262. Building a More Trusting and Human Internet w/ Aaron Painter

Fact: 99% of deepfake audios can be used to break into someone's account that’s voice-based.


As the digital environment gets noisier and more polluted, trust becomes even harder to build. Identity and verification go a long way to increasing safety, security, confidence and trust.
Aaron Painter is the CEO of Nametag, the world's first identity verification platform designed to protect accounts from impersonators and AI generated deepfakes. In this episode, he dissects the standard protocol of security questions and the impact it has on both the employee experience AND the customer experience. Aaron knew there had to be a better way to prove who's behind the screen.
Thus, Nametag was born.


Join us as we discuss:

• How EX inevitably impacts CX: when employees feel heard, customers feel heard
• How Nametag’s technology is streamlining human identity
• Why deepfakes are becoming an enormous problem
• What exactly MFA is, and how it’s evolving over time
• How to build company culture in the remote world: steps to improve EX

More information about Andrew Carothers and today’s topics:

• LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronpainter/
• Company Website: https://www.getnametag.com/
• Aaron’s Book: LOYAL: A Leader's Guide to Winning Customer and Employee Loyalty
• Other Relevant Link: Warby Parker

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
The single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
better experience for your customers. Learnhow sales, marketing and customer success experts
create internal alignment, achieved desired outcomes, and exceed customer expectations in a personal
and human way. This is theCustomer Experience Podcast. Here's your host,

(00:24):
Ethan Butte. As the digital environmentgets noisier and more polluted, trust becomes
even harder to build. Identity andverification go a long way to increasing safety,
security, confidence and trust. Nametagis the world's first identity verification platform
protect accounts from impersonators and AI generateddeep fakes. Today we're talking with their

(00:49):
CEO. He spent nearly fourteen yearswith Microsoft, primarily in China. He
also wrote a book called Loyal,a leader's guide to winning customer and employee
loyalty. So we'll be talking safety, security, identity, privacy, c
X, and ex. Aaron Painter, Welcome to the Customer Experience Podcast.
It's an honor to be here.You than I'm a big fan of the
show. Awesome, appreciate that positivefeedback right off the top. This is

(01:12):
going to be great and we'll startAaron where we always do, which is
customer experience. When I say that, what does it mean to you?
To me, it means feeling,feeling recognized and sort of being heard.
I often feel that so often welive in this world where people are anonymous.
When you walk into a store,you'd begin a customer support phone call
until we suddenly need to know whothey are, and then too often the

(01:34):
process is figuring out who that personis is just simply too difficult. Very
good what is because you tied customeremployee loyalty together in loyal and we've had
this conversation a lot on the show, but you obviously have a very strong
I mean, you're motivated enough towrite a book about it. So I'd
love for you to share, likesome top line thoughts or maybe even updated

(01:56):
thoughts relative to your thinking at thetime on the relations ship between customer experience
and employee experience. Is so muchof my career, particularly in my years
at Microsoft, was living in differentgeographies and parts of the world where I
often didn't speak the same language,so I often didn't look or sound like
the other people at the table,and I had to try and find a
way both to fit in and reallyto have an impact or to kind of

(02:19):
make a difference as much as Icould. And one of the things I
realized was that the employees I hadthe chance to work with were the front
lines in interacting with our customers,and so when they felt like their voice
mattered, when they felt like theywere being heard, they were eager and
recepted to doing the same kind ofhunting for feedback and comments back from customers.

(02:42):
And so as I went on thisjourney of kind of writing the book
with that that premise in mind,I was able to work with a bunch
of different companies and really sit inand listen and learn. I learned from
so many companies who had kind ofgot that right. One of the most
interesting was, you know Warby Parkerin the US at the time, you
know the eyeglass or the purchase eyeglass, a bunch of other wonderful things online
and in store. But when youwatch how those employees from the moment they're

(03:06):
hired, their first day in thejob, how much their management cares about
wanting to know what they think,wanting them to be able to feel vulnerable
and expressive vulnerability in their first meetingas a way to sort of build trust.
You quickly see when you walk intoretail store, you listen to them
on the call center on a phone. They were constantly hunting for customer feedback
because they knew that their management caredand the management would listen. And so

(03:29):
that sense of culture that was createdwith employees feeling like they were heard carries
so naturally to customers feeling like they'veheard. And when people feel heard or
listen to, they feel respected.And when they feel respected, to me,
that's the fundational element of building trustreally good. I love the way
that you tied all of that together, and I'll say this is one of
the best reasons, one of themain reasons I'm so excited to see great

(03:53):
brands that I mean, for me, Warby Parker physical locations. I know
that they've had them for a longtime, but they haven't been in Denver
and Colorado Springs all that long.And the way that that comes to life
in a direct human to human interaction, not mediated through the phone, through
chat, through video, through itthrough email, but just in person,

(04:14):
you can feel exactly what you justtalked about. I took three pairs.
I all my glasses have been fromthem, like the last five years,
and so one of them wasn't fittinggreat, and so I brought up three
pairs of glasses, quickly scheduled alittle appointment, and then just had this
lovely chat with a woman who wastelling me about her path through the company
while she's fixing, kind of likethe way that it bends around my ear.
She's telling about her path through thecompany where she started in a call

(04:38):
center and then eventually took advantage ofa program that trains them to be optometrists.
Like, what a cool place.Yeah, you're spot on, you
know. It's also really interesting tome about the stores as they've continued just
evolved in a smart way. We'veall just talked, you know, in
society now about AI and there's AIcomplement humans or does it have a potential
to replace them one day? Andwatching the way that they have developed such

