[Webinar] Technology & Tactics
for Brand Trust & CX

Orchestrating the Experience, Technology & Tactics for Brand Trust & CX, Part 1

[Automated Transcripts provided by Wistia]

[Casey Ferguson]
Welcome and thank you for joining us. I'm Casey Ferguson. I'm the VP of marketing at Zoot Enterprises. And I'm going to lead a short chat here on a topic that we've been following closely, why customers put their trust in certain brands, and what financial services organizations and retailers can do to gain trust with important customer service and customer experience initiatives and sort of right products, right time, right data strategies. So today, I'm joined by Bob Lonergan. Bob, hey, how are you doing?

[Bob Lonergan]
Doing well.

[Casey Ferguson]
Good. So Bob's a financial technology solutions veteran, having held management roles at HP, Oracle, Cisco and for the last 11 years here at Zoot. So he's helping banks and retailers to deploy Zoot's data and rules orchestration solutions for KYC, fraud, workflows, customer experience and all kinds of good stuff. So thanks for being here, Bob.

[Bob Lonergan]
Glad to be here.

[Casey Ferguson]
Great, and Bob and I are excited to welcome our guest, Alyson Clarke. Alyson is a principal analyst at Forrester and has dedicated the better part of her career to helping financial services leaders understand and prepare for the future, helping them drive change, generate new business, all that good stuff. So thank you so much for being here, Alyson.

[Alyson Clarke]
Thanks for having me.

[Casey Ferguson]
So as the financial and retail landscape continues to morph and, you know, customer expectations shift, it's really important that brands take a good look at their strategies for loyalty, retention, satisfaction. Delivering really exceptional experiences throughout the customer journey is a big, big part of that. Right? So let's maybe put brands in focus to kick us off. You know, we all know that strong brands are built on really top notch customer experience moments. But what makes for a good customer experience? Alyson, Forrester does plenty of study into this. What do you see?

[Alyson Clarke]
We do, we do lots of research into this. And we've been looking at customer experience for many years now to really try and help firms understand, you know, not just what drives a great experience, but how do you link that back to what matters to the firm like loyalty, retention, share of wallet, advocacy, all those lovely kind of business benefits. And what it really boils down to and look, we've been doing this for, gosh, I don't know, 15 or more years. We've been pulling data to kind of look at all of this together. It comes down to what we call the three E's: Ease, Effectiveness and Emotion. So ease, of course, how easy is the experience for the customer? How and this is customer's perception, by the way, not the bank's perception. It's always customer experience is the customer's perception of how things are, right? So a bank might think it's easy, but a customer might not. So it's really important to think about it and look at what the customer's view of things are. So customers want to know. They want experiences that are easy for them to do. They want experiences that are effective. In other words, they can actually do what they want to do, right? They can get things done. And then finally, emotion. Emotion plays a really important role. And I think it's one of the most misunderstood elements of customer experience. And by the way, it's not making people happy. It's a lot more than that. We look at that for many brands in many industries around the globe. And to give you example, in banking, it's what's really important is making customers feel respected and valued and appreciated and also confident, particularly younger consumers, and particularly as brands start moving to a lot more self-service. When we hit tough economic times and things and customers want to feel confident that they know what they're doing with their finances. So, you know, these emotions are really important. And they drive experience and loyalty. And in fact, emotion actually has a bigger impact on loyalty than ease or effectiveness. So just to give you a sense of how those 3 start to play out. Trust is also becoming very important. And we've recently deepened our research into trust because we were finding that many firms, they wanted to build trust. They believed it created great business outcomes. Again, similar ones like loyalty and retention and advocacy and share of wallet and all those lovely business benefits. But we're finding that many firms, they don't know how to measure it. They seem to be misunderstanding what drives it. We're seeing that in our quantitative and qualitative research. And, you know, this link to revenue is still a little bit mystifying for them. And so, again, like customer experience, we're trying to draw that connection and there absolutely is a connection with that. And when it comes to trust, you know, trust is really about a customer expecting a positive outcome when they interact with a brand. And, you know, when we dig in to what came out of the data about what's important, it's being dependable, it's empathetic. This is what we're seeing for banks and financial services brands. You know, they want their firm, the financial services, their primary bank. They want them to care about them. They want someone that understands their financial needs, their financial well-being. You know, that's the sort of stuff that really drives trust. And an interesting kind of point, because I talked about about CX and I talked about trust, is they're actually linked. We’re finding that CX leaders are trust leaders and CX laggards are trust laggards. And part of that is because, you know, with trust, every interaction is an opportunity to earn more trust or to destroy trust or to reinforce a customer's perception of trust. So they are very much linked and they both very much have revenue and business benefits out of them. But hopefully that gives you little bit of an insight in terms of what we're seeing, in terms of what drives at ease effectiveness, emotion and things like dependability and empathy.

