Experts of Experience - #35 How GNC is Shaping Product Strategy with Customer Feedback

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

On this episode, Michael Costello, CEO of GNC, emphasizes the importance of the customer experience in providing personalized support to customers. He also discusses the impact of customer experience on business growth and the challenges of creating a sticky online experience. Plus, a deep dive into the implementation of AI in customer service, the approach to innovation, and the importance of customer feedback in shaping product strategy.Key TakeawaysThe importance of customer experience in driving successful business growthThe role of GNC's coaches in providing personalized support to customersChallenges and opportunities in creating a sticky online experienceThe impact of consumer behavior on the health and wellness sectorThe evolving role of AI in customer service AI can improve customer service efficiency while still considering the human aspect of customer needs.Innovation strategy should be driven by customer health journeys and needs, with a focus on solving specific problems.Customer feedback plays a crucial role in shaping product strategy and maintaining brand loyalty.Leadership involves staying connected to the consumer and ensuring a customer-centric approach to decision-making.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org 

What is the importance of customer experience when it comes to driving a successful business? I think it's the only reason to come into a store. As simple as that. What other reason is there to go to a store and show for the customer experience? I love that you call them coaches. They're not just store associates. They're there to coach and help people. We don't want to hire cashiers. We want to hire coaches. That was our special socks is coach in the store.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm thrilled to have Michael Costello, CEO of GNC on the show. We're going to discuss all things retail landscape, GNC's innovative support programs, and the competitive dynamics of the health and wellness sector. Michael, thank you so much for coming on. How are you doing today? I'm excited to be here. It's fun. Great. So in looking into your background, you've been in the CPG industry for 30 years, spending a lot of time at Clorox. You've spent a lot of time advising.

I'm on my 36th year now, so... 36 years. I'm trying to bringth year now, so. 36 years. Trying to bring me down a little bit. I appreciate that. All good. What I'm trying to say is that you have a ton of experience in this space, not only at Clorox and GNC, but also advising startups and Fortune 500 companies. And so I'm curious to know from your perspective, what is the state of consumer behavior today and how has it changed even from the past five years? That's obviously involves a lot of different things, right?

Yeah. Consumers change. The reality is consumers are always changing. Yeah. And so we talk about, you know, you go back in 1990, 88, when I started working to today. But what I see is consumers change a lot of behaviors and how they do things. But so many of the motivations are still the same motivations. The desire for folks to live well, for example, in a health and wellness space has been there consistently. How they do it, what information they have, how they react to the messages are very different. So much health and wellness information is off TikTok these days, which is very different from just a few years ago. Yeah. And when I think about that, I agree with you. Consumers are always changing.

And it kind of feels like right now, but they're not. Because my point is that core behaviors, the reasons why they're doing the things they're doing are typically very similar. So you have to think about both of those, right? Like why are they doing the actions, but there's a lot of tools and opportunities as the environment has changed. I think about how the state of the world today with social media, the rise of AI, so much competition entering the market. I'm curious to know your perspective when it comes to legacy brands such as GNC,

which has been around since the 30s, I believe. What is the key for survival? How can brands that have been around for so long really stay up to date with changing market dynamics? So, Oren, I want to go back to it. So I'm going to reframe it from a legacy brand as, yes, we were founded in 1935 as one of the first mission-driven brands out there. Like, we were mission-driven before mission-driven brands were cool. And that's how we stay relevant. We've got to stay on our mission of helping consumers live well. Now, yes, that means we have to follow science, make sure our science is all updated.

We are on TikTok talking about our brands on TikTok. We're on Amazon. You know, as consumers want to shop on Amazon. But more importantly, this category of health and wellness is confusing. Walk to a store and just try to walk around one of our stores, walk to a big box, type in online, and you're going to find that it's there's a plethora of products and they have various different needs some folks should use a versus b magnesium there's five different types of magnesium out there which one should you take well if you come to our stores in gnc we're going to coach you about that we're going to ask you questions one magnesium i actually

use two different versions for different times that I need them for. But that kind of knowledge is hard to really for the normal consumer to gather, or it takes them so much time. And there's been studies out there that show on TikTok, only 2% of the claims on TikTok are actually true. So- We got to watch out. Say it's 50% are true and the other 50% are not. It doesn't really matter. The point is, don't you want that educated coach to help you kind of navigate?

