Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should: Where Marketers Draw the Ethical Line

Hazem has spent nearly two decades running martech across 20-plus markets, and his argument is refreshingly unfashionable. Ticking the legal box is not the same as doing right by a customer. His test for whether a campaign belongs in the world is disarmingly simple: would you be happy for it to land in front of your own parents or kids?

Trust, he argues, deserves to sit alongside conversion as a metric that actually matters, because the quick win often costs you the relationship. The same discipline applies to data. The skill is collecting the least you need and making it count, rather than hoarding everything and personalising because the tech now lets you.

Consent gets a similar going-over. A 90% opt-in rate means little if people ticked the box to reach the checkout and then ignore you. And AI, in his framing, changes the rules of the game rather than the game itself. It scales whatever you feed it, good judgement or bad.

Takeaways:

• Trust is a metric. Start treating it like one.
• The family test: if you’d not send it to your own loved ones, rethink it.
• Minimum data, maximum impact. The rest is hoarding.
• A signed consent box is permission, not comprehension.
• AI doesn’t rewrite the ethics. It just scales your answer.
• Governance is what holds the line when the commercial pressure arrives.

Most people don’t set out to market unethically. They run out of time, hit a target, and the customer turns back into a number on a dashboard. Hazem’s point is that the fix isn’t more conscience in the moment. It’s building the guardrails before the pressure builds.

Catch the full episode on Spotify, YouTube if you prefer video, or wherever you usually tune into your favourite podcasts.

Chantelle – 0:18: What if the biggest driver of customer experience wasn’t your technology, your product, or even your customer service team, but your employees? On today’s episode of The CX Equation, we’re joined by Brett Kiley, customer experience executive operator and the founder of Experience Improvement Partners. With over two decades leading large-scale operations, building customer experience programmes from the ground up, Brett has transformed frontline engagement into measurable business outcomes, taking NPS from 24 to 81, reducing employee turnover from 61% to 9%, increasing engagement from 74% to 96%, and helping retain billions in customer revenue. So today, we’re exploring his theory that employee experience isn’t separate from customer experience. We’ll look at why so many organisations focus on hiring and overlook retention, and how culture, operational discipline, and data can dramatically improve both employee engagement and customer outcomes. Brett, it’s great to have you with us.

Brett – 1:14: Yes. Thank you for having me.

Chantelle – 1:16: And to just jump straight in there with our first question. So you’ve made a statement many times before that customer experience starts with employee experience. So what does that actually mean to you?

Brett – 1:27: Yeah. Absolutely. When I look at customer experience, companies, time and time again, say this is our number one priority. The customer’s number one. Treat the customer the best. The reality is the people making these decisions probably haven’t interacted with the customer in a long time. There’s usually somebody below them, below them, below them. There’s this frontline person that is interacting with the customer day to day, hour to hour. And if that person is highly engaged and very motivated to take care of the customer, the customer service takes care of itself. We even had this conversation very recently about treating our customer second. Stop saying the customer is number one. Start saying the frontline employee is number one. We start treating them that way, and they’ll start behaving that way, and it’s amazing how the customer service will go up almost automatically.

Chantelle – 2:14: Yeah. I think that reminds me of the Richard Branson quote that says, put your staff first, your customers second, and your shareholders third, and everyone will benefit in the end. I don’t know if that’s it word for word, but it shares the same.

Brett – 2:24: There you go. Same idea. Absolutely. It works.

Chantelle – 2:27: And was there a specific moment or a challenge where you first saw this direct connection between engaged employees and producing better customer outcomes?

