The one with 2 T-Rexes and 2 Pennies - Mercer Smith, VP CX Insights and Community at Partner Hero E116

🎤🎞️Building communities CX and beyond in “The one with 2 T-Rexes and 2 Pennies” with Mercer Smith VP CX Insights and Community at Partner Hero | CX Passport E116🎧 What’s in the episode?...

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction

2:32 Using communities to better the Customer Experience world

4:45 What makes a GOOD community?

9:33 Elevate the customer insights from the front-line

13:59 Providing the support and language for mental wellness

16:08 1st Class Lounge

20:47 How to scale great teams

25:20 A brilliant trait to block the tribalism of CX labels

27:48 What’s next for communities and customer experience?

30:40 Closing and contact information

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Episode resources:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smithmercer/

Social Media handles: @mercenator

Website: https://www.mercenator.com/

Transcript

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Mercer Smith: 0:00

My tip for people looking to scale is learn about your customer identify which areas are important to them and which areas aren't right, there's always going to be something in the customer experience that your customers don't give a hoot about. And those are the areas where you can deprioritize focus.

Rick Denton: 0:23

You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. Whenever I write intros for guests, I like to combine Yeah, a little bit of what they've shared with me during a pre show call and some elements of their public digital trail. It's fun to see what's out there. It's even more fun when a guest comes up with a very unique way to describe who they are and what they do. Today's guest Mercer Smith, Vice President customer experience insights and community partner hero tells us on LinkedIn that she talks about creating your customer experience from scratch. Okay, that's cool. I'm curious about how that happens. Oh, wait. There's one more line. I build in scale customer facing teams that give a S**T and can help you do the same? Well, now that's a tagline. What have come to know about Mercer and as I've seen her content on LinkedIn and interacted with her. This isn't just a tagline. This isn't branding fluffernutter she really cares about getting that right. And she really cares about you. Getting that right. Mercer comes to us today from a town you've heard me rave about a before in the show, Austin, Texas. It's where I grew up. I love the city. It's a wonderful place having in her words, transition from being a barista to working in customer experience. 15 years ago, life has not been the same for her sense. With a wealth of experience building teams and supporting success. Mercer finds her energy and being a connector building community creating peer groups, which is the focus of her role today. Folks, there's also a master's in creative nonfiction writing and Mercer's background. I imagine many of you have seen her content for HelpScout, and HubSpot. If not get out there and consume it. She's got great wisdom to share. Looking forward to this show. Mercer. Welcome to CX passport.

Mercer Smith: 2:29

Thanks so much for having me, Rick, I'm really excited to be here.

Rick Denton: 2:32

Yeah, this is gonna be fun. I'm excited about it. Of course, let's start with that keyword in your title community. A community can be this absolutely rich source of development, customer experience, world's no different. And I know you've built a ton of experience in your world. How are you using communities, this key part of who you are now in your role to advance the overall betterment of customer experience across all CX roles?

Mercer Smith: 2:58

Yeah, so I think in CX especially we have, you know, a lot of thought leadership, there's a lot of great people with great things to say. And I find that they actually become bottlenecks, right, like people who are just starting out in CX think that they need to talk to one of these people in order to like, get better at their role. And so I think, yeah, and so I think the key thing that I'm focusing on, especially in communities is connecting these people together, because they actually have much more wisdom than they think they do. Right? So for a long time, I was doing mentorship, and I would talk one on one with people, and they could kind of come and talk to the duck with me about whatever they were thinking about. And I found that as I removed myself as that, as that bottleneck, and gave them the space to talk to each other, they're actually actually doing a lot more elevating and a lot more growing than they would have been just speaking to someone one on one. I think that's the best opportunity that we have in communities right now. You know, we talked about the separation between support and success and experience and people working in UX and what have you x versus CX, and all of that. And I think the more you can get people together and get them talking, the better elevated everyone is across the board. So that's, that's I think where I'm focusing on with communities is trying to do more elevation of the individual contributors and community members, rather than the people doing like community leadership.

