Lara Schmosiman (00:11)

Hi everyone, welcome back to coffee number five. So we talk a lot. mean, every time I talk to a client, the prospective client, I do a little mini audit. I cannot do a full audit because I don’t have access to their files. And also that will take a long time to really get the data, understand the data and see what’s going on. But there are a lot of things that you can see a little bit just because of experience that I’ve been there done that, but also

 

a lot of things that you can see. And one of the things that I always can see right away is a user experience. Is the user experience there on a website? mean, it’s the user experience. ⁓ Someone that it gets them. mean, everyone who comes to a website comes with a mission, comes or even a store. People come to the mission. You want coffee? You want to come to a store and find out what kind of coffee you want.

 

What do they serve? And so you need to have that experience, prepare for your customers to come and understand what you serve and get it to there and being able to finalize the truck section. So today I want to bring you an expert, Ken Hughes. He’s right here with us and thank you so much for joining us.

 

Ken Hughes (01:31)

you’re very welcome. a pleasure.

 

Lara Schmosiman (01:32)

My analysis is always with coffee as you know, but we can do We can talk about anything and any other experience, but I see that you’ve been also at Starbucks, Bacala. You’ve been ⁓ You’ve been in so many places. So tell us a little more about yourself and your trajectory and what ⁓ and how did you get to the understanding of the CX in this modern culture?

 

Ken Hughes (02:00)

Okay. But first of all, I’m a social scientist. So I often describe myself as a kind of a social scientist Frankenstein. So I’m made up of like various parts and fascinated by consumer psychology. It’s my background as to why people buy fascinated by cyber behaviorism, how we behave digitally and how that’s changing our real world expectations. Fascinated by sociology, by anthropology, know, all the ologies. So I’m interested in human behavior and why why why we do what we do.

 

And I work with brands all over the world. mentioned some of them, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, all around how we can help the modern consumer better connect with the brands that we’re bringing to market. And so you mentioned experience in your intro. And so really, there’s a huge commoditization of product and service right now. It’s very easy for anyone to copy your product, copy your service. And then there’s a commoditization of service delivery, even with AI. So you have every mom and pop store.

 

Able now to use AI tools to deliver hyper personalization and amazing insight. And so there’s a level playing field happening where every brand of business has access to the same tools now and they can do the same stuff with connection. so really we’re pushing past products. So it’s not really long. It’s not about the coffee. It’s not about the hotel. It’s not about the gym, whatever product or service you have. It’s about your connection with your customer. That’s all that matters now. As we enter into a deeper digital world of AI and quantum computing and humanoid robotics and

 

The world that we live in, the society we live in is going to get deeper and deeper digitally. And then the law of economics basically states that the thing that is scarcer becomes more valuable. And the thing that will become scarcer is human connection, what matters, human empathy, emotional intelligence, and all those things that are non-machine, that are non-digital, they rise to the surface as the things that will fully differentiate brands. So if you’re an entrepreneur listening to this, what you really should be looking at is, yes, your product and service has to be good. Of course it does.

 

But so is everyone else’s. What is your experience, Laird, that’s wrapped around that? What is the thing that makes people feel that there’s a belonging and community, a connection to what you’re doing, that the purpose that you stand for is real, that the meaning is real, that what matters in terms of how you deliver it what you sell? And so we’re really pushing past a world of transactional and product into a world of relationship and emotional connection.

 

Lara Schmosiman (04:12)

I love that and something that I’ve been noticing for a while now is that somehow there is a disconnection. Maybe because I’m old school and I cannot disconnect and that’s how I learned from the beginning but I feel like we are separating the brand world right now from the growth world.

 

And to me, that’s a lot of noise because I cannot disconnect them. We are forgetting to infuse the brand of personalities. We only believe that personality is a color and a font. And then on top of that, the messaging of how to connect with the consumer.

 

Ken Hughes (04:52)

Yeah. mean, consumers, can look at it through a lens of storytelling. So what is going to make a customer tell your story? What are they going to tell? How are they going to tell your brand story? And very rarely would a customer say, my God, I have this product and it’s amazing. And it does this, this, this, this. mean, they will sometimes talk about that, but what they will really talk about is what happened to them and experience they had with the brand and with the service. And so, and then they will tell that story to other people. Let me tell you a really simple story. There was a family.