(05:00):
smart technology using to do your vision, to use a mobile phone for example,
to diagnose and help come up withprescriptions. The reps are often using
that in store, but they're makingit such a human experience, right,
You're connecting with that other human,that great person that works there, and
they're charming personality and charisma, butthen they're using really smart technology tools to

(05:21):
kind of make that in person experienceeven better. And to me, that's
again just such a role model ofthis hybrid world we can live in where
technology can enrich those human experiences,especially sort a customer experience. Yeah,
so good. It reminds me ofa conversation we had I think five episodes
back where it was like doing what'sright for the customers the filter and so

(05:41):
no matter what decision we're making inthis case, which tech do we deploy,
how do we deploy it, where, how deeply, et cetera,
as long as we have the customerin mind, it's difficult to make really
bad decisions. Okay, as thatwas a really fun passage. I wasn't
anticipating that. So what I wantto do next is get into name tag.
I specifically did something that I don'tnormally do, which is kind of

(06:02):
use some of the positioning language forthe company your brand right off the top.
But it's so interesting and compelling whatyou're doing. But i'd love to
hear in your own words, Sofor folks who aren't familiar, tell us
about name tag, like who areyour ideal customers and what are some of
the problems that you're solving for them. Really focused in on customer support interactions

(06:23):
today and all all of us knowthe experience we have a worked in call
center or customer support interactions with itsemail or phone based or in person or
we've certainly been on the other endof that sort of trying to call and
make an account change or get somethingdone. And it's just such a strong
contrast to me where people get intothis profession and there are professionals that clearly

(06:43):
care about connecting with others and sortof being human, and yet part of
their job is to be a detective. Right They don't get to start a
conversation often saying how can I hell, they sort of conversation saying who are
you? And part of the successof their job is dependent on how well
they sort of interrogate that customer toidentify them and is it in a thoughtful
way? Is a very service leveland which case, okay, well,

(07:03):
quickly we can get to helping ormedia they call for something that's important or
it's a high value account. Really, as a customer service rep have this
responsibility and even your job is onthe line, this person's account is on
the line of asking security questions,of asking a whole bunch of things to
really prove that the person behind thescreen is who they claim. And our

(07:24):
argument is is that is a humanprocess that could really benefit from additional technology,
and the goal standard today of securityquestions just hasn't changed much in decades.
It's not cutting it. It's ahorrible experience, you know, and
in the best case, people justwalk away frustrated, and in the worst
case, getting that right is thedifference between someone's account being changed unlawfully or

(07:46):
potentially being taken over. And sowe've we've created a really smooth, out
of the box way for customer supportreps be able to verify their callers or
sings of an email on a supportticket where they can rely on us.
They send the link to that userwherever they areever, they that user interacts,
and the user is able to gothrough a very familiar process of scanning

(08:07):
a government issued ID and taking aselfie. We've added to it a few
things. One, it is incrediblyprivacy oriented, so we made it such
that the user doesn't need to wesay overshare, you know, sort of
the analogy of going into a barand you know, the person at the
door in the US really only needto know you're over twenty one. They
don't need to know your home address, and it can be the same in
this interaction. Maybe someone needs toknow your age, or your birthdate or

(08:30):
your legal name. They don't necessarilyneed everything then your government issued ID.
And so we have significant levels ofprivacy controls that put the user in control
of what they share back with thatcompany who's asking. But we're doing it
in mobile phones, so instead ofdoing done web browsers your webcams, by
using a mobile phone, like everythingin our world, apps can be really
slick and feel smooth and feel native. So not only is that a smooth

(08:54):
process, it feels really easy,it feels slick, and it's incredibly high
fidelity because these philos we carry aroundhave incredible processing power in them and advance
cameras and other features we're able touse to make the process both fast and
really secure. And then the waywe built this actually has a super added
cool thing where the second time thata customer comes back with that company or

(09:15):
any other company, they can havean express re verification experience so that they
don't need to scam the government IDagain, they can just take a selfie
to verify who they are, andthen we match that selfie back to earlier
selfies and back to the government issuedID. So you have confidence and the
rep you're speaking with as confidence thatyou are the rightful person and the rightful
account owner. So we found away to take the friction out of experience

(09:37):
and increase the security, which justcan fundamentally change the nature of those customer
sport interactions. Yeah, and totie it back to where you started.
It improves the employee experience and thecustomer experience. I no longer feel like
my number one job is to interrogatesomeone. In addition, just per basic

(09:58):
cyber se ecology, the human isthe most vulnerable point in any system for
the most part, And so likeI don't have this pressure of did I
do enough? Did I make theright decision? Did I? You know?
Uh? And then on the customerside, the privacy and security that
you spoke to in particular, assoon as you said, like, you
know, the way in hasn't changedmuch for the customer. I'm like one

(10:20):
one one one one, you know, like fantastic, that's so secure.
Okay, talk a little bit aboutI mean, so I heard kind of
call centers, places where people needcustomer interaction. I would assume that the
people most interested in adopting are probablysomewhere in just to start the conversation.

