thinking outside in you know I you know companies I worked for that I worked in everyone thinks they're being customer-led you know I never work with anyone that was a horrible person at
home is trying to do the right thing but they just don't realize they're disconnected and part of us and the first Mick I'll talk about is the myth of customer feedback they've never been more customer data coming into organizations it's full of it and it's the same in the US either in the UK and across Europe we're in this epidemic of feedback surveys you can't
have any experience with an organization now without immediately being asked what did you think about the experience would you recommend us give us a rating attitude and and this this information floods into organizations but the problem is you know if you think about customers lives as being this kind of wedge shape you know and the second of the words you've got your customers
lives the real people the things that really match them their hopes dreams ambition their friends their family my sons your grandkids as you were talking about you've got you know the the things we're trying to achieve our business our work the challenges we've got the services we used to help and right in the thin end of that wage is that organization in that organization's role
but 99 of all of that information that's coming into organizations is at the thin end of the wedge what do you think about us what do you think about our service what do you think about our product would you recommend this and in itself it's okay because it's okay to have that kind of information but the problem is that this information goes into organizations and it convinces
leaders that they're close to what matters to customers whereas in truth they're only really close to customers opinions of their business and there's a factor which significant difference between those two things and so it becomes a kind of semantic thing because its leaders believes they're close to their customers then when they get challenged on it they say no no I know
exactly what I can look at all this data I've got but they do that and in doing that they stock going to really get close to all that stuff if they're still going to visit their houses so it's a it's a it's a bit of a Fool's errand all this data coming in conversely if making organizations Less close to customers rather than closer but it convinces
people they are closer yeah and it's very difficult to get somebody to uh understand something that they think they already know right so so they think that they're close to the customer and that I I was really struck by that because it reminded me of you know the Fiasco of Robert McNamara when he was the defense secretary in the United States during the Vietnam war
and literally he thought he was a data junkie and now mind you this is coming from a Quant right this is coming from somebody who builds algorithms for a living or used to um and and yet he was so blind to the fact that first off all of the people reporting to him there were hierarchy problems they were terrified of telling him bad news um and and so the news was definitely
cleansed before it got up to him and there he is at his whiteboard or chalkboard or whatever he was using thinking oh man we are doing so well in this war if all he would have done is go over and like not even spend time with the generals just go hang out with the grunts he would have gotten a much more complete picture why don't people do that
yeah I I'm guessing it's a brilliant question I mean there's two things I think that that stand out to me throughout one is that actually a lot of senior leaders are actually a bit afraid of doing it and that's because most of their contact with customers comes in the form of complaints so you know organizations set up these customer closeness programs and what that really
is is once a month an executive perhaps the cool customer that's unhappy so they they actually start to become uncomfortable with it and after a while you know if you think about it you've got people that love working on the front line in branches in stores or marketing still with being with people and you've got people that love working in head office and actually there is a
personality type there and quite often some of the people that work in head office they want to don't want to be the people working on the front lines so some of them are a little bit a little bit uncomfortable with doing it I think the the other problem is that quite often people in organization they don't really want to hear the inconvenient
truths because it gets in the way of their strategy and what we find is and what I've found in him right in the book is that all of it even with all of his data come and even if you go and do the research and you do go and understand what matters to customers at the thick end of the word if you go in and you present it on a PowerPoint or a plea people in the room would rather question
the methodology than accept the inconvenience fruits they'd rather say well is that the right sample size and were they really the right customers and maybe we asked them on the wrong day whereas if you go and visit customers directly if you go and spend time with them directly even if what even if you don't like what you hear you can't fail to understand
that it is very true so I'll give you an example we did a big bit of work in one of the big supermarkets in the UK a few years ago and they were in quite a lot of trouble so it was just the start of a turnaround and we took their CEO to go and visit one of their brand new refurbished branches up in stores up in Grimsby in the north of England
and we got the CEO to go shopping with an 80 year old Widow and she took him around this newly refurbished store and he was really proud of it and it took her two hours to go around with him and she told him every single thing that was wrong with the way that they'd refurbished it every single thing the fish counter was too high she couldn't see the backboard where the ingredients
were anymore they got rid of the lady that gave her the recipes and told her what she should do with every single thing actually it was quite an eviscerating experience for him and even if coming out of that he says well you know that's not statistically significant you can't deny it's true and it's true for how those people feel so I think I think
really this that's kind of part of the problem because people don't want to do it because they're afraid of what they'll find out and they're afraid of some of those conversations because it's actually inconvenient to do it and the status quo it's safer to be I think Daniel Kahneman got talked about people you can get people to do anything if they're surrounded by a group of
like-minded thinkers well in a big organization the gravity is quite strong you're surrounded by people that agree with that way just kind of keep the data coming in just keep doing this way we don't really want to appear over the parapet too much if we do actually we might have to make some serious changes to be inconvenient so I think that's what's in the heart yeah a lack of a
lack of real burning ambition to go and make things better for customers that's really interesting to me uh again in the book that I mentioned the genius of Beast he talks about how he had a a variety of careers he had a scientific education and anyway it was talking about um becoming a music promoter and he realized that all of the exec I don't
recall the label he was at but all of the executives at the label were competing only with each other they they weren't out in the clubs listening to oh this might be like the next whatever the next Beetle the next stones and rather it was just this internal competition literally he he made a funny joke he's like when one guy got a double pen set and everyone else only had one pen
everyone ran out and bought the double pen set and it just seemed insane to me one of the things that I've always done well not always I actually learned this the hard way and we'll get into that in a minute but that I've done for a long time is I try to push every decision in my companies down to the people who are actually doing the thing right so when
we were setting up O'Shaughnessy Asset Management which we subsequently sold to Franklin Templeton uh the president of the organization and I were having lunch and he goes you know we have to decide on you know the trading software and the training systems and I looked at them and I went Chris we don't have to decide on anything we have to go down ask our
Traders and our portfolio managers what do they want why is that so hard it seems obvious it made my life much easier yeah it's exactly right I mean so in the in the book I've got a few examples of organization to do this really well one of them is ao.com they're a electrical retailer in the UK and their CEO John Roberts he's a he's an inspirational guy fantastic story
about how he set up the business based on a one pound bet in a pub in Manchester with his friend and all kinds of things wonderful wonderful business hugely customer lit and he talks all the time about Walkabout management you know he says I have to be down on the floor I have to deal with my drivers I have to be in the contact center I have to hear
what's going on for two reasons I have to set the standards but also I have they're the only people that can really tell me because as it comes like you say as it comes up the line I'm not going to be told the truth everything's gonna get given a shame for me you have to go out he has to go out and do it but again I think I think in part of it I mean I think what you said is brilliant in
partly it comes down to a pride thing I think there's a lot of middle management and a lot of Steely management that wouldn't want to do what you've described because they would feel in some way that you know well it's my job to make the decision do if I look like I'm passing the decision on then you know people will think I don't what I'm
talking about or I'm going to leave my pride rather than seeing the bigger picture about empowering your team empowering your style empowering your colleagues again I I might just be at anomaly but just you know that just seems so intuitively correct to me um you know uh one thing I did learn uh when I started my first company was I would when I would when we would have a
