Master Customer Experience: How You Can Leverage AI for Customer Service and Digital Marketing w/ Jay Baer

0:00The thing about AI, it's going to take a little longer than some of the future are predicting, but it is going to change everything. Jay Baer, teaching us how to turn our customers into marketers. Teaching us how to use AI in our business today. Businesses and sort of all my successes have been rooted in the same principle, which is be as helpful as you can. Love it. Coming out of the pandemic, I had this observation that people, including myself, and I suspect you as well, value their time more than before. Because the pandemic taught us a lot of things, but one of the things that reminded us is that, like, tomorrow's not guaranteed.

0:32Time is money, but now it's actually true. Jay Baer is going to take us through customer experience, digital marketing, AI, turning your customers into raving fans, and how all of that comes together for you and me to have more success. Jay, your definition of success. For me, my definition, Brad, is that I can spend all of my time exactly how I want. Time being the big thing, huh? Well, or responsibilities or just focus, right? Got it. I've engineered my life over a number of years to be able to spend my time in only the ways that I choose. I don't have to take orders from anybody else. If I don't want to do a project, I say no.

1:16And I guess maybe the easier way to answer your question is, to me, success is the power of saying no. Got it. Yes, the ability to say no is a wonderful definition of success. Where do you feel in your life? Well, let's take a look at your life because tequila psalm, barbecue judge, customer experience for ever in a day, digital marketing stuff, and that's all combining together today. Where do you feel that you sort of chose success for your life? Was it as a kid? Was it as a college? Where did that happen? You know, I think I know the exact ignition switch. So my family has been self-employed since like the 1840s or something.

2:03I'm a seventh generation entrepreneur. My son's an eighth generation entrepreneur. And so it was always just sort of assumed that you would kind of go down that entrepreneurial success path. and I was 30 and had not done that yet, had always wanted to. Ever since I got out of university, I'd always wanted to kind of do my own thing. But I got really fortunate and right out of school, I got a series of pretty highly paid jobs in corporate. And so I was like, I don't really want to leave this job and start my own company because what if it doesn't work out? And so I was just scared, right? I was scared to make that success leap.

2:44And here's what happened, Brad. My best friend had been my best friend since second grade, right? So we were best friends since we were seven years old. We were such good friends, Brad, that he married my wife's sister. So my best friend, yeah. So my best friend became my brother-in-law, which I totally recommend to everybody. If you can engineer that, do it. It's great. It makes Thanksgiving so much more fun. So it was amazing. So when we were 30, he was 30, I was 30, both of our wives were 30. And he called me one day and said, I just got back from the doctor. I'm like, oh, what's up? He's like, I have brain cancer.

3:21And he ended up having very serious brain cancer and had a series of surgeries, etc. And the day after he called me, I walked in and quit and I haven't worked for anybody since. because that phone call made me realize that my downside of pursuing a success path was nothing compared to his downside. It contextualized the risk for me. And that was the nudge I needed to take the leap and I never looked back. So what's the J. Bear formula for success? What are the components that make success happen? Yeah. And I've been lucky that I've been able to kind of replicate this across a number of different businesses that I've started and frankly, a number of different types of businesses as well.

4:06And to me, it's always the same playbook, which is just provide as much value to an audience as possible. Like figure out what you know that they don't and then give all of that knowledge away one little bite at a time. And if you do that long enough, good things will happen. So right now I'm the number two most popular tequila influencer on the planet. I made my first tequila video two years ago yesterday. And in a very quick period of time became towards the top of that profession, if you can even call it a profession. But the secret is I just make videos that teach people a lot about tequila.

4:50And I do it every single day. And eventually people recognize that. And then eventually they start to pay you. And eventually, because I understand how these kinds of things work, you figure out a monetization scheme and then you just kind of climb that ladder. But all of my businesses and sort of all my successes have been rooted in the same principle, which is just be as helpful as you can. Love it. Love it. What about, what's your theory on the relationship between failure and success? I am not a big devotee of this thesis that one begets the other. Like a lot of people will tell you you can't succeed unless you fail.

