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May 28, 2025 33 mins

What if you could unlock executive buy-in—and real alignment—by channeling the breakthrough strategies of world-famous celebrities in your customer experience approach?

In this episode of the Delighted Customers podcast, guest Ania Rodriguez flips the script on how CX leaders can influence their C-suite and drive transformative change. By drawing on the archetypes of iconic figures like Oprah, Lady Gaga, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, and Taylor Swift, Ania reveals how leaders can meaningfully connect with stakeholders, avoid the "hero's trap," and move from mere buy-in to active organizational alignment. The impact? A more dynamic, emotionally intelligent, and business-savvy customer experience program that gets noticed—and gets results.

Listeners should tune in to hear from Ania Rodriguez, an award-winning CX and UX advisor to Fortune 500 companies—and the founder behind both Key Lime Interactive and JourneyTrack. Ania’s hands-on experience helping brands like Google, Cisco, Amazon, Meta, and Disney achieve double-digit growth brings practical, actionable insight for customer experience leaders at every stage.

Here are three big questions Ania answers on this episode:

  • What’s the difference between passive buy-in and active alignment—and how do CX leaders get to the latter?

  • Which “celebrity archetype” do you need to channel when working with key executives on journey mapping and change management?

  • How can AI-powered tools like JourneyTrack help organizations synthesize data, spot emotional inflection points, and make smarter, faster CX decisions?

Don’t miss this episode—it’s packed with memorable analogies, real-world case studies, and Ania’s expert playbook for leading change. Listen and subscribe now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or find Delighted Customers on all your favorite podcast platforms!

JourneyTrack is a proud sponsor of The Delighted Customers Podcast

Learn more about how JourneyTrack can help you leverage AI to improve CX.

 

Meet Ania:

Ania is a self-made entrepreneur who has made a name for herself, serving as a CX/UX advisor to Fortune 500 companies around the world for over two decades. Known for her focus on actionable results and quality, 

Ania’s leadership has resulted in double-digit growth for her first company, Key Lime Interactive, over the past decade. The company has emerged to become one of the leading user experience research firms in the United States. Her work as a CX/UX strategist and researcher demonstrated to her the need for a platform that could take her journey mapping vision to the next level. JourneyTrack is the tool that meets that vision.

Email Ania mentioned: sales@journeytrack.io
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Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Welcome to the Delighted Customers Podcast. I am so glad
you're here. We challenge conventional thinking about customer
experience because I believe that improving experiences isn't just good
for business. It's a powerful way to make a meaningful difference
in people's lives. Each week we feature thought provoking
conversations with industry thought leaders from a

(00:30):
variety of backgrounds, offering you unique perspectives and
actionable insights. Get ready to sharpen your
leadership and transform your approach to customer experience.
Let's dive in.
Well, welcome to this episode of the Delighted Customers podcast.

(00:52):
I am thrilled to have back on the show a returning guest, Anya
Rodriguez, who is a self made entrepreneur and made her
name for herself serving as a CX and UX advisor to
Fortune 500 companies around the world from Google to
Cisco to Amazon, Meta Disney and many others.
And she did so getting double digit growth for her

(01:14):
first company, Key Lime Interactive, over the past decade. And that
company has emerged to become one of the leading user experience research firms
in the United States. Now she heads up Journey Track,
which is a journey tracking tool,
really what I call journey management tool that combines
the use of artificial intelligence with the most business

(01:37):
impactful processes and capabilities that you'd want
to have. And today, first, before we get into what we're going to talk about
today and Anya, let me welcome you to the show. Thank you. Marcus, great to
be back. Thank you so much for having me. Again here and such an
honor. And Anya and her company JourneyTrack, are sponsors
of the Delighted Customers podcast and we're just incredibly excited

(01:58):
about that partnership. So welcome back. And today we're going to
be taking a little different view through a different lens
of how leaders can make effective change in
organizations by looking through the lens of celebrities
and how important it is to be able to identify the fact that those
key stakeholders that we need to make an impact on

(02:20):
to influence for change, the kind of support that we need to
garner as CX leaders all have different interests. By looking
at this through a different lens, lens of some of these celebrities,
you would have heard of all of them. We're going to hopefully
give some fresh insights, whether you're a CX leader or any other
kind of leader, on how you can make change. Am I on the right