Rick Denton: 4:22

That's, you know, I had never thought of that in that way of the CX leader, the one that's the Man, I hate this term by influencer, the thought leader that's out there, all those bad cliches that exist as being a bottleneck. I hadn't thought of it in that way. The idea of using communities to help open that up and improve how people develop and how they grow, hadn't really thought of that. Now, one of the things about communities though, and I've been a part of several, and I've been there's a whole spectrum, right? There's the great engaged community that's a lot of people are contributing and being a part of and then there's the men right We sign up for the community, we check the box because it was a lot of excitement at the beginning. But then there's no participation, there's limited value. So how are you tactically, as a community builder really trying to prevent that outcome? And creating that thriving sharing community that you described earlier?

Mercer Smith: 5:16

Yeah. So I think, you know, that's tricky for everyone, right? Like, because it's really about the members, there's nothing. Honestly, there's nothing that as a community builder I can do to like, get people into the community and get them talking, right? Like, I can't drag them there. You can't, you can only like, you know, you can create the space. And so I think the best thing that I'm trying to consider right now is like, what are the different platforms for right? So total transparency, I have a community on Discord that where people are talking, it's my CSL peer group. They're on Discord. And I was like, you know, we need somewhere different to go we need some are better, that's more structured than discord that's more professional than this like, tool that people use for gaming effectively. So I created a circle. And, you know, I'm discovering that less Chatter is happening on the circle, more Chatter is still happening in discord. And maybe the different platforms are actually better for different things. Right. So I think, you know, we assume that for a community to be thriving, there needs to be a lot of conversation. And I don't necessarily know that that's true. I'm reevaluating that, I guess is what I'm saying is, in some spaces, I think it's okay to just have long standing evergreen content, right. So like, one of the spaces we have in the circle community is resources for people who are hunting for jobs. So like people have put together things like resume review, or top tips for interviews and things like that. And that's kind of evergreen content that people can find and use, it's still helpful. It's not an ongoing conversation, though things do get added every once in a while. And so I think there's still community to be made around that I would urge. And this is not just selfishly like to think that my community is still thriving, right. But I would urge us to reconsider, like what community looks like and how the different components of a community can pull together to create that thriving whole.

Your CX Passport Captain: 7:11

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. <ding> While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Rick Denton: 7:37

Boy, and I'm actually my brains a little frozen for a second here as I absorbed that because I know going into this conversation my vision of community is is well whether the former lat I can't remember. But the one that is that, that Mike, if you just kind of comments, oh my gosh, there's a ton of people engaged today. And there's firing information back and forth and, and what that looks like. But then as I think to some of the resources, I think that's why I would think of it differently is or have thought of it differently, I mean, use that you're changing my mind. And that is I would have thought of it as resources or something like that. But resources have there's can be a community of itself that we've got this space, that is a place that you can go and find your job hunting test. But then you can also have this engaging conversation around this problem that I had, in the middle of a job search, this active issue that I have, and be able to have that be a part of the community, I hadn't thought of that spectrum. You know, it sounds like you're doing Mercer, it sounds like what you're doing is you're listening to your customer. And then acting on what they want to do you know, kind of the principles of customer experience what you describe going from barista to customer experience. Yeah.

Mercer Smith: 8:44

Yeah, I think, you know, I think resources can be cultivated by a community. And in that case, there's still a part of the community, right. So I just, I think we're gonna see a shift and what that might look like as communities become more expansive. There might be a shift away from like the typical, like message board comments back and forth measure of engagement, and like, what kind of meaningful things are being produced by the community?

Rick Denton: 9:08

As opposed to Yeah, right. If I'm using such data, where were the resources, but that is what's being created, what is the content? What's new, the community itself, the creation of that community more so than even the discussion back and forth? can be an element of community? Whoo, I like that, oh, gosh, we could spend all that there. But I want to, I want to take you into that customer experience world a little bit here. And so I know I talk a lot about on CX passport and my youtube channel shorts. I've got a lot of energy focused on the frontline. And I know the frontline means a lot to you it is the epicenter of customer insights, or I believe it is or rather could be if the company paid attention to them, right. So I know that a lot of companies ignore they fail to pay attention to that risk rich source. So I'm curious, knowing that you care about that, too. How How should we how can we better elevate the insights that the frontline provides?