 

flying from the UK to the US. They were emigrating to the US with their eight year old boy and they were using Virgin Atlantic. They were checking in at Gatwick airport and the lady was checking them in and she started laughing because behind them, the parents, behind the parents, the little boy was holding his goldfish in a plastic bag, in one of those plastic, and she started thinking, you can’t, there’s more than a hundred mils of liquid in that bag, first of all, and you don’t get to carry fish onto planes. And so she explained to the parents, you can’t bring a fish.

 

on board, quarantine and animals and America. And the little boy starts roaring, crying in the airport because he’s leaving his home. He’s emigrating. He’s leaving his friends, his family, his school, his hobbies. He just wanted to bring his fish to America. know, snot and tears in the airport. And quick as a flash, the lady check in and says to him, no, no, honey, you don’t understand what I mean is you, you can’t bring the fish on board. You got to give them to me, sweetheart.

 

And I’ll put him with all the other VIP goldfish that are flying today on the plane. There’s a special section on the plane for fish and he’ll swim with all the little other fishies on the way to America. And so he dries his tears and he hands over his fish to go to the special VIP section. And she prints out the boarding cards, gives them to the parents who wink at her and think, thank you so much. Thank you. And they kind of ushered the kid through security and they think, he’ll forget about the fish. And, so she dissolved a pain point for that, family, which is lovely. And they think that’s where that story ends, but it didn’t end there. She took out her phone.

 

And she took a few pictures of the goldfish and she sent those pictures to her colleague in Atlanta, who left her workstation, drove to the local pet shop, bought an identical looking goldfish. And 10 hours later, when that plane touched down in Atlanta, she was standing there with his fish and he took his fish to America. Now, as a story, that’s a beautiful story because what it does is it brings the Virgin brand to life. Everyone who hears that story thinks, yeah, I want to fly a Virgin too. So it’s not about the plane and the scheduling and the airports and the

 

product. It’s about how you make someone feel. So how did that family feel that day when they landed in Atlanta to a surprise goldfish that looked identical to the other goldfish and the boy was none the wiser. They felt really seen and valued as customers. And the moment you have that emotional connection with a brand, that’s the roots of customer lifetime value. That’s the roots of deep emotive loyalty because most business people mistake.

 

transactional loyalty for loyalty. You know that like buy nine cups of coffee, get a 10th coffee free. That’s not a…

 

Lara Schmosiman (07:38)

I love that you’re saying that because I

 

feel like lately is the approach is so transactional. It’s about making the sell now. And even my fellow marketers, they’re all about the raws and what are you going to get. And it’s in the now, it’s not in the lifetime value of our customers.

 

Ken Hughes (07:45)

Mm.

 

Hmm. Hmm.

 

Yeah.

 

And actually, if you look at it through, so a lot of my work is in relationship work. And so I spend a lot of time with CEOs and with C-level executives all over the world talking about the shift from transactional to relational. And what we do is we put it in human relationship terms. So imagine dating and imagine having a one night stand and a one night stand is a wonderful thing. It is what it is. It’s a transaction and you could have a one night stand every night for six months. But eventually.

 

you know, you’re going to get bored and there’s no, there’s no real depth. There’s no intimacy. And so, you know, it can be fun for a while, but you’ll run out of road. And so what you’re really craving at the end of that three months of one night stands is depth, is connection, is someone take care of you, is intimacy. And that’s why we, as humans, we crave relationship. And so brands have this awful habit of having one night stands continuously with the customer. They just want the money. They just want the profit. As you said, the ROI, give it to me now. And if you were in a relationship,

 

where your other partner, your husband, your wife, your lover, maybe you have all three. I don’t judge. know, if you’re in a relationship with someone and they just want you for the now, you would leave that relationship quite quickly because you wouldn’t feel…

 

Lara Schmosiman (09:06)

Yeah, because the

 

relationships are long term and we’re forgetting about making a relationship with our consumers. As you can see, like that’s the name of my company, The Darl, and people always ask me why The Darl? There is a whole story behind it, but I always said that the marketing agency or my marketing agency need to have a name that could be a marketing agency or a bar.

