The one with three customer loyalty tiers | Ali Cudby Co-Founder & CEO Alignmint Growth Strategies E149

🎤🎞️Get customers to climb the loyalty ladder “The one with three customer loyalty tiers” with Ali Cudby Co-Founder & CEO Alignmint Growth Strategies in CX Passport Episode 149🎧 What’s in the episode?...

CHAPTERS

0:00 Introduction

2:17 The Importance of Customer Loyalty

6:02 Loyalty evolution example from New York Times

9:50 Three Tiers of Customer Loyalty

15:48 Front of House / Back of House - Inspiration from “Bear”

19:23 1st Class Lounge

24:08 Origin of Alignmint

25:08 Balancing numbers and humanity

29:51 Process of Writing a Book

33:20 Contact info and closing

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I'm Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport

Episode resources:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicudby/

Website: https://alignmintforgrowth.com/

Book: keepyourcustomersbook.com

Transcript

Ali Cudby: 0:00

There really are these three tiers and you have to be mindful of them. So I classify them as lazy loyals limited loyals and lucrative loyals.

Rick Denton: 0:16

You're listening to CX Passport, the show about creating great customer experiences with a dash of travel talk. Each episode we’ll talk with our guests about great CX, travel...and just like the best journeys, explore new directions we never anticipated. I'm your host Rick Denton. I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport. Let's get going. Hey there CX passport travelers welcome back to a another great guest. Now today's guest comes to us from a winter day in the greater Boston area. I love Boston. But man this Texan cannot handle those winters. Our guests that even told me that there was a beautiful sunset happening now but the temperature not so beautiful. So it further reinforced. Oh my goodness, I'm glad to be in Texas. Boston, though is a wonderful place. Joining us today from that wonderful Boston Area place is Ali could be the co founder and CEO of alignment growth strategies. Ally's mission is crystal clear to help companies architect a better customer experience through clear, consistent processes. As the driving force behind alignment growth strategies ally believes that customer experience is not just a department. It's cross functional. Guiding companies to transform their customer loyalty ally drives this movement with her number one best selling book, keep your customers today she's here to share insights that will make your customers not just spend more but become vocal advocates for your brand. Ali's experts expertise spans across industries from subscription based industry businesses to retail financial services, manufacturing and beyond, which helps him form this wide spectrum of customer loyalty needs. If you're ready to unlock the secrets of customer loyalty, and grow your business without the constant grind of new customer acquisition, you're in the right place. Let's get this trip started. Ali, welcome to CX passport.

Ali Cudby: 2:14

Thank you so much. I am so glad to be on this journey with you.

Rick Denton: 2:18

This let's have a good little trip here. Let's the boarding door is closed and we are now pushing back and about to take off. Let's start off with loyalty in general. Why did loyalty stand out to you as a focus? What got you started in that loyalty path.

Ali Cudby: 2:34

So I graduated from business school and ended up going to the New York Times Company right out of school, I joined their corporate strategic planning group, which is kind of like an internal consulting group for the company, not just the newspaper, but the company as a whole. And we had different projects that we would be staffed on and I got staffed on a call center project. At the time, that was considered to be a real bummer. People were coming up to me and say like, oh, my gosh, I'm

Rick Denton: 3:06

so sorry, Ali.

Ali Cudby: 3:06

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Condolences. And it was actually really fascinating, because you think about the New York Times Company, this great global brand. And it was right at a time when in the in the evolution of the Internet. You know, when a company when a customer went from being a paper subscriber to a digital subscriber, at that point, they were going from being profitable to unprofitable and we were having a lot of experiences where people were calling into the call center, and then saying, You know what, I'm just going to become a digital subscriber. And my job was to figure out why and how do we fix it? Well, long story short, we were not really giving our internal team, our employees, an experience that made them want to deliver a great customer experience to our readers. And what I discovered was that when we were able to fix our internal processes, it made a big difference with our customers. And thereby we were able to do a better job of retaining these profitable print subscribers. And it was fascinating to me, I started thinking about, well, you know, all of the different aspects of what makes a customer loyal. So these customers thought they were loyal. They loved the New York Times, they weren't trying to leave the New York Times, they just wanted to consume it slightly differently. And it was up to us to encourage them to have a great experience with the product that they had. Because at the time we really wanted to keep them as printing and the focus was less on the customers themselves and really more on what do we need to do inside our organization to deliver an experience that promotes loyalty on the customer. And and that was a huge an aha moment for me and transformed the trajectory of my career since

