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Four Keys to Customer Experience Success With Richard Walker

Richard Walker

Richard Walker is the CEO of Quik!, a provider of forms automation and management solutions for companies looking to maximize efficiency and productivity. He started Quik! in 2002 to help people spend less time on paperwork and more time on what they do best. Before Quik!, Richard was a business consultant with Arthur Andersen. He is also a published author of two books and a father of three boys.




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


  • [2:45] Rocky Chugani on listening closely to understand customer needs

  • [5:47] Richard Walker shares how loving your customer is the foundation for great experiences

  • [7:19] David Steele’s philosophy of designing restaurants that he personally enjoys

  • [10:02] Being your own first customer to improve experience design

  • [12:11] Bobby Steiner’s method of focusing entirely on the customer’s goals

  • [17:09] Joining your customer’s team to solve their problems

  • [19:46] Shelli Taylor on enforcing Alamo Drafthouse’s distraction-free rules

  • [23:20] Recap of four core principles for delivering excellent customer experience

In this episode…


Many businesses struggle to consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences, often missing the subtle but crucial elements that foster lasting loyalty. From poor listening to unclear expectations, these gaps erode trust and satisfaction. How can companies build experiences that not only meet but exceed customer expectations every time?


Rocky Chugani, a custom clothing expert, stresses the importance of genuinely loving your customer and tailoring services to their unique needs. Building on the theme of empathy, David Steele, a hospitality and financial services leader, advises becoming your own first customer to anticipate pain points better. Golf pro Bobby Steiner offers a different perspective, highlighting the value of joining your customer’s team, focusing fully on their goals. Shelli Taylor, a cinema executive, emphasizes the importance of setting clear boundaries to protect the experience, proving that well-defined rules can significantly enhance satisfaction.


In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker reviews previous episodes on building meaningful customer relationships. These guests share insights on valuing your customer, being your own first customer, joining your customer’s team, and setting boundaries. They also explore tailoring details, hospitality best practices, and creating distraction-free experiences.


Resources Mentioned in this episode



Quotable Moments:


  • "If you want to create the best customer experience, you must first love your customer."

  • "You have to be your first customer to know what it's like to have a customer experience."

  • "To be on their team, you have to think about sitting next to them on their side."

  • "I care about solving problems for my customers, not making sales when we can’t meet their needs."

  • "People have a better experience when they know what to expect and get what they expect."


Action Steps:


  1. Love your customer: Building genuine care for your customers fosters trust and loyalty, differentiating your brand in competitive markets.

  2. Be your first customer: Experiencing your product or service firsthand helps identify pain points and align the experience with real user needs.

  3. Sit on your customer’s team: Positioning yourself alongside your customers builds stronger relationships and enhances satisfaction through collaborative problem-solving.

  4. Set clear boundaries: Defining rules for your service creates consistency and prevents disappointment by setting clear expectations.

  5. Ask more questions upfront: Deep discovery before offering solutions ensures you address the root of a customer’s challenges and build credibility.


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.


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. Today I'm going to do something a little bit different. I want to share some of the deeper lessons I've learned about customer success, from talking to various guests on this show. Over the past 150-plus episodes, I've found a few patterns that indicate what it takes to build the best customer experiences. So on this show, I'm going to play back some of the key moments where the conversation with specific guests helped me see these patterns clearly.

Many of my guests have contributed to this overall understanding, but certain episodes culminated in concrete terms that I believe will help you build the best experiences for your customers. 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 our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context-rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions.

Visit quik.com to get started. So welcome to The Customer Wins. If you haven't heard this podcast before, I love to talk with 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 growing their own company. Today, I'm going to reintroduce you to several guests whose words, thoughts, and concepts enabled me to see what it truly takes to build the best customer experiences as we go through some of these clips and the lessons I've learned, I hope you'll be inspired to use these lessons in your own business and to go find these episodes and watch them in full.

