Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with people and companies building the future of customer experience.
Table Service is presented by Tavolo Consulting and I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Nate Brown loves two things very much, customer experience and community. Fortunately, these concepts go hand in hand. As a community builder, Nate Co founded CX Accelerator in 2018.
Quickly growing to well over 4,000 members, this vibrant collection of CX leaders is helping one another to maximize their career and accomplish remarkable things in service to others. Nate also heads up advisory services for Metric Sherpa, a research firm helping organizations to transform customer interactions. When not CXing, Nate is a competitive disc golfer, certified pickleball instructor, husband to a super cool wife, and dad to two incredible daughters.
Nate, welcome to the table.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Thank you, Jordan. It is an honor to be at this table. I brought some bread to break. It's a baguette.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Brilliant. I the level of respect I have for you for leaning into this theme is immense. So thank you very much. You were the first person to bring more than just coffee to the table.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Come on. I do have some hot cinnamon spice tea as well.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: We are well prepared. I've got my second cup of coffee going over here and we're good to go.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: If things really go crazy, we're gonna have to break out these mandolins because I keep staring longingly at your beautif mandolin that you have back there, man.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: I'm not sure how well Riverside would handle that though. So we might, might have to wait until we're in person somewhere.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Love that. Love that.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Well, Nate, for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, I'd love if you could tell us a little bit more about yourself. Let's hear the story.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I live in Nashville, love customer experience, work, and I use that in a very royal sense. Basically anything that's this dealing with customer centricity I've just been very attracted to since my early 20s. I was selling postage meters on the streets of Jacksonville, Florida for a period of time and that didn't go super well. I got tired of getting custom out of strip malls, so. But I did find that those who had a little postage meter, I really enjoyed offering customer service to them and so found my way into a customer service role. Super high volume, ticket monster kind of guy, working for a management company for 12 years that became UL, took ownership of that team and man, it's just been such a fun ride. Morphing from that customer service background into more enterprise level customer experience.
Did some really fun consulting for Warner Brothers Games and Sun Basket and Bosch and some other companies. And now, you know, independent with a dear friend of mine, Justin Robbins. And we're changing the CX world as analysts and as, as people making dynamic content. And it has been the most fun six months of my career.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. Let's, let's talk a little bit before we dig into the.
Some of the core concepts that I know inform everything that you're doing. I'd love to hear a little bit more about CX Accelerator. So I know for me, I' member of CCX accelerator since 2022, I believe, and have found it to be an incredibly valuable place. I think half the guests that I have on this podcast are members of the community as well, so. Definitely valuable. Definitely a great place, a fun place too. But I'd love to hear a little bit more from you on what was the, the idea that started Accelerator.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I was, I was inside of ul, which, which is a great company, but as a customer experience person, I felt really lonely.
Like I was trying to do something that was new and different to the organization and I needed inspiration beyond the walls of my office.
And at that time, I mean, in 2018, there was not a lot of places to channel into as a new CX professional. You know, like that burst forth starting point. There was a. I call it a legacy institution that was very good for hearing analysts pontificate about how smart they were. It wasn't quite for me, so I was like, you know, I need something a little different where I can be vulnerable and lear and, you know, be on level playing field with other people that are also wanting to learn and grow, but are new in the space and it just wasn't there. So we started it. And, you know, Erica Moroise, Jeremy Watkin, Jenny Dempsey, Kay Chapman, Becky Roman, you know, those are really our original leaders. And we built something very cool and very special. And it has helped. It has truly helped a lot of people to get started in the field of CX and to crunch into a meaningful, rich career. And that is still the goal of it. We have some really good new ways that we're going to try to do that this year that we're really excited about. But, you know, that's why it got started and that's why it still exists.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: You know, I think one of the things that a lot of folks maybe don't understand, and obviously we're talking about CX is this very wide tent that encompasses all sorts of things. For me, I'm A CX lover, but I'm also a support leader, so that's kind of my specific stream. But generally, I think when folks think about jobs and service roles, they think about them as short term. They think about them as stepping stones to the next thing. They think about them as a necessary evil because you got to pay the bills.
How can we change that dynamic? How can we help think about work for service workers where in which they can have a really rich and rewarding career?
[00:05:09] Speaker B: It's a great question. And I do think, coincidentally, that that is kind of changing for us. The world around us is shifting to the point where the idea of a very remedial transactional customer service role that's not going to exist as much anymore. And that's good. Like I'm a fan of that. The customer service roles that are out there today require a highly skilled strategic professional. I like to call it a mini marriage ceremony. So you've got it. You've got to be able to speak the language of the customer in such a way that you can infer what the customer is not able to say. Like they don't know enough yet to guide themselves to success.