Brett – 2:36: There’s been quite a few because this is really where I spend the time. I was leading a call centre, and in this call centre, we had okay customer service. Our OSAT (Overall satisfaction) at the time was just middle of the pack, if not bottom. It wasn’t great, but we kept focusing. This is our number one driver. We get really excited. We went from 40% to 45%. Look at our improvement, but it was never, how do we make this amazing? And we changed this philosophy. We looked at what we were tracking in this call centre. We were looking at “we say the customer is number one, but then what we follow up on is, hey, did you get off that phone in less than five minutes? That call can’t go so long”. And we say “the customer is number one”, but when you listen to the conversation, there’s no personality, there’s no happiness, there’s no engagement. So there was a big disconnect between saying they’re number one and then what we’re following up on. Small tweak, which didn’t even cost us any money. Instead of following up on average handle time, how fast do we get off the phone, we started following up on, was it a very good experience for the customer? Did they end with the solution that they wanted when they started that call? So first call resolution effectively. And the change in this was so dramatic that instead of me running to the end of this call and, “Chantelle, sorry, I’m almost out of time, let me transfer you to somebody else”, and then they start over and it becomes this downward cycle of frustration. It’s “Let me spend a couple more minutes and make sure you have this 100%. Are you happy? Everything’s good? Okay, good.” Now we end the call. The most dramatic part, by simply following up on this employee, how they’re measured, we saw their executive complaints drop 94% over the three months afterwards. That’s like almost all of them eradicated because instead of me being passed, passed, passed, now I have to go to the CEO, it is I don’t get passed. It takes a little bit longer, but I get my resolution. Huge outcome on our customer experience by focusing on the employee.

Chantelle – 4:38: That’s a great example of how that was surfaced and the solution you came up with. Do you find most organisations are still treating customer experience separate from employee experience, and where else does that disconnect cause big problems?

Brett – 4:51: Absolutely there. And I think here is why. In most organisations, if you look at the customer experience, it resides with operations with the people leading the business. And then if you look at employee experience, it resides with an HR function. They do the surveys and they follow up. Right? So you have two separate verticals. You have two separate goals, separate budgets, separate everything. And what we found is this employee experience really is an operations impact. If you’re turning over people, people who are really good at their jobs, who know how to do these ins and outs, they know all the shortcuts, they have all this knowledge, and you’re not taking care of them, so you lose them, and you now start over with a new person, this turnover cycle, and it’s impacting operations over here. I keep having new people. It’s a revolving door. We can’t take care of our customer. So these two silos, the more we can merge them together, typically, we actually do that through the finance part of it. You look at how much turnover is costing you in reality. It is, the more we can merge those together and break down those silos, the more powerful it is together.

Chantelle – 6:00: That resonates with us a little bit. I think what that looks like, for instance, Tap CXM – the company that we work for, we’re a consultancy. Right? And we have all this really niche knowledge. And so when you’ve got the really specific knowledge to train someone up and to enable someone else to do that job and do what we do in the MarTech space is no small feat. And so you’re not only missing out on having to pay the costs of all the recruitment and the gap in resource, you’re also having to account for all of that missing time and of training people up and the loss of knowledge. And I imagine if you’re working for an individual company, like, it’s the same, like, you build up over years and years legacy knowledge that you can’t teach easily.

Brett – 6:38: So true. And it’s interesting. SNIPPET 1 So some companies will have a lot of turnover, 70% in the first year, just cycling through people. Some companies have almost no turnover. Average ten years, fifteen years. They stick around for life. What’s interesting about those, though, if you take somebody who has fifteen years of knowledge, experience, they know how things were done, they know the industry, and then they switch to a competitor, it’s more than just losing one person. I have to backfill that position. I’m losing a lot of institutional knowledge. I’m losing a lot of connections. And all of this that I was providing service to my customers and my business is now going to the competitor. And that’s a huge retention watch out.

Chantelle – 7:22: For sure. Yeah. I lead a team of consultants at Tap, and I’m a massive fan of prioritising retention over acquiring new people. Something, I think, Mark, my co-host, who’s not with us today, said which is interesting was in the customer experience world. So just park employee experience for a second. In the customer experience world, often retaining current customers has a lot bigger payoff than acquiring new customers. And we said it’s interesting, we haven’t spoken about employee experience and the link to it. But it’s exactly the same. Like, I mean, we’re all humans after all, aren’t we? So it kind of makes sense whether you’re an employee or you’re a customer. Like I said, a lot of companies will invest heavily in recruitment and don’t prioritise looking after their current employees. You’ve just said you argue that they’re focusing on the wrong part. Where do you think organisations should be investing to retain current employees and to keep their current employees happy?