Mercer Smith: 9:56

Yeah, I mean, I think some of this falls to the company. As a whole, and some of it falls to the frontline team, right? I think something I get asked about this a lot from frontline teams, like, how can I do this? How do I get people to care? And a lot of it is speaking the same language, right? So you can say, like, Oh, we got like 9 million tickets about this issue, and customers really want it. Nobody understands what that means. If they don't work on some kind of customer facing team, right? Like, your engineering team doesn't have any context for what 9 million tickets means. I mean, it sounds like a lot. But you get what I'm saying. Is that a lot? Is it a little right? Yeah, like in the grand scheme of things, like if you get, like I say this to my son all the time, he's like, is to a lot, and I'm like, well to Tyrannosaurus rexes, is a lot to pennies, not so much. So you need to have some kind of context to understand the size and scope of this issue. And so I think, for the frontline team, being able to translate the stuff that they're talking about into the language of the people that they're trying to meet, right. So in engineering, like, you could say something like, oh, you know, we're having 18 customers that are not able to do this specific task, because there's a bug in the product. And that's out of 100 customers or, you know, something like that, give them some kind of context for what it is that you're talking about. And I think the reason that a lot of companies or many companies, when they're just starting out, assume that there aren't any insights in the frontline support organization, or frontline, customer facing organization, is because they don't have the context or the language to understand what it means. So I think that's that's the big first step is making sure that the the frontline team has the language to communicate that and is using it in an effective way. Beyond that, I think, you know, we see this issue definitely on the smaller side of things, right, when teams are just getting started. But we also see it in these like massive organizations that assume that they already know what their customers want, they assume that they already know what's going on. And so these insights kind of take a back a backseat. Right? Yeah. And I think the same advice goes for them, right, like being able to understand the scope of these issues. And not necessarily just looking at size, but looking at pain, right. So I think there are two ways to look at customer issues. One of them is, as I said, like the frequency, the level of frequency, how often it's happening, and the amount of pain that it causes. And I think that on the larger side of things for these, like enterprise businesses that are no longer viewing, customer support or frontline support as a methodology for understanding your customer better. It's thinking about that pain rather than the frequency because there's so much signal to noise. Yeah, that scale, I think it's just a matter of reframing

Rick Denton: 12:53

that that idea of pain and the signal to noise aspect of it. So true. And I think there's even a next step further and at the front line really helps with this as well. And that is okay. But and also what is the business impact of that frequency? If it happens a ton. And there's not a lot of pain and there's no business impact? Well, then, okay, maybe that's not what we focus as opposed to it happened twice. It was incredibly painful. And it cost the company X dollars, or the inefficiency or whatever the results are. And so that focus on the business result aspect of it can be so so so focused, sorry, such a focus there and how getting that right. You know why I was stumbling there? Because I was actually thinking about your two T rexes and two pennies. What a brew. How big is too well, I don't know. Is it a teenager? Is it a penny? What a brilliant and I think that beyond just the application your son it's so true in the customer experience world and everything else is Is it a T Rex or is it a penny, you may get us the title of the show, actually, Mercer, we'll see how this episode goes out. Let's stay in that frontline space for a little bit. It is no secret that that is one of the most challenging roles, whether it's a contact center with a headset on or it's a retail employee or a restaurant server or anything like that, that frontline that closest contact to the customer is overlooked. It's under resourced, it's overworked. Mental health becomes a factor. I want to talk about mental health a little bit here. How can companies how should they be caring for their frontline if they're the rich source of insights? And they're the CO delivery of great customer experience with the customer? How can a company protect the frontline from giving away just everything of themselves?

Mercer Smith: 14:33

Yeah. Something that I feel really passionate about is giving support folks or frontline folks the opportunity to work on things outside of the queue. Right. So this comes back to them just having really great insights. Right, your your frontline folks know your customers better than anybody else. They also know what they need and what they want better than anybody else. So giving them the freedom to level themselves up and work on projects. acts that are like passion projects for them can be a huge benefit both for your teams like mental health and, and brain space. But also for your customers, right? Like some really cool stuff can come out of that you could get really great automation, you could get new resources and documentation, you could try some new experiments in terms of like pathing in your product, like, these are all things that I've seen come out of this out of the queue stuff that I think is really valuable. And then beyond that, like ensuring that the people that are leading these frontline teams have the language to speak to mental wellness, right? I think a lot of people have not are not necessarily comfortable speaking about burnout, speaking about anxiety, speaking about their own personal struggles. And I feel like that's a really key component to anyone in leadership in the customer facing space. You need to be able to speak to those things because it's the best way to reach the people on your team that may be struggling with it

Rick Denton: 16:08

Mercer I think that's so important. I love that that focus and the idea of giving language so that whether it's frontline or any human right, any human has the ability to speak to those that can and find that that support now, I realized that the first class Lounge is a little bit more trivial than actual mental health. But there is a moment of if you're in travel or you're really busy, it can be nice to just take that respite. And so I'd love for you to join me here in the first class lounge. We're going to move quickly, but we're gonna have a little bit of fun to what is a dream travel location from your past?

