Adam Toporek, Customer Service Expert, Speaker and Author, CTS Service Solutions
As a third-generation entrepreneur with extensive experience in retail, wholesale, franchising, and small business, Adam understands the impact that customer experience can have on the bottom line and brings lessons from the front lines of entrepreneurship to organizations of all sizes.
Much of Adam’s real-world approach to customer experience comes from his entrepreneurial background. He understands that each organization is different and faces unique challenges and that most organizations are trying to compete on customer experience in a world of shrinking budgets and tight timelines.
https://customersthatstick.com/
Be Your Customer’s Hero
http://www.crackthecustomercode.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamtoporek
https://twitter.com/adamtoporek
http://www.youtube.com/user/customersthatstick
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive
[00:00:58] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Adam Toporek and he is author of Be Your Customer’s Hero. He is also the founder of the popular blog Customers That Stick. And he's co-host of the podcast Crack the Customer Code. Always enjoy having other podcasters on air. It's always a fun conversation with that. Adam, welcome to the program.
[00:01:18] Oh, thank you so much for is so excited to be here. And it's always fun know because we're podcasters as well. You know, it's great when you have the other podcasts because they always have the right equipment.
[00:01:27] You try. You know, we tried to dial this at over time. It's been an interesting process putting together a podcast. So let's talk a little bit about you and your background before we get into kind of the whole art of customer experience, design and customer service. How did you get into this space? What was your background? Tell us the story.
[00:01:44] So I'm actually a third generation entrepreneur. I grew up in and around small business. My grandfather had a main street shoe store. Mother had a children's clothing business. Father had a wholesale distributorship. So I literally grew up in business my whole life. Later autumn, I own years and I went and got my MBA, all that kind of good stuff. And then I was in retail for over a decade and I've essentially taken that small business lens about 2011. I started blogging about customer service and customer experience and I guess stuff sort of caught on. I kept doing. And now, you know, fast forward, I don't know what eight years later, strategic advisor, keynote speaker. You know, obviously, I have a book on customer experience or customer service that I will have another one coming out next year.
[00:02:27] And I'm just completely into the space and really taking the lessons of small business and applying the both to small and mid-sized organizations, but also to the challenges of scale.
[00:02:39] Yeah, well, I think that's an important one, because I think one of the issues that I kind of keep seeing out there and market working with a lot of these companies that are looking to grow in scale. Anyone that is either service base or has some kind of customer service component ends up running to these really kind of unique or specific challenges. I mean, if you were a widget company, you know, you just need to find, you know, more raw material and increase your factory line and increase your production volume and ship more. It's, you know, scaling those kind of material product kind of companies is, you know, doesn't have the same kind of challenges. Talk to us about what are some of the challenges you've seen and companies that are service based or have these kind of service components to them. What are the challenges they run into when they go to actually scale the business and try to grow it and make it bigger?
[00:03:22] So I would actually sort of challenge the underlying assumptions of question voice, which is I just got through working with the manufacturing and industrial company last week and they are looking at how do we become more customer centric and less product centric because they see that regardless of how good their product is, you know, quality and on time, but they still have to deliver experience. So we can talk sort of maybe about the emotional customer and that type of stuff. But the challenges of scale. It's interesting. I think the challenges of scale are the same in many disciplines in business, not just customer experience, which is you've got silos, right? Silos and communications. One of the things we look at is Hassel and the customer journey, which is one there's sort of hassel at each individual touch point. Right. How are you treating the customer? What kind of hoops are they having to go through? And then how are the silos communicating? How is the customer going from point A to point B to point C? And often you've got silos with different incentives, different focus, a lack of sort of a cohesive vision of being customer centric from the top. And all of these things tend to play out. And the bigger the organization, the more entrenched these problems are as a rule.
