The one with the psychology of loyalty - Vinay Parmar E204

🎤🎞️“The one with the psychology of loyalty” with Vinay Parmar Speaker & Consultant in CX Passport Episode 204🎧 What’s in the episode?...

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction: Welcoming Vinay Parmar

1:19 Why relationships matter more than products in CX

3:25 The three types of customers: One-night stand vs. lifelong loyalty

6:37 The role of trust in customer decision-making

8:18 The psychology behind customer experience

11:24 How emotions shape brand perception and loyalty

12:37 Listening as the key to better business results

14:20 The flaws of traditional voice-of-customer programs

18:25 First Class Lounge

22:35 How companies can truly understand customer emotions

25:43 Turning insights into action inside a company

29:06 Creating sustainable CX strategies through consistency

32:06 Measuring what truly matters to your customers

33:31 Where to connect with Vinay

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

Episode resources:

Vinay LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinayparmar/

Vinay website: https://vinayparmar.co.uk/

Transcript

Rick Denton: 0:00

Assuming a company actually understands that importance, how can they tactically, ethically and successfully leverage psychology to improve experience and deliver improved business results?

Vinay Parmar: 0:10

Yeah, it's great question, and the simple answer to that customer

Rick Denton: 0:15

experience wisdom a dash of travel talk, we've been cleared for takeoff. The best meals are served outside and require passport today on CX passport, I'm joined by Vinay Parmer, a leader who understands the human side of customer experience with over three decades of experience across industries like retail, travel, utilities, Vinay focuses on the psychology behind CX, why customers think, feel and act the way they do, and how businesses can create meaningful connections by knowing that, as a speaker and consultant, Binet has helped businesses not just improve processes, but also tap into what truly matters to their Customers, his work bridges data and human behavior turning insights into action. And you all know how much I love that insights to action that then build loyalty and trust. I'm curious to hear how Vinay blends that psychology with strategy to help businesses deliver experiences that stick. Vinay, welcome to CX passport.

Vinay Parmar: 1:19

Hey, Rick, thank you for having me.

Rick Denton: 1:21

I am excited to have you. And folks, I didn't say it in the intro. I should have said in the intro, Binet comes to us from the UK. And you know how much I love getting out of my US borders, and so it's a treat for me to cross the pond virtually with the nay today. Yeah, I do want to get at something right there at the top. Okay, you have talked about that. It's all about building relationships in the sense of a business context, it's not about product, it's not about service, it's not about features, it's building relationships. I have to imagine that there are quite a few alternative views to that idea sitting out there. Business isn't just about heart. There are cold, hard financial realities. So how do you respond to someone who challenges your relationship view

Vinay Parmar: 2:02

the cold, hard truth is that business is about the financial realities. It's about profitability, reducing cost, increasing revenue. But revenue isn't just generated through the set of products and services. It's generated through trust. It's delivered to developing trust, and that's the basis for relationships. Now, I'm not saying that products and services don't matter. Of course they do. They're the hiking factor, right? You have to do what you say on the tin. If it's just a big old hug,

Rick Denton: 2:33

then people are just gonna start giving you money, even though there's nothing there. Okay, yeah. I

Vinay Parmar: 2:37

mean, even Disneyland gives you the hugs, but still makes money, you know. And so the way to think about it is this is that, yes, revenue is generated from the sale of products and services. That's a given, but the output from that is, you kind of get three buckets of people that come out of that that process. The first bucket is those people that are your one time stopping by for just one thing, they're going to buy from you once for a number of reasons. Maybe they're out of town, and your business is a local business, and they're only going to buy for you because they're there. Maybe it's a point to point problem, and you're going to solve the problem that's in that kind of thing. They might have had a negative experience to decide, I'm never using you again. But for whatever reason, they are your one night standers. Never going to use you again. They are done, never coming

Rick Denton: 3:25

back. I don't want to interrupt your flow, but I have to Whoa. I haven't heard that one before. All right, the one with the one night stand there we go. We are talking