And of course, the other things are needs to change over time, right? What I needed when I was in my 20s, when I was taking a lot of creatine and what I need now as I'm trying to healthfully age, this is very, very different. So that coach, our coach in store goes through lots of training to be able to help you with those issues. So what I'm hearing from you is it's really about the customer experience and them being able to solve their full problem. Not just, I need to buy magnesium, but I need to understand what magnesium to take. That's exactly it. That's why we teach our coaches to open with

lifestyle questions, not product questions. So what are you trying to accomplish is one of our questions, not do you want a protein, right? And even if you want a protein, what are you trying to accomplish? Because maybe you want a weight gainer because you're trying to bulk up a lot. Maybe you actually want maybe a lower calorie protein because you're actually just trying to feel full and add some more proteins in your body. Those are, they're sitting on the shelf next to each other, but it's not inherently obvious all the time for somebody who just walks in the door. So yes, it's about that throughout those lifestyle questions and then therefore what the coach can help with that experience. I love that you call them coaches just as a starting point. They're not just store associates. They're there to coach and help people.

We don't want to hire cashiers. We want to hire coaches because the coach makes that experience happen. That is our special sauce is coach in the store. Great. Tell me a little bit about these coaches. How do you set them up for success? What's the training program like? What's their world? Yeah, so we have a bunch of different ways that we train. One of the primary things is we have a GNC University, which actually I just finished shooting a spot

for a promo coming out, explaining the why behind the promo and how I want the coaches to behave in the store. All right, so they'll see that GNC University spot. We put those out on a regular basis. But we also, when a new person starts, we have a training program that starts to where they get bronze, silver, gold, platinum. And that goes through training from how to open a store, how to do things just to be able to take your return, all the way to what products we have, whether the products matter,

and how they can talk to consumers about those products. And so I was just in the store the other day in New York, had a person who'd been there barely three months and was already a platinum coach because we're setting an expectation that we want our coaches at a difference. He was super proud, obviously, about the fact that within a short period of time,

he was able to look at everything and he was able to walk around the store as consumers came in and tell them about the very different sections. Is it like kind of a self-led program or how do they move through the different levels? So for that particular training, it's very self-led. Okay. So they can do it as if there's a downtime in the store or whatnot, or in their initial phase, when they're training with another coach there, they can go through that. We ask questions at the end to make sure people understood. So it's that typical kind of web training where you go through all the things, you see the videos, and then you hopefully answer the questions right,

although you have to go back to the beginning again. But that's only one part of our program and training. I was in Queens last month where we did a training for when we rolled out GLP-1 on April 28th. April 27th, we took all of our stores and had people come in. I showed up at the store

in Queens at 8.30. I left at 11. We went through role plays. We went through the whys behind GLP-1s, the science behind why folks will take the semaglutides or the glp ones out there how our products can help them with it and then we did role plays as with that we had set up with consumers coming in like so the person

had their own kind of only like i'm secret shopper in that way yeah a couple of that here's who i am here's my things you ask me lifestyle questions i have the answers there and I play into it. And hopefully you are able to help solve those problems. So it's a mixture between having the standard web-based training. And then when you have these new rollouts like the GLP-1 and just so for everyone listening, just in case you don't know, even though it's all over the news, this is the olympics of the world. And GNC has really rolled out a whole new suite of products and section of the store specifically tailored to the side effects of GLP-1 for customers, which I'd love to get into a little bit more. But I want to stay on this training topic for a moment just to understand, because I think I've helped to develop these training programs in companies. I've been an employee in companies where I've gone through these training programs. And I think when you're only in a web-based application, sometimes it can get a little...

Boring. Boring. Thank you for saying that. And so how do you find the balance between the web-based as well as the in-person? So we balance it, right? And we continue to reinforce it. But I'll give you a good example. So on the GLP-1, we rolled out a series of videos that were all a few minutes apiece explaining what GLP-1s were, how our products did side effects, the empathy we needed with consumers when they came in the door. And each one of us at the executive team also watched all the same videos.

