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“The customers who complain aren’t your biggest problem. They’re your biggest opportunity.”
Ellza Malok
🛠Actionable Listening Tips
✅ If you’re in B2B sales & marketing, pay close attention to the sections on Speed to Lead, Peer Influence, & Buyer Psychology.
✅ For CEOs & Founders, the insights on customer intelligence, community-led growth, and advertising shifts are must-listens.
✅ If you’re in product development, listen to how AI-driven insights from customer conversations are reshaping innovation.
[00:00] – Introduction & Guest Overview
[01:20] – The Alice in Wonderland Curiosity
[03:10] – Ego vs. Empathy in Marketing
[06:51] – Speed to Lead & The CIA’s Sales Strategy
[11:52] – Politics, PR & Framing the Narrative
[14:11] – Buyer Psychology: How We Learn & Make Decisions
[19:11] – The Death of Traditional Advertising?
[24:06] – The Power of Community in B2B Marketing
[29:06] – Fake Reviews & Trust Issues in B2B
[31:12] – The Net Promoter Score (NPS) Trap
[37:13] – Hidden Gold in Conversational Data
[42:35] – How the Best Companies Use Customer Intelligence
Guest: Ellza Malok
Key Takeaways & Insights:
1. The Power of Research & Curiosity in Marketing
2. Empathy vs. Ego in Marketing
3. Speed to Lead: The CIA & First Mover Advantage
4. The Growing Importance of Communities & Peer Influence
5. The Death of Traditional Advertising?
6. Net Promoter Score (NPS) & Customer Insights
7. The Future of Sales & Marketing Intelligence
Final Thoughts
Stay Tuned for Part 2!
00:00- Speaker:
Welcome to the chat. Come behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past 10 years at Chatmetrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales. across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales who share insider secrets and strategies for driving inbound success.
00:36-
Join us on The Chat, your front row seat to the future of inbound.
00:48- Terry Wilson:
Today, we’re thrilled to welcome a true innovator in the marketing world, Ellza Malok. As the founder and chair of the Blue Monarch Group, Ellza has built a powerhouse agency that combines psychology and data science to craft marketing strategies that truly resonate.
We’re The journey from Kosovo to becoming an award winning leader in global marketing is nothing short of inspiring. Known for her Alice in Wonderland curiosity, which we’ll dig in a little bit later on, Elza is unafraid to go down the rabbit holes in her research, redefining what it means to connect with audiences on a meaningful level.
Stay tuned for an inside look at the mind of a trailblazer changing the game in modern marketing. Ellza. We will definitely get onto the question about the training that the CIA does in terms of, um, speed to lead and speed to responses in particular, but you’ve been described as someone with an Alice in Wonderland curiosity.
Constantly exploring your rabbit holes in psychology and data to drive your marketing strategies. What’s the most unexpected insight you’ve uncovered down one of those rabbit holes that’s transformed the way you think about connecting with audiences?
01:58- Ellza Malok:
Terry, thank you so much for having me on. Um, it’s a delight to kind of sit and chat with you about, about it. there’s so many unexpected things. gems that you kind of find when you put research first. Um, the entire, my entire workplace offers are, we’re, we’re found from that, um, elements around how do we drive, uh, further on a user experience beyond the general UX psychology models. So it kind of goes on. And the funniest one I guess I have is, you know, helping an organization re recruit a different personality and then realizing they were only they were recruiting a very wrong type of personality. That was much more givers than takers.
02:44- Terry Wilson:
Mm
02:45- Ellza Malok:
sometimes even borderline, uh, uh, Sociopathic, uh, tendencies in, in the recruiting models without even understanding it.
So there’s, there’s, there are so many of these nuggets and I, and that’s why I think, um, that that curiosity 1st, um, is, is something I live up to. In fact, I was so curious that everyone used to tell me, you know, curiosity killed the cat. And then I actually looked up the whole quote and realized.
03:10- Terry Wilson:
hmm.
03:11- Ellza Malok:
The rest of it is in satisfaction brought it back.
03:14- Terry Wilson:
Yeah.
03:14- Ellza Malok:
um, that whole Nine Lives thing apparently works really well for curious cats.