Vinay Parmar: 3:34

about relationships, right? So we sure are. And then you've got, then you've got another group, which are your we're going to stick around. We kind of like you, but there might be something better. So we're sticking around because we kind of like you. It's been okay. But part of the reason I might be sticking with you could be because there just isn't a bad choice. And in business that could be a lack of competition. It could be like here in the UK, for example, in utilities, your water companies, your water company, you can't change to a different water company. It's the one you're stuck with, right? It's the same thing. So that can be a false dawn, Fauci it can be a false measure for some companies, that just because customers are sticking around, that creates loyalty. It's not they're they're captive. They're not captured through that experience, and then you've got the bucket. That's the one that I'm most interested in. That is the group that stay loyal to you. They're in for the long game. They're beyond the one night stand. They're in for, you know, a long term relationship, marriage, the whole nine yards. And we could go to town of this analogy, I won't do but they are there. They are the guys and girls that talk about you when you're not in the room in the most positive way, to their friends, their family, their business networks. They are advocates of yours, and they are trusting enough to keep coming back to you for business time and time again, their default and if you only focus on the product or service, you. And you treat it like a standalone transaction, you get more of the first two buckets. Okay, yeah, makes sense. But if you start each transaction with the mindset that this is the start of a beautiful relationship, then something quite powerful happens. There's a different mindset that engenders the way that people interact with customers, the way they decide about how they develop products and services, and that's the kind of premise that you start from. This is the start of a relationship. Because in every interaction, what the customer is doing is re asking themselves, do I trust this do I trust this company? Do I trust this brand? Do I want to keep doing business with them? That's the assessment they're making through every single interaction. Now, if they've had a good run up until now, that's sometimes a pretty easy answer, because you've got credit in the bank, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later. But if it's been a choppy ride, then that's dangerous waters, because suddenly they're starting to think, I'm not sure about this. So that's the relationship part each of those interactions, just like any any relationship that you have in life is about, how do you keep reconfirming I'm somebody that you want to be involved with, I'm somebody or a brand that you want to trust. I'm here. I'm going to take care of you. Yes, I'm going to deliver what my product or service says, but I'm also going beyond that. And you know, just interestingly, as a quick stat, Rick the Edelman Trust Barometer that's done annually here in the UK. In their 2024 report, they said that 81% of customers now hold trust as a key factor in their purchase decision making. It's becoming a bigger and bigger factor of what people are using to choose. Hey

Rick Denton: 6:37

there, CX passport, travelers. I want to let you know about CX passport live. Cx passport live helps brands amplify their events impact with the power of live in person podcasting. Brands partner with CX passport live at their on site event to help excite attendees, reward high value customers and convert potential customers. Bring a new level of energy and excitement to your event and amplify your brand's impact with CX passport. Live. Learn more at CX passport, live.com, now back to the show that that resonates with me, one just conceptually, you know, living in the customer experience world and then individually as a customer, because I've been failed by so many brands that when I do find one, that I feel I can trust whatever that is, whether it's a great dining experience, a great airline experience, good luck, great hotel experience, whatever that looks like that, trust that what they said they're gonna do, they're gonna deliver. All right. Good I try. That makes sense. I want to, I want to later, get back into kind of, okay, so great, if that's how a company can make more money. Great product. Products are important. You didn't actually say that products aren't important. But rather, start with the relationship, yeah, and then the others will come together. I want to, I want to stay a little more theoretical though first. And that is sure your approach is this idea of psychology, because we've heard so many conversations around loyalty, and I get it all of that is right, but that psychology the human mentality of customer brand connection. Can you go deeper? Because, Lord knows, I'm not a psychologist. How does psychology truly affect the customer? Yeah,

Vinay Parmar: 8:18

well, look, Rick, I'm not a psychologist either. So we're in good company, okay, but, but what I can say is that ultimately, I do know that P business is about people, and people are driven by their emotions, as much as like, as much as we like to think that we are not. We are emotional beings. We make most of our decisions based on emotions. We might think we're being logical, and men are particularly good at this, is that we'll make a decision and then we'll backwards engineer it to tell us that we logically made that decision, and often we'll make the choice that we didn't make seem worse than the one that we have made, to kind of just justify it to our partners and our loved ones, right? So

