How AI Is Transforming the Customer Experience With Marisa Murgatroyd

Marisa Murgatroyd is the Founder and CEO of The Experience Group, a company that uses behavioral science to design how people engage with technology, products, and organizations. She is also the Founder of Live Your Message, a business coaching and training company that helps entrepreneurs create engaging, experiential products and customer journeys. Marisa helps organizations close the gap between their AI and digital investments and the experiences their customers actually have. Her work focuses on experience design, customer engagement, retention, and helping businesses deliver better customer outcomes.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:31] Marisa Murgatroyd discusses how The Experience Group and Live Your Message helps companies improve customer experience and customer success

• [4:57] Mapping the customer journey around a core result, transformation, or outcome

• [6:24] How automation and commoditization are driving the transformation economy

• [10:38] Designing long-term customer journeys from the customer’s perspective

• [15:11] Marisa talks about focusing resources on loyal customers who drive the greatest value

• [16:54] The connection between customer, employee, organizational, and AI experiences

• [20:58] How to use user experience and gamification to increase engagement and action

• [25:05] Leveraging AI for mass customization instead of simply reducing costs

• [30:42] Building customer trust through consistency, competency, authenticity, and care
  

In this episode…

As AI and automation reshape business, many companies are prioritizing cost reduction and customer acquisition while overlooking the customers they already have. Poorly designed automation, fragmented customer journeys, and impersonal experiences can increase churn and weaken trust. How can businesses use AI while creating experiences that keep customers engaged, loyal, and successful?

Marisa Murgatroyd, an expert in customer experience, behavioral science, and experience design, recommends making customer success a North Star metric and mapping the entire customer journey around the transformation customers want. She explains that businesses can fight commoditization by creating personalized experiences, improving retention, and designing every touchpoint around customer needs rather than internal cost savings. Marisa also recommends using AI for mass customization, applying behavioral design and gamification to encourage engagement, and building trust through consistency, competency, authenticity, and genuine care.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Marisa Murgatroyd, Founder and CEO of The Experience Group, about creating customer-centered experiences in the age of AI. Marisa discusses the transformation economy, customer retention, and using behavioral design and gamification to increase engagement.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Quik!

• Richard Walker on LinkedIn

• Marisa Murgatroyd on LinkedIn

• The Experience Group

• X-Factor CX Scorecard

• Live Your Message

• "Customer Psychology, Marketing, and Growth With Bob Serling" on The Customer Wins

• "Redefining Meetings and the Agentic Future With Artem Koren" on The Customer Wins

• "Demystifying AI Adoption in Financial Services With Geoff Moore" on The Customer Wins

• "Transforming Customer Experience Through Culture and AI With Katie DeFeo" on The Customer Wins

• Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business by Jay Conrad Levinson

  
  

Quotable Moments:

• “When you optimize your entire company around customer success as a leading indicator, all of the other metrics follow.”

• “What your customer wants becomes what you want. And when you optimize everything to give your customers what they want.”

• “The people who love you, it actually has a much higher return on investment with much less time.”

• “People want to feel smart. They want to feel like they're making progress.”

• “You can beat commoditization by creating a custom responsive experience that gives people what they want on demand.”

  
  

Action Steps:

1. Make customer success your North Star metric: Center decisions around helping customers achieve meaningful results to improve retention, lifetime value, revenue, and profitability.

2. Map the entire customer journey: Examine every touchpoint from discovery and onboarding through long-term engagement to identify friction and opportunities to improve the customer experience.

3. Focus on retaining and engaging existing customers: Invest in serving the customers you already have so they spend more, remain longer, and become ambassadors for your business.

4. Use AI to personalize the customer experience: Apply AI to understand customers and create responsive experiences that differentiate your business while making customers feel understood and supported.

5. Build trust through consistent customer experiences: Deliver on your promises reliably while demonstrating competency, authenticity, and genuine care to create deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships.

   
   

Sponsor for this episode...

This is brought to you by Quik!

At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.

Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.

Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.

Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.

Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.

Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company

Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02 

Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.

Richard Walker: 00:16 

Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Bob Serling of Licensing Lab, Artem Koren, Sembly AI, and Geoff Moore of Valmark Financial Group. Today, I'm speaking with Marisa Murgatroyd, founder and CEO of The Experience Group, and today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms. Instead, get Quik! using Quik!.

