Keynote Speaker
Jon Picoult

Seek To Impress™ – The Art and Science of Great Customer Experiences

How do you get your business to stand out from the crowd? Many sources of competitive differentiation can be fleeting – product innovations can be mimicked, technology advances can be copied, and cost leadership is difficult to achieve let alone sustain.

But as Jon Picoult describes in this presentation, a great customer experience can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate.

Filled with compelling statistics and fascinating case studies, this program will give your audience very specific, actionable ideas for enhancing their own organization’s customer experience.

Topics covered include:

• What the “customer experience” is and what’s so special about great ones.
• How great experiences boost financial results and accelerate business growth.
• The current state of customer experience in your industry.
• The link between a company’s employee experience and its customer experience.
• A behavioral and operational prescription for customer experience excellence.

Don’t Just Make It Easy... Make It Effortless!

Lots of companies fly the “easy to do business with” banner. Few ever actually fulfill that promise, as most consumers can attest.

In this fascinating talk, Jon Picoult will challenge your audience to raise the bar – so they seek to make it not just easy for customers to do business… but effortless.

Using eye-opening statistics and amusing real-world examples, Jon explains why an effortless customer experience is such a rare and powerful competitive differentiator.

Topics covered include:

• What is bad “customer effort” and why does it sap brand loyalty?
• How can you detect drivers of bad customer effort, in sales and service interactions?
• What is the financial gain from an effortless customer experience?
• How can you create a more effortless experience – quickly and cost efficiently?
• What is the connection between “employee effort” and “customer effort”?

The Forgotten Customer: A New Perspective On Winning The War For Talent

Many businesses are routinely ignoring one of their most important customers. As a result, they’re not only tarnishing their brand, but they’re also losing the war for talent.

Based on Jon Picoult’s popular New York Times feature, this presentation offers a compelling case for viewing employment candidates as customers. It illustrates how companies can turn administrative recruiting touchpoints into persuasive marketing opportunities that help draw talented people into an organization.

The program also highlights the often overlooked connection between job applicants and actual customers, demonstrating how recruiting interactions can influence your company’s brand and shape consumer perceptions.

Topics covered include:

• Why the “applicant experience” is broader and more influential than you think.
• Why talent acquisition is a business like any other – product, provider and customer.
• What job applicants think of companies’ current recruiting experiences.
• What companies have to gain from a great applicant experience.
• How customer experience management principles can be applied to the recruiting arena.

The Solution To Your Growth Challenge

What if the key to growing your business was right under your nose, but you didn’t realize it?

It might sound outrageous, but it happens all the time. Many businesses, when trying to solve their growth equation, focus almost exclusively on acquiring new customers. But what they fail to recognize is how their existing customers – people they’re already working with – can help propel the business to new heights.

In this program, Jon Picoult explains how you can harness the power of loyalty within your own business, fueling growth in even the most challenging environments.

Topics covered include:

• Why advances in customer loyalty trigger a disproportionate rise in revenues and profits.
• Why loyalty leaders never focus on satisfying and retaining customers.
• The right way (and wrong way) to gauge customer loyalty.
• How to unlock growth opportunities by tapping into the insights of existing clientele.
• The surprising connection between customer loyalty and insight.

It’s All In Your Head: Cognitive Science And The Customer Experience

The mind works in mysterious ways. When people interact with a business, their satisfaction and loyalty is shaped by how they perceive, process and remember those experiences.

In this fascinating presentation, Jon Picoult describes how companies can capitalize on cognitive science to create a stronger, more memorable customer experience. From improving sales close rates to building positive word-of-mouth to enhancing employee engagement – you’ll find the principles outlined in this program to be invaluable.

Topics covered include:

• How memories are formed and then shape customer perceptions about your business.
• Why some business brands inspire intense consumer appeal, while others fall flat.
• How customers can be satisfied – even if your customer experience is far from perfect.
• How service failure can turn everyday customers into loyal brand advocates.
• How common cognitive biases can be turned into competitive business advantages.

Five Surprising Truths About Great Customer Experiences

Many businesses think they know what it takes – and costs – to create a great customer experience. It’s all about delivering great service, satisfying customers and improving retention – right?

Not exactly. These are just some of the common misconceptions that often derail companies’ efforts to enhance their customer experience.

In this eye-opening presentation, Jon Picoult dispels these myths by revealing five surprising truths about what’s really involved in differentiating your business’ customer experience.

Topics covered include:

• Why customer experience is not the same as customer service.
• Why aiming for customer satisfaction is like aspiring to mediocrity.
• Why customer retention is nearly meaningless.
• What it really takes to delight a customer.
• How great customer experiences can actually reduce expenses.

Learn From Experience: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

As consumers, we all have examples of unforgettable customer experiences – memorable either for how great they were, or how awful.

But look beyond the delight or frustration associated with these experiences, and there are valuable business lessons to be learned from them. Every unforgettable customer experience offers a tutorial on how to strengthen customer loyalty, or erode it.

In this entertaining presentation, Jon Picoult mines his own unforgettable customer experiences and uses those eyewitness accounts to illustrate key principles for cultivating customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Topics covered include:

• The best service recovery ever – turning failure into fortune.
• Maggots on a plane – communicating during times of customer distress.
• The best painter in the world – the surprising truth about delighting customers.
• The call center that doesn’t take calls – the perils of internal focus.
• The worst 800-line greeting ever – creating a frictionless customer experience.

The Top Five Reasons Why Customers Are Tuning You Out

Is your business having trouble getting its message across to customers? Do you find that your attempts to communicate are falling on deaf ears?

In today’s smartphone-enabled, Twitter-obsessed, e-mail barraged, 500-TV channel world, it can be tough for any business to capture consumers’ attention. But the sad fact is, many companies fail to capitalize on some basic approaches that would help them to better understand and communicate with their customers.

In this presentation, Jon Picoult describes the most common reasons why consumers often tune businesses out – and shows how companies can change this dynamic so that when they talk, their customers listen.

Topics covered include:

• The current state of customer engagement in your industry.
• How to create a brand that resonates with consumers and employees.
• Why many businesses’ customer communication strategies are doomed to fail.
• The power of simplicity in fostering customer understanding and engagement.
• The most valuable source of customer insight that companies routinely ignore.