team meeting I would speak first and then I would ask my colleagues and teammates for their opinions and it was it was a magical experience because they all reflected my opinion and then and then I realized oh you're such an idiot you've got to talk last right so I I just I I guess the pride thing and the and and that I understand but I sometimes kind of think is that
just a function of the size of the organization I think it can be so we it's one of my colleagues Charlie Dawson he wrote a brilliant a couple of years ago called the customer Copernicus and he's got this great analogy for being custom related for organizations being like planets and with gravity so if you think of an organization of the planet and the
customers are kind of floating around the outside and uh the people on the front line of the organization they're kind of on the surface of the planet and then the more scenery you get the more inside the planet you are you know the more inside the business if you are and basically there's more layers between you and the edge of the Earth the edge of your
planet and where your customers are and you can be customer-led you can get out and really understand you can get in a rocket and fly off your planet and really understand what matters to those customers but it's like gravity because this is just the way organizations and people work it's an inbuilt human bias that is inside out thinking so the
gravity will eventually pull you back in and the bigger the planet the stronger the gravity so when you're a startup and there's only four or five of you in the business you've got your own little planet but there's not that many layers and actually it's quite easy to kind of Escape that gravity and stay close to the characters when you're a big Bank
and there's so many layers between you and uh and and your customers and also there's so many Demand on your time you know if you're a bank CEO you've got a lot of time with regulators and uh investors and shareholders and stuff you know so many demand from your time that gravity takes so much effort unless it's really naturally built so much effort but more than that all of the forces
around you in the way most organizations work are driven to make you not go and speak to your customers they're driven for you to be in meetings with your colleagues the whole way organizations work and what's interesting when I looked at some of the organizations I studied the likes of octopus for example in the UK I love to work there in the US as well actually they've got kind of
just quite a fundamental way of running their business which is very very different but it absolutely comes from the top it's you know it's like obviously the CEO right from when they're a startup you know he's quite happy to have his email published everyone can email me and that's still true now they've got seven million customers in the UK they're getting
bigger and bigger and bigger still true that's how to make some changes but some of those fundamental principles are true similarly one of the rail companies I looked at in the UK they insist that they're senior managers live somewhere on that Railway line so they have to get their own train into work every day and they have to weigh in on their name badge
and just that just that rule is the thing that I think keeps them the most satisfied customer base in the UK in their own network because they're getting first-hand direct experience with their own products and they're getting first-hand direct feedback on their own products every single day whether they like it or not and Alan Riley the guy I spoke to there he he
said The more formal The Forum the less I learned because he said we did all these focus groups did all these meet the manager events but they were never useful no one really told me anything I learned everything I needed to on the 748 from Princess Roseborough to London bannington every single morning so it does need to be an organizational and
that's why I'm going to talk about these neighbors and organizational ways of working that enable it otherwise the Natural Way organizations currently work is to suppress that contact and take up Senior Management time with everything else that needs that needs doing I love that the more formal The Forum the less I learned that is so great I will be stealing that just so you know
um the uh you know we sort of had a similar uh principle at uh the firmite sold or shown us the asset management uh we all had to invest only in our own portfolios right that we offered our clients and uh I didn't get any pushback everyone was like well of course of course we should like that just makes sense um and and what we try to do is because
we are experiencing the same thing the client is if we have investments in that particular strategy uh it makes you a good deal more empathetic uh if things are going poorly and it also makes you a a bit more willing to say don't get overly excited if things are going really really great because you are having the experience much like the executive saying everything I needed was
is on that 748 train um yeah it it seems to me though that there's this other thing I I have a little shorthand uh which is when I'm dealing with an organization I I do what I call a bogon search are you familiar with uh Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide oh yeah so so so the bogons are the are the galaxies bureaucrats and they speak in in you you can't make your work way
through their word salads and everything is that's not the way it's done everything's in the passive voice they're quite funny actually and and like when I was starting on sea Ventures uh one of my colleagues said well what's the first rule and I said no bo Gods meaning why why is also it seems to me uh Communications right corporate comps
they're horrible for the most part they're they're beyond horrible like everything is in the passive voice it was decided uh you know nameless faceless automaton told me this and I will now be informing you and then and we are a bit guilty of this in finance even now even as I try to cleanse the jargon like you you do develop these shorthand terms of art right that are
useful when you're talking to your clients but like that can be really really challenging because one thing I started to realize when I would go and talk to clients I would use something like basis points right and and and and and I would get I could tell by usually the man it was a couple usually the man you could see on his face he didn't know what basis points
were the white would often or his partner would often say what are basis points it is is is it a function of male female are are men just loathed to say hey I don't know what that is would you tell me what that is yeah he's so interesting so so you know similarly about 12 years my 12 years in banking it was so interesting to see how many letters we wrote out to people that
were just themed to us to make sense but when I showed them I I ended up showing everything into my wife but before we sent it out I would show it to my wife and I would say does this make sense because she wasn't you know in any way working in banking or business actually and she would always be brilliantly brutal and tell me no listen and she actually was a speech therapist
she was very very good at connotating this doesn't make sense and again it's that that kind of inside out view where you just start using language that you're unaware of but I think recently that's now been matched up by this slightly August thing that's happening in organization of being very very defensive and we've kind of gone from customer is
always right to you know the customer is probably wrong they're probably trying to put a fast one on this it would need to be as defensive as possible and that kind of legalese that's coming into so many of the lessons that we're writing but it but it matters so much and I think your point is absolutely right matters in terms of the customer experience because of the customers
we're getting a load of language that we don't understand but that language is actually really powerful going back to the point before about how organizations work so one of the examples I use in the book is one of the Broadband companies uh in the UK uh if you go on their website and go to the join us page you get invited to phone their acquisition setting you know because all
of us as humans want to be acquired as much as for one of these with days and you can just see these little Clues starting to starting to come out of this language and in the book I also talk about loyalty and we might talk about this later a bit about Customer Loyalty not really not really being a thing but I think that the problem with that is
again the semantics of it the kids actually when people say loyalty what they're really talking about is customers just stay with them because they're staying useful but as soon as people start using the word oh we have loyal customers they stop trying because royalty suggests well they're going to stay with us anyway so all this language is really
important it's really interesting kind of how it worked but it is again this kind of interesting um change in behavior that happens when people go into a meeting room or turn on a zoom call and they stop writing like humans one of the best examples I think I had about that and the difference is the show where we've come from to where we are now is when you get a complaint
when you've had a complaint you get the response and in the book I talk about this letter from a suit company called moss Bros and it was 1951 and uh he the the managing director receives a complaint that's because they'd failed to and delivered a wedding suit to someone's wedding on the day they were meant to say and this is a letter back to the
managing director and it says words fail to express the humility in which I found for how badly we've let you down today and it's this really powerful lecture he's so sorry yeah at the bottom of the letter is interesting he sends two checks one check from mosh boss and one person checks from himself could be so sorry now you compare that to now and you can play in the story for the
inconvenience caused or sorry if there was any inconvenience paused or sorry if you felt there was any inconvenient pools just followed by a whole load of text boxes and even worse just to ramble about this for a bit more uh a friend of mine yesterday told me a story about ubereats and and about uh he he'd order the Chinese and he'd ordered bro stuck and