You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to get started. All right, I think today's guest is like the ideal person to have on our show. So I'm excited to introduce Marissa Murgatroyd, founder of The Experience Group, where she helps organizations close the gap between their AI and digital investments and the experiences their customers actually have. Drawing on behavioral science frameworks from mentors at.

 I can't even say it. Oculus Telesis.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 01:31 

Thank you. The guy who founded…

Richard Walker: 01:34 

Stanford Behavior Design Lab, she has designed and optimized thousands of digital customer journeys across industries, consistently outperforming industry benchmarks and retention, completion and referral. She created the X Factor Experience Design methodology and speaks at international customer experience conferences on the intersection of AI, behavioral design, and human focused customer experience strategy. Marissa, welcome to The Customer Wins.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 01:58 

I am super stoked to be here because the name of your podcast says it all. And my belief is that when your customers win, well guess what? Your business wins. Your company. The world wins.

Richard Walker: 02:10 

I'm telling you this is probably going to have to be a four hour episode. So for my audience who hasn't heard my podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience. And the challenge is to grow their own company. So Marissa, let's understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 02:31 

Well, I have a portfolio of companies that are all wrapped around customer experience. So I've been 15 years in a business coaching and training company and developed a methodology that gets 10 to 30 times greater customer engagement and success, because I believe retention and engagement is the name of the game. And so many companies optimize for this kind of marketing and for sales. And then once someone buys, the experience dramatically changes. But when you can create an integrated customer journey all the way through, you ascend together into greater levels of investment, commitment, results and breakthrough.

So what I've been doing at Live Your Message is helping people create these types of engaging, experiential products in their own businesses and customer journeys. And in The Experience Group, we provide service offerings to design this inside of companies as well. And one of the biggest things that I've discovered over the years that I think is especially critical right now, when the whole conversation is dominated by AI, is that we have made customer success our North Star metric, where every conversation, everything we do in our business is all about providing outsized industry leading success rates. And we've found that that is the ultimate leading indicator. And when you optimize your entire company around customer success as a leading indicator.

 All of the other metrics follow. Revenue. Profitability. Lifetime value. All of the important numbers.

 I think a lot of people have gotten into short term decision making of how we can reduce costs? How can we replace staff? How can we win the AI arms race, whatever it happens to be in this focus on customer success has gotten lost, and I think we're on the brink of a backlash.

Richard Walker: 04:25 

Oh man, I love this, I love this. So you're telling me I haven't done it wrong because we didn't focus on sales and marketing. We focused on how we make our customers happy and how we create the best success out of things. And that meant product design decisions. That meant the friction of movement, of onboarding and how people get support.

And I mean, I feel like it's a religion. Sometimes people will come up with these ideas for products. I'm like, how does that help the customer? So how do you transform a company that hasn't been thinking this way? What are your techniques to help them see it?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 04:57 

Well, the very first thing is to map the journey, which is and define the ultimate outcome, result or transformation. So who do you serve? You know, why are they using you specifically? Why will they continue to use you over everybody else? So one of the things that I see right now is that people can spin up competitors for your business instantaneously.

So if you're only kind of focusing on the solution itself and you're kind of taking your customers for granted, they will find someone else who can do what you do better or cheaper or with a better experience and, you know, pay more attention to you. So the first thing is to really get hyper, hyper focused on what is that core result transformation outcome that you deliver? How do you deliver it in a way that is distinct that nobody else can? Who exactly do you deliver it to? And then how do you optimize the journey over time from, you know, first encounter in the discovery phase to that onboarding experience all the way through to making sure that people are up and running and using the thing that you sell.

 And then, you know, a lot of people miss this strategy of how do you turn people into ambassadors?

Richard Walker: 06:13 

And hold on a second, I gotta, I gotta bring up something you just said. What you said is if you're not focusing on how to build a better experience for your customer, you're commoditizing your own business.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 06:24 

Yeah. So interestingly, the forces and I just got back from a transformational economy certification with Joe Pyne. And what he's shown is that the forces of commoditization have actually shifted the economic value of the marketplace over hundreds of years. And that all relates to innovations and mass production and automation. So I know that sounds super, super geeky, but let me just give you about 62nd heads up, like what this actually means.

