The 10-second customer journey and how to remove friction fast

[00:00:00] Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with industry leaders shaping the future of growth, customer experience and global engagement. I’m your host, Jason Hemingway, the CMO at Phrase. And today we’re very lucky to be joined by Todd Unger, the Chief Experience Officer at the American Medical Association. Todd’s a seasoned marketing professional, digital and product leader and actually a bestselling author with a career spanning healthcare, publishing, gaming and technology building out AOL’s local platforms and leading digital brands at Time inc., all the way to transforming member engagement at the American Medical Association. So quite a varied set of roles there. Todd’s focused on breaking down silos and putting the customer at the center of growth. And we’re going to talk to him all today about buying decisions and how they happen in seconds and what that means for leaders under pressure to scale. So without further ado, hi, Todd. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

I’m doing great. Thank you for having me today. It’s great to be here.

Absolute pleasure. So you’ve had a fascinating path, really, from consumer marketing and publishing at AOL and Time, all the way through gaming and now healthcare with the AMA. Can you tell us a little bit, we’d like to start off with a little bit about your journey. How did you go from those early days in marketing to leading customer growth and experience at the AMA?

Yeah, I say that I’m an accidental CXO because my career looks pretty strange. But as you look at the different chapters of it, they really do kind of build on the corners of how I define customer experience, which are marketing, product, commerce, and sales. And so a first phase in classical kind of consumer products, marketing and advertising, a phase in digital media and product development, a phase in e-commerce, and then this latest membership, subscription management and customer service, plus the full array of all these other things. And so they do make sense in that regard. But I did ask them when they first came to recruit me, I was working in horse racing and I was like, why are you talking to me? But under the hood, it’s the same dynamics. It’s just a different audience.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because the CXO role, I think one of the early things that you talk about in the 10-Second Customer Journey book is kind of there was no real or there’s no real definition of what that meant for you. So you kind of went looking at it from a completely different sort of independent standpoint and sort of going, well, what does this actually mean? Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you kind of transitioned away from marketing and into that?

Yeah. Imagine that you had this title, Chief Experience Officer, and people just keep asking you, what do you do? Because they don’t understand that. It doesn’t really have a common definition. And those out there have really different responsibilities. And that’s why I felt it was really important to kind of say what it was and to align it with growth and not the traditional perceptions of how people think about experience, which they’re often going to be, you know, perceptions and feelings and retail, you know, level kind of transactional experience when, you know, we’ve moved in this world to a very different kind of system buying and selling, where, you know, you can’t smell a hamburger through a website. So we need a different experience definition.

Yeah. And you’ve come a long way in terms of defining that for your role, which is really interesting. And let’s talk about the 10-Second Customer Journey a little bit, the book that you’ve written and about how the premise really is that the buying decisions happen in seconds instead of long protracted months. And I’m sure that’s the same in technology, B2B technology where I work and in other places, that are a bit more fast-moving consumer goods, still those decisions are still making and the interactions are made in seconds. And just give us a little bit of what that really demands of leaders who want to drive growth, particularly when thinking about new customers, new countries, new markets.

Well, I call this the ‘Tornado Funnel’ because it’s so different than the traditional marketing funnels of yesterday, where people kind of gingerly walked through this process of awareness and interest and trial and repeat. Now you think about the decisions that you make about buying and how all of those levels, they might be mixed up at the same time. You may become aware of a certain thing and instantly like it because they did a good job of explaining it quickly. And they made it so easy to buy that you have your shopping cart immediately. You pay it with, you know, Google Pay or Apple Pay and you’re out the door in 10 seconds. And if any part of that process fails, you’re on to something else. So that’s pretty much what you have to do these days because attention spans are so short. And the demands to meet excellence in every step of that process are so high.

And that’s where that kind of CXO title comes in, right? Because you’re actually pulling together, and you said it at the beginning, you’re pulling together sales, service, commerce, product, because all of those different parts have to actually tune in together, right? Really to help the customer get where they want to go or help them buy, right?