So I watched the same videos because it was going to get too boring. I'll get bored too. The point is that everybody should be really kind of working through that same training. After everybody was done with that web training, that's when we did the in-source stuff. So they already have a base. They've already went through all of it, but we're going to reinforce it with additional videos. And on that videos, we actually have our science team on a video talking about all the products and reasons behind it. And then we went into role play and the role play is fun, right? It's always feels a little out of body when you're doing

role playing because you're working with your peers or sometimes with me showing up there a little bit. Of course. But going through that role play really brings to life that real consumer situation. Right. And we all, we all learn from practice. It's such an important component to it. And I, I think the reason why I'm just double clicking on this is because we, we need to give people that real life experience, even if it is role play, but getting to say those things out loud is so necessary. And you said something that I want to double click on, which is empathy. And how do you teach empathy to your coaches so that they can really show up for the employees? So I'll go back to GLP-1 just because we did that recently. First of all, we did a training on,

we had two things we talked about. One was to understand how, what a big deal it was for somebody who has GLB1, who's trying on a big weight loss journey typically, for them to come across our lease line and open that door. The courage it takes them to do that and to think about how much courage that person has just walking that door. Yeah. And so once you realize it took courage for that person to do that, well, then what's our job is to like welcome them. And then I asked every one

of our coaches when that person walks in to think about a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, all of us know somebody who has some problem with losing weight, that they struggle with it, they're working hard, but they're not really able to get over that hump. And Jailbreak Ones are a miracle drug for that group. So imagine that person coming through the door is my mom. How am I going to treat my mom? How am I going to give her advice? That's very different than thinking about it as somebody who's just coming to buy $100 worth of product. Yeah, that's amazing. Another question I have is, so you're spending a lot of time and effort making sure that your coaches are trained up and able to not only show up with the facts,

but also show up with empathy. How does this impact your customer retention and overall business performance? How do you draw the lines? A lot of things are very hard to connect straight from one to the other. Totally. But we need stores. And we don't argue every day about whether we need a store or not. The reason why GNC exists, the reason why as a specialty retailer, we are going to continue to be here is because of the coach and the coach bringing that consumer in. I've been in a ton of stores where I sit there. I worked a store about two months ago, stocking shelves, cleaning everything else, so we could all understand what it takes for our coaches to accomplish things in a store.

But the amount of people would walk in and actually talk to coaches, have the coach's name, talk about what's going on. The coach talking back about, hey, so how's your workout going? What are you doing on these? How did that creatine work for you, right? Our best coaches create these friendships with people. That's retention, right? There's no better retention than that. And I think about it myself personally. I buy my shoes, my running shoes at this one particular store and I buy it there. They're actually more expensive than Zappos, more expensive than Amazon. But every time I go

in, I'm a hookah user and I love them, but they're always changing different versions. What's going on? I come in and I say, Hey, here's what I'm needing. They, they put them on me. I get up on the treadmill. I do a little running on it. Right. And I get exactly what I need. Now, could I buy it from Amazon and return it by again? Or like, yes. And finally get that one feeling that that they're working for my best interest is that experience. And that's what we want to have at GNC every day. I think it's difficult,

especially for smaller companies sometimes to understand that because you can't show the KPI of trust and the KPI of that relationship, right? Like we can't necessarily measure the fact that Bob, our customer at this store really loves this one coach. And so he always comes in and talks to him and buys things from him. Like it's kind of intangible. And so it's a difficult thing to explain sometimes. It is. And I think you see it over time, right? That's the challenge is that you're not going to see this happen and tomorrow we're going to see retention go up. But over time, right? That's the challenge is that you're not going to see this happen and

tomorrow we're going to see retention go up. But over time, right? Folks will remember the GNC experience. They'll want to repeat that GNC experience and they'll come in more often. So it's probably 12 to 18 months before we see it really show up. I know it's true. I don't know it from my own personal experience. I know that the stores that tend to really have really great customer experiences are the ones that are growing today. Tell me more about that. Because I mean, that's obviously what we talk about on this show is how customer experience is such a key to business growth. But in your opinion, what is the importance of customer experience when it comes to driving a successful business? I think it's the only reason to come into a store.

