Back to What We Think

The One Question Every Customer Experience Should Answer

Image

The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or two — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

maslansky + partners’ Senior Vice Presidents Maria Boos and Katie Cronen join Michael and Lee to talk about the language of customer experience and why it’s so important to get the language right. Especially now, what makes it harder? How can we do it right? We share what we have learned from companies in the marketplace today and work that we’ve done in the past.  They cover the one question all communicators should be able to answer, how to define success, and the importance of intuition and simplicity.

Listen below or on your preferred streaming platform:

LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

maslansky + partners newsletter

EPISODE 5 TRANSCRIPT:

Lee Carter:
All right. They said what? Welcome to Hearsay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky + Partners, where we provide our take on the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today. And what you can learn from their experience. Our philosophy is, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this HearSay. I’m Lee Carter. And I wrote a book called Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter, and I’m president and partner here at Maslansky + Partners and absolutely passionate about language and it’s impact it can have on other people.

Michael Maslansky:
And I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of the firm that invented language strategy and author of The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics. And today we’re going to talk about customer experience, why it’s so important. And especially now, what makes it harder? How can we do it right? What can we learn from companies out there in the marketplace today and work that we’ve done in the past? So we’re going to dive in. And for this conversation, Lee and I have invited two of our colleagues with extensive experience in customer communications and in customer experience, Maria Boos and Katie Cronen, who are both senior vice presidents at Maslansky + Partners. Welcome to both of you.

All right. So Lee and I have talked a lot on the podcast about how the pandemic has really acted as an accelerator or an amplifier. It hasn’t necessarily created a lot of new trends, but trends that were out there are now either moving faster or much more important than they were before COVID-19. And to us, one of those trends really seems to be the importance of customer experience. And so, what we want to talk to you both about today is the shift. Why is it more important than ever? What is driving it? What makes it harder today than it used to be? But before we start, I think it’s really important to define our terms. And Maria, I want to start with you. You’ve spent decades focused on customer experience, on simplifying communications, on the role that communications play in building relationships after marketing turns the prospect into a customer. When we talk about customer experience, what are we talking about?

Maria Boos:
Well, I think we’re talking about all of the ways a customer experiences a product, a service, a brand, and that obviously goes way beyond the product or service itself. So it’s every communication. It’s every interaction in every channel. Even the ones that the company is not owning or controlling, it’s what’s happening out there in the marketplace among customers as well.  So it’s all of those things. And the more intangible the product, like in financial services or insurance, or even in energy, the experience is the brand. And we know that it’s the totality of the experience that drives satisfaction, which drives loyalty, which drives likelihood to continue a relationship or expand the relationship or recommend. So it’s all of those things.

Michael Maslansky:
As we think as kind of marketers and communicators, we’re often focused on those really critical external communications, the most kind of visible touch points that are out there. And this part is often left to other parts of the business or other people. Lee, let’s talk a little bit about, why is it important?

Lee Carter:
It shapes everything that we do and everything that we believe about a company. And one bad experience will change your perception entirely. On the flip side of that, one great experience is going to change your experience entirely with a brand. And you’re going to tell other people about that. A few words can totally change someone’s experience with a company. And it can be just that simple. Somebody says to you as something as simple as, listen, I know that you don’t want to be here any longer than you have to. So we’ve redone this process to get you in and out the door as quickly as possible. If you need anything else, let me know. That simple use of language changes the experience entirely from something that got you in and out the door to, wow, they thought about me and my needs. And that might be something that I might tell somebody else. So how can you be explicit in your experience about showing that you have thought about the customer? I think that’s something that we don’t do enough of.

Michael Maslansky:
But why is it so important now? I mean, if we think that COVID in some ways has amplified the importance of it, Katie, why? What is it about this moment in time that makes customer experience even more important than it has been?

Katie Cronen:
I think in many ways, that’s all we have. You don’t have as many touch points with brands and companies that you would beyond that experience. And there are a lot of good studies out there that show that it does in fact, make a difference to companies’ bottom lines. There’s a report in 2018 by PWC where 42% of Americans would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience. And on the flip side of that, when people love a company or a product but they have several bad experiences, they found that 59% will walk away. And in fact, 17% will walk away after just one bad experience. Now that data is a few years old now, so it is pre-pandemic, but you think about where we can turn when we’re stressed, when we’re trying to go about our lives and get things done, the stakes are going to be a little bit higher than that. And so, the experiences is the place to focus because that’s where you’re going to win and be a hero, or really let people down when their patience is already a little low.

