Cannabis & The Customer Experience - Branding Bud Live Episode 27
THE SUMMARY
Listen in to this week’s episode of Branding Bud Live as the former editor of the Harvard Business Review, and co-author of the bestselling book “Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight”, Thomas A. Stewart, chats about customer experience and using “service design” to differentiate, build customer loyalty, and create lasting relationships.
THE CO-HOSTS
David Paleschuck, Adriana Hemans
THE SPECIAL GUEST
Tom Stewart, Author & Thought-Leader
THE TRANSCRIPT
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Welcome to Branding Bud Live, the live stream that’s 100% THC and 0% WTF. Every week we speak with business people about the business of cannabis. I’m David Paleschuck, founder of Branding Bud Consulting Group and author of the first book on cannabis branding. I’m joined by my co-host Adriana Hemans, a Marketing executive with over 8 years in the cannabis space. Hi Adriana!
ADRIANA HEMANS
Hi David. Thank you for that intro. I’m so excited to co-host the show with you. We’re bringing amazing guests from across the cannabis ecosystem to share their perspectives. My favorite thing about Branding Bud Live is that we focus on building community - and we encourage audience participation. It’s not just about us talking, it’s about all of us building something together. So feel free to drop your questions and/or opinions in the chat, and we’ll share them too.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Thank you, Adriana. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We have a lot to get into today. Today, we’ll be talking with Tom Stewart, Bestselling Author of “Woo, Wow, and Win: Designing Superior Customer Experience”. Tom is a Thought Leader and former editor of the Harvard Business Review. Today, we’ll be chatting about “Cannabis & The Customer Experience” with Tom. Some of the topics we’ll cover are:
Is there a process to designing a customer experience?
What are the key elements of a successful customer service strategy?
What role does technology play in enhancing the customer experience?
I’m super excited to chat with Tom today.
ADRIANA:
Me too!
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Please welcome Tom Stewart.
ADRIANA HEMANS
Hey, Tom, welcome. Tell us about yourself, what gets you up in the morning?
TOM STEWART
Well, the literal answer to that question is two hungry cats, the clock radio and a cup of coffee, or three. But you know, for many years, as David was saying, I've worked at the Harvard Business Review, I've worked with Fortune, I've worked as the Executive Director of the National Center for the middle market at Ohio State. And, and I've always liked this sort of intersection between ideas and practice, not only in the business world, but elsewhere. I live and breathe ideas. And I get excited when I get new ideas. And when I when I get a new idea. I'm like a, you know, a dog with a new toy or a teenage boy with a new girlfriend, I just, I just get thrilled by ideas. And so I guess that's what, that's what gets me up in the morning and idea of learning something new, and playing with it and sharing it.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
That's very cool. And I can appreciate both the I guess the conceptual side of things and the applied side of things as well. So we're here to talk about cannabis and the customer experience. Why don't we all know what cannabis is? Or hopefully we do? And if not, I highly recommend it. So let's get to the to the customer experience, component of it, you know, what is a customer experience? Really, at its most basic? And would you give us an example of one?