Mercer Smith: 16:42

Chefchaouen in Morocco.

Rick Denton: 16:45

Okay. You see my eyes you see that? I know Morocco. Tell me more about Chefchaouen Did I get that right

Mercer Smith: 16:52

Chefchaouen Okay. Yeah. So it is an entirely Blue City. So all the walls are view all the houses are blue. Everything is blue. It's built into a mountainside. It's very, very beautiful. There are tons and tons of cats, which I really love. Moroccan food is excellent. It's just it's very peaceful. And I loved it. I went there a few years ago.

Rick Denton: 17:13

Oh my gosh, you hit me on all sorts of fronts of happiness there. And I think now that you I didn't know the name but I think I've seen the pictures of it. My daughter brought introduced our family. We're a dog family, but introduced us to cats. And I actually had been to a cat cafe now. So now your city that you're describing here in Morocco, I think I want to go there good. Now you gave me a new one for my list. Let's talk about your list. A dream travel location you've not been to yet.

Mercer Smith: 17:35

Berlin. I'd love to go to Berlin. I've never been to Berlin. I have never been to Germany, I was supposed to go. Right before the pandemic hit for Oktoberfest. I didn't get a chance to go Berlin is a really beautiful, artsy city. And there's a lot of history there.

Rick Denton: 17:52

So clearly plenty of history and it does seem to have this quirky is the wrong word. Avant Garde is a little too overused, but sort of forward looking, edgy type of arts and culture to it that inspires and I think it would be a fun place to head. You mentioned Oktoberfest that's associated primarily with beer but there's a lot of German food to be had as well. So let's talk about food for a bit. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Mercer Smith: 18:21

Hmm, I really love Indian food. That's my fifth probably one of my favorite foods to eat. I also cook a lot though and I can't really cook Indian food.

Rick Denton: 18:34

So so it's nice to have somebody else do that for us. Yes, yes. Yeah, there are things that I cook well, not many, not many, but there are things that I cook well, and I am thankful for all of the other people who know how to cook and enjoy that so Mercer let's talk about the other direction though. What is the thing your parents forced you to eat but you hated as a kid?

Mercer Smith: 18:54

Honestly, I've been thinking about this and I cannot think of anything I will say I mean my parents always made me eat just basically everything like I had like Guney at the age of six and I've just kind of been eating a lot of weird stuff my whole life my grandmother did make me eat sweet breads like the veal glands when I was like seven and that was not a favorite of mine but I didn't hate it. I don't really use the word hate and I love food of all kinds. I always have

Rick Denton: 19:24

well Mercer I've gotten to that point in my life now where I feel the same way as you that I'll eat I'll try anything I'll eat anything but there are some things that I didn't like so much. Although my mom was a huge fan of sweet breads. And so those were introduced to us early on and very infrequently. It's a bit of a delicate but yes, it is interesting to to hear that at least you tried them and kudos to you. All right, thank you. Let's go back to travel what is one item not including your phone not including your passport that you will not leave home without

Mercer Smith: 19:55

I was gonna say my children but they're not really an item. Probably Probably a book

Rick Denton: 20:09

Mercer, I'm still laughing. That's awesome. My kids are not an item. Now, I will say this. There are times that my kids, I felt like they're an item. And they're an item that needs to just you know, you're not coming with me on this trip because I just didn't know. So I believe minor little or minor, Senior High School University age. And so I've had plenty of moments where Yeah, they were an item, but one of the kids love them. They're great. But I love that. So we will count it as a book that you will not leave home without even though your bring your kids on your trip. So let's get back to that great LinkedIn line. Now I'm gonna avoid having to use another bleep here. So they don't have to put the explicit flag on my episode. But let's focus on that scale customer facing teams section. How do you go about that scaling is such a challenging thing, right? The idea is great at the beginning, but how does it get big? So as your team has grown? How have you managed that scalability and what they seek to deliver?