So back in the days we were a commodity based business, commodity based economy where people were just, you know, taking from the earth what they needed, whether it's, you know, wheat or whatever, the raw materials eventually process innovations and technology improvements to create goods. So then we went into the manufacturing and the industrial era. Then that became automated. And the, you know, the improvements meant that less and less people were needed. Right.

 That drove us into the service area industry. All of the automation and mass production then drives commoditization. And that moved us into the experience economy. Right? And believe it or not, all of the automations and process improvements are now moving us into the transformation economy, which is what people pay for now is not so much the good or the service or even the experience.

 It's the transformation, the result, the outcome that they're going to get for it. Now, it doesn't mean that none of the other stuff is still in play because, you know, transformations are built on experiences, are built on. Services are built on. Goods are built on commodities. But that we've evolved in terms of how and where we see the value and what we're willing to pay for.

 And a lot of companies are still out there trying to offer goods and services that are commoditized based on AI and mass production.

Richard Walker: 08:14 

So you have just articulated probably the best explanation I can think of, and I've heard why people are rejecting SaaS pricing, seat based pricing, and wanting outcome based pricing because they're looking for the transformation of that outcome. 100% the same.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 08:32 

Yeah. So we have in the last in my company, in the last three months, we have reduced $5,000 a month in software by building our own software, vibe, coding everything. We've replaced the project management system, monday.com. We've replaced frame.io for video editing. We're systematically going through replacing all of these because these companies have been charging in a way that is, first of all, opaque, right, for the customer.

It makes sense for them, but it's not commensurate with the value that I'm receiving. And so more and more people are going to do that, and we can make better versions than what the SaaS companies are offering because they offer a lot of really limited basic versions not customized to us. So we're paying for stuff that we don't even want or use. And then, you know, they're penalizing you for using it more. Right.

 None of it makes sense.

Richard Walker: 09:27 

That one feature you really need, but they're making you pay double for it.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 09:31 

So they've kind of for a very, very long time been using just antiquated pricing and people, you know, sucked it up because that was the only option available. Now it's no longer the only option. So the technological and production and automation capacity has driven us beyond this, you know, service based model software as a service where you're ultimately renting the thing right into these other types of models. So if you don't really restructure your business model, then as well as your models, you might be dead in the water. And I think a lot of companies are going under because of that.

Even looking at some of the valuations and acquisitions recently, I think Airtable went only for a two X valuation when they got acquired. That's one of those unicorns, you know, softwares. Everybody was talking about that. You know two years ago would have driven a 5 to 10 X you know acquisition. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Walker: 10:22 

I didn't realize that. Wow. I think you're 100% right. I know I derailed my original question to you because I mean, this was just remarkable. But so let's go back.

The first thing is to know who your customer is, what you're trying to help them transform into. And then what else are you doing?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 10:38 

Yeah. And then from there it's like mapping the journey to the outcome, right? And the journey, not necessarily from your perspective, but from their perspective, which is what are all the different touch points and the ways in which they interact. So, so many companies have negative experiences all the way through where, you know, they're just trying to kind of cut costs and cut corners and eliminate real support. All of these sorts of things drop bots in to automate, you know, interactions versus thinking about what does the customer really want and need at this particular moment in their journey with your company. So also, how does this break down with the different kinds of edge cases?

You know, what happens when something does not go as planned? So really doing like the full on journey map and looking at it from a long term perspective of not just, I would start with the first 30 days, but then extend into two years and three years. And a lot of people don't plan that journey for a long enough time frame. So it defaults into just, you know, whatever happens, like people feel forgotten, you know, after a month or three and then some new shiny AI based business comes out, offers it cheaper, and you've just been commoditized, right?

Richard Walker: 11:55  

I wonder if that is why so many companies, especially SaaS companies, experience churn and they can't really figure out how to affect that churn, meaning stop losing the customers. And look, we have our own level of churn with end users, but our enterprise customers have been with us from day one. I still have customer number one, two, three, five, ten, 12, 15, 20. Because we just keep innovating, we keep adding value to what they're doing. We keep listening to what they want and keep adding to what they can get quickly.

And I just don't think a lot of companies think that way. So I wonder, I mean, do you see that? Do you see other people turning out because they haven't really focused on their journey or is it something else?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 12:35 

Yeah, 100%. So, you know, the name of the game for the last probably decade has been more leads, more sales, more buyers, right? Yeah. But then there's this leaky bucket, which is retention and engagement of the buyers that they do have. And because, you know, back in the day, marketing was really cheap and accessible.

