An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Under promise and over deliver — Running my own agency allowed me to quickly learn that “wowing” customers, especially early on in the relationship, is the key to a long, fruitful relationship. When starting off, set your promises low and take that as an opportunity to go above and beyond to “wow” them. This strategy helped us impress and positively influence every client with our ideas.
As a part of our series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Martin. As CMO, Steve leads Act!’s global marketing team overseeing the planning, developing, and execution of the company’s marketing strategy. Bringing over 20 years of experience to Act!, his success in generating revenues by increasing sales has led to successful marketing initiatives throughout his career.
Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I started my career (many, many years ago) working nights in the data center of a large New England bank. I had been into personal computers for a few years — my Dad brought home an Apple II in 1980 and an IBM PC shortly thereafter — and “stepping up” to mainframe operations seemed like fun. After 10 years in IT, going from PC Support to networking, I ‘graduated’ to selling tech solutions, which soon became a career in software marketing, where I’ve happily spent the last 20 years at places like American Express and IBM as well as smart startups and growth-stage SaaS companies. I do think that a deep understanding of how systems work together enables me to better grasp and articulate the real value for users. I’m “pretty tech for a marketing guy” and “very marketing for a tech guy”.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting?
My first real job was working nights, where I didn’t have as much supervision as the day shift had (no suits around). Plenty of opportunity to roam around this expansive ‘raised floor’ data center, which housed a plethora of intriguing devices, not all of which we used. In the back of the room, was a button (on the floor!) which I kid you not, was labeled “do not press”. So I didn’t. But one night, it was slow and I was young and dumb, and I thought “what could possibly go wrong?”, so I pressed it. Everything went wrong. It took hours to reset all the systems and I never owned up to pressing the button (I’m not even sure that anyone knew there was one).
We also used a pretty basic control language (JCL) to move jobs around the data center, and I once, when trying to pause a laser printer (about the size of three refrigerators) for maintenance, I instead accidentally restarted a million line print job, which wasted hundreds of pages of check stock, and several hours of operations time, which was a really big deal. Lots of explaining ensued, and it taught me that syntax matters (and not to press just any button).
Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
Yes! Never press a button that says “do not press this button”. Take it from me. I can honestly say I have successfully resisted that urge ever since. I also still find myself double checking input commands — syntax matters. Although operating systems are a lot more forgiving (who doesn’t love Ctrl Z ?), I’m still more cautious than most when issuing system commands.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
There are more than a few, and at the risk of sounding cheesy, I’d say my Dad probably had the biggest positive impact on me. While he and I didn’t see eye to eye on much, he (strongly) encouraged me to go to a private high school, which because it was far away (and all boys), wasn’t exactly on my wish list at 15. I think he recognized that I was drifting a little in middle school and ignoring much of my potential. That push led me to a school that prioritized critical thinking and had me studying rhetoric when I was 16 years old. That experience, more than any other, has shaped how I think and how I evaluate what others are saying. I’m glad I went, but he made me go (and he paid for it) so kudos to him for forcing that issue and guiding my development.
Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?
Providing great customer experiences is essential for driving growth today. Now more than ever, people are willing to pay for good customer service, and many are highly motivated to let the world know when they feel they didn’t receive it. They want to feel seen and heard by their favorite brands, and they recognize when companies go out of their way to serve customers well.
This means businesses can not only see real ROI from the work they put in on the customer experience side, there’s a persistent and public price to be paid for failing to meet expectations.
Consumers can easily jump to a competitor and tarnish your reputation on the way out the door. So, yes, absolutely — great customer experience is foundational for success in business and it always has been, but the stakes do feel higher now. Superior customer experience is key for building loyal client relationships and creating more long-term value for your company.
We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?
To me, the underlying problem is that many companies don’t realize how much is involved in creating and delivering a “superior customer experience.” We often think all that matters is the initial interaction, the final conversion, or the customer service response. Too many fail to realize that all of this is connected.
In reality, every engagement, every chat, every call, every website visit — these are all opportunities to engage customers. In addition, no interaction happens in isolation. For instance, we have to stop seeing customer service requests as short-term problems that need solving rather than as valuable opportunities to nurture long-term, personalized relationships. This is what the best customer experience teams are doing. To answer your question directly, the front line teams are, in many cases, overworked, underpaid and occasionally under siege. Companies should not expect to balance their entire CX strategy on the backs of these teams if they are not properly supporting them.
Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?
Competition can absolutely motivate companies to innovate or fix issues with the customer experiences they offer. The businesses that deliver the best customer experience are the ones that constantly evaluate what their peers are doing and ask what they could do to improve, which creates an “arms race” to bring a better experience to market.
As far as external pressures go, customer feedback is obviously important to consider. Businesses should go back to their customers regularly to learn what their challenges are and how their needs have changed over time. It doesn’t have to be as formal as an NPS survey, but assumptions drive a stagnant status quo and direct feedback can provide a wake up call. Conditions in the broader marketplace can certainly cause organizations to revisit their customer experiences. Unfortunately for many, we saw this move in the wrong direction during COVID — companies had to cut budget on the customer experience side, leading to a decline in service quality. Fortunately, things are turning around.
Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?