the uh hoisin sauce hadn't turned up with the race that so he messaged Uber Eats and said that can you give me a refund on that and the long story short is they kept saying no but in all these automated responses that they got they'd be like five paragraphs long and four of the paragraphs will be basically saying how much they cared about customers so
it would start by saying thank you so much for your your uh equal contact ubereats we take customer experience very very seriously we're so sorry we've had to contact us we take on your feedback blah blah blah blah blah full paragraphs of that and then unfortunately we won't be able to give you a refund from this item thank you very much for getting in touch we do
value for this and and it's just this day it's kind of just really on like it's almost like a chat GPT it's just writing things it's just it's not human but the question really I think if do you blame the human that's doing that or do you blame the system around the human that's not letting them feel like they can act like they're human and the language just becomes a part of that do
people feel they're allowed to stay what they really want to say feel they're allowed to write what they really want to write what do they feel they're going to get in trouble then offensive thing you know the good guy greens about risk Savvy a defensive decision is to just write in the way you're taught to write because you won't get in trouble for
that and I think that may be at the heart of a lot of what's going on here yeah I think that that's a really good point because um you know uh back to the Roman times I can't remember which worthy said it but um it was along the lines of the the more laws uh the the weaker the society and and when you when you complicate uh things from a legal perspective right
um you know you you get situations like you're in New York City the the manual that uh Public School teachers have to read and comply with is this sick and for those of you who are listening and not watching I'm doing like three phone books here and and any normal human when they read this say this is utterly insane why why are you not willing to let
teachers like Comfort a child who's in obvious distress and and like America can we've got a lot of problems we've got a lot of great things but we also are much more of a litigious Society than than other societies and so what's happened is these these rules have run amok and people have forgotten what what's at the base right at the base of a teacher-student relationship if it's
gonna work is the humanity the the interaction that those two can engage in and I I just wonder it like your book offers many many solutions but it it does this come back down to a size question because one thing I found myself as a reading your book I loved it and I'm thinking but does it scale is can can this type of thing like scale to
uh an HSBC or a city or or is that impossible yeah I think it's a brilliant question a very fair question what I've thought about myself because I'm aware that the organization in the book are are not quite that size you know we have seen this when you when you're looking again if I look at say um UK for example you look at like a Tesco if you go to Singapore and you
look at VBS there are examples of big organizations that do this well so actually I think the question is less of it can it scale and more of can it scale forever to get all of the companies that get big and do it really well they will tip at some point they all have a natural cycle at some point and often that cycle is when uh there's
changes in the leadership team and changes in priorities and there's a bit of pressure and they just start to do something a little bit more that's about the money and those shareholders a little bit just a little bit and then they do a little bit more and a little bit more and all of a sudden it's unraveling because the belief has gone and and the approach has gone the
question I think though is there's a version of the answer which is now which is I think it can scale but I think it clicks after a while but actually I think it's a different question for what will that look like in the next 10 to 15 years because I think a lot of the problems that have been that have come about come about because for all of the good of all the
technology we've had in the last 20 years that is the Ned organizations to believe they can really cut to the Bone the costs on their customer experience like this Holy Grail of automation is going to come along and really help digitize The Experience everyone is going to be really delighted and we're all going to give a service like Amazon but the treating that hasn't happened
for all the good that that's bought and all the great things we can do and that has improved in the customer experience we've done it at the expense of that emotional experience but what I think we see now is a new generation of organizations coming through that are now going to start to grow to that size that have grown and started with that technology there right from the start
whereas in the past 20 years it's been organizations that were pretty much already there but then trying to fit fit the technology within their business so someone like octopus you know their whole business is built on this fantastic I.T system they've got called Kraken that that really helps them put the customer at the heart of what they do and builds their team
structure around what they do so every uh every time they get another 50 000 customers they build in another customer service team and that customer service team looks after that 50 000 customers and their system allows them to do that and they can keep doing that they can keep doing that because their cost model works so that's never going to push
across the exponentially higher so their model continually works every 50 000 customers another team of 10 every 50 000 customers in every team but because they died from that point rather than the incumbents trying to trying to catch up I think the picture in 10 years time might look quite different I do think in 10 years you could have companies of significant size
that are doing this in in this way the HSBC in the world is a slightly different question because there's an overall question of are they are they just too big there's organizations anyway and actually do you have to just manage those as a series of smaller organizations so the UK ages VC business could do it and the Hong Kong HSBC business could do it uh can it do it at
a global level that's incredibly difficult with all of them even Parks so then you've essentially got to treat it like 20 different businesses coming won't I think um but it's a it's a really interesting question and one that I need to do more exploration on as well I think the uh you have a Showcase of the companies and you mentioned several of them
um and uh one of the things that I was taken away or I took away as I was reading it is I have a friend here in Manhattan who is a doctor a radiologist and uh he's relatively young and worked at a hospital with its horrible bureaucracy um and Rose rather rapidly um to be on the committee that runs the hospital and he opened his meeting uh his first meeting with a list that he
had compiled of all the simple things that were wrong that would be easy to correct and and then he told bees a great Storyteller too and he and he told me literally you could have heard a flea fart in that room because of the reaction and and and he was like what what's going on you know what what did I did I say something wrong and and so the
the chairman uh of the group asked him to stay after the meeting and and he said to him don't ever ever do that again the systems that we have are we have them for a reason and they we are so hyper regulated et cetera well the cut to the reaction he resigned and he went he went home and he sat with his wife and he said get your friends to tell you everything they hate about
doctors and hospitals and literally they had like 10 pages on yellow legal sheets and he started a series of incredibly successful Radiology centers how by addressing everything on that list and and so many of them were just very simple like and it actually comes up in your findings as well uh doctors at that time weren't giving their cell phone numbers to their
patients and and and so one of his things was no machine will ever pick up so he has a 24-hour answering service with a human and he leaps his phone on and he goes Now Grant I'm a radiologist I don't get too many 3 A.M calls he said but when I do I answer the phone and he said like literally I've gotten letters and emails and texts from clients saying I
recommend you to everyone yeah is it yeah is it really just is is it really just that if we start over and and and and and start like from first principles can that help it can and I think yeah actually another question about we used to said on the question before is you know there's a colleague angle to this as well that you know doing this isn't just making things
better for customers you know being restricted by the rules having to speak in a certain way you know colleagues aren't happy with that people aren't happy with that you know college satisfaction at work is is producing as well because people feel like they can't express themselves they can't be themselves they you know can you imagine being the person on the other end of the
phone that's in the kind of what I would but I could but I can't you know like you know you know it's it's an awful place to be for for both people on there and and I do think when you really when you really strip it back and I was quite Keen I suppose in the book not to make it too formulate because that is hard it really is just just sipping down be that
be that human person um you know there is there's a story there's no in the books it only happened recently about this that I think I think it kind of shows its balance to your point just first principles but also about how this is just very bad and costly to companies anyway like just at Christmas the the um the team here decided we were going to do black tie
for the Christmas do which I kind of reticently went along with um only because I it had been quite a while since I won Black Diamond Glass to buy a bow tie so last minute I decided to dial a boat buy a bow tie join him with the thumb but it was only two days before the Christmas thing so I had to order it on my next day delivery I paid extra seven