So you've got to know so much about that customer Persona and what they're looking to achieve. And you can marry it then to the real capabilities of the business. Not what the marketing team says that you do, but like what you could actually do.
And you bring the customer, the customer's true need, unstated or stated, together with the actual capabilities of the business. That's a remarkably capable person.
I personally, Jordan, and we might disagree on this a little bit. I'm okay with the stepping stone thing and I have, I'm the type of support leader. I have hired a lot of support professionals and I have seen them move into unbelievable careers in other areas of organizations from that customer service role. And I celebrate that. I love that. But for those that want to have a rich and meaningful career in that field, they should be able to get paid well and they should be able to have a career path there in front of. And that that is what has lacked that I feel like is changing now for us because you've got that capability to become this customer service machine that can do so many things and it leads to a very, very strategic resource for the company.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: I agree with you entirely there from the stepping stone standpoint. I think one of the things that I've loved as a support leader is that a lot of folks that have come through and I would say less than half of Them stick around in some kind of customer truly customer support role. But I've spun people off to customer success. Account management, sales, you name it.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: But I had a period of time where I got to go. What does it look like to really love your customer and have a passion for your customer? So now they're a sales leader who loves customers. They're an account manager who loves customers. They're designing products that customers are crazy about because they're always thinking with the customer mind so fully aligned with you there in terms of that. And then especially for those who want to stay, I mean, I'm one that stayed. I left customer support briefly and did a little stint somewhere else and was like, no, not, not my thing. I really, I really love where I'm at. And so I totally agree. I think we have a really cool opportunity as this generation of leaders to go now. This is not the status quo anymore. We can do something really special here.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And thinking about what customer service is becoming like, I've been using a few terms and one of them is that of knowledge curator.
So it's this idea of making the organization smarter with every customer interaction.
So suddenly you're doing service at scale. Like you're not just taking calls, you're not just taking tickets. Like you're, you're making the organization more intelligent by deciphering the customer's needs and learning from those interactions. And the other one that I think I'm even more excited about, I know we're going to get into this topic is that of a community facilitator.
Look at how many brands already are using community as a customer service channel.
I mean, the gaming industry did it first. I mean, look at discord and the fact that you had players supporting players for a couple decades, then the tech industry picked it up.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: And you've got these Apple experts that are customers that are supporting other, other Apple users. And they've kind of gamified that and point ified that in some ways. Well, I mean, that's spilling over into so many different retail applications. It's spilling over even into B2B applications. I built for, for a safety science company. I built a small community where you had people that loved a certain product that were able to directly interface and help other customers of that product. And it really gave them a unified sense of identity and they were really helping each other in a way that's just a little different than what customer service could offer. But what does customer service do in that they become facilitators of those Interactions.
They're pumping value into that. They're guiding this really great community function. And that's just another way that we get to elevate our legacy view of customer service into something really new and exciting and strategic.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Absolutely. Let's think about that a little bit more. So in terms of how we build up that community first inside of our organization, you know, what does it look like to get customer experience, customer service, customer support at the table, to even start these conversations and then let's expand out to customers. So let's start there internally. What does it look like to start to build that discipline of knowledge management in terms of customer experience?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I love, I love your at the table comment, especially given our podcast.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Yes.
I guess before we even go at the idea of getting to the table, like, let's. Let's get inside of our own head and heart a little bit and just think about is the circle of psychological safety around me?
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Do I have that to where, like, I can focus on customers and get excited about the brand promise of the organization that I'm serving, or are there factors that are. That are sucking that excitement away and making it to where I am very distracted in a mode of self preservation in one way or another. And that can take a lot of different forms.
We can sadly become a victim of our own jobs.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: There's a lot of different things that can happen in the corporate environment that are really sad and negative.
So we've got to insulate these folks as leaders and restore that circle of psychological safety around them. And to some degree, we can't do that for them. They get to do that for themselves and we get to do that for ourselves. And as we succeed in that, the circle kind of pulsates outward and we get to draw other people into that and get them excited and activated. Activated about what we're getting to do in service to these customers and how unique that is. And we start building a community inside of the circle of safety and then it starts to expand outward and pulsate out. Eventually we get to invite our customers into this as well. But. But until we have that established and there's that good, safe, healthy culture inside of the service team, you almost haven't earned the right yet. Jordan, in my mind to go find the table, that's just me. I don't know, that might be a little unrealistic or extreme. And what do you think about that?