When I ran my own agency, I learned quickly that “under promising and over delivering” was the key to delighting customers and eliciting a “wow”. It took a little time to learn this, but I soon took to making a deliberate effort to keep customer expectations low, and then delivering everything you could think of. A common request was building brands for companies that were just starting out. We would gather information and tell the customer, we’ll back in a week with a few logo outlines that we can discuss and iterate on. Instead, we would fall back and develop a handful of logos and type treatments that we loved, and then quickly reproduce them in a variety of ways to help clients envision them in action. We’d show renderings on coffee cups, print ads, billboards… the impact of a ‘logo in action’ was exponentially greater than a lone logo on a white background. They came into those reviews expecting a slide show of 3–5 treatments and we showed them 40 images of those same logos on shirts and sites and trade show booths. We certainly didn’t win every job, but we were overwhelming most every client with our ideas.
Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects?
Well it definitely became a part of our culture. It was a small shop, maybe 10 people at its height, but this idea that we should strive to exceed our commitments started to surface in our internal interactions with people over delivering or delivering early because that’s how we entered every RFP or prospect engagement. Of course, this does mean that more effort goes into every iteration and that’s not everyone’s mindset all the time. Sometimes you just want to knock something out and move on to the next thing.
Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.
1. Under promise and over deliver — Running my own agency allowed me to quickly learn that “wowing” customers, especially early on in the relationship, is the key to a long, fruitful relationship. When starting off, set your promises low and take that as an opportunity to go above and beyond to “wow” them. This strategy helped us impress and positively influence every client with our ideas.
2. You don’t need a full-scale customer experience team in order to deliver exceptional service — Incredible value can be gleaned from leveraging software solutions, like CRM and other martech solutions, to streamline client communications and create a seamless customer experience without a full staff. For example, Hal Hanstein, President at Cardinal Realty Group and Act! customer, runs a small real estate firm, but with the help of Act!’s CRM platform, he is armed with the resources he needs to run his business like an enterprise.
3. Nurture, Nurture, Nurture — Don’t underestimate how many steps and engagements are involved in creating and delivering superior customer experience. The truth is, every engagement, chat, call and website visit are all opportunities to engage customers. In the financial services industry, Ron Buck, President of Performance Insights, finds that customer profiles change daily and that leveraging a CRM platform helps his team retain customers and keep up with client communications, enabling them to take a proactive approach when his clients face major life events like a job change or inheritance.
4. Remember that no interaction happens in isolation — For example, business leaders need to stop viewing customer service requests as short-term problems that need solving (ticket closing mentality), and instead treat them as valuable opportunities to nurture long-term, personalized relationships.
5. Earn loyalty everyday — It is always cheaper to retain customers than it is to acquire new ones. Therefore, it’s critical to find time to invest in client relationships that build brand loyalty and create more long-term value for your business through a “wow!” customer experience. For example, in today’s marketing landscape, consumers are willing to pay for good customer service, and feel motivated to let the world know when they don’t receive it. By maintaining regular touchpoints with clients and continuing to build the relationship with them even after you’ve closed your first sale with them, you will build repeat customers, and they will recommend your brand to their family and friends.
Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?
I highly recommend that customer experience teams reach out regularly and have real conversations with actual customers. This is where you learn about how people actually experience your brand, probe for what more you might be able to do, and unearth new brand champions. These conversations will reveal the advocates among your customers and recognizing, rewarding and encouraging them to share their experience is key to create an authentic ‘knock on effect’ to realize exponential returns from your CX efforts.
It’s not uncommon to offer customers incentives for helping you grow your business. We’re all familiar with these tactics — discount codes, referral bonuses, etc. — in exchange for getting others to try your service or for sharing on a review site. These devices really do work, especially with your most loyal and passionate customers, who may be happy to help.
My particular expertise is in retail, so I’d like to ask a question about that. Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise retail companies and eCommerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?
I want business leaders to understand that they don’t have to have a full-scale customer experience team to deliver exceptional service. Most companies (99%?) will never be able to compete with the Amazons of the world in terms of the resources and staff they can allocate to customer service (not to mention the price pressure they exert).
But that doesn’t mean businesses can’t delight patrons and meet their unique needs in a way a “big box retailer” simply doesn’t take the time to. Where I see a lot of opportunity today is in the connection point between customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation. This is where the magic — i.e., the “wowing” — can really be amped up. It’s how companies are bringing back personalized, concierge service to every encounter. And it’s how they are competing with powerhouses with tremendous economies of scale and lower prices. As mentioned earlier, most people are willing to pay for great customer experience, but those of us competing with titans need to make clear the additional value we bring to every transaction.
You are a person of great influence — if you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Well, I don’t know about great influence — my dog doesn’t even listen to me! Since the dawn of the internet, I have been infatuated with the idea of disintermediation. The idea that a new system can streamline an existing process by removing “middle men” — the stops along the way that can add great expense, but little value. When the ‘net first hit, the promise was no more car dealerships — people will look at cars online, build their preferred package and get one delivered to their home. Twenty five years in, and we’re almost there with services like Carvana, but of course there are still dealerships everywhere. To me banking seems ripe for this kind of disruption and the blockchain (not crypto!) seems like the means. Smart contracts on Ethereum hold the potential to make transactions between parties easier and more economical without the involvement of “big banks”. I would love to see a movement that brings banking to the billions of people who don’t have conventional accounts because they’re poor — the four billion people at the so-called “bottom of the pyramid.” It’s not that these people have no money, they just don’t have much money, and therefore the traditional banking systems are open to them, but a blockchain based, mobile first banking experience might enable them to transact (and save) safely and more easily (without extortionate fees).
How can our readers follow you on social media?
I post fairly regularly on LinkedIn and would welcome followers, connections and interaction there: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bostonstevemartin/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Steve Martin Of Act! On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
