The Science of Customer Experience: Insights from Scott Broetzmann

Wayne Herring 00:00:00 - 00:01:37
Hey, business builders. Today, I am joined by Scott Broetzmann. Scott is the founder of CCMC, Customer Care Management and Consulting. And Scott is special to me because back when I was in industry, back when I was a VP of sales and marketing of a family owned business, we had Scott come in, and he and his team designed a survey, gathered data, and then produced actionable results so that we could do better in terms of customer retention and new customer acquisition. Scott is also the creator of the customer rage survey, and that customer rage study comes out in partnership with a college every 2 or 3 years. And that rage study, even if you weren't to hire Scott to come and work individually with your company, would give you insights into why do customers get mad and why do they not want to refer other people or even worse, why do they become online terrorists? Scott's customer rage study will give you material that'll allow you to train your team to be more effective, and it'll make you aware of what angry customers want. Beyond that, though, Scott in this interview tells us about the journey as he formed his company and has he built this high level consultancy. And as he decided or came up with the idea that he was going to do the customer rage study, which gave him publicity and gave him street cred that helped him get some of his first clients, which then has morphed into this much larger and ongoing business that has persisted for a long time.
Wayne Herring00:01:38 - 00:01:42
You're gonna love this episode. Thanks Scott for showing up for the Business Builders.
Scott Broetzmann00:01:42 - 00:01:43
Good morning, Scott.
Wayne Herring00:01:43 - 00:02:04
Customer care measurement and consulting, CCMC is your business that you were just talking about. You're in the season of transition. And so on the Business Builder way, what I do is just talk to people about their story. How are you and how is your work and life and what's going
Scott Broetzmann00:02:04 - 00:02:33
on? Yeah. I mean, life is is good. I'm 64 now. I'll be 65 next month. And I find whenever I'm asked that question now, the immediate thing that comes to mind is, well, I finally got my Medicare card. So that's sort of a milestone in in life. And before that, 2 years ago, our, daughter gave birth to our first grandchild. She and her partner and the grandchild live with us, so that's sort of, you know, right up there at the top of of the conversation list.
Scott Broetzmann00:02:33 - 00:03:54
So, you know, the businesses has thrived over the last 5 or 6 years. Things have really kinda done very well, partially aided by the PPP grants that came with COVID. You know, we were one of the firms I imagine there were there were probably 3 kinds of firms that were in those buckets of PPP grants. You know, one were companies that you're gonna give it to them, but, basically, it's gonna be life support for as long as the money lasts. And when the money lasts, they're gonna evaporate. Then I think there's probably a second bucket where it's a 5050 coin toss with that grant, and then there was a 3rd bucket of companies that were doing okay, and that really allowed them to kinda strengthen their business as opposed to kinda continue hand to mouth. We were in maybe that 3rd bucket, so so that certainly played a role. But that wouldn't have been the case if there hadn't been plenty of hard work beforehand and and lots of effort to kind of grow the business in a very reasonable organic way, you know, where we never had illusions of being a large firm or really even setting the business up for for sale, you know, to make big multiples or anything at all like that.
Scott Broetzmann00:03:54 - 00:04:55
Like you, to some degree, we wanted to do good work, you know, make an honest living, and at the end of the day, have a little bit more control than we might otherwise if we were working through the man as part of a big company. So that, you know, the business is pretty good. It's a little soft now. The economy is a little soft, in the sense of there's and I saw this on the news yesterday, I think, at the consumer level, but I think it operates in the b to b sense too. A lot of people are just kinda holding their breath for November to see what's gonna happen before they make any major kinds of decisions, whether they be, you know, for their own household or whether it be for their business. So I'm attributing the softness to that because all the other economic indicators are that the economy's, you know, pretty robust at this point. So so, yeah, life is is good. We're just about to enter some point in the next couple of years, a big period of change, you know, retirement and, you know, transitioning the business.
Scott Broetzmann00:04:56 - 00:05:31
And so many of those things are undecided yet at this point. It's kind of in a liminal space, you know, of, real narrow space of trying to figure out what it will be, and it's not so much about the the business. I think the business ultimately will be will be okay. It's more about, you know, what's the next season of life for me? You know, that's kind of the kind of the piece. But, thankfully, I have a good therapist, and I have a good spiritual director, and those things kinda help provide some additional perspective. So, anyway, that's a thumbnail, in answer to your question, how am I doing?
Wayne Herring00:05:32 - 00:05:44
When did it occur to you to start a business? How did you start the business? So what what is CCMC right now? What does it look like? Yeah. What's the current state? And then we'll kinda go back to the to beginning a little bit.