03:20- Terry Wilson:
Look, I think research as well is one of those things that any good marketer really needs to do at the front end because it’s the research and understanding the market and understanding the product that allows you to, you know, Effectively deliver messaging and, and get the outcome that you’re looking for with marketing, which is really about brand awareness and, and the ultimate goal of increasing sales.
03:45- Ellza Malok:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think even when you go into, um, and it, it takes a certain level of reduction in ego, I think for you to say, I’m going to go research because I don’t know, um, especially the more seasoned you become as a marketer that there’s a level of empathy around. Let me go understand something that. May have changed, may have been different. Um, so I do think that there’s, um, a little bit of that and, um, knowing that research is probably going to play a stronger role because the, the acceleration to change has gotten rapid over year, quarter over quarter, week over week sometimes, um, is so critical to our, to our process.
04:31- Terry Wilson:
You know, you’ve just mentioned their empathy and ego in the same sentence, it’s like, it doesn’t happen very often, but you’re so, I think you’ve, you know, absolutely nailed it when it comes to research, one of the biggest barriers can be ego and that I already know, I know, I think I know, through my life’s experiences, I know already, um, and yet that yeah.
It’s really the, that empathy to take those steps that uncovers little insights or the little nuggets, the little, um, unique mechanisms or particular little components along the way that can just make a huge difference.
05:07- Ellza Malok:
Absolutely. And I think that I think the marketing roles are going to be significantly more. Empathy driven. And this is more of a trend that I’m seeing than they have been ego driven. We, come from that, look how amazing this company is. Look what they can do to the end of it, to more of that point, pain point based model of here’s how we can help you and here’s some stories of people just like you. And I’m taught, and I’m not even conversing on the consumer side, but the B2B side, probably even more so in that process. So. What, what has traditionally worked may not work because buyer intelligence is at an all time high and it’s going to continue to be so there’s more information available to, um, any type of buyer than there has been in human history.
05:57- Terry Wilson:
Absolutely. Look, I sort of coined it as, as other centered versus self centered. And when you’re other centered, then you just have a completely different focus on your messaging. And we found it out in the early days when we were starting our email outreach, for instance. Um, we, it wasn’t so much that we were completely self centered, but we were talking a lot more about what we can do for you as opposed to what you need help with and, and, and, um, others that aren’t necessarily doing it as well.
It shows there might be an opportunity for you. phrasing the whole messaging to be from their perspective as opposed to ours. Let’s jump onto the big question that’s in my mind. You and I spoke well, a couple of years ago, almost now. And I mentioned that there’s a statistic about speed to lead, um and that we’ve, we’ve discovered it now and over the last decade of doing live chat.
And there’s been research that’s done as well. That shows that over 50 percent of winnable deals, in B2B Go to the organization that responds to the inbound lead first. And I remember your eyes lighting up when you said that. Now that reminds me about the CIA. Please tell me that story about the CIA. I’m fascinated to think that going from a Business to business, um, research and, and study that we know works and that we’ve seen work ourselves in terms of timing of response.
How, how does the CIA, um, come up with a similar sort of thing or believe in the same philosophy?
07:32- Ellza Malok:
the story actually originally started when I was, um, uh, an analyst and I was reporting up to the VP of sales who has a military and intelligence background. and his whole comment around, you know, leading sales was whoever spoke first. It took me about a decade to get what that really meant from an intelligence standpoint.
Um, but first mover advantage automatically plants a seed in the brain. Your buyer’s mind and anybody’s mind, you can, you can use this beyond sales. You can use it anywhere. Really? You’re planting the seed that will continue to fester and nurture that even when counteracting evidence comes into play, it’s harder for that seed to go away or that, particular notion, because it’s on a neuroscience level.
It’s that fax action. There’s a, there’s kind of a dopamine hit that get that the receiver gets from, from that. And, and then it, it’s. Once you get a lot of other responses, as we know, you know, when, when buyers their three to five, um, potential vendors or service providers that they want to use, the others start to kind of become cognitive overload a little bit.
Cause then everybody starts to roll in around it. Um, but I, I heard that then. Then as I was doing psychology research, I was like, oh, this makes sense why That was such a, an element of, of how intrinsic it was to the sales process that, that we organized. And I was in the analytics role at the time, so just kind of measuring those and, and a lot of it was those time-based analytics that I was asked to do.