Right. Simple as that. What other reason is there to go to a store except for the customer experience? Everything else you can buy online. So the big thing is retail exists today. Now I exclude some other channels like C-stores and I need to get food and groceries,

but even that I can buy online. But especially whether it be clothing or food or shoes or a lot of the other products that specialty retail has always been focused on, the only reason to come to my store, the only reason to come to the GNC is because there's that experience. So then how do you tackle this in the online world? How do you create an experience that is as sticky when you don't have the physical aspect? It's harder, but I really believe the folks who are shopping us primarily online are ones who've actually been in store before. So if you want to come into one store and next time you just want to go online and buy from us,

perfect, right? We've had that experience. Maybe you need to come in a few years later to recheck and as I said, update because there's other needs you might have. Come back in store, go back online. There's a lot of performance marketing, a lot of CX work that works online to try and make it easier to shop, easier to be kind of more intuitive. We do all that, but it's really table stakes and online. The differentiator for me is in retail and you can go to other sites, but really only at us can you actually really get that experience, but also come back and get this coach experience in store. Do you provide any type of coaching experience online? We have blogs, we have a lot of articles as you're searching, but it puts some of the onus back on the consumer. Yeah, totally. To me, it's still less than ideal. And we're trying to figure out how we continue to make that better.

And I think as some of the tools change with AI, we'll get better and better at it. Yeah. But that's still in the future. What's your hope? I talk to people about this all the time where I have clients of mine, I'm a customer experience consultant,

and I have clients who say, we don't need to, we'll just get rid of customer service. We're just going to have AI to tackle it. And I think that's just very hopeful and also probably not the best for anyone involved at the end of the day. So mean, there are times where I just want to send an IM and have my thing get resolved, right? Totally. I don't want to talk to anybody. This is broken. I want a replacement sent. Simple problem. Just like fix it.

Fix it. That's my preference though. If I want to talk to a customer service person, then I should be able to do that too. Where I think AI is going to help is that we've all had the situations where we've been on customer service lines where we call somebody we get one answer you call back a different answer you call back you get a third answer so you keep calling so you get the answer you want i think ai will help with training in a lot of customer service so we can get consistent experiences online yeah whether that be from the chatbot, whether that's from an IM, whether

that's from the phone call or the DM. I think we'll have an AI will really help accelerate how those customer service agents can actually help consumers. Completely. How's GNC looking at AI? Is there anything that you're working on to implement? There are things we're looking at. I mean, there's a lot of back office stuff that we're still looking at, right? How do we work with

the warehouse and whatnot? Those are easy to implement. We are looking at some consumer facing things, but not ready to build those yet. Yeah. Cool. I think it's going to be so fascinating to see how this really plays out. We're at such an early phase of it. And I think the consumer is still holding on to the human interactions. I've been reading studies about this and humans still want that human interaction. I think we're still skeptical of AI. Yet we also see that AI could help us to avoid those lengthy wait times and having to call back multiple times in order to get the answer that we want. Like there's a ton of inefficiency in this space that can definitely be solved by AI. The question is, how do we implement it while still thinking about the humans on the other side, our customers?

And what does that human actually need in that moment? When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. There are times all of us don't want any human interaction. We just want the stuff done now. Yeah. And then there's more complex problems that I want to talk to a human. I want to explain

what's going on. Maybe I'm just upset. I want to rant. Yeah. And I want to hear the thank you, the sorry from the company. Totally. Yeah. There are some cases where an AI is just going to make this a lot worse if you don't just put someone on the line to apologize. Yeah. So as I said, I think we're, yes, we're definitely early stages. I don't think we all want to talk to robots every day. No, we don't want that at all. I want to pivot a little bit to how you approach innovation.

And I know you had mentioned GLP-1 and this big rollout. And I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that. Maybe we can use that even as like a case study in how did you approach kind of seeing the trends, which everyone's talking about Ozympic and GLP-1, but how did you then translate that into, okay, here's what we're going to do that's going to best serve our customer? Yeah. So we've always had a section of our category called weight management, right? And if you think about it, GNC is here is to figure out what health journeys people are on and how we can best solve them. So there's over 40% of Americans are trying to lose weight at any given time.

Yeah. So we had a category and that category has, has had products in it that help you assist with your losing weight, especially if you're working out. I'm going to grab one for you. Actually, this is January. We actually just launched Glucatrim, which I'm personally on. And it helps you.

