Episode #167: Our Amazing, 1-Year Anniversary Extravaganza

That’s right. A whole year. 167 episodes, and we’re still going strong. In fact, we’re just getting started. So, with a year under our belt it seemed like it was about time for an episode…about time. Literally. Because time is a precious commodity, and a key ingredient of stellar customer experiences.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Grad
Wow. Today is a very, very special day. It’s a listen to a little Jimi Hendrix, you sip a cup of coffee, think about the future. As your mind wanders, think to yourself, now how long have I been listening to the Unified CXM Experience? Cause it’s just so awesome. It doesn’t seem like that long, but has it been longer? How many episodes have they done? Today’s our one-year anniversary. Cue one year anniversary music …. (musical interlude)

Okay, enough of that. Also 166 episodes. Not bad, right? You know, is it 166 with this one, Randy, or is it 167 with this one?

Randy
This is 167.

Grad
This is 167. So 166 in the past,167 today. 1967 was a great year. That was the year of the Montreal Expo. Canadian Centennial. 1967 was a great year. So 167 episodes in a year. By the way, Randy, I think it’s time to change our entry music. I feel like I’ve enjoyed Jimi for a year and it’s now time to try to something else. Something maybe more circus-like perhaps. Okay. Circus of Martech. I don’t know. Mannheim Steamroller? I don’t know something different.

Randy
Okay, let me think about it.

Grad
I’m sure you’ll come up with some good ideas. So let me talk a little bit about the last year. I want to spend just a moment or two talking about how it all started. And just what our thinking was at the time. I’m going to talk a little bit about which had been the top shows from Apple podcasts, just the top downloaded shows. And then I’ll talk a little bit about the theme of this anniversary in the context of unified CXM. As always, of course, I mean, I don’t want to sound pedantic, but it’s important and can’t stop talking about it. So and I’ll just as a cue to that section, the first anniversary traditionally, was celebrated with gifts made out of paper, and in the modern versions – so there’s a traditional and a modern version of how you celebrate these anniversaries typically wedding – and in the modern version, it’s a clock. And I actually saw something really cool the other day, for a first-year anniversary, it was an origami paper clock. It was like an amazing way to blend the two. So we’re going to talk a little bit about clocks and time. Go back a year. So if you were to have told me a year ago, that you need to crank out 166 podcasts and keep going, all on the topic of Unified CXM. I would have thought you’re crazy. I couldn’t have seen that. I don’t know how I would have even wrapped my mind around that. It seemed like almost an impossible task. And yet here we are and what’s almost bizarre is not only did it feel pretty easy to get 166 done. I’m sorry, Randy. I know it wasn’t easy, but it did seem to kind of come off the mind pretty easily. There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, but it was easy for me. And I don’t just have 166 more in me, I’ve got 1,066 more in me, I’ve got 10,066 more in me, I can talk about this forever. It’s actually kind of amazing. The more you dig into it, the more you uncover. And now I have people sending me things. I’ve got people sending me screenshots of these crazy customer experiences they have which I’ll be profiling some in the near future. And it is really amazing that the nerve we’ve touched as we talk about unified CXM, because we talk about it from the standpoint of what is your experience like today as a customer? And what should it be like? And there’s a big gap there, a bigger gap than most companies realize. So I would say that what’s been very interesting about this last year is that as we’ve dug into it, we’ve learned so much and we have learned enough, I think, at this point to realize how little we know and that’s always the sign of real learning that at some point you learn enough about something to realize you know nothing about it.

I feel like that’s coming out right now. So I’m at that point of a beginner’s mindset of having talked about this enough, interviewed enough people, done enough modeling and descriptions of it and talked about enough case studies that I now realize, I know, basically, nothing at all, which is humbling. But I guess that’s the penalty of repetition. So that is sort of my mindset. And I just wanted to thank everyone, there’s been tens and tens of thousands of people who’ve downloaded and listened to the show, and just an incredible number of people who’ve reached out and talked to us and given us advice and feedback, which we’ve loved. And almost all of that we’ve incorporated, I’ve left out some of the Howard Stern suggestions, but otherwise, we’ve taken almost everything. And I think what’s interesting is this has all been organic. And we’re not spending any money to promote the show. It’s just people passing it on to others and talking about it and sending it to other people and discovering it, which is even cooler. So we’ll see what this next year has to bring. It is funny. At this time last year, when we just started it, you do the first show, and then you have to wait a couple of weeks for Apple to listen to it, be okay with it, and then put it up. And then you can start to produce from there on. And then we’re on like about 30 different podcasting platforms. But obviously, if we couldn’t get on Apple, that would have been a big problem, because that’s the primary one. And then you start to build an audience. So remember by Christmas, last year, so Christmas 2020. Early, mid-December, I got really excited because we had just crossed the 1,000-download threshold. And we’re way past that now. And it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. So who knows where we’ll be this time next year? So top ten shows. So I was trying to get like a theme of these shows. What is interesting is that of the top ten shows, seven of them are with guests.

