The one where he goes beyond CX - Vimal Rai Managing Partner, Commercial Excellence Partners E134

🎤🎞️He is DONE with CX! Go beyond “The one where he goes beyond CX” with Vimal Rai Managing Partner, Commercial Excellence Partners in CX Passport Episode 134🎧 What’s in the episode?...🎧

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction

3:05 The broken aviation industry

8:55 Why Brussels Airport is a great customer experience

13:00 He is DONE with customer experience

17:45 Contrasting Singapore and Dubai

23:03 1st Class Lounge

28:30 The emotional (revenue driving!) impact of customer experience

32:03 Contact info and closing

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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport

Episode resources:

Vimal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vimalrai/

Transcript

Vimal Rai: 0:00

You know, I want to move beyond customer experience. And I'm so done with CX. What I mean, when I say I want to move on is I want to start talking about impact, I want to start talking about the bottom line, I want to start talking about revenue. So I want to start drawing that line between, you know, customer experience and revenues, customer experience and growth, customer experience, loyalty, repeat business. That's what I mean by saying moving beyond ca.

Rick Denton: 0:26

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. Today, I'm excited to head back to Dubai. Well, actually, I'm technically heading to India, when I talked today with Vimal Rai. It's what happens when you're talking to someone global when you expect to turn on the camera and see them in Dubai and they're in India was Singapore background. That's what I love when you've got someone who has an incredible global experience and global focus. Well them all and I came to know each other through an earlier CX passport episode to Mark Ross Smith's episode number 78, which was focused on airline loyalty, while realizing that Jamal and I both had a shared interest in airlines. And actually I kind of recall, he and I were talking about where we really tie that we'd look up at the sky and wonder, where's that flight coming from? Oh, where's that flight going, which I can tell you annoys the crud out of my family when I do this. But realizing that shared interest, we're going to keep that conversation going leading into the malls appearance today, with depth and airline and travel experience for mall knows what makes those customers tick, what they're seeking in an experience and what keeps them coming back or running away. In addition to that travel passion for mall founded commercial excellence partners, focusing on large businesses to enable them to perform better at sales marketing plan and to be more customer centric. Now, here's this because what caught me off guard, especially given that focus on customer when I was talking to them all earlier, he said this quote, he was kind of done with CX and looking to go beyond it. Well, that's interesting, especially for a guest on Customer Experience podcast, I'm really interested to hear more about his perspective there. Now, when I first talked with him while he was in Singapore, he's now moved to Dubai. I'm talking to him today in India, I've never been to Singapore or Dubai, I've been to India, which I loved. But I do hope to get to Singapore, Dubai someday in the interim, we're just going to have to live vicariously through them all. And I welcome listeners to do the same for them Vimal. Welcome to CX Passport.

Vimal Rai: 2:56

Thanks, Rick. Very, very nice to be here. It's an honor to be on your podcast, I mean, avid listener, and so to have this opportunity to speak with you is a real honor. Thank you.

Rick Denton: 3:05

Well, the honor is then shared or certainly mine, because I am so excited to finally get you on the show. I know we've had some hiccups along the way. And it's so great to finally have you recording today. Let's start with that shared interest in the airlines that I mentioned in the intro you and I love the idea of airlines and travel. Man, the reality is so disappointing these days. Why is customer experience so broken in the aviation industry?