And I’m like, I wonder why this is such a big point. And then. Um, a few years ago, and I can’t remember the, um, the, the, the speaker’s name, but he also came from an intelligence background and he mentioned that this is part of the intelligence training that a lot of those go and we know that, you know, CIA does a ton of psychological intelligence, um,
Throughout the process so it was you know those pieces of puzzles of puzzle
started to make much more sense
Um, as, as I was doing my psychology research for BMG and that was probably one of the first nuggets of “ahhas” that I had, because I went through a journey of about a year of just investigative research before actually doing pilots and going through the process.
And it was, it was just such a. Wow. That’s interesting. I wonder what else is in, you know, that Rolodex, of nuggets that I can go in. So, um, that’s really how that whoever spoke first spoke best mentality. And transparently you see this everywhere. You see this in politics, you see this in PR, you see this in so many of these, everyone says we’ve got to get a message ahead of the problem, because if you get it ahead, you technically spoke first and it’s a psychological trigger to. Be perceived at least as more believable and more trustworthy, whether or not that’s the case, is a different question. Absolutely.
10:47- Terry Wilson:
It
was fascinating for me to
watch
from Australia this whole
election process that’s been going on and I’m not going to get into politics here, but in particular, I saw a, it was almost a behind the scenes documentary snippet of how Trump was watching, um, a, uh, Kamala speach And he and his team were sitting there taking snippets out of that and putting them into Twitter like as they’re being said within seconds of them being said in real time.
it was fascinating and all I could keep thinking back was, you know what, people are watching this. He is now the first to speak in response to these statements that have been made, and he is having more of an impact on framing the conversation, I feel, than what the person actually, regardless of who it was, when you’re in that environment, the person that’s responding like that and commenting and putting a frame around those particular words that the presenter is saying, I think they’re having a bigger impact on, on the message that’s being delivered than the person that’s actually presenting it.
It was fascinating to watch.
11:54- Ellza Malok:
Absolutely And even in that medium, it’s such an interesting way to do it because it’s also an inherently easy way for, in this case, his buyers to absorb the information. We all remember the, the, um, Twitter watch parties that we do on TV. This is the equivalent of that. It’s just. On a political side, it’s not, um, you know, West Wing or whatever, whatever shows your flavor of it, um, for it that that is what occurs and transpires. So it it’s kind of that coupling of. Whoever spoke first that first mover advantage with a medium that is already inherently a pattern in in there in a particular of people. So, it kind of makes a ton of sense and that’s that’s that goes back to regardless of whatever party you align with, it goes back to, like, having. Specific tactics of the messages that is, is, is definitely important. The vehicle in which you deliver the message is just as important. and then how you roll that out. You can’t, sometimes, it helps to go, you know, guns blazing, you know, shoot the runway, let’s, let’s move. Other times you have to pace yourself because the, the path to adoption of just that, that idea, that concept is. is far greater. My, um, a lot of my work is in tech and life sciences. So before I even started BMG, it was a lot of, do we introduce this particular therapy into the market? How do we introduce this particular technology into the market? Um, so that, that, that’s one of the reasons why that, that method just ended up working so well is methodology and vehicle, um, to, to get that kind of level of success.
13:46- Terry Wilson:
If you think about it from a buyer’s perspective and back to product now away from away from politics, normally when somebody is putting an inquiry and they’ve already done some research, they have a kernel of knowledge in their mind, certainly about the problem that they’re trying to solve, but by the time they’re reaching out to an organization, they kernel of knowledge about that information about that business itself.
Thank you. When we go through the learning process, the bigger that kernel gets, the easier it is to slot in new pieces of information. And I think once you’re at that stage where you’re reaching out about an organization, they already have an understanding. The impact that a speedy response has, and a response that isn’t just, hello, how are you?
It’s actually responding to their inquiries, having, and entering into a conversation. The knowledge about that particular component grows very quickly and exponentially during that conversation. And, and I think further to your point before about messaging overload as the others start to come in, this is how you, you get the opportunity to build the framework because you’ve got the, the, the buyer’s got the kernel of knowledge.
It’s very easy for them to slot in the pieces of information that you’re saying, and that builds the framework about how they should understand the problem, how they should solve the problem. When they start to get countering information, pieces of information come in, it’s more doubtful and cynical than as opposed to, Oh, yeah, that’s reinforcing it.