(10:43):
I'm sure there are many applications,but off the top of my head,
I'm thinking like banks, credit unions, credit cards, some of the fraud
detection stuff. Whenever, most ofthe time I engage with anyone, it's
when I get that alert that,you know, the fraud detection or whatever,
and some of that's automated. Buttake it to the you know,
where are people really getting excited aboutthis concept? Like where is it most

(11:03):
needed? And perhaps where I can'tI mean, I can't think of any
place off the top of my head, but like where might it be overkill?
Like like talk about the range ofwhere does this level of thought care
implementation really make obvious lay up senseand where is it like maybe kind of
a more of a great well itcould make sense here. Yeah, the
best way to compar it is almostto our in person you know, offline

(11:26):
lives where there's sometimes you walk intoa store and maybe you're able to pay
with cash and walk out and whatyou're buying doesn't require proof of age.
It's not a particularly expensive item,so you're not necessarily concerned with this is
a fraudulent transaction or credit card.But let's think about secure experiences. When
you go to a conference or anevent, you check in, you show
your ID, and someone gives you, ironically a name tag that you wear

(11:48):
the sort of valugine to say,this person has sort of been been verified,
we know who they are, andtherefore you're in a safe community to
go meet other people. When yougo to the airport and you go through
security and again you show your governmentID, you know everyone on the other
side of that is sort of safeand they've been vetted and is roughly a
trusted environment. Those human interactions thatexist offline, we don't have an easy

(12:09):
way to recreate those online, andso it extends to social communities. You
know, whether you think of datingsites or what the efforts of Twitter or
the like or all trying to donow is thinking of sort of verified profiles.
And to me, it's not aone time thing. It's not simply
a oh, we've checked your IDMonce not to pick on. But take
the Airbnb platform today, the Airbnbwas trying to mimic what you do offline.

(12:31):
When you go to a hotel,you give your ID and your credit
card when you show up. GreatAirbnb created that same point when you create
your Airbnb account. But unfortunately youcould create your account years ago. Someone
else might have access to that account, Your credentials might be compromised, and
it still says verified profile as ifthat person is forever verified, and we
know that's not really the case.And so trying to think of those scenarios

(12:54):
where trust and safety matter, orwhere there's significant economic loss or hardship on
the line. For all of usin our digital lives, different accounts might
have different value to us. Sotoday we find a lot of traction where
there are things worth protecting, andwhether that's a reputation or whether it's an
actual account multi factor authentication. Familiarwith concepts of authenticator apps and things like

(13:16):
that. Whenever a company has rolledthat out for us, that's a really
good proxy for you know this accountis somehow worth protecting. And that matters
for employee accounts. If you thinkof all the millions of professionals and help
desk rolls, and it help deskrolls, it turns out is an incredibly
expensive and very high volume area whereidentity verification is required. Some of the

(13:39):
analysts firms estimate up to fifty percentof tickets and a help center or help
desk require identity verification. For manycompanies, they're now scheduling zoom calls to
say, hey, do you looklike your badge photo on your ID.
It's time consuming your offline, maybefor many hours. Let's say you're locked
out if you're Authenticator app because youupgraded your phone or something didn't work or
broke, you lost it. Andwe have a way essentially to automate that

(14:03):
where the support rep could have anew tool, or a company can even
implement it such that a user mightnot have to call support, they could
do it self service and they couldreset their MFA without needing to kind of
bother the help desk team and letthem work on other more interesting things.
The same. Yeah, sumer accounts, so wherever you have a high value
customer account and you were spot on. Financial services is a great area,
as are other business services, youknow, increasing whether it's a marketing platform

(14:26):
or an Internet domain or other things. There are a lot of certain your
accounting, your platform. There arethings that you really care about and you
need security, which is why thecompany has tried to roll out MFA to
keep your account more protected. Butpeople get locked out, and when they
get locked out, if it's hardto let the right person back in.
You're also unfortunately open to impersonators becausesomeone else can call and pretend to be

(14:48):
the person who's locked out, andthat rep doesn't have a great way to
verify it to you, and sounfortunately it leads to the leaves the door
open for impersonators to sort of accessyour The idea that if you have something
you want to keep, then youhave something someone would want to take.
That was introduced to me by doctorEric Huffman, he's our director of it
here at Bomb Bomb and so Ilove to hear that theme throughout. It's

(15:13):
like, it's easy to overlook thethings that would really that we don't want
to lose. If you have somethingyou don't want to lose, then you
probably have something that someone else wouldbe reinterested in taking, you know,
So you're right on the verge there. I mean, I think as you
did on the verge of where Iwanted to go next. Was this idea
of deep fake, and I wantto come at it from like a really
high level. I would love yourperspective as someone who's been not exactly in

(15:39):
name tag, but like in thespace in general, thinking about these themes
and topics for years. I usethe term digital noise just to refer to
the sheer volume of things. It'sapproximately benign, except to the point that
it hurts productivity. It kind ofgrinds us a little bit emotionally. It's
just a sheer amount of stuff tosort through in our inbox and all the
other places. On the other hand, digital pollution, I separate to say

(16:03):
that it's an unwelcome digital distraction,and it ranges from just like why am
I on this reply all chain email? Or why did I get thrown into
this text message in group or LinkedIngroup? That's relatively innocent. But on
the other end, of course,we know that we have Is this link
safe to click? Is this attachmentsafe to download? Is this from who
it says it's from? Does thatlanguage resonate with you at all? And

(16:26):
how would you describe kind of thestate of what I'll just say. AI
will probably drive it exponentially because anythingthat has good potential also has bad potential,
and they're good actors and pad actorseverywhere. But when I say digital
pollution, does that mean anything toyou? I think as humans and consumers,
it certainly does. And the samewith digital noise or pollution. My

(16:48):
early days at Microsoft work on Officeand the early days of Office product management,
we did a lot of market researchand you know, one of the
biggest things that came back was informationoverload and even those twenty years ago or
people are getting so many emails andso many things they don't know how to
respond and there's pending so much wastedtime on it. That stuff hasn't gotten
much better. But what else hasgotten much better? Or our methods of

(17:10):
protecting our accounts, but we're stillrelying on passwords from the earliest days of
computing in the nineteen fifties, whichback then was kind of different. You
know, the Internet started because trustedacademic institutions were online and sharing information and
they all had an email address froman academic institution, so he knew who
they were was largely in person.The credentials were given to them in person.