[Casey Ferguson]
That's great. I love the three E's.

[Bob Lonergan]
Yeah.

[Casey Ferguson]
You know, I'm thinking about those and thinking about, you know, these are pretty similar topics we cover all the time, right?

[Bob Lonergan]
Right.

[Casey Ferguson]
Here at Zoot, Bob. You know, in supporting our customers, both today and for actually many years. Any thoughts on some of those?

[Bob Lonergan]
Yeah no, I couldn't agree more with that summary, you know, we I know there's a direct correlation between, you know, when you get into a branded experience, how it drives loyalty, how it drives revenue, quite honestly. Right and so, you know, over the past 30 years, Zoot has been in that game of driving that customer experience for our clients. You know, before CX was coined, we were delivering that, right? It started out in the very early years. It was all about speed, right? It was about speed of the transaction. And once speed became kind of table stakes, it moved into frictionless. And now it's actually moving even further into kind of knowing what your customer’s thinking about before they ask. Right? That kind of drives that, that whole customer experience, drives loyalty, which then drives the brand. And again, everything that we're talking about is really driving to, you know, to driving new revenues, you know, expanding revenues, having that retention of the customer, having them get into a larger wallet share with, with the, with the institution. Every one of our clients that we work with, they're on that continuum of the brand, right? Not all are in the same spot. Right? So they're continually trying to improve that customer experience. They're looking for new data components to be able to have that frictionless moment with that customer and get that customer boarded. Right? So it's just, you know, when we look at it, we think of it as more of a way to differentiate the products, differentiate the services and allow our clients to grow their footprint, expand into that, you know, acquire more customers, retain more customers and drive those efficiencies.

[Casey Ferguson]
Yep, yeah, OK so let's dive into maybe a little bit of report information here, Alyson. Your team recently published a couple of really nice, nice index rankings reports. The titles are as big as the big data you find inside. So the "US Credit Card Customer Experience Index Rankings" and the "Trust Index Rankings." So both customer experience and trust, big themes that we're talking about today. So these studies highlight and you know, Alyson, you touched on this a minute ago, but, you know, the customer perception of the brand determines how much customers are willing to buy. Right how much they're willing to spend, even how much you know, to what level they might recommend a product or a service too. A little bit more on the findings. What were some of the highlights?

[Alyson Clarke]
Yeah so it's interesting because we're seeing really similar kind of outcome behaviors from customers. So, you know, if customers have had a great experience or they have high trust in a brand, then the likelihood of them performing what I call revenue generating behaviors is very, very strong. You know, for example, retention, the likelihood of staying with the brand, enrichment, buying more products and services of the brand, or advocacy, recommending the brand to family and friends. We also see a bit of a gap. It's interesting in our trust research, we identified what we call the outcome gap, the trust outcome gap, and that's the differential in behaviors from customers that have high trust in the brand versus customers that have low trust in the brand. And what we find is that, you know, things like, you know, recommending the family, the brand to family and friends, preferring the company over competitors, opening an account with that company again, or using additional products or services from that company. Around 90% of customers with high trust in their bank brand or their credit card brand say that they will do those things. If a customer has low trust, only about 40% of customers say they will do those things. There is a huge imperative to move the needle both on customer experience and trust, to move customers up to having great experiences and building much stronger and higher levels of trust in the brand. Because we know that the revenue behaviors and the business benefits or the outcomes, if you like, from great experiences and trust are financially rewarding and exactly what, you know, banks and credit card issuers and other firms are after.