Scott Broetzmann00:05:44 - 00:06:29
Sure. Sure. Sure. So cc often in a prospect meeting say that our vocation is customer experience surveys, helping companies do surveys that give them privileged insights into the customer experience that ultimately they can leverage to create better customer experiences and and grow their business. But our mission is really helping our clients make better business decisions about the finite resources they have for driving a better customer experience. The surveys are a means to an end. And the end here is people in in business, regardless of the industry, regardless of the size of the business, tend to be pretty bad decision makers. They rely on a lot of, a lot of decision making biases.
Scott Broetzmann00:06:29 - 00:07:37
I think I read that there are somewhere in the range of 1200 different biases that characterize our day to day decision making, and business decision makers are not immune from those sorts of things. And so we think a certain particular empirical data about the customer experience can help offset some of those challenges at making better decisions. So, you know, vocation and mission for us are are a little bit different, though obviously very, codependent on one another. But in any event, CCMC is, is also a boutique research and consulting practice in the sense that we're less than a dozen people. Some of those people have significant amounts of years in the practice of customer experience. You know, some of those folks are 50 years. Other people like me are probably closer to 35 ish, maybe a little bit more, maybe 40, depending on how you count the years in the early part of the career. And then we have some more folks that are kind of in between and and then a few folks that are more entry level analysts.
Scott Broetzmann00:07:37 - 00:08:36
We're headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, and I'm in the office today. But many of our staff are remote. When COVID took place, my business partner was not as favorable towards remote working as I was regardless of whether COVID was there or not. But I think he, like everyone else, really understood that if you were going to maintain a capable workforce, you were gonna have to learn to be more flexible around those kinds of things. And, you know, for many of our younger staff, given where we live, it's impossible to buy a house. And many of our staff were starting to come to the point where they were getting married or they had significant others, and they wanted to start that next part of their life. And so being remote allowed them to go to other places where they could maybe afford a different style of living than you could here in the exorbitantly priced nation's capital area. Everything costs a a fortune.
Scott Broetzmann00:08:36 - 00:09:51
So partly, resident, partly remote. Our business takes us to nearly every industry you can think of. Though I'd say that probably 70 ish percent of our business stream comes from business to business and the rest from business to consumer, tend to be companies that are, I guess, a blue chip, well known often for their investments in the customer experience. Although we have our fair share as well across the years of companies that were more in a crisis mode when they came to us to do a survey. There was some burning platform, that they were trying to jump off of and and needed the insights to do that, but but that tends to be the exception more than the rule. A lot of people would get into business with CCMC because they envision a a long term arc of how they're gonna change their culture and how they're gonna change the way they look at data and how they're going to respond to and act on the insights that they get. So it tends to be longer enduring relationships with our clients rather than kind of a shotgun transactional kind of, event where we do one survey and move on. Those happen too.
Scott Broetzmann00:09:51 - 00:10:18
But I think, oftentimes, if I can say it selfishly, that that's more a result of the immaturity of some of the companies that we might work with who are in the nascent stages of trying to figure out how they're gonna be more customer as opposed to company centric, and it's easy to fall off the wagon, particularly in the early years of trying to make that cultural shift. So, anyway, that's a bit about CCMC and who we are at present state.
Wayne Herring00:10:19 - 00:11:01
So super smart people who design surveys of customers to take a look at the customer experience and then provide this data to companies so they can make better decisions. And you and I know each other because we worked together years ago, and we were one of those companies that were trying to figure things out. And we were a one off if you will, but it was helpful. And many of the people that I work with know that I was a sales leader in a family business and that the business was in the used car warranty space. And we had the, the reason we came to you, Scott, was we had we were at this stage where we wanted to grow and we realized we were having a lot of churn. We were not a lot. No. That's not really true.
Wayne Herring00:11:01 - 00:11:53
We were having more churn than we wanted to have, or we recognized that if we could cut it down, then we were gonna it's it's easier to grow if you stop losing customers. So That's right. We wanted you to do a a survey of our customers and their experience so that hopefully they wouldn't leave. And in fact, maybe would use us more than the competition because it was a fairly commoditized type business where we were competing with 2 or 3 in any given auto dealer. We were competing with 2 or 3 other, used car warranty companies. We wanted a bigger share of wallet and hopefully exclusivity. And then of course, the other thing that we were trying to figure out was just how to get our foot in the door and what type of a thing would these car dealers listen to. Because when it really came down to it, apples to apples on paper, the companies, us and our competitors, all look the same.
Wayne Herring00:11:53 - 00:12:06
That might help people to understand what you do too. Like, share how do you encounter a company like like where we were at and then help them design a survey and then get get some data to them. What would that project look like?