And if it does reinforce what the original responder says, then all it’s doing is saying, Yes, that person was right. It’s not saying, Oh, yes, this is now where I want to be the path that I’m moving in. It’s a, it’s a fascinating component for me, that whole, the way that the speed to lead actually leverages off the way that we learn.
Yeah.
15:39- Ellza Malok:
it, it’s so true. And it actually becomes if, if, uh, one of the first books I read, uh, in, in this space that, that became the catalyst was, uh, Robert Cialdini’s, uh, uh, influence book, and he talks about the levers of influence and in that scenario, your competitors became your social proof.
15:59- Terry Wilson:
Absolutely correct. That’s exactly right.
16:01- Ellza Malok:
such an interesting pathway to kind of organize. And if you can orchestrate that by responding first, you will have a higher chance. And we know the stats, right? Very few people will actually reach out individually to create an inbound. Um, because we’ve trained them not to do so. Um, so it’s no longer an organization communicating to their customers. There’s behavior learnings that the customers are doing to circumvent the game that potentially, or kind of the environment that,, the seller has, has provided. So it is, it’s bilateral now. Um, And 2, if, since they know that risk of, I know I’m going to get calls, I know I’m going to get, you know, there’s going to be a bombardment of information that’s going to come at me for them to take that risk in 2024.
That’s a really, really high opportunity. Right there, because those organizations are going to do this lately and the buyers and the procurement team are going to say, yeah, sure. Send me 5 members that I can go investigate. so. I would, I would dare say even that. you’re getting those kind of inbounds today and you’re not responding to them within, you know, six to 24 hours, um, you’re, you’re kind of saying, I don’t really want the sale transparently.
17:25- Terry Wilson:
I’m going to, I’m going to shock you, shock you. If you say six to 24 hours, um, the impact of the difference in responding in minutes, individual minutes to five minutes is like 50%. And the chances of actually having, being able to connect with an inbound prospect that’s placed in inquiry decreases at an exponential rate after the first few minutes.
Yes. This is why we have these SDR teams that follow up and follow up and follow up and almost become annoying because individuals then have distracted and moved on or somebody else has replied and they’ve taken that path of conversation rather than your own. And our clients have told us point blank that, The difference now between having a conversation live on the website as they, as the prospect is doing their research and getting it to a point where you’ve satisfied their thirst for knowledge and proven that there’s a potential to solve their problem, then qualified them to make sure that they’re actually a potential in fit for the organization.
And book them to a meeting with an account executive. So you’re taking out all of these loops and steps of follow up along the way has been so effective. It’s shortened their sales cycles. It’s gone through the whole, um, uh, removed a whole lot of effort and cost from the business in terms of SDRs having to follow up.
and it’s increased the conversion rates. It varies. It depends on the quality of the traffic, but in most cases, it’s more than doubled the conversion rates from the website, which has all those other flow ons. It builds their pipeline and reduces client acquisition costs and everything. But, the impact of speed to lead now from what we’re seeing is actually measured in minutes.
You mentioned before the game, I think it is a game, you know, prospects and buyers that have got problems. do everything they can to avoid being identified by, uh, the organizations or potential organizations that they’re researching. And we’ve got this dark social or dark funnel where you’re using their own peers and, and their own networks to try and research and, and find possible solutions and viable, uh, suppliers, uh, is, is so much more in the fore
now, I mean, we’ve, it’s been spoken a bit about over the last couple of years, but, um, we’re finding where we’re seeing ourselves that it’s. The clients that we’re dealing with are reducing their amount of advertising because they’re finding that they’re just not getting the return. So advertising budgets are being reduced as the, as you know, the, the cost per click and the, and the, um, uh, cost per impressions is just increasing on a constant basis.
And then people are not identifying themselves when they come through to the website.
20:13- Ellza Malok:
Yeah. I mean, that, that’s a whole other, debacle. I think that too, to that game that I, that I mentioned, um, I, I think at this point, um, I have to remember, I, I recall it was around 50% of our existing clients. We recommended either a reduction of ads because the cost per customer acquisition is just not worth it anymore compared to the lifetime value. Um, or the quality of them ha is just too, is just too high. Um, because of your point. If the buyer and seller is this cat and mouse, what has become, unfortunately, is this cat and mouse model. Well, the mouse knows, you know, all the traps and so on. They’ve, they’ve gotten used to areas and, um, you know, the things that, that maybe have traditionally worked don’t. Um, so, in, in many instances, we recommended to take more of an organic approach to getting those models or doing a different type of outreach that that doesn’t. Um, put it at the forefront. So, you know, we’re looking at. AI is more from a search answer model versus a search engine model. Some of those elements to kind of bolster it a bit, a bit better.