[Casey Ferguson]
Bob, you had mentioned you had mentioned the journey, right. That that a lot of our customers are on and many banks and retailers are on. Can you expand on that a little bit?

[Bob Lonergan]
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I love the research on trust. I completely believe in that. And it is a measurable outcome. Right? It's something that I believe all of our customers aspire to obtain from all of their customers. Right? I mean, you have trust, it drives revenue, drives retention, it drives recommendation, it drives ROI. Right? So you mentioned data. I want to talk a little bit about that. And you know, at the core of all these type of decisions, when it comes to customer experience, trust, brand loyalty, it really gets down to data. And you know how you for us, it's how quickly we can access the data, the right data at the right time, make that immediate decision to deliver on that customer experience, the ease of the orchestration of the logic to bring everything in. You know, a lot of our clients, when they come to us, that's what they're looking to do. They're there on that journey to try to go in and build out that brand journey, if you would, to drive more revenue, drive more acquisition, drive more retention within their customer base. So having ease of orchestration, ease of access to a multitude of data, data being it could be third party data could be actually most of our clients, in fact, most all of our clients utilize internal data because it has such great insight, right, to allow them to kind of continue on that, that journey of the brand. Right? You know, I'm just kind of thinking of some of the examples. We tend, our clients tend to look at it from an omni-view. They want to be able to, you know, within the journey that the customer is on, any time they touch the institution, whether it's a bank or a retailer, could be an auto lender, they want to be able to have that information at their fingertips so they can have that great customer experience, be able to help the customer build that brand again. Right? Because, you know, when you're buying a most of the folks who we work with are household names. Right? They have a lot of value in that brand and they want to be able to leverage that brand into every experience that the customer has. So having that type of information at their fingertips to be able to make that offering, to expand that wallet share, to deliver that brand experience or that brand image that goes along with the logo that, you know, people get, they gravitate towards, is really important to the client. And so that's kind of where we tend to help out our clients is in that onboarding journey all the way through the complete credit lifecycle, all the way back to, quite honestly, to collection and recovery. Because even there the brand is important because you want them to come back. You know, some folks fall on hard times, right? They won't be there all the time. You want them to come back and buy from you again. So you got to treat them well even on the way out as you do on the way in.

[Alyson Clarke]
An interesting point that you make around collections because, you know, I think we have seen, I've seen a number of firms start to treat collections as they treat customer experience and they make sure they infuse it with emotion and empathy and those sorts of things and they’re, they're seeing, you know, much greater results with their collections and better experiences with customers. It's I find it fascinating. And also, I'm very happy to see that collections in a lot of firms is very much shifting to that. And exactly the same techniques that firms are perhaps using to deliver customer experiences when someone's buying a product are being applied. And it's is that emotion is that empathy is being applied to the collections process. It not only creates financial benefits for the firm, but also a great experience for the customer, as you noted as well.

[Bob Lonergan]
And it absolutely helps with retention. I mean, they spend, you know, our clients spend millions of dollars, right? You know, to acquire a new account, right. Or a new customer to have to do that over again after a bad experience, a collection experience is pretty detrimental, right? So while you have them, treat them the way you would treat them as if they were know, they're a client that was paying their bills on a regular basis. Right so we see that a lot. We we stand up strategy engines around collection systems that support that type of approach, if you would, to a customer experience on the back end of a credit flow, right.

[Casey Ferguson]
OK so kind of in summary, they're just, you know, capturing a couple of notes from for you two, right? Good direct correlation between the experiences that customers are going through, the trust they're building, the loyalty to the brand. And Alyson, as you kind of mentioned, the mythical ROI, but it is linked to revenue, right? I mean, in the end, so.

[Bob Lonergan]
Absolutely.