TOM STEWART
Yeah, let me let me first of all, this is an idea. This is one of those ideas that I started getting excited about when I first realized that customer experience is a different and bigger idea than something like customer satisfaction or customer service. Customer Experience is the whole gamut of things that happened to a customer and the interaction of a customer with something that she or he is buying. And then let me let me give you a simple compare contrast example of a CI can sort of get a sense of the difference. You can think about you can get a cup of coffee from Starbucks or you can get a coffee cup of coffee from Dunkin Donuts, or you can get a cup of coffee from a lot of other places. But those two are very different experiences in every way. You know, at Starbucks, the line is long. There are many, many choices. The lighting is low there's comfortable seating well logo is green, you know, everything about Starbucks says, sit and stay come and linger for a while, everything about Dunkin whose tagline for a long time was “America Runs On Dunkin” is getting go, I mean, the logo is pink and orange. The seating if there is any is uncomfortable and little stools, the lighting is bright, you know, and both of these companies, each of them selling what, you know, an overpriced decent cup of coffee are creating a different experience for the customer. And some of them are going to be appropriate in some circumstances, and some of them are going to be different. I mean, you know, I hate nothing more than being in a Starbucks line at an airport when I've got a flight to catch. Because inevitably, there's this long line and the person in front of me has been in the line for five minutes and kept the front and says, and what do you want. And on the other hand, if I have time to kill, it's wonderful. So that's what customer experience is customer experience is a designed set of interactions. It's designed to create in the customer a certain set of reactions, so that she or he thinks, yeah, this is what I came for. This is what I'm getting. I like what I'm getting.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Right. You know, and just to comment on that quickly, you know, having worked at MasterCard for, I don't know, 12 plus years, you know, I understood there was everything is a purchase, right, but there's a transaction, and then there's a shopping experience. And those two things are really different. And you know, what I realized coming into the cannabis space was that consumers are really different. And let me just run through I use this example. It's total stereotypes, but I'll make it quick. You know, you have, let's just say a college kid, or some young kid that wants to smoke a pre roll during his half hour 30 minute lunch. So when he walks in during lunch to take 10 or 15 minutes just to buy a pre roll and then smoke it during lunch before he goes back to work. He knows what he wants. When he walks in the store. He's ready to buy what he wants, and he wants to get to eating lunch, washing his hands and not smelling like cannabis before he goes back to work. But if he gets stuck behind, again, stereotype soccer mom, that gets up to the front of the line and looks at everything including flour, beverages, sublingual, slips, transdermal patches, vape pens, you know, you get it edibles, run down the list, and then she doesn't even know where to start if she's a newbie. So that whole explanation of the different form factors and the different uptakes. With each with each of the form factors is a big conversation. So it's exactly what you're pointing out or, you know, and then really, how do you manage that across all your customers to make sure that each one with different needs? Has the right customer experience? Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's critical.
TOM STEWART
And it's also interesting. It's, it's interesting, because providers often are so focused on what they're selling, that they pay a little less attention to what people are buying. I saw a wonderful survey, wonderful study that was done by a major law firm, it was trying to work on its brand. And they asked current partners and former partners and employees and they asked clients and former clients, they asked all kinds of people, what do you look for in a lawyer, and they came up with whole sets of different kinds of attributes ranging from legal skill, technical skill, so on and so forth. Empathy, and warmth, and so on and so forth. And then they asked the lawyers what they thought was most important, and the lawyers focused on legal skill, technical ability, so on and so forth. And then they asked the clients and the clients focused on attentiveness experience. They took for granted the idea that the lawyer knew the law. Yeah, it mattered. But what was a differentiator was the experience. And so it's interesting that the producer and the buyer had different ideas about what was most valuable.
ADRIANA HEMANS
That's interesting. I'm sure that's really common in the cannabis space, too. I'm sure we could think of some examples, right, where people sort of assume that they know who their customer is, and what they're looking for. But it turns out, they're using their products for something completely different, maybe something that they never even thought of like for pain management, just as an example. And they were thinking that it was like they were going to a party and passing it around with their friends.
TOM STEWART
So yeah, actually, David and I were on we're on a webinar with the LA County people last week, where somebody in the chat said as the only thing that matters is the quality of the of the quality of your stuff. The quality of the product is the only thing that matters and We sort of jumped on him a little bit. I hope the lightning said, it's not the only thing that matters. Yes, it matters. But there are other things that matter to including David to your example, whether I've got to wait 15 minutes behind, or let's be empathetic with the soccer mom or whether I'm rushed through an experience. I mean, she might come in there and say, and feel that she was not getting the attention, she needed to make a decision that she was not used to make. So you know, you have these product is important. But product is one element of experience. And customers tend to be buying the whole experience and not just the product.
ADRIANA HEMANS
And they'll go out of their way to go to a store, even if it's more expensive that has the product they want and has the experience that they want, where they can ask questions, or maybe the opposite where they can get in and out quickly. We have a couple of quotes about customer experience that maybe we could take a look at that could give some context for our conversation here. So yeah, maybe I'll read them out in case in case anybody's watching on a small screen on your phone. The first one is from Steve Jobs, it says you've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around. Interesting quote, and I'll read another one from Jeff Bezos, if there's one reason we have done better than our peers in the internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience. And that really does matter. I think in any business, it certainly matters online where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. And then the last one here, your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. That one I think, is really interesting. Coming from having some experience working in in market research and working with respondents who we paid them to tell us their opinion about products and services that they were using. They were a lot more verbose and a lot more detailed than people who had a good experience.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Yeah. And you know, it's funny, having worked almost eight years at Microsoft, and that quote, coming from Bill Gates, I kind of chuckled because the thing I, when I read that, is your most unhappy employees are your greatest source of learning.
