Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Table Service podcast where we'll dish on all things support, success and beyond with the people and companies building the future of customer experience. Table Service is presented by Tableau Consulting. I'm your host, Jordan Hooker. Jason Anello is a marketing maverick with over 20 years of experience pioneering the intersection of experiential and digital marketing. Jason's unique approach blends hospitality stories, story and behavioral science to help brands create deeper connections with their customers, shifting from transactions to true advocacy. Today, he's here to share how businesses can build meaningful, smile inducing experiences for their customers.
Jason, welcome to the table.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me, Jordan. I'm really excited to be here, really.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Excited for this conversation. For our listeners who may not be familiar, we'd love for you to tell us a little bit about what you do. Tell us, tell us the story.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Sure. So I got two ways that I explain this. One is super, sort of. So I call the blue collar version, which is I help businesses design remarkable experiences that build customer trust and revenue.
The slightly more professional industry way to say that is it's really a confluence of brand strategy, growth marketing, and experience design. And over the course of my career, I've either done one of those things specifically for a company or a client that I worked for, or I've done all of them at the same time. So that's how I sort of brought all of that together into this thing that I call experience strategy. It is not something that the industry or many other people understand, which is why I say it as often as I can. People are like, oh, experience strategy, that's a thing.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: What's the story of how you ended up working in that field?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Based upon what I just said, that nobody really knows what experience strategy is. I sort of made up the field. But sure, experience design is a thing that a lot of people understand. My path has been interesting in that others say that to me because I started as a art director in an in the agency world in the beginning of my career. So I was a creative through and through. After a few agencies that I worked at, winding up being a creative director and sort of managing a creative team, I jumped the fence, so to speak, into being a marketer by title. And then at another part of my career later on, I was the head of head of product design. And I've done that role for several different companies that I worked for. And so the way that that trifecta of growth marketing, brand strategy and experience design kind of come together, it's by using those bits of experience, experience that has allowed me to be like, interesting. This is a design piece. This is a marketing piece. This is a. The other thing that I always add to this story is when I graduated college with a business and fine art degree, which is a whole other story we can get into if we need to, I accidentally wound up with enough credits to have a behavioral science degree also. And so I like to mention that because I credit that with so much of how I do what I do. It's really about understanding how human beings behave and think and. And what they want and what they need.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Kind of thinking in terms then of customer experience design, which is kind of the. The banner over the type of work you do. Would love to hear a little bit from you about why you think companies really should focus significant attention on this piece, whatever industry.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: I think of two things immediately. It's like, so what's the benefit to the company?
But then I also think about what's the benefit to the customer? Right. So I'll answer it in two parts. I think that experience design is important for companies for their bottom line.
It's hard sometimes to measure one to one, oh, we did this thing, and we created this better experience. Especially when we're top of the funnel. Like, if we're just talking awareness and education of prospects, it's very hard to be like, oh, we did all that stuff, spent all that money on these extra good experiences, or we spent all this time figuring out these moments that could move somebody deeper into the funnel or create a little bit more trust with them. That doesn't work out on a spreadsheet perfectly all the time. When you get deeper into the funnel, it's easier to do that and to see that. But ultimately, I believe, and I've seen through doing this for a long time, that it does drive revenue, it does increase the bottom line of the business. It does help with business goals substantially. Because at the end of the day. Now, flipping to the second side of the answer. If you pay a lot of attention to your customers and what the customers want, need, feel beyond just the tactical part of, we make a widget. You need a widget. How about you buy our widget? We're beyond that when we're talking about experience design. And my.
My work in doing that, it's. It's what do you really need? What do you really want? And if you're paying attention to that, then all the little moments across your entire customer journey, you can optimize which is. Which is, in essence what. What I do when I go into a company or have have one of the many roles that I explain that I have at companies.
So I think it's super important because it does help you reach your business goals, but also it gets you so close to your customer and understanding who your customer is. And ultimately that's what makes a business thrive in longevity, is really understanding your customers. And when those customers change or they change how they feel, you change with them.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: I think it's interesting as other guests on this podcast, that there really is a through line of thinking about what do our customers actually want, what is the thing that our customers actually want to experience and how do we best help our teams internally understand that work with that. Would love to hear a little bit from you just in terms of the work that you do, whether in a full time role or in your consulting capacity. Like how do you help companies think about that. How do you help various teams inside a company start to think with that type of a mindset?
