Adam Torres and Shamir Duverseau discuss enterprise level digital customer experience.
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Show Notes:
A great digital customer experience is crucial for many businesses. In this episode, Adam Torres interviewed Shamir Duverseau, Co-Founder & Managing Director at Smart Panda Labs. Explore what it takes to create an exceptional digital experience and the new book Shamir will be launching with Mission Matters.
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About Shamir Duverseau
Shamir Duverseau is the Managing Director, Chief Strategist & Co-founder of Smart Panda Labs. This digital experience agency helps B2C enterprise marketers navigate digital transformation to create the experiences their customers’ demand.
Shamir is responsible for business management, marketing, and strategic development. He has a passion for making minorities part of the business conversation and an interest in promoting diversity across his field.
He has worked across several industries, from travel to entertainment to technology, with brands like Southwest Airlines, The Walt Disney Company, and NBC Universal.
During his last 20 years in marketing, Shamir has held leadership roles, overseeing everything from product management to digital strategy, including user experience design, web development, experimentation, and web analytics. Before Smart Panda Labs, Shamir was the Senior Director of Digital Strategy and Services for Marriott International’s Vacation Club Division.
The son of immigrants who moved to the US in the early 1960s, he was raised in NJ but now living in Florida with his wife and son. Most of his free time includes volunteering with his family.
About Smart Panda Labs
Smart Panda Labs helps enterprise companies plan, build, and improve the activities that bridge the gaps in your digital experience between ad and action.
By helping you use personalization, automated messages, and A/B testing, you can make your website and communications easier to use, more relevant, and more compelling to your visitors, earning you more valuable customers for less money.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BR Guest to apply. All right, so today is a very special episode. We’re we’re welcoming Shair Duver, so on the line into not only the show, but also into our Mission Matters community.
He will be participating as an upcoming author in our next. Book release. First off, SHAIR, just wanna say welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Adam. I’m happy to be here. All right, so we, we got a lot to cover today, so we’re gonna talk about creating a great enterprise level digital customer experience.
Also, I wanna get into what you’re doing as co-founder and managing director over at Smart Panda Labs. But before we do that, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with our mission matters minute. So Shair, we at Mission Matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives and experts.
That’s our mission. Shair. What mission matters to you? You know, what’s really matters to us is having people have the kind of experience that that we all want to have when we walk in a store, when we go on a website, that we all really treat each other the way that we’d want to be treated as customers, and being able to really evangelize that experience across the board.
So having been kind of on both sides side, I’m on now the business, the side I used to be on, on the corporate side, and of course all my adult life and even part of my childhood, having been a customer, I’ve certainly seen all different spectrums of that and, and having experienced all those spectrums, all those angles, it ultimately just comes down to trying to deliver the best experience that, that you possibly can for people.
And that kind of selfless attitude ultimately pays, pays itself back. Fantastic. Love bringing mission-based individuals on the line to share, you know, why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we can all learn from that so that we can all grow together. So, great. Having Yan, and let’s start a little bit to get this kicked off, let’s start a little bit further back in your career.
So how, how did you get started as an entrepreneur? Like, where’d all that begin for you? Yeah, so as I kind of mentioned, I started in the corporate world, spent most of my time there, and over the course of my time there worked with a lot of different partners, both internally in those different organizations and externally with different agencies.
And one thing that happens when you’re in a corporate world for long enough is you get a a bit frustrated, frustrated by the red tape, frustrated by the bureaucracy of everything that’s happening and what’s going on. Just not getting the answers and the kind of help that you truly need. Mm-hmm. Um, eventually that, that frustration just kind of boiled over into the fact of, of kind of feeling like, you know what?
I can do this, I can do this, at least just as well. If not, you know, better than a lot of the partners that I’m working with, the groups that I end up working with and paying a lot of money to. So eventually I, I got with some people who I’d worked with over the years who I trusted, who I knew were smart and savvy, and I had a good business acumen.
We got together in a room and decided to give it a try. Yes, we decided to, we, we started doing it on the side and we said to ourselves, you know, worst case scenario, we’ll have some extra money in our pockets. Best case scenario, this turns into something that eventually can, can actually pay the bills and that we can actually make a good difference.