Rick Denton: 5:07

I'm grinning, because in the customer experience world, we talk all the time about employee experiences, how you drive customers, once we know that, I just haven't never, I haven't really thought about it, at least as crystallized as you're doing it there that well, no, that's a loyalty play, as well. And it's how do we keep our employees loyal? Therefore, they can transfer that loyalty over there? There's actually quite a few, there's a lot that I'd want to, to pull out of that question that you were talking about the transition from paper, to digital. And that desire to keep the customers in the paper product for that time, was how loyalty was defined. I'm curious, were you there during that evolution, or perhaps even observed it outside where there was a recognition that well, perhaps keeping them on paper is not our definition of loyalty, their connection to the brand is how did that loyalties evolve at New York Times, specifically, as just technology has moved from paper to digital.

Ali Cudby: 6:03

So this was such a long time ago, right. And at the time, you know, if you think about the economics of newspapers, and I know, we don't want to go too deep down this, this road, but if you think about the economics of newspapers, we tend to think about them from the standpoint of subscribers, because that's our experience with newspapers. But the reality is that newspapers are driven by advertising revenue. And the subscription revenue is really just basically covering the cost of getting you the paper or getting you whatever, the magazine, the thing that the physical thing. So everything was about advertising revenue, and really all about classified Avenue revenue. Right. So if you think about what got destroyed by the internet, it was classified revenue. I mean, it was It was horrific. And so the, the entire economic model of newspapers basically changed as a result of the advent of the Internet. And, you know, from from, you know, just basic, you know, individuals placing classified ads to every single house that was up for sale or rent being listed individually to like, now it's you go to a website to every car dealer. I mean, you think about all of the permutations. And so it really was a complete sea change for the industry. Well, it

Rick Denton: 7:27

really was, and I think even now, it's a completely different action. And you're right, that was decades ago that that transition was taking place. I think what's interesting that when you're okay, hang on, I still take the dead tree paper thrown on my lawn in the mirror. So who is the you know, the Okay, Boomer right here. So I'll point that mirror right back at myself, for sure. It does, though, point to the fact that loyalty even though loyalty itself, we think has this definition. It ebbs and flows over time it evolves. It's this widely defined, but it's significantly misunderstood word. Yeah, here's for you. What does customer loyalty mean to you?

Ali Cudby: 8:13

So loyalty, I think, for me, but no, I know what loyalty means. For me, it is the deep, long term loyalty that makes people feel like they are connected to a brand. That's what you're going for. And but what I what I see in the marketplace is that this word loyalty gets used in sort of a punch card loyalty kind of way. You know, it's a loyalty program. It's, you know, buy 10 Get One Free, or it's a referral program. And I tend to differentiate those as lowercase L loyalty versus capital L loyalty. And I want, I play in the realm of capital L loyalty and think that companies should too.

Your CX Passport Captain: 8:59

This is your captain speaking. I want to thank you for listening to CX Passport today. We’ve now reached our cruising altitude so I’ll turn that seatbelt sign off. <ding> While you’re getting comfortable, hit that Follow or Subscribe button in your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. I’d love it if you’d tell a friend about CX Passport and leave a review so that others can discover the show as well. Now, sit back and enjoy the rest of the episode.

Rick Denton: 9:26

I like that lowercase L, capital L. It's interesting. You and I have a very similar style there. I talked about that when I'm talking about incentives when it comes to voice the customer and customer experience programs. And what is how do you incent somebody capitalized dollars lowercase i and the pitfalls of the different? So you and I have a very similar style there. There's, there's something that I noticed in your book and it talks about in that definition of these three tiers of loyalty. So we have that definition. You've got your capital, you've got your lowercase but you've also got these three tiers of loyalty and I'm curious, could you help amplify Add that a bit. Are we talking about just different styles of loyalty? Are these tiers that a company might want to grow through? And if it's the growth, how does a company grow through those tiers?

