What If? So What?
What If? So What? is the podcast where we discover what’s possible with digital and figure out how to make it real in your business. Join host Jim Hertzfeld, Vice President Strategy, as he interviews industry experts and veterans to dissect the buzz, challenge the status quo, and translate grand visions into tangible actions. Because it's not just about dreaming big, it's about asking the right questions: 'What If?' 'So What?’, and most importantly, “Now What?”
What If? So What?
What if You Had 10 Seconds to Figure Out Your Customer Journey? An Interview with AMA's Todd Unger
In this episode of the What If, So What podcast, Jim Hertzfeld speaks with Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer of the American Medical Association and author of "The 10-Second Customer Journey."
The conversation uncovered valuable insights on customer experience (CX) and its impact on business growth. Unger emphasized the importance of adapting to the rapid pace of customer decision-making in today's digital landscape and highlighted the need for organizations to unify their approach to customer experience, breaking down silos between product, marketing, commerce, and service departments. They discussed how small changes can lead to significant conversion rate increases, and that measurement is a critical aspect of CX strategy.
Unger introduced the concept of a "customer friction index" and discussed the use of automated tools to identify pain points in real-time, such as detecting "rage clicks" on websites. The two also discussed alignment between marketing and CX initiatives, with a focus on growth while maintaining the operational capability to address day-to-day customer issues.
The conversation underscored that effective CX is not just about high-level strategy but requires rolling up sleeves and tackling concrete problems that impact customer satisfaction and, ultimately, business growth.
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Spend all sorts of time on all these features on your site. You're trying to build demand and get people to interact on the stuff. Pay attention to the thing that actually converts people into customers, because all of this A-B testing and incremental improvements that you make, they pay off in such a huge way. I was like, wow, that was very good advice. And I, you know, go into work the next day and I find out that we have like a little upsell in one of our major kind of offerings. That wasn't working and that was like the answer to why we were so far down in the count for, you know, customers coming from this thing and I was like, oh my God, we've spent so much time adding new features and content and all this stuff. It's like you got to pay attention to the upsell.
Jim Hertzfeld:Welcome to what If so what, the podcast where we explore what's possible with digital and discover how to make it real in your business. I'm your host, Jim Hertzfeld, and we get shit done by asking digital leaders the right questions what, if so what? And, most importantly now, what? Hey, I'm really excited to be here with Todd Unger. He's the Chief Experience Officer of the American Medical Association and the author of the 10-Second Customer Journey, a book about really for the CXO. In fact, it's the CXO's playbook for growing and retaining customers in a digital world. That's what we're here for. That's what we all want to know. Todd, welcome to the podcast.
Todd Unger:It's great to be here today.
Jim Hertzfeld:So, Todd, just quick background, maybe a little bit about your role. But then I'd love to ask people like what got you here? And you have a great backstory, so maybe you could just give the folks a little background on where you're coming from and what you do with the AMA.
Todd Unger:Yeah, I will tell you. First off, I never thought of or aimed to be a chief experience officer. In fact, if you had asked me what that was 10 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. But my background really is in a few different places that have added up to what I think experience is today.
Todd Unger:I started out in classic marketing and advertising. I worked for Procter and Gamble, I worked for a big ad agency, Leo Burnett, and then I jumped in the late nineties into the digital world. I worked for America Online, as it used to be called, and a bunch of other kind of New York-based media companies where I learned about kind of content development and product management. It was really my kind of initial foray into that, ran a bunch of websites and the last thing I did before I came to the AMA was I was in horse racing, where I really started to get into a combination of digital content and commerce. I helped build a betting platform and selling premium content and data and all that kind of stuff and, although it sounds very far away from medicine and healthcare kind of under the hood type of activities are very much the same of what I do as a chief experience officer today.
Jim Hertzfeld:I think that broad experience is important for any type of experience because it may not be obvious for everyone, and so that diversity of thought I think is really important. In fact, I think a lot of brands look for that right. They they're looking to go and undergo some sort of transformation. They're going to look outside of what they're used to. Yeah.
