How Client Expectations Have Changed

Ian, welcome to the same side selling Podcast. I'm

Ian Altman. How have client expectations changed in recent

years? Well, I want you to think about the experience that your

customers have every day and how the state of the art even five

years ago isn't acceptable today. So a few years ago, you

could send a message to your client that their order was on

its way. But that's not really enough anymore. It used to be

that customers had access to product information only through

sales people. Then we had the internet, and now they get

access to cut to to product information and making decisions

about buying without sales people and now customers have

expectations that not only is information available online,

but just about everything is available in real time. See,

recently I was traveling on airlines and to make it so it's

an equal opportunity episode today, I will tell you that I

had an equally frustrating experience on United Airlines

and on American Airlines in the past year. In each case, I was

in a situation where I had checked a bag, which I almost

never do, but if I'm, if I'm, let's say, bringing wine to

somebody, I have to check the bag. If I have golf clubs, I

have to check the bag. So it was in each case, there was rare

instances where I had to check a bag. And through flight delays

that can happen or change in aircraft, or all these things

that are totally reasonable things to have happen. The

airline had lost track of my bag, but because I have RFID

tags in my bag, I had more accurate and up to date

information about my bag than they did. So did the airlines

make use of that information? No, of course, they didn't.

Instead, they tried to convince me that the information I had

that was real time as of two seconds prior to sharing the

information with them was outdated. They knew better where

the bags were than I did, and of course, as a customer, I was

frustrated because I was trying to help them succeed, and they

weren't taking that information, and instead, were committed to

failure, which made it really frustrating, made a negative

experience for me. This is one of these things where they were

relying on their outdated systems, their outdated

methodologies, and saying, no, no, trust us, we know where your

bag is. And I'm saying, no, no, my bag is at gate D right now,

and we're at Gate A, I'm pretty sure it's not there. I know

exactly where it is. And they said, Oh, well, it's probably

outdated. And I said, No, no, this is as of three seconds ago.

As of two seconds ago. This is current. It was just scanned,

and it's almost like they didn't believe it. And then, of course,

the airline fell back on their own procedures and said, Well,

you know, things are complicated, and there was no

way for us to know where the bag was, when the reality is we knew

exactly where it was. One of my team recently were working on

something, and we were building a plan, and she said to me, Hey,

I hope it's okay. I cheated, and I used AI to draft a plan, and

it's pretty good. I'm just modifying it. And my response

was, you didn't cheat. You intelligently use technology to

save yourself time and learn from other people's experiences.

So the question is, are you as transparent as Uber when it

comes to pricing and location, so your customers know where

things are at all times. Do you manage expectations as well as

Amazon does when it comes to deliveries? When I'm receiving a

package via Amazon, not only do I have a sense of when it's

going to arrive, but once it's on in route to me via Amazon, I

know that I'm four stops away. I can see where the vehicle is in

my neighborhood, which is scary in and of itself, because it'll

tell me it's six stops away and it's two streets over in our

development, which just tells me how much business Amazon is

doing in our community. It's not about competing with Amazon or

competing with Uber, but instead, what you need to

recognize is that your B to B customer is used to getting that

live updated information every waking moment, from Uber, from

Lyft, from Amazon, from all the vendors they deal with day to

day. So when you don't implement similar systems that provide

real time information when you don't use AI to make things

faster and better for your customers. When you're not

embracing this new technology, you can quickly become

irrelevant, and all of a sudden, your customers will lose faith

in your ability to execute, and some people will. Say to me,

Well, you know, I don't think we're ready to do that. And the

question I have for you is this, if you're thinking you're going

to wait, what would happen if your competition beat you to it?

And now the bigger question is, what if you beat them to it? So

don't fall back on your old systems and don't say this the

way we've always done it. What I want you to think about is,

where can we make changes today that will actually improve our

customers experience? Where might we use AI to help our

customers get answers faster? In our same site selling Academy,

we implemented recently, AI, something we call ask virtual

Ian. So 24/7 our members can go into the system and ask

pieces of content that we've loaded in and train an LLM, a

large language model in AI to help provide answers to our

customers. And you might say, well, Ian, doesn't that make you

somewhat irrelevant to your customers? I guess to a certain

degree it does. It could make it so they're less dependent on me

personally, but what it means is that we get a sense of the

questions are asking, which means I can tailor my content to

their needs. They get answers quickly. We can also see if

they're not getting answers that we think are the right answers,

and we can tweak our model a little bit to create better

information so that over time, it gets better as people use the

system. It's the same thing you can do for your customers. So

once again, what would happen if your competition got there

first, and what kind of market opportunity could you seize if

you got there before then, if there are topics you'd like me

to address, just drop me a note to Ian at Ian altman.com see on

the next episode of the same side selling podcast. So long

Ian. Long.