Ali Cudby: 10:10

So there's lots of customers that never get to the threshold of loyalty to begin with, right? And there are some statistics about what percentage of your customers actually only buy once from you and then never come back and it's remarkably high. But once you get to this threshold of a loyal customer, somebody who is buying from you repeatedly, there really are these three tiers and you have to be mindful of them. So I classify them as lazy loyals limited loyals, and lucrative loyals. So, the lazy loyal is a customer who is going to buy from you over and over again. But they really are just buying out of convenience. And a great way to think about that is the coffee Street on the corner of your office. And we may go to that coffee shop religiously five days a week, and buy your coffee and bagel or whatever. And the minute your job changes, and you go to a new office, you're not gonna go back to that coffee shop again. And so it it really was predictable revenue for a period of time, but you don't actually have any connection to the business. They just happened to be there selling, selling the good stuff when you needed it in the morning.

Rick Denton: 11:29

Right? Right, kind of a convenience factor, if you will. 100%. Yeah.

Ali Cudby: 11:34

So if you think about that customer as a loyal customer, and you start to you know, want to understand them better, and you do marketing programs around them, you can be really barking up the wrong tree. So you have to be able to know, okay, that's a good customer, we want to treat them well. But they're not the ones we want to base our growth processes on and our plans around. So then you have the limited loyal, limited loyal is somebody who does feel a sense of loyalty to you to a point. And so the one that I've sort of used as an example of a limited loyal is mileage or a travel program with an airline or a hotel or something like that, right? So right now, delta is my airline, I prefer delta I try and use delta, they have just recently completely changed their whatever it's called SkyMiles program. And so now I'm looking again and saying like, Okay, well, is delta still, am I still a Delta girl, you know, am I is that still going to be my airline of choice. So when they are my airline of choice, I go out of my way to fly with Delta, because it is beneficial to me. But as soon as they do something as a business that makes it not so beneficial to me. They've lost my loyalty or at least made me reevaluate it. Yeah, you can you can upgrade somebody from being a limited loyal to a lucrative loyal, it's not a you know, forever designation. But for right now, you know, they've got you to a point. But what businesses really want are those lucrative loyals. Those are the customers that feel invested in what you do, they want you to succeed. They want to give you feedback so you can get better, and they're going to not just stay with you for the long term. They're going to tell their friends about their positive experiences, they're actually going to recruit their friends to your company. You know, they're not just going to say like, oh, you should go to such and such company. They're gonna drag you down the street and say, You gotta meet my friend, Bob, because Bob is doing something. Those are the lucrative loyals and that's what you aspire to. In your business. And

Rick Denton: 13:49

what I like, as you were doing that I'm thinking about, okay, yes, I'm that for that brand. I'm that for that random that forever. Like, right now we're recording this on a product Riverside. And I feel that I'm in that lucrative loyal, they've been getting a ton of revenue out of me. It's a paid service. But I do that I offer them feedback. I'm in their Facebook community groups, I'm actually I want this product to succeed because I feel that not only is this a product for me, I need this. It's part of how this podcast gets created. And if it's great, then the podcast can be great. And I'm interwoven with that. Limited as absolutely my relationship with certain certain airlines. And a lot of times lazy has been sort of that because I live in a city that has two airlines that dominate the the area. And so the lazy as well, I kind of like the nonstop. So I don't know where that sits and lazy or limited, right? If they got rid of the nonstop I'm probably not flying them. And so it's real easy to align with those. Let's go back to the there was a question that I kind of double question. Do you I want to go back to it. Is it important for a company to try to migrate people through those tears? Or is it better for a company to identify those tears so that they can focus their energies where they need to focus their energy Cheese.

Ali Cudby: 15:02

When you are able to give a great customer experience, you can migrate people through the tears. But if you think about what that lazy loyal looks like, yeah, there's not that much you can do. So you treat them well, you give them a really great experience, maybe they're going to give you some word of mouth value. But if I mean, if you think about that coffee shop example, if your office moves across town, I don't care how good you know that experience was, how likely are you to actually go back across town to get your morning coffee before work? Not it's not very like, right. So you know, it's really a matter of picking your battles now, moving people from limited to lucrative that is much more within your power. And that's something that you want to be working on.