Rick Denton: 8:56

that's a choice, rationalization, choice, guilty, exactly,

Vinay Parmar: 8:59

but this is part of our brain called the limbic system. That's the place and the home of our memories our emotions. The amygdala is the place that drives our emotions and our behavior, and then the hippocampus is the place that makes our memories and controls our emotions. And so, you know, when I talk about experience, I talk about the product of customer. Experience is memory, because memory critique contains the emotions, and it's the emotions that drive our future behavior and influence what we're doing. So the experiences that we deliver create those memories, right? And the more powerful the memory, the most powerful the association with the brand and across the customer journey, all of those interaction points, some are more valuable than others. Some of have a greater opportunity to be have a deeper connection than others, and part of that connection depends is kind of is correlated to the the size of the the emotional bandwidth. And what I mean by that is, in times of high stress. Or at times of high emotion, what you experience gets locked in things that fire together, wire together. So it's kind of like if you think back in your life, and you think back to your first day or a really happy occasion, or whatever you might remember the song or where you were, because it's linked to a really important emotional memory. And equally, if you have a negative memory, the same thing happens. So, you know, disruption with an airline or a particular airport, your bags get lost at an airport. You have a really bad meal in a restaurant, and something gets happened. Something happens on a really special occasion. Those can wire negatively. And here's the interesting thing, negative experiences have twice the impact as a positive one on loyalty, like twice as bad. Yeah. And the other thing about the experiences is that there's a thing called the somatic somatic marker. And what that is is that in those particularly high emotionally intense ones where it really wires together, not only does the customer recall a memory and an emotion, emotional response. It can also drive a physiological response, tension in the body, anxiety, heart racing, all of those that can happen. The good news is, your brain has neuroplasticity, so it can relearn that, but it takes time to relearn the wiring. Once it's wired, but it can change. So that's why, when you have a negative experience and it's recovered really well. That rewiring starts to take shape,

Rick Denton: 11:25

yeah? That that, that the psychology of that is that it really helps. That idea of why restoring relationships, the Disney phrase, as opposed to fixing issues, really comes into play, that if you fix the issue, All right, great, but it didn't, I'm never the word you said neuro plasticity, yeah, hey, I got it. But that neuroplasticity, that is not something that comes just after an issue is fixed, because that negative, and you talking about the physiological component of that, even as you were telling that, I actually started visualizing some memories, and I could feel my heart actually start to not race, but just need to kind of accelerate a little bit. So thankfully, through neuroplasticity of this experience, I'm going to get that heart rate down, and we're going to continue to have a good conversation. But you did, I felt it as you were describing that. Let's, let's talk about what that means, then, for business results, because if, if relationships matter and if psychology is a key component of cementing those relationships, assuming a company actually understands that importance, how can they tactically, ethically and successfully leverage psychology to improve experience and thus actually deliver improved business results? Yeah,

Vinay Parmar: 12:37

it's great question, and the simple answer to that is, learn to listen well. And it sounds simplistic, but it's also quite difficult, because listening in theory is, you know, great, but in practice, it's difficult, because here's what happens normally when we think we're listening, what we're really listening for is the gap in the conversation, which is the point that I can reply to what you're saying to me. I'm not actually listening to what you're saying. I am listening to listening to you, by

Rick Denton: 13:04

the way, but that's the part I'm going to cut out. I'm not listening to you. Rick,

Vinay Parmar: 13:09

and if we do think we're listening, the other thing that happens is then we only listen to the bits that are being said that conveniently align to what we're looking for. That back up our thought processes, our agenda, our evidence, so we pick out so we can be quite superficial like that. To really get into that objective, critical listening, you have to be able to detach yourself and take a step back and for boards. That's really important, to be able to lean in and listen. Nobody likes to hear bad news about themselves. So it takes, you know, a mindset to kind of lean in and go, No, we really need to listen here. And listening for lots of organizations is normally done through a voice of the customer program. And, you know, we've talked about this outside of here, that it's normally feedback forms in NPS, and there are a couple of problems that take shape in there, right, right? The gamification, so chasing the number becomes the thing, and also that you've now got this weird thing that happens, that employees are incentivized around it, so then they have a behavior that says, Please give me a 10 out of 10 or a five out of five, right? Because otherwise I get fired and I don't get my bonus. All right, you know, I don't get my kids don't