[00:04:33] How do you find that it's that organization just needs to be kind of quote-unquote more customer centric, or is there like a specific version for their business, for their customer about what customer centric means or what the intended customer experience means for that particular business, I think is how caught up to people end up becoming in terms of, well, we just need to be more customer oriented versus now. We need to really figure out what does that mean for us and then how are we gonna deliver that?
[00:04:57] I think it's both. You really have to figure out what that means because it's going to be different for a manufacturing company versus a restaurant. Right. You've got to figure out what being customer centric means and you have to figure it out. I'm very big on real world. I think that's where the part of the small business lens comes from. You grow up in small business or as an entrepreneur, never having enough budget or time or staff. Right. I mean, this is how you live and this is how. Most big organizations have been living since 2008 and a lot of cases not all, obviously some are flush with cash and it is good to be the king. But, you know, so I think you are figuring out the vision and figuring out what that means in your context related to your constraints and to your other priorities. I think when you start talking about a publicly traded company, one of things I look at as hard ROIC versus soft or so hard or why as you go into a meeting and you say if we cut our staff by 10 percent, here's exactly what that does to the bottom line this quarter.
[00:05:52] Soft our ally is if we invest X percent more in customer experience, here's what we think will happen and here's when we hope it will happen.
[00:06:01] And that's generally longer term and squishier in terms of numbers are well, how did why is that math harder to do for most companies?
[00:06:08] It's usually very hard to do. You know, I'll ask somebody a lot of company use. NPR is like, okay, do you know what a 5 percent increase in NPS does to Ibut? And then I get the blank stare. That's fine. Look, we all operate. I'm not saying that you should. You know that the world is going to miraculously give you the data you need right now. But here's the thing. You have to understand that there's still going to be a cost to. And you've got to try to balance the gut cost of what happens if we don't treat our customer right in the short term. Our customers having a challenge. Right. Something happened in their business and they need a little help from us. Any need better payment terms, they need something, something else. Right. And we say, well, you're not going anywhere. So no, you don't say it that way. But we basically they know it. And, you know, you're calculating the amount of profit we can squeeze out before you leave. Right. That's a captive customer. Well, we don't know the costs of when they're not captive anymore. What happens? Right. You look at Bonta. Right. Yeah. I mean, look at Blockbuster. And obviously, these are sort of multivariate problems. And they're not just down to how customers are treated, but blockbuster taxes.
[00:07:12] Right. All right. LaRaza? Yeah, you're right. They just gave a bad experience. After bad experience, the customers had nowhere else to go cable. And as soon as a customer had somewhere else to go, they ran.
[00:07:26] Yeah. So I guess how in terms of figuring out what the customer needs. So how how do you go about actually understanding that, revealing that, identifying that in your customers in terms of maybe the areas that you're not servicing as well as you should or opportunities you have for increasing your service level?
[00:07:42] Well, I'll give you the sort of the formal and then the informal approach. The formal answer is right. Well, because that's what big companies you're right. And you do voice that the customer, you really do deep journey mapping. You do focus groups even. You really try to dig into what the customer wants. You figure out your most valuable segments. All that kind of stuff. But if you're scaling it out at right. And not at scale and you're not going to do, you know, a five figure survey, you're not going to do some of these things just yet. The first thing is talk to your frontline teams. They know better than anyone what the customer needs. And also, we could talk about this some more. What's in the way of the journey? What are the things that are impacting the journey, the lack of empowerment or the processes and policies? So talk to your frontline team and of course, talk to your customers. And I know it seems very fundamental and very elemental, but you'd be surprised how many organizations don't actually just have conversations with their customers.
[00:08:37] We had conversations you recommend having. I mean, is this just picking up the phone? Do you want to take them out to lunch? Do you invite them into, you know, some kind of customer panel feedback event that you're putting on? And what's what are the best techniques here? You know, given limited resources and, you know, budgets for, you know, companies that are still in the scaling process?