Rick Denton: 15:48

Okay, and that I can see that because again, the brain immediately went to and it almost hurts my heart. There was a restaurant that my wife and I loved when we lived in a certain area, I would have thought that we were lucrative loyals, but the moment that we moved, when we're not driving 20 minutes to go to that restaurant, there's other Italian places. And so I guess in the end, I was a Lazy, Lazy, loyal and I thought, I want to ask you about something because you talked about kind of moving to the tears. And a lot of that is experience based. There's so many other factors. But a lot of it is this delivery of great experience. And there's a show that, as I guess you'd say currently on bear, I've wrapped it up. But I've loved it. It's bear. And it's this show on Hulu that shows the stunning complexity of operating a restaurant, there's so much more to the show. It's a beautiful, it's beautifully shot, the great music, the storylines, the characters are all beautiful, but just focusing on the restaurant part of it. There was a great episode near the end of season two, and there's no spoilers here. But it brilliantly shows this weaving between the front of house which is the dining room and the back of house was the kitchen and the the chaos of the kitchen and the elegance of the front of house. And yet it always together with a difference of style and mood into one great experience for the customer, the diner. That's true of experience delivery in general. I'm curious, how do you use this idea of front and back of house to build that customer loyalty we talked about earlier? Well, I

Ali Cudby: 17:06

love that you use this example because I actually talk about front of house and back of house all the time. So I usually talk about it in terms of Top Chef, I actually haven't seen Season Two of the bear yet which I'm dying to hear this

Rick Denton: 17:19

episode is going to fit right in the way your front of house back house for sure.

Ali Cudby: 17:23

Right. Right. So so but but everybody has probably eaten at a restaurant. And so they can sort of get the get the idea. When you're in the dining room, you're having this experience. And it needs to be good. But the way that it's good is not just based on how good your the waitstaff is or how good the person who greets you is or any of those things, it's really based also on what happens behind the scenes. And you know, how, and you see it a lot in the show Top Chef, where there's this episode called restaurant wars. And they're always an absolutely disaster behind the scenes, you know, they're opening this restaurant in one day. And we're trying to put this menu together and trying to figure out what they're doing. And so backstage is about, you know, the back of house can be really chaotic. And but you need to be able to deliver a good experience for the customer. And so what is it that you can do to create a better back of house experience, so that the front of house becomes easier? And really looking at those two things as making sure that, you know, yeah, you can maybe finesse that front of house experience for a while. But at a certain point, if the back of house is really messy, it's going to catch up with you. You know, the waiter can only stay saying when but for so long. And if the food isn't ready, the food isn't ready and you're going to become irritated. And so and so yes, there can be messiness behind the scenes, in an any business, there's a certain amount of going through the fire drills, doing what it takes. But as your company grows and scales, that doesn't scale with you, you have to create consistent and clear processes, so that you can deliver this good experience to the customer. And that's really what we focus on at alignment

Rick Denton: 19:23

ally little change of pace here, although I'm still thinking about your front of house back of house from bear in front of house back of house from top chef. One of the things about travel and you're in Boston, I'm in Texas and that's a it's only about a four hour flight, but it still can be nice and there can be a lot of disruptions and it can be nice to you know have a little lounge visit their little first class lounge visit either DFW or Logan. And I think the best lounges are perhaps those that do that where you're out there in the front and it just feels nice and you feel relaxed, who knows what heck, chaos is going back behind there. It may have been difficult for the staff to get through employees or airport security or how Do you staff it? Or how do you provide the materials that allow the lounge to be what it is, but it'd be relaxing. And so that's what I would invite you to do here who knows what's stirring behind the back of house but front of house here in the first class lounge. I hope that you enjoy this. Let's stop down. Have a little fun here. And we can move quickly. But we can have a little bit of fun here. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Ali Cudby: 20:22

So from my past, you know, when I was a kid, my family used to go to Aspen, Colorado. And what I will tell you is that Aspen, Colorado did not used to be the glitzy fabulous place that it is now when when my oh yeah, it was a really sleepy little town with you know, town summer, softball league, and everybody knew each other. And it was really, really not fancy. And that my Aspen. And not only that, but I went one summer I was eight, my brother was five, we were allowed to walk around town by ourselves, and like go toy store and walk to Carl's pharmacy and get an orange sherbet. And it was just this absolute Norman Rockwell summer. And that is my favorite past travel experience.