Everyone could just, you know, blanket Facebook, carpet bomb, you know, all of these different, you know, digital marketing strategies. But now that's no longer as easy and as effective as it used to be. And yet people are still trying to think of, well, maybe if we just automate and drive down costs, right? So people keep trying to avoid the whole issue of customer engagement and retention and a product that actually works, thinking they can solve it with more leads or by reducing costs, and that profitability is either more customers or less cost to deliver versus why don't you try better serving the customers you have? They'll spend more money, they'll start to market your products for you, right?

 Or you'll have that lifetime value. But we've been in the cycle of short term thinking in the business world. And still so many businesses today are so busy with AI augmentation this year that they're still continuing to overlook all of these important things. But I do think that the pendulum is starting to swing and people will start to value what I think is truly the most important asset in their company, which is their customer. So when you go beyond even setting customer success as your North Star metric, but when that becomes the kind of mission your company becomes your customers, like your customers mission becomes your mission.

 Does that make sense? Yeah. What your customer wants becomes what you want. And when you optimize everything to give your customers what they want, well, then you've got a good business. And it's one of those things that's so intuitive.

 And yet it's, it's like nobody really focuses on it because we all take our customers for granted, you know?

Richard Walker: 14:29 

Yeah.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 14:30 

And we think that from us before they're going to buy from us again. The sun, you know, rises in the East every day and it's going to rise in the east again tomorrow. Go ahead.

Richard Walker: 14:38 

Yeah.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 14:39 

Yeah.

Richard Walker: 14:39 

No, I was thinking about a couple of things. I think I'm really fortunate because when I was a teenager I read Guerrilla Marketing. Is that Jay Conrad Levinson? And one of the things I took from his book was, put 90% of your money and effort into current customers and only 10% into new customer acquisition. And it's a philosophy that we've had here at Kwik that I just said, yeah, I'm going to try to keep every customer I can keep.

And I'm not saying I did it right, but that's been a philosophy. I don't know if a lot of companies take on that philosophy because of what you've just said.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 15:11 

No. And beyond that, it's interesting too, is there are studies where, you know, everyone talks about NPS and all these different things. And the truth is, if you focus on just the detractors and the people that are having a bad experience, you can actually spend a huge amount of time and resources trying to optimize for the people that are not having a good experience. But if you actually optimize for the people who are like the eight nines and ten out of tens, you know what I mean? The people who love you, it actually has a much higher return on investment with much less time and energy and resources.

And so even within customer experience, people focus on the squeaky wheels and most people take the good customers for granted. But the good customers like from the Pareto principle, there's always the 20% that drives 80% of the revenue. And people like those.

Richard Walker: 16:03 

You know, I'm so glad you said that. I'm actually struggling today talking to my general counsel about an agreement we're working through. And I almost feel like saying no to the customer. I think the customer is going to be really difficult. And I don't like saying no.

I want to help them, but I feel like their attitudes and their culture is going to make it really a lot of friction with my team, and that's just going to burn everybody out. Why do that to ourselves when we can serve our other customers so much better? And I haven't said no to the customer. I'm going to keep pushing forward because I think maybe I'm misreading it. I don't want to make a mistake in this part, but at the same time, I have to protect my team.

 You know, Marissa, there's one other thing that goes with this. If you focus on creating a better customer experience, it actually reduces the friction on your own team. You therefore become more efficient as a company and more cost effective at what you're doing. Are you seeing those results with your customers?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 16:54 

Yeah, 100%. Because ultimately what you're building is an ecosystem. And when I look at experience design, which is what I consider my core area of expertise, there's subsets, you know. And I started to draw a model for this, which I'll have to send to you for the show notes is, you know, experience design at the intersection. You've got customer experience, but you also have employee experience, you have organizational experience.

And then I would say right now, AI experience is a key part of that as well. But all of these intersections between C x and x, x and O x, o x, and you know, a I x, right? Form this whole kind of transformational experience that you're a part of. And they all impact each other because these are synergistic ecosystems that we're building. And at the end of the day, when people know in their bones that they're doing right by the people they're serving, not just by their bosses, they're a lot more motivated.

