September 18, 2025 • 34 mins
What happens when your company’s reputation—and your customers’ trust—hangs by a thread? Are you ready for a moment when a crisis isn’t just possible, but inevitable?
In this episode, I dive deep into one of the most critical topics for today’s leaders: how strategy, communication, and integrity intersect to protect (and sometimes rebuild) your organization's trust in the face of crisis. When everything is on the line, understanding this intersection isn’t just important—it’s essential. The choices you make, and how you communicate them, can mean the difference between lasting customer loyalty or irreparable damage to your brand.
That’s why you can’t afford to miss my conversation with Michael Meath. Michael has spent over 40 years advising companies across the country through some of the toughest, most sensitive situations—from toxic crises to everyday reputational risks. He’s also served as interim chair of the prestigious Syracuse University School of Public Relations, shaping the next generation of communicators. If you’re a business leader, organizational communicator, or anyone invested in customer experience, Michael’s insights are a must-hear.
Here are three questions Michael answers on this episode:
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Why is it essential for CEOs and leaders to invest in communication and public relations—not just in a crisis, but every single day?
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What are the most dangerous myths and common missteps companies make when high-stakes moments arise?
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How can leaders activate a simple yet powerful model to ensure their communications strategy is rooted in integrity, builds trust, and truly delights customers—even when things go wrong?
I invite you to listen and subscribe to the Delighted Customers podcast! You can find this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, as well as all your favorite podcast platforms.
Meet Michael Meath
Michael Meath is a nationally recognized expert in crisis communications, public affairs, and ethical leadership. With more than four decades in the field, he’s guided Fortune 500 companies, public utilities, health systems, and financial institutions through high-profile challenges—like the Tylenol cyanide scare, Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal, and environmental disasters. His innate ability to “run toward the fire” has earned him a reputation as the trusted advisor organizations hope they never have to call—but are thankful for when the stakes are highest.
Michael served as interim chair and an adjunct professor at Syracuse University’s world-renowned S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, teaching ethics, communications, and leadership to both graduate and undergraduate students. He’s also a business owner, published author, and consultant to the military and veteran organizations. Michael’s signature model highlights the overlap between strategy, communications, and integrity—insisting that true organizational success requires all three, with integrity at the core.
Connect with Michael on LinkedIn: Michael Meath LinkedIn
Learn more about his work at michaelmeath.com or reach him via email at MF@falling-brooke.com.
Show Notes & References
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michaelmeath@falling-brooke.com (Email)
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Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Think about the Tylenol cyanide scare, the Exxon
Valdez oil spill, or the Wells Fargo fake account
scandal. Moments when corporate trust hangs by a thread,
those are the kinds of high stakes crisis my guest, Michael
Meef has spent his career helping organizations navigate.
As former interim chair of the Syracuse University School of Public
(00:22):
Relations, Michael is a trusted guide. Leaders turn to when
reputations are. Are on the line, when times are
uneventful, and when crisis hits. Michael, welcome to the
Delighted Customers podcast. Mark, it's great to be with you and thanks for having
me. I am so excited. You have spent over 40
years helping all these organizations throughout the United
(00:44):
States navigate sensitive and confidential, quite frankly,
confidential situations. CEOs, when those, I imagine those
doors close and the executive team gathers together and says, holy
crap, what do we do now? I mean, have you
found yourself in that situation and what's it like to be the person
somebody turns to? Well, it's interesting, Mark, I never planned
(01:06):
on having that as a career path, but as I found
myself more and more and more kind of going from the frying pan
to the fire and being involved with these pretty significant
high stakes situations and sometimes just really sensitive
situations, I found myself more and more in the room
listening to CEOs who were really dealing with
(01:29):
some troubling issues and needing somebody who would
be honest with them, would be straightforward with them, and
would not necessarily try to just be a yes person.
And that seems to be a role that I just sort of fell into.
I did not plan it, but the more I got into it, the more I
found that it was an adrenaline rush and it was also something that
(01:51):
seemed to add value. Well, you, you really are trusted
not just by businesses, but also by Syracuse, which when I
heard that you were chairing the public relations department,
I was totally impressed because if you, some of, some of our listeners may or
may not be aware that the kind of reputation
Syracuse Communications has, you've got
(02:13):
people like Ted Koppel, Steve Kroft, Marv
Albert, Bob Costas, Mike Tirico, these
people all came. Dick Clark, these people all came out of
Syracuse in the communications area. I got to teach in the Bob
Costas room and the Mike Tirico room almost every
semester. So, yeah, absolutely. I would see these names. Awesome.
(02:35):
Awesome. Well, you may be asking where. What is the.
Why do I have Michael on the show? And what's the intersection between communications,
public relations and customer experience management? So we're gonna talk a
little bit about that today when it comes to the strategy around
that. And Michael has Some ideas, some models or a
model around how business leaders can think about that.
(02:57):
But first, can we do some level setting when we talk about
strategy, communications and customer experience and kind of the intersection there
for people who may not be familiar. When we. When you think about
strategy, when you think about communications and how they intersect with
cx, what are we really talking about there? Well,
I think, Mark, that strategy and communications have absolutely
(03:19):
everything to do with customer experience. I mean, there isn't a moment
that they don't align, although people don't think about it
necessarily. So strategy, everybody knows strategy
is kind of what's your plan, what's your objective, what are you trying to
do with your business? And it could be that I want to make, I want
to make more of these, or it could be that I want to raise more
(03:40):
money for a non profit, or it could be that there's a particular piece of
legislation that I'm trying to get through. Or it could be any of those
things. It's the idea of having a, a
direction where you're trying to go. And any successful
organization, as we know, has some kind of a strategy that
they're trying to execute on. So that's strategy. Now
(04:02):
communications can be any form that we might use all the
vehicles and the tools, whether it's public relations or marketing or
advertising. Now the digital arena and everything that that
holds for us. However, what it's really all about is
helping that CEO help her get it from here,
right from their head, their brain, for those that are listening to their
(04:24):
mouth and to get the word out. If you're a nonprofit,
I always like to say that it's. I'm trying to get it from my heart
to my mouth or to my audiences. And
so then the customer experience is every one of those many
places that you talk about every week on your show where we
are trying to interface with the customer
(04:45):
so that they have the best experience possible. And when things
go wrong, and they will go wrong, how do we make them better?
