Episode #15: Friday Fun: CX Day, the CXPA, and The Iron Giant
Well, darn it. We missed CX Day (it was the first Tuesday in October). And, full disclosure, I didn’t really know CX Day was a thing until this morning. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it now. In this episode we celebrate CX, talk about the Customer Experience Professionals Association, have fun with The Iron Giant, and give you a peek behind the scenes of The CXM Experience.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, it’s the CXM Experience. We’re back again, every weekday. And I’m Grad Conn, CXO at Sprinklr here to talk about customer experience management, or CXM.
So today, I thought it would be kind of fun… I’m in a sort of endorphin mood because I just went on a long bike ride. And I’m currently hiding out in Florida. And down here for Thanksgiving. But we’ve got here early, so we could quarantine for two weeks, and then a bunch of family time and then we head back to the big city and quarantine again. But right now I’m in Florida, and so decided to go on a nice long bike ride. And went down to the beach and had just a great time. And came screaming back just in time to hit my podcast recording time for today.
And I thought it would be kind of fun to talk a little bit about what goes on behind the scenes at the CXM Experience. So a couple things. One is I record the CXM Experience every day. It’s something that I think is really important, it’s important have a daily rhythm about it. So I’m not doing like 50 of these than having them cut up like a lot of TV shows do. This is every day, I do what I’m doing. And so I’m able to be topical, about what’s happening at the moment. Second thing is that I do these straight. We’re using a program called Zencastr to do it. And this is just me talking straight without any edits. So I just put it straight into Zencastr. And off we go. Number three, I do not use a script. So I’ll have sometimes a deck or two, or some materials that I’m looking at, but these aren’t scripted out. That allows me to do it every day. You know, a lot of people say, oh, wow, you doing a daily podcast, I would never have the time for that. And like well, it, it really only takes me about a half an hour a day to do it. So it’s really not a ton of overhead. And super, super fun.
Next, my producer, and this is the person who makes it all happen behind the scenes. is Randy. And Randy can’t say hello, because he’s not on a mic right now. But Randy is an invaluable, unbelievably hard working member of the team. And Randy sort of makes it all happen, gets stuff posted, gets things on all the different channels. He and I will throw topics back and forth and honestly couldn’t ever in a million years do this without him.
And so Randy and I were talking just before the podcast today. And we’re sort of joking around because I was gonna do a bunch of AI stuff today. And I just wasn’t in the mood to talk about AI. Nothing wrong with AI. I love AI. But I just wasn’t in an AI mood. And so I want to talk about something else. And so Randy sort of joked around and he said, you know, maybe there’s a customer experience day. Like, there’s a day for everything. And so that triggered two things. One is, I did want to talk about how there’s a day for everything, I actually think there’s something there that’s never been leveraged, and I’ll, I’ll put it out in the universe to see what happens. And I’ll do that in a second. The second thing is I just Googled, you know, customer experience day. And lo and behold, there is a customer experience day. We all missed it, unfortunately. But each year, on the first Tuesday in October, the CX community celebrates the professionals and companies that make great customer experiences happen. And this celebration is known as CX day, where it’s an opportunity to recognize great customer work, discover professional development opportunities, and strengthen professional networks.
And this is brought to you by the Customer Experience Professionals Association, CXPA, and you can hit their site at cxpa.org. I literally just discovered this because I was you know, sort of Google searching on something. There is a little video describing what CX day is, they have their own hashtag of course, which is #cxday, fairly logical. And they have CX Day celebrations around the web and they have pictures of people in different locations, which is pretty cool. And so they talk about their momentum and they have a discussion forum and you can attend events and they got thanks to their sponsors. And they’ve got some case studies. So they’ve got a CXA sponsor, CXPA sponsor, excuse me, called usermind and they’re they’re talking about some of their case studies as well. So kind of a cool looking org. I think I’m gonna join and sort of find out more and get involved in them, but for now, that is for all of you to take a look too. CX Day.