TOM STEWART
So that's true, too. That's true, too. Yeah, you know, that's interesting, the bs off quote, might come from the HBR (Harvard Business Review) interview that I did with him in which he pointed out that they that Amazon has built its strategy on two ideas. One is good prices. And the other is convenience, you know, speed of execution is, you know, the world of technology changes, the world changes really fast. But those ideas are, are the hub of the hub of a fast-turning wheel, they stay, they stay very steady. And you can build a strategy around core ideas. And one of the things that was interesting, Amazon, actually, at one point, experimented with competing with eBay in the auction business. And they stopped, because it violated that experiential point of speed, the Amazon customer does not want to wait three days to see whether you've won the product than it is, the Amazon customer wants to deliver it in three hours. And so they said this is the wrong option for the wrong business for us, because it violates the experience, which is a, which is a pillar of our strategy.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
That's interesting. Let's talk about that. I mean, when, obviously, there is a, a strategy we're talking about for, you know, building a customer experience, but, you know, can you help us or walk us through what it's like and what that process is? And how does one design a customer experience? How does one design a customer experience?
TOM STEWART
Yeah, good question. And it's a great question. The first thing is to figure out what the experience is that you're trying to provide that as a fundamental principle. Now there are going to be exceptions to this there's going to be soccer moms, and there's going to be, you know, kids on their lunch break. But, but, you know, one of the first things that I think is important is to understand the fundamental value that you want customers to experience I think that there are nine experienced design archetypes and I know David you have your brand archetypes and these experience archetypes actually can be mapped to some of the brand archetypes that you so smartly layout in branding, but one of them is the bargain. It's you know, this is it's the Walmart of it's the cheapest place this is you will always We will never be undersold. That's one architect. Another is the trendsetter, the innovator, we're the apple of we are going to be always on the cutting edge. Another is the safe choice. It's not too hot. It's not too cold. It's a Goldilocks. It's not too edgy. It's not too bad. It's not too retro. It's you know, take your in-laws. It's Macy's, it's, it's Olive Garden, it's you know, it'll be okay. Another is the specialist we only do x we are you know; we are the Wrthopedist, not the neurosurgeon or the neurosurgeon at the neurosurgeon, I can do your brain, but I can't do your right. Yeah, I can't do your sinuses, right? Another is the, what we call the old shoe. And that's the local, it's like your pump. It's like the restaurant where the meatloaf is bready. And the coffee is weak, but the waitress calls you hon and says, Would you like your usual and it's a very familiar kind of plus, then there are solution providers, and which, you know, I'm going to help you work your way, what are you trying to do? Let me put the pieces together for you. And then there's the aggregators, which is like Amazon to aggregate, it's one-stop shopping, you're going to put the pieces together. But we've got everything you can think about that is like a hardware store where somebody can help you is the solution and the hardware store where somebody who really knows what he or she is doing coincidences, I mean, this kind of not in this kind of screwed, they can be very, very different. So you start with that idea, what are we trying to do? And then you layer into that. Some questions about different customers and different types of customers. These are often called use cases. And your two examples of the of the browser and the hunter, are two different use cases. And what do we what does a bargain want to provide for these for these two use cases? Whom do I want to attract? And what do I do to attract them? And you also then want to think about so you think about your basic archetype? what the value is that we think customers will perceive not the value we think we've got, but the value customers will perceive. Think about how that would be translated by different types of customers. And then think about what they would expect. What would this kind of customer who might want to expect from me if I'm a trendsetter, or expect from me, if I'm a bargain or expect from me, if I'm the old shoe, if I'm the local? With those things in mind, you can start to say what a great customer experience would look like. So that gives you your picture. You then people talk about a journey map, they talk about a customer journey, which is every time that the customer interacts with the seller, from, you know, driving past the store, seeing them on the web, to responding to an ad, some, you know, walking, walking in for the first time paying, you know, service afterwards, every one of those touch points on the journey, you want to map and you want to say okay, what would the customer, these customers I want? What would they expect at each point? What would make them happy? What would make them hurt? And we'd like to tell them the aha moments in the out moments what at each point, what do I want to do? And what do I want to not do to make sure that I'm delivering the experience you want. So that's sort of how you do it. And you can actually, as I've sort of been doing it with my hands, or you can imagine a whiteboard and lay out that layout that journey, you laid out what your value proposition is, your archetypes are thought about your expectations, and then think about the journeys that different customers would make, and how you would make them happy at each point in the journey. That's sort of the process.