Vimal Rai: 3:33

So there's there's a couple of smaller ones like travel expectations, right? We know that travel expectations are changing constantly. And when you come in touch, when you come into contact with an airline, whether you're booking a ticket, or you're flying, or you're doing anything checking in using the lounge, our experiences and our expectations are actually shadowed and sort of sort of, you know, the the expectations that we bring in our interaction with the airline have been set by other service providers who have set the benchmark for the airline on behalf of the airline. Right. So if you talk about, you know, airlines, bringing people from A to B, well, hey, guess what, there's an Uber that does that, right? And you can, and you can track it on an app. And it's, it's, you know, even if it's late, you know what's going to happen. If you're buying if you're buying something on a on an airline website, you know, hey, we're all we're all used to buying stuff on a website called Amazon, right. And we've got one click Checkout, you know, and you can tell when your products being delivered, and so on and so forth. And you've got reviews and you've got clarity and transparency. You talked about refunds. I mean, there's all sorts of startups and disruptive SAS companies that give you refunds almost immediately. Right? If we talk about loyalty, which is another big thing with airlines, there's Netflix, right? There's your local grocery store who knows you they treat you well because they know you they know what you like and they Keep giving you more of what you like, airlines, you know, heck, sometimes they can't even do the basics getting of getting you from A to B. So that's kind of one of the reasons, you know, one of the small reasons why I think customer experience is so broken. There's a couple of big reasons, though, and, and maybe, that you know, so there's two big reasons I can pick up, right. So, you know, most travelers have either too much or too little choice in the market. In some markets, like in Dubai, for example, there's basically a very finite choice of airlines, I can fly, depending on where I need to go. Right. In other markets, like in India, where I am right now, there's way too many choices of airlines on the same routes. So what this means, you know, in either scenario, what this means is that there's no real incentive for the airlines to invest in CX beyond the absolute minimum, right? Either if you control the market, or if everybody else is in the same market as you, there is an absolute minimum where most airlines will not go beyond, right. And you'd be silly to not sort of keep to that minimum expectation. You might not do it if you're a new entrant in the market. You know, you might go beyond the beyond the usual launch a promotion that differs from everybody else. But basically everybody comes back down to the minimum. And I think the second biggest reason why airlines CX is in dire straits is unfortunately down to you know, the outcome of the first big reason that I told you where there's too little or too much choice in the market. And the result of that too little too much choice is basically we as customers, we acquiesce to bad CX, right? Oh, yeah. So Right. I mean, we accept it, you know, so airlines started putting 10 seats in a row, you know, we get every now and then you hear about that crew service. There's delayed flights, there's late are no refunds, there's terrible food and, and we complain, yeah. But, you know, in spite of that famous statistic that says 50 to 80% of customers will switch service providers after one bad experience. Really? Do we do that in the airline industry? I don't really think so. Right? So if I'm using a CRM and sales, I have 800 other choices? Yeah, I'm flying my airline with my loyalty points. I don't really have that choice. Yeah, that's

Rick Denton: 7:17

a really good point there. When I've asked that question before we get into things like the operational complexity and the regulatory environment, and the fact that, well, if somebody fails me in a grocery store, maybe I get a spoiled grapefruit. Whereas if I'm failed in the airline industry, I'm abandoned, or God forbid, you know, some sort of catastrophic event. And so there are elements to the airline industry that are unique there, you bring in something there about customer choice and the absence of choice or perhaps the absence of the habit, this the perception of the absence of choice in consumers drives a lot of that I know that it took me a long time to fire certain airline from my domestic business. And I was willing to put up with just increasingly bad service because I was an ex lifetime member with them. And in theory received some element of loyalty, I'd never really saw that loyalty manifested. But in theory, I had it there. And so both the fortress hub, like you're describing and Dubai, I think many would argue that the Dubai fortress have airline there does deliver great CX it's still though the point of the absence of choice, and the tie of loyalty helps drive some of that.

Your CX Passport Captain: 8:28

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Rick Denton: 8:55

In that vein, Vimal. It's related to the airlines. But it's a thing that the airlines and us as passengers use. We've seen transformations driven out of COVID. I know that you and I are talking several years after, well, maybe just a few years after what we kind of perceive as the end or the the waning days of that global pandemic. Some have used that to transform their experiences. And you were a part of that in an airport situation. So in the Brussels airport, you help them transform their experience to be something that was actually great, something delightful. Tell me more about that transformation out of the Brussels airport.

