Creating Raving Fans and Integrating AI into Transformative Business Strategies

From a podcast interview featuring Scott Wozniak, CEO of Swoz Consulting

Overview

In this episode of CEO Growth Talks, host Pete Hayes interviews Scott Wozniak, CEO of Swaz Consulting, about creating legendary customer experiences and integrating AI into business operations. Scott shares how early leadership failures shaped his approach, leading him to develop high-impact consulting strategies. His Customer Experience Engine model emphasizes systematic methods to turn customers into passionate advocates.

Scott explains how B2B companies can apply principles that made Chick-fil-A famous, using AI to enhance customer and employee experiences. He highlights AI’s untapped potential in refining core business processes for differentiation. From global consulting experience, Scott shares practical strategies to transform customer interactions, making AI a game-changer in any industry.

Key Takeaways

• Scott Wozniak emphasizes the importance of structured systems in creating extraordinary customer experiences, as his Customer Experience Engine model encapsulates.

• Practical AI application starts with understanding and defining the desired customer and employee experience rather than chasing shiny new technologies without a strategic end goal.

• Even in technical B2B sectors, opportunities for enhancing customer experiences are substantial, often untapped due to low industry expectations.

• True customer insight, not just data, is critical for developing effective marketing and operational strategies that resonate with customer needs and aspirations.

• Scott’s Legendary Brands Academy offers affordable resources and guidance for businesses of all sizes to implement world-class customer experience strategies.

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[Episode Transcript]

[00:00:00] Pete Hayes: Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to CEO Growth Talks. I'm Pete Hayes, your host, and I am delighted to welcome Scott Wozniak, CEO of Swoz Consulting. You are going to enjoy the next 20 minutes or so because Swaz has all sorts of great stories: how he got into the business he's currently in, and how quickly, I believe, he got into AI consulting services as well.

[00:00:25] Pete Hayes: He's in the business of providing really customer experience services, and you're going to hear why he has the credentials to do that right now. So, Scott, why don't you introduce yourself and give us a little background?

[00:00:35] Scott Wozniak: Yeah, thanks, Pete. Always great hanging with you and folks at Chief Outsiders. You guys are awesome. Man, I've had a wild ride, but I did not expect to be doing what I'm doing. I came into this, honestly, because of a massive crash and burn in my early career. I worked for some really nice guys who had great intentions and these big visions. They were nice people, and they were terrible leaders. I don't mean just that it was annoying—two of those organizations don't exist anymore. They were run into the ground with problems, pain, and frustration. Now, there was a bad boss in there, those early days, where I was like, it's just a bad guy, right?

[00:01:13] Scott Wozniak: So, these troubles got me to a point of saying, what are you doing? One of my mentors actually gave me a business book, and this will tell you my mindset and how much things have changed. I actually resisted, and I was like, listen, I don't do that kind of business accounting stuff. You don't get it. I'm a visionary, and they read the book, man. Now I've written four business books myself since then. So I've come full pendulum swing the other side around. But what happened was I read that book, and it was like an explosion in my head of, wait a minute. It's not just try harder or the guy who cares the most wins; there are systems and strategies and tools. I started studying and reading, and books turned into conferences and a coach and a mentor. I eventually even went back to master's school and got a business degree and was studying all this stuff. In that process—this is where that organization changed my life—I became a consultant. One of my professors in grad school asked me to start doing some consulting on the side with him, part of an organization he was part of. When I graduated, I ended up working full time for that company, that coaching strategy group. Then the founder of that group retired and asked me to take over the company.

[00:02:21] Scott Wozniak: So, I'm running this consulting company, traveling the world, going to London, working with folks in Singapore. It was a blast, right? That's not the organization you're talking about. I thought I had arrived, and at that point, I hadn't even just begun, because as cool as all that was, the next thing—I think the one you're thinking of—showed up.

[00:02:39] Scott Wozniak: One of my high school buddies is a guy named Andrew Cathy. We played three sports together, rode dirt bikes—great friend—and Andrew happens to be the grandson of Truett Cathy, who founded this little local joint here in Atlanta. We call Chick-fil-A, a couple of your folks might've heard of them. Thirty years ago, I graduated high school, and I'm like, hey, good luck with your little mall restaurant. You hope you make it. Yeah—they're going to make it, Pete. They're going to be all right. They cleared about 22 billion in sales last year. So this is about 17 years ago.