Rick Denton: 14:16

get fed tonight. Yeah, exactly. I'm hungry Exactly. And

Vinay Parmar: 14:20

so that that's one thing that happens, which then gives you an over inflated view of what might happen. There's also survey fatigue and all those kind of things. You get quite a disparate view. The other thing I think that's interesting to think about is that at the best of times, we struggle to describe how we feel like we as human beings. We struggle to find the language. We're not all great writers, orators, communicators, sometimes just communicating to our family about how we feel about something's quite difficult. So now imagine being faced with a box that says, give us a score and tell us how you feel and what you gave to that our ability to take what it is we're feeling inside and use the right vocabulary and language that. Describe that accurately in a way that the person reading is going to get it is quite difficult because vocabulary is different for all of us. You know, we're on different sides of the punts. It's aluminum, not aluminum, by the way,

Rick Denton: 15:15

I've started saying whilst instead of wild, is that? Do I get to learn an honorary and

Vinay Parmar: 15:22

so language can mean different things. Word means different things. We also have different tolerances. So what might anger me might just be straight you, so you got all of that in there. So, but a lot of companies depend on that mechanism for their listening. And what I'm saying is, is that organizations first need to develop what I call their organizational sensory acuity, that's their ability to observe beyond just one particular lens. And when I was a kid, there was a song about rainbow. So don't know whether you have it in the US, but it's the colors of the rainbow, red and yellow and purple and green. And in the line, in the song, there's a line that says, listen with your ears, listen with your eyes, and sing everything you see. And when I was growing up, I was like, What a strange thing to have listen with your eyes. How do you listen with your eyes? And it's only later when I started to read and study a bit more about psychology and the human brain and how we think is that. What it was really saying is that observation is all of your senses. You know to be able to listen, you should. You can listen with your eyes. You're watching what happens, right? So organizations need to understand that. So then that's where those conversations with your front line are really important. Where you get that first hand observation of not just what customers are saying and doing, but how they're behaving. Why? Using your data points on your website, for example, about where people are dwelling what they're doing next, where they're going and what pages they're on, how they might be moving through your store or your restaurant, or what seats they pick. All of those data points combined with all the other stuff, develops that customer intelligence. And the power of that customer intelligence comes into play because when you use it properly, you not only use it to fix issues and problems that most Voice of the Customer programs do, but when you create that kind of real strong customer intelligence with those varying different data points, what you can then do is use it to drive development of products and services. And I led digital transformation at the last company I worked with, and we implemented agile. And a key part of Agile is using customer data and stories to understand what's going on and develop your roadmap. So if you informed by that you're better going to meet the needs and expectations of customers. You can use it to drive your marketing plan and strategies around branding and what customers are really thinking, both current and emerging. You can use it to to think about your recruitment policies and how you're attracting talent. So all of those things come into play, but it starts with developing that ability to listen and really develop that customer intelligence.

Rick Denton: 18:00

Vinay, I want to take you on a place where I hope that our emotions and our psychology will not be elevated. I hope that we can have a little moment here, a little relaxation. I hope that this is an experience that you remember fondly and want to return to someday. I'd want 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?

Vinay Parmar: 18:25

I would say the Maldives. I went in 2006 and it's exactly what you see on the postcard, white beaches, beautiful water. Snorkel out there. It was absolutely beautiful.