But to your point, it’s, it’s becoming for a lot of companies and a lot of those that have, you know, you spend so much on the front end for, um, when you, when you measure an attribution model or, uh, an impact analysis as we do here at BMG.
So it’s going to be an interesting planning session for 2025
around where their budgets are going to lie. But, um, this quarter, specifically, we’ve, we’ve actually made recommendations to say. We recommend you permanently turn it off and, here’s a couple other channels to take into consideration, uh, that would probably suit better. Or we’ve asked for a reduction and then reallocate those funds into, uh, content or events or some other, some other vehicle of communication just due to the fact that their particular buyers are so. inundated with advertising and, um, and I, I’m more thinking around, the digital advertising space online, not necessarily CTV or, um, the O H models. Those are, those are still newer and probably require more investigation, but just the traditional, um, SEM of models seem to
23:21- Terry Wilson:
yeah.
23:22- Ellza Malok:
where the most, most of that wastage comes in.
23:25- Terry Wilson:
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, look, we’re, it’s fascinating, but we’re still seeing some clients using things like billboards, hard media signage, you know, that, that type of thing. I think because of the differential in cost, it’s a little bit harder to track because you can’t allocate a pixel. You can’t measure the clicks.
Um, but they’re seeing a better return on investment from the media buys as opposed to the, the, um, SEM at the moment. What do you think? And I’ve seen a little bit over the last 24 months seems to be a bit of a rise of community organizations actually building community. What’s, what’s your thoughts on that
24:06- Ellza Malok:
Um,
24:07- Terry Wilson:
as a channel?
Sorry.
24:08- Ellza Malok:
Yeah, it’s, it’s so interesting because I was just discussing with, with a colleague of mine actually around,
And we’ve gone from searching engines to searching AI and that still doesn’t cover cause obviously chat ChatGPT and co-pilot and Gemini and all these other, systems don’t necessarily have all of the web intelligence
at this time or have limited, um, uh, aspects. We’ll see how that changes. But the secondary notion has been, let me go ask my peer, especially if you’re in the C suite and that’s who your buyer is. The recommendations that I’m in a couple of coffee talks and communities myself with, with entrepreneurs and, and, um, CMOs, the amount of “has anyone heard of this what do you think of them or I’m looking for this particular solution, does anyone have any recommendations is probably one of the highest talking points in those. and it’s Slack channel, its board sessions it is in a new app what have you, that is a really big one and I think we’re going to you. that is a really big one and I think we are going to start to see that. Um, and I think that becomes that comes from an anthropological level. You start to not necessarily trust the systems. Like search engines, or, or going on to a company’s websites, and then you go back to, like, the 2nd thing you trust most, which is. your peers Um, I know when I have a particular problem, I will go to my peers and say, Because there’s
So much information and we’re at, we’re at
this level of cognitive overload at this point that sometimes even if it is not the best answer it gives me a direction even my even if my peer has never actually experienced that particular problem you know, having that sounding board has become so much more important and we’ve done study after study about how lonely it is at the top when you’re a c-suite and having that tribe to go to and saying, I’ve got this other problem
I think we’re entering a phase of kind of leaning back to our anthropological like we need a village. Kind of models, um, because the, the digital space is, is wonderful in that early, early stage, but it, but it doesn’t talk back to you and it doesn’t give you insight and it doesn’t empathize with you or any of those things that are just so inherently human that I think, um, we’re needing.
And, um, I think coven actually accelerated that because we saw that in the early stages and then. We kind of went 10 years into the future and into that type of necessity.
26:54- Terry Wilson:
I agree, I agree entirely, I believe that if you think about where do you go and what you do when you’re going to research about something, the first thing you do is go and have a look at the reviews. Normally you would just go and look at the reviews and in the past, that has been an amazing source of credibility and trust, but then you have organizations like G2 and Capterra, who we find now, um, They bought reviews, their paid reviews, and I can speak from personal experience where we had our organization on G2, and they suggest that we run a campaign across our clients to get gain reviews on offer a small incentive.