[00:06:36] Speaker B: The place that I always start, start here. No matter what the role is, whether it's consulting or a full time role, which is I this, I do this customer journey mapping exercise, which I would think a lot of people are somewhat familiar with. I do it using what is often looked at as the marketing bow tie, which is a bow tie that starts with awareness and education and moves you into this purchase moment, which is the center of the bow tie and then beyond which is the retention and the account management of a customer that you've acquired because they've purchased. And then ultimately advocacy. And then I have this sort of loop that that creates so to sort of paint the visual for those that are listening. And I don't have a graphic for that so you can see right now, but in all of those different stages and there's probably 12 to 14 of them depending on how the particular client or company wants to sort of chop that up.
We look at that and in essence audit that. And what we find often from that is all of these moments that the experience isn't necessarily leaning into the needs and wants of the customer in that particular moment. Or we just broke the chain and we didn't put an action to get them to move to the next step, whether that's immediately or later on when they decide that they want to move to it. Another way to think about this, how I like to answer this is I love maps. Like my whole life I've just been like fascinated with maps because they're like, oh, that's the, that's the whole layout of the thing. And so, like, how do we navigate it? And that has led me to be a pretty avid outdoor adventurer type of person. I've done lots of different outdoor things, but one of the things that I learned early on in looking at maps with this fascination that I have is how to read a topographic map and what a topographic map actually is and does. And in essence, it gives you the overall picture of what the landscape is that you're about to walk through or to bring it back to what we're talking about, your journey. You want to go from point A to point B. You may even not know what point B is. But when you look at a topographic map, or when I look at a topographic map, I can say, like, okay, if a person is moving from here to here, they're going to hit a very tight ridge. Because I know that when these lines are very close to each other, that's a steep incline. But then I can see a river traverse over here, or maybe that's a creek, or. And so bringing this together, when I am out in the wilderness and reading a topographic map, it's interesting in that I can navigate how I want to get from point A to point B. I may want to go straight up that hard incline, or not, or go around it, or go to a pond and hang out there for a minute and then continue on. But ultimately, I'm moving through a path through this landscape. And so what this journey exercise does is the same thing. It creates, in essence, to use the metaphor, a topographic map of the experience and the landscape that could happen. And then we create individual paths for the customer, sometimes multiple paths, because you have different types of customers. But think of it as this initial journey audit creates this topographic map that has all the things that could be in the landscape. And then you take your customer and you create a path for them through that that's optimized for the things that they want, they need, and they feel at the different moments in which they're going through the journey.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: From a standpoint of thinking internally as a team, looking at, you know, let's say a company has done a really good job of mapping that out. What's that experience going to look like for our customers generally? What might they run into? How can a company best track what is happening inside of that experience and then back out and go, okay, well, we thought this aspect of this was going to work well, but it's not. So maybe we need to adjust something. How can they best track and improve, end to end, that experience for customers? As customers go through that journey.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Great question.
It greatly depends upon what is happening at each moment of the journey and how it could be tracked. I do a lot of work across both digital experiences and physical experiences. Those just in themselves are tracked really, really differently. So an example is, you know, how do you track this is. This is a very specific example. It's one that I often use because we all, we all will be like, yeah, I've experienced that. I often will track by standing in the restaurant, how a restaurant flows particularly. I've done a lot of work in QSR restaurants. And so imagine that you got your lunch rush, you got a queue that, that forms in the restaurant. You've got some seating in the restaurant for people who have finished purchasing something and got their food, they're sitting down to eat. And then you have obviously the line in which people are either choosing their food or ordering their food and then paying for their food and picking it up. And to track that, I'll stand in the restaurant and look at what is happening. Like, where is that line? Where are people naturally going to stand? And then I'll look at things like, where's the napkins?
Because if you put the napkins on the other side of the queue, then you're creating a terrible experience for the person who just got their food. And then I have to cross a line and you're creating a terrible experience for the person that's in line, that is near the napkins, that keeps getting the, excuse me, can I get through the line? And. And so that's just one small detail of what's happening in a dining room at a lunch rush at any, at any given time.