Vimal Rai: 9:35

Yeah, Rick. So this was driven by a local sort of infrastructure professional services organization that was close to Brussels Airport, and they contacted me and they asked me for my help on a relaunch strategy, right. This was sort of very early on in the, in the pandemic, when a few of the very forward thinking airports in the world were trying to actually put in place plan to re launch operations, right, anticipating the borders would open up and travel would would would resume, at some point fairly quickly. I mean, literally, we know that, you know, travel was going to shut down for almost two years. Right? Right. But, but we worked on a plan, which was driven very much from the customer backwards. Whilst the people that I worked with the people that actually hired me to help them, we're working in terms of, you know, tools and sort of digital tools and technology and processes and all of that outwards, right? So the airport was very focused on, you know, how can we manage the things that we are in control of, whilst I was brought in as the as the customer advocate, right. And so what I did was in a nutshell, I came up with a three art plan, and the three R's really stand for relaunch, recover, and regrow. And what that means really, simply is, you know, how do we approach the relaunch of operations? What are some of the, what are some of the facets of relaunch that we need to cover, and one of them was obviously, you know, you, you need to win the hearts and the minds of, of customers, you need to convince them, you need to give them the confidence that, that you've, you've taken care of their needs around COVID, the new needs around COVID, being touchless. And of course, the minute you talk about touchless, then you start to see the value of digital marketplaces or digital platforms, right. And at that point, you know, Brussels Airport was struggling to get people to get onto its digital platform. And so this would have been the perfect opportunity, after we launch and as part of the recovery process to actually get get customers on board, the digital platforms that they were creating. And then when you really look at regrowth, so you know, sort of phase one, phase two, phase three. So phase one, relaunch phase two, recover. And phase three regrowth is when you really look at the results of of the last few months of relaunch and regrowth, relaunch and recover, and then, you know, plan ahead and then see how you can drive more of passengers to use that digital marketplace. And so it was really about focusing on customers focusing on creating confidence, and then bringing in commercial elements at the end, too, because as you know, I mean, efforts ultimately thrive on non aeronautical revenues as well.

Rick Denton: 12:25

Right. Right. Well, then I like that. And I like the three R's. I hope that you've got that trademarked or a part of your methodology, taking that forward. That's a that's a very effective way to take that forward and understand how can we bring that customer centricity? And I like talking about that in the context of airports I've had guests on that are responsible for airports and the like. And it's, it's not something that we natively think about as passengers. And yet there's a lot of thought that goes into what does that experience? What does it like so that not only passengers are satisfied with the airlines, the ones that sort of create a certainly element of lifeblood of the airport, that the experience for the airline is great as well, let's let's step away from airlines, even though I guarantee you and I could talk that whole time about airlines and travel. I know that I'm channeling a show from the 1990s. Heck, I still watch episodes, but when you and I talked earlier, you mentioned going beyond customer experience. Or if I may say it, you were on a break with CX, what's driving you to want to go beyond customer experience? What does that look like?

Vimal Rai: 13:35

So Rick, I need to clarify what I meant. And the problem was as follows, you know, with my given my background, when I started working with airlines, and then moved on to, you know, to work in other industries, around travel and around aviation. Most of the time when I read about CX or when I came into this understanding that there's this thing called customer experience, right? What I was reading was, you know, basically discussions of bad service, problematic situations, rude people, broken systems, legacy technology, you know, all the all the normal things that we can complain about. And I think one of the things that I realized after a few years was that we need to accept that, you know, that problems happen, right? And nobody's perfect and systems break down and we need to expect but, but we also need to remember that Hindsight is 2020. It always is, everyone is Einstein after the fact, right? Everybody knows, everybody knows what you should have done when that happened. The problem I saw was that we all stopped, we stopped right there. So we all we all saw that there was a problem. We also what was wrong. We all came up with, you know, with these wonderful theories of what should happen, but then we stopped there. And you never read about anything that you know talks about the real impact of what happened, what was the change that was that was instituted, what you know, what's been put in place to mitigate similar circumstances that might happen again. And that's the bit that I saw was a big hole in CES. So when I say that, you know, I want to move beyond customer experience. And I'm so done with CX, I, what I mean to say is, I'm so done with the normal elements of CX. What I mean, when I say I want to move on is I want to start talking about impact, I want to start talking about the bottom line, I want to start talking about revenue. So I want to start drawing that line between, you know, customer experience and revenues, customer experience, and growth, customer experience, loyalty, repeat business. That's what I mean by saying moving beyond CX. And that's not very easy to do, even today.

Rick Denton: 15:51

You have hit my heart there, I didn't, I didn't actually expect because you and I didn't talk about exactly what you meant by this. So that has me feeling as if I could say the same sentence that I too want to move on CX now I actually would rather bring CX the label forward into your definition yet, regardless of how we label it. I 100% agree with the idea that we've got to move to action, my little pithy phrase is stop serving scores start, listen and act focusing on voice the customer elements of this. But the reality is, if we aren't generating some element of business, progress of customer progress, these are for profit businesses, typically that we're working for there as a whole nonprofit customer experience segment as well. It is still a result that is intended with the improving of experience. And if we aren't driving towards that, then we continue to see some of the let's just call them departures of customer experience leaders and departures of customer experience teams, because they weren't perceived as being effective. I can get on board with going beyond CX, if that's what your definition is, we've got to get to action.