And I’m here today. Yeah, what a great story. And I, I love when, when, when businesses start pretty organically, like you see a need in the market, you go after it and you’re like, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna give it our best shot. And maybe this is something big, maybe, maybe it’s a, it ends up being a si a sigh thing, right?
Which is both have, its their own pros and cons. But I’m in, I’m, I’m interested in that point in time, like when was that point when you were like, okay, this is, this is getting serious. Like I think we can really grow this. Thing like, like how did you make that decision? Like when, when was that for you?
Yeah, so we started it in, in 2010, but it was probably in 2012 when I got serious. We got a, a large enough account, a project that we attained, and we did some good work on that project. It was fun, all some traveling, which was really nice. And eventually from that, if, if this goes through, I, I think we’re, we’re big enough at this point to kind of make the leap and, and sure enough it did.
So I was actually the first one to kind of make the leap. And subsequently, over the course of ensuing months and years, others then kind of made the transition. Made leap over to joining us full-time, and as you mentioned organically, it kind of grew and became itself. Yeah. But it was that, that one kind of key project that we had that that really kind of helped us to, to be able to make that transition from, from part-time to full-time.
Yeah. Was that, was that an easy decision for you? I, I’ll, I’ll tell you, when I went from being like under the corporate umbrella of these large finance institutions I used to work for when I went out on my own, man, that was a scary moment. How was it for you? Oh yeah, it was by Nomans. Easy decision. I like security, I like padding.
I like me too, you know? So the idea of not having that security, of not having that padding was very scary. Probably one of the scariest things I, I’ve ever done in my life. So you, you plan as much as you can, but you know, it’s one thing to. To be a part of a fortune, you know, 500, 100 organization and feel like this.
This is pretty secure. Like this company’s probably not going away. I mean, granted, you can always get laid off or whatever. Of course, course, you know, this company’s not going away, but it’s another thing when it’s your own company, it’s a lot smaller. You have just a handful of clients. Mm-hmm. So that revenue stream is significantly more fragile mm-hmm.
Than, than it is when you’re, when you’re dealing with a large corporation that you’re working for. So it was, it was pretty scary, but it definitely has paid itself off. And, you know, here I am over a decade later and, and still going. So I’m happy I made the decision. I did. Now there’ll be, you know, there’ll be quite a few entrepreneurs and, and executives that watch this and some, you know what, just for context for everybody watching this, we’re recording this in, in April of 2023.
So let’s just say we’re coming out of the pandemic. A lot of maybe displacement, a lot of pivoting, going on a lot of different things, and some are considering that entrepreneurship route, you know, based on, on your experience, what kind of things would you tell some of those that are start, are, are kind of in that same position that we both were right?
Thinking of like, okay, we’re gonna go full-time. Like from, you know, the, the being under the umbrella of corporate, what are some of the things that you would kind of give the advice to, to that next generation or that next crop of entrepreneurs? Yeah, I definitely say as much as you reasonably can, as I alluded to with even myself, and I’m sure you did the same thing, Adam, you know, you plan as much as you can.
Uh, you can’t. Plan yourself into paralysis. Mm-hmm. But you plan as much as you reasonably can. So take the leap, but, but knowing that you have some kind of foundation in place and some kind of structure in place to move forward. Mm-hmm. One thing that I know I didn’t have when, when I made the leap, maybe you didn’t have yourself, Adam, is that the internet today in, in 2023 just afford so many avenues of diversification.
You can have. So many potential revenue streams. Again, more so than I was able to have, you know, a little over a decade ago. Mm-hmm. And I would definitely take advantage of that. Diversification of revenue streams, get a lot of different things going. Right? Because then as those pandemic events happen in the world, as they do, or multitude of other things that we can’t even conceive or plan for, you know what, how that affects maybe one particular stream.
It doesn’t affect another or, or maybe it negatively affects one stream, but then positively affects another. So one big thing, probably the. Single p. Biggest piece of advice I would give is to focus on diversification. Mm-hmm. Really diversify that revenue stream, get a couple of different things going, a few different things, and kind of continue to work on all those things, and maybe some will take off and some won’t, but That’s great.