Scott Broetzmann00:12:07 - 00:13:20
Yeah. In many other scenarios of clients we would work with, there are some engagements and relationships that begin with a much broader scope of work. You know, for example, we did something with a company called Charter Steel, which is one of the larger steel manufacturers in America. There happened to be in in Wisconsin. And that work began with trying to sensitize their frontline staff to how to treat their business business customers much better. And then it it evolved into a piece of work where we were doing an assessment of the customer service function, looking at all the things they were doing and and describing their compliance or lack of compliance with better practice for how they're handling customers in a whole bunch of different areas. And then that evolved into a customer survey, an annual customer survey that they do in order to get the customer's perspective on how things are going, and that relationship is now, I think, in its 3rd or 4th year. But that's an example of something that was probably a little bit broader in scope than what we might have done together with you at the time.
Scott Broetzmann00:13:21 - 00:14:38
But all of those projects, you know, if we're just talking about the survey piece, which is, I think, the most fundamental and I say it's the most fundamental because as much as companies might value to some degree our expert advice. You know, you work with whoever you're working with in in whatever industry. And and if you're working with somebody that's got 20, 30, 40, 50 years in the industry, whatever the industry is, whether it's consulting or or or a doctor, for instance, you have a lot more confidence in somebody that that, you know, has has been around the block more than once or twice. But back to the main point, these survey sorts of experiences with our clients, they tend to be, you know, maybe 16 to 18 week kinds of engagements, and our work is is end to end. We're helping companies sort of think about beyond the standard metrics one has to ask in these surveys. Were you satisfied overall? There's an NPS measure called net promoter score, which is a recommend question. You know, that's kind of a standard thing. And then there's a variety of others, but but it's helping companies think through the proper design and customization of the kinds of customer experience metrics that they wanna put up on a dashboard or that they want to have available to them to figure out how to improve the customer experience.
Scott Broetzmann00:14:38 - 00:16:12
So designing the survey, helping them with generating the list of customers, you have no idea, even in the advanced world we live in, how difficult it is for companies to even know who their customers are, the names, the addresses, the emails. And and in many cases, that sample is not just one person. It's not just Wayne or Scott. There are multiple key contacts within a company in trying to sort out who are they, how many of them are there, who should we include in the survey. It's an important question because as you well know from the cliche, garbage in, garbage out, the 2 things that have the most impact on whether you're gonna get good insights from any survey are, did you ask the right questions, and did you ask the right people? And did you get enough responses back from those from those right people to be able to generalize to your to your whole customer base? So help with the sample, we field the survey, whether that's by web or by mail or by telephone or in person kinds of interviews. And then we're analyzing the data, and then we're preparing reports, and then we're doing a number of different briefings to bring life to the data. The most important two briefings of which are one we call a roundtable briefing, which is where we spend the better part of a day with clients, trying to help them appreciate the fact that in many cases, data is made up of sort of black points, white points, and gray points. And what I mean by that is any survey is gonna tell you 1 or 2 things that are unequivocal.
Scott Broetzmann00:16:13 - 00:17:22
You could look at any of the data at any point, anywhere in the dataset, and it's gonna say, this is wrong or this is right. But there's only 1 or 2 of those things in every survey. 90% of the stuff in a survey is gonna fall in this gray area where you have to impose your own managerial wisdom and expertise on top of the data to make sense of it and to reconcile what may be disparate or conflicting pieces of information from the survey. And so the roundtable briefing is a chance to deal in a proactive way with helping companies begin to tell their own story about what the data mean and what they need to do to improve. That's a really important part of the process. And then the last piece, which, you know, I don't even know whether y'all did or not, is called action planning. Companies really struggle with operationalizing change in their business in response to these survey insights. You know, one of the one of the decision biases maybe that operates in that regard is, you know, they tend to look at the absolute results, the black and white ones, and sometimes overreact.
Scott Broetzmann00:17:24 - 00:18:41
Right? You'll I'm sure you've seen these things on Monday mornings after the NFL games. There's a whole column that says, here's what happened. Is it an overreaction or an underreaction? You know, that sort of thing. And so to the main point, action planning is a chance for companies in a facilitated way with our guidance to come together. And after their leadership says, we want to improve in these three areas, that cross functional set of, a team for for a company will take those priorities and begin to brainstorm using things like design thinking or at least derivatives of design thinking if you're familiar with it, and they'll begin to spec out a very rough project plan for how they're going to go about, implementing some kind of action for the priority. And the whole purpose of that is eventually to take whatever they produce, their output from action planning. And if you're in a big company, it would typically go to something called a PMO office, a project management office, who will make sure that, accountability and and and things happen. If you're in a smaller company, it might be transitioned to your lieutenant or somebody that you can know and trust that they're gonna actually follow through on making those actions happen.