5:29And I think that's not true. Like I think it's very possible to have a series of successes with incremental failures along the way. What I have learned about failure is this. When I fail, it's always for the same reason. Always, every time. it's because I get super excited about an opportunity and I go and pursue it without fully thinking through the actual plan. Right. Um, I, I, I, I look before I leap or wait, other way around. I don't look before I leap and then I leap and I'm like, and I'm like halfway down, like in midair. And I'm like, Oh wait, I forgot to figure out how we were going to pay for that.

6:07Right. Um, and then I'm like, Oh, well that was dumb. I should know better by now. And so every time I've screwed up, it's been the exact same reason. I got too excited and I didn't actually think it through all the way. Love it. Love it. Let's think through then customer experience. Now, you know, way back when it was still called customer service, you moved it into the whole experience thing. Give people your understanding of the difference between the old way of customer service and what we do today of designing that experience. Yeah, I think it's always been the same. We've just used different taxonomy.

6:44So the way we typically talk about it in the business of experience now is that customer service starts when the customer experience fails. So you proactively design and develop and cultivate and polish an experience, which is optimally set up so that the customer has as close to a frictionless experience as possible. They love it. They feel respected. They feel happy, all of those things. But then invariably, sometimes that won't work, right? They get confused. They get angry. They get disappointed. They get frustrated. And then they're like, wait a second. I got to get some help here. And that's where customer service kind of takes place.

7:27So if you think about it, probably a shorthand is that customer experience is often a more proactive version of it. And customer service is a more reactive version of customer interactions. Does that make sense? Yeah. Your new book where you talk about the time being, it's called The Time to Win, about time being the most relative aspect of a lot of that. Explain that theory to us because I think it's really important to understand. Yeah. So coming out of the pandemic, I had this observation that people, including myself, and I suspect you as well, value their time more than before. Because the pandemic taught us a lot of things.

8:08But one of the things that reminded us is that like tomorrow is not guaranteed. Like nothing's promised to us. Like you don't know. Like you don't know what's going to happen. Right. You get hit by Sputnik. Like you don't know what's going to happen. And then we had all these trends, right? Like the great resignation and quiet quitting and people wanting to work from home because they don't want to commute. Bleisure travel, which is a hot thing now. It's the combination of business and leisure travel. It's when you take your kids to the conference and double dip the trip. That's like a hot trend.

8:35Even in baseball, right? Major League Baseball has the pitch clock now. So the average game is 26 minutes a night shorter than it was before the pandemic. and they've got record ratings, record attendance, because it turns out people don't want to spend an extra 26 minutes a night watching somebody stand around and scratch their nuts. It's all the same trend. All of this is the same trend. And the trend is we care about our time more than ever. So I did a huge research project on this and found that indeed it's true. Two-thirds of customers, two and three, say that speed is as important as price.

9:12And half, half of all customers will hire whichever business contacts them first, regardless of price. So if you know those things to be true, shouldn't you elevate responsiveness and speed in your list of business priorities? I think you absolutely should. Of all the different elements of customer experience, personalization, empathy, et cetera, I believe speed is the most important right now. We've obviously been talking about the phrase, time is money for a long, long, long, long, long time. But now it's actually true. Like it's demonstrably true. And so one thing, and AI will help with this, one thing you've really got to figure out in your business, like right now as we're having this conversation, is how can you be faster for your customers?

10:03You're on the Big Success Podcast. Make sure you subscribe. We'll be back in a moment. We're going to talk about AI, customer experience, and digital marketing with Jay Baer. Regardless of how successful your business currently is, there's always room to increase profits. Brad Sugars' book, Instant Profit, will go over the proven strategies countless other successful business owners have used to develop flourishing companies. You can turn your company into a profit-generating machine and substantially grow your company's bottom line. And we're back. Jay's talking to us about time. That's probably why you're listening to me on one and a half speed, so you can save more time and get through this whole thing.