You know, that’s, yeah. That’s the beauty of kind of being able to kind of experiment with all these different avenues and really seeing what works and what doesn’t. Yeah, well said. And this is, this is why I love bringing entrepreneurs on the line because sometimes it’s easy to look at somebody when they’re maybe a little bit further along in their journey and think like, Hey, oh, they had it figured out, or they could do something or not.
But I try to, I, I always. Pick on myself on this one. I’m like, anything that we’ve built has been the process of like refining mistakes, trying to get better, making more mistakes, trying to get better. But it definitely is not all figured out. And if that’s any solace to anybody out there that’s in the middle of figuring it out, to get to the next stage of, of where they wanna be, all the better.
Exactly. So Samir, I want to, uh, let’s, let’s change it up a bit here. So, digital transformation, where did this, I know you were working in corporate prior, but where did this, this obsession or this want to help, you know, large enterprises with digital transformation? Where did that come about? Well, as you mentioned, it came about from working in corporate, and I think it came about from the time that I worked in corporate, so early two thousands, really at that time period where, The internet had obviously been around even in the nineties, but I think it was really in the early two thousands where it became this significant part of enterprise companies strategy.
Um mm-hmm. Every enterprise company came to some realization in the early two thousands that. We’re gonna need to invest in this, this, this is gonna be a big thing. It’s gonna continue to grow. It’s gonna eventually become a significant part of our business. Mm-hmm. Uh, a significant revenue stream, and we’re gonna have to really invest in it and understand what that is.
Mm-hmm. So, being there that time when these large companies like you lived to Marriott n NBCUniversal, others were starting to invest in it. You saw a lot of the pain, the growing pains that come from making such a dramatic shift, especially one that involves so many technical elements. Mm-hmm. Uh, which is just a real struggle to be able to, to get your hands around and to be able to take that huge shift, this huge enterprise company that maybe has had some technical foundation for decades and being able to say, okay, we need to turn this.
So now instead of working this way, it works this way. That was hard. That was painful for so many companies. And going through that and experiencing that helped me to see that, you know, there’s gonna be a lot of companies that for a long time are gonna need a lot of help making that shift. Mm-hmm. Really turning that ship and enabling themselves to be able to develop the experience that continues to grow and evolve each and every day.
So now you have a world where, you know, Amazon is the expectation, you know? Mm-hmm. People are just used to that experience and, and, and what that’s like and what that delivers. And they expect everyone to be like that. They don’t care about your industry. Mm-hmm. How long you’ve been in business, how painful it is for, you know, your IT people to make that happen.
Yeah. They, they just have that expectation and much different than it was in the past. As consumers, they can drive that expectation, right? Mm-hmm. They, they really have much more control. So now you’re, you’re kind of stuck and you need to figure this out. So from that kind of spring, this, this interest in saying, how can I help?
Enterprises, how can I help marketers make that kind of digital transformation so they can deliver that kind of experience that people expect? Yeah. To go just a, a little bit further into the topic, could you maybe help define for the context of this conversation what digital transformation means, and specifically maybe some of the early stages that your, that you’re helping companies with, just to give us some examples.
Yeah, no, that’s a good question. You know, people define digital transformation a lot of different ways. To me, very simply put it is how you are enabling yourself as an organization to be able to deliver the digital customer experience. Mm. So being able to, to plop up a website’s relatively easy, but for that website to have information, it needs to have about your products, about your services, for people to be able to do what they need to do, whether that’s pay a bill or request more information or, or purchase something and be able to do that all on their website or on their mobile phone or an app.
That takes a huge amount of effort on the backend to do that. And the digital transformation is saying, how do we get off these old systems that were built before the internet existed? Mm-hmm. And how do we transform them to be able to now say, okay, now I’m built so I can deliver. And people can do this in the, in the digital world, so they can go on the website and they can buy.
So they can go on their mobile app and they can fill out a request for customer service or whatever those different needs are. And in particular, as I mentioned, from a marketing standpoint, we help marketers when we start at that foundation level. Mm-hmm. I’m kind of saying, what are the critical digital tactics we wanna deliver?