 I mean, look at all the research on, you know, Gen Z and millennials and everything else. They want to only work for cause based companies that they align with and they believe in. And a lot of times that alignment and believing isn't the lip service of what the company says that they're about, but it's actually being able to see the stories of transformation and the individual lives of the customers that that company is serving.

Richard Walker: 18:16 

How important a role does company culture play in all of this?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 18:21 

Yeah. So when it comes to customer experience, I think it really does depend on the actual company and who it is that they serve. You know, if you've got a company that's doing, you know, defense contracting with the federal government or something that has a handful of big clients, it's not as important. But if you're having a, like a direct to customer, direct to consumer company where, you know, it's like individual people that, that they're interacting with and that the company members interact with the clients on a regular basis, then I think it does play a big role. But if there's more of a remove, you know, it might be more of a B2B business or whatever else it happens to be, it may be less.

So obviously, the more automated something is, the more removed they are from the customer, the less important that is. And I think a lot of SaaS was built to remove from the customer. So it is interesting how quickly SaaS has fallen behind. I will say the hell of having your ears to the ground and those customer interactions and having feedback loops that then go and inform the product teams and the marketing teams are really important. So in my business training and coaching company, I interact with thousands of our customers and our clients every single year.

 And so I get to feel like the canary in the coal mine who, you know, has my fingers on the pulse so I can bring that feedback into, you know, evolving the company on a regular basis. So I think, you know, that kind of loop plays a role too.

Richard Walker: 19:57 

Yeah. I think it also, if you're, if you look, this is my view and maybe it's just my filter of where I've come from because our customers are enterprise. But if your focus is thinking, oh, the company culture doesn't matter to the customer, maybe you're talking about the wrong customer in that way. And I say that's true for Quik! because when we started, it was about giving financial advisors, independent advisors a tool to do their forms. It quickly turned into selling to the enterprise and helping the enterprise become more efficient as a whole.

So although the end user may experience quickly from a form and that experience matters, the overall customer experience is at the enterprise level. And that's really who our customer focus is put upon. Marisa, I want to talk about something else because I've known you for a while, and if I recall you are a magician with gamification and really helping the user experience go through a really fun, dynamic and engaging thing. How important is that user experience to the overall customer experience in your mind?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 20:58 

Yeah. So user experience, you know, a lot of times relates more to kind of platforms, apps, pages, that sort of thing. When you're using that term, UX versus the overall CX. And I think again, it sort of depends on the product and whether, you know, it has that user experience kind of interface as well. But I think that, you know, businesses are integrated through multiple touchpoints.

So whether you have digital touchpoints or you don't have digital touchpoints, the integration of all the touchpoints, you're basically building a world that people interact and engage with. So, you know, I always like to compare it to Disney World, you know, where even the garbage cans and the different frontier land is going to look like Wild West theme versus Future Land or whatever it's called. It's going to look more streamlined. So there's nothing in that world that actually makes people feel like they're in some kind of artificial, contrived thing. It's the same thing watching just a really good television show or movie where you just enter a new world and that world is internally consistent.

 So I think that when you're looking at user experience, people want to feel smart. They want to feel like they're making progress. They want to feel like they can find whatever they want quickly and easily. And, you know, the more you help empower people to feel smart and to get what they want, the better you're going to be. And so it is a really key kind of opportunity in the user experience.

 And a lot of people, you know, don't really focus on ease of use and simplicity and everything else as much as they could. And I know one of my mentors, Yu-Kai Chao, who's the godfather of gamification, says that, you know, basically after three seconds, if someone doesn't know where to go, you've kind of lost them and you've disempowered them. So this idea of gamification, which is it can be applied to not just UX, it can be applied to, you know, the entire relationship. At its core, gamification is based on behavioral science and behavioral design, which is how do you get people into action? And the reason why it's important is because games are things that are completely optional.

 So they have to be wired to get people engaged or there's no purpose to games. You know, many of us are in businesses where we provide a service or whatever it happens to be that people fundamentally need. And because people fundamentally need it, we assume it does not have to be engaging. But when you apply some of these game mechanics to experiences that are normally not engaging or boring. And then you incentivize people to come back to make it a habit, to kind of continue the behavior, to align with their motivations to, you know, drive people forward.

 They're going to want to continue to engage because it feels good, right? Yeah. So at the end of the day, it's like, how do you make people feel good? How do you make them feel smart? How do you make them do what they want or get what they want?