10:38Jay, you touched on it. AI customer experience. How much is it going to change it? Is it going to be as massive as everyone says, or is it going to take a bit of time? Fill us in. What's the, what's the scoop? I'd say yes and yes, it will be as massive as everyone says, but it will take longer than, than people think. Because nobody, nobody is like, well, you know what? I really hate Google, right? I mean, nobody has a huge problem with the status quo. And so you've got to have a quite a bit better mousetrap for people to switch from something they already are okay with. I'll give an example from my own career.

11:18Many, many years ago, my, let's see, second, third internet venture. So this is like mid nineties. Some friends and I started a free voice and video calling company online. It was for all intents and purposes, Skype, like 10 years before Skype. Like we were like the first ones and it totally failed. and partially for the reasons I talked about earlier, we got too excited and didn't think it through. And the thing we didn't think through was in those days, mid nineties, nobody was like, you know what sucks? The phone. Like everybody was like, nobody had a problem with the current state of affairs.

11:58Right? So that's going to be the thing about AI. It's going to take a little longer than some of the futurists are predicting only because my mom is not going to switch horses just because I say so. There's a whole world out there that takes a while to adopt stuff, but it is going to change everything. If I may give you one example of how it works today that will help everybody understand where we're headed very quickly. There is a insurance company called Lemonade. Lemonade primarily sells renter's insurance to young people who live in apartments, et cetera. My son is a Lemonade customer. Lemonade was built with AI from the beginning.

12:41The way it works is if you have a claim, so the example that they often talk about that I use in presentations is this guy, Paul, lives in New York City, has like a$950 Canada Goose full-length parka, goes to the restroom, leaves it on the stool, gets stolen. So he opens up his phone, goes into Lemonade app, clicks, make a claim. He talks into his phone, makes a video. Hi, it's Paul. I'm at this bar in New York City. I had this Canada Goose parka. I don't have the receipt, obviously, but I think it was about$950. I left it on the stool. It got stolen. I'm totally sorry. Hopefully you guys can help me.

13:18Submit. On the back end, Lemonade runs a bunch of AI machine learning algorithms. They analyze his tone of voice, his rate of speaking, his breathing patterns. They look at his eye movements to see if he indicates that he's not telling the truth. They do some lookups behind the scene on his credit history, et cetera. They already have access to his bank account because that is set up when you establish the relationship with the company. They decide, yes, he's probably telling the truth. They reduce the payment by the fee of his deductible, which is$250. So the jacket's$950, deductible's$250. They owe him$700.

13:54They wire the$700 to his bank account. and they push a notification to his phone that says, claim approved, your money's in your account. Okay? That entire process, three seconds. Three seconds. So your time theory of people needing better time plus AI, the ability to serve faster is just going to be blown out. If you're a conventional insurance company, what do you do? Yeah, you've got 700 people touching a piece of paper to deal with that thing. Absolutely. Now, does Lemonade pay out more fraudulent claims than State Farm? Yes. Yes. But it's worth it to be 10 % wrong if you're 90 % faster. And you have 90 % less costs.

14:40Yeah. I mean, their revenue per employee is like here. Conventional insurance company is like here, right? And they've got the highest net promoter score, the highest average rating, the best word of mouth. Why would you not recommend them? Hmm. So let's talk about then taking that AI into the customer experience. What should a entrepreneur or business person be doing today, even to get themselves prepared for this sort of thing, to get themselves moving in the right direction? Almost anything you can imagine is possible is possible. And that can be paralyzing, right? Because you can't eat an entire six foot sandwich at once, right?

15:19You've got to cut it into pieces. And so the best way to do this is to deep dive your business and really talk to your team, especially your lowest level people. And you say, what things do you do that are repetitive? What things do you do that you hate? Because typically if humans hate a job or a task, AI will love it and will crush it. Right. So so, for example, one of my friends is building a lot of AI solution technology for business. And he works with a commercial leasing company. And so they built an AI application that will read like a hundred page lease and instantly surface the 10 different clauses that are unusual compared to most commercial leases that they can then have conversations with the tenant about those clauses.