Scott Broetzmann00:18:41 - 00:18:53
So that whole process takes about 16 to 18 weeks to, you know, to get that first line in the sand of strategic and and and very important tactical data.
Wayne Herring00:18:53 - 00:19:47
So when we work together, we didn't do that part of it, but what we had going for us was the CJ Zaruba was the guy that connected you with, you know, really my dad and I in the leadership team. And CJ had worked at Daimler and then doing truck financing, and I think that's where he met you. He was a very action oriented kinda guy and had been in the corporate environment where he understood how to put action to recommendations. So you gave us all this data and then certain you know, these are the black like, as you said, these are the black, very clear findings. These are kinda gray. We took that whole list, and we sat around and CJ said, we need to go through this, and we need to prioritize. And he introduced me to this maybe crass way of saying this, but, basically, he called it slow fat rabbits. We have to find the slow fat rabbits here.
Wayne Herring00:19:47 - 00:20:24
We gotta find those things we could do that are easy to implement, but will give us the most impact, the most bang for our buck. And then after that, we could start looking at the somewhat faster, but still fat rabbits. Still a lot of meat on the bone, a lot of benefit, but it's gonna be harder to execute on. And then he was that lieutenant. Or as I said, in my world, we call these people right handers, and the right handers help the visionary or the entrepreneur to say, let's let's not go find some new idea now. Let's stick with what we said we were gonna implement and be patient. Right? So, yeah, CJ was the guy that was the bridge there.
Scott Broetzmann00:20:24 - 00:20:27
I like that. Flow fat rabbits. I'll I'll be sure to
Wayne Herring00:20:27 - 00:20:28
blow Very technical.
Scott Broetzmann00:20:28 - 00:20:30
Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.
Wayne Herring00:20:30 - 00:21:07
No. It's okay. No. So, anyway but that that makes sense to me. You do the round table, and then you're helping people actually put action to it. And then with these bigger companies, maybe you come back around the next year to see have there been actual improvements in how customers feel like they were handled. And I know as a bridge, anybody listening, one of the things you do that I believe the business builders, my clients will benefit from, and I've shared this with some of that, If you do a larger study, you've been doing a larger study for years that you partner with the college to do that you call the customer rage study, I believe. Yes.
Wayne Herring00:21:07 - 00:21:07
Right?
Scott Broetzmann00:21:08 - 00:21:08
Yes. And
Wayne Herring00:21:08 - 00:21:34
so rather in your in your consulting work that the business does, you go work specifically with the data set of a company and their customers. And, but in this case, you're doing more of a broad brush and this would be useful information for almost anybody that has a business where they're interacting with customers. So could you tell us a little bit about that study? And how would people get it if they want a copy of it?
Scott Broetzmann00:21:34 - 00:22:04
Yeah. First of all, it's easy to get. If you go to our website, www customer care, m like March, c like cat.com, customer care m c dot com. There will be a a pop up where it'll invite you to request the most recent version of the rage study. So it's easy to get. We don't charge anything for you. You just have to tell us where to send it. So the the rage study, the origin of the rage study was 22 ish years ago.
Scott Broetzmann00:22:04 - 00:22:47
We had just formed CCMC. And and I formed CCMC with a guy that I had worked with where I was a right hander in his business. It was a much bigger business. It's, you know, 100 people globally, offices in London and a number of other places. And they sold that business to a company called Telespectrum, which is actually kind of up up it was up in your area, King of Prussia. Not exactly in your area, but but in your state anyway. And so I've gotten tired of working at at TARP after I changed hands so many times. That was the name of the company and formed CCMC with Mark Greiner is his name.
Scott Broetzmann00:22:47 - 00:24:05
He was a cofounder of TARP, and then he became a cofounder of CCMC. And and Mark, together with a fellow named John Goodman, had done what many regard as the most important study ever done in the customer experience or customer care field. And I know that sounds like some hyperbole, but at the time, back in the middle seventies, there was no study that told a a business owner or a company that if you improve the way you provide service to customers, you can make more money. And that's what that study did. And it was followed by some rather important studies that were done on a proprietary basis for Coca Cola and some other companies where they began to explore the powerful nature of word-of-mouth, which today is taken for granted as a primary vehicle for generating new business and new sales. But at the time, it was a rather important and novel set of data and findings about how word-of-mouth could have a much more significant influence than advertising or other kinds of lead gen activity. So in any event, Mark and John did this large study for the US Office of Consumer Affairs that was affiliated with the White House. A person named Virginia Nower was the project officer.