Brett – 8:13: You can look at the same dollar amount, like we were talking about, good question on the investing. Where are you putting your money? So we’re investing now in more recruiters. We’re now investing in marketing, advertising. There’s a company spending $350,000 a year on LinkedIn so they can bring in new people. We’re spending all this money bringing in these people. How much are you investing on the people that you already have? Well, we don’t have enough money to do these benefits or this pay or this career ladder. We don’t really wanna invest in the career growth or training. So it’s very interesting to see where the money actually goes. You can almost tell very quickly the first few weeks of conversations, where is your money being spent. You can see, are they really serious about this employee experience, or are they misguided in where it’s going? And you made the point a second ago about the retention being so much cheaper than the new. It’s the same way for customers. It’s cheaper to retain a customer and grow that business than it is to go get a new one. It’s the same for employees. It’s cheaper to retain them than it is to go get a new one. Significantly cheaper on both sides. We haven’t done, I think, as organisations or as advisers such as myself, we haven’t done a good enough job of showing here’s the actual financial implications of if you don’t retain this client, if you don’t retain this customer, if you don’t retain this employee. So we spend a lot of time quantifying that, and it is eye-opening how much more that people expect.

Chantelle – 9:45: What are leaders getting wrong about the real cost of turnover? You know? What are they missing out?

Brett – 9:49: If you ask somebody right now and say, you’re gonna lose one of your employees, what’s it take to backfill that position? I can picture my hard costs. I have to open a requisition. I have to do some interviews. I have to post a job description, maybe some LinkedIn outreach, recruiter costs. They really can’t get past eight. It’s like this magic number. Like, even if I wrote them down, they wouldn’t get past eight. The reality is there’s about 250 different variables that go into that. One of these 13 buckets is the hard cost that they can usually list. Then there’s this knowledge loss of all of this institutional knowledge that’s walking out the door. There’s the productivity loss because the new person coming in is not going to be as productive as the person who’s been doing it for years. There’s the overtime or additional productivity loss when you have to have somebody really good come out of what they’re doing to train the new person to get better. There’s the overall increase in safety issues or compliance issues because new people make mistakes at a higher rate. None of this is research-backed. But then when you put a dollar amount to it, then it goes from, oh, I thought this problem was $100,000 a year. Now we added it up, and it’s really 1,200,000. It’s almost a 10x difference between what people think it is versus what it actually is.

Chantelle – 11:09: Wow. And you think that money could be pushed back into the business, into current employees? And just on the subject of retention then, beyond, I think, we can all say if we gave people pay increases and salary increases, they’d be happy. Like, we don’t mind a bit more money. But beyond compensation, in your opinion, what actually makes people want to stay? What else can companies do to keep their employees working for them?

Brett – 11:32: So what’s really interesting about this is pay and compensation are so easy to say. And I can talk to you about exit interviews and the reasons that that comes up, but it is something very quantifiable. Right? If I was going to leave a company, I would tell you, Chantelle, I’m leaving for this other opportunity because I’m going to make more money. Now the reality might be the person that I’m working for is a micromanager and I can’t stand it. It might be I’ve had the service ticket in to fix my equipment for the last three months and it keeps getting bounced around. It might be I don’t have the tools. I have a broken mouse that won’t work and I can’t get through this procurement process. There’s a lot of friction signals, but I’m not gonna state that. I’m gonna say I’m going for more money and a better opportunity. And so it naturally comes up, more money, better opportunity. We can’t just pay people more. What we’ve done through our research and found is that when you take the top 10 reasons people actually leave and you do that through the people that are currently there, not just the people who have already left, when you find those top 10, pay is generally four, five, or six. It’s almost never one, two, and three. And there’s some very big long-term studies that have been done that say, when you ask people why they left, 60% say they left for pay. However, only 20% would have stayed for more pay. And that says that I’m telling you it’s for more pay, but the reality is you could have paid me more and I wasn’t going to stay because it’s these other reasons.

Chantelle – 12:59: People say one thing and they feel another. Right? So just on that then, so, obviously, we’ve discussed keeping your employees happy is in the interest of also your customers or of your clients. Can you walk us through sort of a real-life example of where you’ve seen looking after the employee experience has directly impacted the customer experience and what that has looked like practically? Give people an idea of what they can do themselves.