I've been fortunate to talk with many amazing people on the show who have all shared their knowledge, challenges, and lessons for success. I'm equally looking forward to talking with the next 150 guests to see what additional lessons we learn together. All right. The first guest I want to bring on is Rocky Chugani, the founder of Rocky's Custom Clothes, based out of Hollywood. Rocky and I spoke about the intimacy of working with people and helping them become their best through customized clothing that is designed to fit them exclusively.

Let's take a listen. And I bet the people that you bring on board are people who really, really love people. They enjoy working that closely.

Rocky Chugani: 02:45

They have to. They have to. The whole idea is that they have to be, as I think in any business, you want a person to be able to. Here we were just talking about it. So the person has to be able to hear what the other person wants, which is the hardest these days.

And then provide the solution to it. It brings me to an interesting thing which, you know, not too many people know, but if you think about it, all our bodies are not symmetrical. Pretty much. Right. Because we measure people, right?

So 98% of people, one shoulder is lower than the other. Is it? And so we have like literally tailoring devices which measure like, you know, like Home Depot stuff almost. But it's a tailoring device which measures the shoulder slope. And so we kind of go to that much detail that if suppose a person's one right shoulder is quarter inch, half inch lower than the the jacket shoulder has to be adjusted accordingly.

And that's where custom-made comes in. Because when you talk about Armani, you were talking about and Hugo Boss, you were talking about, those suits are cut for, you know, size 40 is cut for a person who has a chest of 40. Stomach of this, waist of this. And it has to fit everybody who is in that size.

Richard Walker: 04:03

Right?

Rocky Chugani: 04:05

Little alterations are done, but typically that has to fit everybody. In our case, it's not based on that. Our case is not just measurements. It's actually based on their posture. If the person back is a little more curved, if the person walks a little differently, talks, you know, so it's cut for that person.

So a suit, when it's made for a person with the same 40, 32, 36 will not fit the other 40, 32, 36 because this has been cut for this one person individually.

Richard Walker: 04:35

Yeah.

Rocky Chugani: 04:35

And that's how that person feels good. Like when you put a jacket on or a shirt on, which is made to those kind of specifications. The jacket, the shirt moves with you. You don't feel like you're you don't feel like after you get back from work. Hey, I need to get out of this right now.

Yes, I do want to get out of it, but I'm comfortable in it. I don't mind sitting in it and chatting with my family for a few minutes. It doesn't matter. I don't need to get out of it. It's not like it's a uniform.

Richard Walker: 05:03

Right, man. Rocky, I love the fact that you have these details, that you've thought about these details. You're aware of it because this is really, I think, what builds expertise and enables you to do what you do. I also want to comment on something else that I want to articulate. I haven't actually talked about this as a fundamental, but I think one of the fundamentals you're expressing is to create a great customer experience is that you actually have to love your customer.

You have to love what the outcome is, right?

Rocky Chugani: 05:31

No doubt about it. You know, our mission statement actually is literally that a client step of ultimate confidence in a Rocky's outfit is the true expression of joy.

Richard Walker: 05:45

Nice.

Rocky Chugani: 05:46

Literally.

Richard Walker: 05:47

So this conversation with Rocky helped me understand something fundamental to creating the best customer experience. If you want to create the best customer experience, you must first love your customer. When I came to this realization, it suddenly seemed so obvious. But it's only obvious when you think about the opposite. If you don't love your customer, how could you possibly create the best experience for them?

I know we've all had terrible experiences in life. When we meet somebody who's unhappy in their job, or when somebody is enforcing a bad policy and is unwilling to bend. Yet we all love it when somebody loves their job and seems to enjoy working with their customers. So the first question you have to ask yourself when you're thinking about the customer experience is do you love your customer? And if you don't, maybe you're in the wrong business.