Yeah. And think about it. When someone experiences a problem in that process, they don’t care about your organizational structure. So they don’t really care if it was a product problem or a website problem or a social media problem or a commerce, you know. They just blame the brand. And the issue is that all of the things that it takes to deliver that seamless experience generally exist in different parts of an organization. They might have their own metrics, different leaders, different missions, so to speak. And this was just a big advantage to be able to bring the levers of growth together and see how that could make the process more efficient for customers out there.

And so you’ve led those different parts. Do you think that’s helped in kind of shaping your point of view? And a two-part question, if it has, what’s been the toughest challenges you kind of face when you’ve got to make what would be, I don’t know, called a kind of seamless journey or at least a connected journey?

It’s helped tremendously because as I say in the book, this is about… learning from the past and capturing these things that really still matter, which are around targeting and positioning and carrying them in to the modern world where we have a new tool set, a digital tool set, and bringing the best of that kind of old school marketing mentality and new powerful digital tools. And I’ll tell you what. Those worlds don’t often cross. And in my experience, kind of a lot of people have forgotten those. But if you think about what is involved in that customer journey, it starts before the clock even starts. Are you talking to the right person? How do you know that? Are you reaching them in the correct platforms? What are you saying to them? And then everything on down from that until the point of purchase. Those are all different kinds of skill sets. And I learned… the ins and outs of each of those because I was involved in all of them. And I don’t think I would have known as much if I didn’t have to develop digital products or been involved in a commerce business and experienced the, you know, you’re in the muck. And so you have kind of a broad view of how the system works from end-to-end.

Yeah, and I think that’s a thing that you kind of learn over time and gives you experience. As you get exposed to all the different departments, I suppose in a marketing career, you can see into those departments, but you’re actually sort of sitting across them now in the CXO role. So there’s parts of your role that are still thinking about segmentation, targeting, and thinking about personalization, even, which is something I want to kind of get into in a minute. What would you say is a challenge that you’ve faced to try and tackle? And how did you tackle it when you were sort of sitting there thinking about it?

Getting this process to an enterprise level, because I’m working on, you know, one specific part of this. But, you know, what I found today is, you know, I can’t really drive membership, let’s say, at the AMA without working very, very closely with everyone that provides these programs across our organization. And again, you know, if you think it’s hard to unite the pieces of your own portfolio together, now you start adding in the enterprise and it just points, you know, that’s the challenge for every organization out there. It’s like, what’s the metric for everybody and how are we going to get there together?

Yeah, it’s like a North Star metric. How do we figure that out? That’s quite interesting. And I love the idea of the ‘Tornado Funnel’ because it kind of people, you know, you’ve heard all the things about the funnel being flipped and all of those kinds of things. But actually, the funnel is, is not.. It’s just faster.

Well, it’s faster. It’s also not linear, right? It’s not linear because especially I think from my background, B2B, you’re very sort of B2C at the moment, I guess. But when somebody jumps from a web interaction to a call center or an in-store interaction, that to them is a seamless experience, right? But for a business, they’re jumping over lots of different things and trying to knit that together across different teams is actually quite a tricky thing to do, as you said. Yeah, and we’re reaching out to institutions as well. So we do have, you know, we don’t call it B2B, but we have that particular avenue as well and it works the very same.

Yeah, I think it’s no different between the two. So let’s think about that topic that you do think about, which is personalization and it’s been talked about, and I think in the book, you mention it, and it’s one of the things I read early doors, which was, you know, Peppers and Rogers one-to-one and all of those kinds of things. So it’s not a new concept. But how do you see it evolving now? And what does that mean for the future of how businesses engage with their customers? And I don’t mean, I don’t want to talk about marketing, but I mean, engaging with customers because you can engage with them in marketing and service and product and all those things. What does it mean to you? Or what have you observed?