All right, so let me talk about days, you know, I’ve had this stone in my shoe for a long time, which is, there is a day, or a week, or a month, even years assigned to everything. You know, there’s national teddy bears day, there’s national Hot Dog Day, there’s, you know, there’s very serious things like Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Black History Month, which, you know, is coming up in February. And many, many, many other things. In fact, if you were just to start kind of Googling all those, there are literally thousands of days. And people declare days for towns, people declare days for movements, people declare days for people, people declare days for objects, people declare days for brands. It’s, it’s never ending. And I’ve always thought that it would be really cool to create a calendar of all the days. A dynamic, always updating, and it would be non trivial, because there are so many. But I think it would be doable in terms of being able just to search and pull it in. Like Sprinklr could easily do something like that, and create a calendar of every single day. And then on all those days, make sure that there is social content, and amplifiable content for that day available. And so, take it. I mean, someone should do this. And I don’t know what you call it, you call it, you know, daysoftheyear.com or something like that. I just I do feel like it would be a great tool, and a lot of marketers would subscribe to it. Because I’d love to know what day it is. And I’d love to know what I can say that would be pithy and clever, and get to a certain target.
Now, if I really wanted to be cool about it, I would have that calendar also connected to all the organizations that are sponsoring those days. Many of them would be nonprofits, not all but many would be nonprofits. And wouldn’t it be cool to allow an aggregated nonprofit collection machine to be running, where you’re basically pulling in all the people who want to advertise in a targeted way to people in a way that they would care, because I care that it’s, say CX Day. And so someone could come to me and talk about CX Day, and I’ll listen. And then there can be exchange of, you know, donations or whatever, and take an exchange on that. So I think that’d be super fun to do. And it’d be it would be great to have as a resource. So if you build that, would you please let me know, I’d love to take a look.
So last thing for today, and it’s just my sort of fun Amazon story of the week. I’m here in Florida, as I mentioned. I do like toys, I play with toys a lot, there’s always a toy on my desk. But packing for this trip, I didn’t even think about taking a toy because it didn’t kind of fully cross my mind, I was gonna be here for a month, which is pretty long time. And sure enough, after a few days, I was starting to get really antsy, my hands are just like, looking for something to play with. I need something to keep me distracted. And it’s funny how Amazon works, I really don’t understand it sometimes.
I get an email from Amazon, and new toy is out — iron robot. So it’s an iron… do you know actually the movie Iron Giant? So there’s this iron robot in the movie Iron Giant, and it’s a brand new version of it has come out with eyes that light up. And the little kid sits on the shoulder with a magnet. And it’s articulated with 16 points of articulation. And Amazon just popped it up and just sort of said, Hey, check this out. And I don’t know what they’re looking at, they’re probably looking at my buying patterns, they can see me buying a lot of household goods like I’m buying, like washing liquid and things like that, that are not normal. They could see that I was shipping everything to a different address. So maybe I was setting up a new household. They know I have a long history of buying robots and space toys. So that’s that’s clearly going on there as well. Nonetheless, I couldn’t have pressed by fast enough, and Iron Giant is sitting on my desk right now. And the eyes do light up and they’re amazing. And it is articulated in 16 points. And it’s incredible.
And you know, that’s a great example of customer experience. You know, it’s not necessarily about how you treat someone on the way out the door, or at the transaction, it’s often about how you bring the transaction to them. You know, Amazon essentially did this great service for me, which is: we think you might be lonely. We think you might need a toy. Here’s a toy we think you might like. I’m like, yes please! I couldn’t be happier. They got me to pay them money to send it to me and to buy it. And I feel like I owe a debt of gratitude to Amazon because they’ve given me something to keep my hands busy at my desk.
So a really interesting way of thinking about CX, which is not just the flow, but also the discovery mechanism and getting people to it. And then you know, the great thing about Amazon is that the flow was very smooth and very quick, and I was able to transact my Iron Giant purchase really quickly.
So that’s it for today. Thank you for listening. This is the CXM Experience with Grad Conn and I’ll see you next time.