So while Rocky was the first to help me see a pattern through my conversation on this podcast, my next guest, David Steele, is actually the latest to give me an epiphany on the customer experience journey. David Steele is the co-founder of One Wealth Advisors, as well as the co-founder of two restaurant groups called Flour and Water Hospitality Group and Great Gold Hospitality. I knew before I had him join me on the show that he would offer some incredible insights on customer experience, given that he has both financial advisory and hospitality backgrounds. He didn't disappoint. Let's take a listen.

Here's one of the main questions I really was interested in asking you about to be on my show with. How do you create this amazing culinary experience guests experience in restaurants?

David Steele: 07:19

Well, I mean, I said earlier that and we opened our first restaurant 16 years ago. What I'm saying when I say about the intersection of technical proficiency, proficiency, and from a culinary perspective with casual, comfortable environment that was very unusual in cities at the time. It's become way more common in San Francisco and New York and Chicago and the main cities. But at the time, you had either casual or fine dining. For the most part, it was pretty rare.

Now again, it's it's really, really common. So I'd like to think that's something that we've done. And we do really, really well. I mean, it's a thing I'm, I'm, I'm most proud of because I don't like stuffiness. I don't like being sitting in a restaurant, being in an environment where I feel like I, I, I can't have a natural, comfortable conversation at a volume level that is normal and natural.

That I am afraid to get the tablecloth dirty. I, you know, so I really built with my partners restaurants that I wanted to eat at. So it's a bit selfish actually.

Richard Walker: 08:36

Okay. So I'm going to codify this because this is maybe one of the secrets to building a great customer service customer experience. It sounds like you are the first customer.

David Steele: 08:45

Yeah. That's that's as you were saying it I it just. Yes, exactly.

Richard Walker: 08:54

I like this, David. Yeah. If I was for my software, I built it so it would be easy for me. I gave it to my partner, my in financial planning, who had been with IBM forever, like he was the worldwide global planner. Took me three months to get him to use it, but when he saw it, he was like, how have I not been using this?

This is the simplest software product I've ever used. And that was my kind of idea of like, gotta make it really easy so I don't stress about it, worry about it. It's just like click, click, go, done. I love that idea. You have to be the first customer and you were modeling it over the things that you loved and didn't love in restaurants.

All right.

David Steele: 09:33

Oh, and financial planning, by the way, because I, I don't want to be a billionaire. I have no interest in that. So when I say, and I do want to live a happier, more peaceful life, and I do believe that if treated the right way, money can buy happiness if everything is in harmony in a, in, in, in a sort of integrated, systematic way. And so I think my financial planning business had me in what I want my ideals in mind as well.

Richard Walker: 10:02

Yeah. I jokingly say this to people, but I truly mean it. If money can buy happiness. Spend the money. Obviously within reason.

So the key lesson I took from David is exactly what I said. What I said in this clip. You have to be your first customer to know what it's like to have a customer experience with your company. If you can keep that mindset of being a customer for your own company, and try to see how your users and constituents go through your process, then you're more likely to identify the challenges and the areas of improvement so that you can create the best experience overall. I've certainly done that with Quik!.

I started off as a financial advisor who had to fill out paperwork, and I didn't want to do that, so I built the software for myself, not even considering that I would ever sell it to anybody else. But when enough people saw the problem and I had a solution for it, it became obvious that there was a need for this. To this day, I hate filling out paperwork, so I'm still a customer because of that need at various places that I go to fill out paperwork, and I always look at the person giving me the paperwork and say, do you know what I do for a living? I could make this so much easier for you and me. And this leads me to the third lesson that I want to bring up today.

One of the things I've done with this podcast is I've brought in people who are completely outside this industry, like Rocky, who makes custom suits, and also like this next guest, Bobby Steiner, who is the golf pro at horseshoe Bay resort. Bobby has a wonderful YouTube channel teaching golf to people, and he has been an educator of golf for decades. So when he talks about how he works with his clients in the hour that he has with them, it created a powerful mindset for me that I think you're going to learn a lot from in this clip. So, Bobby, let me let's switch gears a little bit, because in your role of helping people, they come to your resort, they get instruction, they work with you maybe one time, maybe they're there for just one weekend out of their entire life. Or maybe you have people that are there every weekend working with you.

