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Dan Gingiss:
And when we create great experiences and remarkable experiences, the word remarkable is intentional, because it means literally worthy of remark, worthy of talking about. We can make our customer base our best sales and marketing people.

James Robert Lay :
Greetings and hello. I am James Robert Lay, and welcome to the 171st episode of the Banking on Digital Growth Podcast. Today's episode is part of the Exponential Insight Series and I'm excited to welcome Dan Gingiss to the show. Dan is a keynote speaker and customer experience coach who helps companies create remarkable customer experiences that become their best sells and marketing. You see, Dan spent 14 years in financial services, including almost 10 years at Discover where he led all design, development and customer experience initiatives on the Discover card's flagship website, which directly and significantly contributed to Discover winning a J.D. Power Award for the highest in customer satisfaction with credit card companies. Welcome to the show, Dan. It is so good to share some time with you today.

Dan Gingiss:
I am excited to a talk with you today. Thanks so much for having me on.

James Robert Lay :
Absolutely. Before we get into this idea of your book, The Experience Maker, I always want to start off with just a positive question, set things off in a good step. What has been going well for you personally or professionally Dan? It's always your pick to get started.

Dan Gingiss:
Well, what's going well right now is that live events are finally coming back. And that is really exciting because I am never happier than when I'm on a stage talking to people and inspiring them in this whole customer experience business. And it's been really tough to be doing that online where you can't see people's eyes, you can't see the audience, you don't get the reaction. It's really challenging. And so certainly we've done it just like everybody's had to do it, but I am so excited to get back out on the road and be in front of real people again.

James Robert Lay :
I'm right there with you. I know it's been a challenge. It's been hard. I typically speak 10, 15, 20 times a year at different events. And when you go into this virtual space, we do the best to create an experience for the audience, for the dear listener, even in the case of this podcast. But when you lose that human touch, you lose that human connection, it's very hard to "read" the audience. If there's one thing, if you could look back into all the speaking that you've done, what has been the most joyous part of that for you?

Dan Gingiss:
It's really when somebody comes up to me afterwards and is so excited by what they just heard, that they want to share their story with me. And when I get on stage, most of what I do is storytelling. I'm kind of a believer that you shouldn't believe me just because I'm the one on stage or I wrote the book. You should believe me because I'm sharing tons and tons of real life examples with you, of companies that are doing this and are successful at it. So to me, that's really where the credibility is. And so when somebody runs up to me and says, "Oh, I got to tell you about something that I did at my business." Or even better, if they're inspired by something I said to go make a change on Monday, or whenever they get back to the office, that's when I feel the best.

Dan Gingiss:
Because really, yeah, we speak because to living and we get paid and we want to feed our children, but it's really when you can make an impact on somebody and they can say, "Man, I can do this. This is something I didn't think maybe was my responsibility. Or I didn't think I was capable of doing, but I can and I'm going to." That's what feels so good.

James Robert Lay :
Yes. Yeah. You give people help, you give them a sense of hope, you give them some inspiration and then they're like, I can do this. And then they go off and do it. And then you hear, three, six months later, whatever that is, you're like, wow, that's amazing. And I love the way that you frame this. It's like you're a curator of stories, you're a curator of experiences to educate and to help others. And you spent 14 years in financial services, you won the J.D. Power Award for customer satisfaction at Discover, which you've shared as one of your great career experiences, your career achievements. But now, you've written a great book, The Experience Maker, and that has now moved into the top spot. Speaking about inspiration, what was your inspiration to write the book in the first place?

Dan Gingiss:
Well, I have been collecting customer experience stories for a long time. I'm still collecting them. In fact, I just delivered a speech this morning and included several examples that didn't make the book because I found them after the book was published. So I'm continuously building on a library, both from experiences that I have from ones I've observed, from ones people send me. And so I feel like the storytelling is what ... It gets me excited. And I find that it's just a means of communication that gets audience members excited as well.