(02:43):
track, Anya? You're right on track. Yes. Thank you, Mark. Okay,
well, you are most welcome. Let's dig into this and we're calling
it loosely from Oprah to Branson, five
celebrity archetypes every CX leader needs.
So let's start off as why is it such a big
deal to maybe take A different approach that will give us

(03:05):
more impact with executives. Why should the C Suite
even care? Yeah, What I see, and having been
working in this field for over two decades, is that CEX leaders are often
misunderstood or underutilized by the C Suite. They're expected to fix
things, but not empowered to really drive strategic change. So
these five architects remind experienced people

(03:28):
in general to really think about and shift and reframe
how they present themselves to the leadership. Everybody talks about getting
a seat at the table, but what does that really mean? And I think each
of the archetypes, Oprah, Lady Gaga, Branson, Cuban, Mark Cuban,
and Taylor Swift have their own way of doing it, and they've all been super
successful. Oprah starts with intention. Gaga is really

(03:50):
about breaking mold. Branson is about building
unforgettable, you know, experiences. Cuban is about
really making it undeniable for your cfo. And then
Taylor is really storytelling. Each of them presents a different
mindset. And I think why, you know, why it's such a big
deal. It can improve clarity and help those that are

(04:11):
struggling. And I think the biggest component when people are trying to do
customer experience transformations in general, I've seen this
pattern over and over, over again, is that they,
they don't really know how to create.
Not necessarily buy in, but alignment. Right. In that case,
it's a common mistake. Alignment is something that you do actively. You know,

(04:33):
before I started these companies, I worked at IBM in their
global services team, really helping senior leaders, helping them
really think strategically and really afford cx. And even at
that young age, I learned that, that folks really got
stuck in just knowing how to frame things and really
inspiring folks to make that change. And so that's where it was coming from.

(04:55):
So let's talk a little bit. Double click on that to make sure we can
level set for the audience. We talked about buy in versus alignment.
Could you define each one of those for us? Yeah. To me,
buy in is something that's passive. Sure. Do your CX thing,
you know, versus alignment is active. This is how my team
contributes to the journey. So to me, there's like two different ways. Buy

(05:17):
in is something you passively do, and then alignment is something
you actively do and you're consistently showing contribution. So the key
then is how do we get alignment in practice? What are some
common mistakes that you see CX leaders making when they're
trying to influence people? They need to come on board.
Yeah, I think when they're trying to

(05:39):
influence, they are. You know, I think that the classic
things that people are sort of repeating, repeating over and over is still happening, right?
They're still stuck in like Visa customer metrics and talking about, about
NPS or those things even though no one wants to talk about are still
happening today. Those are common mistakes that I still see. There's movement
that I'm starting to see across a lot of the enterprises but it's still there.

(06:01):
There's still this desire to want to talk through
revenue conversations but people really don't even know how to start. They, they,
they just, you know, revert to what they're accustomed
to. I think one of the things that I see in general as common mistakes
is that CX is, is really a team sport.
If you solo it, if you solo it by yourself, you're going to sabotage it

(06:22):
if you think you're going to. You know, I have a retailer customer that,
that, that has been owning all the customer
journeys within this big retailer and you know, she has
a couple of people start dedicated to creating these like
these maps and Figma, which is a, you know, prototyping tool
and she doesn't want to have others in other teams

(06:44):
to, to basically build their own journeys. All the designers, which they should,
they should be doing that but she wants to control it. She makes it a
very much a siloed my, it's my, you know, it's my area
expertise. If you're doing this, if you're, if you're trying to, to
really to build a, you know, to transform the company and
really be driven from a customer centricity perspective. It no longer is owned

(07:06):
by one person or one department, it's now owned by everybody and it becomes part
of that DNA. And I think that's a long ways for a lot of companies.
Even though everybody wants to be there, there's just still one department who's owning
it and then they're consulting to other areas. And I think that's broken personally,
you. Know, I think you're hitting on a really good and important
point and I am guilty as charged. I was

(07:28):
leading a CX practice at a bank in the mid Atlantic and
one of the mistakes I made. Now I can look back and refer to it
as part of what is in the training program I offer
is I fell into the hero's trap and that was really trying
to be the hero and do it all myself and not realize the
importance of being a guide and how important it is to help

(07:49):
others achieve the goals that they're trying to achieve. And
to use to your vernacular alignment as
aligning if you're the customer's advocate, what the customers want,
need, desire with what they're trying to achieve.
Does that make sense? That totally does, yeah. I
see the hero journey as you call it all the time.