 

Ken Hughes (09:09)

Absolutely.

 

Yeah, and so, yeah.

 

Lara Schmosiman (09:30)

It’s a place that I can work, but I can hang out with the same people. If I don’t want to have a drink or a coffee with ⁓ my team or with my clients, I don’t want it.

 

Ken Hughes (09:42)

Yeah, because you’ve drifted into a transactional consulting role. And what you want also is you want a family from an employee experience point of view, and you want a relationship with your clients where they of course need the work done, but they value you as a person and the way the work is done. And that’s the future of business. And so the challenge here is how we do that. It’s very easy when you do it with a small group of customers, where you have one store. And the question I get asked all the time is how do we scale it? How do we scale that goldfish story?

 

Lara Schmosiman (09:57)

course.

 

Ken Hughes (10:09)

How do you make everybody in the organization believe in the goldfish moment and create their own goldfish moments every day? And that’s very valid question. The first thing I think is leadership. You have to have a leader who fully believes in connection, empathy, emotional intelligence, and going beyond customer expectations. If you don’t have that leader, it’s very difficult for everyone else to believe and to have a philosophy like that. I was at breakfast recently with the CEO of one of the largest

 

US hospital groups. And he told me that when he visits one of their hospitals, he has a habit of taking off his jacket and his tie and he puts on one of the plastic aprons that the dinner ladies wear. And he visits patients at their bedside, delivering their lunch and delivering their dinner. Because he’s worked out a couple of things. One, that a bit like hairdressers, people tell their hairdresser everything. They tell their hairdresser more than they would tell their therapist. And in the hospital setting, the patients tell the dinner staff everything.

 

They don’t, maybe they close their mouth to the clinicians and the nurses, but they tell the dinner staff everything. And so he gets really good information from his customers, but more importantly, his clinical staff and his admin staff see the CEO of one of the biggest health companies in the world getting down on the factory floor. And if he can do it, you can certainly do it. And if he can spend one or two minutes with every patient talking to them as people, not patients, you can certainly do it too.

 

And so this is where leadership really kicks in, terms of believing in connection, like pushing past product and thinking about connection. was watching the Wimbledon tennis tournament two weeks ago. You know, one of the, the longest running tennis tournament in the world. And I thought as an analogy, it’s really interesting because if you serve a really strong tennis serve and it’s an ace, it’s an amazing shot. But as an audience, it’s fun to watch once. But if the whole game was just single serve points.

 

It’s very boring to watch. And that’s what brands do all the time. They just serve across the net and they say, here’s our Parkland service. Give us your money. And they’re gone. Whereas what we want is a rally. What we want is to and fro and to and fro and to. We want a conversation. And then when you’re watching tennis, once the rally goes beyond five or six points, you start to become quite interested and you’re leaning front in your seat and you’re, where is this going to go? It’s what we need to learn as brands is to have those continual conversations with our customers.

 

not just when they’re in the seat in the salon or when they’re in the store or where they’re getting their annual renewal for insurance. We need to have a continuous relationship conversation with that customer and make them feel that it is a relationship, but not a transaction.

 

Lara Schmosiman (12:38)

Okay. I want to divide this conversation into parts because I, it’s, I’m obsessed with what you’re saying here. And I can, I can see it that from so many different points of view, and I’m going to give myself as an example of an owner of a company and leadership. And sometimes when you understand this human connection and it’s hard for a lot of people to differentiate that.

 

we’re human, we don’t want to be transactional, but still I can love you as a person, but the work needs to be done. And I think that there is a lot of pushback and people don’t understanding that these two things need to work together.

 

Ken Hughes (13:13)

.