Mercer Smith: 21:02

It's actually been different at each team that I've had to scale. So my like, stick has been going to companies starting at like zero or one employees and scaling up to usually between 20 and 50. And the scale is different everywhere. And I think the common mistake is that we try to speak to scale as if it's the same thing for everybody, right? We're like, oh, how do you scale? People are like, Oh, use automation use bots do this. And yeah, sure that that works, I guess, but it's not the best way to do it. So my tip for people looking to scale is learn about your customer identify which areas are important to them, and which areas aren't right, there's always going to be something in the customer experience that your customers don't give a hoot about. And those are the areas where you can deprioritize focus, right? So, for example, at Trello, we had six support team members for like 15 million customers or users, I should say, because Trello is a freemium product. The way that we scaled that effectively is by having excellent documentation, right? Like we knew that the people that were coming through wanted to find answers for themselves, they didn't want to wait in support, they didn't want to talk to support because they were free users for this free product that's fairly lightweight. So that was our methodology, their focus on self service, focus on tools to make self service accessible. Later on, when I was at benify, the strategy is different, right? They're very high touch, it's a security company, people are expecting different things. So with that, the scale came through by focusing on processes, right, like how do we make processes repeatable? How do we make templates? How do we make this like very, very high touch, Customer Success strategy, repeatable in order for us to be able to scale. So if you look at those two different strategies, like you wouldn't have been able to just kind of map one onto the other, you really have to know the customer and know what they care about. So that's, that's the key nugget that I will give away. In regards to the easiest and best way to scale.

Rick Denton: 23:12

It fits everything you said at the very beginning, right, where we were talking about your community and understanding your community and designing it in such a way we're going to be on Discord, or we're going to try circles, we're going to do whatever the platform needs, excuse me to be what the customer is driving you to do. And I think that's something that gets lost in that scale. So often, I love that you focused on that. Because you're right, the knee jerk reaction is automate bots. And then those of us on the customer side get pissed off at the automation and the bots when we're trying to solve a particular need that great if I wanted to ask you my account balance, which I don't know why we keep using that answer. How many people ask for their account balance, but anyway, so I want something basic, right? Yeah, I want a bot I want to book a reservation at a restaurant, I want an automated solution. But you know, what, if my flights canceled, I'm stuck in Tampa for four days, I would like to talk to someone. And so that idea of scaling, understanding what your customers need is and understanding what they are seeking, really driving that solution such a a twist on what I normally hear when I asked people about that scaling part of it,

Mercer Smith: 24:14

I would say you know, like in in regards to that, like people talking like there for your flight to Tampa gets canceled and you're stuck in an airport for four days. Like you can also scale that like there is a way to scale that and have it scale in a way that meets the customer's needs. And I think the thing to remember is that you can scale anything like and if you really want that, like touch that like deep human connection, you can also scale that it just means that there's something else somewhere else that needs to be de prioritized or shifted or done in a different way so that you can free up the resources that are being used there to help scale this efficiently.

Rick Denton: 24:55

Love that. And that's such an important discussion in business trade offs. We'd like to talk about things as being good or bad. But frequently in business, it's just a trade off that path A means I can do less a path B, that's not good or bad. It's just a trade off that I need to choose between, in many cases, right, Mercer? You you talked about this actually earlier on and I was thinking about it. As you said, I wanted to go back to it though. And I don't like this tribalism that exists in the customer experience world, we see it a lot of times where people want to talk about, you know, what is the definition of customer success, or versus service or experience or UX, I get fatigued with these definitional focus on labels. Ultimately, all of us are just trying to create something great for the customer. So in your community and your content and your job, how are you bridging the gap between all those worlds?

Mercer Smith: 25:46

Yeah, I think the way that I'm bridging the gap is just by being increasingly stubborn about not using those definitions. So I see, like, for instance, my peer group that I have, right, there's like 150 members, we meet up once a month. And inevitably, every time that someone finds out about it, they're like, Well, is this for customer successful? Is this for support folks? Like, who is this for? And I am like it's for everyone. And they're like, Well, do you break people up in Success and Support separate? And I'm like, No, I don't everyone is in there, like randomized peer groups, because that's going to be the best way to learn support folks have stuff to learn from customer successful customer success, folks have something to learn from customer experience, folks. And also like, sometimes the definitions overlap, like there are some companies that call frontline support people customer success, like there is no way to use this definition and have it be meaningful. So let's just not use it in the context of these peer groups is