ADRIANA HEMANS
Wow, that is totally fascinating. I'm sitting here thinking like, Okay, is there an element that's related to the customer service itself? So like, say you're a trend setter provider? Are is your customer service reps? Are they going to be like, a little bit aloof, and there's a feeling of exclusivity in the store, just?
TOM STEWART
think about actually think about Apple. And think about the difference between Apple Care and, and, and a lot of customers a lot of tech support, you know, the Apple Care support is actually gorgeous. And, you know, with the idea of the Genius Bar at Apple came from the concierge desk at the Four Seasons Hotel. And, and that's it's an interesting example of something that's happening right here. One of the best ways to think about customer experience is not just to look at what's happening in your industry, but to look at analogies to other industries, and their Steve Jobs. You know, start with the customer experience. I've worked with the technology saying, I want customer support for Apple to be of the same kind of quality that you would get at the Four Seasons Hotel.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Well, you know, it's so interesting too, because, you know, in the medical industry, they call it bedside manner, right? You know, it's like, yes, you expect your doctor to do everything right and to take care of you. And then on top of that, you know, it's expected that that he'll listen to you and he'll, we're sure she will, you know, focus on you and care about you and give you the TLC that you know, every week and think about Dr. House, right, right. Terrible bedside manner, but technically brilliant. And I would go to doctor house if I knew I needed him, but I wouldn't want to go to doctor house as my GP.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
How to how does one measure customer satisfaction?
TOM STEWART
Well, there are a few ways of doing it, you can there are some things that you can do that will measure customer loyalty. What you know, and what and the value of a customer does it you know, does my do I see the same customers over and over again, what percentage of my business comes from recurring customers, so on and so forth. So you can create in the business literature will give you a number of measures on that there's the Net Promoter Score various customer satisfaction scores that can measure that. There's something else that I like to do and I think is really smart. I like to think about creating a report card that looks at two elements of customer experience. One is what the customer sees. Often when people think about customer experience, they think of what's onstage, that the customer sees and what's backstage what we need to do to produce what the customer sees. And if you can create a report card for elements on stage and backstage. One of the things that we created in the book Blue Island, when my co-author and I, Patricia O'Connell, developed five measures for each one. They were empathy on the onstage measures included empathy. Am I walking in the shoes of my customers’ expectations, have I set clear expectations, emotions have I figured have I taken account the customer's emotion you know, I'm at the side of the road with my car burning up and, and I call the insurance company and the guy says please listen closely, because our menu options have changed? That's not what I want to hear, right? Elegance is a clean and simple, nothing superfluous. Nothing left out. And engagement, are there ways for me to interact. And there are five similar ones on the inside the economics of it, executed quality of execution. And you can take those things and you can grade yourself; you can give yourself an ABCD and grade yourself on a five point scale from zero to four. Zero is an F four is an A. And then you can give yourself a GPA, you can add those things up and give yourself a GPA, you could do that also with your competitors, or you can do it with peers you want compare your GPA to that at the brew pub down the street, or compare your GPA to various others. And then you can sort of get an overall picture. And then you can also begin to identify things that you might want to improve and we improve both on the on the customer facing the onstage stuff and improve backstage, I think that kind of thing can use something like a customer satisfaction score gives you a number. But it doesn't give you the things that go into making that number. And so I think you want both you want something that gives you some sort of baseline economic number about customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, whatever it is. And then you want something that starts going in and seeing how the engines working.