Todd Unger:I wonder. I mean they did specifically at the AMA and they knew I didn't have any healthcare background or anything like that. But when I think back about like in my career and what you know, say at Procter and Gamble, where they kind of moved you around a lot and you had to take a turn at sales, and I don't think they really do that widely anymore and so when you think about the skill set into getting a building experience, like finding people like that in the pipeline, it's a challenge that have experience across all those components.
Jim Hertzfeld:Yeah, I think you're right. I know when I was coming up in my career, it seemed like all the large corporations you knew you were going to go into a two year rotation every time. And I don't I, with my clients, I don't see that as much as I used to, but I do think that gives you an appreciation for a lot of different things. It just makes you a better professional. So so yeah, you've gone through a lot and what would you say? And it sort of changed the most, like what sort of changed in the world that, and in particular, has brought us to a world, like you said, you never expected you know around being responsible for your customer's experience.
Todd Unger:I'd say, and I'm not going to say AI right off the bat, which is what I think everybody would say Thank you.
Jim Hertzfeld:This is an AI-free zone.
Todd Unger:Okay so, but it will figure into, I think, probably what we talk about, but especially compared to when I first entered the world of marketing much more one-dimensional and especially slow, and so I think the biggest thing that has changed today is the speed with which people make and execute buying decisions. It is a totally different paradigm than the one I learned about when I was coming up through marketing, and so having layered on these additional parts of my career in digital media and commerce has really changed me in terms of how I think about my job and what I do.
Jim Hertzfeld:Yeah, that's a. You know there's a lot of nostalgia in there. Todd right, like like good word, yeah, I'm thinking of like it's back to school season now, right, and there's brands that plan all year for back to school and you really just can't do that anymore because you have to be pretty responsive. I was just thinking like, okay, what do I do with the Olympics? And I know the convention is happening. We were just talking about that and how the weather's changing. All these things are factoring into really journey steps along the way. So that's a good point. So in the AMA in particular, you know, why do these things? Why does this decisioning matter and the speed matter?
Todd Unger:Yeah, I think it applies to any business, any operation out there where you're trying to get more members or more customers. You just have to accept that the way that decision-making happens right now on the other end of that is fundamentally different than it used to be. And that change, along with just the serendipitousness of, or serendipity of, being named a chief experience officer, really challenged, I think, my own identity as a I would have considered myself a marketer or a digital marketer or a digital person in the past and to embrace this paradigm of experience, which I found to be needing to be updated, let's say, for the digital world, and really caused me to rethink, kind of my role. And what I talk about and we'll talk more in the book is just the orchestration of the elements of experience, product marketing, commerce and service and how, in the customer's minds, they all go together. They're just one thing, whether that's digital or in retail and in-store, whatever environment, they don't care what department it is.
Todd Unger:They just want an easy experience with getting done what they want.
Jim Hertzfeld:Well, that reminds me of a phrase I remember hearing or using a lot Don't make your customer interact with the channel, they just want to interact with the brand, right? So I think one of the things that we can all relate to as consumers is the need for that, and we but we don't always apply that professionally. The formula seems easy, it sounds easy, and you've done a great job of kind of simplifying this, and we're going to get to that in a second. But why do you think this is so challenging for organizations, for institutions, today?
Todd Unger:Yeah, it's literally structural because organizations are not set up to have a seamless experience internally between those four pillars of experience. They all sit in different places and report into different people and a lot of the early pioneering work done and experience I think points out the problem. There's a famous kind of person and experienced, bruce Temkin, that says a lot of experience problems are like they're in between. They're in between different parts of your organizations are in between different parts of like the customer's journey and literally nobody owns those in between places. And yet we're so focused, especially, like I would have said in my earlier days of marketing you know, to treat it like a marketing problem where there's somebody on the other end of it that's treating it as a customer service problem, or is it a product problem or a technology problem? It's like nobody cares, they just want to get through it. So there just literally isn't normally somebody in an organization that has the purview and the motivation and oversight and sometimes authority to unify those streams of work.