Rick Denton: 26:48

I love the idea of stubbornness as being the solution to that it's rare that we get a an answer that, you know, you know how to solve that problem stubbornness. And I love that. It's so true, though. And that's why I use the term fatigue. I'm just tired of it. And I like that approach. And you're right. I mean, I've fellow CX, er, that's out there. Nicholas Eisler has talked about this a lot, go out there and just look for customer experience jobs. And look at the difference in job descriptions based off the same title, none of us know what the definition is, it's impossible to define it. Even if it is possible to find the value of finding some purest definition is worthless, when really what we're all trying to do is just create something great for the customer. So I applaud you and your stubbornness and support you in that, and we'll use that you've given me something new to use. Yeah, Mercer, I want to look forward. And I think we've kind of, we're getting close to the end of our time here, which is unfortunate, because I'm laughing with you. And we'd like to keep this going a lot longer. But I'm curious. In your team today, what's next? What's next for you and your team? What are kind of the challenges that you're looking at and the opportunities that you're seeing clients needing to solve now?

Mercer Smith: 27:56

Yeah, that's a great question. For me, I mean, I'm trying to create this one stop shop for businesses that want to provide amazing CX. So I want to be able to offer we select your tools for you, we maintain your tools for you, we staff, your team's for you, we manage their performance, we tell you what metrics to look at. I want people I want rather businesses that really want to do good CX, but understand that they don't necessarily have either the cycles or the expertise to do it as well as they want to, to come to us and us to be able to provide that. I think the biggest opportunity that we're currently seeing, which I feel sad to say, but is AI right, everyone's talking about AI, I don't want to be yet another person talking about it. But I think that that's a big frontier, right is like, how do we implement AI? I know that we can't just set it and forget it, right? Like, that's not a way to do it. So how do we manage that for our customers? How do we implement it in a way that feels authentic to these businesses? Because I think, you know, we're seeing this, this thought that like AI can replace customer support folks, or I can replace your low level marketing people, hey, I can replace this I can replace that. And I don't think that's true. So identifying what the actual need is for each of these companies rather than taking a blanket approach. And then helping them to craft an AI strategy that feels authentic and feels supportive to them rather than method of replacement is kind of our biggest challenge that we're trying to tackle right now.

Rick Denton: 29:43

I am not surprised to hear AI come up in that conversation on that question, but I am absolutely delighted to hear the approach that you're describing that it is not this just automatic drop it in forget about it. Everybody can be fired because we can just type in a question. interesting debate discussion on LinkedIn a few days ago around you know, is our travel agents going to be gone? Their travel agents as an industry have started decline anyway. But will this eliminate them? And the answer is no. it'll eliminate anybody saying hey, can you book me a flight. But when it comes to a complex and a human, I want to know what the richness of experiences that are available to me in Morocco, right, that's not going to come from an AI solution. And whether that's travel agency or whether it's software as a service or whatever the thing is, that is being considered for AI. I really appreciate your approach to saying hey, it's not the automatic let's let's dig into this and really understand what's right for the customer and be able to deliver that Mercer I've enjoyed the heck I've clearly I've laughed a ton on this episode. It I've learned a lot from you. I've definitely really come to appreciate your approach to communities. I've gotten to rebut certainly grow in my appreciation on your approach to customer experience. And I'm glad that you and I both share that fatigue of the tribalism and now I'm adding stubbornness as a key criteria for me in that regard of saying Nope, we're not going to do this and man alive I will never ever forget about the is too big Mercer folks want to know a little bit more about your approach get some insight that I gained on this episode but get a little sense of getting deeper with you and understanding your approach partner yours approach all that what's the best way for someone to get in touch with you and learn more?

Mercer Smith: 31:28

Sure, I'm on LinkedIn, Mercer Smith and then otherwise you can find me anywhere on the internet with mercinator which I think Rick will include in the notes here my website is mercinator and@mercinator on all social media channels.

Rick Denton: 31:42

Awesome. I will get all of that in the show notes scroll down click connect with Mercer you're gonna have a brilliant customer experience conversation at the very least be out there reading or content and engage whether they're it's it's there's a lot of wisdom that she's sharing out there. And in the various various worlds out there. Mercer really appreciated you being on the show. Thank you for being on CX passport.

Mercer Smith: 32:03

Thanks for having me, Rick.

Rick Denton: 32:10

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.