What do you do when everyone in the world is your customer? This is precisely the challenge Google aims to solve every day.

They think a lot about customer experience but at times it might be called “user experience” because every person that uses Google is a customer—even though they might not be a paid customer. It wasn’t until I met Darren Pleasance, Managing Director of Global Customer Acquisitions, at Google and saw him keynote the SOCAP annual conference that I was aware of this customer experience team inside Google. What you might not realize about customer experience at Google is what a large focus growing small and medium sized businesses is for the company. 

Technology has become the great equalizer. No matter your size you can now compete on the world’s scale. Technology now hides complexity—products are more user friendly. Non-technical business owners can build detailed websites and mobile experiences just like any coder would. For example when was the last time you did not go to YouTube first in an effort to find a tutorial online? Google has improved consumers lives in many ways.

In this episode of The Modern Customer Podcast Darren Pleasance and I explore how Google views customer experience.

Some things you will learn:

How small and medium sized businesses leverage modern technology to scale (and look bigger than they are)
How one global grocer uses digital engagement to keep up with the on-demand economy
What Google X is up to 

Scaling Customer Experience With Google's Darren Pleasance

We're at a crossroads in education. There is an increasing gap between the skills that are in demand in the workforce, and modern day education. It simply is not making the cut. Even though the education system today is largely an old machine, sometimes you come upon stories that give you hope. Enter Paulina Raguimov, a young creative gamer who at the age of 16 applied for an internship at JumpStart--a well-known game company--got the internship and ended up pitching a concept for a new game to the CEO, and getting that game produced. Now at the age of 20 Raguimov continues to do cutting edge work at JumpStart and finds time in her busy schedule to mentor younger people as well.

Paulina Raguimov 01

Raguimov took the road less travelled by skipping college (so far) and wants to provide information and resources to others like her in school who don't know exactly what they wanted to be when they grow up. Raguimov has generated a lot of attention already with features in TechCrunch and Huffington Post. I have met Paulina Raguimov many times and am happy to have had the opportunity to share her story with Forbes' listeners.
What You Will Learn In This Podcast:

Learn how a young person can navigate the waters of tech and seek gateway opportunities early on
Learn about why young girls benefit from going into gaming
Hear tips from Raguimov on how to generate opportunities with tech companies
For more on Paulina Raguimov follow her on Twitter @PollyRag or LinkedIn here. 

How Young People Can Be Successful In Technology: Advice From A Leading Game Designer

Most of the companies that are doing social customer service well are on the journey. This means they have focused on a few solid channels and work to create a strong process to enable customers to interact with them on that channel. MailChimp is one of those companies. The company serves many of the world’s small businesses as the preferred email marketing solution. It was founded in 2001 and by June 2014 10 billion emails per month were sent through MailChimp. Most of these MailChimp customers are small businesses but some are larger too such as Uber–a company known to use the service. They’ve launched and operationalized a strong social listening and response customer service program to serve their many customers. In this podcast I talk to practitioner Kevan Gammage, MailChimp’s Social Support Manager who gave our listeners on The Modern Customer podcast a unique view into the daily ongoings of social customer support at MailChimp. 

Social Customer Service at Mailchimp

Peter Drucker's grandson Nova Spivack, CEO of Bottlenose, says that Drucker would have felt today that real influencers are not spending a lot of time on social media. In The Modern Customer Podcast this week we talk to Spivack who is an entrepreneur and investor who at six years old remembers being in line behind Jack Welch for an appointment to spend time with his grandfather, one of the most famous management thinkers of our time Peter Drucker. These memories are vivid for Spivack who today spends time thinking about the big business questions we face today.

Spivack believes his grandfather felt real influence is not visible but built through face to face interaction. From personal branding and influence to building a brand’s influence, we cover it all in this podcast.

There are many challenges Spivack sees for brands that are trying to build influence. He says while people may be brands, brands are not people. While you can "friend" a brand, this is not a bi-directional relationship. Brands have to recognize that they aren't people and the relationships they're building are not like human friendships. Brands need to become memes--virally replicating ideas that spread through cultures. Spivack says brands are more like viruses than they are like people. Spivack's grandfather coined the term the "non-customer." Spivack argues that you still need to understand these non-customers as much as you seek to understand your customer. It's your non-customers that represent your potential for growth. Brands today spend an immense amount of time but not enough time trying to reach their non-customers.

Recently through there have been some debates around the focus on non-customers from a branding perspective versus purely focusing on the valuable top spending customers.

According to Spivack one of the things brands need to do is think of the risk of having only one niche. If we look at evolution the species that have survived—if you can compare this to brands—are the species that were not confined to one ecological niche. They were able to colonize other niches. You can think of demographics and audience segments as niches.

In this podcast you will learn

The best ways to build influence as a brand
How you can identify new market opportunities
Examples of brands that are generating awareness through killer content

People May Be Brands But Brands Are Not People

Customer centricity is something we all intend to do–it sounds like it means being “into” your customers. You are interested and focused on them right? Well, not really. Customer centricity as defined by Dr. Peter Fader of Wharton might be different than what you think. I saw Dr. Fader speak at the 2nd Annual Customer Centricity Conference–there was a debate with the audience around the purpose of a brand. It quickly became clear everyone disagreed about customer centricity especially as it relates to the purpose of a brand. According to Fader, customer centricity is when the brand identifies the most valuable customers and surrounds them with relevant products and services.The brand creates enough influence with their key customers that these customers see the brand as a trusted advisor. Clearly there are differing opinions today about how you treat your customers. Do you take your most financially rewarding customers and spend all of your time creating services, products and loyalty programs for them? Or do you treat all of your customers equally? In this podcast you will learn:

The role of big data in customer centricity
The business case for customer centricity
Case studies from the gaming community on customer centricity done right. Dr. Peter Fader is Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and taught marketing at Wharton for 29 years. He is the author of the book Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage.


Blake Michelle Morgan