Brett – 13:27: Absolutely. And by the way, I don’t necessarily say that keeping them happy is the right thing. That is a big part of it. You know, you wanna enjoy your job and be happy, but there’s also this thriving component. I can be happy, and I can have the career trajectory where I wanna grow with this business. So to answer your question on what we did, to go over this team that had about—they’d just gone through a restructuring. They had lost about 40% of their team to a big reduction in force. So then we take over. Everyone’s thinking, well, I got a bunch of extra work to do. There’s all this turmoil and chaos. The dust hasn’t even settled yet. This is when I take over into this picture. And what was happening is their mindset changed. It was always good until this reduction in force, and then they say, all these people were let go. This company doesn’t care about me. I would think the same thing. Right? I happen to be in the 60% that’s still here, but maybe I’m the one that’s next. So what happens is the 60% that are retained, then they’re looking for other opportunities. They’re getting their resume ready because it could be me. So what we did very simply was sit down with each person, and we prioritised them by our high performers, mid tier, and so forth. We wanna make sure that our high performers aren’t gonna leave and mapped out what the vision is for them over the next five years. Here’s where we see you going. Here’s where your career advancement is. Here’s when your pay will increase. Your title will increase. Your scope will increase. Here’s how we see this playing out. Not a commitment, not a contract, but what it did is it showed them—transferred in their heads from, I could be gone in two years, I could be gone in two months, to they want me around for five years. They’re investing in me. And those small things really changed. So instead of this big drop, which we experienced—so we lost the 40% of our people, take over. We still lost another 10% right after that because good people left, but then it plateaued out, and then we were able to retain and maintain because we had this system in place.

Chantelle – 15:32: I guess as well, to tie it back to customer experience, the exercise of collaborating together and coming up with what their growth would look like together. As business leaders, you have an idea of where you want, strategically, where your business is going. So if you’re setting goals and you’re working together to develop their own growth trajectory, then, like you said, it’s gonna directly impact the business outcomes and the customer outcomes as well.

Brett – 15:55: Absolutely.

Chantelle – 15:56: So just in that example, what did you change both from an operational perspective and a cultural perspective? I know we’ve talked about operational stuff, but also culturally, how does culture impact the employee experience and, in turn, the customer experience as well?

Brett – 16:14: This is a really good case—good time to talk about the annual survey. So what’s happening here is we had a disconnect between the frontline employees and the Ivory Tower headquarters. They’re doing all these things to us. They’re not listening to us. There was no mechanism to get that feedback. They had a once-a-year annual survey, paid a bunch of money for it. You’d fill out these 20 questions one through 10, and then put some comments in there. Nothing really happened from it. Felt good from a corporate side that things are being done. And what we changed here was this closed feedback loop, where now, instead of a once-a-year survey that may or may not be acted on, we created these monthly pulse checks. And a monthly pulse check was simply one or two questions. What’s on your mind? What would make things better? What problems did you experience that we should solve? Small things. Putting those together, and then being able to share those vertically. And then we combined all of those. Here’s the five things you all are asking for. It’s getting in your way of taking care of our customer. So here’s what we’re doing about these five things. Just imagine how powerful that conversation is now with an employee, like, that was my idea. I’ve been saying that for a long time. That was mine. And so now that people get bought in, like, oh, it’s not just them doing this to us. They’re listening to us, and they’re doing things for us.

Chantelle – 17:41: And they feel like they’re affecting change as well where they work, which is—people like to feel useful, don’t they? And feel like they’re doing well and they’re thriving, like you said, I think is message. What kind of things do you measure when you’re executing some of these programmes right from, you know, what data do you look at in the beginning to figure out where the problem lies? And at the end, once you’ve implemented certain processes or you’ve come up with solutions, what are you measuring?

Brett – 18:08: This is where the style matters. So there’s a lot of companies, there’s a lot of consultants and such that will come in and they’ll look, let me find all your problems. Sometimes the problems that they find aren’t the actual root problem or they’re not the one that drives the outcome that you want. So we look at it differently. We look at it through what does success look like. Where is that person that’s been around ten years that’s a high performer, very engaged, has the best customer service, has the best sales, whatever it may be. What does the best look like? And what does average look like? What does the person look like who quit at ninety days? What happened? So what we’re doing is we’re building a model. Chantelle, it’s funny. It’s only, like, four or five characteristics. It is not this giant huge model, although we’ve built them as big as 50. But, really, it’s three, four, five characteristics that say, if you start the company with these five traits, you’re wanting to be a high performer and long-tenured. So then if we evaluate that, what does good look like, what does great look like, what does bad look like, now we can find the problems. Because now we say, this is where we’re trying to get to, what questions are we asking during the interview process? What kind of people are we bringing on? When we’re training them, why are we training them with paper when we should be using interactive tools? I mean, there’s so many different things, but you can’t solve those problems until you know what great looks like.