ADRIANA HEMANS
Interesting, really interesting and something that I think a lot of not only retailers in cannabis could benefit from but also brands to things like can they open the packaging? Is it too childproof? Is it does it have the information on the package that people are actually looking for or not? We could dissect and maybe we should do that as a follow up episode is take some specific examples. We could get really, really in the weeds with that one.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Well, you know, I mean, just to talk about this for a moment, this So begs, well, so as we talked about the customer experience, and we bring it over toward cannabis, this begs the question of vertical integration, right? Because let's talk about McDonald's for a moment. The McDonald's experience, if you will, or a McDonald's experience is your super hungry, you're driving down the highway, you see the golden arches, from miles away. You know, it's like the North Star, it's getting closer, it's getting closer, when they get off the exit. And of course, you have to figure out, you finally do, you know, you go through this whole experience, whether it's good or whether it's not good. That experience started when you saw the golden arches. So for me, I think about vertical integration, I think about in states where they can, depending on whatever it is, but the spectrum being from seed to sale, so if somebody can grow it, produce it, process it, sell it in a store, and sell their own brand in a store, then they can also brand the store, you know, obviously within reason and regulations that exist in each and every state where there is that, but you can start the experience sooner some cannabis, some states with vertical integration would allow a cannabis company to start that experience sooner, meaning maybe when they saw the sign from afar, maybe when they pulled the parking lot, so the style of building, and when I'm talking about this, I know it's slightly different. But that's what McDonald's has done. That's what I hope has done. You know, they use architecture as a way of starting the experience long before somebody even gets into the building itself. So in cannabis, it's really interesting. Some states will allow this some states won't. Some brands can have this advantage, other brands can't. And I just think it's interesting as we talk about what is that experience? And where does it start?
TOM STEWART
You may start with the architecture, but it might also start with the app, right, that may be your first introduction to a customer. There's some interesting things to think about in this because you may not be able to be vertically integrated. But you are part of an ecosystem. And you know, you are you are part of the ecosystem of the mall where you're located or the street in which you're looking at the neighborhood in which you're located. There's a physical ecosystem, there's an ecosystem in terms of your suppliers, you may not be able to be vertically integrated, but maybe you can be an authorized ex seller or you can have a sort of a good housekeeping seal of approval, you can have a relationship with brands, you know, you worked at Microsoft, you remember all the Intel Inside branding that Microsoft tried to have an Intel tried to do Intel was selling not directly to consumers, but they had a prestigious brand. And so they wanted, they wanted to attach their brand to what was there in the end product. So you can create sort of relationships there that are branding and, and other relationships. There's something here that is that there's a there's a phrase that we use in the book that we picked up from somebody who was doing this in banking, back in the 90s. Back when Citibank was Citibank and that Citi Corp, and it was the idea of creating tangible evidence. When you're selling a service as opposed to a product when you're, when you're selling an experience as opposed to a product. You can't kick the tires, there's, it's you can't, you can't, you know, weigh the diamond and say how many characters you try to create tangible evidence. And if you go way back into prehistory to the early days of McDonald's, one of the things that McDonald's was trying to create was it was trying to create in a world of, you know, burger shops and clam shacks on the side of the road. They were trying to say you can get a burger here and not get domain. And that was part of their value proposition. It was a safe place. And one of the pieces of tangible evidence is all the kids at McDonald's all the staff at McDonald's however, pimply faced an adolescent they might have been had these little white paper watch caps on and white uniforms. It was clean. And that cap was a piece of tangible evidence of the expectation that was related to the experience that McDonald's said it was going to provide to you. Rather than Joe's burgers and clams on the side of the road. It was a real important point.
ADRIANA HEMANS
I love that fascinating, tangible evidence. I want to comment from Sam Rodriguez who says Vegas is built on customer service. I always remind my teams of this everyone no matter what should be treated like their Tip. There's probably in her example some tangible evidence of what kind of service people will be receiving when they come to these establishments. And it's and it's communicated clearly and in the in the promotional activities. So really great example, I wanted to quickly jump over since our audience has warmed up now and thank you for your comments, Sam to the audience participation where we asked folks who are listening in if they can guess the answer to our question, the first question, it is a multiple choice one. So try your hand you have a 25% chance even if you're totally guessing what percentage of store visitors don't know what they want when they walk into a cannabis dispensary?