Rick Denton: 21:15

Oh my gosh, I almost want to just sit on that for a little while because that sounds so beautiful and so different than I haven't been asked me about what my perception of Aspen is. It reminds me a little of how I just I grew up in Austin and I grew up in Austin, the 70s and 80s. And I describe it very similar to sleepy college town and other government stuff there. And it's not the Austin that is the Austin today I've got a whole side story about this small little festival that I volunteered at, called South by Southwest that it was unheard of at the time. But that's a different story for a different time. Yeah, grown quite a bit. What about a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Ali Cudby: 21:48

I have this hankering to go to one of those places where you stay in a hut over the water like the Maldives. That's really on my bucket list right now.

Rick Denton: 22:00

Does that sound right? Well, and is that let me just ask you this. Ali. Is that a little bit influenced by the temperature outside right now? Or is it always on the bucket list?

Ali Cudby: 22:09

For those tropical vacations become appealing? Yeah.

Rick Denton: 22:13

That's right. What is a favorite thing if you were to eat?

Ali Cudby: 22:19

My mom's chicken noodle soup. It is just, it's what she would make when I was sick. It is just it's my it's my heart food.

Rick Denton: 22:29

That's awesome. Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'm going to take you the other direction. With something growing up. You were forced to eat but you hated as a kid.

Ali Cudby: 22:37

Yeah, well, since I just gave my mom a little bit of a nod I can. She would make and it was my mother who made dinner, liver and onions. And oh my gosh. And it was she you know, the rule was like, I don't care how much ketchup you drown in, drown it in. But you have to eat. I think it was like three bites. And

Rick Denton: 23:02

so the ketchup budget quintupled the week of liver and onion meal.

Ali Cudby: 23:08

choke it down.

Rick Denton: 23:09

The reason I'm laughing is I have lost count. But in the recent past and I'm talking about only a couple months, liver and onions has come up multiple times on the show. So listeners are gonna be sitting or going, Rick, are you planting these? No, I promise I'm not. But apparently liver and onions has had a really strong influence on people's childhood and I would agree I experienced it too as a child. Going back to travel we're unfortunately going to have to leave the lounge here what is one travel item not including your phone, not including your passport, you will not leave home without

Ali Cudby: 23:43

you know, it's probably a notebook. Something that I can do to Lin take notes in capture my thoughts share, you know, remind myself of either great meals or great experiences are things that I want to do in my business or life. How do you leave home without something like a notebook?

Rick Denton: 24:08

At least we were going into the first class lounge you mentioned that this was a particular focus and approach for alignment. But I think listeners viewers will have already seen this. But listeners may not have seen this alignment is actually spelled a li GNMINTY That name, what's the origin story of alignment? So

Ali Cudby: 24:28

when I was thinking about how to name my company, I talked to a lot of customers and said, You know what is it that inspires you? And the word alignment as a challenge that businesses were trying to overcome came up a lot. So that's where the alignment sort of started. But then when we played around with it, well, let's talk about Mitt because what is mint do? You know when you plant mint, it grows like crazy. And when something is awesome, it's in mint condition and When you make a lot of money, you make a mint. And so that is where the mint came from. So it's very intentional.

Rick Denton: 25:08

That's Oh, I like that. Oh, that's okay. I actually did not know that. That's kind of fun to know that. Mmm hmm. I had all the different flavors, a hot flavors of mint, you've broken my synapses there for a bit. That's a lot of fun. So the work that alignment does is so heavily loyalty based and loyalty. Like customer experience, work gets distilled or if over distilled as a word it applies here into numbers. listeners have heard me rant about scoreboards and dashboards instead of actually understanding the customer all that so the reality is we're talking about humans, you can crunch the numbers all you want, ultimately, this is dealing with people. So how can companies avoid that numbers trap, especially in the loyalty space, and stay focused on the human?