Todd Unger:And that's a hard job.
Jim Hertzfeld:Yeah, sort of sometimes I call that like you're either gluing things together or you're putting varnish on something right, or polyurethane right, it's like.
Todd Unger:Yeah, people talk all the time about silos and stuff like that. It's so old, you just want to, and the unhappiness with which every organization I've ever worked in in my whole life, like you, have these same kind of activities where they're just not together. It's so easy for portions of an of an organization to get out of whack because they're not focused on the customer.
Jim Hertzfeld:Right. No, that's good, I mean, and probably worth and one of the hardest things to solve, right. But and of course it comes back to humanity and how organizational dynamics and and you mentioned motivation, right, communication, some, some fundamentals things we've heard before. Here's a kind of a random question Is there a disconnect? The other organizational disconnects, but do you think that there are, let's say, different perceptions within the organization about or degrees in which we buy into this customer centricity? Do you think there are leaders out there who are still not ready for the customer centric world?
Todd Unger:Absolutely, and there's so many definitions even around like the term customer experience. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book, because people can't even agree on what that is. But I think there's one thing that everybody agrees on growth. And so you know, when I started this job, my very specific kind of marching orders were to grow membership, and I looked at it that way and broadened kind of my purview over what it took to drive those things, all the different levers.
Todd Unger:But a lot of people in the world out there are focused on more intermediate measures or customer experiences, just like in the old days of like digital transformation, like the big highfalutin term and other terms that are intermediary. Everybody wants to grow, everybody's got to build customers, build revenue, and so if you can unify the operation around that and all the different parts of it and how they contribute to that, that's kind of where the action is. Everybody's going to be motivated by different things and has different skills they bring to the table. But it's really at that strategic level where the power can be in terms of bringing the process together.
Jim Hertzfeld:That's a good one. Growth I like that you immediately juxtaposed membership, maybe, versus revenue, because I think people's minds usually go to revenue. I've worked with manufacturers or, in particular. They kind of stand out. The only number, sometimes the only number they care about, is the opposite of growth, meaning, how do we take cost out of the business? Right? That's another one, maybe another way of saying the same thing.
Jim Hertzfeld:But I really enjoyed the book, todd, and one of the things I liked about it is it's don't mean this to come across the wrong way, but it's short and readable, and what I like about that is I had time to read it and I'm intrigued by the stories and I always love to hear other people's perspectives because I learn a few things, but I also sort of validate things that I think I already know. I'm like, yeah, like Todd agrees with me, this is good, like, and you found a really good way of putting things. But I thought as I was reading through it, I thought this is I need 10 copies of this because and I think you do need 10, maybe a hundred copies, you know because it's something that I could put in front of a client, you know, a prospect to say hey, are you? You know, if you weren't really sure about what it meant to be customer centric or adopt a customer experience program or mindset, you know you're unsure about why or how to do it. This is a great process, it's a great approach, it's a great start and I think you did a great job at, you know, taking your learnings but making them accessible to to others who maybe had lived in their own silo, their silo, their part of this equation, and I thought, wow, if I could really kind of get somebody a primer you know, before I was able to do anything else with them as a consultant, this to get somebody a primer, you know, before I was able to do anything else with them as a consultant this might be the way to do it. So thank you for writing the book and I really mean that it was really well put together.
Jim Hertzfeld:Now you just needed like a photo part in the middle, like the old books. I need more pictures. Yeah, I need more pictures. I noticed that as a thing. You know, here's a suggestion for the second edition, a graphic novel. That might be kind of cool. That's a lot that goes into it. But I've seen books have second editions with a graphic novel, so you just kind of read it like a comic strip.
Todd Unger:So and it's unfortunate because I had. We had our annual customer experience forum at the AMA and my customer experience director did something so cool. We have about 40 or 50 different kinds of leads on projects that are all across the hundreds of people working on customer experience issues at AMA and she made a personalized sign for each one of them about what they did and they all. You know we have this one picture of all of them holding up their signs and I was like this is like bringing tears to my eyes and I wish I'd had that picture to put in the book, but it shows how you can catalyze an organization and how you scale a CX operation. It's not through the team only, it's through the whole group of people that are stakeholders in this.