 

Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit like, again, let’s bring it back to human relationships. It’s like having a fight with your partner. You can even have conflict with a client and you can still love the person. So you can have a fight with your husband and wife and you can be in the middle of an argument, but you’re arguing maybe about whatever, but you still love the person. And that’s why it’s a healthy thing. You talk to the conflict. And one of the best things I ever did was an active listening workshop and conflict workshop for personal development. I remember the coach saying,

 

He said, if you approach every argument with your loved one, with not the, I win this argument, which we all do, we all want to win. We all want to be right. If you change the focus to how can we end this conversation where the relationship will be stronger? If that’s the focus of both people in the argument, then of course the whole dynamic changes, no one wants to be right or wrong. We all just work to the common goal of how can we resolve this issue where the relationship will be stronger?

 

Lara Schmosiman (14:09)

Yeah.

 

Ken Hughes (14:15)

And immediately the whole dynamic shifts. And in business, the same thing. In any moment of conflict with a client or a customer, you really need to step back and think, well, what do I want from this? Do I want to lose a customer? No. Do I want to lose a client? No. So how can we resolve this? Maybe it does mean you step down a little bit. Or maybe it means that you change the perception of what’s happening to the place of, well, how can we make the relationship stronger out the other side of this? So it is, get back to it. It’s all about relationship.

 

Lara Schmosiman (14:39)

It’s,

 

it’s, it is, but it’s so interesting that many people at the first conflict once instead of fighting about the conflict, immediately they start fighting about the continuous, the continuation of the relationship.

 

Ken Hughes (14:57)

Yeah, yeah. so it’s, yeah, I mean, if you’re looking, if you’re, again, it’s about a future focus. So that, that word customer lifetime value, for instance, is thrown around boardrooms all the time, but people don’t really stop and think, well, what does that mean? Customer lifetime value. It means that you, yeah, you can put a value and you can even put a number on the, on the value if you want of like how much this client is going to pay me over 40 years.

 

But really, it’s about like a bit like a wedding ring. A wedding ring is a a infinite shape as the point. This is forever. And so if you approach every client interaction with this is forever, you do start to away from an ROI perspective of like, you know, what are they doing for me? And I always talk about, you know, again, if you you think about it through human relationship terms, imagine if you imagine if you if you monitored your own human relationships through ROI, like if you if you went

 

home tonight, looked under your bed and you found a ledger, a book that your husband or wife was keeping and in the book was every nice thing you ever did and every bad thing you ever did. And they were deciding based on the good and bad things, what they were going to love you and how they were going to love you. You would be very shocked. Like you think, my God, I’m in a toxic relationship because they’re keeping track of all the little things you say and the kisses you do. And they’re deciding based on what you do, what they would do. Now, that’s weird. But in brand, in branding, we do it every day.

 

Lara Schmosiman (16:18)

It is.

 

Ken Hughes (16:20)

So we’re saying, well, what’s the ROI on this investment for? So I’ve started to talk to my clients and say, shift away from the word ROI and change it to a DTI, a desire to invest. Forget about return on investment. Have a desire to invest.

 

Lara Schmosiman (16:35)

I’m

 

so tired. mean, for people, if you’ve received my newsletter, you see that a few weeks ago, I was talking like, let’s stop talking about ROAS. ROAS is not something measurable at the long run. When you are having a brand, a brand is a long-term, it’s playing that infinite game. It’s creating a brand that your grandkids are going to keep running.

 

Ken Hughes (16:57)

Yeah, and longevity is a really interesting one. I have a book coming out in October called Tailor Making around Taylor Swift. mean, one of the most iconic brands of our time. And if you look at her success, so, you know, yes, she’s on the front of the time People of the Year magazine, the only woman actually to be on the front of the time Person of the Year twice. Her album is the most streamed album of all time. Her concert movie is the most streamed concert of all time. Her Ears tour was the biggest live event.

 

of all time in terms of its gross revenue. So she’s broken every record, but she’s done that for 20 consecutive years. And in the pop industry, that kind of longevity is extremely unusual. So, of course, you have bands that come around again for nostalgia, but she has actually built on herself year by year by year over 20 years. Why? It’s because from the very beginning, she invested in the customer connection. Yes, the music is great. It doesn’t matter if you love her hate the music, but you can’t deny that she has

 

one of the biggest tribal fandoms and followings of our time. Her Swifty Army is one of the biggest consumer fandoms and tribal belonging communities that we have in the world today. Why? So Madonna and Pink and Rihanna and Beyonce, they’re all good artists and they all have access to the same materials, producers, directors, songwriters. Why is Taylor Swift who she is? It’s because she invested in the connection, the relationship from the very beginning. She’s famous for the hand to hearts. She understands that this is me and this is you.

