IAM041 – Author & Speaker Helps Companies with Innovative Customer-Centric Strategies

Dr. Chip R. Bell is a world-renowned authority on customer loyalty and innovative service. Global Gurus ranked him in 2018 the #2 keynote speaker in the world on customer service; #1 in North America. He also is the author of numerous national and international best-selling books including Take Their Breath Away, Managing Knock Your Socks off Service, Magnetic Service, The 9½ Principles of Innovative Service and Customers as Partners. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages. His newest customer service book is the award-winning, best-selling book Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles. Dr. Bell has appeared live on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, Fox Business, ABC, CBS, NPR Marketplace and his work has been featured in Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, Businessweek, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, and Fast Company.

Website: www.chipbell.com/

• CEO Hack: Reading and looking at how that relates to customer service.  Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Wired, Rolling Stones; looking at holistic changes and who's disrupting. Book: If it Ain't Broke…Break!,
• CEO Nugget: Find and follow your passion. Bring a balance of curiosity and humility. Being able to follow others. Always be reinventing.
• CEO Defined: It's inspiring people to help others at their highest level to be their highest self.

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE.

Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place, Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:26

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today Chip Bell of chipbell.com. Chip, it's awesome to have you on the show. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Chip so you can get an idea of all the awesome things that he's been able to accomplish and do Chip R. Bell has helped many Fortune 100 companies dramatically enhance their bottom lines and marketplace reputation through innovative customer-centric strategies.

Dr. Bill reveals the best practices from the organization's leading the customer loyalty charge, giving his audiences powerful cutting-edge ideas and unique strategies they can immediately put into practice. He is considered a world-renowned authority on customer loyalty and service innovation, writing over 600 articles for many business journals, magazines, and blogs. And He has authored nine national best-selling books. Chip, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Dr. Chip Bell 1:21

I can't wait.

Gresham Harkless 1:22

Well, I want to jump right in. And I want to ask you a little bit more about what led you to get started with your business and what exactly your CEO story was.

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Dr. Chip Bell 1:29

Sure, my focus is all on the customer. And that has been a passion of my life. I think that's why the good Lord put me on this earth to hopefully help organizations figure out ways to serve customers in a way that's memorable. That's impactful. And that's profound. And so I started my career many, many years ago. With that as a focus, I'm a picky customer. And too many times I've seen opportunities where it could have been not just good, but great. And not just great, but unique. And so that aspect, which we'll talk about as we go along, of making the experience unique has been sort of my focal point, my trademark, and what I would call my sweet spot. But it all began with a desire to make a difference in the lives of customers.

Gresham Harkless 2:17

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And for anybody that's been in business or is in business, we understand how important customers are. So I wanted to ask you and drill a little bit deeper to find out what you feel is your quote-unquote, secret sauce. Or what do you feel makes you in your organization unique?

Dr. Chip Bell 2:30

I think what makes us unique is, is that because we're all about innovation, it is creating an organization that's always changing, that is always focusing on the leading edge that's looking for ways to help organizations be disruptive in what they do. I think it is the ones that win, or the pioneers, the ones that lead the way we know all the fun metaphors about arrows in your back when you're a pioneer. But nevertheless, it's the ones out front that are willing to take risks and try new things, the ones that are willing to fail forward.

I think those are the organizations today that are going to win. And here's why I think we have reached the limits of what I call incremental improvement. We got to revolutionize everything we do. We got to change the way we think about everything. Well, I help organizations think that way.

Gresham Harkless 3:23

I love it, I love it. And yeah, definitely being a revolution, especially with technology improving so rapidly that it's hard to try to incrementally improve and be ahead of the competition. As you said, you have to make you have to be a game changer and make a revolutionary change in what it is that you're doing. So I love that. What I want to do is switch gears a little bit and ask you now for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app or a book or something that you lean on and use that makes you super efficient and effective in your everyday business.

Dr. Chip Bell 3:52

I read a lot, Gresham, and I like to read weird things. I like to read Rolling Stone and Wired Magazine. And in addition to things you might expect them to CEO read, like Harvard Business Review, and a magazine and entrepreneur and fortune Businessweek and all the usuals because I think the insights come from looking at how things are changing in a more holistic way and not in a specific way. And then more than reading it is trying to discern the insight from what you read. It is like okay, what does it mean?