What are those key things we wanna be able to do on the website with our email communications, with sms, things like that. Yeah. Defining what those things are saying, what tools do we need to be able to deliver on those things? Mm-hmm. To be able to do that, and then setting up that fundamental structure.
Right. So that’s really the, the starting point. That’s the foundation of it. And then kind of taking that just to the next level to, to get to the, that’s just the edge of maturity. Is in that framework of saying, okay, great, we’ve got these things running. How do we measure how those things are performing in a meaningful way?
Mm-hmm. And tie those metrics back to the big business goals that we have as an organization. And then how do we take that information and say, based on what we’re seeing here, here’s what we should try next. And then begin to experiment and improve, and then really start that cycle really moving. Right?
Because competitors are changing. The market’s constantly changing. People are constantly changing. So you’ve gotta create some kind of framework in place where you can change and adapt with it. Mm-hmm. And that’s really what digital transformation is about. It’s empowering you as an organization to be able to constantly get that feedback loop and keep making those changes and keep adapting that experience for the market and for your customers.
So help me understand this a bit, Samir, because, you know, mission matters. We’re not an enterprise level yet. When I think about some of the things that you’re mentioning with, you know, email and helping with email or a, a website journey or user experience, you know, when I think of mission matters, we’re obviously using, you know, off the shelf things, pretty, pretty straightforward.
We might use Zapier to connect something or some API or like, it’s nothing. Too, too complex at the level that we’re at, but you’re working with large enterprises. Can you maybe help me wrap my head around like what it takes to bring somebody, let’s just say, up to date when it comes to something like email or a website journey?
Sure. So I try to think about it this way and you kind of have to like take a step back, right? And kind of understand the big picture. And that’s, people come to your website because they’re, they’re trying to get enough information to make a decision. Mm-hmm. That, that’s the fundamental thing that, that, that they’re trying to do.
And that’s what you want ’em to do. You wanna make a decision, you want ’em to purchase, fill the form, whatever the case is. Mm-hmm. The challenge becomes, well, there’s certain things that people expect on that website. Mm-hmm. For example, personalization. They expect communications. They expect you to kind of know who they are and, um, have they been there before?
What they’re interested in, have they purchased before? What have they purchased? What they need next, right? So there’s all these kind of questions that we need to be able to answer, to deliver on these expectations, to surface the right information so people can make these decisions. But the answer to all those questions sits in a whole bunch of systems back in some room or some basement somewhere.
It sits somewhere up in the cloud or whatever. Or Yeah. Or multiple clouds. Right? So all this information that you need to kind of put together in this nice mill clean package so that you can show it in a very organized way to your customers or to your prospects, it exists in all these places. Mm-hmm. So we kind of help people connect those dots, right?
So we, we say, okay, what information do we wanna show? How do we wanna show it? Okay, now where do we need to get that information? Who do we need to work with to access that? Mm-hmm. So a great example is companies tend to have, a lot of companies tend to have a point of sale system. So that’s the system that kind of runs it.
Like when someone goes into a store and they buy something, right? And you, and you run their credit card and you charge it. That’s your your point of sale system. And that’s what says that this product is sold for this price. We’re gonna charge it, we’re gonna keep track of that transaction, we’re gonna get the money from the credit card company and so forth.
Yeah. So there’s all this data and information that sits in there. But then people go on the website or they call the call center and they expect that all those different touchpoints have the exact same information. Mm-hmm. If I tell you who I am and I tell you my ID number or my email address or whatever, you’re gonna know that, Hey, I went to the store down the street last week and I bought this cuz you’re gonna pull my customer record, or I can pull it up myself on the website and pull up what I, you know what I bought and I can enter a complaint or mm-hmm.
Whatever I need to do. Well, that requires the website talking to that point of sale system or whatever system that the, the customer service rep is, is working on the computer that they’re clicking into, that that system is talking to the point of sale system. Mm-hmm. So it’s being able to make all those connections, right, so that it’s seamless to the person.
But of course that takes a lot of work on the back end of the actual organization to make that happen. Hold on, Samir. So, uh, I just realized how much I take for granted in my customer experience as a, as a consumer. So what you’re saying is that all the stuff you just described, that doesn’t just happen automatically.