Vimal Rai: 17:04

Yeah, so it's one of the reasons I actually co founded commercial vaccines partners, right, I want to work with the biggest brands to move beyond just CX, I mean, we do a whole lot of work on the commercial on the pure commercial elements. But when it comes to, when it comes to customer experience, that's my speciality in the business. And, you know, I want to truly understand how to draw that link between customer experience, revenue, customer experience, cost, design, the value that appeals to customers, and deliver that value through your products, through innovation through your services. I want to talk about pricing and the impact that has on on, on customer experience, I want to talk about positioning, and the impact that that has on customer experience. I want to be able to draw a pretty, you know, quantifiable line, as far as it's possible between customer experience and the money that your business is spending or making in the future.

Rick Denton: 18:02

Amen. Okay, right there. We're not going to stop because I have more that I want to ask you about. But we could stop there because of the fact that that's exact like To me that's that's what's where we are right now, when I talk to clients. That's exactly it. How are you generating actual results? Don't I sometimes flip it on the head, don't even read. Don't talk to me. If you aren't interested in generating business results. I don't care about your NPS score. I care about what your business result is as a result of the increase or decrease of that NPS score. Let's step out of the business space for a bit because I did I know I'm talking to you in India, but you were in Singapore, you've moved to Dubai, you're you're living in Dubai most of the time. You've lived in two world class cities with those these are two world class airports, two world class city experiences two very, very close double cities. They sound incredibly similar and yet we know they're also incredibly different. I would love to just know what are some of your favorite stories of both cities and your experiences there and what are you finding similar as you've made the move and what have you found to be surprisingly different?

Vimal Rai: 19:08

Oh, great question and loads of answers there.

Rick Denton: 19:11

I'm thinking we only have a half hour Yeah, no.

Vimal Rai: 19:16

So I'm, I'm Singaporean. I was born and brought up in Singapore. So you know, everything that Singaporean meals have to go through that's going through the army. I've done all of that. I studied political science, you know, so I, I spent, you know, 30 years of my life in Singapore from from being bonded to before I moved out, and then then I spent a chunk of time away from Singapore. And when I say chunk, I mean a chunk. I mean, I didn't live in Singapore for 21 years. And in those 21 years, you know, I lived in five different countries. 10 other cities. So it's not just I've lived in Madrid, you know, I've lived part of the time in Barcelona. I've lived in Hong Kong. So I've lived in a few

Rick Denton: 19:56

my favorite cities in the world. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Vimal Rai: 19:59

So So it's, you know, everything that I bring with me today is, is accumulator. It's an accumulation of all my experiences across all of these cities. So I have that unique ability to be a local in Singapore and speak Singlish, which is what we call in Singapore in English. And I have that ability to be to be a local and I have the ability to also be a relative outsider if I need to be because, you know, I've spent two thirds of my life away from Singapore, right. And Dubai is a very different place to Singapore, it's actually a completely different growth trajectory and a learning curve, I would say Singapore's. You know, it's small, it's concentrated, it's, but it's very mature. It's a very young country. You know, we gained independence in 1965. But it's, you know, economically it's a pretty mature country in a in a pretty mature workforce and a pretty mature government. Right? Dubai is a very different ballgame altogether. It's a very vast land. So compared to Singapore, which is a tiny dot, you know, Singapore is like 660 square kilometers or something, Dubai, you know, vast land, right? Even a desert, you know, if you'd like, but it's also the gateway to the rest of the Middle East. Right. And, and it's a showcase for, I think, I think not many people see it this way. But Dubai is actually a showcase for Arabian culture and hospitality, and the Arabian economy, right? It is a melting pot in a petri dish sort of rolled into one. And what that means is, you know, it's, it's a melting pot. It's unlike Singapore, where you've got 90% locals and 10% expats, Dubai is the other way around, it's 10% locals and 90% expense. So that's the melting pot. Because with it, because with so many different cultures, and, and so much growth happening at such a short, within such a short period of time, everything, almost everything is, you know, is is based on trial and error, almost everything is an experiment, right? You know, to buy wants to double its population in the next seven years, that's going from 3.6 million to over 7 million, right? The pressures that come with that kind of growth, population growth is mind boggling, right? So, so there's a lot of planning, there's a lot of money, there's a lot of resources going into building up the infrastructure. And not just the infrastructure, but the people that emit the technology or limit the process element. All of that is relatively lagging behind in terms of the great, beautiful infrastructure and architecture that you see in Dubai, all of these things are still lagging behind. Right. And so that's, that's kind of what I want to tap into by moving into Dubai.