Dan Gingiss:
And so the book was really about, well, what if I ... In the course of a keynote, I can maybe tell a dozen stories but what if I just threw the whole library at it? And there's got to be at least 50 stories in the book. And I just thought it was really fun to kind of unload every story because you never know which one is going to stick with somebody. And while they've all been vetted. And I know that audience members react to them, what I definitely find is depending on the industry, depending on where they are in their own customer experience journey, certain stories appeal to different people. And so I felt like one of the things I could do was put enough stories in there that anyone who reads the book is going to find at least a few that they're inspired by.

James Robert Lay :
Well, I love this the way we're taking this story, because even in Banking on Digital Growth, I have a chapter called Story Selling. And so every great story always begins with some type of conflict. We need some type of reason to move beyond the present state. And you open up the book, noting that traditional marketing is no longer enough. Why do you believe it? What's your take here?

Dan Gingiss:
Well, first of all, I should say that I come at customer experience from a marketer's lens because my 20 plus years in corporate America, that's what I did. I was in marketing almost all of that time. And so I now believe that if I never have to create another marketing campaign, it'll be too soon because what's far more effective is to get your customers to do the marketing for you. And when we create great experiences and remarkable experiences, the word remarkable is intentional, because it means literally worthy of remark, worthy of talking about, we can make our customer base our best sales and marketing people.

Dan Gingiss:
And you know this as well as I do. It's so much more credible when someone else is talking about us than when we're talking about ourselves. So that's what I do is I help companies try to find those customers and create the types of experiences where you've been through it. You can't help yourself. You're in the middle of an experience, you pull out your phone because you just have to record it and share it with somebody. Those are the kinds of experiences that I think pretty much any company is capable of creating with a little bit of work.

James Robert Lay :
I like the fact that you said you're coming at this from the lens of a marketer. And I believe that marketing has the potential. And I even wrote about this. Marketing has the potential to become what I call experience engineers, crafting these experiences, but I want to get your take here because this word, experience, it gets thrown around so much. You've got CX, you've got customer experience, you've got EX, you've got employee experience, you've got LX, lead experience. How would you define experience, like that word, if we could just put some thinking around that? What does that mean to you? Experience?

Dan Gingiss:
Well, it's a combination of every single interaction that the person has, could be an employee, could be a customer, could be a lead, along with the feeling that they have with those interactions. So it's important that both of those things are put together because we often forget that the customer experience encompasses every interaction. It's not just when you call customer service, that's an interaction, but marketing is part of the customer experience. Your website, your mobile app are part of the experience. If you have a physical location, walking in is part of the experience. The smile on somebody's face or the frown on somebody's face is part of the experience. But the feeling that it evokes is really what people remember. And so when we can create feelings of happiness, of joy, of excitement, of surprise, of delight, those are the kinds of things that people end up wanting to share.

James Robert Lay :
Yes.

Dan Gingiss:
And one of the core studies that my book is based on found that consumers are more willing to share positive experiences than negative ones by far. The problem is that two thirds of consumers can't remember the last time that a brand exceeded their expectations. So all we got to do is give them the positive stories and they are more than willing to share them. The thing is that the vast majority of experiences that we have with any brands, financial or not, are average or ordinary and nobody shares that.

James Robert Lay :
Yes. And that idea of extraordinary is an area that we'll touch into here in a moment, to go beyond the ordinary. And I'm curious, 14 years in financial services, what's a commonly held belief around this idea of experience that others might have, but you would disagree with them on for one reason or another? Where might they, there's an opportunity for what I would say, to transform their thinking based upon your experience and what you know here?

Dan Gingiss:
Well, I'm a straight shooter. And so I'm just going to tell you like it is. The mistake that most financial services companies make is believing that their customers want to engage with them. Let's be honest. No one wakes up in the morning wanting to go to their bank's website. Like that just doesn't happen. And so if you can accept that, then you begin to build experiences from a different state of mind. Let me give you an example. Early on in my career in Discover, what we found is that when people logged in, if we could throw a popup at them and try to offer them, cross sell them, upsell them something, we could make more money. But the thing that's missing there is that while 5, 10% of people might click on that popup, the other 90, 95% of people are irritated. And that's not worth the cost in my opinion.