Chantelle – 19:37: To bring you back to a bit of my experience, years ago when I had my first grad job, they had something called, like, their own DNA or something like that, and it was those kind of pillars, like, what was it to work at this company? And, actually, they used that for hiring decisions. But also when we were day-to-day working, it kind of came out through the work that we were doing as well and how we were engaging. I worked—used to work—more on the tech side now, but I used to work more on the marketing side and how we engage with customers as well. So it’s all through, like, the DNA as they used to call it. But it’s these kind of characteristics, like you say, if you’ve always got them in the back of your head of anything you’re doing in the company, whether it’s recruiting new people, training, you’re on the customer service frontlines, like you say, talking to customers, it all leaks up.

Brett – 20:20: That’s a great one. It’s the DNA. It’s who you are, who you are as a company. Interesting how many times they diverge. We say one thing. This is our DNA. This is who we are. I’ll tell you a perfect example of that. You’re saying in our DNA. We have a client that is a big client, and they talk about collaboration. All of us working together, that’s the most important thing. We’re gonna share ideas. The one plus one is more than two, that sort of thing. Absolutely. Sounds great. And then you go to the meetings, and it’s everybody stack-ranked. One, two, three, four. And tell you number one, two, right, here’s your performance. Stack-ranked. And so what incentive is there for number one to tell number two, three, or four, or anybody, here’s what I’m doing to be number one? There’s none. Because if I tell you how to be number one, then you might be number one. Now I’m the one that gets yelled at on these calls. So there’s such a difference here in what we say and what we do. I love your DNA example of being consistent all the way through.

Chantelle – 21:19: Yeah. And just going back to the operational side of employee experience and how you can impact things operationally. When—I love process. I’m someone that loves process, so this isn’t me. But sometimes, if you work for big enterprises or big companies, sometimes there’s a tendency to overdo it on the process side. You know? It can feel like this is actually inhibiting our productivity rather than adding to it. But how do you use operational discipline to improve the employee experience rather than just making the work feel rigid?

Brett – 21:51: It’s such a good question because you’re absolutely providing the structure, the script, here’s what success looks like, and then also providing the wiggle room to put your own personality and spin on things. It’s a balancing act. It’s a balancing act to where you fit that out. Now we work with a sales team that had some turnover in the sales department, and we’re working with them on how do you retain this. It’s a very established sales team. Right? We gotta fix this. Why are people leaving? They’re leaving for a variety of reasons, but they’re also leaving because you have to have a certain number of meetings every single day. You have to have a certain number of calls all logged into Salesforce. You have all of these different rules, rules, rules, checkboxes. And the other thing, I’ve been doing this for eight years. I’ve hit my quota every single year. I’m, like, one of your top people, and you’re still micromanaging me like the new guy who just came out of school. And so that’s kind of what you’re talking about there is you have the structure which works for some and not for others, and where do you find that balance? And we spend a lot of time—it’s a lot of senior leadership, a lot of C-suite. This is what made us successful. We’re not changing. And there’s many more, especially now, that are seeing a need to be adaptable. What works for that new person in their first year, they need that structure. What works for the person who’s been here ten years that’s a high performer, they don’t need that structure. And we spend a lot of time compartmentalising or customising what are going to be our rules and where we’re gonna have flexibility.

Chantelle – 23:20: Yes. And it’s a balancing act like most things. Just there, you mentioned the sort of C-suite level people that you need buy-in from, so, like, the leadership teams. This is a fairly sweeping statement. So I’m very stereotyping here, but often, obviously, the employee experience isn’t as high a priority as other things. The leadership team are under a lot of pressure and always have different initiatives, different programmes going on, and a lot of the time, employee experience just isn’t up there as the priority. How do you convince the C-suite or senior leadership teams that it should become a priority and that it can actually have a commercial advantage as well as, obviously, employee well-being, etcetera?