Oh, what only wish, what you just described is like, is kind of like the Barry, I won’t say the Barry. For entry, but it’s just a, it’s a very like expected user experience and customer journey experience for, you know, many companies and just what you expect. So when it doesn’t happen it like that, that experience can not only take away, but it just makes you kind of wonder.
So you wonder how much money that companies that don’t have a system like that or that type of integration and, you know, the different systems talking to each other, like how much they lose from, whether it’s the initial sale or, or repeat customers. And that’s, and that’s, that’s the key issue. Right. And that’s, that’s sometimes what what we, what we miss as marketers Yeah.
Is that, you know, we, we expect the advertising to do so much work and we forget what happens after someone clicks on the ad mm-hmm. And all that additional information that needs to happen. Yeah. Even if you took it outside the world of digital, it, it’s great to be able to, to run all these ads on a commercial or on, on the radio or even, even online, to get someone into your store.
But if a person can’t find what they’re looking for or if they’re frustrated by the purchase experience, they’re gonna leave. And, and again, we all do it. You, you, you’re on your way home from, from somewhere. You decide, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna stop by the supermarket. I just, there’s one thing I need to grab.
I’m go, I’m gonna go in and grab it. Mm-hmm. So you run in there and if you can’t find it fast enough, you’re just like, you know what, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll get it somewhere, I’ll get it some somewhere else. I’ll get it some other time. Yeah. And you leave cuz you got, you got things to do. Or maybe you, you run in and you do find it, you, I know exactly where it is.
It’s on aisle two. I know exactly where it’s, mm-hmm. So you go in, you grab it in aisle two, then you get the checkout and like there’s five lines and they’re all like 20 people long. And you’re like, I’m not, I’m not waiting for all this for sure. Right. You put it down the nearest shelf and you run out and you say, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll handle this later.
So you’ve got all these points of frustration and friction that we run into in our buying experience, and that directly translates into what happens online. You put points of frustration and friction in front of people. People are gonna, they’re gonna bail. They’re, they’re busy. They don’t have the time, they don’t have the patience.
They’re just gonna bail. Talk to me a little bit, and I know this is gonna, like, I know this will vary from, from client to client, company to company of course, but talk to me a little bit more about the process of website experimentation and how you and, and the process that Smart Panda Labs goes through to kind of, you know, push the needle for your clients and to, you know, make them incrementally better.
Yeah. So a lot of it has to do with skin clients setup to do it. Mm-hmm. Um, creating a process around which they can do that, that kind of experimentation, helping them understand not only the importance of the process, but mm-hmm the scope and scale of things that can be experimented upon to be able to feed that process.
Mm-hmm. So one of the first things we do is we help create a roadmap for them so they can kind of track and say, okay, let’s look at all the possible things we can experiment on. Let’s define what those things are, exactly. What’s the definition of success for those things that we wanna experiment on? And then we begin to prioritize them and begin to track them and, and move them through four phases of experimentation, from defining what it is that we’re doing to actually building that experiment, to running it, and then to analyzing the results and, and kind of determining what those next steps are.
So that’s the kind of the process that we help run them through. And then from a thought process of really trying to develop that culture of experimentation. Helping them to see that it’s not just about saying, okay, what, what color is best for what button or mm-hmm. You know, what word is best here? And those things can be valuable, but it’s about saying you need to invest a lot of time and energy and money to make these changes in your digital experience.
Mm-hmm. So to make a change on a website, perhaps the navigation, that can be a lot of effort. Right. And this can be a number of people involved. It can take time. It can take money. Isn’t it better to test that and say, yeah. Is this worth our time and energy and effort than it is just, just to go ahead and do it and move forward?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If you test it and you find out, Hey, look, the data says people don’t care whether we change this or not, or, or even the data says that when we change this, people actually don’t like it. That, that this turns people off. Mm-hmm. Well, how much time and energy and money did you just save yourself?
From just going ahead and kind of blindly making that change. Mm-hmm. Really thinking everything that we’re gonna change and we’re gonna do, if we have the ability to validate it first with data, that’s a validated first with data, and that’s, that has the basis for the decision because that’s gonna yield a much, much better end result.