Dan Gingiss:
Harvard Business Review found that the single most important facet to engendering loyalty is removing customer barriers, removing friction, making it easy on people. And when we won J.D. Power, that was right after spent all of this time, trying to make things as easy as possible on our website. I'm going to give you a great example of this that wowed me. So we learned through just looking at the metrics on the site, that one of the top reasons people came to the site was to review their most recent transactions. They want to make sure that the waiter didn't overcharge them with a tip or whatever it is. Well, it took about three clicks to get to your recent transactions. So we said, well, what if we reduced that? And we thought about reducing it to two clicks, we thought about reducing it to one click.

Dan Gingiss:
And then we decided to create a Facebook like feed on the homepage that showed your most recent 10 transactions. As soon as we launched this, an incredible thing happened. Tens of thousands of people logged on to the credit card website and then logged right back off. They didn't click on anything, but you know what? The satisfaction scores went through the roof.

James Robert Lay :
Yes.

Dan Gingiss:
Because we just gave them what they wanted. We made it as easy as possible and we were willing to acknowledge no one wants to spend even an extra second on the credit card website. They just want to get there and leave. And it's hard for people to acknowledge because we want to believe that the people like us, and they want to work with us or whatever, but you know what? Some industries, that just is generally not the case. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news in that way, but it is fixable. You just make it as easy as possible for people.

James Robert Lay :
Why do we, I would say not just in financial services, but maybe just as human beings, tend to make things more complex than they need to be?

Dan Gingiss:
Well, first of all, it's because we don't look at problems or scenarios through a customer lens. We look at them through a business lens. So think about a typical financial services institution and when we were all at work in person. People are walking the halls, they're using banking jargon, they're talking in acronyms.

James Robert Lay :
[inaudible 00:14:19].

Dan Gingiss:
Right. And even something as simple as APR.

James Robert Lay :
Yep.

Dan Gingiss:
If you ask the standard customer what APR means, especially compared to APY, like high brain explosion, you might get that somebody says interest rate and that's probably the best answer you're going to get from a consumer. But the truth is they really don't know. And so the question persists, why do we continue to use an acronym that our customers don't understand? And why do we have to talk bank and not plain English?

James Robert Lay :
People, yeah.

Dan Gingiss:
Yeah. And so I think that's the big mistake is that people think, well we live and breathe this every day. So we know these differences. We know the subtle difference between one acronym and another, but our customers don't necessarily really understand that nor do they want to take the time to learn it. So we've got to help them. We got to hold their hand a little bit.

James Robert Lay :
I want to tell a true story here, because you're speaking into something that we have seen multiple times when doing digital secret shopping studies. And one time, I'll never forget this. It was a user, a human being on a financial brands website. And they mentioned APY on a checking account. And they took it as they're going to charge me 3% of all of my money to keep a checking account there. No, forget that. And I'm like, wow. Like it was at that moment, I realized how much others don't know because they're not in this world day in and day out. They took APY as what APR was and that was it. And it was just an honest confusion. And so I'm in agreement, like if we step out of our worldview and into the hearts and minds of people and just look at things a little bit differently, that's where the big transformation can happen.

James Robert Lay :
And speaking of transformation, I always appreciate, and I'm going to poke a little fun here because we're talking acronyms and I'm a big acronym person. It's how I remember things. For example, we have like the BANCER, B-A-N-C-E-R, strategy circle and acronyms run rampant in digital growthtopia. But I appreciate the acronym that you used here in the context, in the book, because it does make it easier to remember things like what you're talking about. We want to be WISE when it comes to experience, and WISE stands for Witty, Immersive, Shareable and Extraordinary. And I think to me, this was like the best part of the book, because it's like, ah, when I'm thinking about experience, I want to make sure that I'm wise about this experience. And so I want to break each one of these points down for the dear listener in context of experience, starting with witty. What does that mean here?

