Ep. 42 | Junction of Customer Experience & CLV
This week in the Accelerator: Everyone talks about Customer Experience but how do you find value in this generalized term? Where do Personas and Customer Journeys add value and what typical mistakes do organizations make? In this episode host Allison Hartsoe speaks with Ehow Chen from Ambition Data about these challenges and more. By connecting Customer Value to Customer Experience a beautiful, logical order of operations emerges which satisfies all.
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Allison Hartsoe – 00:01 – This is the Customer Equity Accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom-line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of Ambition Data. Each week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go.
Welcome, everyone. Today’s show is about the intersection of customer experience and customer value. And to help me discuss this topic is Ehow Chen. Ehow is the VP of customer insight at Ambition Data. Ehow, welcome to the show.
Ehow Chen – 00:49 – Hey there, Allison. Thanks for having me.
Allison Hartsoe – 00:50 – So now I have to tell the story of how we met because it was just my favorite story and we met at a networking event here in Portland. Gosh, it must be three, four years ago now. It’s been awhile.
Ehow Chen – 01:04 – Three years now.
Allison Hartsoe – 01:05 – three years now. And you were walking around this networking event doing something that I have never seen anyone deal but I thought was so inherently clever. And instead of the name tag saying, you know, Ehow Chen, you know, and, and any kind of company name or consulting or anything else, you basically have put down seeking employment and it didn’t even have your name there, but it was like, it was like you made yourself into a billboard. I thought that was the most ingenious way to work at a networking event.
Ehow Chen – 01:36 – Oh, it was a marketing networking event. So it seems inherently intuitive to do that. Right.
Allison Hartsoe – 01:41 – It was so appropriate. So from there, our conversations took off, and you decided to join my company. Thank you so much. And I have just been totally enjoying your growth and your, the things that you’ve figured out how to do along the way. Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about your background and how you got in this space of being interested in customer insights?
Ehow Chen – 02:06 – Sure. My background is actually in chemistry. I have a doctorate in it. I worked at Intel for a while as a manufacturing process engineer, and part of why I decided to move was I found that I liked working with data and numbers a lot less so the manufacturing portion, so really at the end of the day I was really interested in seeing where data, where numbers could be more helpful or can be analyzed in a way that can be helpful in other areas in the world. Specifically what I do at Ambition Data is really the kind of the guts, so really a data transformation and data analytics. Also a bit of looking at customer journey and customer experience through whatever means we can in the data.
Allison Hartsoe – 02:51 – Fantastic. So let’s dive into the topic about customer experience. Now this word is just used all the place. Everywhere I turn people are keen on customer experience, and sometimes people use it to mean Omni channel and sometimes people use it to mean customer experience for everyone. Tell us a little bit about why I should inherently care about customer experience and then if you can maybe elaborate on what it should really mean.
Ehow Chen – 03:22 – Customer experience to me really is understanding how your customers are interacting with your business at any point, and so you need to have you. You’ll have data collection at various points, whether it’s digitally, whether it’s through call center, whether it’s through your sales people, uh, all these pieces form that customer experience and why it’s important is that you need to not only collect it, but you also need to analyze it in a way that really forms the cohesive picture as to what is happening with your customer base and how you can optimize on those experiences.
Allison Hartsoe – 03:59 – So now I imagine that most people don’t know that that is easier said than done to form the cohesive picture of the customer. What kind of things do people run into that you see?
Ehow Chen – 04:12 – Well, there’s always the inherent problem that you need to identify each interaction to a particular customer and being able to do that identification, whether it’s through an inherent customer id or an email address, that that is always going to be the number one challenge. And especially when you run into instances of people calling in or people who aren’t necessarily even customers yet, then it’s especially challenging to try and measure those experiences for one, for the customer.
Allison Hartsoe – 04:43 – I always wonder about the trade for value in that respect. So if you’re trying to identify a customer, let’s say I call you for customer service, I’m pretty much willing to give my name, contact information, etc. because I have a particular need at that point in time. But if I pull up a website and I’m just browsing through, it’s not as easy to get that identification, is it?
Ehow Chen – 05:08 – No. Especially not think that’s where you have that as art exchange for information. Like I’m willing to give my email address if I get something in return. And I think in more modern times of that exchange needs to be a great reward at this point. Maybe it’s a 10 percent discount, or maybe it’s at a really interesting white paper that I really want to read
Allison Hartsoe – 05:28 – and I think this is exactly where we get into the heterogeneity of the customer experience. Because what always gets me when people talk about customer experience is they think about making the same experience or similar experiences for everyone. I want people to come into my store and have a great experience. That’s not wrong by any means, but when we think about customer centricity, do you think there is a more granular way to think about that customer?