[00:03:10] Scott Wozniak: They were on a rocket ship, taking off in the early stage. They hadn't yet hit national excitement, but people who knew, knew. They said, hey, you're a consultant. Maybe you can help us. At first, I was like, I'm not a restaurant guy. What do you want? They were like, no, listen, we have restaurant guys. I ended up with this crazy cool job, which leads exactly to what I do today, better than all my master's degrees in books and all the other stuff that I'd done. Here was my job: They said, hey, we just need you to help us build the business. Don't be in the business; work on the business. So, 50 percent of my time, I traveled the world, went inside other companies, and just learned how the best in the world actually operate.

[00:03:48] Scott Wozniak: Then, the other half was coming back and turning it into some sort of company upgrade, working with the executive team and just constantly learning how the best... I mean, crazy. Hey, you want to learn leadership development? They sent me to Harvard Business School. Hey, Ken Blanchard's written some good stuff, so they call up: "Hey, Ken, can our guy come?" I ended up in Ken Blanchard's living room talking strategy and processes with him for a whole day. That was my first month on the job. It was ridiculous, Pete. So, the super fun stuff that we did turned into all these learnings, and we began to notice a pattern. All the great companies have the same set of systems. Anyone with raving fans— not just regular customers, raving fans—has the same set of systems.

[00:04:30] Pete Hayes: I'll just interrupt for a second because that's one of your more recent books, right?

[00:04:34] Scott Wozniak: Yes. That book is Make Your Brand Legendary: How to Use the Customer Experience Engine to Create Raving Fans, and that's this little diagram we drew called the Customer Experience Engine. So, I did this for Chick-fil-A for eight years, had a blast, wrote a couple of books—not that one. That one came after Chick-fil-A, but I felt like I needed to help other companies. I told Chick-fil-A, man, I love you guys. I need to leave. And the first client they assigned me was Chick-fil-A. I get to keep working with them. They're super awesome. But yeah, we've blown up, and now we've got a cool boutique firm where we go around the world helping people build the systems that create raving fans—this high-end customer experience. It's super fun, and we're doing it in super cool retail places, high-end white glove, but also in manufacturing, and construction.

[00:05:20] Pete Hayes: most everyone is familiar with the legendary Chick-fil-A experience, and it's in a whole other world. It's like when you talk about Regis hotels, and it's just in that whole other class. Then, to your point of their growth curves... they're famous for not being open on Sundays because they believe that's a day of faith. All this stuff that makes them different... but then a business-to-business, like you say, manufacturing—how are those principles still applicable to B2B companies?

[00:05:48] Scott Wozniak: No, this is huge because I think most of these technical B2B companies just write this idea off: "Ah, you can't do it in my space." In fact, here's the irony: the more technical and quote-unquote boring your industry is, probably the bigger your opportunity is, because everyone else in your category has given up.

[00:06:10] Scott Wozniak: I think Chick-fil-A is actually a decent example of this. You've got to go back 20 or 30 years, for some of us, to remember what fast food was like. Chick-fil-A is fast food, Pete. Fast food is the industry we make jokes about: "Ah, you know, your life's a dead end. Go spend some time flipping burgers and making fries." Nobody expects it to be good; they expect it all to suck. In fact, part of why I think we love Chick-fil-A so much is because, in a zone where everyone expects it to be bad, they show up good. What Chick-fil-A does in a fine-dining setting is like, yeah, it's normal, right? They actually don't do the crazy Michelin-starred fine dining stuff because, frankly, the finances of the intense "seven people will show up and simultaneously plate your food, every person gets their plate dropped at the exact same moment with this fancy hand gesture"—Chick-fil-A doesn't do that, right? They can't afford to have seven people surround your table every time you order a meal. It's because the industry has such a low expectation that they do such amazing stuff. Some of our biggest, most powerful success stories have been in these zones. Now, the way you do it changes, right?

[00:07:20] Scott Wozniak: It's not about billboards in your manufacturing thing, but you get deeper relationships in this business-to-business thing. You tend to have fewer clients with longer, deeper relationships, so guess what matters even more? The service experience you provide to those relationships.

[00:07:36] Scott Wozniak: Oh man, yes, the tactics are different, and we could get into some of the nuances. Like, I'll give you a couple quick examples: your ability to show up and celebrate the success of your long-term business-to-business partners. When they win, you make them feel awesome, and you're like, look at you, and hey, everybody, check these guys out.