pounds extra for next day delivery and uh nothing say that thing happened where the delivery driver drove up outside my house looked in my window kind of looked at me and then just drove off and then I got the email straight away saying oh sorry we missed you you were out uh and obviously I was fairly annoyed so I I phoned up the company and the first
thing that happened is the company that I get the automated message saying I'm really sorry we've got unexpectedly High call volumes at the moment okay it could be a while and so I wait on the phone for half an hour and eventually I get through and I say that this is what happened I need to make sure it's delivered tomorrow but also I'd write the seven pound back because I
paid for next day delivery and it's not been delivered next day and she says um yeah I'm sorry I'm not sure we're gonna be able to do that because you know we're going to deliver it tomorrow I was like yeah but it's seven pound for next day she's like okay I'll see what I can do so she goes off five minutes later you can just come back we can offer you five pounds as a
gift voucher and I said I said well that's and and the thing is my wife I'm in I'm in the kitchen and I do this for a living obviously am I white kind of here's my reaction and she goes oh here we go I'm like right I'm in this house I said well no that's basically seven pound not five Town the second year I don't want a gift voucher because I can't buy anything
from your shop for Five Towns I'm gonna have to spend more money and um and she said well uh I'm sorry that's the that's the max that we're able to do and I was like go and ask your boss so she comes back and she says okay we can give you seven pounds as a gift voucher and by now I've been on the phone 45 minutes and I said no I'm sorry that's not enough now I don't want to
gift voucher I want money and you know yeah it should be more than that you know and she went that is the maximum RIT system is able to give you so and this is one of the biggest retail companies in the UK and can we have this back and forth and and then I end up saying I said I want a speech your manager and she says that we're really busy I warn
you if you wait on the phone it could take up to 20 minutes and so obviously I said I'll wait I'm gonna wait okay she got any jobs ten minutes later she comes back then she says okay I've spoken to my manager we can give you 10 pounds in cash and I'm sorry okay fine I'll take the 10 pounds in cash and you wonder why they've got unexpectedly High call volumes but it's
a great example where it's awful for me like brilliant what what the best companies would do there was automatically refund me the money because they know they've got the system automatically refund me the money so that's the first thing uh the second thing is that it's bad for the colleague because she's having to be on the phone for an hour and 10 minutes
whilst I'm you know getting a bit angry and obviously tune into my arms back and then the third thing is it's really expensive from the company an hour an hour and 10 minutes on the phone so these kind of things you get these examples all of the time bad for colleague bad customer and if you do go back to those third principles if you do go back to that really really
simple way of just doing the right thing doing the common sense approach it's going to get you a really long way I think I I couldn't agree more uh the company I run right now shows the ventures is completely globally dispersed and literally uh it it's you know people get to do their own thing right we we meet and and do monthly but but they're those
are more like to share our excitement about what we're working on and and very little about any command and control structure from above I you know I I'm a inveterate Rabbit Hole diver and and I love complex adaptive systems and like emergence comes from below it does not come from above and and I just it seems like such a simple principle to me
um and and hearing that story reminds me of like I very rarely call right so I I and and one time uh my wife was like well that's outrageous I'd ordered something and it didn't come and she's like are aren't you going to call and I went no I I it'll just put me into a horrible mood and and and then I said to her you know what God damn it it's like so many of these companies that we're
dealing with are like grifters and and like you wonder why people don't want to work at them you wonder why people don't want to use them because they feel like they're being fleeced they feel like you know the the con person uh or a con artist is the one that can correspondent yeah and they forget that we're paying to be a customer I mean this is the
incredible thing like with if it was a free series like you know it's like a Facebook thing or a Twitter thing like Elon Musk you go well it's a free it's free so I'm a good pleasure but I'm I'm paying I'm paying a service I'm paying my money for it so ao.com I mentioned and John Roberts brilliant what makes them brilliant is the team is so empowered his team is so empowered to do
the right thing for a customer and their customer experience strategy is two rules it treat people in the way that you'd like your grandmother to be treated and make decisions that would make your mum proud and that's it and you save every six months and Grand that's all he talks about runs and ground runs and Grand and it's one of these companies everyone's kind of got a budget to do
just the right thing it's not like a Target it's not like have 200 pounds it's just just know you can do the right thing if you do something and we think well I probably was a bit basketball have a chat about it afterwards but you will never get in trouble if you thought he was doing the right thing make decisions and you know to your point about scale that
means it's a business they they they're able to grow and scale because they don't have all these Rule books but there's two things I think are interested in firstly is John also sets them out to make sure that the team have everything they need to be successful so with the delivery drivers every morning they get in the they get in their van their van has been fully cleaned
overnight it's got fresh bottles of water in because they're going to be driving around quite a lot and they pack the van in the order that the deliveries need to come out they do all of that to the driver it's really easy for the driver they secondly allows these little kind of moments of magic that you can't process map to occur so he tells a great
story about um one of their delivery drivers phoned up a customer was delivering a fridge phoned up a customer and said I'm going to be with you in half an hour and it was the customer son that answered and um and he said oh yeah that's completely fine just so you know it's my parents wedding anniversary so there's quite a few more people around the house
you can still come but just you know might be a bit busy so on the way delivery driver just stops at the local florist picks up a plant in your ao's colors are green and white so picks up a plant in brown colors and when I was at the house knocks on the door hello I'm from AO my name's Kevin so here's the fridge and by the way happy anniversary and that's a really really tiny thing
but that story has gone around the company that story will go around that friendship group it's cost them 20 pounds 10 pounds for the cost of a plan almost nothing but you can't you can't process map it you can't say in this situation do this if your phone off and there's an anniversary do that you just have to let the people be human now
you compare that to most organizations where it's cut costs do the thing it's all about auditions and get the job done don't waste one single minute going to pick up a pot plant but what you lose what you gain from that compared to what you lose from that when you lose from that Humanity so ultimately if you hire the right people and you hire people that naturally want
to give a great experience and then give them the freedom and the support to do that you're going to have a great experience you don't need a big complex strategy and I think that can scale if your Recruitment and your HR part is really strong and that's why that those two sides the HR side and the the customer experience I'd need to be really Army known rather than separate
parts of the organization because they're so dependent on each other but yeah I think John and ayodocum is a brilliant example of how you can build that empowerment in but it starts from the manager the leader being there and giving that permission to be empowered and make the right decision yeah and it just seems to me like so much of this like for example uh we
don't we don't have any complex uh you know uh mission statement that everyone needs to adhere to we basically say look we're gonna play positive some games with positive some players that's what we want to do and and like you you you do that the way you think is going to be best for you to do that and you know uh We've we've had people who on the team who just
completely unexpectedly did something really cool and um like delighted I have gotten so many emails and texts from people when a team member like goes out of their way to you know I I was trying to figure out how to do this Fellowship application and I couldn't figure it out and then somebody actually called me I didn't even I I just said like uh this is too
complicated it and I got a call and that blew me away and and he walked me through the the thing and and I didn't ask him to do that he just did it because that's the way we want to run things it it isn't it interesting though that when those kind of things happen now it's like a nice surprise exactly just the way it's it's like if you phone a company and you get straight through
you're like oh wow like we we've allowed and this I think is a really important we've allowed our standards to fall we've allowed ambition to I talk about these five kind of enabling these ways of working these companies have and the major one of that is ambition all of the companies are standing that do this well they do it because they really can they
really want to do it they've got high standards they're not accepting well it's fine to have people in heart for half an hour on a phone you know I did what I once tried to get an organization to change their metrics to change their average call waiting time metric to human lives wasted because I thought well that was sharpen their mind a bit