And now we’re gonna get the most out of our time, energy, and money. And that’s real return on investment, right? Yeah, no, it, it, it sounds great. And I, and I know that there’s some people that will watch this and they’re maybe in those early stages as an enterprise of digital transformation. Are there any, like, and you can, you can feed off this question, whichever direction you wanna take at Shair.
So is there any dos, like some things that they should be definitely thinking about? Or is there any don’ts, like things that you have. Kind of scene where you’re like, ah, I kind of wish they wouldn’t have started there, and I wish they would’ve done something slightly different, like from your experience.
Yeah. I, I’ll, I’ll give you one of each. Okay. So I, let’s start with the positive, right? The dos, right? Mm-hmm. So we were talking about experimentation, even if you don’t have a definitive process yet in place for experimentation. Mm-hmm. Do still try it doing something. In some cases it is better than doing nothing.
And that is definitely the case with experimentation, at least starting it, giving it a try, and starting that, that thinking process that allows data to drive the decision versus just someone’s opinion or what someone thinks will work best. Mm-hmm. Just getting that mind process, uh, really going and really flowing is gonna make a huge difference.
Mm-hmm. So do start with experimentation, even if you start small, even if it’s. You know, starting with just that, the color of the button or whatever the case is. Mm-hmm. Just getting that, that mind process going is gonna make a big difference in terms of helping people to understand, hey, decisions can be made more objectively than perhaps we’ve made them before, or they’ve been made in the past.
When it comes to the don’t, on the flip side of that, kind of has marketers, we think a lot about advertising and we tend to think advertising solve every problem. And the advertising platforms, the, the Googles and the Metas and the, the LinkedIns of the world. Mm-hmm. They want you to think that they’re, that spending money on their platforms is the solution to every problem.
And, and they’re very good at that, right? Yes. They’re so, but again, when we think about it, people spend moments, just mere moments interacting with an ad. Yeah. They spend the overwhelming majority of their time making the decision based on what’s happening on your website or, or whatever other digital property that they’re interacting with.
So how much money are you spending on ads getting them there? How much money are you spending on where people are spending their time? And does that equation really make sense, right? Are you spending the over one major majority of your dollars where people are spending seconds, but then not having any real investment where people are spending, you know, minutes coming back again and again in order to make their informed decision and ultimately become a customer?
What? What’s that balance? So don’t be fooled by thinking advertising is a solution to every problem. Really focus on that post-click experience. What happens after the click? What happens? Post-click, and make sure you’re putting the investment there because that investment is gonna drive profitability.
That investment’s gonna reduce your customer acquisition costs. That inquest, that investment is gonna drive customer lifetime value. Hmm. That’s great. Tell, tell me a little bit about this, how we should all be thinking about, and this, I think there’s a lot of crossover here, by the way, from the enterprise also to the small business.
Um, but how we should be thinking about the idea of, of omnichannel digital campaigns, marketing campaigns, like how should we be framing that? Because, you know, some some’s gonna be, obviously online, the digital component, some’s gonna be email, some’s gonna be like, and, and really a lot of things people are talking about right, is attribution and like where the actual.
Where to spend the most money and what, and you know, get the best ROI on it. How do you view that though? The omnichannel marketing component of this? Yeah, it’s critically important and people are easily distracted. People’s attention spans are are small. They have a lot of things competing for their attention, and I’m not talking about the things that are competing for their attention online.
There’s things competing for their attention just in the, you know, in the real world, right? Yeah. The things that they’re going through each and every day. So often it takes multiple touchpoints. Not so much to, you don’t wanna bother or kind of be a nuisance to someone. Yeah. But you, you really just wanna help remind them of kind of like, Hey, this is something you were interested in doing.
Kind of complete the process, right? Mm-hmm. So a lot of times people have the full intention of completing the process in buying. They’re just distracted. Mm-hmm. So omnichannel plays a role in that because, Again, it may start with the ad, but then it goes to the website and mm-hmm. You start to kind of look around, but then you get distracted and, and you leave.
Mm-hmm. And that’s when the email gets sent and says, Hey, you were, you were on the website, you were searching for this, you’re still interested in this. Yeah. And Oh, that, that, yeah, that’s right. And you know, you go back and maybe you get a little bit further in the process and you add something to your cart and then you leave again.