Elon Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla launched or roadster Tesla Roadster out there in space and an astronaut behind the wheel. It's up there right now, up there rotating in space play and David buoys the lap on Mars, which is fun in itself. What's the significance of why would he here be a disrupter squared what led him to spend the money to launch a roadster in space, a car out there in space? So, you know what? Why would he do that?

So it's thinking like the Apple Watch is interesting, but could it become the portal to everything in our life, everything in our life, you know, we already know it has the technology, for example, to be able to, for someone who's diabetic to take to do a test on their check their diabetes and give them insulin, the watch can give you a dose of insulin if it needed to. And so if you thought the watch can do that, what else could it do? And what does that mean for my manufacturing company? What does that mean for my healthcare company?

What does that mean for my entertainment company? And so it's so I think about, I read a lot about who's out there disrupting all kinds of industries. And how is that changing customer expectations? And, you know, I look at how Uber changed the way we think about ordering a taxi on your smartphone, tracking it, because you can see it coming, and being able to pay for it all online, and etcetera. I see all of that. I saw how he did all that. And I go, Well, what's that gonna do to the banking industry? What's that gonna do to the hotel industry? Well, you know, in the hotel industry, now I can not only can I use my smartphone to check in remotely, but it also I can just bypass the front desk, go straight to my room and open the guestroom door with my iPhone.

And so what does that mean for every company? And so it's not just what I read, I think it's how you think about what you read, and looking for those insights that are then translatable to all companies, because now you're looking through the lens of how does that change customer expectations.

Gresham Harkless 6:39

Understand the essence and be able to drill it down to exactly what it is that is transferable to other industries and other parts of your life. So I love that. And that actually transitions me now to what I would call your CEO nuggets. So what kind of pearls or words of wisdom would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs, existing entrepreneurs, and business owners?

Dr. Chip Bell 6:56

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think of several things that have been important to me. I've been doing this for 35-plus years. And I think one is I would say, Find your passion and follow your passion of all above the else, I think the importance of if you aren't having fun, why do it people keep asking me, when are you going to retire? And I say when is about Clint Eastwood. He's about 86. And I don't think he's retired yet, how come he hadn't retired, I know that boy doesn't have problems with his mortgage.

And so I think it's finding something you love and, and being willing to follow that passion. I think another thing that is important to me as a CEO, and I think for all entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs is, is the degree that they bring a balance of curiosity and humility to what they do. I think if you study the lives of those who have come before us, who've been successful as entrepreneurs, they all possess a sense of wonderment, the ease with which they are amazed at things and, and they liked the way that feels. And so they're always curious, but they're also willing to borrow from others and look at what others have done and said, What does that mean for me?

I mean, the Industrial Revolution was started by Sam Koch, did you know that I didn't realize that, he was the guy who invented the Colt Pistol, and he was the one who first applied together interchangeable parts and an assembly line because he got used to pistols being made by hand. And he got a big order for 1000 pistols from the Texas Rangers for a revolver that can shoot five rounds. And he realized he couldn't make that order without some other way. And he'd been looking for a way to test it. And so he finally perfected this whole concept of interchangeable parts, which we've had before, and assembly line which existed before, but he put them together in a way that later Henry Ford goes, we could do that with automobiles, in fact, we could move the automobile and not have the worker have to move. And all of a sudden, from that we got the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And so because it all of a sudden made goods and services available to the masses, and obviously, there were tons of factors that, you know, contributed to the industrial revolution.

But I think being able to look through a different lens and say, What could that do for me, how could I apply that? That's the kind of curiosity I'm talking about, that I think is critical for any entrepreneur, you've got to always be reinventing. And you got to always be willing to try new things and never be satisfied with the way things are my friend Bob Krieger wrote a great book that was titled, If it Ain't Broke, Break It. And all. That means that never stopped changing, never stop improving, never stopped looking for ways to think of it differently, and never be satisfied, because there's always a better way. And part of the rationale for that is because you're delivering it to a marketplace that's always changing. You got to stay.

I think I would add to that having a great sense of marketing and an understanding of the marketplace and what the marketplace wants and needs and studying the marketplace and following the trends in the marketplace, so you can be there and be proactive in terms of what you bring to the market. We all grew up with Ralph Waldo Emerson's great line that says, If you build a better mousetrap the world will be the path to the door not unless they know about the mousetrap, they're not gonna go anywhere. Hopefully, that's a few nuggets that might be helpful.