 And that's really what it is at its core. It's actually really, really simple. And we, you know, tend to make it about technology or something else and overcomplicate versus getting to the core of, you know, how we behave as humans, what we want, why we want it, and optimizing and designing for that.

Richard Walker: 24:26 

I think it's so ironic in business, we come up with a great idea, a new business model, a new product, whatever it is, because we want to serve a customer, we want to help the customer with our service or product. And so many companies lose sight of that, and they're just selling the product because they want to make the money versus helping the customer with the product. And I don't know where I'm going with this. I just think it's such an irony of, of where you start versus where a lot of companies have ended up being. All right, let's switch gears.

Talk about AI. I mean, it's on everybody's lips and it's on everybody's fingertips as well. How are you seeing AI used effectively in the customer experience? What are things people should be doing and maybe even avoiding with AI?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 25:05 

Well, the opposite of mass commoditization, which we talked about recently, is mass customization. So you can beat commoditization by creating a custom responsive experience that gives people what they want on demand and adapts to them. So most people, you know, companies leveraging AI are doing it to reduce costs or to not have to take team time in order to respond to a ticket, versus how do we leverage AI to build platforms that allow us to gain Intel about a client and actually serve them better over time. You know, one great example. You know, of this that's more old school is the Ritz Carlton's mystique system, where they were tracking, you know, just every little thing that the customer did.

Right. To then be able to make sure that the customer gets the pillows that they want on their bed the next time they come, and they're double checking whether they've been there before. And they can customize the greeting so people know that they're seen and that people are noticing that they're coming back and they're not a first time customer, and they don't have to be asked that sort of thing. Well, that's an old school application that was pre AI, but AI has made that kind of thing so much easier. I mean, how many times have you called into a call center and there's like three handoffs.

 You have to repeat the same information at every single handoff. Yeah. Not even just being like, instead, the AI should know exactly who you are when you call. And maybe yes, there's some validation and verification, but if you're calling from a particular number. And maybe it knows your voice and it has some voice or whatever it happens to be like, there's so many ways to just eliminate all of that friction.

 And, you know, there's a concept called customer sacrifice, which is how much are you making your customer sacrifice in order to use your product? And it feels like that customer sacrifice is embedded into all of those, you know, automated phone systems and chat bots now. And it's like, let the customer pay so we don't have to pay. Right?

Richard Walker: 27:09 

And my, so my mom's my partner, my poor mom, she has just, she's so frustrated with Wells Fargo right now. They denied a wire request without telling her. So we missed a payment in a timely manner. Then they locked her out of our account because they denied the payment. And it makes no sense at all.

And there's no follow up. I'm sorry, I don't mean to air it all out, but I mean, that kind of sacrifice makes us never want to do business with them. And it's incredible because it's not that hard to just send a notice or say on the phone when you're talking to the rep, hey, we can't process this today or whatever it is.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 27:46 

I know 100%. And then what happens is it's, it's all of the automations that are working against the customer, right? And so that's where you have to be really careful. And the automations in AI tend to break down on the edge cases where people most need support, where they're having an emergency or they're having a crisis. And then the automations break and there's like, people are trapped in this loop and they can't get out of it and they can't get their real concerns addressed.

And then, you know, it's a, it can be a massive breakdown with real consequences for the human on the other end of the line. And, you know.

Richard Walker: 28:24 

I think that's one of the challenges with AI, though, is that if it's not implemented well, it could dismiss the customer. It could tell them the wrong thing. It could put them in a worse position as a result. And one of my prior guests on the show, Katie DeFeo of a son, West Credit Union. She talked about how they implemented an AI and pulled it back immediately, and they realized they needed to give it a life.

They needed to make it part of the persona of the company and then tell people, hey, I'm you're not stuck here in the AI world. You can talk to a human right now, press zero and we'll take you there. It's not a problem. So I think there's also that pitfall that people have to watch out for because it's just too easy to be like, oh, I got AI, let's let it handle it all and dismiss it and put the burden back on the customer as a result.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 29:06 

100%. Yep. And you know, these sorts of time cost saving systems, they're necessary in business, but they end up breaking down when the customer is only looking at it from their side, which is what they want? They want to deflect tickets to the AI. They want to cut costs.