(17:32):
And then suddenly Gmail came along andanybody from untrusted sources because suddenly you
have an email address, you couldcreate as many of them as you wanted,
be any way you want. Andwe're relying on that email or user
name and that password for decades,we're using security questions if they're on the
phone, and then we've tried tosay, well, let's add another layer
with this concept of MFA as away to protect that mighty password. We

(17:53):
know what. Unfortunately, MFA breaksdown at this point when you don't know
who the person is who call andclaims to be locked out or claims to
be the account owner, yet canaccess their account, and so you're back
to the least secure method of thingslike these security questions. And so all
these jed decades later and all ofour growth and technology and digital usage,
we have not fixed this fundamental problem. And AI is now giving fraudsters new

(18:18):
tools to use to defeat are veryvery old methods. Yeah, and they're
very effective at I think, Imean this is now a couple of months
old, I feel like as thetime of recording here in summer of twenty
twenty three, but you know,we started seeing the stories emerge of deep
bake audio built off of you know, three to ten second clips of audio
where peeps are like now like essentiallymaking ransom calls with fake audio. Someone's

(18:44):
child this kind of a thing,And so it leads me to just thoughts
on the state of deep bake,and then I'll kind of steer it very
specifically toward video. I think thisidea of using your smartphone in real time
tied to and for folks listening whenAaron says MFA, just to restate,
it's multi factor authentication. We alluse this all the time, and state

(19:07):
of deep fake in general for you, like what is I mean? Obviously,
with the absence of video, theaudio itself can be super compelling,
especially because audio is already chewed upover a phone call anyway, especially since
we're calling like driving seven new pilesan hour down the highway and you know,
moving between cell towers and all theother things that kind of chew up

(19:29):
the audio anyway, And then nowyou can relatively easily fake it. Thoughts
on deep faked technology audio or videoand really even foot photography too, I
mean, like just graphics. Thoughtson deep fake. I think it's becoming
an enormous problem, and even asthe numbers are growing, we're seeing it
everywhere. We're hearing it from everycustomer we speak with. We're seeing in

(19:49):
every market. Stat is a problem, and the technology is getting better.
What we have found is that thereare ways to defeat it, and some
of the things that the best wayto defeated, frankly, is in using
the technology that we all carry withour mobile phones. These phones are incredibly
powerful. They are as much ormore powerful than when we go to an

(20:10):
airport kiosk or go through an immigrationcounter. They have incredibly advanced processing cameras
and other things in them, andyou can use those that same thing that
you might use face idea to unlockyour iPhone. The challenge with face idea
is that it doesn't necessarily know whoseface it is. It just knows the
same face as the one who setup the iPhone. Great, but that
camera is incredibly powerful if you canuse a three D depthmap camera. Let

(20:33):
me leaves it fast. But actuallyit's a great way to prove that someone
is human. And so that's coreand our identity verification experience and for re
verification. But more broadly, theseconcepts of voice or video fakes are real.
I mean, the last study Isaw something that was overwhelmingly shocking,
but ninety nine percent of deep fakeaudios can be to see. It can
can be used to break into someone'saccount that are voice based. The voice

(20:57):
based of dedication actually already have aproblem, meaning you don't necessarily know who
you set up in the first place. So if I call and I give
you my answer to my security questionand then the rep says, hey,
would you like to enroll in voiceauthentication for the future, great, You
better hope I'm the rightful account orwhen I enroll otherwise, you've just made
it much easier for me. Conversely, if I call and say, oh,

(21:18):
the voice authentication thing didn't work,the reps okay, no problem,
let's go back to the security questions. And so it's a convenience factor.
It had issues around bias, you'reright, call quality and other things.
But now the fact that you caneven say sure, I'll use your secure
method, no problem, and gospin up a deep fake audio file and
simply play it on a phone call, my goodness, that will last and

(21:40):
you're right. For many firms thatare trying to be progressive, particularly in
financial services, those are their leadingtools today. The audio and video video
pieces is equally bad. You know, the ability that we're using webcams.
Every flow that tries to verify someone'sidentity today traditionally uses webcamps. And unfortunately,
webcams aren't two dimensional. They arenot good at defeating themselves from holding

(22:00):
up a photo or a video,and so that makes it susceptible to digital
manipulation. It makes it susceptible tothese new tools that frousters have. We
fundamentally believe the right way to doit, most effective way is to send
someone to their mobile phone and letthem use that incredibly powerful supercomputer in their
pocket to verify their identity. It'sgreat. I have a number of just

(22:23):
kind of general guiding life of philosophiesor principles. What are them for?
Examples? You don't get what youdon't ask for. The worst you're ever
going to hear is know. Anotherone that's not quite as useful as that
one is the idea that the badguys are always a step ahead. And
you know, one of my proxiesfor this is something like doping in Olympic

(22:44):
sports. Right, you can thepeople who are the best get the best
access to the newest stuff. That'salways one or two or three steps ahead
of the current testing, and bythe time that the test catch up to
that situation, they're on to thenext right. And of course the law
is I mean, we can't relyhaving the law for really anything in this