Brett – 24:00: Absolutely. So at one point in my time in my life, I was in charge of NPS for a very huge company. Right? So you asked me what’s the most important thing: Net Promoter Score. It’s the customer experience. At one point, I had a giant team, and they put me in charge of engagement for our whole market. What was the most important thing to me? Engagement. So it’s whatever you’re in charge of is that thing. Now the higher you go needs to become more drivers of the actual thing that the C-suite cares about. I’m in charge of growing my business, the strategy, the vision. What we need is to increase our top-line revenue. We need to maintain and reduce our costs so we can gain profitability either for our own company to reinvest or for shareholders. If I just look at it from income up and expenses down, the employee experience is a huge driver of that. So the highly engaged employees produce higher sales, better close rates, better experience on the phone, fewer callbacks, all of that drives your top line. Hey, look at us. We provide the best service. You can sell that. And by them handling those issues so the customer doesn’t have to call back or handling them inside of a facility, so there’s fewer issues, fewer safety issues, your costs go down. So what I try to show them is this employee experience, the retention of these people, this is what is going to drive top line and bottom line. It proves out really well.

Chantelle – 25:30: Yeah. Focus on the numbers then. They can’t complain. They can’t, uh, disagree with the data. Just so we’ve gotten—I’m surprised this far. Yeah. I’m very proud of us for doing that by not mentioning AI. But I do have—because I think it affects employee experience, right? Um, I guess to start the question, I’ll give you an example. I don’t know if you’ve heard this example, but Klarna recently made something like 700 people redundant because they implemented new—an agentic AI workflow to replace all of these people’s jobs. And then basically it failed. It wasn’t successful. It actually was a lot less productive, and they had to rehire all of these people with their tail between their legs and say, oh, we need you back. That was obviously a massive faux pas on their part. Have you found that AI is creating uncertainty in organisations? And do you think it’s reshaping resource planning and culture and retention of employees? And what are your thoughts there?

Brett – 26:25: Absolutely. It’s reshaped a lot, and I sell or advise on AI solutions day to day. And that is a lot of what the businesses want. I can’t be left behind. Right? A huge risk of this is my competitors adopt AI. They provide a better everything than me. I’m left behind, so I have to do something with AI. But then, unfortunately, they’re using AI saying, alright, I can maximise my profit this year. Like we were talking about, reduce the headcount this year. Look at this. I can do an AI agent, what five other people would do. And then you see these examples where it backfires. To me, the mistake that a lot of them are making is trying to reduce overall headcount to say everything that Chantelle does can be replaced by AI. What really we should be looking at is if you have your team of people, there are certain tasks that are very basic, very taking notes manually, or following up, going through your inbox. I mean, there’s some very basic things that we do on a day-to-day basis we don’t have to do. Those are really good use cases for AI. First of all, it frees up their time to be able to do other things that you wanna repurpose them for. And then, secondly, it improves their experience. Now I don’t have to do this. The doctors getting ambient AI in their rooms, they didn’t really like it at first. And now you talk to the doctors that have that, where they’re talking to a patient, we’re talking right now, and it’s taking notes for me. I just have to approve those notes. They don’t want it to go away. Even if they hated it, the idea of it, they don’t want it going away. So there are plenty of really good use cases for AI. The companies doing it right, building it in the right way, are seeing those returns. The companies that aren’t, like your example, it’s a huge loss.

Chantelle – 28:15: I agree with that. I think there needs to be problem-led rather than solution-led. They should figure out where the gaps are first, like you say, where the time can be saved. Cool. I’ve got a couple of closing questions for you, which is—we ask everyone on our podcast, what’s a recent good customer experience you’ve had personally? But that is the question. But also, could you find one where you’ve had an experience where you could tell the employee had an impact on that customer experience and it was positive or negative, actually. They’re also useful to talk about. You don’t have to mention it—the negative ones.