Ehow Chen – 05:58 – Oh, for sure, and as your listeners might already know, customer centricity or a CLV really has an inherit premise that not all your customers are the same. They’re all going to have different values or predicted values of spending in the future, and so when you talk about user experience research, you actually have that very same premise that people can be different based off of their behaviors and the way they approach a particular scenario. A and this is something that I learned at the Nielsen Norman Conference and continually observing through the analysis that we’ve been doing.
Allison Hartsoe – 06:33 – Tell us more about that because I think that aspect a Nielsen Norman is a highly respected organization. The way they look at customers is I think, incredibly valuable. Incredible. Tell us a little bit about what you learned at the conference and how it applies to the customer experience.
Ehow Chen – 06:50 – Sure. As I’ve already alluded to, when you do the research, you often have to frame questions in a way that will help you differentiate customers or users based off of behaviors. These are done in a kind of two different ways. The primary method in which you do that is through personas and personas are basically taking your customer base, asking them very specific questions about, uh, how they interact with your business and through those questions you can differentiate between groups of customers.
Allison Hartsoe – 07:22 – Now, it. When you talk about that approach, that question-driven approach, is that in conflict with a different approach or maybe a data-driven approach or other ways that people can generate personas? How do you bring it all together?
Ehow Chen – 07:38 – You have to think of personas as a complimentary methodology to say digital analytics where you have very hard numbers, but you don’t necessarily have the motivation behind the page hits and the clicks and whatever else. As your listeners, by knowing what digital analytics provides his signatures behind those activities, but you never really know the motive behind why they’re doing what they’re doing, and personas can provide that insight as to how people approach the interaction with your, uh, interfaces.
Allison Hartsoe – 08:08 – Yeah, I hear you. And that, that’s kind of getting to the why I oftentimes see that in digital data. We can see what happened. We can even maybe predict to some degree what might happen, but we can’t get to the why very easily. So the important point here, if I’m hearing you correctly, is that the personas get closer to the motivation and help you understand more about how to provide the right kind of experience
Ehow Chen – 08:35 – For sure.
Allison Hartsoe – 08:36 – And, and how does that relate to journey maps? Because if you’re looking at people coming through and what kind of persona they’re illustrating, where do the two connect?
Ehow Chen – 08:45 – So personas are how you would describe your customer base. So for example, you might have your business owners versus your consumers versus, uh, you know, people need primarily technical support. A journey. Maps are really a subset of those personas where you’re looking at one persona specifically and then their journey through a particular task or sets of tasks for your business. Specifically, we can talk about an example that was taught during the Nielsen Norman Conference specifically. We went over surveys that really went over, uh, basically a cell phone company and uh, we had one persona who was framed as a mother of a family and she’s a very busy, busy businesswoman and she has very little time to make these decisions and she’s very thrifty because she was trying to save money for her family. So that’s an example of a persona.
Ehow Chen – 09:45 – But then the journey mapping was really taking a look at the survey responses from said persona and then from there you could figure out the steps in the process in which she would approach taking her current cell phone bill and then trying to negotiate it through the existing company as well. Shop around for other companies.
Allison Hartsoe – 10:04 – So if I were speaking digital analytics, would it be fair to say that the persona mapping is really about the visit towards the customer and the journey map is really about the visit, the task completion?
Ehow Chen – 10:19 – Yeah, I think that’s a fair analogy there, but we have to consider that the journey map, uh, there’s multiple visits throughout the process. Probably there are other interfaces beyond the website. There might be, you know, the call is involved or maybe emails, uh, as well as kind of more market shopping, so things that are outside of your sphere of influence or ability to see.
Allison Hartsoe – 10:40 – Got it. So if you assume that customer experience can be seen and can be measured through the journey map with the context of the personas, could you also assume that you might be able to see an advance the customer value rising and falling? Could it give you early signals?
Ehow Chen – 11:00 – That’s a great question. Uh, I think when we had our last customer centricity conference, there was a lot of talk about how you have your predicted CLV for your various customer basis. But then there’s also that additional element of being able to predict when someone might fall off or someone might have a bad experience, and you know, give them a red flag to say, Hey, you were, we’re losing an important customer here. You need to make sure that you fix the situation. Uh, I think that the personas and journey mapping can provide that kind of insight as well as analytics to back said observations through these qualitative measurements.