Ali Cudby: 25:57

It truly does boil down to making people feel seen, heard and valued people's decisions to buy, again, people's decisions to talk positively about you in the marketplace, or negatively about you in the marketplace. Right? So I talk about it in my book, keep your customers I talk about it is that balance between heart and smart, you have to be able to dig into how people are feeling and connect with them as humans and build trust and build relationships. And that is a very people oriented engagement. It doesn't mean that the numbers aren't there, right? So Oh, yeah, you can't ignore them. Yeah, absolutely. And I always think that it's a great statistic that so McKinsey did a study and they decided they determined that 70% of a customer's decision to purchase is based on how they feel they were treated in the buying transaction. So it's this perfect statistic that explains the the heart and the smart, right. Yeah, it's a very wonky statistics. So you know, smart oriented, but all about the feeling and the engagement piece. And I do think that in business, we tend to over index on the quantitative, and we think of the qualitative as being fluffy. But we are all humans. And as humans, we really need to feel like we matter. And if we don't, we're not going to stay. And so it is absolutely important to make sure that you have both in mind as you're building out your processes and building out your customer experience. That is

Rick Denton: 27:47

I could not agree with you more when it comes to that. Businesses over index on numbers. And I haven't quite figured out yet if it's just that those that go into business happen to be more left brain and right brain, if that's just the nature of the draw to that field. Or if it's just easier, and I know that's gonna hurt a lot of data analysts. But is it easier to have a number it's clean, it's clear, it's a it's a, it's a defined, there is no gray, it's either a two or a three. And I think a lot of times that qualitative by never can get them right. But the qualitative, it can be harder to understand and harder to appreciate. Yet it hits so much deeper at the heart, when I'm trying to motivate a leadership team to make a certain focus on customer oriented elements of their business. Man, customer stories do so much more than the numbers on the page to hear how a customer is actually impacted or to take those leaders and you know, why don't you go live that economy seat? Yeah, and see what that's like, the difference that comes there.

Ali Cudby: 28:46

I also think a lot of it, I think a lot of the of the the black and white piece is a big component of it, I think there's a lot of business that is driven by a sales oriented culture, a lot of CEOs carried a sales bag for a while. And that is a very numbers driven game. And this thinking about the customer and the retention side of things. It seems counterintuitive, but it's almost a newer side of business. Yeah. And so this, this, and I do also think that there's a gendered Miss to it all, you know, sales is, you know, you're Hunter and Aurora, and it's very, you know, like male and go kill the will to beast. And, you know, retention is, is it's farming, and that's sort of been feminized, and I, by the way, I mean, in case you can't tell from my tone of voice, I think that's ludicrous. Right. But But I do think that there's an element of that in business culture. And fortunately, I see that changing. Well, the

Rick Denton: 29:51

word changing, I think, is the key part there in this conversation and that what you're describing as being ludicrous, was probably actually lucid reality and decades prior to us, we've all watched madmen, right? And so what, what is that world like versus what businesses like today? And how long does it take a culture to evolve? I did not expect us to go this direction. But I'm fascinated by this. And I liked the thought of exactly that. How can we bring both perspectives, regardless of whether it's feminized or masculine eyes or whatever, but bring that into business? If it's historically been over indexed on one side, pulling from the other side is how we will likely get that right, right forward path. You know, Ally, there's something that always fascinates me about somebody that has written a book and a real is this isn't necessarily customer experience related. But talk to me about the sausage of bookmaking, I know there's going to be listeners, and I know actually of active listeners that want want to write a book, but you have, how did you go about that? What's, what's the sausage of making a book?