So bringing that back to tracking, that's like me physically, or someone physically standing and watching how what happens and tracking what happens at what time, etc. When we talk about digital and even other physical moments of experience, it's easier to track them because something is capturing how many people have shared this or how many people have liked this, or how many people wound up on this particular page, how long have they stayed on this page and what did they do? So to give a little bit more of a detailed answer around, like how I think you best track things. I always say track everything, but then be able to look at that data for insights that relate to what the customer may be experiencing. Right? So you're trying to kind of figure out based upon things that are happening, both numbers and spreadsheets, and your eye is watching where that person is going to get the napkins, what's actually happening. Because I think a lot of times tracking, quote unquote, just gives you data that they're like, this is how many people like this? And then you jump to a conclusion that is, oh, not so many people like that. So we shouldn't make that type of content anymore because that doesn't help them in their experience. Not necessarily true. Maybe likes isn't the thing that you should be looking at. Maybe comments is. Or how many people saved that because that means that they, that's a piece of education that they were like, oh, I want to reference this later on, they may not have liked it just because that wasn't an action that they decided to take.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Kind of stepping back into some other related topics, certainly one of the things that, that I know you've done this year is challenge yourself to post something on LinkedIn related to this sphere of your, your life. And one of the things that you had recently talked about is the choice architecture principle. Would love if you could elaborate on this. As I listen to you talk through this, this seemed like something that a lot of our listeners could benefit from having a good understanding of.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: First off, the challenge, it's a challenge. Like it's, it's you, you hear it when you talk about content and creation of it, but it's. I think that's why it's a challenge, right? Like it's can, can we do it?
And then to the principle of choice architecture.
So the principle of choice architecture, really what that means is it refers to designing environments in a way that influences people to make certain decisions. Now, I talked about that in one of my posts around Delta's under two hours movie selection and their entertainment system. And in that particular context, this choice architecture, it comes into play in that there's a lot of things when you think about being on an airplane and looking at the entertainment system, there's a lot of things that are going on there. If you minimize that or you help guide somebody easier to a place that they can make a decision that removes stress from them. And a lot of this happens subconsciously and because they're less stressed, they're having a better experience. So in the case of that under two hours, I finished doing some work on a plane. I look and say, like, what am I gonna do now? I look at the flight tracker and I've got two hours and 15 minutes. And most movies that I wanna watch, I know are longer than that. So this helps me just get right to things that I can watch before I land. And that also is more fulfilling to me because then I get to see the whole movie instead of miss the last 22 minutes and be like, now do I gotta rewatch the whole thing? How do I get back to that? Or I just say, forget it altogether.
And so that's an example of how choice architecture works. But I think it could also work in the toothpaste aisle of the pharmacy or on Amazon, if that's where we all buy our toothpaste right now. But the amount of options that exist and the lack of explanation for what those options are is ripe for implementing the principle of choice architecture into that.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: So it would sound to me like this is something that companies like Costco have learned to do really well. Let's keep our SKU count very, very low, but have these wonderful options that our customers love. That way, when they come to the toothpaste aisle, there's not that many for you to choose from. There's a very select few. It sounds to me like companies like that have learned how to practice this principle.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: I think that's an excellent example of Costco and that they. They usually have one or two of each. Each thing, and that's. That's your only choice. Just to kind of build on the point of Costco. They've used that choice architecture, and then they've also added to that that you're getting a better cost. Anything you touch in Costco is a better cost than if you bought it someplace else. Right. So you always have that in the back of your mind as well to ease the entire process of decision.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: So then thinking about companies like this that have designed these really great experiences. I'd love to hear a little bit about what you mean when you talk about micro hospitality and how companies can practice this in whatever world they existed.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Sure. I say micro hospitality a lot. It's sort of the term that I've coined to really mean the tiniest moments of any customer experience, customer journey, whatever words you want to use for how somebody touches and feels a product or service or really anything in their lives. I subscribe to the it's all about the little moments thing just in life. Like, often when people come to New York City, where I live, I say, hey, look up as often as you can when you're walking around.