(08:12):
There's just everywhere it's interesting everything from like teams and
enterprises to small little teams and even consultancies. There's this
desire to just perhaps because there's, there's almost
like a, a perception that there's still like
a land grab situation. I think people just very much like this is my
land and this is my land. There's a territorial thing that continues

(08:34):
to happen for whatever reason and I think that really breaks, breaks
the ability for companies to really sort of align and it really becomes
customer centric, not aligned but really establish or finally
meet their whatever objectives from a centricity perspective. So it held them back
for better or for worse. You can have tools, you can have people, but if
you don't really have good change management and that's part of why this

(08:56):
was built. I think the strongest thing CX leaders need
right now is to learn change management skills. Because
I think that's, that's probably the biggest blocker that I see. Right.
And I think part of why I created this, I was like, I was trying
to help them get perspective because oftentimes just
thinking about how we all show up to, to work and how we show up

(09:18):
in our life, you know, there's, we all have different archetypes, right of what we
are. I think the biggest thing that, that can, that, that they need
to understand is that everybody is their, their typical, you know,
buy in blueprint if you will, the C Suite. They are, they have,
they're very clear of what, what they want depending on who it
is. But they're also, they have, they have their own archetype. They

(09:42):
have, you know, obviously your, your CFO is pretty much your Mark Cuban. You know
something, tell me the numbers. You know. But there's people in that
team that are really much about like making it a forgettable experiences like the
Virgin brands. I think each company has their own
way of doing it. But I think as leaders in cx, right the, the
biggest thing that people can do to really

(10:04):
mature and shift the mindset of a company is really start working
with within right. Thinking through all the components around change
management. Tell us about how say for example
we can channel Taylor Swift to help us do our job.
Yeah, so Taylor is all about storytelling. She's, she's the
queen of that. If you think about using her lens

(10:27):
to track your Impact, you know, might think about how you
stories behind your CX outcomes. So it's not just saying like
a Cuban would be like show me the ROI or efficiency gains. But she's more
about telling me the story behind that. Like I'm really double tapping
on why and you know, and kind of pulling that out. She's, she's a
phenomenal storyteller. That's what makes her amazing, I think in my opinion anyways.

(10:49):
Whereas a Lady Gaga, her lens would be a little bit more
about what bold move did you do that shifted
customer emotion or behavior and things like that. She's all about that
bold shift. And then
Oprah, you know, I love Oprah, but she's all about trust
and really changes in trust and customer sentiment really underlying

(11:10):
that. Right. And of course Branson is like will
people remember this and share this like that he cares about that. Wow. If you
take those. Each architect sees value differently. As you think about
impact, it's not just about, you know, you know,
the impact itself, but you know, you have to measure the shifts in
emotion. There's a lot of now new work that's coming around that double tapping into

(11:32):
the emotional journeys. Many years ago we actually had a public case study
that I could talk about with Southwest Airlines. We worked, my other company, Key Lime,
worked on a bunch of projects with them to just really get to the
underlying emotional journey, to really shift it. And I thought it was interesting.
This is all pre Covid, but it really shows an example of really
getting to that shift to really kind of elicit a certain

(11:55):
experience and then measuring that through time and seeing their arise.
It's interesting we were able to shift and sort of, you know, show some, some,
some of those at the conference customer presented at. But net net
is that, you know, as you're thinking through these initiatives, you have to
think through these different lenses to basically make sure you're looking at it from different
viewpoints because there's going to for sure be different stances

(12:17):
within your even company and leadership. So I, I love what you're saying,
Anya, about both understanding who it is
that you need to make an impact on and influence and not treat
everyone the same way and also be aware of different
styles that you may use to approach those people
the way they respond best. Yeah, right.