Michael Maslansky:
Well, and so picking up on that point about patience being low, Lee, you’ve talked about how people are, in this moment, more sensitive than under normal conditions. How does that impact customer experience?

Lee Carter:
It impacts it tremendously. I mean, our nerves are raw, and things that we used to be able to take with no problem, a long hold time, waiting in line, navigating complex situations, not being able to understand. Even in health insurance or claims language, for example, we had patience. We didn’t like it. I mean, we … But everything right now, I think for most people, feels like it’s just too much. When you just get a moment of somebody saying, I get you, I hear you. I understand where you’re coming from. And I’ve thought about you. It makes you feel better. It makes you feel heard. It makes you feel understood. Just the simple act of explaining it in a human way, in a plain-spoken way, and putting yourself in the shoes of the other goes such a long way when people are raw.

Michael Maslansky:
The question then is, so we talked a little bit about what it is, it affects all the touch points, why it’s more important than ever; but it seems like knowing that, companies should be armed to get it right every time. So why is it hard? Why do companies not get it right every time? Maria, what’s at the core of this issue?

Maria Boos:
I think there are a couple of things. One is really the siloed nature of organizations. It makes it difficult to have a cohesive and consistent customer experience across all lines of business, so that’s just something companies and organizations need to address head on.

Michael Maslansky:
Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you mean by that? What are some of the silos that you’ve seen, where it becomes difficult to kind of create a consistent experience?

Maria Boos:
Well, what all companies want is to have as deep a relationship with a customer as they possibly can, right? So, if I have multiple accounts with a financial service’s company, some are transactional, some are growth oriented, but they’re all contributing to my financial outlook and how I make decisions in total. But if I get communications that don’t seem to recognize the other parts of my relationship, it makes it harder for me to understand my full picture and feel confident that I’m making the right decisions. And sometimes it’s even just the stupid stuff that makes me feel like, “This company doesn’t care about me at all.” When you get something that says, “If you also have a savings account with us,” well, of course they should know if I have a savings account with them. So it just diminishes my trust that they’re really looking out for me and that they know me as an individual.

Michael Maslansky:
What are some of the other things that you’ve noticed are particularly challenging for companies in the context of the pandemic that they should be even more focused on responding to?

Katie Cronen:
Well, I think a lot of financial services, institutions, and banks dealing with PPP, they’re trying to communicate a lot with their customers, and in many situations, the rules are changing as time is going on. And in other instances, they’re having to share information that isn’t necessarily a decision that that bank made. So I think that’s been really complicated for companies to navigate, is, how do I make sure people understand? But also, if there are guidelines that are in place that weren’t our fault, how do we make sure that we’re clear but we’re not necessarily bearing the brunt of those policies?

Maria Boos:
I also think you can’t make assumptions that people know what they’re supposed to do next. Some of the modes of relief that are provided for under the Care Act, they’re actually administered by individual companies, and people really don’t know what their first phone call is supposed to be or where they submit an application or how. So I think it’s really incumbent on all of those organizations who are participating on some level to make the next steps incredibly clear. You can’t over communicate, in all channels, about what people should do next.

Katie Cronen:
There are a lot of companies that went out of their way with some kind of, we call them symbolic gestures, where they waive fees for a period of time or they do something extra above and beyond than they normally do for customers. And we are reaching a point or we will reach a point, where those perks go away. And I think that’ll be a really critical thing to watch, is how do companies navigate that? Because now you’re basically taking away something that now is going to feel like an entitlement, and that’ll be pretty tricky to navigate too.

Lee Carter:
When this all started, we gave a lot of benefit of the doubt. So when you were on hold and somebody said “Due to COVID-19, we’re experiencing unnecessarily high call volume,” and a lot of scripts were changed. We gave people the benefit of the doubt, because it was hard. We understood that people needed to change their business model, that maybe people weren’t in call centers like they used to be, that maybe now they’re at home. But we’re a year into this thing, and it’s not the same today as when all of this started. I think you have to rethink, how do you create a moment where you’re going to get the benefit of doubt from the customer if you’re creating an experience that is challenging for them? We have to keep communications fresh, and I don’t think that a lot of companies are doing that.