(23:04):
space of identity verification, privacy,security, et cetera. Because I mean,
it's it's of course, when wesee the video clips, it's laughable
the nature of the questions that someof the legislators are ask ask asking,
like they don't fundamentally understand the technology, which then leads to all of the

(23:25):
fallout on you don't understand the consequenceof the problem, etcet. So with
that, obviously you all have beenworking for years on some solutions. But
like I'm asking the impossible right here, take yourself outside of name tag which,
by the way, great call backto the to the in person you

(23:45):
know, name badges that we getafter checking into an event. I love
the the iconography around the brand nametoo, like I love the name tag
piece and so that so the physicalcomparison is fantastic. But take yourself out
of this environment a little bit,like as a professional and someone with people
in the world who you care about, like where is your hope around this

(24:07):
idea, like, first of all, are the bad guys generally one step
ahead of the rest of us?And if so, where's your hope for
yourself and for the people you careabout? In As more of our lives
personally and professionally become digital, virtualand online, and as those spaces get
noisier and more polluted, there's justas much malfeasance there as there ever was

(24:30):
in the real world, perhaps morebecause bots can do it now. Like
what are some what are some glimmersof hope? What are some exciting things?
Where do you find a little bitof solace? Like why does it
this keep you up at night?Perhaps worse than it might already? Like
I think many folks early and whenyou turn to start and build something new.
This was for me was driven bya very personal problem. And it

(24:52):
said at the start of the pandemic, I had a lot of friends and
family who had their identity stolen.And I said, you know, I
would be a good friend, theywould be a good son, Like let's
jump on the follow let's call let'sreach out, let's try and fix this.
And everybody said, oh, comeinto the branch or email or facts
me something or other, and Ijust said, this is outrageous, like
you really don't have a way toknow who who's really calling or who I
am. And it turned out thata bad actor had calling done the same

(25:15):
thing, and that again unsuspected RABdoing the best they could unknowingly let the
wrong person into an account, andthen when we called, they had no
idea to know we were the rightfulaccount owners. And so it just sort
of shocked me. And you know, you mentioned my time in China,
like there was so much in China. You could do anything from your mobile
phone, and that's one of theamazing things I learned, and you know,
culturally really respected. It was justa pace of innovation and people trying

(25:37):
new things out, and unfortunately alsosaw a lot of attempts at fraud and
other things, not only in China, but surely we see globally today.
And I realized there had to bea better way, that there had to
be a way to prove who's behinda screen. And so for me as
a human, as a citizen,as a consumer, as a friend,
as you know, as a son, like those are the things I want
to be able to do. Iwant this in my own life I want

(26:00):
a way to be able to buildtrust fast with that people I'm connecting with,
so that I can use these incredibledigital tools to build relationships and access
accounts and have all the convenience.But if you don't bring security to it,
and fakly, if you don't solveidentity, I don't know how you
can protect the perimeter and I don'tknow how you can actually keep things secure.
Yeah, totally fair, And Iappreciate the personal piece of that as

(26:22):
well, and how challenging and frustratingit is. It's funny. I take
a lot of calls from my dad, who is he's about a thousand miles
east of me. I see himregularly, but you know, it's like,
hey, this thing popped up onmy computer. Hey this thing popped
and he reads it to me andI'm like, I don't don't touch any
of it. Asmis, hey,don't touch any of it because because you

(26:45):
just don't know and I can't seeit and I can't figure it out.
And just just even the idea ofuntangling all of the things that you describe,
like at the onset of the pandemic, just untangling all of that and
getting into the mess of it isjust it's got to be emotion emotionally exhaust
and of course insanely time consuming.One of the one of the reasons that

(27:06):
your language of identity and verification resonatewith me so much is that we went
through an exercise here at bombobs videoemail, video messaging put more human peace
inside your digital communication for you know, nuance, emotion building, some psychological
proximity, people feel like they knowyou before they ever meet you, and
all these other benefits that we getright like typing thank you into an email

(27:30):
is not in your list, sameas thank you so much. Gosh,
when you did X, Y,and Z, it made me feel so
amazing. You're fantastic, appreciate youso much. When we were elevating beyond
the mechanics of the conversation, abovethe mechanics of you know, record and
send videos, here's some use cases, et cetera, we got to this
idea of identity and verification, likewhy does this work so well, especially

(27:52):
in situations like we're trying to recruita new employee or doing you know,
outbound prospecting this kind of a thing, and it's so much of I'm not
some bot who's shooting all this stuffat you incessantly, you know, essentially
going trawl or fishing and scraping theentire ocean floor and pulling up every living

(28:14):
thing in order to get the onething we actually want. I'm actually a
real person, and I'm the onewho left you that voicemail the other day,
and the reason I left that,as I said on the call,
was X, Y and Z,And so if that's something that's of interest
to you, would love a quickreply, right, So, identity and
verification, we felt like this notquite in the same level of security,
but I think it has the potential, especially in light of all the deep

(28:34):
fake video. I know I justsaid a lot of things to you,
but you're a highly intelligent person andI'm hoping it triggered something for you.
Any thoughts on the idea of creatingsome amount and now it's a little bit
out of the context of nametag inparticular, it's not solving that kind of
a problem, but from like aI'm a real person perspective in digital environments,

(28:56):
do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I believe fundamentally that
we need to verify the sender,the recipient or the center, the poster,
the contributor, the person contributing thecontent should be the one that we
make sure is real. And likein my analogy, this is sort of
an offline world. If you goto the old Talent Square, Twitter fashioned
itself right the virtual town square.If you go to the little town Square,