(12:39):
I think there's a lot this, this is. I thought I found myself
very lucky at a very young age. IBM sent me to a bunch of
leadership training early on. They had some like leadership, what 10 women
leadership thing and I was. But what I'VE I still use a
lot of those learnings and I think that's what made me pretty successful at building
both businesses. If you want to create buy in even before you get into that

(13:00):
meeting, you want to like alignment. You want to meet with someone who is either
who knows who you're. Let's just say that it's your CFO who is going to
make this decision of whatever you need to get. Let's just get some software.
Whatever it is, if you're meeting with him or her, you're going to want to
ensure that depending on their style. Right. Get to know somebody
who's already done it right before and got approval

(13:23):
or is a influencer to this person and can appreciate
that information. Right. Because what that does for you is it can kind of gets
you hey, I'm meeting with with Jane and Jane is
the cfo. And you know, you know I it's my first time doing it.
You know, here's what I prepared. What do you think and is close enough to
that person will be like oh no, no, she wants to see it XYZ or

(13:44):
she's really about. She's really about numbers or she's really about maybe
she's a little bit of her Oprah. What are we. What changes of trust do
we see? Is there something that now is a different version of things
depending on what at the end that person is their style,
if you will. It's that alignment to it. You know, I found that either doing
that or you know, if you're meeting with a greater group and

(14:06):
that person is a decision maker, if somehow you can pick their
brain for 15 minutes before so they don't just get like blindsided in the meeting.
It's those types of little things that really I found to be super
helpful as the years have gone by,
struggling. To connect the dots across your customer journeys,
you're not alone. For many CX professionals, journey mapping

(14:28):
is still manual and fragmented. Especially in
large organizations. JourneyTrack changes that
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of every touchpoint. Uncover friction, align
teams and prove the ROI of your CX initiatives

(14:50):
so you can make smarter decisions and deliver smoother
journeys. Want to see how AI can help you map
smarter, not harder? Download our free white paper at
JourneyTrack IO podcast or
click the link at the end of the show. Notes to get started with
AI powered journey mapping in minutes.

(15:15):
So Anya, let's play this out for our
audience and make believe that we were able
to use Journey track to review a key
customer journey. And we'll pick a business, maybe we'll pick an
amusement park just for fun. And we're speaking to the
head of CX for the amusement park. We have just now gotten the results

(15:37):
back of using JourneyTrack and collaborating with
a team of internal and customers to help
collect the information that we have. And we're going to share those with
results. And of course, you can make up whatever you want the results are, but
I'm going to ask you to walk through each one of these people and ask
what, what they might notice in. In the, in the feedback and

(15:59):
in the result of, of the tool that they might want to communicate with their
C suite in the meeting. So let's start with Oprah. What would
Oprah approach it? What she see in the data and how might she approach it?
Yeah, she, she would start off with the intention. You know, everything comes a. From
place of purpose. So our purpose at Mark's
playground is to really have people have a lot of

(16:22):
fun and learn a lot of things. So she would lead with the
intention. How well did we. Did we meet that intention,
that purpose? Did you know, did our. Did the parents who were there,
did they feel that? Who's talking about it? That's how she would, I think,
approach it. In the case of Gaga, she would be like, okay, we
need to break the. These molds. You know, we need to stop blending in.

(16:44):
Mark's playground has to be, like, amazing and has
to have a strong identity. And, and we really,
you know, we gotta do like the, you know,
you know, Nickelodeon used to have those, you know, what was it? The
green. Oh, my gosh. Nickelodeon had those green things. There was like an
obstacle course and kids used to run around. The point is, it

(17:06):
was even whatever, 30, 40 years later, whatever it is, I
still remember, right? So it's about breaking those molds, doing something so wild and fun
and crazy and everybody's gonna be like, oh, my goodness, it's so much fun.
Right? That's, that's what Gaga is gonna do. Or so wild that it's like, you
know, you come up with some, like, robot, I don't know, roller coaster
that you ride at a roller coaster. And I don't know, it's VR and this

(17:27):
other stuff. I don't know, some crazy stuff. And that's, that's really what she wants
to go after. So she would lead with the. That she would craft some identity.
That. That breaks the mold, breaks the typical mindset. Branson
was don't make it unforgettable. He's the guy that's gonna, don't be boring. We're
gonna like, we're gonna make this an amazing. People are gonna be so
talking about us and that's, we, we want to make it wild

(17:49):
and fun and, and just, you know, just amazing.
Right? Let's just deliver once in a lifetime kind of moment
that you know, people are gonna talk about it for months and it's going to
be, it's going to bring, it's going to build a bunch of loyalty and
brag worthy brand equity. That's, that's his play.