[00:08:56] Yeah, I think it depends a bit. But B2B can do depending on how big your customer bases, how many what percent any one customer ism. And if you have a customer, that's 10 percent your business. I would talk to that one customer. Right, for sure. But yeah, I mean, I think you could do folks reaching do panels. You can do, you know, face to face. I look at it this way. One of things we teach in our customer service training is how we've evolved, essentially, how the human minds evolved, why emotion matters and how we've evolved to read each other's faces or read each other's tone of voice, all these types of things. And we have a process called signal stripping, which is every time you strip away these human signals, communication becomes less easy to understand. And it's also much easier to have, you know, mis conceptions or misunderstandings. So is face to face better? Yeah, of course, if you can do it face to face and then video, you sort of work your way down the human signal chain, as I like to say. But you've got to be scalable, right? The Zord scaling up services. So you've got to figure out what works for you. The issue's a little less well, how do you put them together as? What do you ask and how do you follow up?
[00:10:02] So what do you ask and how do you know this is what you ask, no matter what company you are? But yeah, right. As far as what do you ask? I think you really start with use that discussion with the team. I said to figure out the questions. Right. You can talk to the OK. So we've gotten this complaint. We've gotten this complaint. You talk about those things. We've gotten this compliment, we've gotten this compliment. You talk about those things. What do you like about it? How could it be even better? Dig into both. You know where you're doing well and where there seems to be challenges. And then, of course, you could have all kinds of open ended questions. What would you like to see in the experience? How could we make it smoother for you? How could we make it easier to do business with? And that's obviously a huge thing nowadays.
[00:10:45] You and I were talking before about customer hassle, you know? Right. What are things preventing? Hassle is so huge. Because life is so complicated right now. I have a theory which is that when we talk about customers, everyone is rushed. Everyone is stressed. And you should approach your customers essentially with that mindframe.
[00:11:02] And in terms of, you know, once you once you identify all these different sort of possible questions, you gather all this feedback, you've got this now, you know, list of areas where you can make improvements. How do you go about tackling this? I mean, is this something you should you should be trying to address all these things as best you can? Do you prioritize them? Do you proteasome strategically? I mean, what's what is the way in which you kind of you know, after you've collected this data, you figure out what you're gonna do, when you're gonna do it, how you're going to allocate it, allocate limited resources and time and and budgets.
[00:11:35] If you listen to a lot of customer experience experts, I say every little touchpoint matters, every detail matters. And that is all 100 percent true. The problem is everything is important, but everything is not equally important. And I am just a huge 80:20 person. Territo principle how you want to look at it, which is we don't have time to fix all journey. No one does. They just don't. So even when you do journey mapping, you pick key touchpoints, you know, ten or twelve you fit what we talk about. The different 'tween touchpoints and pressure points and pressure points are those make or break moment. Some people call them moments of truth, whatever term you want to use, those moments that are essential to the actual emotional connection you have with the customer and how they're going to feel about the service. So, for example, the marketing for outlets just like use a really dorky example, like a hair salon. Like the marketing flyer, unless it makes some kind of crazy claim. That's right. Not a pressure point, right? I mean, it's a touchpoint. It matters. It matters what it looks like. It matters what it says. Pressure points when they're greeted, when they walk in the door. Right. If they're treated rudely. It's going to set off the whole experience. The pressure one, of course, is the haircut. So everything matters. I mean, the working flower matters. But if you're going to sit there and go and say, what can we improve, what pressure points, what touchpoints are we going to focus on? First, we're going to focus on the greeting.
[00:12:49] You're going to focus on the haircut itself, possibly the shampoo, get a little fancy hair and that, you know, the manicure or as you're acting out. Exactly.
[00:13:01] How do you map this out?
[00:13:03] I think that actually kind of designing that customer experience or your first kind of capturing what is the current customer experience in the designing the new one or designing the one you want to strive for? How do you go about doing that? Is that just what you put into that map or do you not put into that map? What are the key bits of information? How do you kind of how do you document to what does that process look like?