Rick Denton: 18:38

I continue to hear Maldives as an answer to that question, and then, certainly outside of CX passport, it's just such a journey for those of us that live in the US, yet the descriptions that I hear folks like you and others saying it's certainly worth, absolutely worth the journey. I want that over water bungalow. I want to absolutely experience nothing. Maybe got to get there soon. As sea levels continue to rise, what is a dream, speaking of getting somewhere soon? What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Vinay Parmar: 19:09

I've not been to Thailand and Japan. They're two on my list. Really want to go to Thailand for the culture. I want to see some of the temples and James Bond Island, because everybody wants to see PP Island, right? And then Japan, because I just think it's a fascinating place, again, the history, the culture, the architecture. It's, yeah, two places on my list, and

Rick Denton: 19:32

those are two very wonderful places that I actually have had the chance to go to. And it's interesting you mentioned them, because I think sometimes we think, Okay, well, you know, it's over, they're kind of similar. Read, at least, I never get longitude and latitude, but you know, sort of on that side of the globe, yet it's a long way away from each other. So, you know, somebody's trying to link those. You may need two trips out of that, but I would definitely recommend getting to both. One of the things that I loved about both countries, in addition the culture, is the food. And so what is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Vinay Parmar: 20:04

So I'm going to be super biased. I love Indian food. I'm from. It's my heritage. I love my wife is an amazing cook. My mother in law is an amazing cook, which explains why I was half the size before I got married. And then 25 years since then, I've just piled on the pans and got bigger and bigger because the food is amazing. I

Rick Denton: 20:23

love I absolutely love that. I love the fact that not only is it a type of food, but it's a type of food you've got at high quality at home. That's awesome. What about the other way something you were forced to eat growing up, but you hated as a kid? I

Vinay Parmar: 20:36

think I was thinking about this Brock, not broccoli, cauliflower. I can. I love broccoli, but cauliflower, yeah, I'm not a fan. Any

Rick Denton: 20:46

any traumatic stories that we need to process through here today? No,

Vinay Parmar: 20:50

I just, I think my early, early recollection of eating it was just maybe I shouldn't say it for your listeners, because I don't want anybody heaving while they were talking. But yeah, just it wasn't a nice experience. Hey,

Rick Denton: 21:00

look, I've had a lot of heave worthy answers to that one. So fear not. You're in a safe place to explore that pain. But we'll move past that, because, remember, I said it was supposed to be a good experience. Yeah, we do have to leave the lounge. However, what is one travel item not including your phone, not including your passport, that you will not leave home without? So this

Vinay Parmar: 21:20

I'm going to attribute to a speaker friend of mine, Roger harup, who shared this tip I now take on holiday everywhere I go an extension lead. And the reason I do that is, instead of having to buy multiple converters, I now only need to buy one. I plug in the extension lead, and then I can use my normal plugs for everything else. So I never, ever leave hull at home without an extension lead.

Rick Denton: 21:51

Vinay, that's a brilliant one. And when I travel overseas, I too use that, that splitter, that, that where you've got the multiple the power strip there, for exactly that reason. My gosh, sometimes hotels do a really good job of hiding their outlets, and it's a pain in the Fannie. There's an experience that we could try to help them. There. The psychology is I get frustrated when I can't plug my devices. There you go. One of the things we were talking about psychology, and when I was thinking about our as we had a prep call and the conversations around psychology, I have a hard enough time understanding my own thoughts. So how can a company who isn't, at least for now, inside my head, truly, truly understand what I or what customers are feeling?

Vinay Parmar: 22:35

Yeah, so can you ever 100% understand what everyone's feeling in the in that instant, in that moment. No, it's impossible, yeah, unless you've got some kind of Marvel superpower, it's, it's pretty impossible, right? Or

Rick Denton: 22:49

the the implants that are coming, right? You know, eventually, right? But we're not there yet, not quite