Allison Hartsoe – 11:40 – So they really provide the framework.
Ehow Chen – 11:42 – Yeah, exactly. And really the, going back to what journey maps are really about a, you might be able to deduce that, hey, there are five steps in the process of someone shopping around for a new cell phone service. They might be doing some research on their current bill. Then they might look at how they’re looking throughout the market to see what prices there are better prices or deal with this person can get them through our class. We actually found this kind of new phase during the shopping experience, which is really the negotiation step where they would call up their current cell phone provider and say, Hey, I found this better deal. I, I want this deal, or you know, I want a better deal than what I have now. And that was kind of the make it or break point for most of the customers that were surveyed. And then the following steps, we’re kind of expected as usual, but through that research, through journey mapping, I think a lot of this particular company in this example didn’t really know about an important negotiation step. Uh, and uh, I think that really brought a lot of clarity as to how they could retain their customers as well as acquire new ones.
Allison Hartsoe – 12:47 – That’s an excellent point. I think what I see a lot is that people look at the data, they think about what they want the experience to be, and they’re, they’re constantly approaching it from the company’s point of view. And to flip the paradigm and really put on that customer hat requires that you talk to customers. And so what if, if I’m hearing you correctly, what you’re saying is that you can map out a journey, but you might very well be missing a piece if you don’t couple it with the persona research or some kind of voice of customer to validate that that’s actually the journey people go through.
Ehow Chen – 13:22 – Exactly. Nielsen Norman always says is a, you are not the user and similarly are not the customer. Right? When you’re, when you’re the marketer, you’re the salesperson. Yeah. To remember that you are not the customer. You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes to really figure out what that experience is like. And I think that’s why a lot of CEOs will say, sit in their own airline and economy to see how that experience is as opposed to it always flying first class because there are obviously very different experiences in those two classes.
Allison Hartsoe – 13:53 – Exactly. What a great example. Do you have any other examples from the conference or otherwise that you, that you can share?
Ehow Chen – 13:59 – Yeah, we touched a bit on journey mapping where we’re talking about how different stages of experience can be unveiled. I can also go through something along the lines of the persona development specifically. The example that we went through in class was talking about booking hotels. In this case, it was a hotel website that we were trying to differentiate different personas within their customer base. So what we did was we again had a number of surveys for the various customers. In this case, we had four or five different surveys, and we had to read through each of these very pointed questions about how they went about booking their travel in general, not specifically about how these customers interacted with the webpage. It was actually very broad. It was almost like market research. Talking about how often do you travel, what’s important when you, when you think about travel, what’s important in the website specifically, and we know what are the most important aspects to think about, uh, when booking through the website.
Ehow Chen – 15:00 – So really it’s talking more broadly about what they expect and then how that hooks into each kind of persona within those customers. And so, uh, when we went through these surveys, we actually found a pretty quick delineation between business travelers and then kind of everyone else or leisure travelers. So that was a very quick way to sort of develop one persona really that different class of customer that is very different kind of mode of operation, if you will, and kind of tie this back to CLV, uh, these business travelers are very likely to be higher spenders than say those who are leisurely traveling on their own dime. And then when you look at the more leisurely travelers, then we were able to split them out into two different groups here. One was more kind of a free spirit kind of traveler. They took deals and kind of went wherever they wanted, and they would travel fairly frequently. And then didn’t.
Ehow Chen – 15:54 – The other buck had. You had that kind of travelers that planned that big family vacation. But we’re still very thrifty about the decisions that we’re making. So just within the example alone, we were able to develop three personas, which is basically the minimum you would need to be able to start a framework for, for your company or business.
Allison Hartsoe – 16:13 – So the three personas at a minimum, does that come from the idea that you can only take so many actions from the result of the persona, the information that you then start to generate within the company.
Ehow Chen – 16:28 – It’s a little bit of that, but it’s also depending on a number of questions you ask. Um, but, and then also the adoption of said personas, you have to strive for a balance of simplicity but also a differentiation between the groups. Then the example just gave, I could have just said, well we have business travelers and leisure travelers, and that might work for the most part, but then that the leisure traveler has that delineation. There might be a CLV play there specifically where you could say, hey, the people who like to just spontaneously take travel, they might have the ability, or they might be more likely to spend more compared to the once a year at travelers.