Michael Maslansky:
What about the investment side of this? In many cases, we hear that clients may not want to make the investment that it takes in order to get a good experience all the way across their touch points. How have you experienced this? What do you think are the challenges of doing this? Why should they make the investment? Maria, tell us. Preach.

Maria Boos:
Well, I do think there’s a lot to talk about in terms of making the investment. But before that, I will say, where can you look at what you’re already doing and see it through a more customer focused lens? Companies tend to think of their functional communications as just that. We have to send a bill or we are required by regulation to send this annual notice, so why should we think about the customer in that? But actually, any interaction can be an opportunity to reinforce the customer relationship if you truly are thinking about it from a customer focused perspective. So for example, an energy company sends you a bill every month. It’s just a request for payment. But it’s also the opportunity where they could talk to you about real energy efficiency tips that are relevant based on where you live and your usage patterns. That’s data they already have, it’s a communication they’re already sending, so there really isn’t a significant investment there. Or similarly, your credit card company is required by regulation to send the agreement once a year. It’s a legal document, it comes in a plain white envelope, it goes straight into the recycling in the vast majority of households. But what if they took that moment to say, “Hey, we looked at your spending over the last year and we actually think you would get more rewards if you switched to X card, because you’d earn triple on groceries, and you’ve been spending a lot on groceries during the pandemic.” So, it’s really about, how can we look at everything from the customer’s perspective and do double duty in some of those required communications? But that said, there is an investment in having that data and making sure you use it in a way that really is to the customer’s advantage.

Michael Maslansky:
Katie, any other examples that you can point to where companies just seem to, it seems to be hard to get the customer experience right?

Katie Cronen:
Yeah. One thing I like to look at is, if you have data about how you’re resolving issues or what your customer experience is like, what kind of metrics are you looking at? For instance, it’s not enough and it’s potentially misleading, to just look at call times and try to get them as short as possible. Because if I’m on the phone with your customer service person and I’m fed up and I hang up after five seconds, that’s a short call, but that is not a sign of a great customer experience. It would be much more effective to look at what percentage of people say that the issue was resolved. Or if you are looking at letters where you are sending out information and you need people to take action, it’s not enough to just use a Flesch-Kincaid reading level score to determine whether or not the letter was impactful, you need to actually measure comprehension. And so even looking at the kind of data that you have and what you’re tracking can make a big difference.

Michael Maslansky:
And sometimes they pick the wrong metrics, because they’re incentivized to pick the wrong metrics, right? If you get through more calls in your call center, it’s going to save you money.

Katie Cronen:
I would argue penny-wise pound-foolish, but yes, absolutely.

Michael Maslansky:
Lee, what do you see out there as places where companies get it wrong?

Lee Carter:
I think another place where companies get it wrong, is where they contradict themselves. And this can be super, super frustrating. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, the insurance companies say, “We’re going to deny your claim,” and give you this long explanation of benefits. And then you’ll get a phone call from their service center that says, “We want to help you get the most out of your health insurance. We’re offering this new nurse provider who is going to offer you extra level of service.” And you’re like, “I don’t care about some nurse I don’t know giving me service. If you can’t even process a claim in a way that I can understand. It can be a complete contradiction experience. And so, I think people really need to look at the totality of what it is that they’re offering and what does everything ladder up to?

Michael Maslansky:
And that really seems to reinforce Maria’s point, about siloed nature of things, right? Because, the people in the department writing the note about claims denials, they’re in a different department, they have different goals. They’re there to manage claims and unless they’re also taught to be brand ambassadors, then they may not realize how the letter’s going to impact the overall relationship.

Lee Carter:
That’s exactly right. And that really, to me goes back to why the importance of having a master narrative or a clear value proposition for your company, that everyone understands what their role is in delivering that experience is, is so, so important.

Michael Maslansky:
Maria, one of the things I know that you’ve experienced a lot, is when you’ve got people whose job it is actually to communicate, and then they write communications that seem to defeat the purpose that they’re trying to achieve. What do you see out there?