 

customer and together, together we’re the brand. And so she’s really strong and believer in co-collaboration. Her customers, her fans don’t think that they’re consumers. They are part of the product. They are part of the Swiftie community. So it’s a collaborative space. It’s a co-creative space. And she might be the ones writing the songs, but they’re all singing them. They’re all consuming them. They’re all part of this thing. And so the book is literally an 11, 12 chapter playbook looking at each value she’s used.

 

And every brand and business listening to this can do the same. You can just take the playbook and you can replicate those values and have the same longevity she’s had.

 

Lara Schmosiman (18:55)

I want to.

 

I want a copy right now. Longevity is such a

 

trending word right now in so many, because we live longer, we want to look younger and we are, but also I think that the consumer has shift because the consumer with all this technology that we have, it’s easier for them to find out answers. And as a brand, need to be, two things are happening. First of all, we need to give a lot more

 

Ken Hughes (19:04)

Hmm.

 

Lara Schmosiman (19:27)

information because people want more information, also as the we have it becoming it shows is way straight that Consumers talk about our products too, and we need them we live in the content creation times we live even a brand ambassadors and social proof

 

Ken Hughes (19:47)

Absolutely.

 

And the real interesting about getting a customer to tell your story and to be that brand ambassador is you of course have to go beyond their expectations. If you deliver what they expect to get, if experience meets expectation, that’s the definition of satisfaction. But all you’ve done is given them the experience that they expected to get. That’s not great. What you need to do is go beyond their expectation, do something that makes them feel. And then you’ve got an emotive.

 

customer who’s willing to tell the story and empowered. Let me tell you a story about a guy on United Airlines, a guy called Kerry Drake, lived in San Francisco and he got that call that many of us have got already. And if you haven’t, you’ll get it someday. Maybe his mother was about to pass away and he got that call that said, you know, you need to get home. You need to get home tonight. She was ill. And so he rushed onto the United website and booked himself a couple of flights. So he’s in San Francisco. He needs to get back through Houston.

 

to Lubbock, Texas. So he’s got a connection in Houston, really short, one hour connection, two flights. He’s on the first flight in United in San Francisco. And the pilot comes on and says, I’m sorry, we’re going to be delayed by about 40 minutes. And he knows instantly that that’s the connection time gone. So he’s not going to make the connection in Houston. He’s not going to make it to the bedside of his dying mother. And obviously he’s really upset because, you know, we all have this Hollywood belief that we should be there at the bedside and hopefully we all will.

 

So he starts to cry on the plane, just softly to himself, that he’s going to miss that moment with his mum, the last moment. And the aerostess sees him crying and comes down to give him some napkins to dry his tears. And he tells her why he’s crying. And she thinks, yeah, that sucks. That really sucks. And so she’s going back up the plane and she talks to the pilot who’s just waiting during this delay. And she shares the story that she just heard. And the pilot also thinks, ⁓ that, yeah, that sucks.

 

And maybe he had been through it recently himself. You know, you don’t know what’s happening in people’s lives. And so he decided in that moment to do something about it. So he picked up the radio and he radioed ahead to Houston and he got patched through to the next pilot of the plane that the guy was trying to chase. And between the two pilots, they colluded to keep the second plane on the ground. Now, anyone who works in aviation knows that planes in the air make money, planes on the ground make no money. And so, know, pilots are bonus to get the plane out, get it going, get it going. And so

 

Lara Schmosiman (22:03)

Yeah.

 

Ken Hughes (22:04)

These two pilots decided no, no, sometimes the right thing to do is better than the profitable thing to do. And so Mr. Drake flew. He was 45 minutes late. He landed into Houston. He did the airport Olympics thing that we all do running from gate to gate turner and he came around the corner to that next gate. And what he found was the pilot of the next plane standing at the top of the ramp with his arms folded. And he said, Mr. Drake, please stop. Don’t run. This plane goes nowhere without you on board, sir. And he gets the plane and he does make it.