(18:11):
Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban. He's going to go a little bit different.
He's going to be very much about what kind of initiative does this support
from a, you know, ROI perspective. Let's look at, look at
the numbers. Let's look at it. Does it make sense?
So we're looking at the journey map of this amusement park and we notice

(18:32):
that there, maybe there's some bottlenecks on certain rides
or on the concession stands. He's not happy with that. Oh gosh,
no. Because that's going to cost him money. And that's money.
Money is the most important thing for him. He wants to see the results
and how we can reduce, I don't know, that bottleneck of saying what are we
going to do from an operations management perspective to reduce

(18:54):
that efficiency? Because that means that people are less able to
use their time to go buy more food at the food stand.
So he cares about driving food stand sales. I worked at a movie theater
and that was my first job. And it was not about buying the movies.
It was about the food stand, the food stands where people make money at these
parks. So that's probably what he's thinking about, like how do we drive more people

(19:16):
to those food stands and get whatever Slurpee stands and ice cream
stands about Taylor Swift. Taylor, Taylor, Taylor. She's,
she's creating a movement. She's all about how do I, how
do I tell a story that's going to be there? How do I create a
movement? How do I make it so that, I mean, let's, let's talk about. I've
been to her concert three hours. What other, you know, kind of folks do three

(19:37):
hours? There's a level of storytelling and movement and just
making people feel like they're, they're included and
just are seen and heard and there's some
narrative. So like her thing is totally about narrative
versus, you know, Gaga, Boldness, Oprah Purpose,
Cuban Impact and Franson's all about memorability. So each of

(19:59):
them bring Sir Herzebel narrative. She's gonna try to connect that to that.
So how might I be able to use a tool like
JourneyTrack? And I remember you sharing a case study of Paychex
using not unlike a lot of other companies that have
patched together old tools like Excel or
Miro or Mural to manage the

(20:21):
customer journey, try and track the customer journey. How can they better utilize
a tool like JourneyTrack to help them with these. Five
archetypes to do their job better? Yeah, so if you
have, if you're more like an Oprah, your purpose, you care about
research and you care about telling, making sure you build that
purpose through research. We have an Insights repository and

(20:44):
Insights, you know, hub, if you will. And not only can you just upload
raw research and it like basically creates themes and it tags
it to journeys and, and it also, for all intensive purposes, you can
create journeys from a bunch of qualitative, quantitative, raw research
and then at least start you there. So Oprah, at least you can, you know,
you're going to get clarity through the data you have and, and sort of, that

(21:06):
sort of builds not just journeys for the sake of journeys, but journeys that are
research based. So if you're purpose driven, you might care about that. Gaga,
the journey maps. I think it's all about doing stuff that actually look good in
the boardroom. She's caring about breaking that mold. You know, if you're still doing
sticky notes on a wall and you're still getting super frustrated because half the people
on the call, if you're a mirror or can't figure out how to move the

(21:28):
sticky, then our workshop feature is amazing. It
allows you to run this and at a click of a button, get done quickly.
So then you can go and, and go to back to Mark's playground. So it
gets you stuff done in at least half the time, sometimes even depending on what
you, depending how quickly things. I mean, it could be what used to take days
and months, now take, you know, hours. The craziness of what's

(21:49):
happening now with AI and some of the features we've. Built in and Anya,
let me, let me double click on Lady Gaga here for a minute. She's using
this tool and she has access with the click of a button, as you say,
to all this data, maybe tell me if I'm way off base here. She
can easily identify an
opportunity that is a high emotion

(22:10):
opportunity in the journey. Maybe it's when they first get there or
Maybe in the case of
paychecks, when there's some major conversion at a company and
the risk is incredibly high and everybody's worried about how it goes. Could
she say, look out with the old, in with the new. We
need to rethink how we approach this particular thing and the way that our

(22:32):
customers, whether they're employees or customers. Where is an opportunity to
impact emotion the most? Yeah, for sure. Sometimes people call those
moments of truth. Sometimes people use those terminology so that
it's exactly that you can have, you know, you can bring in
your data, kind of looks at, you know, those very
high motion data points. Right. Kind of creates an

(22:55):
evidence library around all those things that are happening. How many times did that
happen? Was it just once that people really,
really doesn't dislike? That Dragon Slayer line was for
the roller coaster. Dragon Slayer was too long. Now that's like, it's become
so long and it has no, I don't know, no good Disney model to make
you enjoy their line does we need to work through that, if you will. So