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Sure. I think there's probably a level of balance. I think in an ideal world, we would have a six Month period. Especially coming into a new leadership role, developing in that, to kind of build that in reality, you've probably got a little less time than that to get things moving before the. There's some conversation with the higher ups of, hey, you know, we hired you to deliver, and you're not quite delivering yet. So I think there is a balance. But I love that thought of this being really the ideal of what does it look like to actually set people up for success? And I think that's really what we're talking about here, like, as a company, as leaders, as a business. What does it look like to not just see our people as cogs in the wheel, but to see them as people coming in to deliver to our customers and wanting to do that. And I think if a company doesn't think about their people that way, I'd kind of prefer they just shut down and move on. On. I'd like.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: I've got a few. I could name a few. I was telling Jordan before the podcast started, I was on the phone with a company for two and a half hours yesterday. I was literally screaming in the woods at a bot.
But I. I will. I will digress there. No, I. I love how you say that, Jordan, but, yeah, I mean, you're right. There is that pressure to deliver. A lot of this is in the onboarding cycle, right?
[00:13:13] Speaker A: I mean, absolutely.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: How often do we look at the onboarding as speed to competence? I hate that.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: And I get, you know, and I've been an L and D person that's designed some of those onboarding programs, and I. I know why that's important, but I like to think about it now in terms of speed and depth of activation.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Yep.
Yeah.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: Have we. Have we got this? Like, the main thing in my mind that I'm trying to achieve in onboarding is is this person excited to work here?
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Mm.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: And if we haven't done that, then. Then something's wrong with. With what we did in those first couple of weeks. Like, they should be activated and excited to jump in and do something really special with the skills that they have.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Then let's continue to hone in and develop those skills. And that's a very, very much an ongoing process. That's not an onboarding thing.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Very true.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: But there's an educational element where, of course, you know, practically there's things about this organization you've got to know and learn. And we're going to accelerate your. Your indoctrination into those truths.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: But more. More than anything, like, I'm Working on peer to peer relationships. I'm working on culture, like let' person activated as deeply and as quickly as possible.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: I also think there's an element there that we miss so much of how valuable fresh eyes are on what we're doing day in and day out in our work. And when we're driving to that, hey, let's make sure you're competent. Let's make sure you can respond to as many support tickets as possible day. We are missing so much of an opportunity to give them margin to go, hey, why are you, why are you doing that that way? That doesn't make sense. Maybe you should do it another way. And then you're giving people ownership as well of what they're doing. And so I love that. Of, you know, what does it look like to, yes, let's get them competent, let's get them developed. But what does it look like to get them active, excited? Because most people, you know, they sign that job offer, they get into the job, they're excited, you know, they're ready to go. Especially in this environment where so many people are coming into role after a few months of not working, yeah, maybe I'm ready to go.
And then it turns into, well, all right, here's your three weeks of onboarding. And then throw you to the wolves. But instead, if we can say, you know, here's your three weeks of onboarding, now you've got the margin, you've got some knowledge, so you can go be dangerous and let's let that person go be dangerous.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Love it. Yeah. When I was developing, you know, last year, the onboarding program for a major performing rights organization in the music industry, I would challenge each of the person that was going through. They had their own personal onboarding plan. And I would tell them, I want you to help me make this better for the next person.
Like, let, let's, let's together make this something even better for the next person. And each of them did that in their own special way. And it was really exciting to see much and how quickly that onboarding developed into very much a peer to peer led concept that became really special.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's, again, it just changes so much of the ownership mentality. It's not, I'm the leader and therefore I own this whole thing. It's you own what you're doing day in and day out, and I'm here to support you in that. And it just changes that mentality. I love, love that thought of how do we quickly get people involved in improving the process Improving the experience for the folks who come up behind them.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: And that's the caliber of a customer service professional that we need for the work as it is today, regardless. Like, we need that type of elevated strategic resource.