It wasn’t much of a 25, you know, visa voucher, these types of things just to actually get them to respond. And then I started to see all of these reviews pop up. That weren’t from our clients. Uh, they were people that I had no idea, they’d never worked in any of our clients, they’d never worked with us.
Obviously from the comments had no idea about what we actually did. And when I went back and questioned it, it turns out, oh no G2, oh no, we just send it out broader through our network for other people that might have used your product. Well, we’ve got a pretty tight knit, you know, family of clients here in our business.
And that was honestly, that was, and maybe my naivety was a shock to me. And that happened about four years ago. And when I realized what I was doing, that made me then look across the other businesses. Aside from that, look at what’s happened through, say, Amazon stores and the proliferation of. You know, buy 10, 000 reviews to make your business look credible.
28:25- Ellza Malok:
I think, you know, people have just got to the stage of that once used to be that once trusted resource of, you know, reviews, uh, it’s just not trusted anymore. And I think that’s accelerated this whole, okay, well, I need to find somewhere else that I can get some feedback and trust. And I think that’s, that’s having a huge impact on, on, uh, the, the growth of communities, I think absolutely. Again, we go back to that gaming model, right? We’ve, we’ve kind of gamified how reviews go and now they, they, um, for better or worse, you know, some of it is easier to get reviews and some of it is not reliable anymore. So the, the general population is, well, that’s not a reliable source of information.
So I have to go elsewhere. And when you have a limited number of, of those that become difficult, I know that’s a similar pattern of, um, some NPS scores, you know, incentivizing NPS scores for your customers. Well, the ones that like you are going to be more likely to respond because now you’ve just given them a spiff. Uh, around it. And, um, that, that is probably the biggest a has that we have when we do that program of, Oh, I didn’t realize that if we paid people, I’m like, well, yeah, cause it’s a human nature thing. Oh, okay. Let me go through it. Very few people who are upset with you are going to, you know, potentially want that 25 gift card. Um, cause they, they’ve already disassociated with you.
29:53- Terry Wilson:
Hmm.
29:53- Ellza Malok:
now you have quieter, negative responses. and louder positive responses, which is going to give you a completely skewed analysis of how your customers treat you. And then you wonder why you’re seven to eight. This is another one that we always kind of do around is, if you’re doing a 10 point scale in your NPS scores, your seven and your eights are your deadliest numbers.
30:19- Terry Wilson:
Hmm.
30:20- Ellza Malok:
And
30:20- Terry Wilson:
Interesting.
30:21- Ellza Malok:
bulk of clients.
30:23- Terry Wilson:
Why is that?
30:24- Ellza Malok:
Because we’ve trained our customers to say, if you give me anything lower than a 7, I’m going to give you a call. If you’ve given me anything higher than a 9 or a 10, I’m going to ask you for a review. Nobody does anything with 7s. So it’s kind of like a silent majority, so to speak. And, um, we actually remove, we say, you should not have any ambiguity. If you’re going to do it, you should do an even scale. So four point scale is kind of our recommended. If they’re going to give you a two, that means you’re, you’re in the middle, but you’re still subpar. in the middle, but you’re still higher. Um, and what happens when people do five scales? Well, everybody picks a three, or the fours and fives get grouped together. But fours and fives are inherently different.
31:12- Terry Wilson:
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. Interesting. Uh, think it was Todd Caponi who wrote the, uh, um, transparency sale, who spoke about the importance of, um, or the, I guess the impact of review ratings when they’re being publicized. Nobody believes a five star review. Nobody believes a five star review. Sure. You may get one or two five star reviews, but if your overall rating is, is five stars, then that’s less believable than a 4.
3 to a 4. 7. It’s that, that same, the same sort of idea where I think that when people are looking at it from the outside, you’ve got hundreds or thousands of reviews and it’s five star rating, that can’t be right. Nobody ever is a hundred percent happy. And we know that you can’t keep all the people happy all the time.
So, it was interesting, you know, it almost plays into the fact that it’s not doing you as an organisation any benefit in those sevens or eights. It doesn’t give you any insight, so to speak. And, and I mean, look, aside from vanity metrics, the main idea of net promoter scores or any of these review type scores, I guess, in my perspective, particularly with the net promoter scores, because you do get some feedback there on, in terms of what’s working, what’s not working, it gives you the insights to be able to go and improve your business, find out where you’re not performing as well as you should be.