(29:18):
someone might stand up and say I'msilly things, inappropriate things, whatever
it was. You might not knowwho that person was, but you'd recognize
them, say I've seen that personbefore that one again, you'd ask around,
somebody would doe who they are.But the fact that you know who
that person is makes a difference.And the fact that the platform or the
community, the sort of the gatekeeperof the community, knows the authentic identity

(29:41):
of the individual I think matters.You can so operate with the pseudonym or
an alias, sort of be anonymousif that's what the community feels is best,
but the host of the community,someone in that town square, should
know who you really are. Asa way to say, the content that
this person's posting is coming from areal source, a human source, we
know the source behind it, becauseI don't think you can necessarily trust what's

(30:03):
being said if you don't trust orhave some sense of who is behind that
comment or post or creative work orother things. Yeah, I agree.
Is it reminds me that the snakeoil salesman was on a wagon for a
reason. Hang around to you alland everyone's couldn't know, you know,
you just got to keep moving.And so this idea of like of like
rooting in and being available in amore you know. And again another idea

(30:27):
here is that people want to knowyour intent. They want to know your
motivation. Do you seem to NowI'm going back a little bit to your
EXCX and I'll kind of change thedirection of the conversation a little bit.
But you know, people want toknow that you believe what you're saying.
That helps them understand if they shouldbelieve what you're saying. They want to
know that you care about them orseem to want to understand them better,

(30:49):
et cetera. Like these are allthe things that we're looking to read off
other people. And so it's oneof the things that's always exciting about video
beyond just the oh, this isa real person. It's this is a
real person who seems to believe whatthey're saying and seems to want to understand
me better, etc. You arethe CEO of this company, You've been
there for three and a half ishyears at the time of this recording,

(31:10):
and you were very I just reallyappreciate your language off the top and the
ex CX conversation about people wanting tofeel seeing her to understand, understood,
appreciated, ultimately respected. And whenwe are here, then we are in
a psychologically safe and trusting environment.Everything happens faster and better and easier where

(31:32):
trust is present. Any thoughts onbuilding your team over the years, any
habits, rituals, things you pickedup in your time at Microsoft that you're
like, I'm definitely going to dothat when I'm you know, in my
next situation, Like, how areyou approaching building, leading, managing the
team in light of all these wonderful, respectful ideas that you obviously care deeply

(31:56):
about. I think we put abig focus and hired on value use and
hiring about sharing values across the team, and I'd say, without a doubt
we have a very high i Qteam. We also have a very sort
of kind team where people really respecteach other and they respect the professional backgrounds
that respect that personally, but evenmore so there's this element of it helped

(32:17):
me understand, right, well,people express themselves in different ways, that
communicate in different ways, but seekingwith curiosity to understand someone's intent and what
they're saying, we feel as reallyfundamental to building just a strong workplace culture.
So we're remote first, and westart during the pandemic as a company.
And so for me, one ofthe new things and a messment perspective
was how do you build a fullyremote culture? How do you build trust

(32:40):
with people that maybe have never metin person? And so we had to
innovate a lot, and we're continuingto try new things and the rhythm of
our week, the types of callsand interactions that we have, you know,
processes to kind of make sure hey, checking in the new Like you
know, certain days of the weekwe do video check ins. Is hey
everyone, even if it's a fifteenminutes stand up call, we on video.

(33:00):
Other days we say okay, avoice is fine, but just as
a way, you know, wehad this one scenario where somebody had fallen
and broken their arm and they wereinjured and we didn't actually know for days
and we're like, wow, wedidn't know you were going through this.
We're in the physical office. Wemight have, but we just didn't know
that they were suffering so much,which I think, incidentally is true with
pain and all flavors. We oftendon't see when people are suffering or know

(33:21):
how they're suffering. But we're tryingto bring this element of culture building such
that we can assume. We callit most respectful interpretation until we ask or
until we know for sure, let'sassume the most respectful interpretation about what's someone
saying. And since we've supplemented within person, so obviously as the pandemic
slid down, we get together.You know, often every couple of months,
we do a lot of team building, and we do things offline to

(33:43):
get to know each other, tosort of build that human trust. We've
gotten really good at working remotely,so we use the time and trust building
and getting to know each other sothat we can work more efficiently and work
kind of with that greater sense oftrust and respect, and that's allowed us
to move fast, to be adaptable, and frankly, what's really need is
just watching other people act like anowner interests of value and step up and

(34:05):
say this just doesn't feel right.I think a customer experience could be better
if we did this or that,or a user experience could be slowly changed,
and they just sort of jump inand proposed solutions, and it's allowed
us to just innovate a really greatspeed. Excellent. Can you state for
me again the phrase that you usearound assume the best something something interpretation?
I call it MRI most respectful interpretation. Good. I'm carrying that language forward.

(34:29):
I will not forget it most respectfulinterpretation MR, because I love it.
It's fantastic. It reminds me ofa conversation I had with a gentleman
recently who was let go from Google, and it was the same kind of
life philosophy MRI most respectful interpretation.Until you know better, just assume the
best and and just like so muchbenefit would come in the world this way.

(34:51):
Talk to me a little bit aboutorg structure. You mentioned this idea
that you know, people can takesome ownership, take some responsibility, raise
their hand. Hey, I thinkcustomer spirits would be a little bit better
if how are you all structured atthis point? Is it? Is it
traditional sas with marketing sales CS,slash CX. How do you think about
that maybe product in dev like,how are you all structured in general?