And so let's let them be that. You know, so often we talk about how they could and should and would be these things, but then we as leaders put them in this little box and just have them taking tickets, essentially.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Break the handcuffs off that chatter, that box. Let, let them do some really cool things and they will surprise you, I guarantee it. Every I've worked for where I've extended freedom, I've needed to provide some guidance. We've needed to change some things along the way. But I have never regretted giving additional freedom and responsibility to frontline staff, ever.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Absolutely. I think giving that level of agency is so critical. And also, as we talked about the safety of knowing if you make a mistake, it's okay. I mean, sure, there's some egregious ones. That's, that's a different conversation. That's 1% of our, of our conversation here. 99% of the time you make a mistake, that's okay. We're going to learn from it, we're going to develop from it. So how do we develop that safety?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: So let's say a company has done a good job of that. We've developed that psychological, you know, circle of safety. Our people come to work, they feel supported, they feel confident, they're developing, they're growing, we're supporting our customers. Well, how do we then start to expand that out past the walls of our, our proverbial office building, which is likely everybody's house now, out to our customers.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. I mean, we do need a mechanism where we get to invite our customers in, you know, and there's a lot of different forms of customer invited communities. I mean, the most basic and the one that we've been doing for a long time is something like a customer advisory board where you've got a group of customers that represent kind of your larger demographic of customers in a smaller format, and you're investing into them, you're having conversations with them, you're interviewing them, that you're, they're bringing them into the office and they're, they're a part of different meetings and strategic conversations. So leveraging that customer advisory board, a lot of times that's done on a sales and marketing level and customer service doesn't participate in that.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: And that's A huge miss. Like they should be a big part of that and benefiting from the relationship with those customers, that would be one. But then, you know, we're expanding now this concept of brand communities. And you know, there's a brilliant resource by Mark Schaefer called Belonging to the Brand, which really highlights, you know, the use cases for a brand creating a digital community.
It could be in the form of an app, it could be in the form of an existing community platform like Geneva or Slack or Discord or any of those. So there's a variety of ways that you create a space where you get to co create alongside your customers.
So what do you do? Well, first you invite those core customers in that are excited, that are activated in a healthy way and you start to build a community that has that really positive feel inside of it and you're collaborating and co creating inside of that space. And your customer service team, you're training them on how to be community facilitators and there's some great training on that from Community Roundtable as an example. I went through that training, loved it. But you're investing in them in terms of their ability to backchannel and moderate and guide a community function. Then you start to invite your larger customer set in and it's brilliant. Jordan, what happens, I mean, when you've established the good positive culture in the community, these other folks see that, they recognize it and they hop on the train and they kind of inherit the vibe that was already there. And that minimizes the need for formation and moderation because it just really helps to accelerate both of those things.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Talk to me a little bit about how you think a sport leader, an experienced leader, goes to more leadership and sells this concept of what we need to do in this way. What's the best way to approach those types of conversations?
[00:20:29] Speaker B: It's all about value, right? I mean, if we think about customer service interactions, you know, we've, we've been on this efficiency train for decades, but you know, I feel like we're finally kind of weaning off of that. And I feel like customer success has given us the kick in the arse that we really needed to be able to say there is something more important than efficiency. It's value, it's generating value. And we have an amazing opportunity in these customer interactions to do that. So training these service workers up, freeing them from the shackles of average handle time, and as I like to say, let's make the quick parts quick, finding information, doing this, you know, whatever, let's make those parts Efficient, of course, but let's make the meaningful part slow. Let's slow down, let's connect, let's generate value, let's do something really special with these parts of the interaction.
So those things start to happen. Jordan, as you start to get that mindset, as your quality scorecard starts to shape in that way, you create a very different mentality within your service staff.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Where they are trying to generate value and do something really cool and special here.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: I love that thought of directing that through the lens of value because obviously a lot of other leaders we talk to, that's still their thinking, which in some ways that, that is their job. We have a different lens to view from. So how we talk about that I think is really critical. So. So I love that idea of approaching it in that way. Just speaking of mentality and in general, I'd love to talk a little bit about a concept that you've shared about the servant challenger mentality. I'd love to hear a little bit more about this.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Well, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to do that. So I was reading a lot of books in the past couple of years and I saw the repetition of this concept of challenger. I mean, obviously Matt Dixon with the challenger sale and then the challenger customer, you've got radical candor, which is that care personally so that you can challenge directly and right there in the circle of psychological safety. If you look at the original four cycles by Timothy R. Clark, the final stage of that circle is that of a challenger.
And what that means is it's somebody who is again activated. And I am pushing the boundaries of the status quo in a healthy way. And there's this unbelievable resource called prime to perform. And they break down very clearly. Why? The most dangerous element inside of an organization is inertia.