if you go well actually if we count up all the time people have been on hold to us this year and convert that into human lifetimes like that will be pretty dramatic to kind of to kind of show people but there's this ambition is really important the other point I just wanted to make and what you said they do is because I think I think this is important as well well
even though it's called The Human Experience and we're talking a lot about Frontline people so much of what we're talking about is still true for where your experience doesn't involve any humans where it is still use to your point earlier about language that's so important if you're on an app if you're on a website if you're in an email doesn't have to
involve an actual human it can just be the way things have been written the way things have been designed taken down to the fact that people want certainty and like certainty in life you know the way you can make things you know take that outside of you to know whether something's going to be complex or not if you've got too much choice you know I often you know tell a story about going
to buy a train ticket in the UK and I'm sure it's the same in the US and you go to the machine and you get like 11 different options than the train ticket and you're like well functionally that's good but emotionally that's a disaster and I'm going to get on the train and just presume I get told that I've got the I've got the wrong ticket and the the other point I just wanted to loop
around with that is so it's not just the human on the front line it's not just the digital that this does have to be the organization it does have to start with how you design your experience it so your point actually about these cool ideas that come out so octopus energy they they do a thing called Friday night dinner and it'll be interesting to see
whether this can really scale but it you can at the moment Friday night five o'clock everyone on the company joins us that call everyone everyone piles in everyone joins and they just talk about what's been good this week what's been annoying and uh they did this one call about a year or so ago and one of the front line teams said I've had so many complaints about
our whole music this this month this week like people are brilliant it's so boring and someone else said well why can't we just like personalize the whole music give people what they want and an engineer kind of popped in and said well we can do an API with Spotify that might work and someone said yeah but how would that make it relevant and
then someone else from like the risk Department said oh we have people's date of birth we have to ask people their day at first to join the Energy company and then someone else said I would have got I read this article that most people connect with the music when they're about 14 and the music they hear when they're about 14 is the music and within
half an hour this idea would spun up that was or when people phone up why don't we play the song that was number one when they were 14 years of age and that's what you now get if you phone up to Twitter so now you know there's six million customers in the UK If you phone up octopus and they've got your date of birth you'll get the song minus the Fuji's you'll get the song that was
number one while you were 14 years of age on your 14th birthday and it's and it's brilliant but the point there is everything we're talking about about being a human it's not just about delivering the service because there the being a human is letting people come up with ideas letting people share their perspectives letting people share their thoughts you know there was
no manager at all you just involved in that conversation they spun it happened a week within a week from that call it was like which was brilliant but for that Humanity needs to go all the way through the organization to create the experience not just letting the people on the front line do good things if that makes it it makes total sense and it
also leads to I I think that uh we we um we other technology um and and we put it over here and we look at it as monolithic you know like there's only so much you can do with it and I'm just the opposite of that I think that you can use technology that is your example was like the best example of this why not do the things that the tech can easily do if you're thinking like a
human right and like oh my God I can't believe I love this song and it goes from being pissed off that you're waiting on hold to not wanting to miss the end of the song right they play ABBA Gold the entire ABBA album which is really annoying because I rang up I rang up Ikea and I was really annoyed with them about something but I couldn't help to be like just singing
along to Waterloo and dancing queen I just couldn't help it some other time I went through I was in a great mood and that annoyed me but anyway so yeah well one of the other things that you Advocate is what you call structured flexibility uh and we talked a little bit about that um with the uh delivery driver picking up the uh the plant for um the client that they were delivering
uh a refrigerator to on their uh anniversary uh how do you how do you inculcate that um that kind of attitude it and let's let's stay with a like an 8 million customer uh company because it's pretty easy if you're a boutique and you know that's why people often are patronizing you anyway because they much prefer that but like with these larger organizations
is is there some kind of way that you can tell who's gonna do that and who's not yeah into when you say who's going to do it do you mean within your um within the company within the individual well no within the company like is there is there something to look for when you're hiring people like to this person's probably much more likely to say stop and pick up a plant that and this person
is yeah I think I think there's I think it's just generally a huge thing about Natural Curiosity and I think Natural Curiosity and natural creativity and the two things that are probably going to keep us ahead of AI actually as humans anyway but but they're the two things I think concludes to people that end up giving a great customer experience for a
couple of reasons if you're curious then you just want to know more about the customer so you know I was working with a company recently with their contacts to try and help them out more human complications and they went and sat me with two of their best people and because they always do that and uh I uh you know it's a mortgage conversation
and customer Rings up beat goes in the air and the customer says yeah I just need to ring up because we just found out we're expecting another charge we need to move house can you help me work out what I can do next and the person says yep great I'll go and look at some rates for you we can work all that out don't you worry how many states the next pool comes in
yeah hi um uh house has just fallen through the house changes just fallen through we had an offer on the house but now we're not gonna be able to buy it you know so I'm gonna need to cancel the mortgage rate I have yeah no worries I can help you do that for you now functionally both of those can be good experience but neither of them were curious enough to kind of go
I'm really sorry about that tell me more about that how are you feeling about that the reason for that was because they were too busy looking at their screens where all this information pops up that you've got this Natural Curiosity that enables people to actually go I'm not going to look at that for a minute I'm just going to talk to you I just want to have the conversation I just
want to speak to you and just find out more about you so straight away if you've got people that are curious they'll have better conversations and that's that's its name in life it's like you said at the start we had a bit of a chat we're both curious people I was interested to know about your Easter you're interested to know about mine that's just how it is that's just the
conversation whereas if you're not a curious person you'll just follow that kind of functional route and you'll just do what you're told to to do and the second element about creativity is then you're interested in finding out new and better ways to do things and so that might be that you follow what you're told to do but it might be that you go
actually we could do it a little bit differently for you I think I can work out a way that might help you Mr or Mrs customer that means things quite often when the customer phones up what they ask for isn't actually the thing that they need because they don't know particularly if you live in a complex Financial products they're asking for
the thing they think they need but they need you to be curious to ask them more questions and to find out what you really need I don't know you need to be creative to help them work out how you can get to the right answer the other two traits I look for and then within that structured flexibility all you really need to say is well the call you know your call has to broadly
be this length maybe maybe not you know done within it you have to tick off these four or five things um and actually I you know my own experience of that is when I was a bronx manager we used to say to our our Premier managers and looked after our high Network customers in the first meeting you have to have the account open the savings account open sign up to
intimate banking this this and this and it really annoyed customers because they're like this is going to take hours I don't want to do it and we switched and we said okay so I probably did within the first month these things have to happen up to you how you do it you can do it in the first meeting you can have three meetings and do it phone calls or whatever you want
and customer satisfaction went through the route because then you just let their Natural Curiosity and creativity work out what the best thing was for the customer and then it went from there within that structure rather than being throttle formula to your point about Romans and rules yeah and that you know that's part of my thesis about like all of the old ways of
doing things are collapsing and I say for the most part good riddance um because uh I also believe passionately that curious uh open-minded people are just going to naturally be better they're going to be better that's what I look for and everyone that I add to the team at my company I want people who are super curious who are going to