[Alyson Clarke, Part 2 Preview]
Not only will it differentiate you out to market, it will bring you that financial benefit of more loyal and stickier customers, which, you know, that's kind of the game here. Another kind of tactic and this kind of, you know, goes back to what you were talking about, Bob, in terms of data is personalization. So, you know, I've seen during the pandemic and since then, a lot of firms investing more heavily in personalization. And I think about personalization with financial services. I think it's absolutely critical to use data to start to personalize on a one to one basis to your customers and in many different ways. Right in terms, it could be, you know, next best action, next best interaction. And if some firms are focusing on next best offer, but I encourage it to be more broader in terms of the actual interaction and insights and data to customers and the value you're adding to customers.

Orchestrating the Experience, Technology & Tactics for Brand Trust & CX, Part 2

[Automated Transcripts provided by Wistia]

[Casey Ferguson]
Welcome back. We're chatting with our guest, Alyson Clarke, principal analyst with Forrester, and Bob Lonergan, VP of sales at Zoot Enterprises, about why customers put their trust in certain brands and what financial services organizations and retailers can do to gain trust with their customers. OK, so let's talk differentiation, brand differentiation. Alyson, you mentioned that, you know, customer experience, obviously, and trust play a big part in driving differentiation. What opportunities do financial services firms, retailers, brands have to drive that differentiation?

[Alyson Clarke]
Yeah, I think that there's a number of areas. And again, if I go back to the research and the data that we're getting from consumers, the two real areas of opportunity that I see in terms of the data that's been coming out for the last few years and it's going to make sense is when I tell you what they are, because it's as we are heading into an economic downturn and they are around emotion and around empathy. Right what we're seeing is leading experienced firms, leading firms at trust do really well at this, but it's usually only one or two doing really well, the research at the bottom of the pack. So it is a numerically it's a differentiator, but I think it's also it is definitely the data is telling us is differentiator to customers as well. And there are a number of things and a number of actions that firms can think about that are coming out from that. So one of them, for example, is hybrid experiences. So we find that where a customer journey includes both digital and human interaction, those journeys are far better. Customers love those journeys much better. They're getting higher experiences, they're building more trust. They have a greater number of positive emotions attached to them. And I think it's because hybrid is kind of the triple threat, right? You've got ease and effectiveness coming through from a digital experience, but you've got a motion through dealing with the human being. And so you've got this efficient and effective experience. You've got the emotion of interacting with the person, you know, not a device. And, and all of that creates a far greater experience. And as I mentioned earlier, emotion drives loyalty. Emotion has a bigger impact on loyalty. So not only will it differentiate you out to market, it will bring you that financial benefit of more loyal and stickier customers, which, you know, that's kind of the game here. Another kind of tactic in this kind of, you know, goes back to what you were talking about, Bob, in terms of data is personalization. So, you know, I've seen during the pandemic and since then, a lot of firms investing more heavily in personalization. And I think about personalization with financial services. I think it's absolutely critical to use data to start to personalize on a one to one basis to your customers and in many different ways. Right in terms it could be, you know, next best action, next best interaction. And if some firms are focusing on next best offer, but I encourage it to be more broader in terms of the actual interaction and insights and data to customers and the value you're adding to customers. You know, I'm also seeing, you know, using data and insights to start to help customers understand whether they're in financial distress or about to become into financial stress. And a lot of the time, I think banks and firms probably know this before a customer does, partly because as human beings, we often get in denial about these sorts of things. And so there's some really great ways and things around using data to help create that emotion, that positive emotion and that empathy and showing that you're caring about the customers and their wellbeing, you know, and that's we're heading into perhaps more dire economic situation this year than we've experienced in the last 12 months. So helping customers with the cost of living crisis, tools and things that help customers get out of debt, not in debt, or even going and promoting debt consolidation loans to customers to help them bring down their value of debt and pay that off sooner. We're seeing perhaps more of that over in Europe then North America. I get a little kind of upset because I think the North American firms need to do more here to really help their customers and show that they care. But at the end of the day, you know, the differentiation and the differentiation, particularly over the next kind of, you know, not so great economic period, it will be driven by that empathy, that emotion, helping people, showing your care you care and getting closer to your customers. Now than perhaps you've ever been. Why? Because when they're ready to buy, when the economy does turn the corner, that you will be the top of mind for them. You won't need to be the cheapest in fees or you know, won't have to have the highest interest rate in your savings or lowest interest rate on your loans. Customers will become more loyal to you and to your brand if you're showing that you care for them during tough times.