And we get stuck in a rut as individuals, we get stuck in a rut as companies. We keep doing silly things or ineffective things or failing to innovate, failing to evolve when our customers are, we need to. But like we get stuck in these patterns of inertia. So what we need are challengers who have that ability to break the status quo and, and, and are in a place where they have the knowledge, the skill, the desire like to actually do that. But, but, but, but I've seen that happen in an organization where you had just a bunch of rogue challengers who were unleashed. And I, I call it the wild wild west of, of innovation. And it was the dumbest thing you could ever witness. This one leader had just, just he read like lean Startup something something. And he got it, got in front of the whole company at an all hands on deck meeting. He's like, everybody go do it. Just do it. Kaizen project. Like go, go find something to change. Break the pavement, shatter the walls. And so like everybody goes and finds like some random petty thing that's relevant to them but nobody else.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: There was no culminating impact. There was no alignment, like there was no strategy.
It fizzled out with his days within days. It was so, it was so silly.
But it's good, like it's healthy in a way for us to look around and be like, hey, this is, this could be better. But then, so what are we missing? The idea of service like which, which is in us, Jordan. Like we have that most of us programmed in of this idea of I want to elevate you, I want to serve you and that idea of being a servant leader.
I'm going to guide you to where you want to go, I'm going to serve you in your journey there and I'm going to elevate your voice. I'm going to remove impediments for you, I'm going to help you along the way, but I want to focus on that idea of elevating your voice.
So as we together are in a healthy place and we're challenging the status quo of the organization but we're not doing that for us. We're not doing that because something bothers just us or to lift ourselves up and to further our own career. Like we're starting to look around and think how can we both challenge and, and serve those around us.
And what you start to have is this collective genius. Not my term.
Thank you. Linda Hill. Brilliant resource called collective Genius. You start to get that type of atmosphere where people are aligned, they're excited about the brand promise, they're excited about serving customers. So they're trying to achieve the same objective, but they also have the courage and capability to break the inertia servant challenger. So that's what we're trying to create. Jordan.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: I love that concept. We've obviously been hearing about the concept of servant leadership for a long time and a wonderful, incredible concept that we need to practice and I love this expansion of it. To think even more deeply about how we go about doing that. Curious as we've talked about just kind of these various aspects of how a company go about doing this. Do you have any success stories you could tell us about companies? Whether you name the company or not, of, of how companies have gone and implemented these things and the changes that that has brought to their organization.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a wonderful retailer in the Midwest that sells physical education equipment to PE teachers.
And they, they have activated some servant challengers in a really cool way.
And a lot, a lot of it through Voice of Customer.
So it, they started doing a thing called like VOC3. So let's think about one way that we can improve the customer experience. Based on the interactions that I've taken today, what's one thing that's going really well and what's a dot that I can connect, help reduce friction internally. 1, 2, 3. VOC 3. But think about how strategic that is. You didn't just go through the day taking tickets.
You went through the day thinking about how can I get smarter through these interactions.
They layered on a really cool customer Persona education program.
And all of a sudden what you have are these people who know more about the customer and who they're serving. They're excited to serve those and they're challenged and equipped with this new information on how to go break inertia.
And these people are activated and they're, I mean, the customer service team is the life of the organization.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: And what a cool testimony to how, how powerful.
Listening to customers and, and using that information in a strategic way and helping and guiding the organization to be more customer centric, which is a superpower that we have.
What a testimony to what most organizations could do with their customer service department.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: You know, we think about these just giants that have service that we all love and have a great experience with. I was recently talking with someone who worked at Zappos in the early days of their customer support team. And the way they did service and the way they think about that and we just don't hear about a lot of companies like that anymore. There's a few, there's a few that are well known.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: Navy, Federal Credit Union, Chewy, Lego. You've got classics.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: Yeah, the classics, but we don't hear it that much. And so to see even smaller companies start to think like, you know what, we don't have to be big to do this. We can be small and do this and we'll likely grow because of this. But that's not the whole, the whole purpose of it, but makes a huge impact.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: It's gonna happen. And here's, here's what I think is happening.
We have this surgence of these unbelievable AI capabilities.
But I mean it is creating a tremendous amount of groupthink.
And you have these companies that are going full bore into these Automated channels.
How distinctive is that going to be in a year? Like right now it's kind of cool, right? It's new, it's different. Wow. Wow. Look how quick I got this. I just used AI to self service like, like. And that, that feels interesting right now Think about a year from now when all these companies are using essentially the same AI vehicles to do the same things.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: How distinctive is that level of service?
So I'm not saying it's bad, it's good. And you need that frictionless layer that's there.
But they're already reducing cost and eliminating the strategic part.