be proactive and and and figure something out and you know what it's great because like that empowers them to be even more Curious right when they when they hear back from me like hey Atman cool that you called that you know it wasn't uh that wasn't convenient to your time in India and yet you did that I really appreciate that and like it just seems so
straightforward to me and and like is it is it the mindset what is what is blocking people well I'll give you one of my favorite stories uh I was gonna say about the book but actually probably from my life actually which I think really drives home the point where they say we moved house about five years ago and I wanted to buy one of those big comfortable reading chairs yeah I'd
obviously forgotten temporary had two small children so the chances of me sitting in it and reading it working and basically zero anyway we went to went to visit a big furniture store and they had the day we got there we didn't know the day we got there they had a half price X display then it should say or what and there was all this big yellow chair and that's all that's the one I want and
it was half price you know hundreds of pounds off so that's what I'm gonna have the only problem was I driven there with my wife and my son quite a small car loads of kids stuff car seat well I'm not gonna be able to get that in the car so I went up to the guy behind the till and I said um look I really want to buy this chair today can I buy it and then
get it delivered and he said no it's hex display Furniture you have to you have to find a way of taking it we won't deliver stuff that's 2005 okay kind of fair enough bit annoying but okay I had a bit the same because like okay there's got to be a way around this so I went up to him again and I said and I take the chair out to the car which is in their car park just outside
can I take the chair out to the car see if I can fit it in if I can I'll buy it and if not I'll just bring it back in so he goes upstairs he asks his manager and he comes back down and he says no you can only take the chair off the premises once you've bought it I said okay can I uh buy the chair fake it out that's why I'm putting in the car
and if it doesn't come back in get a refund but he goes upstairs ask his manager come back down no no refunds or next display Furniture okay but can I can I take the chair uh buy the chair can I then leave it here for an hour while I drive my family home eventually the car come back pick it up goes upstairs ask his manager comes back down no as soon as he bought this chair you
must take it off the premises immediately and at this point my son who's four at the time he's jumping up and down on this chair shouting at anyone else that comes near it like go away this is our chair you know and I feel like I'm in one of those Box chicken bag of grain trying to get across the river but there's an answer in here somewhere but I can't work it
out anyway eventually I decided to risk it I said okay I'm just gonna buy it and I'll leave my family here I'll clear out the car and I'll I'll come back and pick them up later and I'll try and get it in somehow and this guy he's like 21 big muscles everything I'm not and uh I said to him can you at least help me carry it to the car which is just outside your door and
he's like yeah yeah no problem at all no problem at all although I can only carry it to the door because I'm not insured to carry it outside of the premises they're true to his word he carries it to the door puts it down him and his colleagues down to what well me and my wife he's fourth at 10. try and get it over to the car park while my son was
playing chicken with all these other cars it was the most ridiculous situation I've ever been and the thing the thing is with this that as well as the fact that everybody knows this is a ridiculous situation everyone but the thing is to your point I'm first I'm trying to buy a chair I'm trying to give them my money I'm not I'm trying to give you money to a product
that you clearly want to get rid of because you've got it on sale so like there's something should happen here but at no point from his side or from the manager this magical manager that was hitting upstairs that didn't come down at any point during it at no point is there any curiosity or any creativity to try and go right I see the outcome
you're trying to get to Mr customer you're trying to buy this chair and you've got a small car that's full let's work out together your different options it was just this back and forth of no no no no no no no no no and it was it was yeah a remarkable situation I think that's it that that really showcases for me that the problem with this if you have restrictive rules and humans aren't
allowed to be human and if you could just open that freedom up a little bit you can tell people right from the start we want you to be curious we want you to be creative wanting to be sensible because we're running a business and this is the kind of framework and let me help you understand what we're in but go and be your natural creative curious self
you're going to get far more good experiences than you are bad and even if you do get a few things that go wrong there'll be vastly outweighed by the positive limit you'll be having on customers and by the money you'll be saving anyway uh she said as I was listening to the story I was reminded of Monty Python's classic skit with the Dead Parrot where
where he breaks the parent back this parrot is deceased deceased yeah she's an ex-powered this is but it seems to like the the idiocy of this right is that like we've done a ton of studies on which companies survived the longest which what are the attributes of those com accompanied you know quantitatively and qualitatively and one of the things that you find is agility right the
ability to to do to break those ridiculous rules there's a high correlation with how successful and how long that company goes on it would seem to me that this is the ultimate aligned interest of the owners of that company right let's be agile if that's one of the things that works is there is there like a hangover from um you know I I often say that taylorism
was one of the worst things to happen in especially in this country but UK too um and it infected everything it infected government and it infected uh corporations and schools and everything and and it clearly doesn't work and I maybe I'm just an idiot are there not people like starting new companies and looking at these old companies and saying we're just gonna destroy them
yeah I think it's such an interesting it's a really interesting to me I need to do a lot more work on it and thought on it I was talking about this at lunchtime actually about where where this is coming from you know I've talked about the figures in the US the um you think it's called the customer rage certain way I need to double check my wording on that but you know in 1972
when it started 36 of us customers said they had a problem with a company that year and now the city is like 78 I mean it's it's exponential it was it was only 58 in 2017. and I I suppose I've kind of got a couple of hypotheses one is that you come out into financial crash and you've got a generation of people that are now coming into middle
management positions who have kind of been brought up thinking organized big organizations are just really bad and evil and inefficient and actually they don't care about customers and and they have to cut costs as well so as well as having the actual thing about trusting trusting big business falling I had to have kind of seven eight years of cutting cross to kind of keep going
and that's really dented people's expectations and Ambitions of what good experience looks like and I think a lot of that might be a play in terms of what people need those leaders they're an organization I think they should be doing they think think what good what good looks like so I think it's a number of that I think there's an element of organizations just
really you know In fairness to organizations like so many of us really adjusting to this new world so if you look at social media and the impact that's had on politics and on relationships and on discussion and on discourse and on Mental Health we're all still adjusting and that is a new technology and you know I launched the first mobile apps rated PC in the UK
and it was only 10 years ago you know so it is still quite a short time where we'd gone from everyone goes to branches to no one goes to branches like your whole business model is flipped upside down within a decade he's you know he's a huge change and that's true across every industry and every company and it's so easy for us to get I think the
scale of that change in what is still quite a short period of time and the impact that's probably still having on on organization the particularly big organizations I think the thing that I both love and disappointed me a bit with startup she's so many of the startups really do take on the organizations and really do challenge them and they're really coming up with great
new ways to do things Knox which is a brilliant example of that my my challenge I have with some of the startups it disappoints me is how many of them do it without making a profit and so they come in and they get you know capital and they that are now enables them to do things in a different way and then after three or four years they start getting asked relaxing you
need to start paying a profit and they they've effectively built their business model in such a way that doesn't allow them to make a profit and then you're starting to see this with Uber and deliveroo and even likes to Netflix in so many organizations that start to have a massive impact on the rest of the industry and start to force the rest of the industry to cut their costs to
compete but they're not actually doing it in a in a profitable way so we've got a cardo here in the UK that big food delivery service had a great covid because it's online only completely having to challenge or completely challenging the way all the other supermarkets deliver but then obviously they're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger each