Okay, so thanks for level setting. That makes a lot of sense to me. And
the question I'd like to ask next is, gosh, it seems kind of obvious,
right, that it should be a big deal to the C suite, but why
should they care about investing time, money, energy,
(05:07):
resources into the communications public
relations of their organization? What I found was that
number one, some organizations are successful because they have a really good
idea. They have a product we need, they have a service that we're interested
in. And so almost kind of by accident, they
can become successful For a period of time. What I also found
(05:30):
is that if they didn't communicate well about
what that product or service was, that that success could be
short lived. And then I worked with that idea for a while, but
what I found is that there was a piece missing. And the piece for me
that was missing was, oddly enough, integrity. So
we actually, in this company that I started back in 2004,
(05:52):
we developed a logo which we subsequently
trademarked and then I sold. And this logo has
strategy, communications and integrity as three
circles that overlap each other. And then at the
center of that is what I like to call the actual sweet spot
of success. So for an organization to be something successful long
(06:13):
term, they've got to have that strategy. What's the business
plan, the objective that they're trying to accomplish, number one. Number two, they got
to be able to get it from their brain or their heart to their audience.
And then number three, they better do that with some level of
honesty, fairness, you know, treating each other the way we'd like to be
treated. Because if they don't, and that's where the customer comes in, then they might
(06:36):
be successful for a while, but long term, they're not going to be
successful. And that to me became kind of the. That's
why a CEO should care. Right. So I love the model.
And we're going to dig into some of the, some of the ways that you
might be able to activate the model. But first, I just did a
quick, while you were talking, a quick search on the definition of
(06:58):
integrity. So just to do a little more level setting, would you find that,
would you be in harmony with this definition, the quality of being honest and
having strong moral principles, moral uprightness? Would you add
or detract anything from that? Well, I teach ethics as well
at the university, both the graduate and the undergraduate level. And
what I find is that most people try to say that morality
(07:20):
and ethics is the same thing, and it's not. Say more about that.
Well, morals is what you. And not to turn this whole program into
something else. Morals is what
you or I believe is right or wrong. I mean,
at the end of the day, that's what we. That's what our morals are based
on. Integrity or ethics is what we do about
(07:42):
what we think is right or wrong. There's a subtle difference to that.
So an organization that acts ethically or with
integrity is one that is honest, is straightforward,
and treats people with fairness. And it really does kind of
come back to the golden rule in terms of I want to be
treated when you Think about customer experience. I want to be treated the way
(08:05):
that I should be treated. And I think everyone would like to be
treated with some kind of, you know, sort of basic
honesty and. Yeah. And oftentimes in the
CX world, and this may even been something you've heard of as we
talk about the Platinum rule. Right. Instead of treating people the way they
want to be treated the way you want to be treated, treated them the way
(08:27):
they want to be treated. You know, one of your questions I know you're going
to ask me later is that, you know, what's an example? What do I think
it's like to be a delighted customer? Well, to me, to be a delighted customer
is when I buy something, let's say, and it doesn't
always have to be a financial transaction, but quite often it is
that I'm absolutely happy to take the checkbook and write the check. I
(08:48):
mean, in fact, I can't wait to do it because the service or
the product that I've gotten was so impressive to me and the way I was
treated that I am happy to give my money away. And I can think
of two or three examples in my life when I've done that and been really,
really glad to do it. And if you want to be kind of
understanding what the best definition of the delighted customer is, to me,
(09:09):
there isn't anything better. Yeah, well, well said. Well said. So
as companies embark on this journey to try and hit that
sweet spot, the intersection that you talk about, the way they think about
communications and public relations as it relates, as it connects and
delivers on their strategy, what are some of the, some of the myths out there
that really aren't true? Yeah, great. That's a great question. The first one
(09:32):
would probably be that louder is better, right? That the,
the higher the volume, the better we're going to get our name
out there. The more people are going to want to align with us and either
buy our product or service or support us or whatever the case may be.
That just isn't the case now, unfortunately, these devices
have made it seem like that's even more important, that we've got to increase
(09:54):
our volume. We got to increase all that activity. But that's not. It's not
necessarily true. Secondly, I think
we've kind of gotten ourselves so overloaded with
information that any organization feels as though
if I can just flood the market with multiple channels
of information or sources, whether it's advertisement or marketing or
(10:16):
public relations or whatever, that that's going to do me more good.
And that's not necessarily the case. I don't know about you, but even
just this morning when I got off the pickleball court, I started to to
scroll through my daily news and you get a little bit
overwhelmed with information. And then embedded within
that is the 3,000, 4,000 different
(10:38):
messages that we receive during the normal course of a day of
somebody trying to sell us something, influence with something, or
try to, you know, persuade us on something. So the
volume, I think is sometimes something that even
CEOs and really successful companies feel like they've got to
make the most noise and put out the most information possible. Great,
(11:01):
great, great point. 100% agree. Right. So
as companies move along their journey, what are some of the missteps
they make when it comes to applying good communication
or public relations? Well, when things don't go
well, I mean, I tend to be viewed, the joke is
among some of my longest term clients is they sort of view me
(11:23):
as an undertaker. They want to know I'm there, they want to know
that I'm around, but they'd rather not talk to me. So when
a crisis occurs or when something sensitive happens, and I really do want
to emphasize that, Mark, for your listeners, that quite often we think
crisis communications is all this big, everything's high stake. It's the
Exxon Valdez, it's the Tylenol. Right. It's Wells Fargo. But there
(11:46):
are small situations that happen in every organization
every single day that are sensitive. And if not handled
carefully, they could blow up into something bigger or
erode your customer confidence and trust that you
might have. So number one, one of the myths or one of the
missteps I should say that a lot of people make is that
(12:08):
when things don't go well, they get quiet, they don't say anything,
and either because they're not sure what to say, or number
one, number two, they might have legal counsel, and
I do a lot of work with attorneys, but some legal counsel, their response to
any situation that's not going well is no comment.
And there are times when no comment is probably the right thing to say, but
(12:30):
more often than not, I found that you're better off
positioning some kind of a message out there very
strategically rather than saying no comment. Or it could be the
case that they think that if they're silent that the
situation will either dissipate on its own or
be handled in some other way. And I can give you an example either now
(12:51):
or later, whenever you'd like. Yeah, do share an example. Okay. So
relative to silence, I worked for a Company that was a
very, very large energy business for a long time. We had half
a million customers. And my responsibility was public relations, public
affairs at the time. And we had as a large
heating oil company right on the east coast, we
(13:13):
would on occasion put heating oil in somebody's basement because
we connected to the wrong pipe. A pipe was broken, somebody wasn't paying
attention while they were filling the tank, whatever the case might be. And
in the industry, one of the common practices used to be to
tell your driver when that happened. Disconnect, drive
away, don't say anything, don't talk to anybody. And you can
(13:36):
kind of see why when things go wrong, sometimes that's a,
that's a misstep that an organization might take.