So yeah, let's layer on the frictionless experience through AI capability. Well, where's the connection part? Where's the part where you're co creating with customers? Where's the part where you're humanizing the experience and creating a distinctive brand that looks different from every other company down the road that does what you do?
[00:29:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: And so you're going to have organizations that get that and organizations that don't.
And where is loyalty going to go? Loyalty is going to be awarded to those companies who take the extra time to develop a human strategic experience and do the type of things that we're talking about and don't simply take the full on efficiency path.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Right. Yeah.
I also think from the other side of that, the companies that are in that space that are developing that AI technology, those pieces that think in that manner of. My tool is not there to take away your support team. My tool is there to empower your support team. Those are also going to be the companies that are going to be most successful. When they think about the fact that yeah, nobody wants everybody's support to look exactly the same. Mine needs to be unique to my company. It needs to sound like my team. It needs to be an experience that you have come to know and appreciate with my organization. And I think our AI technology companies that think in that way are going to also be the most successful in this space.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: I mean, ring ring.com it's amazing that we can install our own security systems by the way, and do it really quickly. Like their out of the box experience is unbelievable.
But I did get stuck at one point and I had to call and I called into their service center and their whole brand is like, neighbor, you're part of our neighborhood.
So it's like, hey neighbor, how can we help you today? Like that kind of feel.
I love that. Yeah, but, but is that it? No. Like they have all this data in front of them. They know, they knew exactly what I was calling about. Like, I didn't. I didn't have to say anything. Like, they knew exactly where I was in the process. Like, the intelligence that they had around the digital experience was unmatched.
So, I mean, that. That right there is the combination of a really personal, distinctive, exciting brand that's using AI capabilities in a really smart way. Yeah, it can be done.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Well, Nate, as we wrap up this conversation and head towards the end here, I'd love to take a few minutes for just any closing thoughts you have for our listeners around these topics or anything else in this huge tent of sea X that you and I both love so much.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Goodness gracious. Try out pickleball I played this morning. It is definitely a good way to foster your own circle of psychological safety. I feel like there's such an interesting thing that's happened with that game. I mean, it exploded during COVID right?
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Just blew up. It's been around since the 70s. I mean, you might have played it in the gym with, you know, Betsy or PE teacher, but, like, you know, it was just for that. And then really old people. So what happened? I mean, this game is taking over the nation. Fastest growing sport ever. It's the community element. It's the community element. Like, all of a sudden, your identity becomes that of a pickleballer because you have 10 new friends that you made in an hour, and. And you're like, this feels good. Like, my mind is moving, like, you know, head, heart, hands kind of thing. Yo, they're. They're all aligned. Like, they're all activated.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: And then you layer on that. That sense of identity and community. Layer that. That's what we should be doing at work. Folks like that, make your own pickleball phenomenon through the unique brand promise that you have at your job.
Look at tribal leadership if you've ever seen that resource. Jordan.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: I don't believe I have.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: It's so cool. So it talks about, like, the level of tribes you have in organizations, and most people get stuck at level 2tr, which is. Well, I'm okay, but most people around here suck.
Level three tribe is okay. The people around me are kind of smart, and I like what we're doing. Level four is like, this is amazing. I can't believe I get to be here creating what we are creating.
So it's like, push beyond that level two tribe of here. I am, you know, working, you know, doing this thing and, you know, just waiting for something to happen.
Not not only activate yourself, but find how you can activate those around you and start to pulsate that circle of psychological safety outward like that. That would be my biggest encouragement to you. And root it in the unique brand promise of your organization because that's, that's a superpower that only you have and that's what creates loyalty for your team and for your customers.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: It's a great bow on top of a very valuable package that you've delivered to us today. So thanks for taking the time to do that. Now, Nate, if folks wanted to get in touc touch with you, hear more about you, learn more about CX Accelerator or Metric Sherpa, what's the best way for them to to do that?
[00:33:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Cxaccelerator.com follow us on LinkedIn would love that. Metric sherpa.com you know, come and let Justin and I light a fire for you. We could do that in a whole variety of ways and would be honored to help do that. So yeah, I'm also somewhat active on X, though not as much lately. Yeah, LinkedIn and the online and through Slack, you know, CX accelerator, Slack channel as well would be the best ways.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, we'll include those links in the show notes below. But Nate, thanks so much for joining us here at the Table. This has been an incredible conversation and really appreciate your time.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Thanks, Jordan. Thanks everybody.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: You've been listening to the Table Service podcast. You can find out more about today's guest in the show notes below.
The Table Service podcast is presented by Tavolo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