Scott Broetzmann00:24:05 - 00:25:18
She since since passed. But that study done in the middle seventies is frequently called the White House study, at least among people that are in the in the business of customer experience or the TARP study, sometimes it's called. And the study hadn't been done when we formed CCMC in it hadn't been replicated in probably 2 decades. So we thought, well, let's give ourselves a push off from the peer here by replicating that study. And I happened to read while I was preparing the questionnaire and some other things for the study. I happened to read something in the Washington Post, which said that retailers in the DC area were having trouble holding on to staff because the job was was awful with, you know, mean customers and low pay. And so I sort of took that as a potential research question at the time and said, well, what about really mean, ugly, awful customers? Is there anything that exists out in the marketplace of a body of research that's been done to better understand who they are, what they want, what their emotions are? And there really wasn't anything. There were pockets of research.
Scott Broetzmann00:25:18 - 00:26:19
For instance, there was one called hospitality rage. I think that was a master's thesis at some place up in the upper East Coast, so some university. There was another one called software syndrome rage. Of course, there was road rage, which is not related to customers per se, but there was no uniform construct or concept that kind of pulled all that together and and looked deeply into what makes customers really angry and what makes them tick and what do they want, etcetera, etcetera. So I convinced my business partner, Mark Greiner, to put in some questions related to what we were, at the time, just notionally calling customer rage, because there was no term customer rage 22 years ago. It just didn't exist. And and and so he thought I was kinda silly, but he he accommodated me, and we put in those questions. Well, it turned out because the other reason we were doing the study, by the way, was from a pure lead gen standpoint, we wanted to have some media coverage.
Scott Broetzmann00:26:19 - 00:27:03
And and, gosh, it didn't take long at all. It was like, shooting fish in a barrel. You come out with a study that talks about angry customers and how they yell and curse and scream. Well, media was very interested in in that even 22 years ago. Today, if you just contrast what the marketplace is like, it was a it was a lucky find. I mean, I business success, part of it is hard work, but part of it is just you get a lucky break here and there. Serendipity kinda kicks in and you get something that and that really explains the growth and the interest of the rage study and the media's attraction to it. It has a following in the popular press.
Scott Broetzmann00:27:03 - 00:27:34
It has a following in academia. It has a following in just the public at large. And that's because I think I forget who I was talking to the other day. Oh, it's 2 academicians from from way up east. They wanted to learn more about the rage study and what could they do, etcetera, etcetera. But every conversation I have about the rage study starts with somebody recounting their worst customer experience they recently had. Everybody has them. And I was saying to the 2 faculty members, customer rage has really become part of the human condition.
Scott Broetzmann00:27:35 - 00:28:19
You can't go a day if you're living the average life in America. You're buying products and services, and I think you would be challenged to find a day where you don't have some kind of question or problem that results from that experience with using the product or service. And it's only gotten worse. In fact, the rage study, if you go back to the White House version of it, I think at the time, it was about 32 or 31% of people said in the past 12 months they had a problem with a product or service. Today, that number is almost 75%. So products have become more complicated. Services have become more complicated. Businesses and the way that they go to market with those products and services have become more complicated.
Scott Broetzmann00:28:19 - 00:29:08
And all of that together probably is leading up to more problems and more serious problems with products and services. In any event, we did the rage study the 1st year, and our partner in that, as you rightly, point out, is, Arizona State's Center For Services Leadership, which is part of their business school. It's a consortium of companies that are members that pay to be part of that group so they can network with one another about various topics, among them, customer experience. And so ASU has been a cosponsor with us on that work. We do the study now every 2 to 3 years. It's self funded. Nobody pays for it. So we have to expend our own time and money in order to do it, but it became very much like a flywheel, if you get that that metaphor from remember, good to great.
Scott Broetzmann00:29:09 - 00:29:10
The guy talks about Jim Collins.
Wayne Herring00:29:10 - 00:29:11
Jim Collins. Yeah.
Scott Broetzmann00:29:11 - 00:29:11
Talks about He talks
Wayne Herring00:29:11 - 00:29:13
about luck too, which you mentioned.
Scott Broetzmann00:29:13 - 00:30:01
Yeah. Well, and and and and I didn't know that, but, certainly, the flywheel piece I I know of. And and the rage study was like a flywheel. It just kinda built on itself. It just it picked up momentum and people became more interested. And and now, you know, I get literally 100, if not a 1000 plus tasks per year for copies of the rage study from all those different cohorts that we talked about. So, you know, I'll say that from a business perspective, it doesn't necessarily lead directly one to 1 to a sale. But what it does do is it adds an element of authenticity to who we are, and it gives us there's no such thing most cases these days, it's not always true.