Well, we tried to do something a little bit different once. I
had just taken a course at Harvard on dealing with an
angry public and how to manage situations when they don't go
well. And we decided that in this situation, what we would do
(13:58):
is we would instead of running away from the
situation, run to the situation immediately, contact the
customer, say we screwed up and we need you to take your
family and go into a hotel for the next several weeks. We'll pay
for it, get a two room suite so your kids have a separate room. Whatever
it's going to take, we'll take care of it. We're going to take care of
(14:19):
you ripping up your basement floor, replacing all the furniture that's down there,
all the finishes, everything else. And then instead of
putting all our money and our time and our thought into what are the defense
costs going to be to defend ourselves in this? Because we're going to be buying
a house or a basement or something out of this, run towards this
situation, do absolutely everything the right way and
(14:41):
recognize that worst case scenario, we might end
up losing a customer, but we will have at least tried to do the right
thing. Best case scenario, we might actually keep the
customer because recognizing that the world, things
go wrong, things get screwed up. It's what you do
next was one of my favorite lines. It's what you do next.
(15:03):
So by doing that, I think we sort of,
that's the opposite of the misstep of going silent, no comment,
walking away. Yeah, I love that we talk a lot about trust on
the show and how you can build or not build trust. And
obviously one of the principles around that is transparency. So here you're talking
about something that might seem counterintuitive is
(15:26):
diving right into it, owning it. And in the long run, it always
pays off to be honest and Truthful. And as a business, you know, there are
times I can think of a time, you know, I worked at a bank in
the mid Atlantic for almost a decade.
Over that period of time, you might imagine we had. The bad guys are pretty
active when it comes to banks. And so we had everything from
(15:47):
skimmers, if you remember that, where, you know, people would
take an image of your card as you swiped it with a little camera
they put on that pump and scan your, your card number,
create a fake card and use it to security
breaches, just people from overseas getting. Into the database somehow.
And so there were, there were meetings that were kept to a very finite number
(16:10):
of people at the bank, small, small circle of people
to say, okay, what's the impact? What's the magnitude
of the breach? And, and how widespread do we share
it? Because, you know, on the one hand, it's like if I scare people
enough. About security and safety, because people look at banks,
yes, as places where they can leverage their money and grow
(16:32):
it, grow their nest egg, but they also look at it as a safe place.
Many of our customers, community banks or many, many more customers looking
just really for safety. So if you believe that this bank is a target or
the bank isn't as is a sieve, or the bad guys
and you believe your money's at risk, you could leave. So there's that balance of
what do I share? How much do I share? What would be your thoughts on
(16:54):
a situation like that? Well, actually, I had a bank, a regional
bank, had, oh, I want to say about 100
branches northeast, mostly New York,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, up into New England a little bit. And
great, great. You want to talk about a great organization with high
integrity. Tremendous. They had a school district, they
(17:16):
had many school districts as customers, but they had a school district. And
the treasurer of the school district had her
credentials hacked through Facebook. The
bad guys went in and figured out a way just by the basic information
that she would use every day. And they were able to tunnel
their way into the bank account and they, from this
(17:39):
bank, on behalf of the school district, they took out several
million dollars. Now, the bank jumped on it
as they was their kind of their modus operanda when anything didn't
go well. And they were able to recover much of the money,
not all of it, but in the process, what I found is that this was
just another example of not going silent, but going,
(18:02):
you know, kind of full bore right away. Owning something,
communicating about it, getting out in front of it. There's
a term in my industry that's called get ugly early. And
it's the idea to say that it doesn't do any good to just kind
of wait. Now, sometimes I will advise clients to not go
public with something right away. I can think of multiple examples of
(18:24):
that. But at the same time, they have to be ready to
be public. So they have to have messages ready. And I have formulas for
that and everything else so that as soon as they get asked about
something, it's not the no comment, but it's that they have
something to say. The idea of being strategic is not necessarily to
go proactively with all your messages, but you certainly need to
(18:47):
be ready with your messages so that you can say something when
you need to. And it makes me think of another misstep, I think, if that's
okay, another misstep that organizations
sometimes make. And this can directly relate to the
CX area that a customer calls in with a problem.
It could be the shirt didn't fit, it could be the, you know, the
(19:08):
toaster didn't work. It could be any number of things. And
organizations sometimes will try to
pacify the customer or sometimes they'll elevate and
they'll go up the chain. Right. If they need to. Makes sense.
But what I found is that a rule kind of came into play
for me when I would deal not so much in the CX area, but in
(19:29):
the more the corporate area. When things were we talking about a
Chapter 11 bankruptcy, an environmental spill, a wrong site
surgery, I mean, any of those kinds of things is that I came up with
this mantra that you can always go up, but you can't come back
down. Meaning that if you're the spokesperson or
the customer service manager for a particular issue
(19:52):
and you're dealing with the customer, you can certainly elevate it and
take it up a notch. That might, that might help the customer
gain even more confidence. It might get them an answer quicker.
Who knows, Maybe somebody's got more authority and more leeway. But if
you go up and then you come back down, meaning
if you pass that on to your boss and your boss starts to handle
(20:14):
it and says, well, I'm going to shift you back to Mark, then that
customer's confidence is going to be shaken and their trust level
is going to go down. And the classic example of that to go all the
way to the top of your show was the, not the Exxon
Valdez, but the Horizon accident that occurred in the
Gulf of Mexico some years ago. British Petroleum and we had
(20:35):
the well blow off. So in the
Horizons accident, what Happened was Tony Hayward, who was the CEO
of bp, he was over in Great Britain and he immediately
spoke immediately, which was good to say, yes, we've
had an incident in the Gulf. No, we don't know the full magnitude of it.
He probably went a little too far and said, we think we're going to be
(20:55):
able to control it. But nobody knew at that point how really massive it
was. And then he got on an airplane and went
silent for 12 hours. And they ended up pushing the
spokesperson role down to somebody else who was at a much lower
level, who by the way, did a great job because that
individual, I think his name was Chuck Stickles, he was in Louisiana.
(21:17):
He actually had the accent for the region. He. So he could
relate to the people that were most immediately affected. Did a
pretty good job. Then Hayward gets on US soil and
starts to speak about it again. So we've gone up,
down now where he's trying to take control. He wants to go up again. And
very shortly into the incident, it wasn't more than a few
(21:40):
days, he was getting frustrated because things were getting worse and worse
and worse. And he stated the really, really famous line that
every textbook on crisis communications is used since, which was,
hey, I just would like my life back. Yeah. So imagine what that
does to trust, whether you're an employee, a
contractor, an end use customer, somebody who lives on the Gulf, a
(22:02):
fisherman, you name it. So you can always go up, but you can't come back
down. And I think that would apply into anything in the customer
experience area as well. Great story. What a great story.