What is the customer journey like? I mean, what experience are you delivering to them and how are you helping ensure they actually get the most enjoyment from the game while they're experiencing their time at your resort with you?

Bobby Steiner: 12:11

Well, so golf is one of these things. And if you've ever been around an avid golfer, you already know this. And that is, golfers own game means more to them than anybody else's game means to them. Most people don't want they. So what?

The service that I provide is I am their teammate for the time that they're there. I'm that one person in the entire world who's not talking about his own game, but is rather focused on theirs. And that means so much to the person asking second and third and fourth level questions and and each each question that's asked is not just part of a routine of five questions that I ask, but rather it's in response to questions that develop based on the answer to the last question. So. So the path we take is customized based on what I'm hearing and what they're feeling.

And let's go address what you told me. And people know whether they're being listened to or not. There's no denying it. And they don't care how many tournaments I've won. They don't.

That means nothing to them. What they need to know and what my mission is to accomplish, is that I am there to do whatever work I've done on my game is back here. We are on your game today. And so that that is that's what I tell my young instructors guys, you know, if nothing else, these people got to leave that hour knowing that that person in front of them was all about them for that entire hour, because that is what they feel and that is what they'll remember.

Richard Walker: 13:35

Man, there's so much that translates to everything we're doing in business. You know, there's a book that I love. I think it's Donald Miller Storybrand Building Your Storybrand. And he talks about using the Hero's journey as a premise to build your brand. But one of the concepts is your product is not the hero, your customer is the hero, and your product or service is the trusted guide.

And that's what you've just said. You are the trusted guide for this person. You are making your customer the hero for the hour that they work with you.

Bobby Steiner: 14:06

And they feel it. And they and they know the difference. They know, you know, I'll never forget I was I was giving and it sounds like I'm name dropping. I'm not trying to, but this is this is a story that I can't tell without name dropping. I was giving a golf lesson to Bruce Nordstrom of Nordstrom stores.

It's been almost 20 years now. He was the chairman at the time. His grandfather started Nordstrom back in the early 1900s. And I was giving him a golf lesson. And before at the finish of it I said, and I don't know if you know about Nordstrom.

Return policy changed a little bit lately. But it used to be if you buy something at Nordstrom and you want to return it, you may do so that day. A month later, a year later, five years later, whether you've worn it, whether you've not worn it, whether it's clean, dirty, laundered, doesn't matter. You bring it back and you get a full refund. All they ask is that you treat them fairly and you get to determine what fairly is.

And so as I'm wrapping up this lesson, I said, Mr. Nordstrom, I don't know how to say this, but my girlfriend, she says she thinks you're probably a pretty nice guy because of your return policy. And Mr. Nordstrom gave me a penetrating stare. And he says Bobby, it is sort of spoken. He's had a very resonant voice, sort of spoken. He's pear shaped tones.

And he said, Bobby, what is your girlfriend's name? And I said, Courtney, he said, Will you tell Courtney from me that I hope I'm a nice guy? I certainly strive to be, but me being a nice guy has nothing to do with my return policy. I have that return policy in place because I am a bottom line businessman, and I know if I take care of my customers and always give them what they deserve, then I'll always have legions of loyal customers flocking my 152 stores. Bobby, you can never lose by taking too good a care of your customer.

And it was like, whoa! Wow, talk about a now I get it, now I get it. And his rationale was, hey, I might get not beaten on this deal or that deal, or untreated or treated unfairly by this person or that person, but that will be more than outweighed by the number of people who will continue to come to my stores because they know they are treated like the equal of kings when they come in here. And so that's a lesson for us all, and something I try to remind my instructors about, and something I try to adhere to myself if I have to at the conclusion of a golf lesson, say, you know, because sometimes people are confused, and you go, you know what? I started this wrong.