Vinay Parmar: 22:53

there yet, but we can learn to spot the signs, and that requires you having a mindset of curiosity, first and foremost alongside the listening piece, and look, you're married, right? I'm married, and we both know that when we ask our wives, is everything okay, the quality of the answer when they say yes tells us whether they're telling the truth or not because they say yes. But you know, the capital letters in the text message gives it away. The tonality gives it away. Yeah. So, so we learned to spot the signs. And so the first step for organizations is to is to start with, don't take the feedback at surface value that's giving you a part of the story. You've got to go deeper and really, really embrace the listening that we talked about earlier on, to go down multi layers to start to do that, and then I think it's about having that curious mindset. It's asking questions. It's speaking to customers. You know, you'd be surprised the amount of people that I speak to in senior leadership roles that don't use their own products and services, don't use their own company website. Couldn't find information that you were looking for on the company website. So actually, being somebody who's doing what customers do and using your products or services customers do is another great way for you to do that. And you know, I know there's lots of conversation about diversity and inclusion and stuff going on, we won't go down that road. But the diversity piece beyond the normal protected characteristics of ethnicity or whatever, but the diversity of thought and having different people try out your products and services again, gives you different lenses from which to understand what customers think and feel. Yeah, and I think that's that's the way to get there. Yeah,

Rick Denton: 24:37

that idea of understanding that your customers will be across a wide spectrum, and certainly in any spouse, I know that the we often, because you and I are men, and so we're thinking of our experience, I'm sure that I do the same thing in reverse to my wife, that I give mixed signals, or those sorts of things. And so you're right, the words alone do not do it. Yeah, and a company i. Like that sort of perspective of just assume that what you're reading first isn't the depth and reading or hearing or whatever the the input mechanism is, and go deeper. Now that can be challenging, because what we're talking about here, if we stopped there and a company truly understood what a customer thought felt, well, great, but that doesn't do anything. It's kind of the action. It's the insights. So walk me through how we get there to insights. What about the inside of a company as it uses those insights? How do we handle that sort of inside out element of a company, of how they take and process and use those insights to get to action. Yeah,

Vinay Parmar: 25:43

and that's you're right, that's normally the biggest challenge, because what I tend to find in a lot of places is that it's one team in the corner of the office that's charged with that, trying to convince everybody else to use it. You have to establish it as a currency of type in your organization. And you almost have to start to create some habits and rituals about doing that. I'm working with an organization at the moment where we're going through this process where we're replacing intelligence at the heart of the conversation. So we're we're forcing people, in some way through the process to document in their business cases how they have considered customer data and feedback in reaching the decisions. So so it feels a bit falsified right now, because it's done by force, right that it creates a habit. And, you know, like in anything in life, once, it becomes a habit, and once we start to get into a regular cycle of it, it becomes a natural way of thinking, and people start to default to it instead of being forced. It's that old circle of conscious competence, conscious incompetent, sorry, unconscious competence. You know that that kind of learning circle, right? We go through, like when you when you first drive a car, you have to think about mirror signal maneuver whenever driving, but after a while it just becomes second nature. You just do it without even thinking about it. And then sometimes you forget that you've done them. But anyway,

Rick Denton: 27:01

I'm waiting for a lot of the people in the Dallas North Tollway to have that as second nature right now. It doesn't appear to be from my sample size when I'm looking out there, but I understand what you're saying.

Vinay Parmar: 27:10

Yeah. So a lot of it is about habits, rituals, make them visible. You know, there are organizations I know that have driven improvements in their safety by doing things like moving the safety conversations number one on the company agenda in every team meeting, so it's front and foremost. And there are symbolic things that you need to do like that. Then there are more subtle things about leaders demonstrating the behaviors being more visible, taking more interest in what's going on, validating for people that what they are looking for is people to consider customer data in their reasoning and calling that out, and making, almost, at the beginning, again, an extra effort to call that out, because it's, you know, it's trying to set an example. You know, catching people doing the right thing validates for people that that's important to them, they go away and do stuff. So you've got, you've got some things like that. So it is about, it is about implementing habits behaviors, and being consistent with that, and ensuring that you have from people that not just in positions of leadership, but who are considered leaders through their influence. Yeah, are backing that story up.

Rick Denton: 28:16

I want to, we're getting close to the end of time here, and so this is probably the last thing I'll have the opportunity to ask you, but you said a word there that triggered a thought in me, and so I'm not going to go and it reminds me of a post I can't remember, but it reminds me a post you did on LinkedIn a few, probably a couple months ago. Now forgive me if I forget the timing exactly, but that word consistency that you just said, the sustainability, the repeatability. It's one, it's one thing to have a great employee who does that amazing. It was, it was a suit experience. I think you're talking about who delivers this great suit buying experience. But that's once, yeah. How does a company systematize and repeat everything you just described, from psychology to feeling to insights to action. How does that become sustainable so that it really becomes embedded in business results?