year and I think that's there's something around that on the business side that's behind that as well that I do have some sympathy with for Business Leaders who are being forced to change their business model and cut costs to compete with organizations that are starting up and taking their customers but the playing Field's kind of not really even there in a way so you'll
know some more about that than Michael Jordan but I just think there's something there's a few bits coming together from the last 15 years whether it's new technology whether it's um the the impact of the global financial crisis you know a few different things coming together the way veg Captain had come through that is maybe causing this store of
organizations if they want to do the right thing just feel like they just their hands of times they can't do it maybe yeah actually that's a really good point the uh the whole um you know it seems to be another one of the knock-on effects of zero interest rate policy maintained for too long because uh essentially you bring up Uber
it's a great example subsidize who isn't Gonna Love a black car service that costs you less than a taxi uh oh gosh where do I sign up right and then when suddenly Uber needs to make money uh it's a whole different thing so I totally buy into that I always try we focus a lot on on new companies and startups now and one of the things that I always look for is okay is there
actually a business model here that can allow for all those things but also make money because you're not doing anyone any favors if you get them used to like a a a premium service delivered at A Cut Rate cost well of course everyone's gonna love that that doesn't mean it makes great sense you know Rory Sutherland again though one of the things that he mentioned to me which I
really I hadn't thought of it and like I love the way he thinks right because he says you know why Uber this is several years ago do you know why Uber has this market capitalization it has and he took out his phone and he showed me the map of the car and it how long it was going to take to get to you and like that that to me was a brilliant use of new tech right
but even with that and even with all of that Brilliance if you don't have a business model that can actually make money you you're not doing anyone any favors yeah exactly and the guys if you matter see one of the other companies I study and they talk about the blue dot moment they talk about the moment that you were able to look at a map and see
the blue door and know where you were that changed everything because they had everything when it came to kind of Direction planning travel planning everything with a whole different ball game that because you weren't just looking at a static map and trying to work out where you were and where you were going you had the map that showed you exactly where you were and it was a
real a real change so it is those moments like you say that um that people can then build belief in that kind of said this is why this can be something different but you've got to be able to do it in a way that's sustainable and if not and you've got whole industries that are going to be creaking and ultimately it's customers that pay the price ultimately because the customer service the full
salary reduces exactly I I I'm that I have a friend actually his episode is up right now Alex Danko he's a big wig up at Shopify um and and one of his more unusual uh positions at least I thought so I want to get your view on this he he thinks that frictionless customer experiences are not right he thinks that customers actually prefer a little bit of friction
in the process what do you think about that yeah I completely agree I completely agree with that um I've got a friend who uses and analogy yet he says you know uh riding a bike is great but you wouldn't want a frictionless break there's time is when you want to touch the brakes and you want the brakes to work and I I really I really really agree
about three weeks ago I went to an event at Wembley Stadium and I was on the train back afterwards and just outside Wembley they've got one of the Amazon go shops where you know you go in and out without uh without you and it was fascinating on the train on the way home because it had been a big event big pack train all these people started talking about Amazon go because
one of the ladies on the train was holding in an Amazon go bag and uh they didn't know each other and it was like sitting in a focus group so I was just like being quiet and listening and watching and all of them were saying the same thing which is like oh I just don't like walking out without knowing like I don't like walking out without knowing
I've got a bit of certainty that it's gone through properly or that someone knows or they all had different variations of the same thing but it all came back to I just want that little bit of certainty just to know so I think there's one thing around that where you need something a bit of friction just to feel confident it's done the other version is that I think you want to know
that people are taking it seriously and so if I was I don't know if I was doing an investment for example and it was like a million pound investment if it if that's if that's too easy I just think oh is that is that secure like if I could just open it out without any security and just send a million back I'm not that I've got them anymore but
that would be that wouldn't be enough I need a bit of friction there because I want that to tell me it's a bit secure or if I'm you know uh if I'm complaining about something I want to know the other person's taking enough time to get back to me so maybe I'd rather if my complaint was being dealt with I'd rather it takes three days rather than immediate if you ever page three days I
believe you've looked into it properly whereas if you come back too quickly I think where are you just probably milk so I completely agree with with Ali thinks I completely agree with that point that there's times where you want friction and times where the experience adds one more Example The Experience about food if you think of McDonald's
and a Michelin star restaurant get a McDonald's they're both about buying food if you go to McDonald's you want it really quick you want it as quick as humanly possible I want the cheeseburger I know what I want take my 99p give me give me the Burger if I go to a Michelin star restaurant I want to take my time it's not about speed anymore it's not about the food
arriving as quickly as possible I want time to look at the menu I want them to come and explain the menu just tell me about the dishes I want a bit of time between my courses I maybe want them to change the tablecloth I maybe want them to bring me new Cutlery all of which could be described as friction because it's not completely frictionless
necessarily but because I'm looking for a different experience so I think it's a it's a really really good point I really agree with that it's not all about yeah being that easy um and that also brings up a good question uh that do you think customer experience is sector specific and by that I mean like um I wrote a piece back in 99 called the internet contrarian in which I was
saying wrongly it turned out and you'll see why uh that the minute you know uh Amazon uh had a competitor like let's say Walmart on my uh hypothesis was that Walmart was going to become an online store as well and that they were going to underprice Amazon and that sense that was through a screen I'm just gonna buy it from uh Walmart well I was wrong
how did that work out that did not work out I use Amazon for everything pretty much and and so is there anything special about Amazon now I know there's a huge right now going at least the US Amazon is saying you can't return things for free anymore and people are like livid but why do I have is it just because I'm accustomed to it why why do I have an allegiance to getting all my
stuff from Amazon it's the most useful alternative at the moment um so this this goes to my to the hearts my question about my point about the missive Customer Loyalty because if not that you're loyal to Amazon in any way at all it's just really useful for you at the moment if overnight Amazon is probably what's your point actually if Amazon price is tripled overnight and
suddenly you had to do a two-factual authentication sign on every time you went to the website you just stopped using it because yeah it's become less it's become less useful now that you know that and that is true you know it could be about price it could be about speed it could be it could be psychologically it could be that an organization is those should be useful
to you so for example lots of people bought the casuals early on partly because they were good cars but partly because they wanted to be so shown as someone that buys a Tesla you know Tesla is my badge it's the badge that tells you the kind of person I am then what's interesting is his Elon Musk has become fairly less palatable Tesla is equally now slightly less cool so
that stops become useful in a social sense as well so ultimately yeah Amazon has just done a very good job we're just saying the most useful alternative and it's got brand salience it's the first one that you think of it's got a proven track record because most of the time it's delivered well for you if it hasn't delivered well it's probably done the
refund super quickly or dealt with the problem really quickly because they know that that's worth it more than keeping me on the phone for an hour and a half arguing about a bow time so they just managed to just stay far more far more useful I'd I'm interested to see what happens with Amazon in the next four or five years because actually I think their website's a bit of a mess
now you know they've got so much that they farmed off to Marketplace it's really hard to buy products now because you go I think well no let me rephrase that it's easy to buy products it's hard to know that you've got confidence in the product you're buying because when you search for something on Amazon it comes with the loads of sponsored links
then it comes up with a load of marketplace and then it comes out and I'm like I just wants the thing I'm buying from Amazon like you know and it's interesting because that's becoming a I think a far worse experience actually just shopping with Amazon overall um at the moment they don't seem to care too much about that which you know probably suggests they're doing fine and