Jim Hertzfeld:That is one of the coolest things. I remember. You did show that to me. We've got to share that for the audience here because that was powerful. But those are little things, tangible things, that make a difference. I was actually with a software partner this week and we were asking them what can we do to bring our customer or client story back to you? And they said it's almost said the same thing. Give us use cases. You know, give us. I was able to do this, you know I was. I stopped doing that. I was able to offer my customer this. So those those little bits, I think are really important because they're they're tangible, yeah, they're tangible.
Jim Hertzfeld:So well, you talk about a few other things. That, and then many techniques, but a couple of them really stood out to me. I just wanted to kind of get your take on them. So I've read it, I went through it and I thought these are things that little bits I'm going to start sharing with people right away. The first one that you talked about was fix your checkout page right F-Y-C-O-P.
Jim Hertzfeld:Yeah, and a couple of things that I really liked about it. One is you talk about experimentation, which I love. Experimentation A B testing, try something out, try out something small, see how it works out, see what you learn from it, test and learn. It has a few other monikers, and you told a story about challenging a team I think it was a developer who was trying to improve conversion. They made this change and it was 7%. Then somebody else built on it and conversion was improved by, I think, like 10 or 11%. And just the power of those small changes.
Jim Hertzfeld:Trial and error, it sounds like, but it's not. It's thoughtful, it's a hypothesis. You experiment, right, you test it and it comes back. But the thing I really liked about it is you know you made a point that these details matter and you can make incremental change. You don't have to be overwhelmed. And it's not just the checkout experience. It could be an online forum or a CTA, it could be how you walk into a waiting room or how you order coffee at a coffee shop. I mean, am I thinking about this the right way? I mean, this is not just about checkout pages, right. This is about incremental changes. I want to make sure I'm reading that right.
Todd Unger:Yeah, in fact that the story and that acronym or hashtag or whatever you want to call it. It was inspired by a dinner that I had with the co-founders of Stripe, the brothers John and Patrick Collison, and I don't know how I got invited to this dinner, but at the end of it was a question and answer session and I asked what would you do to eliminate customer friction for my book? I'm looking for something for my book and Patrick said fix your checkout page. And, as you might expect someone from Stripe to say, but the way that he told the story was so compelling and simple, which is like you spend all sorts of time on all these features on your site.
Todd Unger:You're trying to build demand and get people to interact on the stuff, but, like, pay attention to the thing that the you know that actually converts people into customers, because all of this AB testing and incremental improvements that you make, they pay off in such a huge way and I kind of I was like, wow, that was very good advice and I, you know, go into work the next day and I find out that we have like a little upsell in one of our major kind of offerings. That wasn't working and that was like the answer to why we were so far down in the count, for, you know, customers coming from this thing and I was like, oh my God, we've spent so much time like adding new features and content and all this stuff. It's like you got to pay attention to the upsell and so I talked to my team about it. It's like it's not just fix your checkout page, it's every page, but there is a huge conversion metric that rides on that. You better make sure it's working and that you're improving it all the time.
Jim Hertzfeld:Every effort you make to do that pays off literally, well, and it kind of reminds me of some other old rules in the 80-20 world, right? I mean, you really have to kind of figure out what matters the most, right? So maybe we're saying two things like the details matter, but you got to know what which details matter.
Todd Unger:Yeah, absolutely Don't take your eye off the ball of that.
Jim Hertzfeld:So I thought that was good. I got to. I immediately started thinking about all the incremental improvements you know we could make. But you mentioned measurement. That was kind of the second thing that stuck out to me in terms of different tactics and techniques. And you know you mentioned Temkin. I remember years ago maybe they're still doing that there's kind of a customer index score, I think the Temkin score. We have a similar approach we call CXIQ. But this kind of inspired me because I about some other measurements to sort of evaluate maybe not how you're doing, but at the end does the experience itself working right and only the customer can kind of define that it's at some point.