I think the feedback I’m getting there is that people know they really like the podcasts when I’m not doing any of the speaking or as little of it as possible. So in those top ten shows with guests, we have two shows that we did with Tom Peters; not surprised, he promoted it on his feed, it was a great, great show. One was called Extreme Humanism and the Customer Experience. The other one was How Small Changes Can Drive Big Impact. And Tom was an amazing guest. We loved having him. So that was that was super fun. We also had our Neha, the breath guru. We did a bunch of shows with her. Two of her shows are in the top ten. One was Monday Morning Inspiration. And the other one was Managing Through a Crisis. And Neha and I got really deep on some stuff. I mean, wow, I listened to one the other day and I was like, “Jeez, did I do that publicly?”. Oh, wow. But they are great shows and Neha is now producing her own podcast and was kind of using us to sort of trial out her technique and how she wanted to do that approach and it’s going fantastic for her so that’s been great. We also had Michael Crosse and Amanda Sternquist from HGS, great partner of ours, it was actually our number one show, the Art of the Possible; talked a lot about unified CXM integration, and how we work with our partners, which was awesome. And then Ryan Bonnici, old friend of mine, CMO extraordinaire, then add a bunch of different companies, but how to align yourself for impact. Ryan did a nice job talking about how he manages his career and has impact in his career, which is pretty cool. And then I guess the shows that I hosted that were popular. One was the Tale of Two CXM Experiences. That was a good one. That was from May of this year. And then How to Revolutionize Your Marketing Strategy with Mass 1:1 and our initial show has a fair number of downloads as well because when people start off in less than the initial or inaugural show, but that’s kind of our top 10 rundown which is pretty cool. So lesson for me is less Grad, more guests, got it, check.

So let’s talk about time. So let’s assume that we’re going to get a clock as a gift. And by the way, if you are sending gifts to the show for our one-year anniversary, send them to Sprinklr at 29 West 35th Street, New York, New York. Zip is 10001 and just put them to the attention of Grad Conn, and you know all gifts, cash, jewelry, all accepted, all welcome, just feel free to send them over. So I can’t wait to see what happens there. And so let’s talk a little bit about our gifts. So say it’s a clock and I want to talk a little bit about time. So just a few shows ago, I talked about this definition of customer experience management, and the foundational principles of CXM. So I’m going to just recap that super-fast, and I want to drill deep on one of them. So, customer experience management, CXM, as composed of three words customer, experience, and management. And if you think about the customer, the question you need to ask yourself is, do you approach your business from the perspective of the customer? When you think about experience you need to ask yourself, do you respect the time of your customers and come back to this one? And when you think about management is do you rapidly respond to your customers? This is the one that management is the one that blows my mind. Most people don’t respond to their customers. I don’t understand why. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But that’s what’s going on out there. And that’s the problem. But let’s talk about experience and talk about the time. So if we’re thinking about our first anniversary gifts, and the clock, think of our clock of customer experience management and the experience part. You know, is your product easy to find? Is it easy to buy? Is it easy to return? Is it easy to repair? Is it easy to recycle? Is it easy? Because you think about anytime that you complain about a customer experience or have had a customer experience that makes you sad, often you speak from the standpoint of, “they wasted my time”. And time is very precious. The thing about time that I really like is that time is a good that we’re all given equal amounts of; nobody on the planet, technically speaking, has more time in a day than anyone else. Now some of us have more days because some of us will live longer than others; pretty hard to predict. But no one has a longer day.

When you think about this, like the richest person on the planet has the exact amount of time in a day as the poorest person on the planet. Now, what happens is that people who are wealthier can get others to do things for them. So they make more efficient use of their time perhaps than some of the poorest who are forced to hardscrabble for themselves. So that’s where there’s some inequity there. But nonetheless, they still have the same amount of time, the rich person can’t buy more time, per se, it’s inexorable. And so if you think about time, from that standpoint, it’s this incredibly precious commodity that we’re all given the same amount of and it’s going down and declining every single day; you can’t do anything about it; can’t stop it; can’t wind it back; you can’t delay it; can’t slow it down; nothing; it just keeps going. Wouldn’t the highest calling for customer experience be to value that resource on the customer; to treat it with respect; with, in fact, more respect than the money that the customer gives us? Because isn’t their time more precious than their money? They can make more money, they can find more money, money is pretty fungible. But they can’t get more time. So when you waste a customer’s time, you’re actually taking advantage of them at a higher order than if you were to take their money. Think about that for a second. Where in your operation today are you making people feel like you’re giving them time back? This is why there’s been such a move to all the new modern channels, people want to asynchronously connect with companies because they want to be able to use their time more effectively. “I want to be able to manage this customer service issue, where’s my package, while also doing something else. be in a class or work at my job or watch something or whatever”. And this is a desire to do two things at once, essentially fast switching between them,  a desire to take better advantage of the time that we have available. If you take that as a sacred covenant that it’s your job as a company or as an organization to value the time of the people that work with you more highly than the money that they give you, does that change the way that you operate? Does that change the way you think? Does it change the way you think about your own people? The covenant you have with them on their own time? It’s kind of a neat way of thinking about things appropriate to our first anniversary. And I am going to sign off for today. We’ve got a whole brand-new year ahead of us. We’ll have some new sounds, some new guests, some new people, some integrations with Sprinklr TV, which will be super fun to do, and a whole bunch of other new ideas coming up. But for now, I’m going to sign off and for the Unified CXM Experience, I’m Grad Conn, CXO, Chief Experience Officer at Sprinklr and I’ll see you next … time.