Dan Gingiss:
Well, first I just want to hear a really funny story about when I created this methodology. I did it quite frankly, because I'm a straight shooter because I looked around at other speakers. I was like, man, everybody's got a methodology. I better have one. And so I sat down and tried to come up with words that made sense, that fit into what I was saying anyway. And I came up with this and the first time I delivered it into speech, I read the audience feedback afterwards and everyone was spitting the word back at me, WISE and WISER.

James Robert Lay :
Yeah.

Dan Gingiss:
"Thank you for making me WISE to come customer experience." Or "I can't wait to implement WISE at my business?" So I knew I had hit on something because I got the feedback back, and that is part of experience is we got to listen to our customers, our audience, and they'll tell you whether they like it or not. And so I knew people liked it and that's why I went with it. But witty is probably my favorite of the four steps. These are the four steps to creating the types of experiences that people want to talk about. Because again, we want our customers talking about us. That's the most credible marketing there is out there.

Dan Gingiss:
Now witty is not about being humorous. I know that humor can be challenging, especially in financial services. It's a little bit risky. Something I find funny, you may not, and let's face it. There's certain brands out there. We'll say like Taco Bell and Wendy's that kind of have a reputation for being funny. And that's probably not your bank or your financial services institution. That's totally fine. But witty is about being clever, using language to your advantage, and this is the important part for your audience, refusing to be boring. There is no law that says that financial services has to be boring. It is in many case, but it doesn't mean that it has to be. And so witty's really about finding every opportunity that you communicate with a customer in any channel, and just trying to show a little personality, have a little fun. It doesn't have to be so serious all the time. When you do that, it stands out to people because they don't expect it from their financial institution.

James Robert Lay :
Yes. And there's a couple of examples in the books of just some signage. One that says "Almost there. Please use the other entrance." And then another one, it's another sign that says, "You're up next, hang tight." And it's just that type of verbiage, I think that you don't expect, but it does leave a positive impression in the mind of like, ah, I get it. And so I like this idea of witty, which really, I think transitions nicely to immersive because we could be witty, but what does immersive mean when it comes to experience here?

Dan Gingiss:
Immersive is about putting the whole customer journey together and making sure that it makes sense to people. We know that journeys are not linear. Customers go back and forth. They have a high demand for your services. Then they don't bother talking to you for a couple of months. Then they really need you. And then there's some emergency and then they don't talk to you for a few months. And so the journey's not linear, but we need to make sure that it feels consistent to the customer. That if they walk into your branch, it doesn't feel like a completely different company than the website that they're used to going to. So some of it's branding, but it's also about how do we find places to draw out either emotion or to appeal to the human senses. These are places where we can create memories that people then want to talk about out later. I give you a really simple example.

Dan Gingiss:
I remember going into the bank as a kid with my parents and they always had lollipops there, which of course made me, the kid really want to go to the bank. I've now seen some that have drive-throughs that if they see there's a dog in the car, when they send it through the little pneumatic tube, there's a little dog biscuit there too, which is such a great touch. Now a dog biscuit probably costs a penny or two. It's not a big investment, but if you have a dog, you know what I'm talking about. Like you do something nice for my dog and I love you forever.

James Robert Lay :
Yeah.

Dan Gingiss:
So these small things, getting to and know your customer and sort of being able to adapt. If there is a kid there, having the lollipop or some little toy or something like that, it makes a huge difference for people. And it takes kind of the sting out of having to go to the bank, which again is not an errand that anybody particularly looks for.

James Robert Lay :
Yes. And I think that right there, it's those small little deposits that we can make in a person's mind that over time, it increases trust, it increases satisfaction and then that brings us to the next element of the WISE model: shareable.