Ali Cudby: 30:54

So there's two pieces of it. One is being really intentional about why you want to write a book, like what is the purpose of you writing a book? You know, are you writing it because you want something to leave to your grandchildren? Do you write it because it's a tool for your business? Do you write it because you are trying to make an impact as an author in the world, just purely as an author with without a business component to it, people write books for lots of reasons. And there's lots of different ways of approaching how you publish a book, based on what your goals are. And so there, the world of publishing tools has evolved so dramatically. And depending upon what you want to achieve, can really drive how you approach the publishing path that you take. So that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is the writing itself. And the worst hardest thing that you can do, as a writer, and as an author, who is trying to create a book is stare at a blank screen. And think I need to make words happen now. And, and every word that I ever thought has now flown out of my brain. And when I was writing my first book, so keep your customers is actually my third book. And right, so when I was writing my first book, I got this advice, which is, don't do that, instead of typing out your first draft, actually do a bunch of outlining, think about exactly what you want to say and dictate it, and then transcribe that. So you're never actually dealing with a blank screen. And you know, you are always starting with a really messy first draft. But editing, something that is on the page is infinitely easier than starting with nothing.

Rick Denton: 32:52

I have to imagine, first of all, yes, that makes so much sense. Stand up, walk around and tuck it, tuck it into existence, I have to imagine there's a lot of energy that comes from that as well, that probably finds its way even into the words that are chosen and the just the vibrancy of the book itself by going at that method rather than fingers on keyboard style.

Ali Cudby: 33:14

Yeah, I think that there's something like when you're writing, especially in today's world, where you're writing on a computer screen, it all looks perfect on the screen. It's not like when we were writing longhand on paper and scratching things out, right? Yes. So it's a lot harder to edit yourself. And so then you're kind of editing while you're writing and you're doing all these different things. But it's harder to take those that holistic view speaking, the book takes you out of that, and it puts you in a slightly different mindset, so that you're just going and it's a lot of the transcript is a disaster, like it's all the arms and the weight. That's and all that when we do that again. But that's okay. It's a lot easier to edit that.

Rick Denton: 33:57

Oh, I like that. I've got an ally, I promise I've got a dozen other questions that I want to ask you about loyalty and in the like, we're out of time here and I'd kind of like ending on the book because even if you aren't writing a book, I think there's some truth to that of we have spent so much time in front of our screens that the idea of just getting away from the screen and just talking your ideas into their existence there's so much value in that whether it's a book whether it's a blog, whether it's the notes for a podcast coming up you may find me now starting to wander around my office here as I start to prepare for episodes in the future Ali, thanks so much for that thank you for walking us through the the perspective on loyalty the especially those three tiers that lazy that limited that lucrative it's really easy to mentally align myself I know which brand I fit on all of those. And I think a company on the flip side can then start to think of the customers that way front of house back of house and then and I love that origin story that you got that was that was a lot of fun there. Alia folks want to get to know more about you your origin story, your perspectives on loyalty, how they can get to grow their revenue and keep their customers as your book says, how can they do that? Well,

Ali Cudby: 35:05

you can come to my website, which is alignment for growth.com. Or find me on LinkedIn. And if you come find me on LinkedIn, please, please remind me that you came from Rick. Because I get a lot of solicitations on LinkedIn. And I, if I know that, if I know that you've come to me based on hearing me on this podcast, and I will of course cept your connection. And I would love to. So those are probably the best two places. And then if you're looking at the book, there's a website, keep your customers book.com. But really, the book is sold wherever books are sold.

Rick Denton: 35:39

Awesome. I will get all that in the show notes. And I love the fact that just listening to CX passport may be the secret key to unlock access to ally. I love that. How much fun is that? Ally. It's been a fun episode with you today. I've really enjoyed it. Try to stay warm there in Boston. And thank you for being on CX passport.

Ali Cudby: 35:56

Thank you enjoy the sunny climes.

Rick Denton: 35:58

Thanks for joining us this week on CX Passport. If you liked today’s episode I have 3 quick next steps for you Click subscribe on the CX Passport youtube channel or your favorite podcast app Next leave a comment below the video or a review in your favorite podcast app so others can find and and enjoy CX Passport too Then, head over to cxpassport.com website for show notes and resources that can help you create tangible business results by delivering great customer experience. Until next time, I’m Rick Denton and I believe the best meals are served outside and require a passport.