[00:07:53] Scott Wozniak: See, one of the questions your customers are asking is, how do I feel about myself when I work with you? Not how do I feel about you, how do I feel about myself when I work with you? And it's subconscious for most of us, but man, it is there, Pete. Everybody's asking this, and so our ability to make them feel like they're a hero because they work with us—not about us, not we're the hero, they're the hero, and we're just there to help them realize how awesome they are—that is easier to do in a business-to-business relationship than this fast-moving retail, where I don't get to really meet these people and build their life.

[00:08:28] Pete Hayes: By the way, that one concept—if you don't just like, oh, yeah, that sounds good, but if you literally say, well, what could we do operationally? What can we do to change that experience?

[00:08:40] Pete Hayes: Disclosure, we hired Swoz Consulting for Chief Outsiders because we wanted to understand how can we improve our clients' experience, and I just remember some of the simplest things, but they're foundational, right? And how do you get them to feel better about themselves as they are interacting with you?

[00:08:57] Pete Hayes: How do you take away any kind of friction, right?

[00:09:00] Scott Wozniak: Yeah. Simple things. We were just talking about this getting ready right before we pushed record. The way you kick off and start the relationship is such a powerful moment. We call this a wet cement moment, right? Everything's fresh, and a little bit of effort is going to make a long-lasting impression.

[00:09:16] Scott Wozniak: You can't make an impression on dry, hard cement later, right? It's just a whole lot more work, but that early day, man. If you just start and do regular activity, you're missing an opportunity. You haven't done anything wrong, but man, you've missed an opportunity to celebrate them and make them feel amazing.

[00:09:33] Scott Wozniak: There's all these little things to do, from gifts you can give them to the packaging and the way you wrap it together. We literally, over the weekend, I ended up taking a picture of this. I'm going to post this on social media—haven't done it yet. I bought a new pair of shoes from a new company, and they're high-end, cool shoes, and they didn't just send me the shoes.

[00:09:52] Scott Wozniak: They put the shoe box in another box with extra bonuses. They gave me shoehorns and a bag for my nice shoes. Pete, I'm not even going to use the bag. I don't need a bag for my shoes. I'm the kind of guy that got a canvas bag for my fancy shoes. They made me feel awesome with that little bit of extra kickoff.

[00:10:11] Scott Wozniak: Now, these are expensive business shoes. By the way, the company I'll give them credit is Taft shoes. They have some really creative, cool designs. I mean, if you're looking for black Oxfords, don't go here. You can get them cheaper elsewhere, but if you want to stand out, go Taft. And they made me feel awesome about it.

[00:10:29] Scott Wozniak: Okay, I paid for that, and now I'm telling stories about it because they made the kickoff experience amazing. So yes, it's not come—

[00:10:37] Pete Hayes: Wait a minute. You're a raving fan.

[00:10:39] Scott Wozniak: I am now. Literally just as of two days ago, I'm a raving fan of Taft. My first experience with them so far, so good.

[00:10:46] Pete Hayes: We've covered the basic things and been in and out of Chick fil A, I think, as an employee and an executive, and now you're back in your consulting business. You're doing this for businesses of any kind all around the world.

[00:10:58] Pete Hayes: We just talked about a retreat you're going to do in Iceland next year or at the end of the year. Those are really, really cool and big things. Still, you stunned me the last time we just connected up in our quarterly chats when you said, oh, yeah, I've got multiple AI experts. We're deploying to help our clients figure out their AI path, and you made a point here just a few moments ago before we got on that this isn't about Swoz Consulting developing an AI tool or platform. This is about helping businesses figure out how to take advantage of what's out there. Tell us more about that. How does that work? What kind of businesses are looking for your help?

[00:11:35] Scott Wozniak: We think one of the keys to great customer experience is customer insight. Do you really know your customers? Do you know what's going on? We think a lot of companies say, oh, we got insight, and we go evaluate, and it turns out they have customer data, not customer insight. And so when you really get to this level of who they are and what they're trying to accomplish and what they're wrestling with, it will inform the way you show up as a business. And I say that because I got into AI because my customers were wrestling with AI, trying to figure out how do I make use of this? And there's all this buzz. This is two years ago, 2023, if you remember. ChatGPT is just hitting, the world's getting exciting. AI speak like, oh my gosh, look at all this stuff.

[00:12:14] Scott Wozniak: Several of my customers started coming to me: hey, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? I'm like, I love the future tech stuff. Personally, I'm always out on the edge, trying new tools, experimenting, but I had been telling people, hey, someday AI is going to be awesome. Not yet.