So just for everybody out there, the reference to the Peppers and Rogers book, the kind of one-to-one future when I was doing research for the book. I remember that from the 90s. And yes, that’s at last century. But when you think about what they were proposing in this book was about personalized communication. And at that time, that meant through databases. This was pre-internet. And so when you look at what they were proposing, I think that it’s mind-blowingly prescient. Because what they didn’t know was the power of what we were going to see from the internet. And then on top of that, and especially the explosion, let’s say, even in the past five years between AI and the tool sets of marketing automation and data automation, we’re going to bring this dream to life. Because that’s what we’re seeing right now, which is that identification of, you know, through behaviors and interests that are expressed either passively or proactively combined with the communication tools allow you to start delivering a personalized content experience. And that has a big impact on people’s engagement and retention.

Yeah, I mean, 100%. And you mentioned an interesting word there, which is content. And I think as it’s becoming much more possible to create all different forms of content, and with Gen AI, which we’ll get to in a bit, you can personalize it in all sorts of different ways. How do you see the future? And if we just go back to marketing, how do you see the future of the content kind of, let’s call it explosion, I know that’s a bit trite, but let’s call it a content explosion, or the possibility of lots of content being created? How do you see that affecting the future of marketing? And what does it mean for brands to try and stay relevant on that?

I think it’s, we’ll just call it an exciting time, to use the positive word, because I think we are at a little bit of a pivot in terms of how brands have been able to utilize content and what it takes to be a superior player in the game. And I think we’re, because of AI, on the precipice of some new form of model, which people are experiencing right now. It’s just not the quantity of content out there. There’s a quality thing, but it’s also the discoverability of it. And the model that’s changing with AI, where you’re just not progressing past that search page and into the generator of that content, you know, that’s really going to upset the apple cart for a lot of people. I think, in general, brands are taking more control of their content production and that a lot of the old school values that we ascribe to content in terms of authenticity and focus and point of view will be combined with the new tools to create more direct relationships with people. The other stuff that we used to do, which is like capitalize on really popular terms that people are searching for, like that stuff is getting eaten up by AI. Not fully, but more and more so. That creates a real challenge for marketers. But going back and combining two of these questions, the one-to-one future and the creation of personalized content and delivery of content, that’s where the power is going to be between those two things. I think you have to be prepared to do both.

Yeah, and I think you’re right in as much as it’s an exciting time. Because I think one of the problems with personalization was that it carried a lot of baggage because it was really just targeting, wasn’t it? It was like our message to you as a consumer, broadcast it and we put your name on it or we rudimentarily personalized it. And that’s not really where it’s going to go, is it? The idea is that it’s tailored content that’s authentic. It’s tailored to what you want to do. You can even talk about the previous stuff that I used to look at was like real-time interactions and how you personalize those. So that’s a really interesting way of thinking about, well, what content does that person need in the moment to help them go on their journey, wherever that might be? So I think that takes you into other areas, which is so we’ve got, you know, you can generate that content that’s relevant and timely to people. And you talk a lot about this idea of friction as a core part of how you lead. How does that kind of, not necessarily content, but how do you remove the friction in the buyer journey? How easy or hard is that in your experience?

Well, I think the key thing to understand, content you mentioned is part of this process, but friction exists at every step of the process. And I use a song that I think symbolizes customer experience in the digital age from Ariana Grande’s Seven Rings. I see it. I like it. I want it. I got it. Those are the key phrases. And you think about that, the steps in customer experience right now and the issue of friction happens at every point in that process. There’s a handoff. Starting with who are you actually talking to? What are you saying to them? How do they do their exploration and research in a very, very quick time frame? How do you then get it to hit that buy now or join now or whatever it is button and then fulfil. And think about the friction that sits between those. And organizations are uniquely not qualified to deal with the problems that fall in those in-between spaces. That’s one of the premises from one of the founders of customer experience theories around there, because they do exist in different groups. And so you really have to think about, how am I going to… Systematically reduce every ounce of friction that prevents somebody from acting at the end because you will lose them.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of competitors that are out there. So they’ve got choice, right? So that’s the thing. So you can lose people quite easily. So have you got any examples where… eliminating that friction has made a massive difference on customer engagement, especially when thinking about the things that we do. You know, we’re a language technology platform, so we particularly think about engagement from a regional and different countries and different languages point of view. But do you have any examples of measurable sort of outcomes of reducing of friction?