 

to the bedside of his dying mom to say his goodbyes to her. it becomes a viral story. And you tell that story to the CNN and the world. But ask yourself the question, who will Mr. Drake fly with for the rest of his life? That’s a moment of customer intimacy where a brand goes beyond your expectation, beyond terms and conditions, and sees you as a person, sees you as a human, and thinks we need to do something here.

 

Lara Schmosiman (22:47)

Absolutely.

 

Ken Hughes (23:00)

And that story was told by Mr. Drake for that reason. He told the story because it made a difference to his life and everyone who hears the story, it makes a difference to you because you think, yeah, there was several people involved there, the first pilot, the second pilot, and they all did what was right. And so in branding and entrepreneurship, sometimes we get so excited about growth and profit and revenue and scale that we sometimes forget about what is important, which is connection and human empathy.

 

and making people’s lives better. And what we need to understand is that every time a customer buys your product or service, they’re inviting you into their life. They’re inviting your brand into their life. And you need to respect that invitation just like you would being invited into someone’s home. You you respect their home. You take your shoes off you. And so in branding and if it’s all about sales and profit for you as an entrepreneur, I think you’re going to have quite an unhappy life.

 

Lara Schmosiman (23:54)

So I love the story that you just told us, but those are situations that were created by humans, but it wasn’t a plant of the brand. So as a brand, what can you do to create those experiences?

 

Ken Hughes (24:01)

Hmm.

 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you need to look at your customer journey, every single piece of it, and think about how we can connect better here. And sometimes the answer is humans. Sometimes the answer is technology. Let me tell you a really simple story from Octopus Energy. They’re a sustainable energy company in the UK. And they were looking at their customer journey. And one of their issues, they’re quite good on customer experience. They really pride themselves on customer experience. Because you need to remember, in the energy business, there are zero differentiators. Everyone is selling electricity and gas. It’s all the same.

 

So how can you stand out? Well, they decided the experience with us would be different. And so they looked at one of the first pieces with the call center. So when you call into a call center, you know, you’re going to be on hold for maybe one minute, two minutes, waiting for an agent to pick up. And they had staffing issues. They couldn’t increase their staff. They had loads of inbound calls. were thinking, how can we improve? And most banks, insurance companies, when you call in, you get that

 

awful music, that awful old music, or else maybe you get their latest campaign song on their ad again and again and again, or you get their upsell, hey Ken, would you like a new car loan? So they make it about them, not about you. And one of the executives in Octopus had recently read an article in a newspaper ⁓ article about nostalgia and music and the power of music and nostalgia. And in that article, it said that the psychology of music

 

Lara Schmosiman (25:02)

us.

 

Ken Hughes (25:27)

And everyone listening to this podcast will Google this afterwards. The most powerful music you will ever hear is the summer hits when you were aged 14. So that long, hot summer, your body’s full of hormones and it’s the summer of possibility, the summer of potential. Whatever the soundtrack was to that summer, if you hear those songs, the hair on your neck will stand up because you’ll be 14 again. You’ll be that 14 year old girl again. And so it’s really powerful.

 

And so he had read that article and he brought it to a team meeting and he thought, how about this? And they built a very simple AI system. This is real, if then technology. You call into their call center, they immediately take your phone number inbound, they match it to the account number, they pull your date of birth, and then they give you a song to listen to when you were 14. And so the jukebox is only like a hundred songs, but it’s giving you the right song. So you’re 42, you’re 34, you’re 67, and it’s giving you the song when you were 14.

 

So the three or four minutes that you’re waiting, you’re not waiting bored now. What you’re doing is you’re singing along. You feel great. think, I love this song. And actually, when the agents picked up the calls, what they often heard was, hey, I was listening to that. So, you know, I don’t even want to talk to you anymore. I want to listen to the song. And so to answer your question, there’s a really, a really simple example of a company thinking, where in our customer journey can we make a customer feel something? How can we do that scale?