Brett – 28:50: It’s funny because my wife and I, we go out. We do shopping and such, and I worked in retail for the bulk of the first half of my life. I love the retail workers, appreciate what they do, and recognise a really good service. And you see the ones that have a smile on their faces, the smallest thing. If you see a worker walking by that says hi and makes eye contact with a smile, it’s such a small thing, doesn’t cost anything. But, a, makes me feel good as the customer. And then, b, it shows that something’s going right in this company. You almost feel better about the company. Different companies have had different issues, but there’s a 7-Eleven, believe it or not, that’s not too far from our house. There’s one in each direction. We always go to the one over here because the first time I went to this place on the inside, the guy’s like, my name is Jeff. What’s your name? From a 7-Eleven. At most, you put your number in to get a free Slurpee one day, and that’s the best interaction we’ve had. It’s fantastic. My name is Jeff. I remember this guy’s name is Jeff. We always go there, and Jeff’s there sometimes. Jeff’s not there sometimes. What a small little interaction. Now he didn’t own the place, just works there. Right now we know Jeff. We know Gabriel. We know some of the other people. We’re really like, this is our 7-Eleven, and it’s a 7-Eleven. This is such a small example that these companies can replicate because Jeff’s treated the right way, Jeff feels part of the company. I don’t know Jeff’s full story, but I know how I feel when I talk to Jeff.

Chantelle – 30:17: And that in turn then gives you a positive experience, a memorable moment with 7-Eleven, the brand—like, the company, the brand in itself.

Brett – 30:25: Exactly.

Chantelle – 30:26: I lived in New York for a while. I live in the UK now, but you guys do customer service a lot better over there. You get a lot more smiles in shops and stuff than you do over here. But going into any shop, any grocery store, and having someone greet you with a smile—you know, I moved over to New York by myself. And just seeing a friendly face, the same faces smiling at you and saying good morning or whatever definitely goes a long way. In the UK, we grumble over here rather than smile at people, but that’s still—that’s familiar and homely to us.

Brett – 30:56: I went over to London not too long ago. I went over for a conference. We were there for a week and loved it, by the way. Of all my European places I’ve been, London was fantastic. We wanna go back. What’s interesting about that, I think the US versus if you look at the restaurant situation, the tip culture over here—though they’re working for tips here, whereas they don’t typically tip. Here, they’ve watered your way to make sure your water’s refilled, make sure you have your food, check in, how are things going? Didn’t really have that experience over there because it’s different. What I think is interesting about the tip culture is if we translate that in some way into a call centre or into a manufacturing facility, into the oil rig workers—if you think about all these areas where you don’t have an opportunity to tip them, however, there’s ways they could go above and beyond if we can tie in some kind of incentives into that, skill-based compensation or outcomes-based compensation or some other comp—and I say compensation doesn’t mean financial. But if we can tie that in to when you go above and beyond, kind of get you the same thing as that amazing service at the store.

Chantelle – 32:04: Cool. So just to summarise everything we spoke about, if you had to leave customer experience and business leaders with just a couple of principles for creating customer experiences through employee experience, what would those principles be?

Brett – 32:18: The principles I would say are, first, do you have a true total cost of what your employee experience costs you? What does your turnover actually cost? What is your retention actually going to benefit you? Most don’t. Truly understand your financial cost of the employee experience. And then secondly, you have a very good understanding of what the root causes are of that experience. The one, two, three, four, five most important things that drive this employee experience, which drive the financial outcomes. And then lastly, is it on your roadmap where you’re actually taking action, or is it simply something that we talk about during our quarterly meetings and our annual town halls? And if it’s actually on your action plan, actually hitting the root causes, it will actually hit your financials and the bottom line. That’s the conversation that we need to have. The more we have it, the better we’ll all be.

Chantelle – 33:21: Couldn’t agree more. I’m gonna send that clip to my bosses. Well, thank you so much for talking to us. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Is there anything you wanted to share with anyone about your work or where they can find some more information about EX and CX linking together?

Brett – 33:37: Yeah, for sure. I assume you’ll put my LinkedIn. Happy to help on that. I think there’s one thing that I pride myself on is being very open and transparent. The company, we’re product-agnostic, tool-agnostic. We give very good advice. And having been an operator in this seat, been the employee, been the leader, and now been the advisor, happy to offer my perspective in any way as needed. Thank you.

Chantelle – 34:02: Great speaking to you.

Mark – 34:07: The CX Equation is brought to you by TapCXM. To find out more about what we do and how we can help you, visit tapcxm.com.

Chantelle – 34:13: And then make sure to search for The CX Equation in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you usually find your podcast. Make sure to click subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.

Mark – 34:24: On behalf of the team here at TapCXM, thank you for listening.