Maria Boos:
There’s a big training issue there and it connects to the question of, where the investment is made in the customer experience. So, we see a lot of titles like chief customer officer, and customer experience as a function now where we didn’t in years past. And that’s great, but the question is, how does that translate to the people who are actually writing those letters? Or, the people who are actually on those calls in the call center. So, there has to be a way to embed the expertise the way Lee was saying. You get everybody to embrace what our North Star is in terms of customer experience, but then you also have to give them training that’s really relevant to their job. So, it’s not those general platitudes, like write shorter sentences, or achieve an eight on the readability formula, which don’t get me started on readability formulas, because there are a false measure of simplicity. It’s really about, because you write this type of account service letter, here are the four things we’re going to relentlessly train you to do. To always have an opening that previews the topic of the communication. That gives you clear next steps of what to do now, that tells you how to get help, if somehow you still don’t understand or dispute what’s going on. Likewise, in the call center, what are the specific ways that somebody can always acknowledge the customer’s concerns to demonstrate empathy? How do you move on to solutions when the customer is really stuck on a problem? That’s the way to embed customer experience across all lines of business in really meaningful ways. It can’t just be, “Oh, a playbook that’s on your internet,” and you expect everybody to suddenly see how it translates to their job.

Michael Maslansky:
I think that’s great. I think, this is one of the places where I think sometimes executives think that they’re communicators and they can get their companies into trouble, because they decide that there’s a message that everybody should hear whether it’s customers, or employees. And they don’t understand if you add 10 points into a letter that the customer’s not going to really read or comprehend any of them. So, it’s a great, great point. I can give you one example where I think companies can often talk the talk about being customer-centric. And the question is, do they really take the time to understand what’s in it for the customer in every communication? And so, one example that I can point to in the pharmaceutical space, where a pharmaceutical company was really trying to increase compliance or adherence to people taking their diabetes medication. In very customer-focused way, they kept on emphasizing to the customer that it was going to improve their quality of life, if they would just continue to take their medication. It turned out that when we went into research, that quality of life and living longer were not the most important benefits that people cared about. What they cared about was, could they have a piece of cake today? Could they live a normal life in this moment, every once in a while on the path to a longer life? So, it was just where, the client had tried to be customer-focused, but didn’t really take the time to talk to, or listen to their customers. And so, they communicated about the wrong topic entirely.

Lee Carter:
It’s so important that you really spend time understanding what the pain points are for your customers.  The name of the game is simplification. But, what does that really mean to your customer? What are you trying to make simpler? If you don’t really understand what the problems are for them, you might be solving for the wrong thing. So, I’d love to talk through a couple of examples on who does this well? On who really simplifies in a way that is really clear and customer-focused?

Maria Boos:
Yeah. One other example from the delivery of medication, so not on the pharmaceutical side, but just on the delivery of them. One of the reasons people don’t take their medication properly, is they don’t pick it up. So, CVS has done an incredible thing where they use Beacon Technology to send you a reminder, to pick up your prescription, when they know you are physically close to the CVS, where it is in a neighborhood and they send you a simple reminder to pick up your prescription. I mean, that’s just, I think, a phenomenal example of understanding what the problem is from the customer perspective and using really simple, encouraging language to just give people the nudge that they need.

Lee Carter:
Do you think simplicity always means shorter?

Katie Cronen:
Simple means intuitive. And it’s not necessarily just about cutting words, because very often companies will try to strip as many words as possible from a header or a sentence. And what you wind up with, are these really long noun phrases. Very often, it’s much more effective to take a couple more words and explain what you mean in active voice, than it is to just have a descriptive title of something. I mean, even if you think about adherence. Do you say adherence, or do you say taking your medication?

Lee Carter:
Totally. So, Katie and Maria, is there anything that’s just dead simple, that you’ve just been able to show to your clients that makes them think, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I didn’t think about it in these terms.”

Maria Boos:
I think one of the biggest things companies can do is, just address the real pain points first. I think sometimes companies, when they embrace the idea of customer experience, feel, “We’re going to have the most comprehensive program and we’re going to have governance across the whole organization.” And that would be great if they could pull it off, but it’s going to take at least five years to get there. And in the meantime, people are burdened by the same gobbledygook that they’ve been sending out. So, if you just look at what are the top 10 touch points in a customer experience that cause the most friction? Either people don’t like them, they get mad, they don’t understand, they call, they drop out. Just fix those first, and then use those as a model of what else you can do going forward.