[00:13:24] Yes. I mean, journey mapping is pretty involved. I'll try to just hit the top line right now. So with journey mapping, you're really doing what you said. You're right. It's current state mapping. You're trying to figure out what is our current journey.
[00:13:36] And depending on the size of the team, depending on the stakeholders involved, you really want to get a broad cross-section of people throughout the organization involved. There's sort of a strategy to this. It's all going to depend on the work, though. Once you do that, you start identifying the touchpoints, right. Which touchpoints are the really big ones, you know, when they call customer service? OK. That's a big one. So whatever it may be, when they first call them, when they make an appointment, when they visit the website, when they book an appointment on the website, whatever it may be. Right. You figure out all these things and then you map them up on the wall and then you start looking at it. And this is where everybody maps sort of differently. You start looking at different layers of it, which is what what is the customer feeling? Where do they think and what are they trying to achieve? And there's a lot of different sort of approaches to this.
[00:14:22] What you're trying to get in the end result is a map of not only the current state experience, but the challenges at each touchpoint. Then you say, what should this experience look like? Right. What is the future state experience for trying to achieve? How do we do it? How do we approach optimizing this touchpoint, optimizing this touchpoint and going from there? And then you can start doing what's called it's a whole nother layer service blueprint thing, which I won't get into, but just essentially says, here are the things that go into it. The things that are onstage, the things that are backstage, which means, for instance, like a line cook at a restaurant's backstage, they never come into contact with a customer. But are they essential to your experience? Yeah, right. And so that's sort of that was why a three minute journey mapping session.
[00:15:11] But I like that.
[00:15:12] I think it helps people kind of understand, as you know, this kind of future state and future state and then y'en and figuring out like how how are you going to deliver that? And then what's the. You know, it gives you a plan, right, that you can actually then sort of say, OK, what what do we do first? What do we do second? What are the resources gonna be? You know, is it better to put, you know, time of money here or a ton of money here? Well, it all depends on, you know, how does it fit into the overall ideas of what we're trying to do, what our goals are.
[00:15:36] Right. And it's going to different whether you're like an association of doctors or an SRS company. Right. I mean, the journey is going to be so different depending on your organization.
[00:15:46] And so talk to me about the kind of the emotional trigger side of this, because I think we we can spend a lot of time in the kind of informational and logical. And, you know, with the words that we use. And so what are the things we need to be aware of from the customer's point of view that are going to drive their kind of emotional reaction to the experience that they're having.
[00:16:04] So one thing you have to you know, you mentioned logic and rational and all that. The first thing you have to realize is that is in second place in most people. All right. And I'll be where a lot of people talk about this stuff now. Daniel Kahneman system one system, too. But essentially, right. The intuitive instinctual tends to override the rational and the logical and the challenges. And you see this even more in B-to-B enterprises as we tend to act like our customers are making rational choices. We want them to make rational choices. We want them to. And that's OK. But we also design around the idea that they are, which is sort of like this, you know, how behavioral economics is sort of kicked traditional economics in the teeth saying, you know, all these things you couldn't explain, like, you know, why there are runs on the bank in how supply demand can get so out of whack and how pricing can get so out of whack in the short term. Yeah, it's because we're humans, right? People are irrational. They act out of fear. They trade when they shouldn't trade. They sell when they shouldn't sell. They buy when they shouldn't buy. And it's the same principle when you're looking at customer experience, you know, just assuming and like I said, and B, B2B, this is even more sort of poignant because it really we assume, oh, well, they're weighing the pros and cons and they're never going to buy if we do this and they're never going to purchase at this level.
[00:17:24] And then we don't realize that, oh, well, we have a captive customer situation. Oh, well, they're not going to go anywhere. It would cost too much. Switching costs are too high.