We have so many and part of this was. I will credit the formation of our own kind of CX team for being able to identify and quantify those levels of friction and then act on the ones that are really preventing the most growth. We do have an online educational platform for resident physicians who have to complete a certain set of educational requirements for their certification. And I’ll tell you, like one of the number one points of friction for so many businesses is still authentication or login. I mean, you just see it everywhere. It’s not just us. We were like, “Why can’t we get these activation levels that we want?”

Well, when we went back to the process and we looked about how are we sending out the information about login? When does a resident actually look at that? It’s probably like exactly 364 days after you sent the email. They can’t find it anymore. The link is dead. They’re probably calling you on a Sunday night when your customer service operation is down you know not live. And we thought, oh, my God, we’ve created a process that’s not going to work. And so how do we systematically then eliminate every point of friction along the way so that that person is able to log in when they want? We immediately increased activation rates by almost half. So, you know, there are these just like big icebergs of friction out there, not to combine metaphors, but like, you know, pick one. It’ll make a big difference.

Yeah, I think that’s probably some good advice there is just don’t try and do it all at once because you’ll be, you know, going around in circles before. But pick one, go after it and see if you can measure the difference afterwards, right?

Yeah, so many things are, you know, what’s the business impact and how hard is it going to be for me to do it? Because there are some things that take. You know, again, like some of these things like on authentication, that’s like an enterprise-wide you know, project with like many tentacles. And even within that, there are easy things to fix and then harder things.

So moving it slightly away from the CXO role, or maybe not moving it away so much, but you’ve driven kind of digital transformation in lots of industries and markets. And pulling those teams together, what’s been critical to help them? you know, work together and get behind the programs because, obviously you’ve got to, to a certain extent where you’re removing these points of friction, but you’ve got to win the hearts and minds of the people in all the other departments, right? So how do you think about that?

I think really a couple of things. One is probably the single most important is creating the win-win scenario, especially when you have groups that are not, that have their own metrics that are not yours. So I think one of the big things that we were able to demonstrate very early in the process, you know, back to the world of content, is that we’re going to leverage the digital platform to build qualified audience for their initiatives. And so in exchange, we asked them to start doing different things in terms of what content they were producing. And one of the classic examples here when I first started, physician burnout is a big, obviously a big problem and a topic here in the States. And we were to type that word in there into Google and we were like on page seven. So like literally no man’s land. And so we were going to like, we’re going to fix that, but that requires a lot of collaboration with the subject matter experts, rebuilding the website on our end, figuring out how to optimize for search, creating kind of content, creating the reputation. That is a team effort. But in the end, now we’re number one. You type it in, that team is ecstatic. We’re ecstatic. We’ve all achieved kind of what we want to do out of it. And it’s like, then once you get that kind of win, it starts to spread.

And then you can move to the next, you can move to the next thing and say, right, now we’re going to tackle this problem and we’re going to win that. And you kind of build this rolling, you know, set of wins that everybody starts believing in and moves the business forward. Brilliant. Okay, well, we’re probably what we call the mid-show moment where I ask our guests kind of, we call it the In Box Confession. But really, it’s about the one thing you wish you could automate in your workday What’s the one thing?

Well, since I just did 10 of them, I get literally every invoice, every contract. That needs to be signed is sent to me. I have to like, if you just walk through the steps, I even resent hitting the start button, the check the box, sign my signature, pick my title. I just wish cut 5 steps out of that process for me. someone somewhere I do need to know what we’re spending, but it would be really great if I could just do that quickly.