 

Lara Schmosiman (26:36)

you

 

Ken Hughes (26:48)

that uses technology. And so there’s no humans involved there other than the one person who had the idea. But other than that, every single person is now getting. So that’s a personalized product delivery at scale. But the most important part of this is it makes you feel it’s a connection moment. So if you take that attitude now, and as an entrepreneur listening to this, if you strip out your whole customer journey and look at the 10 or 20 or 30 touch points you have, you should apply that idea now to every touch point. How can we, what can we do here?

 

and make people feel something. What can we do here? And sometimes it’ll be technology, sometimes it’ll be human, sometimes it’ll be exciting, delight and go beyond expectation, other times it might be something simple. And they’re not all as important as each other as touch points. So you need to find the places where you think this will make a difference. And if you do that, that…

 

Lara Schmosiman (27:30)

There is any right balance of technology and human touch?

 

Ken Hughes (27:33)

No,

 

no, because it really depends on the customer journey, the industry. don’t think there is, but the wonderful thing about the technology that we have available to us today is that five years ago, some of the things like I’ve just said there would take significant investment and you would have to be a large corporation to do it. Whereas now with AI and generative AI and you can, like if you’re a small business, an entrepreneur, and you have two or three stores, you can build an app.

 

And it used to cost you 50,000 euros to build an app, know, or $50,000, $100,000 to have a really good app. Now a generative AI can build you an app for $20 or for free. And so you can, you can have, you know, an amazing website, an amazing app. can have anything you want, you can create today. And that was not true five years ago. So no matter what business you are at this point, you have the ability, you have the technology. so the mix is always.

 

Lara Schmosiman (28:21)

Absolutely.

 

Ken Hughes (28:26)

be different, you know, and, the really good places is where, again, going back to the healthcare industry, Intermountain Health have recently installed a, a DAX co-pilot piece of AI, which is a speech to charting system. So when you go to meet the doctor and again, a clinical appointment, one of the pain points often is a lack of empathy. It’s not a genuine lack of empathy, but what the patient feels because the doctor is talking to you and is taking notes, cause they have to take notes as you talk.

 

OK, and what happened? they keep turning away from you. OK, and then what happened? OK. But you’re there being quite vulnerable. You’ve got a rash. You’ve got a lump in my breast. don’t know. And so you’re really what you need is empathy, but you’re only getting half empathy. So what they did is they said, well, let’s take away the laptop. And so the Dax co-pilot listens to the entire conversation, auto charts everything. So now when the patient walks out, they just turn to the laptop and check that everything’s OK, maybe a small edit.

 

Lara Schmosiman (28:53)

Yeah.

 

Ken Hughes (29:18)

But what it does is it frees up the human now to do 15 minutes of direct eye contact with the patient. So the human does all the empathy piece and the AI does all the admin and the bureaucratic stuff. And of course, the patients, their satisfaction score to the roof, because it’s amazing connection. What’s surprising is the employee experience score to the roof. Because for the first time, the clinicians are able to step away from admin burnout and do what they got into medicine for, which is make a difference in people’s lives. And so again, you know,

 

Let the humans do what they’re good at and let the technology do what it’s good at. That’s the mix you’re looking for. At every touch point, you know, find the place where you’re freeing up the humans, stepping away from the crap and letting them do what humans do well, which is connecting, connecting to each other.

 

Lara Schmosiman (29:59)

That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much, Ken, for being here today and for sharing all of these insights. I’m sure that my listeners would love this episode and that I really hope that it will help you to change a little bit your mindset of when you’re going into a brand, your own brand, the brand that you’re working with, and just set yourself and the brand for those connections.

 

Ken Hughes (30:04)

pleasure. It’s a pleasure.

 

Ultimately, connection,

 

I have a small tagline that is basically three words. Connection is everything. And it’s true in our human relationships, with our friends, with our family, with our partners, and it’s true in branding. Connection is everything. When you focus on connection, trust me, the growth, the revenue, the profits, they follow. Connection is everything.

 

Lara Schmosiman (30:43)

Absolutely. Thank you so much. And to you guys, I will see you next week with more coffee number five.