Seven and eight don’t give you enough incentive to do that, really.
32:41- Ellza Malok:
No, and there’s different. strategies for, if you do a four point scale, you know exactly where your customers stand. That’s kind of the beauty. There is no ambiguity into some kind of middle ground. And, then you have different strategies for each one. If you want to take your one, your ones actually can go to five or I’m sorry, excuse me, to four way faster than your threes, because your ones care enough about you to tell you that they’re happy. is your opportunity to fix it. um, that means that they’re not, uh, there’s no apathy there. If they’ve given you a one, they definitely have a feeling. It may not be one that you like, but they at least feel something, which is much easier to move than the complete apathy, which is a no response. In many of those instances. Um, I think that there’s this element when it comes to, and never more to your point around vanity scores. what happens when you go like, you know, I’m looking for a restaurant. I look at the reviews. What’s the 1st thing you do? You read all the ones. You want to see what the ones say, you know, does it have cockroaches and that’s out, you know, that’s what I’m going to do. And then I look at the 4 and then I move my way up. I want to know what the bad is 1st and everybody has a slightly different pattern, but they go into individual ones because to your point, if you see a ton of fives and there’s no comments, that’s a massive red flag to say, um, these are probably not real, you know, there might be some kind of going on. Uh, to it. So again, we’ve trained our customers to behave a certain way in response to the game that we’ve put a foot.
34:21- Terry Wilson:
Absolutely, absolutely. It’s interesting. I do exactly the same. If I’m researching something, particularly if it’s a restaurant, I will go to the ones and the twos very first off. And in my mind, there’s only one answer. Two types of reviews that you get into one. It’s either a dissatisfied customer or it’s a competitor that seems to be the, the, the place, uh, you know, it’s simple.
I think you mentioned it’s easier to get someone from a one to a four, the opportunity to resolve a problem or to make an improved. Has such a huge impact on an individual when you show that you care that you have that level of, um, you show them that you value them so much that you’ve taken their feedback, you’re interacting directly and you’re making specific improvements that impact them based on their feedback.
The dopamine hit that that gives individuals is just immeasurable. That’s, is that why you consider it gets from a one to four?
35:21- Ellza Malok:
Yeah, exactly. Cause they, again, they cared enough to vocal it. And if you’ve done something about it, then there’s, there’s this reciprocity of like, okay, well I did something and now they fixed it. even as renewal time comes up. You’ve shown effort around repairing it, so you have a much higher chance of getting that customer to stay with you because you cared enough to, address their problems and, and, and really work through that process. I remember 1 of the 1 of the very 1st projects, uh, that that was in the customer intelligence space that we did, um, was right before coping. Um, we had done, uh, an NPS analysis from a, from a perception standpoint. Um, you know, really kind of saying we would like to dig, dig deeper into sevens and eights because that’s the model that you currently use and, and go through it. And I remember the conversation being, well, they gave us seven, so they should be happy enough, and then COVID hit and the very first set of customers that left were not the one through sixes, it was the sevens and eights.
36:30- Terry Wilson:
Wow, that’s interesting, isn’t it?
36:32- Ellza Malok:
they, they left in droves. And this is one of the things I always talk about.
Um, especially if you’re entering like uncertain times economically or, from a market perspective, the ones that you should worry about are the silent ones, because the vocal ones will at least care enough to tell you to your face. The silent ones are always the ones that are just going to say, okay, I’ve got another one.
And if you are a newbie in that space, who you go after. If you’re a new competitor in that space, that’s who you go after. You go after the sevens because they don’t care enough to respond to their existing partners and haven’t built a strong enough relationship to tell them what’s going on.