Yeah. If we could remove the friction from that journey, that would be good, right? Amazing. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, everybody who holds budgetary responsibility would probably agree with you on that. Right. So let’s get back into sort of some more sort of serious questions around AI and personalization. So where do you see AI making the biggest difference in customer experience around the globe?

So I do think right now, I mean, it’s going to affect every aspect of the customer journey as I’ve defined it. But you mentioned the word personalization. So we’ll just start there because you’re able to do that at a scale at which you couldn’t do manually before. And I think the most important thing, I think just a theme for this discussion is. You don’t have to build this on your own because this is being built into powerful and likely global tool sets in terms of marketing automation and combined with kind of data capabilities. So, I mean, I talked to, I remember hearing something, some other association having a 5 PhDs on staff to work on AI projects. I’m like, that’s, we’re just not going to have that here. But I don’t, why do I need that? I have Salesforce. All right. So I’m going to be able to optimize everything about who I send to and when and how many and how do I like reduce the email load on people and drive up my engagement rates and to be able to target more effectively. So that, you know, that’s just being, you know, that’s part of the process now for me. I think the other thing that we’re seeing with AI is this friction detection system that, you know, we use a particular outfit here called quantum metric. Basically like 24-7 surveillance about where friction is occurring on your site. So if they see like a page that is not loading properly, if they see people taking actions where there’s no change. So somebody, let’s say, hitting on a button that says, you know. Especially one that’s like upgrade my membership or, you know, get these features. That’s an upgrade button and nothing is happening. You know, those are the kinds of things sometimes like you can’t even see them because you’re not logged in as a member. You may go weeks without knowing these things until you see the results are not panning, out the way that you wanted them to. Now you have this like relief that these things are showing up and they’re being fed into my CX team. And then they’re working directly with the business units to fix them because it’s giving them actually hints as to where the problem is. So those are just two really huge, powerful things. Yeah No It’s good It’s like it’s almost like an intelligent early warning system that you have kind of built for friction.

Yeah. That’s quite an interesting. That’s quite an interesting model. So you’re in a regulated industry. What do you think for complex industries? What should people watch out for? Are there any sorts of things that you probably wouldn’t suggest or are there any things that people should just keep an eye on?

You know, we’re being very careful about the use of AI. And I think most organizations are approaching it in a similar fashion, which is taking not baby steps, perhaps, but like really being careful and thinking through about the organization, about what data is, you know, let’s just say being put into large language models that are public. like, you really have to think about those things and fast, because when you have especially you know, an organization that’s reasonably dispersed, everybody’s trying to like, use the tools that are available to them and they may not be using them in the right way. So that’s where kind of centralized IT and a steering committee within an organization makes a lot of sense. The second thing you have to worry about, obviously, a lot of laws out there and privacy issues. And the more global you are, the more that you have to deal with. And so you do need to be just very careful and very intentional about your strategy and how you’re going to, how you’re going to proceed.

Yeah, and I think that is particularly important when you’re dealing with regulated industries across the globe. You know, different jurisdictions, different countries have different laws and privacy regulations and, you know, I’m sure there’s lots of medical regulations and things like that across the globe. So you have to keep a proper eye on those things, don’t you? And how complex can it get for a business?

Well, I think, you know, I’m fortunate because, you know, our association, we’re not interacting with patients at all. This is, you know, we’re working with doctors and medical students and residents, you know, and it’s more of a content, an audience, an advocacy organization. But you think about the complexities regarding health care right now and privacy issues surrounding that. It’s extremely complex. And I think that’s where technology is going to help us. It’s already augmenting capabilities of physicians out there pretty significantly. And the best part is kind of, you know, going back to your thing about what would I like to get off my plate? I mean, believe me, there is a lot of burden placed on physicians, I’m sure, in every country across the world. Right. And what better than to use AI to facilitate the reduction of things you just should not be spending time on?

Do you do much in the AMA with communities that are multilingual, different languages? How do you think about that?