It's that last 10 pounds that you're trying to lose. And it's really for the folks who are already working out, you're already doing things. It helps manage your blood sugar and kind of keeps you a little less hungry at times. It's really good for me for late night snacking which is my downfall but when we said as as glp1 come out there the fact is 50 of people give up on glp1s in the first year and they don't reach their goal and so there's all these side effects if you watch the oprah special you would see people talking about all the negative side effects that they were going through still love many of them getting to the goal but suffering so our reaction was we have all these products we have everything in our in a gnc store you walk in has products for these side effects but people just don't know it

so our wall was designed some new products uh but mostly with other products that we figured out all the side effects from the different studies that were launched, right? There's the side effects from all the clinical studies are all available online. Our science team went through what all the side effects were and then identified our top products for those side effects. So again, we're still in the same weight management wall. Now we're adding the GLP-1s. So as you walk in, hopefully you can stay on the GLP longer,

get to your base weight. And then we want you to come in and keep using things like Glucatrim or other things that help maintain it. Got it. So you could come off of a GLP-1 and then go on to this type of product. Yes. Which is in our store available. It's not on our racks. Or if you're like myself, where I don't need a GLP-1, but like I, that last 12 pounds really hard to get off. This is a product for me. So we're trying to meet whatever, whatever journey you're on, whatever we do need in weight management, we want to have that product for you. So that, that was the insight. And it's always been what we're trying. So if you're looking, if you're looking to your yoga and you want to use more protein to really kind of slim your body, that's one. If you're looking really to bulk up,

we have products for bulking, right? So we're looking for where those need states, demand states are out there. And then how do we have a set of products for them? Yeah. It sounds to me like you have very clear kind of segments or personas of people who are coming in, like you mentioned the yoga or someone who's trying to bulk up and you think about what are the products that each of these people want as they're solving this problem? Yes. We think about it in demand states, right? So like healthy aging would be a demand state. And then what kind of product needs would I have across that demand state? So I've still got eight proteins, right? But I also might want to use other products with my joints so I can keep running. And inside demand states, there are different

audiences, or as you said, personas that we'll look at and try and make, are we meeting all our needs? I have a leadership question for you. What's a hard lesson that you've recently learned that's changed your outlook or approach to your work? Almost every lesson is hard. Change is hard. Change is hard. Change is hard. Whenever you lose the touch with the consumer, coming to the GNC, I was a customer of GNC in the 90s.

I sold to GNC in the 2010s. And it's a brand that I've known and loved for a long time. And just seeing how we lost the focus on the consumer here and re-pivoting back to that. And then how hard and easy it is because it's easy to talk about the consumer and really bring them front and center. It's changing all of our behaviors to make sure that all lines up. So just for context, everyone, Michael took the CEO position seven months ago. Yes. So you're still in the early days somewhat of coming in, but it sounds like you've been

in the orbit of GNC for a long time. So it's a personal passion of mine. Yeah. I have a whole rhythm of products I take and my kids and family get mad at me when I'm always telling them what more products they should be taking. Totally. But, you know, it's a passion I have because I know it can really help people. Yeah. But I want to go back to this lesson that you

learned. And when companies lose their focus on the consumer, how did you go about really shifting gears and bringing that customer focus back into the business? It's how we make our decisions. We actually talk about the consumer first. In every one of our decisions, we ask the question, what does the consumer want? And you have to have that first question because if we're not asking that question first, now you still have to figure out how do I make money off of the business? How does this work? Right?

How can I execute it? Those are all things that are the second part. But the what, understanding the why the consumer wants it and what you're going to do about that is the first question you have to answer first as you get to to the how and then how do you find out what it is that the customer actually wants you keep asking do you have your coaches support with that or do you do like focus groups what's the what's the approach we do all of it i mean i'm in store all the time i ask people what's going on i watch tiktok right? I have a whole executive team watching TikTok, see what the trends are going on.

There's social listening, right? It's more formal on that. It's our customer service line. It's our coaches provide us with what products and we collect the data of what they say people are coming in store

looking for. We look at what top sellers are on across the country and what trends we're starting to see and hear about. So we try to look at all of it and really kind of distill it down to those core trends. I'm curious to know a little bit more just about how that customer feedback really feeds

into your innovation strategy. What's the process or rhythm that you're following to really make sure that you're staying on top of things? Because I know GNC is on TikTok. You've mentioned TikTok a couple of times. Clearly, that's like a channel that you weren't on before that you are now. And it's an important one because that's where your consumers are. How are you really approaching this to make sure that you are staying on top of the right trends and bringing them back into your strategies. So we actually review all of our categories on a regular basis and look at what those trends are. What's going on in science?