Vinay Parmar: 29:06

Yeah, the word that I put alongside consistency is deliberate. So you have to act deliberately. So from the moment of recruitment induction through your daily meetings and conversations, there has to be a deliberate effort to ensure that people understand this is important. One of the things that we miss out when we talk about customer experience, we talk about having a CX vision, and when it's like what we want to create for that, but what we haven't necessarily answered in that is why? Why is the CX important to this organization, and what difference does it make when we do that to the point that everybody who's not in customer facing roles understands it as well as those people who are naturally in customer facing roles. Because when you get that articulation right, when people are able to connect themselves with the golden thread, so that I understand why this is important, then it doesn't matter whether you're front office, back office, side office, or wherever you might be, you get. Get that your role contributes to that outcome, and you understand why that does that. So I think that's first and foremost. Then the consistency stems from there. So you give people a set of guidelines and guardrails, rather than rules. I always work on the principles basis guardrails. I call it freedom within frameworks. So you give people the framework to work within. You give them the freedom to perform that allows them to inject their character, but within the context and the guidelines that you've set, and again, the consistent communication, measurement of and recognizing that that's happening. So that's really important on the inside, and then, and then on the outside, it's important to kind of, again, have those quality standards in place across the journey, so you understand that how those internal guardrails and ways that you want customers to feel are showing up in that external experience that you know, surveying or whatever we're doing, we're not just asking random questions or questions that the rule books told us. Like, I'll tell you a really quick story. So there was, there's a brand that I was talking to that's a pest control brand, and they were talking about NPS. And he said, The trouble is, Vinay that our customers don't recommend us, because nobody wants to recommend a pest control company. So it feels like NPS is not really working for us, but we've been told that it's a message gold standard measure, we have to use it. And I went to him, Well, what's most important to you in your business? He said, Well, trust. Because what our customers do is they trust us to be discreet. So if there's a restaurant, we won't Park the van in the front so people can see that you've had pest control around and never come in again, right? They'll Park the van discretely, they'll come and do the job, and they'll disappear without everybody knowing. That's what they really value with us. So my conversation with him was then. So then, why aren't you just measuring trust? Why are you measuring recommendation? If the most important thing to you is, do you trust us to do a great job, and then will you use that trust to use us again? Measure that that's your that's your key KPI. And I think you know, we can get caught up in taking standard measures and KPIs that everybody else uses but we also have to be flexible enough to measure what's important to us.

Rick Denton: 32:06

I love that. And I love that. It starts with what's important to you. Like what do you what do your customers really want you to be known for? And so that's I like that. I like that. We ended there Vinay that that was, that was tasty. I really did appreciate the kind of path. And you can see, I'm drawing it with my hand, for those that are just listening, you know, from the psychology, the getting inside somebody's head, truly understanding it insights action to that consistency, repeatability, and then the understanding how well you delivered on it by getting it. What do we really what does our customer really want us to be known for Vinay, if folks, if folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you, your approach to customer experience, the psychology of CX, what's the best way for them to get in touch? Best

Vinay Parmar: 32:51

Ways to just look me up. You can either find me on LinkedIn. My website is Vinay palmer.co.uk, you'll find my my speaker website there, where you'll be able to see the activities that do around that do around that. Yeah, they're the two quickest ways to get in touch.

Rick Denton: 33:06

Awesome, that's right. And I can already tell that folks would want to have you on stage, because this was a very delightful conversation for me and I think, and I didn't have to travel anywhere for it. And so I appreciate that. Vinay, it was a lot of fun today. I'm glad that we got to connect across the pond and talk a little bit at CX and make sure that I never serve you cauliflower ever again in your life. Should we ever be together? Vinay, thank you for being on CX passport. You're welcome.

Vinay Parmar: 33:31

Thank you for having me.

Rick Denton: 33:38

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.