Dan Gingiss:
I just want to say, I appreciate what you did there with the word deposits. You're witty. You see, you just did it. So shareable is, it's the end game. It's about getting people to talk about their experience, but this has to be intentional. It doesn't happen by accident. And frankly, it doesn't happen very often by asking for it. Have you ever seen a organization say, "Hey, follow us on Instagram and use our hashtag and don't forget to tag us." And there's like so many instructions you're exhausted by the time you're done reading what you're supposed to do. I look for those experiences where the person can't help themselves. It's just no natural to pull out your phone and take a picture of it and want to show somebody or tell somebody about it. That's what makes a shareable experience.

Dan Gingiss:
One of my favorite examples that I use as a metaphor across industries happened at a restaurant, a Fleming's steakhouse. We took my son there for his birthday and we walked in and the maitre d' handed him a birthday card that was signed by the staff, which I thought was a pretty nice gesture. I hadn't seen that before. What's interesting is that not only did that stand on its own as being a great experience, but as we were enjoying our meal, my daughter piped up and said, "If they gave my son a birthday card, I'll bet they're going to do something special at the end of the meal. I'll bet we're not going to get just a slice of cake and a candle." And I thought about how I've trained my kids really well around customer experience. That was my first proud dad moment. But I thought about how interesting it was that the birthday card created this anticipation during the meal [crosstalk 00:24:35] coming.

James Robert Lay :
It's expectation. It's like an expectation setting. Yeah.

Dan Gingiss:
Yeah. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with a slice of cake and a candle, except for one thing, every restaurant does it.

James Robert Lay :
Does it.

Dan Gingiss:
So it's not particularly shareable. Now Fleming's did not disappoint. They came out with a box of four handmade chocolates sitting on a plate that had happy birthday spelled out in cocoa powder. And instead of a candle, they had a sparkler because we all know that a sparkler is so much cooler than a candle.

James Robert Lay :
Yes.

Dan Gingiss:
And I'm telling you, without anybody asking, four people at the table all pulled out their phones to take a picture of this dessert, the adults shared it to Facebook, because that's what we adults do. The kids shared it to Snapchat because that's what the kids do. And just like that, Fleming's Steakhouse has four positive shares across four social media channels, all because they just decided to do a different kind of birthday dessert than anyone else. It's not a more expensive dessert. It's not necessarily a more complicated dessert. It's just different. And that's why it stood out and that's why it's shareable.

James Robert Lay :
To use this story, I think it dovetails so nicely into the last point of the WISE acronym, the WISE model, because what Fleming's did here is they took the ordinary, the ho-hum birthday cake and the candle. They took the ordinary and transformed it into extraordinary. What does this mean from your point of view, this idea of to make an experience extraordinary.

Dan Gingiss:
Yeah. It's a great point. And I'm glad that you made the connection and that's why I use it as a metaphor. Look in your business for where you've got a candle and where you could have a sparkler. Same cost, different experience, better experience. And the good news is, is that most experiences are ordinary and nobody talks about ordinary. Nobody tells you about the average restaurant they went to. They either tell you that it was amazing or they tell you it was really terrible. So if most experiences are ordinary, then all we have to do to stand out is be a little bit better than ordinary. We don't have to be miles above ordinary. We just have to be a little bit better. And that's why all the examples you'll find in the book or in my keynotes are all meant to be simple, practical and inexpensive. I don't want you going out spending millions of dollars on a multi-year transformational customer experience process. I just want you looking for little opportunities across the journey that you can make things better.

James Robert Lay :
Little things.

Dan Gingiss:
And one of the ways, the best way to do that. And I'm sorry again, I don't mean to offend. I spent enough time in the industry, I think I can say this with some credibility. The last place that I want you to look for inspiration is another financial services institution.

James Robert Lay :
Yes, absolutely.