[00:12:29] Scott Wozniak: It's not a profitable tool. Don't listen to the hype. It doesn't actually make you money yet, unless you're in a real specific niche. And I love that niche, but man, in 23, that changed. They were like, we could do this, and we could do this, and so we started it. But I also recognized I'm intelligent enough and educated enough to realize I need a real expert. This world is moving so fast. So I started talking to some of my buddies, and it started with an advisor—hey, I'm just going to pay you to come advise me on AI—and then I started passing that on to a client. They're like, wait, I need more of that, and by the end of 23, I'd put a whole team together.

[00:13:05] Scott Wozniak: I got a guy on my team who's got a master's in AI from Georgia Tech. These guys are neck-deep in it. These are the front edge, like the guys building the stuff for their personal friends. I said, hey, can I get you on this side of the fence? I'm not an AI shop. We're a curator and a connector. We help people who are trying to build a company connect to the right AI tool, ’cause here's the lesson we learned in the process, Pete. The mistake was to go listen to the AI business news, go grab the shiny object, try to jam it into your company engine, and make everything awesome.

[00:13:36] Scott Wozniak: That's a good way to lose your shirt, waste a lot of time and money, blow dollars. That's backwards. What you start with is what customer experience do you want? What experience do you want to create? Or we also talk about the employee experience. There's two engines there. What employee experience do I want, or what customer experience do I want? Then, if you've got a really clearly defined experience you're trying to create, then you get an AI expert and say, hey, what tools exist to help me do that faster, better, cheaper? That's what we're aiming for. And if you do it in that right order, then it works. AI is not the point. That's the mistake. AI is the means to the end. And if you don't know the end, then you can't evaluate which AI tool to grab. But if you do, oh yeah, then we, our team of experts, come alongside, find you the right tools, plug it in.

[00:14:23] Pete Hayes: How often do you have a client you're talking to where maybe it's not the right time? The tool's not ready?

[00:14:29] Scott Wozniak: Great question. Twice in the last three months, I've had to tell clients, whoa, whoa, whoa. That particular thing, I know you read an article about it, but we went and kicked the tires, right? I put my tech guys on it, and they're like, yeah, it doesn't do what you think it does, or it's way more expensive or complicated. I'll give you one. There's one that's like, listen, if you get all the data in, we'll do this very complicated scheduling algorithm, we'll schedule everyone's algorithm and process. They're like, this is amazing. We go look at it. Yeah, that first phrase is what kills you, Pete. If you can get all your people's data in the system—well, the work you have to do is to get your people to load their information in the system. It's so manual and clunky to get it in the way the AI database can use that. By the time you've loaded it all in the system, it actually takes more work than manually going and scheduling. We were like, someday they're gonna figure this one out. But right now, this is actually not a useful tool.

[00:15:24] Scott Wozniak: It's a cool little lab project that, if you get all the people—this is a group that works with dozens of different clients in different industries and spaces—if you can get everybody to follow your spreadsheet and map it precisely using your technical terms, then yes, it'll do all the scheduling for you.

[00:15:39] Scott Wozniak: You're like, that's not a good business tool. So we said, "Don't do it. What's cheaper and a better customer experience for you is hiring two international, English-speaking, high-end executive assistants who just do a ton of phone calls. Everyone gets a live, handheld experience. It costs you less money than this AI tool will. Now, give it 18 months,

[00:16:01] Scott Wozniak: and they might figure out this data entry problem.

[00:16:04] Pete Hayes: That sounds so, so valuable because there's other ways of accomplishing these things. People matter. Sometimes people on the other end of a phone are a better solution. But I want to back up just a second. For those who are listening and familiar with Chief Outsiders, the thing that always gets missed in business planning and business strategy is the insight work, which may be AI's greatest gift. Whether it's customer insight, competitive insight, or insight from just analyzing your data, it's such a powerful tool. The other thing that you're doing that aligns with the stuff that we're up to is applying AI, rather than as a cool efficiency tool in one-off sorts of ways, but looking for ways to apply it to core processes. In your world, that's the customer experience and the employee experience, which are the heart of most organizations.

[00:16:57] Scott Wozniak: That's right. That's right. And I'll just endorse, cause I've used your stuff. Your guys' ability—you can't do great marketing without great insight. It's kind of what the deal is, right? The insight that you guys generate drives all this stuff. And I'll say this to people: if you're ever wrestling through this and you're like, "I don't know, I feel like I have to guess what they want. We got to make a big, risky investment and hope this plays out."

[00:17:21] Scott Wozniak: If you ever feel like you're taking a risky bet and guessing, then you shouldn't do that. What that really means is you don't have enough insight. You need to get someone like Chief Outsiders to create real market insight on who your customer is, what they care about, what drives them—not what they buy from you, but their life.