Michael Maslansky:
Just on that point. I mean, we did a piece of work for one of the big banks a while back where we did just that, where we found their seven, what we called moments of truth. They were the seven letters that were being sent out by the customer communications team that generated the most follow-up phone calls from customers, which cost a lot of money to manage, created a lot of frustration with customers. And we just took a deep dive into what was wrong with those letters. Why were the communications generating phone calls? And we found that, if we could make it clear what the company was trying to say. They were trying to be nice in saying something that really wasn’t so nice and they were burying the lead. So people didn’t understand what they were being told and so they called to ask follow up questions. So they weren’t being clear, they weren’t talking about what the next steps were, and ultimately we found that by looking at those letters closely, by rewriting them, we could reduce the number of phone calls by 40%, and that has two really positive impacts. It reduces the cost in the call center and it increases the satisfaction and retention rates of customers, just by changing the language and really identifying those pain points and finding ways to improve.

Katie Cronen:
There are really simple things that you can do, too, that I think make a big difference. If I think about every email or letter I’ve received from a company, how many of them begin with, “Here at so-and-so we believe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and you skip right over it looking for the actual reason for the communication. So I think there’s a lot of power in cutting that out of the opening and the closing lines of every communication and getting more into what do I need to do and what’s in it for me? I also think that there are a lot of communications that could use headers more appropriately. I like to think about communications where you’re trying to get people to take an action or understand something, almost writing it as if it’s an FAQ but from the perspective of the customer. “What if I blah, blah, blah, blah? Where can I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?” It’s easier to write and it’s really easy to marry up to what kinds of questions you’re getting over and over again that you want to address.

Lee Carter:
So I love having tangible examples that I can picture so I’m now picturing we can rewrite emails, we can rewrite letters and statements and all kinds of things now, based on really putting the customer first. Are there other experiences that you think could benefit from language, like, I don’t know, what you see on a website when something goes wrong?

Katie Cronen:
Yeah, so if any of you have clicked on a broken link or had a browser issue, there’s a difference between seeing 404 Error versus… You know what, I honestly forget who does it but there’s a difference between seeing that and when your browser says, “Well, this is embarrassing.” That’s a moment of human language where you feel like, “Okay, yes, my technology failed but there was a human behind this company who understands my life.”

Lee Carter:
Totally.

Katie Cronen:
Even little things like, I don’t know if anybody else has been ordering food online a lot these days, but when you get a confirmation from Seamless, they say, “We’re cooking up your food,” and then they have a little asterisk that says, “Unless you ordered sushi, but it’s still on its way.” And I think those moments go further than we might expect.

Lee Carter:
I think they go really, really far and my question is, how do you create a culture that allows people to think that way? Because so often what we do is say, “What do we need to tell somebody?” when you’re talking about customer experience. “What do we, as the company, or we as the business have to tell them?” Rather than, “What do they need to hear?” How can we frame things so that it’s around the customer, around their mindset, and how do you create a culture inside your organization that allows for those kind of fun moments?  I’d love to hear if you have any tips or any experience, Michael, on how you’ve gotten clients to rethink the perspective of the customer.

Michael Maslansky:
Well, I think one of the big challenges is that in a lot of cases, customer-centricity as it’s often called, is understood in the head but it’s not really appreciated in the heart. And that it ends up being an initiative or an effort where people, they do the most obvious things to put the customer first, but they don’t really think like the customer. They don’t really put themselves in the shoes of the customer. They don’t always think what’s in it for the customer, and so in many ways what you’re talking about, Lee, is creating a kind of a what’s in it for me as the customer culture. If they can’t answer that question and we’ve often created exercises, like, “Okay, you’re about to write a letter to a customer. What is in it for them? And can you communicate that in the first line or in the subject line, if it’s an email or wherever it’s appropriate, but at the top so that there’s no question what’s in it for them.” It’s kind of taking things to the next level. We talked, some companies have “voice of the customer.” It’s turned into a research department in many places where people know the voice of the customer but they don’t necessarily operationalize what it means to hear the voice of the customer. They don’t internalize it in a way that really changes the culture and every communication, and so in some ways, I think, the language of customer-centricity or being customer-focused is damaging because it makes companies think that they’re doing the work when in fact they’re not.