Okay, so let's talk about, if you would,
some ways to activate this model that we're talking about. Strategy,
communication, cx. What are some practical steps that leaders
(22:24):
can take in order to put this into place? Number one,
leaders should always have in their organizations. But we're
talking about the C suite or the E team or whatever. They should always
have a set of messages surrounding whatever they're
working on, the good news and whatever they might be working on.
That's the not so good news. And those messages
(22:45):
can't be five typewritten pages in eight
point font. We used to have a rule for everything we did. And it
was actually a chief financial officer at
a huge health system taught me this years ago when I was doing some work
for them. And he said one page, 14 point font,
love it. Now anybody who knows anything about, you know, what they type on their
(23:07):
word processor, is that 14 point fonts pretty big? Yeah. And
the way I do it is I number all My messages, good news,
bad news. And I leave a space between each one, which means that on
one page, 14 point font. Whether I'm dealing with a billion
dollar with a B chapter 11 bankruptcy or I'm
dealing with a fireplace insert
(23:29):
company who's had problems with their product and they're trying to
figure out how to get kind of get it under control. One page,
14 point font. This is what we're going to say about it. Number two,
once you develop those messages, you got to make sure that
everybody has them and uses the same sheet of music
internally as well as externally. Mark, I can't tell you
(23:52):
the times when I've seen organizations who would buy into my
thinking about this set of messages. And then they'd get done with them
and they wouldn't bother to tell their own employees internally, they'd say, there's our
messages for our customers or our suppliers or our business partners
or whatever. And then all the employees are sitting around saying,
what's going on? What's the message? What are we doing? So they, and it's not
(24:15):
necessarily intentional, but they step over their most important
audience, right? Think Wegmans. Wegmans food markets,
number one of the number one places to work year over year after year
BY Whether it's U.S. news, whether it's Forbes, doesn't matter.
Wegmans most important customer or most important audience, I
should say, is not their customer. Their most important audience is their employees.
(24:38):
And they make no bones about saying that. So that's kind of
number two. You develop these messages and you make sure you use them internally. Number
three, make sure everybody uses the same messages. There's a story that
I got called once. I was actually out in the middle of a. I was
on a kayak trip in the middle of the Yanderondack Mountains and I got a
phone call from an engineering firm who had been rebuilding a sewage
(24:59):
treatment plant on the border of a Class
B waterway. Class B waterway, it's not you can't swim in it,
but it's clean water. Sewage treatment plants, of course, when
they do their job right, they discharge clean water from
the plant. So they had rebuilt this huge facility.
And in this particular Sunday morning at 4am a 3 million
(25:22):
gallon raw sewage holding tank collapse. And all that
raw sewage went right into the river. So the organization had
their senior team sitting around a conference table at 7:45 in the
morning. I'm sitting in a kayak in the middle of 4th Lake up in the
Adirondack Mountains and we're talking through what the Messages are
going to be. And I said, now we've got to make sure somebody's writing these
(25:43):
down. And they are very specific because one page, 14 point
font. We're not going to. Not pages and pages of stuff. Got done
with all the messages and everything else. Are we good? Everybody's got them?
Yep. End of the day, I finally got to a place where I had more
than just a week cell coverage. Got a hold of the CEO. He
said, all hell broke loose. Did not go well. What went wrong? He
(26:05):
said, well, we used your messages. I said, well, who wrote them down?
Did you just have one set? Oh, no, no, no, no. We all wrote them
down and we all kind of interpreted our own. Well, that's what went wrong.
So then the New York Times and USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, and
they all had kind of a different story. And this company kind of had
a trust issue because people wondered what really happened. And
(26:27):
just think about that example and consider all
the stuff that you're scrolling through in the news all the time now from
every single source. I get on a web browser and I
see story after story after story, and I finally got to the point where I'm
wondering which one's real, which one's really
the truth. So it's this idea of keeping
(26:50):
everybody on the same message. Yeah. What a great. What a great point.
Simple. I love how simple that message is. And I'm sure
getting it right may take a little bit of time, but 14
point font on one page, It's a small investment
compared to what could happen. And as Mark Twain once said, if you wanted
a shorter letter, I needed more time. Exactly. Exactly.
(27:12):
What great strategies. Is there anything else you
would add as guidance for leaders when it comes to this topic?
Make sure. And this is not a pitch for an outside
consultant, because it's really not. Make sure that
there's someone. If you're a leader,
if you're the CEO or you're the vice president of marketing or you're the
(27:34):
vice president of public affairs or whatever your job might be that has that
responsibility. Make sure that there's somebody on your team
and it could be on your team, doesn't have to be on the outside who's
honest with you, who's not afraid to say, and you're willing to
listen to hear that didn't go well. Or we
need to rethink how we position that, because too often
(27:55):
organizations get caught up in groupthink. I used to have a
real estate developer as a client. This guy was a pretty big Deal.
He was a billionaire and he kept me around. And I don't
know why. Mark, you know me just a little bit, and I'm not
necessarily that bombastic. I tend to be a little bit
quieter. But this guy kept me around. We would do conference
(28:17):
calls almost every day at 6:00 in the morning. And he called me Dr.
No because he would want to do things and I wouldn't want to do them.
And I would say no. And it was probably at a time in my
business cycle where I had at least enough confidence that I
thought, if I lose this client, that's okay. And we all get to a certain
point in our careers where we think, as the farmers commercial,
(28:39):
insurance commercial says, you know, we know a thing or two because we've seen a
thing or two. So I was a little more willing to just be
dead honest with this person. And I think
CEOs that are, that are good,
that are thoughtful, that really are interested in long term success
want to have that. They want somebody around them who's not afraid
(29:02):
to say no. So I would always encourage anyone
to be, especially if you've got, and I've had good friends
that ran call centers with thousand. You know, they've got a thousand
CSRs located in multiple countries and everything else just to
make sure that there's somebody on the team. And sometimes we would call
them the crank. I hate to be referred to as that. Sometimes we refer to
(29:24):
them the person that's at least kind of going to do a gut check or
be the conscience. It's important to have around.
Great advice. Boy, so many great gems from
Getting Ugly early, which reminds me of my pickleball game.
To go up, but don't go up and then go back
(29:46):
down and then try and go back up. That's. It's not going to work out
too well. Many great gems here. I want to. We're gonna. Unfortunately, we're gonna
have to land the plane here, but I am gonna ask you that, that question.