Dan Gingiss:
That's not where you're going to find it. I want you to look at Disney World and Starbucks and Apple and Amazon and all these companies that you yourself love and ask yourself, well, what about them do you love? And I think we can extract the takeaways from lots of other industries and then apply them to ours. Let me give you an example that didn't make the book because I learned it afterwards. Universal Studios in Florida has Harry Potter World. And if you are a Harry Potter fan, you've got to check it out. It's incredible. Well, I read an article recently that said that there are lots of people that are now standing in line for the rides without any intention of going on the ride. And the reason is because the standing in line part has become an experience.

James Robert Lay :
Yes.

Dan Gingiss:
You get to wind your way through Hogwarts Castle. You get to interact with characters. You get to look up the walls and see the picture frames that are animated, like they are in the movie and in the books. And so people are spending 45 minutes, a hour in line, they're getting to the ride and then they're leaving, they're not going on the ride.

Dan Gingiss:
So after your brain explodes at this concept, ask yourself, when do we make customers wait? Do we make them wait in a line? Maybe if we have a physical branch. Do we make them wait on hold on the phone? Do we make them wait for a credit decision? How many times have we applied for a credit card, and well, we can't tell you, but we'll send you a, in the mail in 7 to 10 days. Awesome. How do we make the waiting part of our experience, exciting or interesting, or at least, different? And so that's how we can take something where I get it. You're not in the amusement park business, dear listener, but you probably are making your customers wait. And so you can figure out, you can take that inspiration, figure out something you might do in your business to change that. And that's being extraordinary.

James Robert Lay :
I have a keynote called Look Outside to Grow Inside. And it's this idea of looking for inspiration, how you started this whole conversation today of where can we go? What are the other experiences that we can learn from? Disney's a great one because as I was mentioning, marketing has the ability to become experience engineers. Disney has Imagineers. And my Disney story, it was right before the pandemic. It was February of 2020. We picked the kids up. It was Valentine's Day. We picked them up early from school and I'm like, we're going to go to Disneyland. And so we flew from Houston to Disneyland out in California, and it was Star Wars Rise of The Resistance. Very similar experience that you're talking about, the waiting becomes part of the experience.

James Robert Lay :
To me, that is such a practical key takeaway. What are the opportunities to make the waiting to remove some of the anxiety? Because in baking, there's a lot of anxiety tied to waiting, but to transform the anxiety into maybe it's hope or just a different feeling or emotion, which really, I feel like just from our time together. And Dan, I appreciate the knowledge and the insights. I feel wise from what you have shared, but we can end, and I think we can all become a little bit wiser by wrapping up how you did in chapter nine, which the R of WISER stands for responsive. What do you mean here?

Dan Gingiss:
So customers want a relationship with the companies they do business with, and a relationship has to be two way. And so responsive is about always being there for your customer when they have questions, when they have complaints. And frankly, when they leave you compliments, which they're going to do a lot more of if you're following the WISE methodology. They're going to be sharing the positive parts of the experience. And the best thing you can do in that case is go in there and thank them and show them some love back, whether that's on social media or whether they send you an email or they call, make sure that you reciprocate that back. And if customers have questions, make sure that you're there to answer them. Otherwise, someone else is going to be answering them. If they have complaints, don't be afraid of complaints. Customers who complain generally do so because they care. They actually want you to resolve their problems so they can continue doing business with you. That should be a pretty high priority.

Dan Gingiss:
Instead, we often like to shut out complaints and we just don't want to hear them. But ultimately your customer is saying, look, you promised me an experience and you're delivering something else. It's either broken, or it's slower than I expected, or it's missing my expectations. And this is crucial feedback to how we can consistently get better. The reality is, is that customer expectations are only growing. The pandemic made them grow all lot.

James Robert Lay :
Yes.

Dan Gingiss:
And so being responsive and creating that two way conversation is really key to loyalty.