(23:17):
she, she, in her case, I mean, Journey Track can give you that data and
really elevate it so that, hey, these are areas where they're like, there's some pain
points that are pretty intense and you need to do something radical to shift that.
So to, to shape, to shift that and something that's. Now you need to give
everybody who takes longer than five minutes in that line and ice cream at the
end. So. Yeah. And how does it help

(23:38):
someone who's like Mark Cuban when you have the results from the,
the Journey Track tool? So we have this whole Journey Impact stuff built in.
So now, you know, bringing in metrics, we actually now have a.
We're able to bring in metrics through Snowflake. So those that are in Snowflake and
databricks and, you know, BigQuery is next. But now for
Snowflake, you know, you're able to bring in all those operational metrics, tie them to

(24:01):
those CX data points, get timelines and use that to
show roi. And that's what he cares about.
And as do a lot of people in that C suite. Yeah,
you always need to have a Cuban mindset, period. Yeah, I'm going to make
you guys laugh. My, My parents are Cuban, so I was doing this at a
conference and every time I said, you need, you need a Cuban, I'm like, you

(24:23):
need a Nadia. There you go. It's. I think it's interesting to see it. I
think people get so stuck in trying to isolate and
there's just even then like even the folks have been doing this for so long.
I mean look at marketing attribution for years. It's so hard to get that sort
of right. There's this like playbook of like let's get the ROI
right. And honestly for now the first thing people need to start thinking

(24:45):
about, that's why we built the journey impact feature which is at least
showing like here's the, here's maybe a financial metric and then here is
my some like whatever sales of the writers on this dragon
slayer ride and then versus like how happy they are at the
end so that we can see see. And then obviously if you worked at the
kinks the lines and you gave them ice cream for free if they took more

(25:05):
than five minutes your NPS is probably going to go up, your revenue is going
to go down because now you're giving free ice cream. So maybe there's more people
writing it. So the net net is that and you're able to do it now
more efficiently so you have greater sales. These fixes net it
out to a better experience and more revenue and win win.
And and lastly how do you see Taylor Swift using the results

(25:25):
from the journey tracking tool to tell
stories better? Yeah. You know this is where like if you think
there's the whole concept of maps to maps or journey atlas some people call
it that it's like being able to see the bigger story and
then be able to drill into all the different
reasons and things that are like creating whatever like and,

(25:48):
and having that bird eye view but also being able to tell those micro
stories and anything that that's uniquely theirs. Like
Haiti we had the ice cream at the end of the ride sort of says
something that's uniquely theirs and it, and it gives them that freedom to do so
so and tell that story. Yeah, wonderful. So
so looking at the advantages of using a tool

(26:09):
like JourneyTrack, you mentioned AI. How do you see
AI being incorporated into journey management
in the tool to help the CX leader and help businesses.
It's, it's, it is really interesting the things
that we're able to already built in. So I came from a world where we
used to take weeks, months to create these journey maps because

(26:31):
just synthesizing if we were doing data based journeys you would go
around whatever X number of countries, research this and maybe
do some co creation net net and and now AI
synthesizing all that data is, is that literally the easiest thing?
You can also honestly Persona building Personas now we can
either create Proto Personas on the fly with AI. Think about a typical

(26:53):
Persona engagement. To understand who your Personas are. You have a bunch of
data. I don't know, it's behavioral data from. From like web analytics.
You have, you know, qualitative interviews, quantitative data. You
want to either, you know, feed it into our system, say, hey,
I want to, you know, I want you to spit out, you know, like the
major, like X number, whatever you think is the right number of Personas based on

(27:15):
all this data. Or you can say, well, I know that there's like these five
sort of, you know, breakdowns based on our. Maybe our segmentation models.
And I want to make sure I stay strict too. So break it down by
these segmentation sort of requirements. Quite frankly, that work there
is typically on a consult engagement, 80, $90,000 engagement
now is done literally like in seconds. Seconds, which

(27:37):
is crazy, right? Either research or protocol. Like research and behavioral
Persona creation. And at least. At least the initial tap, right? Like initial kind of
saying, going back to evidence and saying, this is where we got this right. There's.
Granted, there's layering that happens after, you know, that's the
first, you know, version one. But that step, that is something
that. So that's amazing. So that's those types of things. And then there's. For

(27:59):
us, there's stuff like synthesizing and creating tags and. And
creating. Obviously, we can also create journeys from raw data as
well. You have a bunch of research data, call center data. Using AI,
we can create some initial journeys for you using that data. Again,
something that used to take forever. And some of our customers are asking us to
create some dashboards. And we've been working through it, but there's actually,