Allison Hartsoe – 17:07 – Okay. So let me give you some questions here around where my head goes for this. Uh, you know, naturally I first look at are these mutually exclusive personas and in the travel case there are people that travel for, in fact all of us probably do travel for business sometimes in travel for pleasure or sometimes is it the fact that you can have multiple personas, persona is not necessarily a one to one demographic match.
Ehow Chen – 17:37 – I think he assets that are kind of your primary way you interact with a particular business. So, in this case, Allison maybe you are more of that business traveler, you do take those family vacations as because that’s part of what you do, but the chances are perhaps your scent maybe 70 or 80 percent of your travel is business based, and so you’re primarily going to be in that business persona, not just because you bake a lot of business travel, but those characteristics, those behavioral questions that were asked. So you may find that WiFi is important regardless of whether it’s personal or business travel, right? Maybe you do like having the bigger suite because not just because your personal travel requires you to have a lot more space, but maybe you prefer that for your business travel as well, so it chances are that you’re going to fall into a persona regardless of having kind of multifaceted interactions within a business, and there’s also that possibility to where you might be your own. Got a new persona.
Ehow Chen – 18:37 – Maybe if you survey five more people, you’ll find that you have pure business travelers, you have pure leisure travelers, and then you have that kind of hybrid of you do a little bit of both a and maybe you lean one way, but you still have enough characteristics that you can be your own persona.
Allison Hartsoe – 18:52 – So if you have three, let’s call them master person as at the top, and then you have some splintering of the sub-personas underneath. Is there a rule of thumb for how far you can splinter those personas underneath?
Ehow Chen – 19:05 – It’s only as good as your data. Right? And so when you collect a lot of qualitative data, your questions need to be structured in a way that maybe you could differentiate it, this case having open text or you know, free-form responses pretty helpful here, but you can’t really force personas to split out. They’ll just kind of naturally do what they do to end, of course, see if you get too many different responses than you might have too many personas, so you end up with nine different personas, then that might be a little bit too much to be able to slice and dice between your customer base and it might be too difficult to act upon, as you mentioned already before.
Allison Hartsoe – 19:40 – And so does that mean that you should keep a certain frequency of constantly speaking to your customer base so that you can see how their personas might be shifting over time?
Ehow Chen – 19:52 – Oh, for sure. I think the more evolved companies on user experience or a really focused on making sure to refresh their pro sodas every couple of years, let’s say, a, to make sure that they still have that kind of pulse on their customer base. To make sure that they haven’t changed in any dramatic fashion that would change how they’re approaching their business.
Allison Hartsoe – 20:10 – It’s interesting that you say every couple of years because I actually thought you would say something like every six months, but it does it just depend on the business or is it just that the process of forming and crystallizing the personas is so elaborate that you need time to do it?
Ehow Chen – 20:25 – It’s a little bit of both really. The. If you feel like your business has changed pretty dramatically in say a year, maybe it’s a time to really take a look at redeveloping your personas or reassessing them. They might not have changed at all, but you can. It’s always good to kind of make sure they’re. On the other hand, if you notice that maybe your personas are working in the applications that you’re applying them to, whether it’s through marketing or customer service. Then that’s an also another point in which you might want to try and reassess because maybe the first run it wasn’t quite right and you need to make sure that it’s solid there.
Allison Hartsoe – 20:57 – So I have my persona is I have my journey map, but yet I see people who are like, Oh, I’ve got this persona and it’s now all these demographics laid out, but what I’m hearing you say in the examples you’re giving is you’re really getting behind the demographics, which is more important to start with. Do you start with the demographics and then go to the behavior or do you start with the behavior and then go with the demographics?
Ehow Chen – 21:22 – So the main takeaway that I got from the conference was really that behavior trumps demographics completely. Demographics are really a correlation, not necessarily causation. When we do these surveys, we do this qualitative research. You don’t ask age and background for the sake of making that specific call on a persona that might help inform you what that persona looks like, but you really want to think about how people interact, how people make decisions based off of their thinking about their, their own self and not they’re demographic
Allison Hartsoe – 21:56 – Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think that’s often how we ended up with headlines that are somewhere, um, you know, something that just doesn’t make sense. Like, uh, I remember one that I saw in Pete Fader’s class a long time ago, he pulled up this article, supplemental reading or something about Hispanics are more likely to buy CDs was an, obviously this was a dated article, but the whole point of the article was that they had cut the data incorrectly and then it was out in the news, and it was, it was creating this whole artificial persona. If I were a Hispanic person, maybe I would start thinking I don’t use CDs, maybe I should be using CDs. Am I somehow different than my peers? And, and it’s just such a wrong way to surface data. If you start with the demographics, I think it leads us right into those stereotypes that perhaps just have no place as opposed to behavioral stereotypes.