Because New York City doesn't make you look up, because there's a lot of things kind of coming at you all at once. But if every once while you look up, you're like, oh, my gosh, that. That church right there has these crazy steeples with gargoyles on them, and it's juxtaposed against this glass building that's got these hexes and like all sorts of things. And New York City is great for lots of things like that, but that's one that I feel like look up and oh, you see a whole different version of kind of where you are. And those are little moments that may happen in your New York City vacation, or in my case, my daily New York City life. I practice what I preach. So micro hospitality sort of came to be in. I was looking for a way to think about how to communicate all these little moments that collectively make for a more hospitable experience.
Hospitality being something that has been cared thought about in a caring way to make a experience better. And like, there's lots of little examples of that. And again, collectively, these micro hospitality moments make for this great experience, this remarkable experience. Some of the examples that I like to use is the. This is, this is one that I feel like every time I say it, somebody goes, get out of here. The arrow on the dashboard of cars next to the fuel symbol tells you which side of the car the gas tank is on. That wasn't always like that. Someone somewhere was like, you know what, let's do that. Because it is helpful. It eases the. Oh, right, it's on that side. I've had my car for five years now. I still look at that thing and go, what's that side of the thing? Is it the, the cup holder that they sometimes integrate into the shopping cart at grocery stores?
These are little tiny moments that, that make for a more hospitable experience in whatever the thing is that you're doing.
And I could go on and on with examples, but that to me is what these micro hospitality moments, why they're so important.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: I guess thinking in terms of what a lot of our listeners will work in, they work in technology, they work in software, they're working in early stage startups that are building these exclusively digital experiences for customers. How could they begin to incorporate a principle like that and thinking like that in that work different from the experience of say, a restaurant where the queue is designed in such a way that it is a much better experience while you wait.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Great, great question. I'm glad you brought it back to digital. For whatever reason, I tend to use a lot of physical world examples and things. It's just as applicable in a digital environment. And I do believe that in most every product and service today there is this digital and physical, some sort of version of that that exists even if the product is purely digital. There's still a physical part of that because you're a human using it and where you're using it and all of that plays into it. But speaking just to sort of the UX part of digital experiences, or not just the UX part, but thinking about it through more of the UX user experience, discipline, lens and okay, where do you put this and what's the information architecture of this digital thing? Micro hospitality plays just the same in that, in that you're still going through an experience. And so there's a digital version of where are the napkins? From my earlier restaurant example. In a digital experience, when you first open up an app, for example, what happens? Does it show you a loading screen or does it say, hello, great to see you today, it's 27 degrees and cold where you are while it's loading. And then it opens into whatever the app is.
That is a way for you to engage a person who's coming to use this particular product in a way that is more hospitable than if you were just to show them the loading screens and that like, okay, something's loading. This is causing me a little bit of stress. Maybe I'm a little distracted while it, while it is loading, I'll go do something else and then I'm unfocused. And so it, it helps with engagement and it helps with like lowering that stress like we were talking about earlier.
If you want, I can continue on this and I can give one example that you and I are both familiar with.
So when we worked together at Booster, we had a lot of digital products that we worked on that we used to run that business, as you know very well. And one of them we nicknamed Armada, which was in essence the portal that customers use to see everything about their account. I don't know how much we've talked about this, but Booster is in essence an energy company that delivers fuel to wherever your vehicle is. And so when a customer, and mostly this is a, this is a business to business business. So that customer may be looking at a portal that has 150 vehicles in it. But back to my example of what happens on the loading screen. So when you first logged in to Armada, what can it say to you? It could just show you a giant set of 125 vehicles and what has happened to them over the course of who knows what days and whatnot. Or you could land on a place that grounds you with, okay, here's what the, the time is, the temperature is, things that maybe don't even have to do with your vehicle, but have to do with how you think about what your vehicles are doing, how much fuel they use, how much fuel they need. Was it a colder day and not colder day, how many miles did all your vehicles go like, things like that in a snapshot, as either things are loading using my other example, or just as an entrance to the kind of place you want to get set up to then go dive into. Like, okay, let me see this cohort of vehicles and more detailed things about them.