[Casey Ferguson]
OK, so I want to keep the conversation moving into a direction that I know is a kind of a topic that's making waves lately. It's really a business model and approach. But embedded finance. Right, which is, of course, you know, where services like banking, financing, payments are embedded into, you know, a somewhat nontraditional journey like shopping or retail. So, Alyson, you know, kind of at that intersection between retail and finance, what should brands be thinking about when it comes to different, you know, to offering, excuse me, when it comes to offering more ways to pay. Delivering great, you know, customer experience through that piece of the journey and kind of this new journey forward for some brands.

[Alyson Clarke]
Yeah, I think there's a lot that both retailers and financial service firms need to think about when it comes to embedded finance. First of all, just bringing it back to the trust element, what we know from our data is a customer may trust your brand, but will they trust the brand where your services are embedded? And, you know, if you embed your services in a brand and something happens, customers lose trust for many reasons. How will that impact yours? Because you're basically going to be joined at the hip on a brand level in an embedded situation. So what impacts their brand could impact your brand even if you go, oh, no, but we're just the credit card. We're not the retailer. It doesn't matter. Customers don't see things like that. So I think that's a really important thing, is to think about who you're partnering with and to think about potential brand impacts down the track. You know, I think there can be challenges with embedded finance and it links back to what we're talking about with customer experience and trust. The biggest challenge I see really comes from who owns the customer experience and who is responsible for the customer service and who serves the customer. Right? Let me play this out an example for you, right? We all know about the Apple Card. Underneath the Apple card, it's Goldman Sachs's X-as-a-service supporting it. But honestly, I'm an Apple fan and I have an Apple card. But like many consumers, when I'm dealing with my Apple Card because I'm getting this great experience in the mobile app and everything else that's going on and maybe interest free on my devices when I buy them on the Apple card, I'm expecting to have a great experience. And in fact, I do have a great experience when things kind of, you know, just tick along and I'm paying my bills and I'm paying things off, et cetera. And the interface that I think Apple has worked with Goldman Sachs to build to Apple has had a big say in it is very much reflective of the Apple brand. Now that's the customer experience side. Let's go to the customer service side. Right? So I've got a problem. Let's say something happens and I had this recently where there was a potential fraudulent transaction and they paused my card, so I needed to chat with them. Now, a lot of the times what happens is when you then go to interact under these embedded finance situations, all you get is a chat bot, which can be as frustrating as hell when you're trying to resolve a problem. And that is a critical moment in a customer's brand loyalty. How you interact and treat them at that moment can impact their loyalty to your brand for years and have a far greater impact than the 100 times a month they're using your mobile banking or something like that, or they're going into your store. So, you know, here I am. I'm trying to get this service. I don't know if it's a bot or not. All I know is that I'm going in circles. It's very frustrating. So it probably is a bot for a little while and I can't get to a human. Finally, I get the problem resolved, but at the end of the day, that experience felt like a Goldman Sachs and a bank experience. It did not feel like an Apple experience. And so these sorts of things can then impact and taint your view of what I call the primary brand in that case would be Apple. So, you know, when you're thinking about embedded finance is kind of a couple of ways to think about it, right? If I think about credit cards, I know a lot of firms go out and use white label, but there's also the option to do like X-as-a-service or credit cards-as-a-service. White label gives you far less control about the experience because what you're typically getting is something that's built by the underlying provider, like bank or card issuer or whatever. It's out of the box, the servicing is out of the box. They might put your logo on it and they might answer the phone with your company name. But you are getting the same pretty much the same experience as a customer or as any other, say, retail brand using that white label service. And, you know, interestingly, we see a lot of retailers offering white label credit cards. There are kind of two major players in the industry behind a lot of these and our data is telling us from customers. Customers hate the experience when something goes wrong. It's very, very poor and the trust is very, very poor. And that's because that experience is not a reflection of the brand. Now, if you shift to X-as-a-service or banking-as-a-service, whatever you want to call it, that is less out of the box. Right? So the retailer can have far greater control over these things and can perhaps, you know, through the provider they're using start to build some, you know as you talk about orchestration and servicing and interactions that are more aligned with the brand and the brand values and perhaps how that customer is served when they deal with what I call the primary brand. So that so that retail brand in that retail setting, so you get far greater control. You know, I think X-as-a-service with the right vendor can very much help you with that. And give you greater control over the customer experience and the service delivery. And that starts to not just protect your brand, but if you do it right, it can enhance your brand. And it can be seen as a great extension.