Ehow Chen – 22:55 – For sure. You probably read news all the time. Millennials do this, millennials do that, but the millennial age group is very diverse, and we have to be lazy and be living at home with our parents. But at the same time, we’re buying more homes now somehow. So that at some point you know that label has to give away, right? Did they have to think about, okay, maybe there’s a gradient within millennials, maybe the millennials are more educated, and they might be making more money, and maybe there are no homeowners or the new age of homeowners or loaded with student debt, and they need to stay at home? So that in itself you’re getting a gradient, a within the demographic and clearly there’s not one easy label to apply to everyone in this group.
Allison Hartsoe – 23:40 – Okay. So I, I love that example about labels are really so broad and just like when we talk about customer experience, the, the label of the customer is way too broad. You have to break it down into a specific persona and ideally tie it to customer lifetime value. What kind of resistance do you generally see when people try to move towards personas or journey mapping? What are the difficulties they run into?
Ehow Chen – 24:12 – I think when you do the user research experience, the biggest resistance you get is primarily and sample size or the qualitative aspect to it for personal as well as through the conference they talked about the executives being very resistant to the idea that seven customers being interviewed is going to make a huge business decisions within the company. Uh, but the fact remains is that if, say even to have your customer surveys say, Oh, well this is a problem. Are you going to ignore them or are you going to actually look into it and see if there is actually an operational issue or you know, some sort of issue that you can remedy within that experience? There’s also an analogy that was made. If you see one person fall into a manhole in the street, do you need to wait for five more people to fall into that manhole to fix that or are you going to make sure that that’s still going to be a problem at the end of the day?
Allison Hartsoe – 25:08 – That’s so funny. I love that example and, and it’s true. I, you know, I, I can, I can see people traversing across digital assets like websites and mobile apps and, and literally falling into manholes if they can’t do something, they can’t complete their task. What a perfect analogy to help people visualize that. Yes, you’ve got to fix that. Okay, so let’s say that I’m convinced that I need to do more with my customer experience data. I want to move forward to make it more powerful. What should I do first, second, third, know? How should I get started?
Ehow Chen – 25:48 – I think one way to start this process is to really hire experts to do it, so there’s plenty of agencies, plenty of research groups out there that are really good at asking the important questions for your business, and alternatively you can hire someone who’s really qualified within the field. There are lots of user experience researchers out there that are looking to make a difference for your company and getting one of them on your team can get that ball rolling. Once you have that person in your team, whether it’s outside or within your company, you can start with that persona development. Figure out what your customer base looks like, so whether that’s, you know, three or four different personas, for example, starting there and then identifying which persona is your most important one. So maybe that’s tied into your CLV and say, Hey, maybe the leisurely travelers in your company are the majority of your customers, and they also drive in the most revenue your company. Then that’s where you want to kind of focus your efforts on.
Ehow Chen – 26:47 – specifically, you would want to build out your journey mapping for them. So really understanding what process they go through and interacting with your company, making sure that journey is what you think it is. And then solving for the specific pain points within that process.
Allison Hartsoe – 27:02 – And you know, what I liked best about the old angle is it can give you a sense of prioritization. Do you think that’s true?
Ehow Chen – 27:09 – For sure. Uh, if you, uh, as already mentioned, if you know that say one persona is if 50 percent of your company but then they drive, you know, 75 percent of your revenue, then yeah, those would be the ones you want to make sure that your experience is optimized for. And one specific aspect to journey mapping that’s important here is you not only just wanted to plot out what those various touch points are, but you also want to tie that into how your business can influence those touchpoints. So tying in the channels, tying in who interacting with the customers at that point and how you can address those concerns at that point through your company.
Allison Hartsoe – 27:45 – Excellent. That makes perfect sense. If people want to reach you, how can they get in touch? What’s the best way to find you? And I, and I also want to call out that there’s some cool stuff that you share in terms of graphics and other aspects of the analytics industry and you’re generally just a good person to follow because you’ve got such a great line of sight into the industry. How can they get in touch with you?