I know you started to allude to it, but what, what delights you as a
customer? I think what delights me as a customer is
when an organization, whether I'm buying a shirt from
(30:07):
L.L. bean or, you know,
$30,000 worth of landscaping from my backyard,
when they speak clearly,
plainly, no jargon, and they do what
they say they're gonna do, and if they do what they say they're gonna do,
my trust level goes up. I'm glad to write the check, and I'm
(30:29):
gonna tell everybody I know about them. And that's what
delights me as a customer. Makes makes perfect sense. Michael,
thank you so much for being a guest on the Delighted Customers
podcast. Very different show today on a topic we have not
covered in over 150 episodes. Fun to have an expert and
someone's experience works with some of the biggest companies,
(30:50):
organizations even. And we didn't mention this, but you do work with
the veterans and the military as well. Thank you so much for being a good
if people want to get a hold of you, Michael, what would be the best
way? Sure. Well, first of all, I have a website and it's
michaelmeith.com so M I C H A e l
M E a t that's there's a
(31:13):
connection there and easily can get from there. Also an email
address MF as in Frank M e
a t H at falling just like falling down
falling hyphen or-brooke b
R-O-O-K.com and either of those are great avenues.
Excellent. And we'll have references in the show notes as well. Great.
(31:36):
Thanks, Mark. I really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks so much
for being on the show. Thanks.
Think about the Tylenol cyanide scare, the Exxon
Valdez oil spill, or the Wells Fargo fake account
scandal. Moments when corporate trust hangs by a thread,
those are the kinds of high stakes crisis my guest, Michael
Meef has spent his career helping organizations navigate.
As former interim chair of the Syracuse University School of Public
(00:22):
Relations, Michael is a trusted guide. Leaders turn to when
reputations are. Are on the line, when times are
uneventful, and when crisis hits. Michael, welcome to the
Delighted Customers podcast. Mark, it's great to be with you and thanks for having
me. I am so excited. You have spent over 40
years helping all these organizations throughout the United
(00:44):
States navigate sensitive and confidential, quite frankly,
confidential situations. CEOs, when those, I imagine those
doors close and the executive team gathers together and says, holy
crap, what do we do now? I mean, have you
found yourself in that situation and what's it like to be the person
somebody turns to? Well, it's interesting, Mark, I never planned
(01:06):
on having that as a career path, but as I found
myself more and more and more kind of going from the frying pan
to the fire and being involved with these pretty significant
high stakes situations and sometimes just really sensitive
situations, I found myself more and more in the room
listening to CEOs who were really dealing with
(01:29):
some troubling issues and needing somebody who would
be honest with them, would be straightforward with them, and
would not necessarily try to just be a yes person.
And that seems to be a role that I just sort of fell into.
I did not plan it, but the more I got into it, the more I
found that it was an adrenaline rush and it was also something that
(01:51):
seemed to add value. Well, you, you really are trusted
not just by businesses, but also by Syracuse, which when I
heard that you were chairing the public relations department,
I was totally impressed because if you, some of, some of our listeners may or
may not be aware that the kind of reputation
Syracuse Communications has, you've got
(02:13):
people like Ted Koppel, Steve Kroft, Marv
Albert, Bob Costas, Mike Tirico, these
people all came. Dick Clark, these people all came out of
Syracuse in the communications area. I got to teach in the Bob
Costas room and the Mike Tirico room almost every
semester. So, yeah, absolutely. I would see these names. Awesome.
(02:35):
Awesome. Well, you may be asking where. What is the.
Why do I have Michael on the show? And what's the intersection between communications,
public relations and customer experience management? So we're gonna talk a
little bit about that today when it comes to the strategy around
that. And Michael has Some ideas, some models or a
model around how business leaders can think about that.
(02:57):
But first, can we do some level setting when we talk about
strategy, communications and customer experience and kind of the intersection there
for people who may not be familiar. When we. When you think about
strategy, when you think about communications and how they intersect with
cx, what are we really talking about there? Well,
I think, Mark, that strategy and communications have absolutely
(03:19):
everything to do with customer experience. I mean, there isn't a moment
that they don't align, although people don't think about it
necessarily. So strategy, everybody knows strategy
is kind of what's your plan, what's your objective, what are you trying to
do with your business? And it could be that I want to make, I want
to make more of these, or it could be that I want to raise more
(03:40):
money for a non profit, or it could be that there's a particular piece of
legislation that I'm trying to get through. Or it could be any of those
things. It's the idea of having a, a
direction where you're trying to go. And any successful
organization, as we know, has some kind of a strategy that
they're trying to execute on. So that's strategy. Now
(04:02):
communications can be any form that we might use all the
vehicles and the tools, whether it's public relations or marketing or
advertising. Now the digital arena and everything that that
holds for us. However, what it's really all about is
helping that CEO help her get it from here,
right from their head, their brain, for those that are listening to their
(04:24):
mouth and to get the word out. If you're a nonprofit,
I always like to say that it's. I'm trying to get it from my heart
to my mouth or to my audiences. And
so then the customer experience is every one of those many
places that you talk about every week on your show where we
are trying to interface with the customer
(04:45):
so that they have the best experience possible. And when things
go wrong, and they will go wrong, how do we make them better?
Okay, so thanks for level setting. That makes a lot of sense to me. And
the question I'd like to ask next is, gosh, it seems kind of obvious,
right, that it should be a big deal to the C suite, but why
should they care about investing time, money, energy,
(05:07):
resources into the communications public
relations of their organization? What I found was that
number one, some organizations are successful because they have a really good
idea. They have a product we need, they have a service that we're interested
in. And so almost kind of by accident, they
can become successful For a period of time. What I also found
(05:30):
is that if they didn't communicate well about
what that product or service was, that that success could be
short lived. And then I worked with that idea for a while, but
what I found is that there was a piece missing. And the piece for me
that was missing was, oddly enough, integrity. So
we actually, in this company that I started back in 2004,
(05:52):
we developed a logo which we subsequently
trademarked and then I sold. And this logo has
strategy, communications and integrity as three
circles that overlap each other. And then at the
center of that is what I like to call the actual sweet spot
of success. So for an organization to be something successful long
(06:13):
term, they've got to have that strategy. What's the business
plan, the objective that they're trying to accomplish, number one. Number two, they got
to be able to get it from their brain or their heart to their audience.
And then number three, they better do that with some level of
honesty, fairness, you know, treating each other the way we'd like to be
treated. Because if they don't, and that's where the customer comes in, then they might
(06:36):
be successful for a while, but long term, they're not going to be
successful. And that to me became kind of the. That's
why a CEO should care. Right. So I love the model.