(35:15):
Yeah, that's pretty traditional and peoplehaving general areas they look after with the
again a high level of trust andrespects. It allows you to sort of
jump into someone else's area. Alsofor professional developments, sometimes people want to
learn new things and so they wantto work on a side projects or slaty
outside maybe their core competency. Oneof the things I'm most proud of that
we do that's just super fun foreveryone. Every other week on Friday's we

(35:38):
have a session we call Kudos andConcerns, and this is basically me in
listening mode and we go around thetable, you know, virtual table,
a kind of unzoom, all differentparts of the company, all different disciplines
and teams, and people can sharethings they're grateful for. Hey you CALLI
helped me out on this, Thankyou so much for that, or this

(35:59):
one really well, or is teamI'm so proud we ship this. But
also concerns also a moment to sayI think as a team we're missing this,
or you know, I felt likelast week I wasn't able to help
out X, and if it's somethingwe can resolve quickly we talk about it.
Then if it needs to be tableto resolve later, we do that
and give a deep recession time.But this concept that one I am kind
of in my CEO role and inlistening mode and want to hear what everyone

(36:21):
has to say, both good andconstructive. We found it has just been
incredibly effective. I want to learna lot. But two that it's created
as culture where people feel comfortable sharingboth the good and the constructive and throughout
the weeks, then that we're notdoing it, we find people are often
hunting for it and they're much fasterto say, oh, thanks for helping
with that, Oh that was reallygreat. You know what, I'm a
little worried about this, and they'renot necessarily waiting for the two week milestone

(36:44):
to share it because it's becomes soingrained in the culture that someone's voice matters.
And back to where we started,When people feel listened to, I
believe they feel respected, and whenthey feel respected, that is the foundation
of building rusts. So good inthe fact that it's a useful exercises a
testament to even just the foundational qualitiesof trust in safety. For people to

(37:07):
even raise these things, I meanit's it's not that hard to pass someone
on the back when they've been reallygood to you. But raising a concern
in a group setting is a challengeno matter what the group is. And
so I'm just well done on creatinga space that allows people to do that
in a in a confident way.I've been in and not in that situation
before, and it's certainly better tobe in the former to the degree that

(37:30):
you're comfortable. Where is Nametag goingnext? Is it? Is it just
like let's get soup and again takethis refretion. Want you don't have to
tell me your future strategy, butlike, is it let's get absolutely amazing
at kind of the zone that we'reworking on now? Or is it let's

(37:50):
let's define the zone that are kindof thesis includes because I you know,
you could take this basic fundamental truththat you've been expressing throughout the conversation and
taking a variety of places, likehow are you thinking about the future here?
I mean, obviously the need fora product or service and a group
of people working on these problems likeyou all are. We need a lot

(38:14):
more of that, Like how areyou thinking about the future in light of
again, I think exponential noise andpollution. Yeah, I think to the
question, we really have this visionof building a more trusted in human Internet,
and for whatever reason in the varietyof them, I believe the world
is moving closer to requiring identity verificationas a core part of any digital experience.

(38:37):
You have age verification requirements popping upthe many US states and the UK
and other places. You have enormousnumber of fraudsters coming with new AI and
deep generated content and deep fate tools. You have security issues. You have
enormous time and costs spent and helpcenter and support desks because of manual processes.
For a whole bunch of reasons,I believe identity verification is going to

(38:59):
become more than Norman our lives we'reseeing in now across many platforms, and
it's only going to expand from there. We are very focused on becoming a
sort of the most efficient way toverify a human and verify humans identity and
a privacy preserving and frankly low frictionway that can be very secure. And
so we can do that, andwe can make identity verification something that's reusable,

(39:22):
that you're able to reverify yourself,let's say, just with a selfie
in an express way. Then youcan find more value and find that security
benefit across more scenarios of your life, whether that's getting customer support help and
verifying yourself in a transaction, orperhaps you can signing in and authenticating into
let's say a website or account inthe first place. Love it, Yeah,

(39:44):
I love your vision. We obviouslyneeded it. Actually triggered for me
the reminder of GDPR, the waythat it's being picked up. And I
think they're about twenty of the UnitedStates who have some version of GDPR in
flight, which then just begs likefore and we're going to happen in national
policy around it. And that's that'sa that's privacy, but it's also identity.
I mean, that's I mean they'rea little bit joined at the hip,

(40:05):
right I Fundamentally we first started,we were thinking when scoping the business,
I actually we thought we thought werestarting a privacy company. And a
lot of our early team members wereso bashador privacy. We all are guide
so much of what we do trulyend user privacy also protecting the company.
But privacy is core who REALI is. You couldn't have privacy if you actually
didn't know who the person was.So you can't have privacy without identity,
because if you don't know who theperson is, you can fundamentally help them

(40:28):
keep their information saved for protected.And so that's kind of will led us
into solving this problem of identity andprivacy became a very heavy ingredient in the
howl. But it was no funor no low impact to create a sort
of privacy company if we weren't solvingidentity in the first place. And that's
where some calls and identity private companiesand our privacies I'm a security company.
The reality is we're combining them all. We believe identity is the permitter for

(40:51):
security, and you can't have theresponsibility of verifying and keeping someone safe if
you're not also respecting their privacy.Yeah, really good, it will.
It just strikes me again as verypro human and that was part of a
number of your responses throughout this conversation. And I think two about the dehumanizing
quality of not being accepted for thehuman being you are kind of the opposite

(41:15):
of MRI in digital environments in particular, is like very dehumanizing. Just the
way that it makes an individual humanbeing feels like, no, I am
I am who I am? Youknow, and so I see a lot
of this as as very very prohuman. Okay, this has been fantastic.
I've enjoyed it very much. Ifyou are listening, and if you've
enjoyed this conversation as well, howto point you to two other conversations on