So again, these micro hospitality moments and something like that is just as applicable in a B2B professional setting, in a massive portal or in a tiny little consumer based app.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: It's interesting because I feel like sometimes when I hear people talk about things like this, what you define as micro hospitality, sometimes it almost seems like they do it just to make the experience better, which is certainly a good thing. But the example you just used, that is not only making the experience better as a user logging in, it's also giving me useful information. It's not just a nice touch that makes me feel good. Like it's much nicer. You open an app and it says, hey, good morning. In that instance, it's a hey, good morning. Here's some information that might actually be useful to you as you look at what you're about to experience inside of our app. And I think a lot of companies maybe don't stop and think about the value that they can get from doing that.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: I love that you said that. It's a huge point. I think that when teams and companies get into, hey, let's do this brainstorm mode, whatever you want to call it, often they're like, that's this would be really cool, or this would be awesome. And some of those ideas wind up happening. And some of those ideas, well, but that, that's awesome. But no, we can't do that because it's just awesome and we can't track it. I think that why that's such a strong point is because. Because I spend a lot of time in what I do taking these sort of disruptive ideas or these things that maybe are cool and connecting them and morphing them with the team into something that isn't just cool, but is cool and has a purpose. And that purpose doesn't have to be super deep, but it has to have a little bit more of a purpose because ultimately that makes the person feel even better. Right. Like, I'll try to think of an example of that.
I'm sorry, I am a food and restaurant person. Like Deeply. So I always tend to go there. But if somebody just comps you an appetizer that feels great, you're like, that's amazing. And that's cool. That's not super cool because that happens all the time. But just using this as an example, but if something were to, if you were to have said, you know, I never, I never really eat shrimp that much because whatever reason while you were ordering and then you didn't order the thing and then that shrimp appetizer came and was comped, that's way more impactful because there's, there's a deeper emotional connection to that and there was like a need that you had or a curiosity that you had as the customer that was picked up on by the server. And for the $6 that that might have cost them, they probably just secured you as a customer for a long, a long period of time.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. You've got a customer and then you've got somebody that's going to be out. Being a raving fan of you would not believe what happened to this restaurant. And it costs basically nothing for that restaurant to take.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Well, as we wrap up our conversation today, we'd love to just give you another moment if there's any closing thoughts you have that you think would be helpful for our listeners to hear as we think about these or similar topics.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: I'll close with a thought that's more of a challenge to whoever's listening to this. If you are interested in this topic, which because you've listened to this, I'm assuming that you are, and ways to hone your ability to create better experiences, better micro hospitality moments, better customer journeys, all that stuff. I do these things called noticing walks. And you could do it by yourself. I sometimes do it with my students or with teams. And the challenge is to take a walk, as is in the name, but notice as many things. And you do this mentally. So sometimes I'll write them down because it's interesting to look back at them. But take a 20 minute walk.
If you're walking on the street, walk in and out of stores and notice things that are not necessarily the obvious thing. So go beyond the sign that says open. Go beyond the door itself, look at the door handle, look at the keyhole when you walk inside. And digitally the same thing when you click on a Google link that you searched for. Then you wind up where, what are all those things? What are the things saying to you? The search results, which one did you click on? Where did you go then? Where did you go from that and look deeper than just the obvious things that you, that you see. And then at the end of the 20 minute walk, catalog that and think about like, did that enhance my experience or did it not enhance my experience or did it hurt my experience? And it's that simple. Like, and you could do this. It's almost like meditation. You know those people that they say like sometimes I just take a quick five minute meditation in the middle of the day. Like you could make that a five minute noticing walk and do whatever you're doing and for five minutes force yourself to not just see the obvious things, but go a little bit deeper, go a little bit beyond the thing that is right there in front of you. And I find that you discover a lot of different things that just makes you think and have different ways that you approach experience then, especially if you're one who designs them.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. I think that'll be a great challenge for all of us to take, especially starting the new year. What does it look like to think differently as we go into designing experience for our customers and those who interact with us? How can people get in touch with you if they're interested in hearing more from you about the work you do? How can they reach out?
[00:30:18] Speaker B: The best way to sort of define me everywhere is Janello J A N E L L O It is sort of my name, but sort of not depending on who you who, how you know me. Janello.com enelo that's that's the easiest and fastest way.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Well, we'll include some of those links down in the show notes as well, so it's easy for folks to get to you. But Jason, thanks so much for joining us here at the Table.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: Jordan, it's been awesome. Thanks for having me.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Table Service podcast. You can learn more about today's guest in the show notes below. Table Service is presented by Tavalo Consulting, hosted by Jordan Hooker, music by Epidemic Sound.