What's going on in duck? What's going on in other retailers? What are consumers out there talking about? That's social listening. That's really what we're trying to do. We also talk to, we have a partnership with Startup CPG, which when we're Expo West, which is a big fair for a lot of natural health brands, we had over 300 brands apply to be the next big thing at GNC.

Oh, cool. And we had all of those founders. We went through it. They submitted videos. And then we picked six to come here to Pittsburgh and present in a Shark Tank-like atmosphere to a group of our buyers and merchandisers, as well as some of our franchisees, and really explain why these products were cool and what was going on and what consumer needs they met. And then we're choosing a set of those to actually get distribution inside our stores. We also talk with some venture capitalists and private equity companies who are looking to, as they're looking to fund new companies, understand what they're looking at, what trends they see.

So we're going as broad as we can to understand what consumers are looking for. And direct consumer brands are a great example because consumers already paid money to get these brands. We know they want them. And so how we go back and really get them out there. Learning from your partners is such an important piece. I'm going to show you another one. I love this one.

Oh, yeah. So Supergut, right, is now launched across all of our GNC products. This is a great product. I'm taking it too. And, you know, the fact is, you know, we know the product's growing. It's growing online. The product's doing really well. And now we brought it on in GNC because to provide more access to more people, it's such a great product. Yep. But learning from your partners, right? Because Supergut, I assume, has a whole different audience. I'm sure there's some overlap, but they're bringing an audience into your store as well. Yeah. We launched Bloom a while back here and a significant portion of people who came in were incremental to us as a company. But importantly,

it was also incremental to them because while they brought in some of their own consumers, there's folks who had never seen the product who are new to Bloom. So it's a win-win. Is there any technology that you really like to use as you're managing customer insights, partner insights? How do you pull all of this information together into something that's tangible that you can actually act on? You know, we're not there yet. It's about our journey over the next few years. AI is going to help with that for sure. Today, it was like really smart people at GNC who are really passionate, doing really hard work.

I mean, I think it's good for us to be like in the weeds with the data sometimes so that we can really get intimate with what is happening, putting those insights together, putting those trends together. And at the same time, I'm really excited for this AI revolution in helping us to parse all of that data.

Right. Again, that's a great example where AI helps somebody do a job better. Completely. This is replacing them, right? I don't ever see hiring an AI customer insights person, right? Insights to tell me all the ins and outs. Totally. Just a simple bot that's going to tell you everything that's going on. No. Yeah. It's something that I do with my consulting clients.

Whenever I do customer interviews, I'll create a custom GPT. I'll put all those insights in there and then I'll just ask it questions. And it is so much faster than reading through every single transcript trying to pull out. Okay. Well, they said that how many people said this versus how many people said this? It's, it makes a world of difference. And I think the possibilities are really endless when it comes to how we're using technology to help us get closer to our customers and really understand our customers. So you spend less time looking at a computer and more time thinking about what that means. Totally. We're talking to more people. Let's get more insights so that we know that we have a computer that will help us to process this easily.

Makes sense. That's great. All right. Well, I have a couple last questions for you. One is, I'd love to know, are there any key resources, publications, podcasts that you like to listen to to really help you in your work i listen a lot of podcasts my biggest issue is trying to catch up on all the things that people have sent me so i get links all the time i get articles i have a good network of people who want to see me succeed and so just even consuming all that information is is really what I'm focused on right now. Yeah. Great. Is there an AI for that? Yeah. Go through my inbox and just tell me, what do I actually need to read? No, if you're interested in it to me, I try and get to it. Yeah. A couple of questions that we ask every single guest. I'd love to hear about a recent

experience that you had with a brand that left you impressed. What was it? So anybody who knows me knows that I'm not typically going out and buying the higher-end clothing and whatnot. But we were on a tour recently to really look at what some of the best consumer experiences are in other stores. Oh, I love that. That's so much fun. It is a lot of fun.