Rick Denton: 23:02

Have them all with Singapore with Dubai, I mentioned to world class airports and too frequently places that to get there for most of us, or many of us around the world. It's a long flight to get there. And so it can be nice to stop into the lounge, take a little break, and enjoy. And so today we're going to do that. I'm going to invite you to join me here in the first class lounge. We'll move quickly here and have a little bit of fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Vimal Rai: 23:31

It's got to be French Polynesia.

Rick Denton: 23:34

I can't imagine it.

Vimal Rai: 23:36

Yeah, but most people call it 80. And most people know Bora Bora. But so it's it's five groups of islands and three of them atolls, if I remember correctly, so I spent, you know, a week or two in Bora Bora. And then I spent the weekend in a place called Nuku. Hiva which is not an atoll and nuclear he was famous for being if I'm not mistaken, in one of the survival series. They've got cannibals on the island.

Rick Denton: 24:02

Okay, all right. Well, I I'm glad that that didn't affect you significantly. But I know how beautiful that is. I would love to see at some time. What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Vimal Rai: 24:17

Oh, there's two that are top on my list. So there's the Seychelles and I have no idea why I just think it sounds sexy. It sounds beautiful. Ever since I was a little kid. So it shows us a place I really want to go to. But the one the one that as an adult I really want to go to see is this part of the world called the Antarctica?

Rick Denton: 24:37

Oh, yeah. Yeah,

Vimal Rai: 24:38

it's not. It's not easy to get to. It's not really a tourist sort of a place but but I really want to go there. I really want to just disconnect and just be with nature.

Rick Denton: 24:50

To want to get an article in the list and a little bit of a selfish just shout out here since we're talking Antarctica, that's the only continent that I don't have a guest for CX passport for yet so I'm still looking for that scientist that wants to be on six passport so when you go them all would you recruit for me? I would appreciate that. Hopefully that happens soon. Thanks so much. What is a favorite thing of yours to

Vimal Rai: 25:13

eat? Ah, I'm a foodie man. I mean, I love food. I love looking at food. I love seafood. That means I see food and I eat it but my favorite would have to be any almost any Singaporean dish right? So I don't know if you're familiar, but there's Luxa There's me Goehring which is fried noodles. There's chicken rice this curry. I also love Japanese. I love burgers. I love Japanese burgers.

Rick Denton: 25:45

So it's all the above so this question may be a trick for you then what is something your parents forced you to eat but you hated as a kid?

Vimal Rai: 25:54

Ah, bitter God. Bitter God you know that is I don't it's a so it's bitter gourd. It's a type of bitter melon. It's in the same family apparently as zucchini and squash and and all of those things are fine but bitter god. Oh my God. It is. It is diabolical. It looks diabolically tasty. Is it is better.

Rick Denton: 26:18

Wow. So you went on two fronts there. One I've never heard a bitter gourd. So that's great. That's something new for me. And I always love seeing people's reactions. But then to I don't think I've heard anyone say that a food item was diabolical. And so you introduced two new things for me in one question. Brilliant. I love it. I'm going to have a good chuckle about that one. What is let's close out the launcher heading back to travel what is one travel item not including your phone or your passport that you will not leave home without?

Vimal Rai: 26:48

Oh, oh, there's quite a few. But at the top of the list is my running shoes. I just love exploring any place that I get to on foot. So if I have a few hours between meetings, I just put those shoes on and I go walking, I go running, I just go exploring, I figured the streets out. I've never traveled without a pair of shoes. And if I actually forget i I'm actually almost guaranteed to go buy a pair

Rick Denton: 27:22

from all you and I are kindred spirits, and not just in the loving of the airlines. But that one specifically it is amazing what happens when you just get on the sidewalk and start wandering Hong Kong. It's one of those cities where I felt that way where you just wander. And you find yourself in nooks and crannies that you wouldn't if you were in a car and a taxi or anything along those lines. And actually, I do have an actual story of forgetting my tennis shoes in Hong Kong and finding a sporting goods store and buying tennis shoes there. So we are more kindred spirit than we realized. You know, let's go back to that heading beyond customer experience. I'm going to drag you back once more, even though I now I understand even better what you mean by that. I've had a lot of former CX passport guests talk about this. And in fact, recently, SANDRA THOMPSON just came on the show. And she talked about AI and I know you talked about it on LinkedIn recently emotions, emotions and customer experience. So you called out that most organizations fail to leverage the power of their customers emotions and feelings. Now you've hit my heart. Amen. Totally agree. But why not so much that that's true. But why is it true? Why are companies so reluctant or unaware of the importance of emotions and customer experience?