[Casey Ferguson]
That's great. You know, so Bob, Alyson's mentioning orchestration, certainly X-as-a-service. I mean, card-as-a-service, right?

[Bob Lonergan]
Right.

[Casey Ferguson]
Zoot's not a white label or off the shelf kind of provider.

[Bob Lonergan]
Right.

[Casey Ferguson]
Do you have some thoughts?

[Bob Lonergan]
Yeah. No, I think when I, when I think of Zoot compared to a kind of a white label, you know, kind of off-the-shelf, baked solution, that's not what we are, right? I mean, we come in as a best-of-breed technology that addresses that front end and back end portion of the transaction, the onboarding all the way through collection recovery. Right? So we tend to work with our clients to brand that experience, have them have complete control over the experience, not only how it appears to their customers, but also internally. Right? But also, I think where it kind of comes in for us is or what we're seeing is a trend, I should say, is more to the point of that best-of-breed. So we're in the technology space. We're seeing our clients more and more starting to shift their back office, their support desks. Right, the call center,s bringing those in-house because they are seeing exactly what you're saying, Alyson, is that there's a mismatch between the brand and the support actions that they're seeing and hearing and being exposed to and that emotion that comes from it. Right, I think we've all had those bad experiences or not. They're not fun. But that's what we see as a trend. We have, you know, many of our clients already have that in place where they look to us as that X-as-a-service provider for the front end and then they go out and, you know, set up those help, those call centers, the help desks, to bring that whole piece together so that they not only control who they're boarding, who they're offering credit to, but they're also controlling how they respond and, you know, how they drive brand into every conversation that they have. So.

[Casey Ferguson]
Just as important, right, we've talked a lot about, you know, servicing and some of those moments when you're already a customer and maybe, you know, are at a point where you're developing some loyalty. But just as important as that is the front end of that lifecycle. Right the application.

[Bob Lonergan]
Right.

[Casey Ferguson]
What does it feel like to join and become a card member or be a customer and pay a different way is so great. OK, so sort of maybe a chance for some summarizing thoughts here. So, you know, Alyson we’ll go to you, you know, maybe with like embedded finance and some of this X-as-a-service, you know, tactical element to the tactical element to X-as-a-service maybe within embedded finance. You know, how will organizations ultimately improve trust and customer service as they continue to put these, you know, services and solutions in place over time?