16:11Well, historically, they do that with like human attorneys and it takes 10 days. this does it with AI and it takes 10 seconds, you know? So it's those kinds of things. Anything that you consider to be like drudgery in your organization is a great place to start. So this idea of like, give me some AI in my business is like ridiculous. That's not how it works. You've got to find like very specific use cases. And the best place to start is with the stuff that's bullshit that nobody likes to do in your company. That's the place to start first. So if we think about the customer experience and, you know, when you go back to your, and I want you to touch on hug your haters as well, because I think people need to read that as well.

16:58But when you think of all of the customer experience that can be solved with AI, the drudgery of that, help me understand how the haters giving us the negatives and the AI can work together to solve things for us. Yeah, it's going to be transformative. So the principle of Hug Your Haters as a book and a premise is that people who are unhappy, your unhappy customers are actually your most important customers. Because unhappy customers typically don't tell you anything. They just stop giving you money. So the data is that only five out of 100 unhappy customers will ever say anything. Only five out of 100.

17:43The other 95 just gone. You don't know what happened. Right. So the five who actually, you know, ask to see a manager or call you or email you or leave a negative review, they're actually doing you a favor because at least at least they're going on record as saying, hey, man, I think you could do this a little bit better. And to me, that's how you really get good in your organization is incremental improvement and customers can help you get there. And so taking the negativity and embracing it, not just tolerating it, but actually embracing it and then responding in a way that actually makes that customer feel heard and respected can really yield very powerful business outcomes.

18:29But now in an AI world, a lot of that interaction is not going to be with human beings. It's going to be with your AI tools. There's a new application that's just in beta right now. It's actually a demo called Hume. And it will absolutely blow your mind, Brad. It's Hume.ai. And it is a voice agent that reads and analyzes your tone of voice and your rate, kind of like what Lemonade does. And then it modulates and changes its verbal patterns in real time accordingly. And so what's so great about this kind of technology is it never gets mad. It never gets frustrated. It never gets annoyed by your accent.

19:12It's tuned to be positive. It's like the ultimate customer service agent. It's pretty amazing. And to think about where we're going to be even 18 months from now is staggering. Oh, look, I'm watching one of my clients implement just their helpline on AI. Like they have about 16 ,000 product lines. Their customer service reps struggle like anything. This, it learns all 16 ,000 products. It reads every single one of the 16 ,000 handbooks. And it's got an answer for any customer at any point in time. I imagine they'll use something like Hume to add to that ability to answer every customer's call.

19:59But when you think of digital marketing now, because that's an area where you've done phenomenal. Like, you know, when you take your tequila where you've become technically a digital marketer because you're a content creator in that way. Let's first of all start with keys to success in digital marketing. Then we'll add the AI component to it. I mean, there's only one success key in digital marketing, in my estimation. And I can say this with some degree of authority, because I started in digital marketing when domain names were free. uh here's how long ago it was brad um my partners and i in my first internet company we sold the domain name budweiser.com to anheuser-busch in 1993 for 50 cases of beer

20:57that's a true story buddy that was back when i had a i had a compu serve numbered email address back then. That's how long I've been doing this. We also sent, this is on a less positive note, we unintentionally, we didn't know what we were doing at the time. I am responsible. We sent the very first spam email in the history of the internet on behalf of a law firm that hired us to do so. We had no idea what we would ultimately unleash. So I've been doing this a long time. And the success formula for digital is only this. You have to be constantly curious. You have to have a thirst, a yearning, a burning passion for experimentation and incremental optimization.

21:49Because if you think you in all of your wisdom know the right answer, I'm here to tell you, you don't. Your instinct is almost always wrong in digital. And the more you set up tests and AB tests and multivariate tests and do a subject line test and add creative tests, you're always wrong. Your gut is almost always wrong. And I learned that very early on. And I continue to use that to my advantage and for my clients. You just have to find out. What I used always tell people is this. They'd ask me like, okay, how much money should we spend on Google ads? Or what, which one of these ads should we run?