And I was introduced to a brand called Viore. I was looking for... I'm now in Pittsburgh, so I need some jackets and some clothes to run in that are a little bit, want to get a little colder here. I'm coming from Miami. I didn't need as many jackets before. For sure.

And so he completely sold me on a jacket, and it's fantastic. I got it. I've now been back to Viore again. I bought three shirts, and what I loved about it was that, so I'm already impressed with how good they are, how they're not, they're not very pushy. They're talking about all different great products here. And then I go to buy these three shirts and I bought two extra larges and

one large. And the cashier was like, you know, sir, do you know you have one large and two extra larges here? And if you need, I can actually order an extra large in the white for you if that's the wrong size like i wanted two sizes i tried them on but the attention to detail and the how she's trying to assist me in it which you could have just rung them off all three right yeah and if i picked the wrong size whose fault would have been have been mine but she was pointing out something and did it in a very empathetic, open way. And she obviously could have lost the sale because I'm like, I don't want a large. You don't have a large here. And she was helping me out as a consumer. Guess what? I'll be going back. Totally. It goes so far. I mean, they've built trust with you. You can now trust that you're

going to go into that store. You're going to get the support you need. You're going to get great clothing at the same time. That's great. And I love that story about the cashier taking note of that, because that's exactly how we want to train the employees who are working with our customers every single day. We want to make sure that they're looking out for the best interest of the customer, even before in many, not all, but in some cases before the company, right? We want to make sure that we're giving that expert experience, even if we lose a sale. I want our folks to give the expert experience to the store. Yeah.

And I got another great example that I'll tell you. We actually had somebody come into one of our stores and they went through the whole GLP-1 wall and they talked about the whole thing and our coach talked to them about all different issues and person was on a GLP-1 and said, I'm having all these issues. I see all that. I can't afford it right now. I don't have my paycheck. And she said, come back.

Right. Like, come on back when you're ready. You know, we get you one or two things and maybe the next one. So she let the person walk out the store. That was a fantastic, fantastic experience. Totally. I'm glad she did it because you'd argue, well, why don't,

why don't you just buy this one thing? No, like let them go and they're going to come back because they got the expertise from us. Totally. We're playing the long game here. That's what customer experience is all about. It's not just that single moment.

It's long-term trust. So I love that story. And therefore loyalty, right? Because I'll be more loyal to those stores that I know treat me right. Completely. So my last question for you is, what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? I think there's two pieces, which is number one, if you're doing customer experience, you're not going to the store, you're not going to where it is, you're not doing it right. I really believe, really, really believe that you have to go to where the customer experience happens.

Could be online, right? Could be in the store. But wherever that is, make sure you know how that feels. And then the other one is realize that your key is those people. So put yourself in the folks who are giving that customer experience and make it your job to make their job as easy as possible. Because the harder you make it, right? We think there's great things where we're having to do all these different tasks. The harder you make it, it's harder for that person to deliver that customer experience. Go to the work, right? what's going on, and then make it easy.

Because I inherently believe everybody wants to do a good job. Everybody wants that customer experience. It's when everything gets in the way of it that folks kind of back off. The employee experience drives the customer experience. If we want our employees to create a seamless customer experience, we need to create a seamless experience for them as well. It goes hand in hand. And if we want our employees to respect our customers, we need to respect our employees. There's so, so many parallels

between the employee experience and the customer experience. And I think just, this is a passion point for me. If we're talking about customer experience, we have to look at the way the employees are set up for success as well. It's just like they go hand in hand. And we call it our coach's journey. Great. So how does that coach have the journey? And what do we do across that journey? Yeah. I mean, if we're mapping our customer journey, we should also be mapping our employees

journey. Because the way that those first 90 to 100 days of our employees experience with our company is really setting them up for how they're going to feel for the rest of their time with your business. So it's really important to think about everything from the hiring process, the onboarding process to, you know, how those performance reviews are going. It's just, it all will contribute to your customer experience at the end of the day. So I'm so glad that you bring that up. Totally agree. Awesome. Well, Michael, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show.

Please keep in touch and good luck with everything over at GNC. And Lauren, if you ever go into a GNC store and you have an experience that you want to say positive or negative, let me know. I'd love to hear it. Perfect. I will. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best.

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