And we're going to dig into some of the, some of the ways that you
might be able to activate the model. But first, I just did a
quick, while you were talking, a quick search on the definition of
(06:58):
integrity. So just to do a little more level setting, would you find that,
would you be in harmony with this definition, the quality of being honest and
having strong moral principles, moral uprightness? Would you add
or detract anything from that? Well, I teach ethics as well
at the university, both the graduate and the undergraduate level. And
what I find is that most people try to say that morality
(07:20):
and ethics is the same thing, and it's not. Say more about that.
Well, morals is what you. And not to turn this whole program into
something else. Morals is what
you or I believe is right or wrong. I mean,
at the end of the day, that's what we. That's what our morals are based
on. Integrity or ethics is what we do about
(07:42):
what we think is right or wrong. There's a subtle difference to that.
So an organization that acts ethically or with
integrity is one that is honest, is straightforward,
and treats people with fairness. And it really does kind of
come back to the golden rule in terms of I want to be
treated when you Think about customer experience. I want to be treated the way
(08:05):
that I should be treated. And I think everyone would like to be
treated with some kind of, you know, sort of basic
honesty and. Yeah. And oftentimes in the
CX world, and this may even been something you've heard of as we
talk about the Platinum rule. Right. Instead of treating people the way they
want to be treated the way you want to be treated, treated them the way
(08:27):
they want to be treated. You know, one of your questions I know you're going
to ask me later is that, you know, what's an example? What do I think
it's like to be a delighted customer? Well, to me, to be a delighted customer
is when I buy something, let's say, and it doesn't
always have to be a financial transaction, but quite often it is
that I'm absolutely happy to take the checkbook and write the check. I
(08:48):
mean, in fact, I can't wait to do it because the service or
the product that I've gotten was so impressive to me and the way I was
treated that I am happy to give my money away. And I can think
of two or three examples in my life when I've done that and been really,
really glad to do it. And if you want to be kind of
understanding what the best definition of the delighted customer is, to me,
(09:09):
there isn't anything better. Yeah, well, well said. Well said. So
as companies embark on this journey to try and hit that
sweet spot, the intersection that you talk about, the way they think about
communications and public relations as it relates, as it connects and
delivers on their strategy, what are some of the, some of the myths out there
that really aren't true? Yeah, great. That's a great question. The first one
(09:32):
would probably be that louder is better, right? That the,
the higher the volume, the better we're going to get our name
out there. The more people are going to want to align with us and either
buy our product or service or support us or whatever the case may be.
That just isn't the case now, unfortunately, these devices
have made it seem like that's even more important, that we've got to increase
(09:54):
our volume. We got to increase all that activity. But that's not. It's not
necessarily true. Secondly, I think
we've kind of gotten ourselves so overloaded with
information that any organization feels as though
if I can just flood the market with multiple channels
of information or sources, whether it's advertisement or marketing or
(10:16):
public relations or whatever, that that's going to do me more good.
And that's not necessarily the case. I don't know about you, but even
just this morning when I got off the pickleball court, I started to to
scroll through my daily news and you get a little bit
overwhelmed with information. And then embedded within
that is the 3,000, 4,000 different
(10:38):
messages that we receive during the normal course of a day of
somebody trying to sell us something, influence with something, or
try to, you know, persuade us on something. So the
volume, I think is sometimes something that even
CEOs and really successful companies feel like they've got to
make the most noise and put out the most information possible. Great,
(11:01):
great, great point. 100% agree. Right. So
as companies move along their journey, what are some of the missteps
they make when it comes to applying good communication
or public relations? Well, when things don't go
well, I mean, I tend to be viewed, the joke is
among some of my longest term clients is they sort of view me
(11:23):
as an undertaker. They want to know I'm there, they want to know
that I'm around, but they'd rather not talk to me. So when
a crisis occurs or when something sensitive happens, and I really do want
to emphasize that, Mark, for your listeners, that quite often we think
crisis communications is all this big, everything's high stake. It's the
Exxon Valdez, it's the Tylenol. Right. It's Wells Fargo. But there
(11:46):
are small situations that happen in every organization
every single day that are sensitive. And if not handled
carefully, they could blow up into something bigger or
erode your customer confidence and trust that you
might have. So number one, one of the myths or one of the
missteps I should say that a lot of people make is that
(12:08):
when things don't go well, they get quiet, they don't say anything,
and either because they're not sure what to say, or number
one, number two, they might have legal counsel, and
I do a lot of work with attorneys, but some legal counsel, their response to
any situation that's not going well is no comment.
And there are times when no comment is probably the right thing to say, but
(12:30):
more often than not, I found that you're better off
positioning some kind of a message out there very
strategically rather than saying no comment. Or it could be the
case that they think that if they're silent that the
situation will either dissipate on its own or
be handled in some other way. And I can give you an example either now
(12:51):
or later, whenever you'd like. Yeah, do share an example. Okay. So
relative to silence, I worked for a Company that was a
very, very large energy business for a long time. We had half
a million customers. And my responsibility was public relations, public
affairs at the time. And we had as a large
heating oil company right on the east coast, we
(13:13):
would on occasion put heating oil in somebody's basement because
we connected to the wrong pipe. A pipe was broken, somebody wasn't paying
attention while they were filling the tank, whatever the case might be. And
in the industry, one of the common practices used to be to
tell your driver when that happened. Disconnect, drive
away, don't say anything, don't talk to anybody. And you can
(13:36):
kind of see why when things go wrong, sometimes that's a,
that's a misstep that an organization might take.
Well, we tried to do something a little bit different once. I
had just taken a course at Harvard on dealing with an
angry public and how to manage situations when they don't go
well. And we decided that in this situation, what we would do
(13:58):
is we would instead of running away from the
situation, run to the situation immediately, contact the
customer, say we screwed up and we need you to take your
family and go into a hotel for the next several weeks. We'll pay
for it, get a two room suite so your kids have a separate room. Whatever
it's going to take, we'll take care of it. We're going to take care of
(14:19):
you ripping up your basement floor, replacing all the furniture that's down there,
all the finishes, everything else. And then instead of
putting all our money and our time and our thought into what are the defense
costs going to be to defend ourselves in this? Because we're going to be buying
a house or a basement or something out of this, run towards this
situation, do absolutely everything the right way and
(14:41):
recognize that worst case scenario, we might end
up losing a customer, but we will have at least tried to do the right
thing. Best case scenario, we might actually keep the
customer because recognizing that the world, things
go wrong, things get screwed up. It's what you do
next was one of my favorite lines. It's what you do next.