[00:17:31] Well, problem is, you tick them off, they actually felt disrespected and they're going to lose a little money just leaving because that actually matters more. Right. And we've all seen this. So when you talk about customer emotion, the first thing is accepting that it is essential and it is the memory of the emotion tends to be what defines an experience. All right. So not actually the emotion you have the during an experience, but the memory of the emotion which you're ahead of the pick and roll. Now, tell me sort of obscure a little role that it's getting a little popularity and also peak ends.
[00:18:04] Very simple. It is essentially that we remember the peak in the end. We remember. And I wish I hadn't called it the peak because it sort of indicates like positive, like high. It's the most it's the most intense moment. So it could be negative. Yeah. So whatever that peak I think about, if you're really angry or you have a great experience with your bank for three years and then you go in and the teller like curses at, you know, a completely new what are you going to remember? Yeah, exactly. And that's about it for a long time. And that's that's an extreme example. But the same goes with, you know, like I've got a story on my website. I did some speeches about the time the hotel like remembered my wife's birthday and laid out this whole spread with like champagne when we walked in the room and all. That's right. That's a positive emotional piece. I still talk about it to this day. And of course, we remember the end because of what happened last year. So we were talking about journey mapping and those pressure points. One of the things you can do is try to design a positive emotional peak. And the other that you can do is try and that's why I have a whole speech on customer Hassel is preventing negative emotion, right. Preventing the things that potentially will cause frustration or anger or any of those kinds of things. There is one study and I don't have the number, but I'll just tell you, it was it was very interesting study. It's from contact centers and it showed that being transferred had a huge spikes in anger and fear just being transferred. You know, there's a. Yeah. So are those two emotions you would like your customer to have?
[00:19:35] Yeah. I'd like the idea that, you know, mapping this out and then choosing these points. The one that that I'm curious about is the recency or the end part of it. How do you make sure that you end these experiences on a strong note?
[00:19:48] I mean, is there are there things that you can do to make sure that you're you're kind of leaving a good taste in the customer's mouth around some of these experiences?
[00:19:56] Yeah. Hundred percent. I mean, one is sort of everything we talk about with emotion. Making them feel appreciated. Making them feel acknowledged. Showing empathy if the situation calls for that. But one of the ways you can control the end, because often you sort of don't know where the end is, is by what's called closing the loop, which is following backup with the customer. And this is particularly important if you're in a service resolution situation. So there's been a problem. Hopefully you've walked the customer back to a place where they're not as upset. You've solved the actual operational issue, whatever that was, and then you circle back with them after the interaction is over and you make sure the feelings are resolved. You do something to make him feel appreciated, make sure they feel hurt, make sure they understand, you know, that you understand what a problem that was and why it was a problem. All those types of things and closing the loops, one of the ways you can sort of control the end, if that makes sense, because you can it helps you pick when the end is. It helps you possibly if they're still really upset, give them a couple of days to calm down and then circle back. And it's got the one beauty beautiful thing that I love, which is it's proactive also. So there's always a huge psychological difference between when they call you to address the situation and you reach out to them, right?
[00:21:11] Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's just like getting an irate customer calling you is is the is the hardest thing to kind of handle as a customer service person? But talk to me a little bit about this. When you have these situations where the the the both the company and the customer, the common customer is kind of multifaceted. And you're dealing with an organization and you may have multiple people involved. I mean, how do you design an experience and how do you really kind of treat your customer service strategy when, you know, it might be several people you're working with a director of a department and then, you know, some of their staff, and then you've got a procurement person, you've got other folks involved in both the sale and the delivery process. What are some things you can do in terms of thinking through a strategy and developing a design for how you're going to treat kind of customer service from that point of view?
[00:22:03] Yeah, and I'll tell you right now, it's the question you're asking is not easy. There are no simple solutions, but I'll give a few principles for that. The first one is you really have to figure out each department, so to speak. Each person's pain point. What is it they want from the relationship with you? That's funny. I was just talking about the situation last week because the company was working with is dealing with procurement at added right in procurement. What's one thing to beat the living? You know what? The right price. Yeah. Yeah. That is our only job. Right. And it doesn't matter.