Scott Broetzmann00:30:01 - 00:30:53
There's no such thing as bad publicity. And that piece of work, the rage study, is a little bit left of the center point of what our core offerings are. But what I will say is that it makes us unique in the marketplace because nobody else has this, and many people want it. And many more people want it now because of what's going on every day that we read about in the newspapers. It's become very topical. But when the day is said and done with with my leadership in CCMC, I think I'll be pretty content that at least when it comes to what I might call business and social commentary, we've left our mark in the marketplace with respect to it. And it's an important topic. I'll just say one more thing about it, and and you may have other questions that we can talk about relative to it.
Scott Broetzmann00:30:53 - 00:32:15
Past year, for the PAST RAGE study, which was done and and released in 2023, we added a whole new set of questions on customer uncivility. And we're only beginning to, I think, educate the marketplace that what was once before just customer rage. Customer rage is when you or I have a problem with a product or service. That's the trigger. Customer uncivility, by contrast, at least the way we've defined it, is when the trigger is a sociopolitical difference of opinion between consumers and a business. And the most common examples, that anyone probably has heard of, and there are many more, there are 100 more, but the Chick Fil A position on sexuality is an example of something that could invite customer uncivility because people, regardless of whatever your position is, may disagree and others agree. The other example, of course, which is more more recent would be the Bud Light exam, which also happened to be about sexuality, by the way. But there are plenty of other things at the time when we did the study that had to do with a a company's position on COVID, a company's position on which candidate they were gonna support, and it's led to, at least for me, a reframing of customer rage conceptually.
Scott Broetzmann00:32:15 - 00:33:28
And the reframing is this, if you look at it in genus and species, genus is kind of the overarching thing and species are the little things underneath. The the genus of this is marketplace conflict Marketplace conflict. And and the species are customer rage, which is, you know, based on a product or service transaction. A species is the customer uncibilty, which is based on sociopolitical kinds of conflict and differences. And then there's 2 other pieces which are more matter of fact in a way, and they certainly come into play in the market these days, mental illness, and something I might call, well-being kinds of considerations. I don't have those completely thought out yet. But when you think about what we read about in the paper today, the outrageous acts, whether it's somebody fatally shot in a restaurant because the person didn't like how long it took to get their order or somebody opening an airplane door or any of the other sorts of things, those things 25 years ago were not normative behavior. Today, they're becoming potentially more normative behavior.
Scott Broetzmann00:33:28 - 00:34:19
P people are desensitized to the things going on. But if you think about all those things we read about, sometimes it's a result of somebody just went off because they had a bad product or service experience. And the example there might be your flight gets delayed, and, you get real angry and you shout at the person, at the desk when you're trying to rebook your flight. Some of that conflict, like the Chick Fil A or the Bud Light thing, is driven by those differences. Some of the conflict is driven by people who are in serious need of better mental health. They have a problem, and they can't get help, and there's no safety net, and things happen. And then lastly, I think some of those are are also are also caused by, what I was calling well-being considerations. Those are more societal in nature.
Scott Broetzmann00:34:19 - 00:34:44
So when you read about, let's say a dime store I'm aging myself here. A pharmacy or something like that, which is now locking up deodorant and soap and razor blades and all kinds of basic things that if you remember Maslow's hierarchy for needs, which talked about at the bottom is health, safety, food, etcetera. At the top is, you know, feeling, euphoria. Self actualization.
Wayne Herring00:34:44 - 00:34:45
Self actualized.
Scott Broetzmann00:34:45 - 00:35:35
But if you think about where we are as a society now, some of the marketplace conflict that we read about is generated by, disparities in income and the fact that people can't take care of themselves. And so I I I think of rage started as just a very simple kind of exercise in small business marketing and lead gen to some degree. It started as an exercise in trying to build on the good science that my colleagues had done many years ago, but it's morphed into something I think that is much bigger and has an important message to share ultimately with society in terms of how we think about the relationship between businesses and and customers. Yeah?
Wayne Herring00:35:35 - 00:36:22
Nice. Well, Well, that was beautiful, though, because in the course of asking that question, you ended up telling me a lot of your business story about starting it and the initial how you found some initial customers, and we got into the flywheel concept. So, you know, that was actually all really helpful. And, we're getting short on time, and I could ask you a whole pile of questions, Scott, and go down other paths. I was actually gonna ask you, you know, looking back now, how do you feel about, you know, the impact that your business has made? And you ultimately answered that. And you said, I think we've made an impact, and we've done this study, and it's been helpful for us, but it also put good data out there. And now you're exploring these other concepts that are, like, deeper and societal. And, it's, it's really fascinating.