I should have changed direction when I realized that you weren't picking up what I was putting down. You know what? There's no charge for today. Come back. Let's do it tomorrow.

Wow. Let's do it tomorrow. Give me another chance. People see that and they go suddenly. The frustration that they felt like I.

Not only am I not, because that happens once in a while. They're just you're not communicating. It just didn't happen. You know, not only am I frustrated even more than ever, but I'm going to have to pay for this. No, let's do it again tomorrow.

Let me let me help. Over. I'm more educated now because I realize the approach I took was wrong. And boy, you now. And it's not just so that they'll recommend you to other people, but so that you can.

You can sleep at night you can and and because of that, you know, they'll have a better experience and they will refer to other people to you because they realize you're not trying to cheat them. You know.

Richard Walker: 17:09

Man, I love talking to Bobby. The key lesson that we learned from Bobby is to be on your customer's team. Too often in the sales process, in the part where we're getting to know a customer, we're sitting on the opposite side of the table from them, meaning we're not on their team yet. We're thinking about how we can help them with our services. We're probably thinking about how we can sell them, convince them, tell them the next cool thing that we have to offer.

But that doesn't put us on their team. That keeps us on ours. To be on their team, you have to think about sitting next to them on their side of the table, looking at the problem from their perspective and understanding the pain that they actually feel. I do this in my company by asking a lot of questions up front. Often in a 30-minute meeting, I will go 20 or 25 minutes asking questions, really just to understand what is their situation, what kind of technology do they use?

What is their pain? What drove them to need this new decision in their business? The more I understand about them, the more I can be on their team and become trusted. The second thing that I do with customers is I never think about the sale for myself. If I can't solve their problem, there is no sale to be made.

So therefore I don't care about making sales. I care about solving problems for my customers. That also includes telling them when we are not the right solution for them. I have found that honesty, transparency and directness has helped me be on my customer's team more than any other thing I can do and whether they ever become my customer or not. They trust me and they come back and ask me to be on their team again.

All right. The next guest I want to show you is Shelley Taylor, the former CEO of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. But she's also somebody I've known for a long time, and I've seen flourish throughout her career. Starting way back in the early days of Starbucks becoming an executive, Starbucks, running all of Starbucks in China, and also working for Disney and many other companies. As an executive, Shelley really understands customer experience, customer service, customer joy, and the entire journey of customer goes through to make a decision to work with your company.

When I interviewed her at Alamo Drafthouse, they have something really well defined that most companies I don't think have as well-defined boundaries. The last lesson I want to share with you today is that to create the best customer experience, you also have to enforce a lot of boundaries with your customers. Alamo Drafthouse does this so well, so I'm going to let her explain. Now, Shelly, I mean, I know Alamo Drafthouse. I think it's one of my favorite, favorite experiences to to go have entertainment, but I don't know that everybody else does.

So tell us about your business. And fundamentally, how are you helping people?

Shelli Taylor: 19:46

Yeah. So if you haven't been to Alamo, the best way to describe it? Well, first of all, we're the original dine in cinema. And so what that means is that when you show up, not only do you get to have a great movie, but you also get to have dinner and or drinks delivered to your seat. So what it means for our customers, like what's amazing is a couple of things.

One, we are a distraction-free zone. So we've really created boundaries. When we think about our guests and the experience we want them to have. And so we have a culture and we share that culture right up front of our rules. So one, you cannot show up late.

We won't let you in. We will refund your ticket. And it's not to punish you or someone showing up late. It's to reward everyone in that auditorium who's shown up and wants to have a distraction free experience. The second thing we do, and we put it in and we try to have fun with it, but we're really serious.

Laugh all you want, cry all you want, gasp all you want. But please don't text and talk. Like if you want to do that, stay home, stream a movie. But once you get to Alamo, we want you to have just like this perfect movie-going experience. And we think when we when we create these boundaries and rules and really our culture, it creates the best guest experience.