[00:22:35] What's the KPI is how much did they reduce their the numbers by.
[00:22:39] Exactly. That's all procurement wants. So the other stakeholders that they're working with are like, you know, that's great, I'm sure. Company X has a cheaper price, but that's really not apples to oranges or you know, you're you're missing the the service we get. You're missing the level of quality assurance we get, you're missing, blah, blah, blah. Right. So first thing is knowing what each party wants, a second thing is figuring out who your advocates are. Now, in that group, right. Of you. If you're working with six people, who's your advocate? I mean, I deal with this on a very micro level as a speaker. Right. It's very rare that the person who calls me to ask about me keynoting their event is the one that's making the decision.
[00:23:20] It's very rare. It's usually goes up. The person who's calling is the first step. So I try to figure out who is my advocate in the organization and try to give them the best experience possible and not just make the sale or start talk about sales right now. But it's the same principle in experience when it's long term, making sure that they're happy and that you're helping them represent themselves well, particularly if they're the one that brought you in.
[00:23:47] All right, Sumi, we've we've kind of mapped that process out and we've got a strategy around this. Talk to me about kind of training, hiring.
[00:23:55] Like how do you make sure that we have the right people in the right spots? You trained in the right things so that they have the tools and resources they need to effectively deliver on this customer experience, because at the end of the day, people are going to be doing this like this for purely eye driven Christmas. You know, I'm going to order Adonai muted voices and stuff that are doing this. How do we make sure that how do we pick the right people? How do we train them? How do we know? How do we make sure that they're gonna be successful?
[00:24:21] Well, first of all, even the A.I. has to be trained if it's going to be human and do a catch. That's the worst part. So hiring and training, obviously, two different things. Training just let you know for transparency. That's what we do is one of our biggest parts of our business. We do customer service training. I'll speak to that and then back into the hiring. So the next book is actually about how we don't train as much as we should and how integral training is to customer experience. One day we've talked all you know already today about emotion and rational customers. And what we know now is that human beings aren't built for reactive customer service. Right? You're not built to get screamed at, yelled at. Thank you, ma'am.
[00:25:00] I'd love to anyone who was built for that. I really I question their psychological makeup.
[00:25:06] Yes, exactly. So we have to train ourselves. That's where training comes. And that's how we get people to understand not only customer emotion, but their own emotional reaction in these situations. How do you handle it? How do you deal? Press How do you not carry it with you to the next customer? I think particularly when we look at like entry level jobs, there's this idea that we're going to bring people in that have never had any training, that haven't even been in the workforce, and they're going to magically have the skills, you know, to handle when somebody twice her age is beating them up over a mistake and that they're gonna know what to say and how to say it and not. And so it really comes across a whole organization. But this is not just true for Frontline, you know, whatever, like retail employees or Frontline. It's true for 20 year sales. Bet that you can always understand better customer experience and training. So training needs to be regular. It needs to support whatever your customer centric vision is. So you want to know what is what are our service standards, what is the customer experience we're trying to deliver? You know, we're talking about that future state. Well, once we back out of that future state, how do we get there? What are the touchpoints that have a lot of humans interaction in them? Right. I mean, I've been an Amazon customer for gosh, I think it's ninety nine, 20 years now. So and I think I've called a human one time in 20 years.
[00:26:29] Right. So in their business it's a different thing if you're Delta Airlines. So you've got a lot of human interactions. Right. And you're going to want to train and you're gonna want to make sure that at every touch point from the contact center to the gate to the ticketing, that you're you know, the people in your organization know how to handle. Both deliver great experiences, I should say, and to handle when those experiences are challenging or the customers or finding them challenging. And here's the thing to me. I'm not a huge fan. I know there's tons of people that do hiring and assessments and all these things. I was in retail. I didn't find assessment's to be that helpful to me. Some people find them very helpful. So I'm not bashing them or just saying I found them. They have limited utility. One of the things I think helps is actually working backwards to hiring, meaning figuring out the training, figuring out the service vision, getting your current team. Not that you're not always hiring, but getting your current team focused to figure out what you're going to figure out, what attributes you're really looking for, who are your superstars and why, who are your, you know, B-plus, A-minus performers and why write and try to replicate that in the interview and hiring process. And obviously, macroeconomics is going to have a lot to say about that. The labor market is all gone further. All kinds of other factors in that right now.