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Right? And that's interesting. You know, and this, this really begs the question here too, is like, depending on what that number is, you serve them totally different, right? If people know exactly what they want, you just serve it up to them as fast as you can. And people don't know what they want. They need to be coaxed into something or sold something or, you know, it's just a different experience. So excuse me. So that said, we have some answers coming in. Wow.
ADRIANA HEMANS
It looks like it could go between C or D. Yeah. More I think with dispensary shopping, it's sort of an interesting case, too, because you might know what you want. But you might also be browsing and looking for something new, which that's something that happens really frequently. Around 420. We see cross-category baskets happening more so than other parts of the year.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
I think I fall into the category that you've just mentioned, which is, you know, when I do make purchases, it's what's my old favorite? And then what can I experience and try something new. So there's always my old standby, just in case. You know, the new product isn't up to snuff, but it's just interesting. Tom, do you have any thoughts on this?
TOM STEWART
The first time I ever walked into a cannabis store to buy legal cannabis. And, you know, the only question I've been used to asking back in break college days was is this good stuff? And to be actually be offered a choice? Polacks you know, like, nice. Well, I said, like, What do you mean? So well, you want something to for the morning? You want them to work? Do you want something to knock you out? Oh, I began to start thinking about it. I never thought about the question. It reminded me of some stuff. Before I went into fortune, I worked in the in the book publishing business. And at the time when the big change, Dalton and Walden are now being killed by Amazon, what as they were emerging. We had an editor in chief who had come from Dalton, who told me that the number one consumer attitude walking into bookstores, was terror was fear. Because most people didn't know what they wanted. And were afraid that they would be embarrassed and shown up to be ignorant. So they were you know, I want to book for my niece. Well, what is your niece? Like to read? I don't know. I don't I've never met her. I don't know her. I want to book for my mother. Right? What is she like to read? I don't know. Some people go in and say I want the new Tom Clancy they know exactly what they want. But a lot of people don't know what they want. And fear is a real fear of embarrassment is a really important emotion that they feel if they don't know what they want. And one of the things those big chains did was they were designed to take that fear away by saying here's the best seller table. Here's the staff recommendations. Here's they made, they sorted things out because there's a lot of choices in a bookstore into piles that made it easier for people to pretend to know that what they were doing or at least to navigate their ignorance without being paralyzed and fearful of it.
ADRIANA HEMANS
I feel like that's something that could have worked so well for retailers in the cannabis space. And we'll reveal the answer. It sounds almost like what you just mentioned, Tom is that there can be sort of a disconnect between people willing even to admit that they don't know what they want because of that fear. And maybe because it's a little bit embarrassing to. So let's go ahead and reveal the results of that the percentage of people who don't know what they want when they walk into a dispensary? And the answer is 48%.
ADRIANA HEMANS
And if you pick the wrong book in a bookstore, chances are it will not have any major impact on your life. But if you pick the wrong product in a dispensary, you may end up passing out during Thanksgiving dinner.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
And conversely, if you pick the right book that could change your life. Tom, would you just talk about the role of technology relative to the experience?
TOM STEWART
Sure, there are two things here to think about. And it's a great question. Number one is that technology has means that we have more different touchpoints. So in retail, and other places people talk about omni channel, right? It's not just what happens when you walk into the store, it's what happens when you go to the website, it's you engage with customers, in all kinds of ways that are both interpersonal and technological, for good, and for ill, right, the good is that you may be able to get a certain consistency and quality through technology that you can't necessarily get. Depending on who you're dealing with. I mean, I like to say that you should design a business so that a great customer experience can be delivered by a guy with 100 with an IQ of 100, at 10 o'clock on an average Wednesday. And it doesn't take you know that everybody can deliver excellent customer experience, United super heroic are special. But and technology can help you do that. So that's one thing that creates omni channel opportunities, it also creates an opportunity to create certain sorts of consistency. Those opportunities are also difficulties, right? You can get, you can get technology that is robotic, you can get the please listen carefully, because our menu options have changed. There is a wonderful study done at Arizona State University every few years called the customer rage survey. And the most recent edition of the of the American Customer rage survey is out and it will be probably surprised nobody that despite being mellowed out from cannabis, the amount of rage in the American customer is higher than ever. And it the biggest, the biggest causes of that are I can't get a person. I can't sorry, the person on the website can't get a person. So technology has can help you scale. It can help you automate; it can help you make things consistent. But it can also dehumanize. And insofar as experience is something that I create my head is your customer, you don't want to dehumanize it too much. Unless that's part of the experience, right part of the it's an automatic, you're putting your putting your you're putting your credit card you know, you're going to get a pre roll like you can't do that yet. But you know, you but you could imagine something with the experience I want is hands off. It's all automated. It's Schwab not, you know, not a broker that you can talk to. So, you know, those are the big issues omni channel, what the experiences you want to create, and whether you're creating dehumanization, or using it to improve quality.