22:30Like whatever, some question. And I would say, I don't know the answer, but I know how to find out, right? Which is we actually test it. And look, if you're not doing that kind of analysis, why are you using digital? The whole reason that digital is great is that the answer is knowable. If you want to just hope you're right, Buy billboards that don't have data and analytics, right? Like, you know, sponsor a golf tournament, you know, do something like that. I was doing analytics back when I used direct mail. I mean, dang, we've been doing analytics forever and a day. And even just yesterday, I wrote 14 ads to test to promote one new book, you know, and they're just color block ads.

23:10We'll start with color block ads. We'll work our way through. I want to get into the how we can make that exponential. But let's take a break quick. Hit subscribe, gang. We'll be back in a second. Jay Baer is going to tell us how to use AI to multiply those results. Jay Baer is a customer experience and digital marketing pioneer, expert, advisor, researcher, and analyst. A seventh generation entrepreneur, Jay has written six bestselling books and founded five multimillion dollar companies. To learn more about Jay Baer, please visit jbaer.com. And we're back. Jay, I was chatting with Ryan Dice on my podcast the other day, and he said, you know, his advantage when he first got into digital was that he could read the analytics and read the data and do all of that stuff.

23:54How's AI going to change that for us going forward? I think it already has, actually. I mean, almost everything that you're going to do today in digital already has a bunch of AI built into it. I mean, every time Meta recommends an ad to you, every time Meta recommends a target audience to you or a lookalike audience, right? Every time you say auto-optimize when you're buying Google ads, almost every display ad buy is now AI-driven. It's all AI. It's just because it's an ingredient in the larger tool set. We don't think of it in the same way we do as like, let's go to a specific AI tool, like a chat GPT, et cetera, where we know it's AI because it says in the corner AI, but almost everything, almost everything in digital is very AI driven.

24:43Even, even something like whatever you use for, for marketing automation, right? So whatever's sending your emails, assuming that you're using the delivery optimizer, which says, okay, we know that Brad is most likely to open his emails between 2 PM and 4 PM. So we're going to auto send emails to Brad at 3pm. And they do that for the totality of your list, right? That's all AI, right? There's not like there's, there's not like there's an intern in the back figuring that out, right? That's machine learning. So so you know, this is, it's already there. And and what's gonna, and what it will help you with, though, and you talked about it earlier with 14 color block ads, the near term future is 140 color block ads.

25:22Yeah. Because the the the the delta between 14 in 140 will be nothing. It won't matter. There will be no extra time or money to do it that way. So you're like, well, let's just test all the colors of the rainbow because like whatever. Yeah. It's amazing just how fast that is moving. And just, you know, even watching agencies try and keep up with it is a massive, massive thing. If you were looking - I sold my agency two years ago and I wish I was smart enough to say, hey, I saw how fast AI was coming and that's why I sold it. That wasn't why, but it certainly is a difficult assignment now because clients know that everything's changed.

26:04And so as an agency, as really any professional service provider, not even marketing services, but it doesn't matter if you're an accountant, an attorney, anything that's professional services, you only have two options, right? You can either say to your clients, okay, we're going to keep your price the same, but because we have access to these tools, we're going to give you more. So it's more for same, or we're going to give you the same amount of stuff and we're going to drop your price. You only have two options. It's more for same or same for less. And you have to understand as a professional service provider, which of those paths you're going to take.

26:36Because if you don't pick either one of them, your clients are eventually going to say, why are you still charging me what you charged me two years ago? I know you're using AI to do all this and you're keeping all the benefits of that. Hey, just a quick one. When I look in the back into this, something that's quite surprising to me, I noticed that it says that 82 % of you who watch the channel regularly haven't hit the subscribe button yet. So one favor, click that button. If you've watched this show before and enjoyed it, just please click that button to subscribe, hit the notifications bell, and make sure you're part of it.

27:11Because as the show gets better, your success gets better. I see that transition from the customer. Well, I want to take it to a deeper level. The marketing experience, the customer experience, how does the marketing experience determine the customer experience going forward or in this day and age? I think it's the other way around that the customer experience dictates the marketing experience, right? So because it's very difficult to win now on an actual price or product differentiation. It's pretty rare. There's not very many categories where you actually have a defensively better or different mousetrap.