Wayne Herring00:36:22 - 00:37:05
And so I hope that people that listen to this go and get, and I'll make it easy, you know, and link to the customer rage study, etcetera. Is there anything. Like, if you were to think of a handful of things, I was telling you about who my clients are, the they're entrepreneurs. So when you think about all the studies you've done in customer rage and uncivility, like, you know, what would be a handful of things that you would say to that kind of business owner who's, like, in many ways, the backbone of our small business economy in the US? Like, what what what are insights? You know, 1, 2, 3 things. Like, y'all should know this, or maybe you haven't thought about this, but this would be important to think about.
Scott Broetzmann00:37:06 - 00:37:30
Yeah. And I I guess most of these will be generated from learnings from, let's say, the rage study or all of our other proprietary research rather than, let's say, the subtext of those with and maybe there are a few of those that will come to mind as well. The subtext being as a as a business owner of a small business, what are the things you need to be most concerned about from a customer perspective?
Wayne Herring00:37:31 - 00:37:31
Mhmm.
Scott Broetzmann00:37:31 - 00:38:49
You know? And these are in no particular order, and I'll just sort of sort of try and deal, with economy of words on on each of them knowing that we're short on time. One thing I would say is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get a hold of comp whether you're a big company or a small company. And and I think that is the next major mountain to be climbed in in business for for customers because, in the rage study, one of the questions we had in the last one was, here's a bunch of things that might frustrate you about customer care that you get from companies with, you know, which of these have you experienced? Which are the most important? And and the 2 that were rose to the top were, I can't figure out how to contact them. And when I do, I gotta go through all these long telephone trees in order to get ahold of somebody that can actually help me. And that falls more generally under the area of access, and companies are becoming increasingly, almost private about how they do business. You can't find phone numbers. You're stuck talking to chat, and AI is only gonna complicate things worse. And so for the kinds of businesses that we've been talking about that you're working with, I I would start with, make it easy for your customers to get a hold of you.
Scott Broetzmann00:38:49 - 00:39:54
If it's difficult, they're gonna give up, and they're gonna go elsewhere. No question there. I think a second piece that also maybe comes from the from the rage study is when customers have a problem, you have to make sure that you know what they want to solve the problem. And that sounds really, really silly, but I'll put it in another context. The faculty member I mentioned earlier that I was talking to wanted to have a little bit of a dialectic, a a little bit of a debate about one of the findings from the RAGE study. And that finding says that if you wanna maximize satisfaction with a customer as a problem, you should make sure that you do things above and beyond the things that involve money, whether that means giving them a refund, giving them the service for free if it didn't work out first at the right time to fix whatever is still broken. Those are all money related things. But the rage study talks about the importance of nonmonetary remedies, treating people with dignity, reassuring them the problem won't happen, giving them apologies.
Scott Broetzmann00:39:54 - 00:40:29
And I'll and I'll I'll build on that, give you an example from my own experience a couple weeks ago. I stayed at and I'll leave it unnamed for our purposes, but it's a it's an international hotel chain. You would know who they are. You've everyone in the audience has probably stayed at some of these kinds of hotels. And it was not a high end, but it was not a low end. It was one of these sort of European style, type hotels. So I've, I'm checking out in the morning, and, and I'm going through my usual protocol of packing and getting things together. And I noticed that a bag on the floor that I left there yesterday is missing.
Scott Broetzmann00:40:30 - 00:40:50
And I had bought some things that I was in a a major city with a university, and I bought some things from there, and I had some other stuff in there. And the bag is missing. It's like, oh god. Did I you get old, you get to be 64, and you forget a few things. It must be me. No. I I did leave it there. So I go down and I talk to the front desk person, and I say, look.
Scott Broetzmann00:40:50 - 00:41:31
I there's a bag missing. It had something and I bought it. It wasn't very expensive, but it's kind of the principle of the thing and one of 2 things happened. They either threw it out because they thought it was trash, which can happen, or somebody took it. And I said, I'm I'm asking 2 things of you. 1, do not reprimand or fire the person that cleaned my room because that person, regardless of the circumstance or why, they need this a lot more than I do, and they need that job. Do not do that. And then I then I said, the other thing I'd like to know is, is it around still? And so the person that was that I was talking with in in a very you can tell from what I'm saying.