Jim Hertzfeld:But you talked about the customer effort score. You know to sort of you know how much work they have to put in. What's the friction score? What's pushing against them?
Jim Hertzfeld:You talked about first contact resolution. So if there's an issue, does it get resolved the first time? You talk about channel switching. You know it sort of has little echoes of omni-channel, you know can do a how? Yeah, you know, and this is everybody's, you know, favorite story. Well, I tried to do this and I. But now I have to call and you know I'm going to be in, I'm going to wait, you know, in a queue forever. Or you know the cloud now, the one you hear all the time I'm trying to cancel my account. There's no way to do it, there is no number, all that sort of by design. But maybe put some shed a little light on measurement, because you know, I think that's, you know, one of the sort of great eye openers right Is to see, you know, we have our gut feel and we have our experience, but what do the numbers have to say? So maybe you can elaborate a little bit on, kind of, where you're going with measurement. Yeah, it really is.
Todd Unger:It's such an important piece of this, the whole metric situation, but especially in the book, what I talk about are the different ways that we look at customer experience. And then I think there are some basic customer service metrics that you employ there too. I mean, you've got your measures around customer effort that are pretty standard. You go to the bathroom at O'Hare and said you know how easy was it to use it. You've got those kinds of things. I think the biggest change for us is in the customer friction index that we've created, which is really simple, which is basically like how many problems are people having out of how many sessions are on this, and so that just kind of gives you a general idea of like what's my friction score on that thing, and you can track that over time and you can monitor for when that goes outside of normal parameters that might indicate a problem.
Todd Unger:And I think the biggest change that we've made in terms is like what gets input into the numerator of that particular equation has changed. For us it used to just be you know people that contacted our service center either by you know whatever channel it was chat, email or phone call and then we would track those things, and then we would see all the sessions and we would count that. But we've since put in a more automated solution onto the site and throughout all our products. We use something called quantum metric that actually automates the collection of that and using certain signals on the site like oh, there's a button being hit and nothing's happening. Oh, there's a button being hit and nothing's happening, and that's my favorite one, a rage click, as we might call it. It's like you push the elevator and it's just not coming any faster, if at all, and so that kind of sends up a red flag and you get the signal and someone could go fix that.
Todd Unger:Now there are two things about it. One is like that's the kind of thing that could go on forever and you don't know about it. That's my nightmare, right. The other thing is that it does broaden the amount of instances that are going to go into that numerator. So it can be pretty depressing if all of a sudden your collection has gone beyond the manual world. Now you're in a automated machine learning type solutions. But boy does it make a huge difference to know, track and improve, and so that's really the key there for us.
Jim Hertzfeld:Yeah, that's cool. I mean again, I just love your attention to these details and focusing on the right things. Rage click is something I haven't heard in a while. It's a great term and everyone knows what it means it is. Yeah, you bet everyone knows the elevator is a little more tangible, knows what it means it is. Yeah, you bet everyone knows the elevator is a little more tangible. Like come on,, I'm late, I guess
Jim Hertzfeld:.
Jim Hertzfeld:, then the. You know you spend a little bit of time on this or a few pages on this, and I think this comes up a lot. And you mentioned sort of the in-between-ness of this, all sort of the. You know there's sort of a twilight zone or no man's land or demilitarized zone, right, that's where these roles sort of happen. But you talk about different organizations. You talk about and I've seen every variety of this and I think everybody is wondering where this CXO function lives, right. And you list a few options for the combinations. Is it a standalone unit? You know it's just. This is the CX team, I see. For the combinations, is it a standalone unit? You know it's just. This is the CX team.