[00:17:39] Scott Wozniak: Let me be blunt. They don't actually care about your thing. They care how your thing makes their life better. So if you don't know the life they're trying to build, you can't actually market, build, operate, or serve them effectively. You're just guessing. You don't have to guess. You can get an expert, you can get insight. And then it's not a guess.

[00:17:57] Scott Wozniak: It's just, "How do we do it faster or better?" You know [00:18:00] what they want.

[00:18:01] Pete Hayes: Yeah, that's really helpful. So, where's your practice headed? You've got the AI thing kicking up, which is just a component—it just helps you accelerate some of the insight work you're probably doing anyway.

[00:18:11] Pete Hayes: Where does this go?

[00:18:12] Scott Wozniak: Right now we are rocking and rolling. I just hired three more people last week to try to keep up with the load we've got. I will say the new thing—so our core business has been these personal, in-depth, intimate, personalized consulting. We love that kind of premium stuff.

[00:18:29] Scott Wozniak: And so if you're interested in becoming one of the great brands, we tend to have people who are on their way to massive size. I still work with folks like Chick-fil-A, but at this point I advise whole teams over there. If you're still trying to grow into that kind of middle market going up, that's our jam.

[00:18:43] Scott Wozniak: However, even that—what we found is that this book... I finally did write a book on the engine and do all this stuff, and it hit number one on Amazon for the customer experience category and all sorts of great things. If I could just be blunt, most of the people who responded were like, "I'm not yet there. I want to get there, but I'm still new or smaller, trying to figure this out." So last year we launched an online program. First time ever in 20 years of doing this kind of consulting, I was like, "I need something." So that's the new thing. I'm continuing to grow the live consulting, cool premium stuff.

[00:19:15] Scott Wozniak: Then we also have this self-guided online experience where you can get all the tools we use with our consulting clients and self-guide it. Here's the tool. Here's the spreadsheet. Here's the worksheet. Here's a video of me explaining how to use it. 

[00:19:28] Pete Hayes: Does that tend to open it up to different-sized companies that maybe think, "Hey, we're not yet at this scale, but I still want to grab these cool ideas"?

[00:19:36] Scott Wozniak: There you go. It's 80 bucks a month for you to get in there. We put new stuff in every month. You get access to the whole thing, and access—

[00:19:43] Pete Hayes: —to your brain and your organization's capabilities. Hey everybody, it's time to go do this!

[00:19:50] Scott Wozniak: I can't show up in person for all those thousands of people, but I can record that and put it up there, and we do a live webinar once a month with all those folks.

[00:19:59] Pete Hayes: Is that a better way to consume the content of your books? 

[00:20:03] Scott Wozniak: It depends on the person. A book can be intimidating for people at times. So, if you just want to pinpoint, "This is the area I want to work in," then, yeah, this program—by the way, it's called Legendary Brands Academy, because we help you build a legendary brand. If you want to check it out, go to legendarybrandsacademy.com. It's plural: Legendary Brands Academy. So if you're interested in that, check it out. But you're right. You could get in there.

[00:20:28] Scott Wozniak: Listen, if you don't like it, just tell us, "This doesn't work for me," and we'll give you your money back—no questions asked. It's either awesome, or I don't want to waste your time. We haven't actually had anybody do that, but that offer still stands.

[00:20:39] Pete Hayes: I know your heart, Scott, and what excites you is that more businesses can get this closer to right. And if you can find that leverage to help more companies... I'm just going to wrap this up.

[00:20:51] Scott Wozniak: I'll just interrupt to say, that's my story, Pete. I was the guy—

[00:20:54] Pete Hayes: That's your story, and you're that guy.

[00:20:56] Scott Wozniak: Yeah, I was like, "How do I help?" This is where it all started. I was shaking my fist at God one day, "It's not right. Why isn't somebody helping people like me do this better?" I felt like I got elbowed, like, "Yeah, yeah. If only somebody would go help. If only somebody would do that." Yeah, that is what drives me still to this day.

[00:21:16] Pete Hayes: So I'll just say to everyone: if you've admired companies like Chick-fil-A or Chick-fil-A specifically and think that that's just some sort of mumbo-jumbo culture thing that came out of nowhere, you'll be delighted to know that it was designed and it's repeatable, and you can learn about that engine for building raving fans from this organization. I think we all have our action items to check out—I'm sure it's up on the screen by now. That's right, legendarybrandsacademy.com.