Scott Broetzmann00:41:31 - 00:42:21
I think I was pretty authentic, and I was not, you know, overdramatized. Person looked at me and said, well, other than that, how's your stay been here? That was the answer I got for articulating, here's the problem. Here's what I want. And so companies today, and if you think about the example I gave, particularly for your businesses you're working with, frontline employees and particularly the now I sound like an old guy. The younger generation don't always have a context for how to have genuine authentic conversations with customers. It's an acquired skill. Mhmm. And so the advice to your brethren, your colleagues that you're working with is you better make sure that you go through, you know, sort of mock customer kinds of conversations and train people how to react.
Scott Broetzmann00:42:21 - 00:43:15
It we did a study, a long time ago called the art of an apology, and we created a fake problem, a small problem, so it it would survive the what are called the the human subjects kinds of limitations in universities where you can't do bad things to people just to to do good research. It was a small problem where we said and all the businesses we called, we called a 100 businesses, they all had to have retail locations. So it was people in consumer electronics, auto, those sort of things. And the problem we created was I called yesterday, and you gave me the address of the retail location. I went there, and there was no business there. So I wasted a lot of my time. And then what we did is we scripted 5 different requests for an apology that varied on the low end from what I was describing, you know, this is a real hassle and cost me time. Mhmm.
Scott Broetzmann00:43:15 - 00:43:51
2, the last one would have been well, I would have least expected an apology, and then everything was in between. And we studied how long it would take companies to apologize, what they said when they apologized, to better understand at a micro level some of that very real interaction. And long story short, you know, what we learned is that companies were not very good at apologizing. They didn't do it quickly. Most times, reps were caught by surprise. Oftentimes, reps would be accusatory towards and and sort of blame somebody else, you know, for what happened Yeah. Right. That I'm sort of owning it, etcetera.
Scott Broetzmann00:43:51 - 00:44:26
So, again, general point here, make it easy for your customers to access. Make sure that your employees know when they get in an interaction with the customer, regardless of what channel, telephone, in person, by chat, that they know the basic rules of how you're going to have a genuine, authentic conversation with customers about the problem and and its solution. So I you know, if a small business did nothing else but those two things, they would be very much more competitive in their marketplace on the basis of service.
Wayne Herring00:44:27 - 00:44:54
Yeah. That's that's really great advice. And I I like the idea of rehearsal or role playing that very basic situation. It's uncomfortable. You know, I do a lot of sales work, and it's uncomfortable to to role play or rehearse with people until you get going, then it's not so bad. And same with that. Like, people wouldn't like it up front, but then to have been in this situation and rehearse through it makes it easier to handle.
Scott Broetzmann00:44:54 - 00:44:56
It sure does. It sure does. Yeah.
Wayne Herring00:44:56 - 00:45:10
That's really great. Well, Scott, I appreciate you showing up and and sharing all of your insights and and story. And like I said, we'll link to that document. Really great. Well, thanks, Scott. You have a great day.
Scott Broetzmann00:45:10 - 00:45:14
It's so good to see you. Thanks thanks for Likewise. Having us be part of this.
Wayne Herring00:45:14 - 00:45:14
Alright.
Scott Broetzmann00:45:14 - 00:45:16 Have a good weekend. See you too.

1. How important is role-playing or rehearsal in preparing for difficult sales situations, according to Wayne Herring, and how can it be effectively implemented in a small business setting?

2. In what ways does Scott Broetzmann suggest companies can improve accessibility for their customers, and why is this critical for maintaining customer relationships?

3. What non-monetary solutions for customer problem resolution does Scott emphasize, and how might these affect a company’s reputation and customer loyalty?

4. Discuss the significance of the "customer rage study" conducted by Scott Broetzmann and CCMC. How have customer dissatisfaction trends changed over the years according to the study?

5. Explore the concept of "marketplace conflict" introduced by Scott. How does this relate to broader societal issues, and what role do companies have in addressing these conflicts?

6. CCMC focuses on long-term client relationships and culture change. How can businesses shift from being company-centric to customer-centric, and why is this transition important?

7. Scott Broetzmann reflects on the challenges businesses face in implementing changes based on survey insights. What are some strategies to ensure that survey data leads to meaningful action?

8. How has the shift to remote work affected CCMC's operations, and what can other boutique firms learn from their adaptation strategies post-COVID?

9. How does Scott Broetzmann's personal journey and milestones, such as nearing retirement, influence his outlook on business transition and future changes in CCMC?

10. In the context of "The Art of an Apology" study, what are some best practices for companies to develop authentic and effective apology strategies to manage customer dissatisfaction?