Ehow Chen – 28:08 – Well, people can always reach out to me on Linkedin. I’m happy to connect with anyone who’s interested in talking, and you can always reach out to me directly at ehow@ambitiondata.com. Happy to have a conversation there.
Allison Hartsoe – 28:20 – Fantastic. Now let’s summarize what we talked a little bit about why should I care about the customer experience and in this section we talked about getting a cohesive picture of the customer. We often hear people say that you’ve got to have that 360-degree view. I don’t think there is such a thing as a 360 degree view, but identifying interactions is clearly a challenge that everybody’s trying to crack, but what’s important behind this though is that not all customers are the same and one of the ways we can help understand that customers aren’t the same, is to frame the customer experience around their behaviors. Behaviors can be surfaced through personas and journey maps that we talked about where journey maps are the subset of personas, how they’re, how their journey goes through to get to a task. Whereas the personas are more question driven, complimentary to digital analytics, get to the motivation and perhaps describes the customer base. Did I get that ready? Huh?
Ehow Chen – 29:18 – Very much so.
Allison Hartsoe – 29:19 – Good. Good. Okay. And then we, when we talked about some examples, we were really looking for the impact that you can get. And uh, one of the first example you talked about was the hotel motivation. Talked about developing three personas as a minimum and finding that beautiful balance of striving for simplicity as well as differentiation. Uh, the primary purpose is the way you interact with the business. And then there might be some sub-personas that breakout underneath that. And one of the key points in the hotel example was that the data really needs to be refreshed. You can’t just set it and forget it. Which gets back to the point of always bringing in that voice of the customer with the timing of when you refresh is really subject to how fast your business moves and your resources.
Allison Hartsoe – 30:12 – I always think that if you’re in the digital space, for example, if you look at a six month period, it’s really equivalent to one year, so if you’re thinking about an annual refresh, maybe you’re pacing really should be six months, but if you’re in another business like something that’s more a slower and traditional, maybe you only need to refresh every couple of years, and we also talked about getting the CLV from the customer base and predicting where they might fall off. So using the journey map and the personas to kind of put that framework in place to help you understand what you might not be seeing. And I love this quote that you said that you got from the conference. You are not the customer. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and sometimes I feel like I have to beat that into myself when I’m thinking about what do our customers need. Because it’s so easy to say, oh, well here’s all the stuff I can surface and I’ll just serve that up.
Allison Hartsoe – 31:10 – And if you build it, they will come. Right? [inaudible]. There’s this tendency to think in that direction, but in our true customer-centric culture, you’re never doing that. You’re always kind of taking a survey of what is happening, what do people need, and then matching that to what you have and I think that is so good because it really forces us to be of service to the customer and that is wholly what modern companies do you agree?
Ehow Chen – 31:39 – Yeah. I think ultimately the user researcher is fundamentally customer-centric and I think that’s the most important to us to take away from this conversation.
Allison Hartsoe – 31:48 – Right. And you know, and you just can’t have the silo between what the digital data says and what customer service knows and what the product team knows. The customer’s voice is really, I think what binds it all together, which is so good. And then, of course, understanding CLV to help you prioritize for sure. Alright, and then we talked about what to do next. I think the key takeaway there is one way or another, getting professional prep advice really helps because it’s already hard enough to deliver what your company is designed to deliver. When you get professional advice, you get that beautiful external perspective that can help you see things that perhaps you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Great. Well thank you, Ehow, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you today, and as we always talk about, everything we discuss is that ambition.com podcast. I really appreciate you taking the time to share what you learned at the conference and help tie that to the fundamental purpose of CLV and customer equity.
Ehow Chen – 32:50 – Thanks for having me, Allison.
Allison Hartsoe – 32:52 – Remember everyone, when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It’s not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. Thank you for joining today’s show. This is your host, Allison Hartsoe, and I have two gifts for you.
First, I’ve written a guide for the customer-centric CMO, which contains some of the best ideas from this podcast, and you can receive it right now. Simply text, ambitiondata, one word to 31996. And after you get that white paper, you’ll have the option for the second gift, which is to receive the signal once a month. I put together a list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent customer equity signal, not noise, and believe me; there’s a lot of noise out there. Things I include could be smart tools. I’ve run across articles, I’ve shared cool statistics, or people and companies I think are making amazing progress as they build customer equity. I hope you enjoy the CMO guide and the signal. See you next week on the Customer Equity Accelerator.