They want to reduce their CS team. Those are all company centric perspectives. What is the customer needing underneath each type of interaction? Right? If you optimize the AI based on the customer's needs at that touch point.

 It's really different.

Richard Walker: 29:43 

We're running out of time. I feel like I have a thousand questions I should have asked you, and I never do this in my show. I want to do this with you. Is there something I should have asked you? I mean, you're such an expert in this.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 29:55 

Yeah. I mean, like you said, we could talk all day about this in terms of. Yeah, but I think that what you should have asked me is honestly, this is just the flow of the conversation. I can't think of something that you should have asked for.

Richard Walker: 30:10 

Okay. There's no gotchas I miss like, oh, we should have told the audience if they do this one thing.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 30:15 

Yeah, it all depends on context and everything else. So you know. Yes.

Richard Walker: 30:20 

No, I know, I know, I, I, one of the things that's hot in our industry is trust and we're in financial services. So if you're putting an AI in front of the customer, do you trust it or not? And I think trust is one of the biggest parts of customer experience. So my last question before we go on to the end here. How do you think you build trust in the customer experience?

What are the factors that matter the most?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 30:42 

Yeah. Well, a big factor in terms of building trust is consistency, right? So consistency is simply that this company will do what it says it's going to do. When it says it's going to do it. And I'm going to have a consistent experience across all touchpoints.

That doesn't depend on getting the one customer service rep who's actually competent or whatever else it happens to be. And so the ability to consistently deliver a service or a product or results over time and respond is really important, right? I think consistency is first, we do not trust things that are inconsistent. The next thing is, you know, delivering the core promise, which is the result of whatever the thing is. And so that's the competency end of things, right?

 It's a little different from consistency. You can be competent but inconsistent. And either one will lose trust. So I think those two. And then the third one is more that this company is human.

 Right now there's a term called the human made premium. So this is the year where three different dictionaries, you know, agreed on the word slop for AI, AI, slop. And it used to be that people, you know, really valued the AI output more than the human output. But that's reversing. Even as AI gets better, there's now a premium on something that feels human made.

 So really telling the story, you know, sharing the mission, the vision, the values, being consistent with them going beyond the transaction and the product delivery and having moments of personality, of care, of alignment and authenticity matter too. So I would say it's all about consistency, competency, and authenticity, right? That this brand has a heart and a pulse and that they're doing this for a reason. They genuinely care. So the authenticity shows care.

 So I think care is also a driver.

Richard Walker: 32:36 

I love that, I love that I've had such a bad relationship with the word authentic. You know, everybody's got to be authentic. But in the case of AI, the authenticity is human. I love this. Marissa, before we get to my very last question, what is the best way for people to find you and, and connect with you?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 32:55 

Yes. So on the business coaching and training side, going to liveyourmessage.com and on the service side, if you want some diagnostics on your own customer journey, going to theexperiencegroup.com and we'll drop a link to a customer experience scorecard you can take to get insights as to where your journey is breaking down as well.

Richard Walker: 33:21 

Nice. That's awesome. All right. I get to ask my favorite question now, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?

Marisa Murgatroyd: 33:32 

All right. Thank you for asking that question. I think that what's impacted me the most is understanding people, right? It's less the leadership skills and all of that than all of the things that I've done to learn to better understand people and their motivation. So that includes the behavioral studies scientists that I've studied with, people like you, Kai Chow and BJ Fogg.

It includes people like Kathy Colby, who, you know, developed the Colby Index, how people are when they strive and the different types of striving. But I think in order to become a good leader, you need to understand people. And I think a lot of leaders have the cognitive bias and the blind spot of seeing their perspective, but not being able to drop into everybody else's perspective. So the things that have impacted me are the ones that allow me to understand, you know, the people that I work with in a deeper way.

Richard Walker: 34:28 

I love that, I love that we're all in business with people. We're selling to people. I don't care about the AI revolution. I don't think it's. I'm sure there's gonna be bots selling to bots, but you're right.

It's about people. Thank you for sharing that. All right. I want to give a huge thank you to Marisa Murgatroyd, founder of The Experience Group, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out her website at theexperiencegroup.com and liveyourmessage.com.

 And then don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com where we make processing forms easier. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Marisa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Marisa Murgatroyd: 35:08 

You are welcome. It was great to have this conversation. I love people who are passionate about customers.

Outro: 35:15 

Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.