(15:03):
So by doing that, I think we sort of,
that's the opposite of the misstep of going silent, no comment,
walking away. Yeah, I love that we talk a lot about trust on
the show and how you can build or not build trust. And
obviously one of the principles around that is transparency. So here you're talking
about something that might seem counterintuitive is
(15:26):
diving right into it, owning it. And in the long run, it always
pays off to be honest and Truthful. And as a business, you know, there are
times I can think of a time, you know, I worked at a bank in
the mid Atlantic for almost a decade.
Over that period of time, you might imagine we had. The bad guys are pretty
active when it comes to banks. And so we had everything from
(15:47):
skimmers, if you remember that, where, you know, people would
take an image of your card as you swiped it with a little camera
they put on that pump and scan your, your card number,
create a fake card and use it to security
breaches, just people from overseas getting. Into the database somehow.
And so there were, there were meetings that were kept to a very finite number
(16:10):
of people at the bank, small, small circle of people
to say, okay, what's the impact? What's the magnitude
of the breach? And, and how widespread do we share
it? Because, you know, on the one hand, it's like if I scare people
enough. About security and safety, because people look at banks,
yes, as places where they can leverage their money and grow
(16:32):
it, grow their nest egg, but they also look at it as a safe place.
Many of our customers, community banks or many, many more customers looking
just really for safety. So if you believe that this bank is a target or
the bank isn't as is a sieve, or the bad guys
and you believe your money's at risk, you could leave. So there's that balance of
what do I share? How much do I share? What would be your thoughts on
(16:54):
a situation like that? Well, actually, I had a bank, a regional
bank, had, oh, I want to say about 100
branches northeast, mostly New York,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, up into New England a little bit. And
great, great. You want to talk about a great organization with high
integrity. Tremendous. They had a school district, they
(17:16):
had many school districts as customers, but they had a school district. And
the treasurer of the school district had her
credentials hacked through Facebook. The
bad guys went in and figured out a way just by the basic information
that she would use every day. And they were able to tunnel
their way into the bank account and they, from this
(17:39):
bank, on behalf of the school district, they took out several
million dollars. Now, the bank jumped on it
as they was their kind of their modus operanda when anything didn't
go well. And they were able to recover much of the money,
not all of it, but in the process, what I found is that this was
just another example of not going silent, but going,
(18:02):
you know, kind of full bore right away. Owning something,
communicating about it, getting out in front of it. There's
a term in my industry that's called get ugly early. And
it's the idea to say that it doesn't do any good to just kind
of wait. Now, sometimes I will advise clients to not go
public with something right away. I can think of multiple examples of
(18:24):
that. But at the same time, they have to be ready to
be public. So they have to have messages ready. And I have formulas for
that and everything else so that as soon as they get asked about
something, it's not the no comment, but it's that they have
something to say. The idea of being strategic is not necessarily to
go proactively with all your messages, but you certainly need to
(18:47):
be ready with your messages so that you can say something when
you need to. And it makes me think of another misstep, I think, if that's
okay, another misstep that organizations
sometimes make. And this can directly relate to the
CX area that a customer calls in with a problem.
It could be the shirt didn't fit, it could be the, you know, the
(19:08):
toaster didn't work. It could be any number of things. And
organizations sometimes will try to
pacify the customer or sometimes they'll elevate and
they'll go up the chain. Right. If they need to. Makes sense.
But what I found is that a rule kind of came into play
for me when I would deal not so much in the CX area, but in
(19:29):
the more the corporate area. When things were we talking about a
Chapter 11 bankruptcy, an environmental spill, a wrong site
surgery, I mean, any of those kinds of things is that I came up with
this mantra that you can always go up, but you can't come back
down. Meaning that if you're the spokesperson or
the customer service manager for a particular issue
(19:52):
and you're dealing with the customer, you can certainly elevate it and
take it up a notch. That might, that might help the customer
gain even more confidence. It might get them an answer quicker.
Who knows, Maybe somebody's got more authority and more leeway. But if
you go up and then you come back down, meaning
if you pass that on to your boss and your boss starts to handle
(20:14):
it and says, well, I'm going to shift you back to Mark, then that
customer's confidence is going to be shaken and their trust level
is going to go down. And the classic example of that to go all the
way to the top of your show was the, not the Exxon
Valdez, but the Horizon accident that occurred in the
Gulf of Mexico some years ago. British Petroleum and we had
(20:35):
the well blow off. So in the
Horizons accident, what Happened was Tony Hayward, who was the CEO
of bp, he was over in Great Britain and he immediately
spoke immediately, which was good to say, yes, we've
had an incident in the Gulf. No, we don't know the full magnitude of it.
He probably went a little too far and said, we think we're going to be
(20:55):
able to control it. But nobody knew at that point how really massive it
was. And then he got on an airplane and went
silent for 12 hours. And they ended up pushing the
spokesperson role down to somebody else who was at a much lower
level, who by the way, did a great job because that
individual, I think his name was Chuck Stickles, he was in Louisiana.
(21:17):
He actually had the accent for the region. He. So he could
relate to the people that were most immediately affected. Did a
pretty good job. Then Hayward gets on US soil and
starts to speak about it again. So we've gone up,
down now where he's trying to take control. He wants to go up again. And
very shortly into the incident, it wasn't more than a few
(21:40):
days, he was getting frustrated because things were getting worse and worse
and worse. And he stated the really, really famous line that
every textbook on crisis communications is used since, which was,
hey, I just would like my life back. Yeah. So imagine what that
does to trust, whether you're an employee, a
contractor, an end use customer, somebody who lives on the Gulf, a
(22:02):
fisherman, you name it. So you can always go up, but you can't come back
down. And I think that would apply into anything in the customer
experience area as well. Great story. What a great story.
Okay, so let's talk about, if you would,
some ways to activate this model that we're talking about. Strategy,
communication, cx. What are some practical steps that leaders
(22:24):
can take in order to put this into place? Number one,
leaders should always have in their organizations. But we're
talking about the C suite or the E team or whatever. They should always
have a set of messages surrounding whatever they're
working on, the good news and whatever they might be working on.
That's the not so good news. And those messages
(22:45):
can't be five typewritten pages in eight
point font. We used to have a rule for everything we did. And it
was actually a chief financial officer at
a huge health system taught me this years ago when I was doing some work
for them. And he said one page, 14 point font,
love it. Now anybody who knows anything about, you know, what they type on their
(23:07):
word processor, is that 14 point fonts pretty big? Yeah. And
the way I do it is I number all My messages, good news,
bad news. And I leave a space between each one, which means that on
one page, 14 point font. Whether I'm dealing with a billion
dollar with a B chapter 11 bankruptcy or I'm
dealing with a fireplace insert
(23:29):
company who's had problems with their product and they're trying to
figure out how to get kind of get it under control. One page,
14 point font. This is what we're going to say about it. Number two,
once you develop those messages, you got to make sure that
everybody has them and uses the same sheet of music
internally as well as externally. Mark, I can't tell you
(23:52):
the times when I've seen organizations who would buy into my
thinking about this set of messages. And then they'd get done with them
and they wouldn't bother to tell their own employees internally, they'd say, there's our
messages for our customers or our suppliers or our business partners
or whatever. And then all the employees are sitting around saying,
what's going on? What's the message? What are we doing? So they, and it's not
(24:15):
necessarily intentional, but they step over their most important
audience, right? Think Wegmans. Wegmans food markets,
number one of the number one places to work year over year after year
BY Whether it's U.S. news, whether it's Forbes, doesn't matter.