We’re primarily U.S.-based. Of course, you have to be a doctor here in the U.S., to be able to be a member. But I would say, to a certain extent, accessibility and language accessibility is a concern for us. We do have a focus on international medical graduates. So to that degree, the answer is yes. And I do think here again is where technology is going to be a great help in adapting to that, whereas that job would have been so much harder 10 years ago.

Well, harder and more costly. I think there’s a lot of ways you can tackle that problem. And it’s particularly pertinent, I think, for businesses that have international customers. But also, I think there’s a huge body in big countries like North America, where there is lots and lots of different communities that make up the population. So how do you engage those? And I think that’s just so much easier, like you say, less laborious, time-consuming and technologies there to kind of help. So I think that’s interesting. So, in your book, you emphasize this idea, and I wanted to explore it a little bit, about staying fresh and agile and always having this idea of… day one, day one. So how can that be applied to kind of any business? I think particularly when expanding and growing the business and having that, because as you scale, is that harder to keep that day one mentality? Cause you get involved in stuff. I don’t know.

I think the number one thing is building a culture of testing. In an organization, it is the single most important ingredient in freshness. I’ll tell you, I had an experience with my team last week. They were talking about results of a test that they were running and the increase that they were seeing in this particular audience was like in the 20s, like 20%. And I was like, how could we have been at this? I’ve been here eight years, and we’re still seeing results like this in testing. And a big part of that is… the capabilities are changing because the tool set is changing. We didn’t have access to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud eight years ago. Now we do. And I have new people with new capabilities. And so we can run new kinds of tests that deliver, continue to deliver these kinds of results, but you have to have your team trained no matter where they are just to be constantly running tests. And like, stay humble about the scenarios and always in that sense of like, how do I beat what I’m doing right now? That’s kind of where the freshness starts and like people are just constantly like trying new things.

Yeah, I think it’s that you have to give people the space and almost in some cases the permission to go and do that. Because sometimes I think people can be scared, a little bit scared of failing. And I’m like, that’s not a problem. Experiments, that’s what they’re there to do. It’s not really a failure.

Yeah, beyond permission, like it has to be an expectation. Like people know, because like I’m into it, that’s going to be that’s a benefit. Like they should be constantly testing everything. We have an expectation of that across the board.

I love it. So when you look ahead, so we’ve talked a bit about now and we’ve talked a bit about how personalization is actually coming into the fore. What really excites you about how you can engage with customers across that journey, that ‘Tornado Funnel’ that you’ve talked about? What are you getting excited about?

I’m excited about the

capabilities right now. I know there’s a lot of fear out there about how these things are all going to pan out. But the bottom line if you’re any form of customer experience or marketing right now. It is literally the single most exciting time in history to be in this business. If you’re the kind of person who’s inquisitive and driven toward growth and likes to figure out these puzzles about how am I going to use these new capabilities to grow. It’s the right time. And the best part is that they’re not… they’re growing together. I don’t know how to better say that they’re becoming more integrated. And so even the advances that we’re seeing, let’s say, in the marketing side and on the data side, they used to there still was like a kludgy situation between the two. Now those are coming together and AI is coming together. And so I think we’re just starting to see that happen. And then even other, other partners and I think this is really the key to thinking globally is that set of partners that you use. I was just at a conference on payment, looking at the work that an organization like Stripe is doing to create basically, you know, boundary-less or borderless commerce they’re gonna do all that all the regulations and all the different rules and all that kind of stuff like that’s all the background. You just pick which country. And like, it’s like that to me is unlocking value and erasing friction and unlocking these capabilities we never had before. So it’s pretty exciting.

