Hi Brad, tell us about yourself and your background
I am originally from New Zealand. I have a German wife, a Romanian dog and I currently live in Vienna, Austria. I’m passionate about fitness and on weekends my wife, dog and I go trail running in the mountains. In terms of my professional background, I am a Product Marketing Insights Lead at one of Europe’s fastest growing B2B software companies called Uberall.
Uberall is a customer experience platform that allows multi-location brands reach the right customers at the moment they are searching for the products and services they need and ensures that their customers are getting the best experience possible.
What is the biggest misunderstanding about customer experience, in your opinion?
There’s been a lot of talk over the past decade in regards to personalisation and the omnichannel approach to marketing and in truth, we cannot master these areas because the technology isn’t there and maybe it never will be in the sense of creating a truly personalised experience for every individual consumer.
Even if you could, you won’t be able to please everyone. Like the saying goes:
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.
This is one of the principles I use a lot within product marketing. If you try to be all things to all people, you are going to waste a lot of time, resources and create an inconsistent value proposition. A business needs to understand where its value lies, why it’s customers are loyal in the first place and where there is opportunity to get new customers without compromising on the values that your current customers stick around for.
What are some of the newer CX companies/solutions you’re keeping your eyes on right now?
I would be remiss of me not to mention my own company Uberall. The direction we are heading in is quite interesting in terms of offering a total local customer experience with a solution that allows a business to manage, advertise and engage with their customers across all local points of sale. A business that can ensure the accuracy and consistency of business information, put tools in the hands of every store owner/operator to engage with customers and tailor individual offerings to local clientele is the business that gets closer to creating the most personalised & trustworthy experience possible.
I’m also a fan of:
- Typeform – (the simplicity & design aesthetic), and;
- Forestadmin – which provides an out-of-the-box solution for creating admin panels that save time, resources, links teams together more efficiently which delivers the end result of a better customer experience
Brad’s tips for improved customer loyalty
What can companies do to improve customer loyalty and retention?
This is never simple but these three steps I find are the most important:
Step 1: Figure out how you can actually best measure customer loyalty and retention. You can’t improve something you can’t measure.
Step 2: make sure you have a strategy to identify foundationally what is most important to the largest section of your customers – what’s most important to them? What are nice to haves but they can live without? What sets you apart from competitors in your niche?
Step 3: Procurement. Identify the best tools out there that can deliver the best customer experience with the least resources and that save you the most time.
What do you think is most relevant and why: CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), NPS (Net Promoter Score), or CES (Customer Effort Score)?
CSAT: For me it’s the most valuable out of all three because it has always provided me with the most clarity on whether or not we are hitting key performance benchmarks and where we should pivot to improve
How can companies better use social media in the era of customer-centricity and personalization?
You may have heard this said a lot but that doesn’t make it any less true. You need to understand which social media channels your customers and ideal audience are using and then focus only on the most important channels to those audiences. Any strategy for content then necessarily involves identifying how their values line up with your product or service.
What is your opinion on AI-based chatbots to handle customer support?
Anything that improves experience with less time and resources is a plus. Just like any customer-facing AI tool though, it’s important to test how customers find these tools and whether they are helping or hindering your offering.
What was the best movie you saw that has come out during this past year?
I haven’t seen many movies I actually liked that came out in the last year. Tenet comes to mind (since it’s the last movie I saw in the cinema) but the last movie I remember really enjoying was Vice – an incredible movie. Extremely creative, shocking and highly entertaining.
Last but not least, what is your favorite CX metric?
Retention loyalty – how likely are you to remain with us? Gathering both quantitative and qualitative analysis for this metric is important to me.