Gresham Harkless 10:19

Awesome. Well, we definitely appreciate that. And now I wanted to ask you like kind of for what you feel would be the definition and what it means to you to be a CEO.

Dr. Chip Bell 10:27

I think it is an MO get a little metaphysical here on you. But I think, you know, the dictionary says it is someone in a row who influences others to achieve important goals. To me, it's more than that. That's sort of the high-level view. But I think it also has a dimension that says it's inspiring people. It's inspiring people to achieve important goals. But it's also inspiring people to help others at their highest level work in a way that approaches their ideal self. And in a way that honors and values people's dignity and well-being. Their wholeness. I think if you look at those organizations that have been around for hundreds of years, was a great book, written by a guy named already guys who were the head of strategic planning for Royal Dutch Shell called the Living company. And he studied companies that had lasted over 200 years to see kind of what they had in common. And I think they all possess that sort of sense of reverence and in the dignity of people. And they didn't, they didn't go about in a way that used people in a negative sense, they looked for ways that would optimize people's best side, the best of who they are got optimized.

And I think those are the healthy companies that help people do that help facilitate a culture where people want to do that for each other. And so it brings out, I'll give you a fun twist on that. I like to ask people which animal in Africa is the most successful, most efficient Hunter, which wild animal is the most efficient hunter in Africa, and a lot of people want to go for, you know, maybe it's a pride of lions, or Tigers or whatever when a lion goes after their prey only about 15% of the time and very successful. And when they're working collaboratively with pride, they only about 30% Cheetah, which is the fastest animal on the planet, they only get about a 50% efficiency ratio, and half the time they fail.

But there's another animal that always surprises people that better than 85% of the time they go after their prey. They're successful. And it's an African Wild Dog. It's a spotted while No. And when zoologists studied them to figure out what it was that accounted for their excellence in the field and their efficiency. What they found was that they had several things. One is they loved each other, they cared about each other as a pack, Lions only come together for the hunt, and they fight among each other in small holes. It's in their DNA to be aggressive. And wild dogs, you know, they'll even bring food back to those that didn't participate in the hunt, the sick, the hurt, the old, the young, whatever. And so they share. And when you watch them, you can go on videos on YouTube videos and watch them They're happy. They're obviously very happy, they support each other, and they take cues from each other.

They teach their young to work as a team, they teach their young to learn tactics in the field, they don't just rely on the DNA of brute strength and so they focus on the long term, not just the short term, and not selfish at all. And so you take away from that, and you go something about this animal that is so good and the way they work together. And I think that's what great CEOs try to do is to create a culture in which people work so well together like those wild dogs. And when it comes to their effectiveness in this case, it's how frequently they bring down the prey they're pursuing in a limited, more scarce market that they're operating in, in Africa.

And I think the metaphor applies to all organizations that say, it's how we work together. It's the CO laboring, it's the collaboration, that makes a difference. And that means we've got to be supportive of each other. And that means I think for the leader, it's not about the leader, all about the leader and the ego of the leader, it's about the leader, as a supporter, as a helper as a resource. As someone who provides people the authority to work on their own, we sometimes call that impairment, but I think all of those things are what make an organization successful in times that are changing very, very quickly.

Gresham Harkless 14:44

That makes perfect sense. And I appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule. I wanted to know if there's anything additional that you might want to let our readers and our listeners know and the best way for them to get a hold of you.

Dr. Chip Bell 14:55

The best way for them to get a hold. Thank you for that. No, I can't think of anything to add. You've done a great job. Gresh couldn't have enjoyed being with you. I think the easiest way for people to reach me is my chipbell.com it's one I can remember or they can email me chip@chipbell.com

When you go on my website, there's you know, information about my organization, what I do books I've written down all usual predictable stuff. That's where they can get a hold of the easiest way to get a hold on.

Gresham Harkless 15:21

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, we'll have those in the show notes. And I appreciate you so much again, Chip for taking some time out of your schedule and partnering with so much knowledge and information and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day

Dr. Chip Bell 15:31

You as well. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you.

Gresham Harkless 15:34

You're welcome.

Outro 15:35

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co

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