(28:20):
with AI, you just can't. Just can prompt all the data you have.
Why do you even, like, you know, you can custom. The days are where you
were like, let's go create a dashboard to figure things out. And everybody had to
try to customize it. Like, you can move away from this.
I can just drill into my own data. Show me this by this, and bam,
you know, there it is. Thing of beauty, the world that we're in now is

(28:42):
so changing so quickly, and yet it's still
critical to be able to traverse the landscape of
our key stakeholders and influence them because they have
oftentimes competing priorities. Yeah, yeah, they.
They. It goes back to how we started this
conversation. Technology is going super fast. People are

(29:03):
not adapting to that speed. And that's why to me, buying is
inevitable. Alignment is. Is obvious. I think now
the thing that our generation and future generations have to really think
about is, is like, it's more the, you know, how do we align our
people, how do we best support sort of this, this big
technology boom that's happening. It's super honestly from

(29:26):
like, I, I think it's so easy now to create
features in a way that used to take months and months and months to do.
Even with like all the dolphin tools, we, we can turn around
code in, you know, days. And that's crazy,
right? So it's, it's an interesting time for sure. But to me, it's back to
human skills, right? It's, it's about how do you engage your

(29:47):
leaders, how do you help the entity move
forward. Those are the real skills that I think
are still very much in demand and very much
what is going to create that, that the right,
the right environment for you to really
succeed in general. I mean, every, every week, it's, it's just, it's just

(30:10):
amazing what the team is doing quickly. And I'm just like, wow, these are, these
are dream things that I always used to dream up with that I, that they're
so, so painful to do that it can now be done quickly. But yeah,
I don't know, it's, it's people and it comes back to
basic human. That's why I think you're, you know, not to hook your horn, but
I think you have an amazing, amazing training that I think

(30:32):
is so like, from the mention, the moment you mention, I'm like, that's
exactly what a lot of our customers need right now more than
anything else. They need to understand how to, to really
break away from your early points, break away from that hero journey, right. To just
kind of think that they own it and the like, that's where it's all at.
Yeah, well said. Well said. Well, it's been so much fun as it always

(30:53):
is. And I want to, I want to end with a question. What
delights you as a customer? I'm about little moments,
right? So I think, I think I did answer this. I'm about those little key
moments, right? So I get delighted when you do little things. Like,
I don't know, let's see, do I have it here? Like, my husband will bring
me little, like little things. Like small, little things that I, he doesn't need

(31:13):
to bring me some, something expensive. Like, I just, I love when you're very. You
very much do something. A small token of appreciation. So little
details. It's what I think grabs me. Yeah. I had
Someone on a show recently and they said, company,
somebody hand wrote a thank you letter. And it had been so long since
I ever got a handwritten letter. It was just felt so special. And

(31:35):
it wasn't a million dollars, it didn't cost him, but it made a huge difference.
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, those little things, it's just like we take things for
granted and I try to, I try to, you know, thank
people when I, you know, when they do nice things as they do it right.
Sometimes it's just like calling them and saying, hey. I just, you know, I wanted
to say that that was super special what you did. And I think there's a

(31:55):
little, I guess it goes down to little moments. I'm very much a little moments
person, so. Yeah, well. And I think it's not just you. I think those,
those things that you can do to make an impact in people's lives, both personally
and professionally, I don't think they have to be these huge grandiose
things. I think they can be small things. And after all, we all want to
be seen, heard, validated, felt like we belong. And

(32:17):
that doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money or take a lot of time. Well
said. Well said. Good stuff. Anya. Thank you. Thank you so much
for being a return guest and on the show and sharing
so much. I love when we talk about celebrities and you help bring it to
life. Thank you for having me make up that fun scenario. I wasn't expecting that
one. Mark Mark's Playground. I'll make a little picture for you, send

(32:39):
it to your way of what that little Marks playground has. We may be on
to something. Yeah, there you go. Let's do it. Well, thank you so much. You
have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. Thanks. Bye. Bye.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Delighted Customers
podcast. It would mean so much if you would take a moment to subscribe.
You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you

(33:01):
listen to podcasts. Click on the plus sign or follow button and that
will ensure that you don't miss an episode and it helps get the word out
to others while you're there. I'd love it if you leave a five star
review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday.
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