And that’s when you get the email or text message that says, Hey, you left this in your cart. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. You still looking buy, oh, that’s right. I need to buy that. Yeah. So you get all these kind of touchpoints kind of driving you all the way down that customer journey until ultimately you, you make that decision, right?
So that’s why omnichannel is so important, because you need those touchpoints, you need those kind of triggers and reminders to kind of nudge you down that process. Mm-hmm. To kind of hold your hand down that path and to ultimately converting. Yeah. Well, as I, as I mentioned kind of in the beginning of this, and I should say it again, is that, so we’re not gonna go too far into the book today.
And the reason for this, for everybody watching is because we’re gonna be bringing Samir back onto the, onto the show for part two of two of this interview series on him, and we will actually do a deep dive into his writing and into what he presents in the upcoming Mission Matters release. But Samir just.
Kind of keeping it high level today, and I know we’re still in editing and we’re still refining content, so I’m not, I’m not holding you on the hook for this, but, uh, high level, what are some of the things you hope to propose in the upcoming release? It’s really about saying the, the importance of focusing on those key elements that we talked about today of digital transformation, right?
And really focusing on that, that post click experience, but also focusing on elements around that that maybe we don’t think about. So the importance of diversity when it comes to really creating a good customer journey. That you’re creating this, this customer journey for all kinds of different people.
And our teams need to be representative of the kind of people. That we’re, we’re trying to talk to. So if our teams don’t reflect that same diversity, then it’s gonna be hard to communicate to the diversity of the market that we’re, that we’re, that we’re speaking to. So there’s not just kind of the very logical kind of 1, 2, 3 step things in there.
Mm-hmm. But there’s also those more subtle, more social aspects that I think we start to address as well, that are really important to also taking into consideration if you really want people to, to be, to be startled and amazed, impacted by the experience that you’re trying to deliver to them. All right.
I’m, I’m cutting you off there. You can’t give them everything, right? There’s a teaser. We still, we still happy, but, uh, to, to pick up a copy of the book, of course, when it’s ready. And also to, to, to tune into the second interview. So I’m gonna cut you off there. But that being said, I mean, really, it has been great having you on the show today and learning more about, of course, smart Panda Labs and also, you know, what it takes to create a great enterprise level customer experience and post-click experience.
That being said, I mean, what’s next? I mean, what’s next for you? What’s next? For Smart Panda Labs. I think really about smart panel labs right now is really about trying to do what we’re doing today, which is trying to really evangelize that message, right? Trying to get people to really understand the different ways that they can really touch and impact the, their customers and deliver that kind of experience that people are really expecting and demanding.
Yeah. We get so blinded sometimes by kind of the, the, the goals and the needs of our organization that we become very organization centric. Right. A bit, a bit selfish about those things. Instead of kind of recognizing that, having a more selfless point of view, that being the needs of the customer will eventually meet the needs of the organization.
So we’re really about starting to evangelize that and, and really try to get that message out there and hope that people kind of listen and begin to, to be able to spread that message themselves. And Samir, if somebody’s watching this or listening to this and they wanna follow up and they wanna learn more about Smart Panda Labs, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Yeah, they can certainly visit us at our website, smart panda labs.com. They can also contact me, connect with me on on LinkedIn if they’d like to follow me. I very much doubt you’ll find another Shamir duo on LinkedIn. So it should be pretty easy to find. So fantastic, and we’ll, we’ll put all that information, by the way, in the show notes so that our audience can just click on the links and head right on over and check you out.
And of course, check out the website. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters or engaging in an episode, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs and executives, and having them share their mission, the reason behind their mission. Really why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and what we can all learn from that, so that we can all grow together again.
The whole point of the Mission Matters platform is so that we all grow together. If that’s the type of content that sounds interesting or fun or exciting to you, we welcome you Hit that subscribe button because we have many more mission-based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing.
And Samir, again, it has been a absolute pleasure having you on the show. Can’t wait till the next time we get to do this again. I’m looking forward to it. Adam, thank you again so much for the opportunity.