Yeah No I mean, it is exciting. And I think global growth is one of the things that becomes a lot easier. We said it before. And if you just think payments is a very infrastructure-heavy kind of thing, but we kind of think about, okay, yeah, going global means, you know, how do you speak to your customers? How do you get them to engage? How do you talk their language very easily at that click of a button? So it’s not difficult. And that could be, that could be a sales conversation, a product, you know, UI, it can be any kind of point across that journey where someone interacts with you. How do you make that personal in the form of their language? I always think, and I say every time on this podcast, almost, I always think when we talk about personalization, people often think in English about personalization, but actually my first principle is, are you speaking the customer’s actual language? You know, not the language of the customer, but the actual language of that customer. So if you can do that, I think you’re on the right step. And it’s a lot easier, like you say, than it ever used to be. Just one last question on sort of this, before we get into the final quickfire round, which I do every, week. So nearly there. When, you think about the experiments and you think about short-termism you know, we’ve all got numbers to hit, you know, quarterly numbers, yearly numbers, whatever they might be. But we’ve also, as you know, you’ve worked in marketing and we think long-term brands and long-term engagement, long-term growth, let’s talk about. How do you kind of, what’s your advice to people trying to balance those rapid results versus the long-term customer-first-brand-led profitable growth?

Well, I don’t think that they’re at odds. I think the most important thing is you do need to have kind of a long-term strategy that you’re thinking about. And for us, here when I came, you know, you could see where the opportunities were. And we had a vision that we were going to build out a multi-channel platform to engage and inform people in our audience about the great work that this organization was doing and then have the systems in place to convert that into membership. And so that’s the broad vision. But, you know, I learned before I came here, you know, whether it was at AOL or any of the other places where I was a Chief Digital Officer that like talking about digital transformation is just so scary. It never gets funded. So, really, a lot of that stuff is the series of quick wins. It’s fixing your email. It’s getting digital marketing program in place, fixing the website, optimizing it for search. All these kinds of like there are quick wins in and of themselves. And then four years from now, you can look back and go, hey, look, our digital transformation is complete or ongoing or whatever it is.

Yeah, well, it probably never stops, but they’re compounding effects, right? Aren’t they? There are things that you, the wins that will build on wins that build on wins so that’s really interesting. Well, we’re in the quickfire round. So three little questions for you that I ask pretty much everyone the same kind of thing. What market would you launch in next?

I’m not sure that question is completely applicable to me, but I’ll give you my perspective on it. What I like about this world right now is that we are all unified by being an enthusiast about something. And the world is basically your market. And you’re looking for those people that are interested in that thing that you’re doing at that point of view that you’ve got. There’s no reason to like limit yourself to say, I’m going to launch in that country. You know, it’s why my wife is a scholar on feminism. She is building a content program for the Canadian Women’s Association. There maybe the audience of feminists in this country is finite, but there are a lot across the world. And that’s why I would say like. That’s your market it is defined by that content interest, not by geographic boundaries.

No, I mean, fantastic answer. And yes, of course, you know, the AMA is very, very American But yeah, I get it. Well, brilliant answer. So if you could then take that thought process, global growth in one word, what would it be?

Boundary-less.

And then lastly, before we say goodbye, is who do you think we on this podcast should speak to next?

I’ll give you two suggestions. One is James Reed, who is the Chairman and CEO of Reed in the UK. And he’s also a podcast host, one of the top five in the UK. So he’s a pretty brilliant guy. And then I think, you know. The Collison brothers who run Stripe are people that just like blow me away. And I think their perspective on global commerce and the impact that they’re having on this universe by what’s happening there is really impressive. So they’d also be a get.

Brilliant. Well, Todd, I’ll tell him you told me to talk to them.

So we’ll see about that

Please do.

Fantastic. I wish you continued success at the AMA. And definitely would advise everyone to read the 10-Second Customer Journey. Fantastic book. But thanks for spending some time with us today, Todd. And I hope to see you again soon.

It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, that wraps up another episode of In Other Words, a podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a massive thank you to Todd Unger for sharing practical insights on frictionless customer journeys, breaking down silos and keeping customer experiences meaningful, even as organizations scale. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, make sure to follow In Other Words on Spotify, Apple, Google or your favorite podcast platform. You can also find more conversations on leadership, growth and what it really means to scale globally at Phrase.com. Thanks again for tuning in and I’ll see you next time.