they've tried to link in all the other elements of prime as well so that probably probably keeps people together but I do wonder if you start to get some decent competition um in the UK we've got bookshops.org which is starting to do a roaring roaring trade just at the bookstore this Bookshop has Runners and started out and so now I've switched from Amazon the
Bookshop just because it's it's far better but it is it's usefulness as long as you stay more useful when you kick your eyes up and you know what matters then you're probably going to be able to kind of keep those customers coming back to you but you can't take it for granted as Kodak and uh you know Toys R Us and we'll listen a whole load of other companies want to test it
and I I love the way you phrase that too useful I you know like people say what is your purpose when they're talking when I'm getting interviewed and I'd say uh I guess my purpose is to be useful and if if that is your purpose suddenly you think about things very differently you do things very differently uh and like your experience or recounting the
experience with Amazon is bang on like I I I was when I'm an early adopter of texts right I love technology and everything so I bought the first CD player and I you know adopted all of all of the stuff and I was the first to move everything to my iTunes uh when they came out and then I watched them systematically destroy iTunes to the point where it became unusable
right what is is there some sort of imperative is it where like ever I always joke to my family yeah every Tech upgrade is actually a significant downgrade um and it's happening now with Apple TV too they're [ __ ] it up and just like they did with iTunes what's going on there yeah I it's like I think there's two things they want it's this unrelenting need for change because I
think so many people have employed now they just feel like sensible things to say that they just feel like they have to keep doing stuff to prove their jobs they keep tweaking and changing things even though actually you kind of go oh it's good just leave it as it is and that's why so many people don't want to upgrade their Mac software because like
I know I like I like the version of iTunes I've got for example and I don't want it I don't want to keep doing that and the other thing I think circles back around to the conversation we had at the start about just being able to keep yourself in the mind of the user because the problem is if you're a a developer that's designing you know if you're working on Apple TV you're so in Apple
TV you're sewing it you've forgotten what it's like the to not know all the internets of Apple TV you've forgotten what it's like to be the person at home with a wife or husband and a couple of kids and a dog running around and the kind of do you remember what's the Apple TV when the remote first came out and you didn't know which way around you had
to hold it I think right I don't know about you but immediately when I got my activity I had to buy a seat plastic case for it because within three seconds my son had stood and stood on it you know you just it's only when you observe people that you get to see these kind of these kind of behaviors it's only when you really kind of get into the detail
of it going right back to that point and I think that's the problem that people are particularly maybe in the kind of developer world for example are just very uh into the data in the design and the code side of things they just don't take the time to properly step out I did see a brilliant piece by the CEO of the Atlantic the other day at least a video
on LinkedIn about the um who had just signed up in secret to be an Uber driver for a week just to experience what that was really like and we know we need more of that we call it immersion we need more of that immersion in people's lives I should tell you one quick story on that which I am work with the food management and Manufacturing Company a few years ago and uh it was
all about ready meals convenience food you know quick food to put in the microwave and so I went to interview this lady and she was in her 40s yoga instructor super healthy said she cooked everything from scratch that she would never uh use ready meals but never used convenience food wouldn't use a microwave couldn't it okay and checked out she had lots of
recipe book lots of ingredients and about uh it's about an hour later I went shopping with her it's the second part of her cast I went shopping with her and we're going up and down the aisles and we got to the ready meal aisle and I thought well we're gonna fly down here but halfway down she stopped and she threw in a ready-made mashed potato okay and then she threw in a ready
chopped red onion so I said well what's going on here I thought you never yeah used many milliliters and she went well I haven't got time to peel and chop vegetables I'm not not mad and then we cut to the the end aisle where the confectionery and the alcohol is and I thought well we're not getting anything from here because she's told me I thought he was a temple Etc but now
she swept in loads like like a Supermarket Sweep just paneling in chocolate and Prosecco couldn't get enough of the champagne and I said well what's that about and she went oh that's girls night on a Friday night that doesn't count and that's why you have to it says customers because even if you ask people people lie not on purpose but they tell
you the version of themselves that they want to believe and I've got loads to it I can tell you but I'm sure we're nearly out of time but and that's the problem with the Apple TV thing as an example the iTunes thing that even if you go and observe people in a formal setting if you came around my house to come and observe me I'd have the kids sat down
nicely on the sofa we sit down together and have some remote we'd watch something nice we'd all laugh in reality it's absolute chaos if kids all over there is stuff being thrown but I'm not gonna let a visitor see that and I probably wouldn't want to admit to anyone that's true so you have to observe people in a way that you know you can do and that goes back to
original point about I spend a lot of time in strangers houses you know watching them and asking them questions that's the only way it's the only way you can really get under the skin of what's really going on and what you need to design otherwise everything else is just built on uh assumptions that often prove to not be true oh that's brilliant John and uh
what an endlessly fascinating uh thing to talk about because it seems to me now that that you know this view is at least getting a better hearing uh people are immediate like wait I I mentioned to a friend that I was going to be talking to you and he immediately started recounting like his horrible experiences set you know X Y and Z and it's it people will talk we'll be honest about
it right but you you need to create an environment in which that can happen and which you certainly have done well this has been amazing I think uh everyone should read your book and and check out what you're doing at the at the end of uh each of our podcasts we um ask our guests a question in that we're going to make you the emperor of the world for one day
um you you can't uh kill anyone and you can't re-educate anyone in a camp but what you can do is we're gonna hand you a magic microphone and you're going to speak two thoughts into it and that those two thoughts will be incepted on the entire population of the world whenever those eight billion people wake up in their next day they're gonna sit up in bed and they're gonna
think I've just had two brilliant ideas and I'm gonna do both of them what what what two things are you going to incept in the world's population oh it's a massive it's a massive question that's a passive question I think I am there's maybe two things I would say but I'm like I'm a cheeky a cheeky fan as well I think I would um I would say advice is what you asked for
when you already know the answer but you're too afraid to admit it because I often find that lots of people are asking advice when they're just trying to avoid the decision and so advice is good whenever you're asking for advice really think about it do I already really know do I already really know the the answer and and the second one I think is when I talk about the
start of the book which is this principle the you are everyone you've ever met you're you're made up of every single interaction conversation with everyone you've ever met and the reason that matters is because my concern is we're we're stopping paying attention to people you know heads down on our phone earphones in you know all of the stuff that I observed
that makes me laugh that makes me think that makes me smile most of it is stuff that you don't expect to observe it's the odd conversation on the crane on the train you weren't expecting the posting that you see and so I think the you know that that may not be the right number the you or everyone you've ever met I think is a principal to remember
that means you need to be observing the world you need to be open to the world and you need to be kind of making the most Immortal of those different occasions my cheeky third one is just to be advice my nan gave me she passed away at the age of 102 uh which was you've got enough at the world and you've got to drink whiskey every day they were her two rules for having a having a long and
happy life to 102 laugh at the world pretty risky every day and uh so if she was there and she had the Magic Pen they would be her two bits of advice and I probably can't get to those actually I love both of those and I love her well this has been phenomenal uh how do we how do people find the book how do they find you yeah thanks Jim yes the book's called
The Human Experience is out in the UK in the USA Australia soon it's in all good bookshops including um including Amazon um I'm uh you can sign me on all the social networks my websites John J seals s i double.com I'm on LinkedIn John J seal Twitter John Jay seals and I've got an Instagram account we choose CX underscore stories which is where I just
post lots of photos of slightly frustrating but quite funny I think uh customer experiences so uh yeah she said if he says John J seals you'll end up finding me somewhere I love it thank you so much for giving me so much of your time John a wonderful book and wonderful conversation no thank you Jim I really really appreciate the conversation I really enjoyed it