37:13- Terry Wilson:
That’s really interesting. You know, the utopia is to be proactive as an organization, but the reality is you’re never going to find all of the things that people aren’t happy about. And in fact, being proactive is the listening component, and looking for where the opportunities to improve are. Yeah,
37:32- Ellza Malok:
Absolutely. I think that that proactivity of, let me at least understand because I think it’s one thing for you to lose a customer and not know it and, and kind of be taken off guard. And then lose another one for the same reason and not knowing it. You know, that, that repetitive pattern, um, you, when you have a massive leak like that, it’s an entirely different one where you, where you have done everything you can. you’ve said, that maybe this customer is an ideal for us because what they’re demanding is not what we necessarily offer two different conversations there. And you can,
38:10- Terry Wilson:
but,
38:11- Ellza Malok:
the latter. So
38:14- Terry Wilson:
and you can make that decision, but that’s absolutely a true scenario. If it, if it’s at the point where what you’re doing, and what you’re providing is not ever going to solve the problem for that client, then it’s a disaster waiting to happen. You’re better off making the decision and, and parting company, you know, we’ve, we’ve, and so I’m feeling like I’ve used examples of our, our clients a couple of times now.
But we’ve got one client in particular who reads every single one. Every single chat transcript from start to finish and they’ve got a team there’s dedicated to do that with their actually will we’re helping as well but using AI for that now to go through and pull out the insights but the fascinating for me thing for me was that I knew anecdotally that there’s gold in the chat transcripts they have physically build it into part of their strategy and they use it to uncover it.
New product features, and questions that are being asked in the chat. Does it do this? Does it not do that? They track every single feature request or question through the chat. They also track all of the, um, support type questions where there’s a difficulty or a challenge or someone is not, um, you know, might be a, a user interface issue.
They track all of those to help with their, um, UI design. They also track and review all of the discussions. And so what I’m talking about here is these are the conversations that there’s been no identification of who the individual is that we’re talking to. And so, yep, sure, there’s the leads that convert.
We’ve got contact details for that. Yes, there the customer support inquiries. We’ve got contact details for that. I’m talking about the gold in, what is usually the unmined conversations. And so from time to time, there’ll be people that will step in and have a concern about something but don’t want to take it any further.
And they use that as well. Then they’re using it in a couple of places. So obviously about their product features, the user interface, and then their own customer support. But they’re also starting to take all of that information now, feed it into something like Claude or chat GPT, and use that to generate content for their marketing team.
So they’re actually talking about the things that the people that are interested in their product, they’re talking about. It’s, um, it’s been a, it’s been a real eye opener for me in terms of the total value. I mean, we charge for the leads, but they’re, they’re extracting so much value from the overall conversations.
It’s, um, it, we should be charging more.
40:50- Ellza Malok:
so interesting. I had a conversation with a colleague of mine and he worked for, uh, at the time he worked for a really large tech company in the, in the customer experience. Division. And we talked about how just anecdotal and in like those, those anecdotes can be key because if you can kind of surmise them and synthesize them in a way that gives you information, you can feed it to sales, you can feed it to marketing, you can feed it to the product. And that’s what I mean by it’s like, it’s become a bilateral service between buyer and seller. Because now you have, it’s not just, it’s not just the company, the bot, the seller that is. information over we’ve, we’ve kind of created this hopefully nutritious cycle, um, with it. And I think that the more, especially business owners start to see that there is a, there is a cycle to this information. Um, and it’s a dialogue as opposed to a handoff, the, the much more proactive mindsets, I think a lot of CEOs are going to, are going to it as. Um, In fact, I, when I, before starting BMT, um, worked for an organization where I built the whole customer intelligence department that was different than the business intelligence department because the analysts in that element did not, necessarily care about sentiment. They cared about forecasting. They cared about numbers. So the customer intelligence department is almost solely on programs for active clients or to generate for future clients.
42:35- Terry Wilson:
And where was that information coming from? Where were they drawing their data from?
42:40- Ellza Malok:
Past clients and existing clients, um, throughout it. So we, we kind of drew it from here’s the programs that we ran, here’s the programs that, um, we’ve proposed. Um, and then even their win loss ratios of what kind of data they give us when they decided to either change out the entire program, cause it was, It was much more of a bidding environment where you would, you would place a bid around.
Here’s my proposal. Uh, it’s more of a creative environment, that this organization ran off of. And then, and then we would say, well, how many times have we proposed Croatia for example, because it was more of an, a travel agency that, that, that was operated off of how many times have we proposed this other location, even as simple as changing locations made a big difference in our win rate to say, if you pick a new place that they haven’t been to, that their perception of that place is. It’s interesting. You’re going to get better buy in, um, from a, from a planning perspective.
Stay tuned for part two of the chat with Ellza.
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