James Robert Lay :
I like that idea of a dialogue, two way conversation. I've appreciated the dialogue here. I want to get real practical as we wrap up together today Dan. What's the next best step? What's something small, simple, practical? And we've already shared some throughout our conversation, but maybe to set the dear listener off on their next steps, on their own journey of growth, around experience, what's one small thing that they can do? Because all transformation that leads the future growth begins with a very small, simple first step. What can that be?

Dan Gingiss:
Pick one communication channel that you have with your customer and review that communication in a group. Meet on Zoom or meet in a conference room and just walk through it, read a letter out loud that you send a customer or an email, or read the contents of your website. If you find that your colleagues are drooling on the table because they've fallen asleep, that's exactly what's happening with your customer. Try to find an opportunity somewhere in that communication, just to show some humanity, to be friendly, to be witty, and you're going to start making a difference. And ultimately this becomes a cultural change. So that every time we communicate with customers, we try to instill some humanity, some fun, some wittiness, it just becomes a natural part of what we do.

Dan Gingiss:
If you want a fun example of this, if you go to my website, dangingiss.com, scroll all the way to the bottom and click on my privacy policy. Now I know that does not sound very fun, does it? But I guarantee you, it's not like any other privacy policy that you've read before. This is what you can do in financial services. You can communicate in a way that gets people to pause and say, wow, I did not expect that. And that's the beginning of creating a memorable experience.

James Robert Lay :
And I like how you framed this privacy policy, AKA, the really important stuff because you're right. This is the wittiness I think that you're talking about, but I appreciate the practicality of just pick one piece of communication. And let's look at this through a different lens. Speaking of communication, what is a great way for someone who's listening, they want to continue the conversation that we've started here today. You've got the book, you got a podcast, what's the best way for them to connect? And you've also got another great resource here that you referenced and highlighted in the book, which is the 10 Day CX Challenge. What's that?

Dan Gingiss:
Yes. The 10 Day CX Challenge. If you go to improvemycx.com, you'll hit my 10 Day CX Challenge. It's completely free. Every day, you get a 90 second whiteboard video from me, giving you a specific tactic that you can work on in your business. I encourage you to grab the team. It's a great team building activity. It's a great way to get people thinking on the same page about customer experience and it teaches you how easy it is to make these incremental changes. You can also always reach out to me at dad@dangingiss.com. I'm on Twitter at DGingiss. I'm very active on LinkedIn and because I teach people to be responsive, you can rest assured I will be responsive to you if you reach out as well.

James Robert Lay :
Dan, thank you so much. Reach out to Dan, connect with Dan. I appreciate your thinking today that you've shared Dan. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining me on another episode of Banking on Digital Growth.

Dan Gingiss:
Thanks for having me man.

James Robert Lay :
As always, and until next time, be well, do good and make your bed.

Brief Summary of Episode #171

Thought leaders who thrive on speaking have had a rough couple of years.

It’s harder to make a meaningful impact without that live connection. 

As a curator of experiences, Dan Gingiss is a sought-after keynote speaker, storyteller, coach, and author of The Experience Maker: How to Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can't Wait to Share.

He’s the Chief Experience Officer at The Experience Maker, LLC

He’s continuously building his armory of tools to help companies find their competitive advantage. 

Customers are your best marketers, and people are more willing to share a positive experience. 

But ⅔ of consumers can’t remember the last time a brand exceeded their expectations. 

Acronyms run rampant in digital growth.

But here's one from Dan’s book you can put into use immediately when it comes to creating CX strategy, be WISER:

  1.  1. Witty
  2.  2. Immersive
  3.  3. Shareable
  4.  4. Extraordinary
  5.  5. Responsive

Crafting juicy experiences for your customers keeps things from getting boring.

People don’t expect wit from their financial institution. 

 

Key Insights and Takeaways

  • What inspired him to write the book
  • Why he believes traditional marketing is no longer enough
  • The WISE methodology for creating better experiences
  • The 10-day CX challenge

Notable Quotables to Share

How to Connect With Dan Gingiss 

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