Tony Bodoh is a #1 best selling author and he’s the founder and co-founder of 5 companies ranging from Customer Experience Consulting to Small Business Training to Television, he easily navigates the International stage, speaking at both personal growth seminars as well as the Uber Nerdy Technology conferences. Tony writes his business blogs, personal growth essays and children’s stories. While he now coaches executives, he has taught High School for 1 year and in the Business Department of Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee for 7 years. As a passion believer in the power and possibility that is contained in each moment of the human experience to alter the course of history; Tony financially supports the building of sustainable villages in Africa and Haiti.
Tony learned at an early age the power of listening and letting people know they have been heard. He started a lawn care business at 11 years old, while his friends had 1 or 2 lawns to cut; Tony kept busy all summer with 16 clients including the local Post Office and Post Master’s lawn. He learned that while quality lawn care mattered, most people just wanted to connect and be acknowledged for who they are.
Questions
- Tell us a little about yourself and your journey
- As a Customer Service Consultant, what do you think are 3 challenges that people face why their customer experience is not consistent in their business?
- What are some everyday solutions that you believe that can help improve customer experience on a global level?
- How do you stay motivated?
- What is one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your personal life or business?
- Do you think that customer experience is linked to a company’s bottom line?
- What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you?
- What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
- Where can our listeners find your information?
- What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?
Highlights
- Tony started by sharing that he grew up in Central Wisconsin, it was a place where there was not much exposure to the outside world. When he went off to college in Virginia, he began to see the world that he didn’t know existed and it lead him to start asking questions and really looking deeper into what he wanted to do with his life. He then got a Liberal Arts Degree as that was the path he was on. He shortly realizes that he wanted to run multiple businesses and went and got his MBA. He worked several corporate jobs for large companies where he built analytical systems. While on that journey building those systems, he learned things that he could do to look at data and understand behaviour from data. Tony was given the opportunity to take over the customer experience world in the hospitality company he worked for to do surveys and understand what the guests and meeting planners were saying. Tony started a consulting company in 2009, which focuses on customer experience and was able to bring growth to other businesses that he started. It has spread from the customer experience consulting to small business training and consulting and now building businesses in the television industry.
- Tony stated the challenges people face why their customer experience is not consistent in their businesses is the human connection – the shared experience that an employee has with a customer or a leader has with an employee is what drives the value for the customer. We talked about the customer’s side and that it starts with the leader and employee and the engagement they have with each other and how they are connecting. Also, the ability to listen, often times we are caught up in our own lives and our minds are distracted. The employee may come to work and because of the challenges in their life they get distracted and are not playing at the top of their game. They are not able to connect in the same way. He also mentioned that there is a disconnection if you don’t believe in the products or services you’re offering and you don’t have the confidence to speak boldly about it. If you don’t believe that you can solve a problem that a customer has, that is a huge disconnection as well. If you’re not unreasonable in your commitment to the product and services that you offer and commitment to solve a problem, you are not going to have a consistent experience over time.
- On a global level, he believes that people need to experience the product that they are working with, the company that they are working for needs to be willing to invest in their people. Anywhere from 50% to 85% of a customer’s experience is based on the connection they make with the person. Connection is #1 and you have to hire the right people who know how to connect and you have to train them up from there. So you want to keep that skill set growing, keep finding ways for them to connect with challenging people, with people in different scenarios or even if they are having a bad day, how do they build up their emotional ability to connect and to take control. Mindset training is one of the biggest things a company can do.
Tony also stated that as a company, we should be asking what is it that our customers are feeling? What do we want them to feel? If we want them to feel this way, what benefit will move them there and what features create those benefits. Do that and we will end up with an amazing product that people will say, how did you do that? It’s because you started with the end in mind.
- Tony shared that he keeps motivated by running multiple businesses; there is a lot of stuff going on, so one of the things he does every morning is visualization and meditation.
“Visualization is geared towards what is it that I am grateful for and what is it I want to achieve today, what are my intentions for the day. And a part of that is to always focus on the abundance around me. Sometimes we get easily caught up with everything, instead just allowing the abundance to flow.”
- Tony shared that the one app/tool that he frequently uses is Evernote. He is a huge fan as he is able to put every idea, blogs, emails and anything he can in Evernote. It also enables him to upload video and pictures as well. He uses Evernote because he has a lot of ideas to pull from whilst dealing with his clients.
- He mentions that customer experience is not about statistics, we can use it to measure but it is about a particular experience in the moment. As it is only in the moment that we have the power to change our trajectory whether it’s our personal life, as a leader or as a business. We can’t change it in the past, we can’t change it in the future, and we only have this moment.
Tony stated that Customer Experience is the opportunity to turn this world around in so many ways because when people have good experiences just even a smile or a connection with the person behind the counter, if we were all a little more empathetic, it would change the world. When someone experiences an act of kindness or another person sees an act of kindness or someone does an act of kindness all of this leads to a better world.
- Tony shares that the book he is on right now that he absolutely loves is “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics” by Richard Thaler, he is one of the leading behavioural economists, so it’s that link between psychology and economics. He talks about the many different cases where behaviour of the human person is irrational. He also shares that the book that really affected his life is “The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield, he stated that was the first self-improvement book he read right around the time that he was told he was taking over the customer experience for the hotel company. It was his first step into the world of psychology and the understanding of how people think and feel and behave.
- Tony shares that he is currently working on a project called Beast Mode Live. He is working with one of the leading mental performance coaches in professional athletics, who has worked with Olympians and they are taking the principles that he has taught for years to professional athletes and bringing it to corporate life and using it with team members in his company. They are now bringing it into the US military on a global scale. They are doing it where it is not funded by the Federal Government or the Politicians but by corporate sponsors so that they can help the military. Tony says, “We are really passionate about it because we have found that 35 – 40% of the military that have completed the service, end up leaving the service and they don’t have a job and many times end up homeless. The sponsorship will help them to touch every member of the military, so that they are at a higher level of performances and when they leave the service they will have control over the money and their emotions and can go out there and do something great because they have done such great service already. Most of them have never had a job outside of the military because they went in right after high school and college and so they don’t understand how their skill sets translate into the corporate life and they want to help them with that. They don’t understand how their skill sets translate into the corporate world. He says this is definitely a passion project and they are putting a ton of effort into it. Tony Bodoh believes that mindset is where everything starts at because that is how he changed his own life.
- Tony says listeners can find him at tonybodoh.com and also
- Tony shares that this is a quote he has been using lately and it’s from his mentor. She shared it with him in a time where he wasn’t seeing the results he wanted to see in a particular area of his life, he sometimes go back to it as he has it is on his desk.
“If the thinking and actions you’ve been doing produced what you were in love with, I’d say keep at it but clearly it’s time to wire a new set of thoughts and then grow them through reputation into new and more expansive results.”
We would welcome a subscribe, rate and review for the show and also that the listeners can come hang out at Navigating the Customer Experience Community on Facebook. This is a private Facebook group for our listeners and past guests to come over share insights and industry trending topics and discussions on business and customer experience – click here!
New Online Course – Mastering Customer Experience and Increasing Your Revenue – 50% off for all who sign up in September…..A Must Have Course for all Business Owners, Entrepreneurs – https://bit.ly/50OFFMCXIR
LINKS:
“Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics” by Richard Thaler
“The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” by Jack Canfield