[Alyson Clarke]
Yeah, I think the key to this is, you know, I talked before about emotion and empathy being important, but I think, you know, when you looking at embedded finance, white label versus X-as-a-service or whatever you do and what depending on who you're working with, you want to be looking at something that gives you greater control over customer experience and service delivery. And for that reason, I believe there is a big shift away from white label. Now it may be a little bit more pain and a little bit more for, say, a retailer to take home than they thought they were willing to. But the universe has shifted. We are not in the 1980 store card environment anymore. Consumers are expecting far greater experiences and experiences similar to what they get with the retail brands now. And so, you know, I think it's not just about better customer outcomes as a result of that, as I talked about before, better customer experience, more trust. It creates better business outcomes. In fact, there's also better business outcomes that could happen through an X-as-a-service situation, you know, be it revenue sharing or even equity stuff. We're seeing equity stakes deals like, you know, Macy's and Klarna in the buy now, pay later space. It's a great example of that. So, you know, I think X-as-a-service gives you a little bit more flexibility. You don't want to just be handing over the customer service, the customer experience, at least not without, you know, rolling up the sleeves and understanding what that means and how different that might be from how your brand typically serves customers. And then my only other bit of advice to retailers is to remember financial services like credit cards and others. This is kind of a relationship game. It's not a fast moving consumer good. So you, you know, those interactions you have each and every time, it's not just about being the cheapest and all that sort of stuff and having the best rewards. It is about how they make you feel. It's about emotion and empathy and those sorts of things really do come into play if you want to differentiate and drive stronger business results.

[Casey Ferguson]
Alyson, you mentioned, you know, kind of the ability to stay flexible, you know, and look at things in New ways, even kind of going back to the Apple Goldman Sachs example, that's just kind of, you know, as they say, great expectations, right? I mean, that has to be a match. And with that comes a lot of responsibility and the need to have control. That was something that kind of crossed my mind as we've been talking about some of these themes. You know, Bob and I talked a lot about the control that we provide to our customers. And, you know, to kind of create that experience, especially when it aligns to the brand. I mean, you have some thoughts there, Bob.

[Bob Lonergan]
Yeah, no, I think you know, I think it really gets down to when you're looking at X-as-a-service, I think it really gets down to selection. Right I mean, you have to work with the right vendors when you're putting it together. There are many out there. We tend to work very closely with our clients. We tend to listen intently to what they're trying to accomplish and then bring the technology, the capabilities that give them that control to deliver on that brand experience that they want. Right? You know, I think that, you know, when it gets down to selecting a technology vendor, it really I think you really need to look at the people. Right? Because at the end of the day, you know, the brand experience, a human has to listen to it and apply it and get the systems to, you know, work in a way that makes the most sense for our clients. And so we have, you know, with Zoot, I mean, what you're getting is a trusted advisor, someone who listens really well and has the best technology in the industry to make these things happen. Right? And again, with the technology giving our clients direct control, if they want to self-manage it, they can. Right, this is a completely self-managed type of platform to enable that brand experience along that account opening journey all the way to the back end.

[Casey Ferguson]
Awesome great discussion. Thanks, Alyson. Huge thanks for joining us. We’ve enjoyed reading your reports.

[Bob Lonergan]
Thanks, Alyson.

[Alyson Clarke]
Thanks for having me.

[Casey Ferguson]
Look forward to what comes out of the team next. Bob, thanks for, thanks for being here. You know, we're co-workers, but you were kind of required.

[Bob Lonergan]
Yeah.

[Casey Ferguson]
Thanks for being here. As always, appreciate the knowledge on the product and technology side here at Zoot. If you'd like a look at the reports that our guest Alyson and her team have produced on trust and customer experiences index rankings, we’ll link to those. And then of course, if you want to strike up a conversation about how Zoot can help to achieve some of the goals we've talked about today, Bob and I would love to hear from you. So until next time. Thanks so much.

[Bob Lonergan]
Great, thank you.

[Alyson Clark, Part 1 Preview]
Interesting in our trust research, we identified what we call the outcome gap, the trust outcome gap. And that's the differential in behaviors from customers that have high trust in the brand versus customers that have low trust in the brand. And what we find is that, you know, things like recommending the family, the brand to family and friends, preferring the company over competitors, opening an account with that company again, or using additional products or services from that company. Around 90% of customers with high trust in their bank brand or their credit card brand say that they will do those things. If a customer has low trust, only about 40% of customers say they will do those things. There is a huge imperative to move the needle both on customer experience and trust, to move customers up to having great experiences and building much stronger and higher levels of trust in the brand. Because we know that the, the, the revenue behaviors and the business benefits or the outcomes, if you like, from great experiences and trust are financially rewarding and exactly what, you know, banks and credit card issuers and other firms are after.