ADRIANA HEMANS
That's really interesting, how dehumanization can be part of the of the brand promise and the customer experience.
TOM STEWART
I self-check-out. I love it.
ADRIANA HEMANS
Tom, what are some emerging trends and technologies that cannabis retailers should be aware of to stay ahead of the curve?
TOM STEWART
Well, you know, there's a lot of stuff about machine learning and AI. And, and it is really clear that chat TPT and the generative chat stuff is going to be able to revolutionize certain parts of technology, cars, customer interaction. I would revert back, however, to the Steve Jobs quote, that you start with what you're trying to do, and you start with what the customer wants. And then you think about what the technologies solutions are going to be. I've been doing some work with the Alex Partners consulting firm and they've done some very interesting studies about how machine learning artificial intelligence in fact Whereas other things can help, can help break the tradeoff between proactive interaction with customers. “Hi, David, how you doing? Hi, Adriana, how you doing?” And scaling? Right, and you know, and mass market, because there is sort of there is sort of a tradeoff, I'd love to give your personal attention, but I just can't give personal attention to 100,000 customers, right? There are ways in which technology can break that trade off and make it more possible to interact on a personal basis to get to know customers, to have you know, a customer record right in front of you. So you walk in if you're there before. “Oh, David, I see the last thing last time you were here, you bought X? How did you like it?” That can be the kind of technology support that supports a human interaction. And the same kinds of things can happen if you're working on the web or something like that.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
It's so intriguing, you know, you bring so many things for us to think about and Adriana and I always talk about, we, we always talk about the cannabis bubble. And we always talk about bursting that bubble and taking some of the best practices from the real world and, and inserting them into the cannabis industry. And you have, you know, your experiences is bar none and your ability to, you know, share those experiences is perfect. And, and we really need that in this industry. So, Tom, we thank you so much for joining us today. You know, some of the examples you've given. And just some of the history that you've shared with us about how other companies have done, what they've done is really important because I just don't think that's an approach that most people take in the cannabis industry. So if we start thinking about our customers first, who they are, what they need, what those experiences are, and build backwards. I think in take much of your advice from today, I think we could build a better experience for cannabis consumers.
TOM STEWART
Thank you both. This has been fun.
DAVID PALESCHUCK
Thank you. You appreciate it. Thank you. Well, as always, right. We've got we've got great people sharing great advice and great knowledge. That's really what it's all about.
ADRIANA HEMANS
Curious to know more about the historical role of beverages, and how cannabis-infused drinks might reshape social interaction? In our next episode, "The Socialization of Cannabis Beverages", we explore cannabis beverages and their significance in reshaping social drinking with Seng Robertson, Technical Director of Cannabis Research & Development at The Boston Beer Company. Some of the topics we’ll cover are:
What role have beverages played in shaping gender associations and societal expectations, and how does this translate to cannabis beverages?
How have beverages traditionally been used to celebrate specific occasions, and how can cannabis beverages contribute to this tradition?
What are some examples of cannabis beverages that are specifically designed for socializing and creating shared experiences?
Listen in to Branding Bud Live for groundbreaking insights into how companies create memorable, differentiating customer experiences that boost reputation, customer satisfaction, and the bottom line.
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DAVID PALESCHUCK
That's right. And don't forget to check out Kevin's is best kept secret at branding but.com. Thank you, everybody. See you next week. Bye.
ADRIANA HEMANS
Thank you. Bye.
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