Vimal Rai: 28:40

records because emotions are not quantifiable, right? A business enterprise is all about, you know, it's all about. So any business. And you said it earlier, any any for profit business is all about drawing that line, from market to product to pricing to sales to, you know, to revenues, and then and then underlining costs, and so on and so forth. Right? revenue and cost attribution is actually how businesses evaluate performance. That that's that's just how it's done. Right? It's all about shareholder value, and returns. And so where's customer emotions and all of this, you can't, you know, you can't pin a number, you can't pin a metric. You can't even try to identify all the emotions that your customers go through when they interact with your brand. And if you can't identify it, there's no way you're going to link it to your sales performance, right? emotions aren't mathematical. They're not really a science in the sense that, you know, you can't have a hypothesis and definitively prove something based on an experiment, right? At most you can you can, you might ask you might draw some conclusions. And so as a consequence of struggling with customer emotions, businesses focus on what they can control and what they can quantify and what they can measure. And so you've got things like CSAT and NPS and customer law Lifetime value and, you know, customer retention rates and effort scores. And all of that is fine, right? I think I think businesses headed in the right direction with all of these metrics. But most of them, don't go beyond that, and try to understand the emotions that fuel customer behaviors. So all these metrics that I mentioned, are good in terms of explaining what the customer is going through, how they rate their interactions with you with your brand, and how much time they're spending and how many processes or steps are taken. But none of them actually are able to identify the emotions that drive a customer to make a decision over another right to make one choice or another. So, you know, again, as I mentioned earlier, is one of the reasons I founded commercial excellence partners, because I find that the focus that we as a business and my partners have on customer centricity and the work that we're doing as individual consultants in the business, to truly sort of drive customer to truly drive enterprises to better commercial performance. There is a very strong alignment with customer emotions. Right. And, and I'm in the process of developing that alignment. Particularly because I think we are on the cusp of, of a tremendous opportunity, right? We've there's one phrase we haven't mentioned on your podcast, and that's artificial intelligence.

Rick Denton: 31:28

The one episode that we haven't talked about it, you're right.

Vimal Rai: 31:33

You know, I think I think we're on the cusp of a tremendous opportunity for for enterprises to deliver new value, enhanced value, right, because of artificial intelligence. So what we're designing at si P is we're helping companies to design, build and create new value so that, you know they can they can use emotional connections, and emotional values that they identify within the customers. As a business strategy for growth.

Rick Denton: 32:04

I always find that this is a little it probably would take us way down a rabbit hole here. But I find it always interesting when we have to have a conversation about, you know, how do we get emotion into business? How do we do that how to? Well, business is nothing more than just a well, at least for now. A collection of humans, humans that have emotion. So you would think that our collection of humanity would then make it more emotional inside of business. And yet we find that to be the most emotionless entity it feels like out there is inside the business world. Your approach of drawing it through the customer metrics and the like to results makes a lot of sense to me. You know them all we are at time. Actually, there's a few other things I'd want to ask you. But we are at time and I would love to give the listeners a little bit of opportunity to know how can they learn more about you, your travel experience your approach to customer experience, your choice to go beyond customer experience? How can people get in touch? Oh,

Vimal Rai: 32:58

yeah, well, Rick, I'm all over LinkedIn. I'm on it every day, you know, half an hour a day at least. I'm pretty prompt so just look for me on LinkedIn, them all right? You got to recognize this. I believe in the journey being more valuable. And you're gonna see that in my headline banner. Yeah, I'm an open networker. So I connect with on anyone who reaches out.

Rick Denton: 33:22

I will get that in the show notes as well. I'll also get a way for folks to find out a little bit more about commercial excellence partners as well in the show notes for them all learned a lot kind of a wide ranging episode. This one went as the intro says interactions I wasn't expecting. And so I enjoyed that. Thank you for teaching me certainly about your travel experiences, what it means to go beyond CX and then this idea of connecting emotions to the actual business results and how you can go about that great conversation today from all thank you for being on CX passport.

Vimal Rai: 33:53

Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

Rick Denton: 34:00

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.