(41:36):
this podcast. I actually personally producedboth of them. The first one is
episode two hundred, which we dedicatedexclusively to employee experience. So if some
of what Aaron shared about how he'sbuilding the team and the culture along with
his team at Nametag, or youalso like this idea of things you can
do that make the employee experience betterday to day, you'll hear from twelve

(42:00):
different experts on episode two hundred theex Takes Mixtape. It was produced as
a mixtape style with twelve different takeson it, and then shortly thereafter episode
two hundred and three, I breakdown our perspective on digital pollution in the
need to think about providing a returnon time and intention for other people as
you're reaching out in digital, virtualand online spaces, not just focusing on

(42:22):
your own ROI as you're thinking abouthow much time or how much effort you
put into something, what am Igoing to get out of it? You're
going to get so much more outof any effort in a digital, virtual,
online environment if you accept the ideathat you're arriving amid pollution and you're
focused more on the return on otherpeople's time and attention. So episode two
hundred, Episode two oh three errorbefore I let you go, I have

(42:44):
things I always like to learn fromall of the guests, so I ask
these to everybody. I would lovefirst to know if there's someone you'd like
to thank or mention for the positiveimpact they've created in your life or in
your career. You'll had this pleasureof working with someone at Microsoft who was
there for thirty five years, stillthere. I mean he ran sort of
Microsoft's global organization. It was hischief of staff twice and was fascinating to

(43:07):
me was watching him intermix across somany different cultures of the world. And
you really taught me to value intorespect how much we can learn from so
many different cultures and ways of doingthings, ways of doing business, just
in different parts of the world.I spent a lot of time traveling with
him and seeking to understand that,and it's just been a huge influential element
of my whole life and career.That's wonderful. I feel like those are

(43:30):
things you can only learn by doing. So if you can be alongside someone
who's done it before, that's superhelpful, so you can make fewer errors
while still being graceful along the way. How about a company or brand that
you personally appreciate for the experience theydeliver for you as a customer. I
had a new one and this issuper wacky. I don't even know if
they'd made anymore. Someone got mejust a couple of weeks ago, something

(43:52):
called a June like the month June, okay, And it is at AI
enabled oven in your kitchen, andso you put in the food and then
it says, is that salmon?Would you like to bake the salmon or
air fry the semin and it sortof monitors it. It has a live
camera, it tells you when it'sdone. It is just such a delightful
product experience, and it feels likea combination of modern technology and an old

(44:15):
world traditional thing we've done, butwith need. I think the company was
just acquired by Weber the Grill folks. But even in that transition, their
customer support and just the experience ofthe product and then helping me want to
help me learn it and you know, one of the parts right damage and
now fantastic they've been. It's acase where the product has really delighted me,
but my other interactions with the organizationto their site and their calls and

(44:36):
other emails have just been fantastic.And so it's turned me into an evangelist.
I guess you could say maybe offtoo. Yeah, it's really good
cameras. It just reminds me ofthis idea of like there's some ARVR,
the three D reading in the camera, Like how what is this in my
oven right now? How big isit? How heavy is it? How

(44:58):
thick is it? It's set likeit needs to know all these things before
it can even do all the otherthings. Like it's super interesting, crazy,
but it does make you feel likeonce you get one of these things
that are smart and you're like,well, how you know? Chat GBT
is an example other thing, whywas I using sort of Google before?
Wow, it's so much easier toask this question to chat GPT, Like
oh, my gosh, the otheroven. I look in the clipbook and

(45:20):
say how long do I hook thisforward? And what do I do?
It's incredibly fast, and it's justit's a joy, and it's really has
made a food prep in my householdmuch more fun, super interesting. I
would check that out before I letyou go. If people are listening at
this point, we're well over fortyfive minutes in. Now they've obviously found
the things that you're sharing interesting anduseful. Where would you send them to

(45:42):
learn more about you or learn moreabout Nametag and humbled if we can at
value You've got a huge collection ofreally really smart and wise words and the
two hundred, double three hundred podcaststhat you've recorded, ye'all. Our website
is get nametag get nametag dot com. It's a great place to check out
what we do. We can actuallygive it a try. Now we've got
a live, real stark from nothingtrial very quickly out of the box,

(46:04):
and we do a lot of LinkedIn. That's probably our primary platform of trying
to publish content and invite comments andthoughts on really this big space that we
all live in today that's super relevant. I think in our lives super get
nametag dot com and he is AaronPainters, both spelled exactly as you would
expect. Hit him up on LinkedIn. My name is Ethan Butte. Last
name is spelled b e ut youhit me up on LinkedIn. Aaron,

(46:28):
thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you, Fiser fun Aden,
thanks for having me. As we'velearned time and again here on the
podcast, the essence of customer experienceand of employee experience is how we make
people feel. But so much ofthe experience relies on digital communication, on
faceless typed out text. To connectand communicate more effectively with the people who

(46:49):
matter most to your success, addsome video emails and video messages to the
mix. Save time, ad clarity, convey sincerity, be seen, heard
and understood, and make other peoplefeel seen, heard and understood. Try
saying thank you, good job orcongratulations with a video. Try answering a
question with a video. Try introducingyourself with a video. Try it free

(47:10):
at bombomb dot com. Thanks forlistening to the Customer Experience Podcast. Remember
the single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
better experience for your customers continue learningthe latest strategies and tactics by subscribing right
now in your favorite podcast player,or visit bombomb dot com slash podcast