[00:27:49] And I'm curious, the thoughts around for a lot of the folks on on this podcast listening here are going to be kind of professional services of various flavors. But if you're if you're a lawyer and you know, you're kind of in a position of, you know, you have to sort of guide the customer, you're basically providing service and you may not be making them happy all the time in terms of delivering on your professional value, but still wanting to create some kind of, you know, positive customer experience. How do you kind of balance or how do you what's the strategy for for people in those situations where they may be dealing with things that are high stress for the for a customer, for a client?
[00:28:29] And, you know, they still want to provide a you know, think about how can they create a good customer experience, but they also have to be doing their job. What's the balance or what's the strategy there? How do you kind of how do you navigate that?
[00:28:39] Yeah. Two things. And first of all, I would be if I was in one of those fields, I would be excited to use customer experience because you've got such a low bar in the industry. And so these people I being it's so just let me say the words in your ear like everyone else. Like if if you and I were going to go try to sell shoes tomorrow and compete with Zappos on customer experience, we have a heavy road ahead of us. But if you want to be the best experience attorney in your city or in a doctor, you've got a lot easier road. Not saying there aren't plenty daughters and attorneys offices doing great experience, but just industry wise it's you've got a lucky lower bar. So be excited, number one. Number two, get all the parts of the experience that have to not do with the primary personal the physician or the lawyer. Right. The primary service delivery, get all of those to be awesome. Might be the easiest billing. Be supportive with insurance payments. Get that whole rest of the journey. Booking appointments, make it great, have great communication, great systems, great follow up, all that, make the rest of the journey just amazing for the actual service provider.
[00:29:48] Lawyer the doctor. I'm just using those new it's going to be about empathy and communication and making them feel like you are on their side. And it's this is probably gonna take some people off. It might be easier for the lawyer to sit there and talk to you because they're getting paid by the minute. So they don't rush you out of the rivers much. Yeah, the doctors for doctors spending time with the patient is a very big, big, very big deal. And there's been a number of studies about doctors treating patients with empathy and doing different sort of experiential. Things and the impact it has on them getting sued for malpractice. There is a direct result between pages that patient, patient, everything we talk about patient experience in the medical field. Patient empathy and those results. So to me, that part is, yeah, you're gonna have to tell somebody that their kid's sick or you're gonna have to tell somebody that even though they're not in the wrong, they're gonna need to settle because the cost of fighting it right. Is you're gonna be delivering bad news if you're in these professions. So it's that's where the human skills and the communication and making them feel cared for, making sure they know you've got their back. Even though you're telling them something that's not that easy to hear.
[00:30:57] Yeah. And this has been a pleasure. We're gonna hit time here. You know, this is a conversation that we could go on for a very long time and unfortunately is a conversation that many, many industries need to hear again and again and again. There's a lot of number of vervain on this. So I'm glad we did this. It's been a real pleasure. If people want to find out more about you, about the work that you do, your book, your podcast, what's the best way to get that information?
[00:31:19] So, first of all, thank you for having me. Bruce, this was a great conversation. I can talk about the stuff all day. And yes, at times you get pretty easy to find Adam Toporek, you can find me all over social and the interwebs, customersthatstick.com and get links to training keynote speaking the book. All that good stuff and feel free. I love connecting with new people. I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
[00:31:44] Great. I will make sure that all those links in the show and so people can click during that again. Adam Taker's take the time. I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation.
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