Jim Hertzfeld:I see that a lot. Is it in marketing, which seems to be sort of the default. I don't know why, I guess, cause maybe that's where someone made a, wrote a persona once you know operations, which is interesting, I you know, cause I think I see that a lot in call center. I think you look at sort of older books about customer experience. They seem to be contact center, call center oriented. Yeah, because that was the only way outside of sales. That's kind of where it happened. Or you talk about sort of an enterprise COE. That's another model where, gosh, we kind of acknowledge that it's everybody's responsibility, but we're not really. If we just put this on Todd's plate, then, like no one else will feel accountable to it, right, and then you have sort of the office of the CXO and this is saying, hey, we're taking this to the, you know, to the next level. I think you nailed all the combinations. But what do you? You know and you kind of allude to different debates and LinkedIn.
Jim Hertzfeld:I think they're very passionate about this. Yeah, they are, they are. I always, I always have a good Reddit debate myself, you know, just cause it's, it's it seems a little be a little spicier. But yeah, so you know, since you've written that, what do you, what do you, you know, do you have any kind of thoughts or advice for people in terms of cause? Again, they're going to read this, they're going to buy into it, but then now, what? Like, how do I make it work if I don't feel like it's working in my organization yet?
Todd Unger:Yeah, well, I think one of the things I'd love to tell you is kind of the origin story of my customer experience journey, and it really began because I have customer service as part of my team and a thing that I noticed was just the volume of calls they were getting in with people unable to log into our site for whatever reasons, and they did a great job of fixing every one of these problems on the spot and getting somebody on the way, but it just kept happening every day and I finally looked at the person that was running customer service and I'm like you know what we actually need to fix this problem and the reason that, like CX has a hard time if it's centered in customer service is because they don't have the authority necessarily to reach out across the organization and involve all the people who need to fix this problem. This is a classic case of the in-between, where this problem involves 50,000 players across every part of the organization, from mine to product, it, to commerce, to service, you name it. It runs the gamut and there's no one to step in and say I'm going to pull the players here together. We're going to figure out how to identify what this problem looks like how to measure it, how all the things that goes into fixing it. That kicked off our customer experience journey and the need to begin a CX operation. And so we started that CX operation in the marketing group because that's what I run.
Todd Unger:But as we matured as an organization we turned it into a center of excellence for the rest of the organization where we are kind of on loan to help people bust down those problems that create friction. And so I think that kind of center of excellence housed within marketing works for a lot of reasons on growth and there is alignment between marketing initiatives and CX Todd initiatives, because on its own CX initiatives like they're tough to fund and so that's why we don't talk about them. I just build that into my growth plan and we fund those initiatives through that. And then the other thing is like they're operational, like this is not like for the faint of heart, right, you got to roll up your sleeves and get in there. And so I think a lot of these things that are housed at, like you know, office of customer experience and the C-suite, they're very highfalutin things. They're not the day-to-day problems that people experience in, you know, in their journeys that prevent growth. And that's really what our team is about.
Jim Hertzfeld:That's great. I love calling back to growth and which goes back to measurements, you know, and going back to sort of rolling up your sleeve. I'm going back to you know, fix your checkout page, like that's kind of roll up your sleeve stuff, like what does it matter? So I love it. So you have a lot more in the book, todd, and I really mean it, like I'm I'm getting more copies because you know it's like I want to meet my next, my next customer and say OK, before we come back and like really, really, really get into, you know, a solution. You need to buy into this. So I appreciate you.
Todd Unger:I appreciate that too. Thank you so much Of all the things that like are meaningful.
Jim Hertzfeld:As an author, it's feedback like that where somebody
Todd Unger:comes back and says, like I learned something and I put it to use. So definitely, yeah, well then. So when somebody comes back and says, like I learned something and I put it to use.
Jim Hertzfeld:So definitely, yeah, well then. So thanks for writing and thanks for joining the podcast. Todd, my pleasure. Thanks for having me today.
Joe Wentzel:It was really fun. You've been listening to what? If so, what A digital strategy podcast from Proficient with Jim Hertzfeld. We want to thank our Proficient colleagues JD Norman and Rick Bauer for our music. Subscribe to the podcast and don't miss a single episode. You can find this season, along with show notes, at proficientcom. Thanks for listening.
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