Lee Carter:
About 10 years ago, you and I worked on a project together and it was actually not directly focused to customer experience, except it was. And we had to teach an organization on how to be more customer-focused. We use this tool at Maslansky + Partners, remember Mad Libs, we’ve taken them and made them Mas Libs where we often do an exercise where you have to fill in the blank. But the original one, the first one we did was about 10 years ago when we got a whole organization, 300 top executives at this organization in a room and we said, ” If you can’t answer this question, you shouldn’t be communicating.” And it was, “We’ve listened to our customers and they told us blank. That’s why we’re doing blank.” If everybody could do everything they did through that lens, “We’ve listened to our customers and they told us blank. That’s why we are doing blank,” I think you’d go a long way in creating a better experience.

Maria Boos:
That cross-functional collaboration from the very get-go is so important. So, Lee, everybody should be contributing to filling in that Mas Lib at the beginning and that includes legal, that includes systems and technology. I think having disclosure that’s really commensurate with the risk or exposure is another principle of customer experience that organizations need to embrace. If not, you get things like the tag on your hairdryer that says don’t stand in the bathtub and use this. I mean, it’s ridiculous levels of disclosure that don’t really have anything to do with the risk the company is facing. So I think one of the ways we counsel our clients to work together is to say, “You have to have legal at the table from the very beginning so they are equally committed to hearing the customer and creating the experience that you all want to create.” And then when they have an objection, because it’s their job to protect the company, you get them to explain what the potential risk is and then you collaborate on how to mitigate that risk in a customer-focused way. So that’s really different from just redlining a lot of legal language, but it requires a commitment to collaborate.

Lee Carter:
All right, well, at the end of every episode we ask our guests a few questions. And so Maria, I’m going to start with you. Can you tell me what is your least or most favorite word?

Maria Boos:
I think my least favorite word continues to be proactive. I’m going to fall on my sword over that one about why it is such an unnecessary word that has become just de rigueur in business communications. Active is a perfectly fine word. We never needed proactive. So since you asked…I’ll tell you.

Lee Carter:
I’m so with you. I put proactive in the same category as empower. Katie, what about you?

Katie Cronen:
I’ll go with favorite. I have many favorite words but one of my favorite words is asinine because it sounds like a bad word, but it’s not.

Michael Maslansky:
Wait, it’s not?

Katie Cronen:
It’s just fun to say.

Lee Carter:
That reminds me of something that my stepson would have done when he was about 12, when he loved to find ways to get swear words in without getting in trouble.

Katie Cronen:
Yeah, you just say, “That’s asinine.”

Lee Carter:
That’s amazing. All right, and the next question that we often ask our guests is, and I think this one is really important because I love to hear what other people’s superpowers are too, and it helps you get in touch with what’s inside of you, so, Maria, if you had to describe your superpower, how would you describe it?

Maria Boos:
I would say, that I can find order in chaos. So whether that’s cleaning the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner or something much more important about how to see the simple story in the way you want to communicate with customers, I just believe there is order in the universe and if you take an archeological approach, you’re going to find it.

Lee Carter:
That’s amazing and you might find an invitation when we’re stopped quarantining. Come to my house. I need order here, so much. Katie, how do you define your superpower?

Katie Cronen:
I think a lot of people at Maslansky share this, but I think I am a very good listener to the point where I pick up on subtext really, really well. Two people can say the same kind of comment, but given the surround sound of everything else they’ve told me, I can understand when they mean different things.

Lee Carter:
And here I thought you were going to stay making us all laugh.

Katie Cronen:
Well, you know, I’m a woman of many superpowers.

Lee Carter:
Yes, you are. Yes, you are. All right, and then the final take away from today, Maria, if there was one thing that you could wish that people would take away from this episode, what would it be?

Maria Boos:
I would say have the courage to really listen to your customers. Have the right metrics to know what’s really important to them and let that be your guide.

Lee Carter:
And Katie, what about you?

Katie Cronen:
That’s pretty good. I’ll go with Maria’s.

Lee Carter:
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of HearSay. For more language insights, and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, follow us on LinkedIn @maslansky-partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas for us, please reach out to us at [email protected]. That’s all for now. Join us next time on HearSay because it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.