Wegmans most important customer or most important audience, I
should say, is not their customer. Their most important audience is their employees.
(24:38):
And they make no bones about saying that. So that's kind of
number two. You develop these messages and you make sure you use them internally. Number
three, make sure everybody uses the same messages. There's a story that
I got called once. I was actually out in the middle of a. I was
on a kayak trip in the middle of the Yanderondack Mountains and I got a
phone call from an engineering firm who had been rebuilding a sewage
(24:59):
treatment plant on the border of a Class
B waterway. Class B waterway, it's not you can't swim in it,
but it's clean water. Sewage treatment plants, of course, when
they do their job right, they discharge clean water from
the plant. So they had rebuilt this huge facility.
And in this particular Sunday morning at 4am a 3 million
(25:22):
gallon raw sewage holding tank collapse. And all that
raw sewage went right into the river. So the organization had
their senior team sitting around a conference table at 7:45 in the
morning. I'm sitting in a kayak in the middle of 4th Lake up in the
Adirondack Mountains and we're talking through what the Messages are
going to be. And I said, now we've got to make sure somebody's writing these
(25:43):
down. And they are very specific because one page, 14 point
font. We're not going to. Not pages and pages of stuff. Got done
with all the messages and everything else. Are we good? Everybody's got them?
Yep. End of the day, I finally got to a place where I had more
than just a week cell coverage. Got a hold of the CEO. He
said, all hell broke loose. Did not go well. What went wrong? He
(26:05):
said, well, we used your messages. I said, well, who wrote them down?
Did you just have one set? Oh, no, no, no, no. We all wrote them
down and we all kind of interpreted our own. Well, that's what went wrong.
So then the New York Times and USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, and
they all had kind of a different story. And this company kind of had
a trust issue because people wondered what really happened. And
(26:27):
just think about that example and consider all
the stuff that you're scrolling through in the news all the time now from
every single source. I get on a web browser and I
see story after story after story, and I finally got to the point where I'm
wondering which one's real, which one's really
the truth. So it's this idea of keeping
(26:50):
everybody on the same message. Yeah. What a great. What a great point.
Simple. I love how simple that message is. And I'm sure
getting it right may take a little bit of time, but 14
point font on one page, It's a small investment
compared to what could happen. And as Mark Twain once said, if you wanted
a shorter letter, I needed more time. Exactly. Exactly.
(27:12):
What great strategies. Is there anything else you
would add as guidance for leaders when it comes to this topic?
Make sure. And this is not a pitch for an outside
consultant, because it's really not. Make sure that
there's someone. If you're a leader,
if you're the CEO or you're the vice president of marketing or you're the
(27:34):
vice president of public affairs or whatever your job might be that has that
responsibility. Make sure that there's somebody on your team
and it could be on your team, doesn't have to be on the outside who's
honest with you, who's not afraid to say, and you're willing to
listen to hear that didn't go well. Or we
need to rethink how we position that, because too often
(27:55):
organizations get caught up in groupthink. I used to have a
real estate developer as a client. This guy was a pretty big Deal.
He was a billionaire and he kept me around. And I don't
know why. Mark, you know me just a little bit, and I'm not
necessarily that bombastic. I tend to be a little bit
quieter. But this guy kept me around. We would do conference
(28:17):
calls almost every day at 6:00 in the morning. And he called me Dr.
No because he would want to do things and I wouldn't want to do them.
And I would say no. And it was probably at a time in my
business cycle where I had at least enough confidence that I
thought, if I lose this client, that's okay. And we all get to a certain
point in our careers where we think, as the farmers commercial,
(28:39):
insurance commercial says, you know, we know a thing or two because we've seen a
thing or two. So I was a little more willing to just be
dead honest with this person. And I think
CEOs that are, that are good,
that are thoughtful, that really are interested in long term success
want to have that. They want somebody around them who's not afraid
(29:02):
to say no. So I would always encourage anyone
to be, especially if you've got, and I've had good friends
that ran call centers with thousand. You know, they've got a thousand
CSRs located in multiple countries and everything else just to
make sure that there's somebody on the team. And sometimes we would call
them the crank. I hate to be referred to as that. Sometimes we refer to
(29:24):
them the person that's at least kind of going to do a gut check or
be the conscience. It's important to have around.
Great advice. Boy, so many great gems from
Getting Ugly early, which reminds me of my pickleball game.
To go up, but don't go up and then go back
(29:46):
down and then try and go back up. That's. It's not going to work out
too well. Many great gems here. I want to. We're gonna. Unfortunately, we're gonna
have to land the plane here, but I am gonna ask you that, that question.
I know you started to allude to it, but what, what delights you as a
customer? I think what delights me as a customer is
when an organization, whether I'm buying a shirt from
(30:07):
L.L. bean or, you know,
$30,000 worth of landscaping from my backyard,
when they speak clearly,
plainly, no jargon, and they do what
they say they're gonna do, and if they do what they say they're gonna do,
my trust level goes up. I'm glad to write the check, and I'm
(30:29):
gonna tell everybody I know about them. And that's what
delights me as a customer. Makes makes perfect sense. Michael,
thank you so much for being a guest on the Delighted Customers
podcast. Very different show today on a topic we have not
covered in over 150 episodes. Fun to have an expert and
someone's experience works with some of the biggest companies,
(30:50):
organizations even. And we didn't mention this, but you do work with
the veterans and the military as well. Thank you so much for being a good
if people want to get a hold of you, Michael, what would be the best
way? Sure. Well, first of all, I have a website and it's
michaelmeith.com so M I C H A e l
M E a t that's there's a
(31:13):
connection there and easily can get from there. Also an email
address MF as in Frank M e
a t H at falling just like falling down
falling hyphen or-brooke b
R-O-O-K.com and either of those are great avenues.
Excellent. And we'll have references in the show notes as well. Great.
(31:36):
Thanks, Mark. I really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks so much
for being on the show. Thanks.
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