And it's what distinguishes us from all the other cinema chains out there.

Shelli Taylor: 21:15

You know, I think that's really well put. I haven't talked to other people about customer experience.

Richard Walker: 21:18

Who said.

Shelli Taylor: 21:19

It's about.

Richard Walker: 21:19

Rules and boundaries. And I.

Shelli Taylor: 21:21

Know.

Richard Walker: 21:21

With my experience going to your movie theaters that I've learned to show up early because it's actually more fun to be there early than to be right on time or potentially late and kicked out. How did you guys develop these rules?

Shelli Taylor: 21:35

Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways in which, like the business was founded. I think first of all, when Tim and Carrie Lee, our founders, started off, I mean, this was just a dream. They went and found a parking garage in downtown Austin and converted that into a one theater, theater, movie chain. And, you know, when they were thinking about it, literally, their attitude was, what is everything we hate about going to the movies theaters right now because we love movies and let's do the absolute opposite. So let's have great food.

Let's have lots of beer. That's why Drafthouse is in our name. We've got 24 or more taps at all of our theaters with local breweries. So the best of the best. And then let's make it really fun.

So it started with like, what's the opposite. And then what? What makes that fun inside? Which is. And you mentioned this.

You like coming early and the weather and a lot of guests don't always recognize why. But if you go to another theater chain, you have to watch local or national ads. And when you come to the Alamo, we've decided not to take that revenue. It's an incredible revenue loss to us. Pure profit.

Right. And we've said no. And instead we curate, you know, a pre-show which might be funny videos. It might be an homage to, you know, the movie that you're about to see somehow. But we curate like this show for 30 minutes or less, 20 or 30, depending on the length of the film that you get to come and see.

And then you watch the trailers, which are of course, very fun. And then the movie that you've paid to see. So we don't hit you with a bunch of ads.

Richard Walker: 23:20

Man, I love talking to Shelli, and that episode's really good, so I highly recommend seeking it out. My mom taught me that when you raise children, they feel the most love when they know the boundaries. While that may sometimes be the opposite of what we think as parents, that you want to give them everything, give them everything they're asking for, it's the opposite. It's when you set the boundaries and the rules that they know how to behave. They know what to expect, and they generally enjoy life better.

That's why I think setting boundaries for your customers is the same thing. People have a better experience when they know what to expect and get what they expect, and the best way to ensure those expectations are met is to set strong boundaries about how you deliver your service, what your product is capable of doing and not capable of doing, and what you and your team are willing to do or not willing to do. And I don't necessarily mean you have to draft a bunch of policies or standard operating procedures. I mean, those help for sure, because they help keep your team aligned. But I think the boundaries we're talking about are driven by your company culture and your overall approach to how you serve your customer.

So I want to keep that in mind as we think about boundaries. For example, you don't simply need a refund policy. Rather, it's what we're willing to do to break the refund policy to make sure the customer is kept whole. When we make a mistake and feels like they deserve it, they be served well when they make a mistake. So as I wrap up this episode, I want to reflect on these four key components that my guests and I have brought to this conversation.

So first, you have to love your customer. Second, you have to be your first customer. Third, you have to be on your customer's team. And fourth, you need to know your boundaries. I believe with these four foundational components, you're destined to create an excellent customer experience.

If you use these ideas to guide your product or service, designs your policies and procedures, but especially your company culture, you're far more likely to succeed than not. I really hope that many of you will comment on this show and raise questions. Share your ideas around what makes for the best foundation for customer experience in your organization. Let's discuss this because it's been very engaging with my guests. So I hope you'll have this discussion on this topic with your own team and peers in the industry as well.

I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to my guests about how they execute on customer experience and how they build products to get there. And I've learned so much from all of my guests. In fact, I wish I could bring all of them back on the show because everybody had something to say about this. 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.

Thanks for joining me today on this very special episode.

Outro: 26:04

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.

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