An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Feedback: Survey your audience, and give them space to express feedback. For ten years we’ve run a thorough annual survey after each Christmas season and benchmarked the current responses with those from previous years. We’ve also implemented a live mini survey to get instant feedback during the season and analyze this data with our BI specialist.
As part of my series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexandre Bérard.
The founder and CEO (Chief Elf Officer) of PNP-Portable North Pole, Alexandre Bérard, was born and raised in Quebec, Canada. Alexandre’s idea for creating PNP-Portable North Pole came from an idea of upgrading the tradition of sending letters to Santa. Alexandre and his wife wanted to make celebrating the magic of Christmas more visual and engaging for all, so in 2008, this family-run business was established and began connecting the children of the world with Santa using the PNP website and mobile apps.
Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
The whole idea was to ‘’update’’ the tradition of writing letters to Santa. First, because young children are usually much more visual and a lot of them still don’t know how to read and write at this age! Or, as we like to say, a group of inventor elves contacted us to help create a console so that Santa could be in contact with all the children of the world, straight from his village. And, the Portable North Pole (PNP) was born!
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
Believing we were going to be quieter during the off-season! People are always joking that we are off half of the year. They don’t understand how busy we are all year long to be ready for the next holiday season. Video filming for the next season starts at the end of January (pre-production in October through December), and we are in post-production up to the launch of the new season on October 1 and even after. The new features, innovations, and updates on the coding part of all platforms (web, iOS, Android, and Amazon) have a never-ending list of ‘ ‘to dos’’ or stories to work on.
Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
I have to say, my wife, because she had the idea of PNP first. She was my girlfriend at that time, so considering the success of the platform, I had to marry her. We’ve been together for almost 20 years, and we have three marvelous elves. I am also grateful for my business group of entrepreneurs. For nearly ten years, I was a member of a group of entrepreneurs who met every six weeks for half a day to help each other with our challenges. It’s very practical to share with colleagues that can understand clearly what you live in the business but also in your personal life. I would recommend this to all new entrepreneurs.
In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?
Customer service and a positive customer experience are critical for business success, especially for an online B2C business, with all of the various ratings, comments, and platforms available to customers, such as the Apple App Store or Google Play. If they are unhappy or having difficulty using/understanding your product (especially in the first few seconds of downloading your app), they will not have the patience, and you may be judged very quickly. We are proud to have kept our mobile apps rating at 4.8 and 4.7 stars after all these years.
Moreover, for the last two years, we have been investing in our AI chatbot. Online users are more willing to ping a bot now, but you need to be sure he is answering the right thing. We also run an annual survey after every season to thousands of customers, we receive loads of answers, especially in open text recommendations, and we read them all and try to implement the most frequent requests.
We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?
Not every company is a ‘’product-driven’’ company. I believe it’s strongly related to the interest/passion of the founder(s). The easiest/known example is Apple and Steve Jobs. They have been devoted to producing amazing products technologically with superb innovations on top. This mix of these 2 key ingredients are at the basis of their success. People don’t realize how tough it is to get there, especially for a digital B2C product. Technology and user behaviors evolve so rapidly that you have to adjust/update constantly. To have success in this special world, you need to be passionate about it upfront, because you will need to put loads of recurring efforts to get there.
Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?
Of course! Competition is at the heart of almost all business. I believe it is also healthy for an economy, as it drives everyone to work harder and innovate, including the customer experience. Again, I would say with all the multiple ways a customer can express themselves on social media and give feedback on their experience with a product, this gives a recurring ‘’temperature’’ of your product with your customers, rapidly you get what needs to improve on customer experience. To some extent, just think how important the introductions years ago of these five small stars ratings on Amazon for any product sold on this platform.
Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?
We are very lucky to develop an application and content on such a magical theme: Christmas and Santa Claus. It is such a passionate and strong emotional moment, especially for families with young children. Because of this, we get thousands of great comments from our users across multiple platforms, including parents/grandparents, writing us that they have cried (of overwhelmed positive emotion) when they see our Santa messages, considering their children’s reaction to our personalized messages but also about themselves and their own memories of Santa Claus and their holidays when they were a child. Not sure how you can get more than this with a customer reaction!
Did that Wow! experience have any long-term ripple effects? Can you share the story?
Amazing customer feedback is usually shared by our customer support lead and myself to the rest of the team. I think it brings us all back on ‘’why’’ we do this and how lucky we are to create such a positive reaction. Not a lot of companies have this connection/privilege with customers, and clearly, it gives a ripple effect on the team first. It’s very important because it’s extremely demanding for all the team considering the very short period of time we have to deliver on many different things.
Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.
- Feedback: Survey your audience, and give them space to express feedback. For ten years we’ve run a thorough annual survey after each Christmas season and benchmarked the current responses with those from previous years. We’ve also implemented a live mini survey to get instant feedback during the season and analyze this data with our BI specialist.
- It may sound obvious, but the leadership team needs to find quiet time and play with your application regularly. Use it like a user (not with your role in the company in mind). Take all the steps a customer would, check all details, words used, colors, tone, etc. on all your platforms.
- Talk and most importantly LISTEN to your ‘neighbors’ that use your application, and ask them what they think, what they understand, challenges, etc. Live feedback like this gives you the opportunity to capture emotions/reality that are not captured in a written survey. For example, during COVID we recognized that children around the world might need additional support during this time. We created a free Santa message to ‘Be Strong’ to help our little ones understand that Santa knows times are strange right now, that they miss people who are far away from them but to be strong and that their loved ones are always connected to them through love.
- Look at what other players are doing, including other industries. As a customer yourself, we also have a great experience, see how you can apply this to your own product. For example, we are an entertainment app, but the platform still has complex functionalities to use, with two main different sections with different objectives (Parents vs Kids), which is not common for an app. I like to see how Airbnb is doing in their own app because it’s a complex app with two main different sections, one for hosts to manage their guests and another for renters to book a place to stay.
- Realize it’s a ‘’never ending job’’ and take nothing for granted. Be sure this part (increasing customer experience) is included in your top-of-the-list yearly deliverables. To progress, first, you need to find ways to measure this aspect correctly and secondly, have SMART goals. For example, we are not only measuring our global stars rating on Apple/Google Play, but the score we get on a weekly basis to see if we are above or under our aggregate scores.
Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?
Invest as much as possible in creating an amazing product (content), sound obvious…? But not easy to do. You need to survey/exchange with your customers and understand their feedback, emotions, etc. about your product. Keep a close eye on what is new out there, not only in your industry but across social media, what is the trend? Then you need to maximize the halo effect (sharing online content for us), again sound obvious, but to do it the right way, for all type of platforms and type of content, it’s not a one size fits all solution and you need to keep in mind the full flow of the customers, from their first contact with your product to the new customer you are trying to inboard. Going through all the tiny steps and think!
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Definitely, it will be about nature/environment, because we all live on the same planet and more and more humans will be challenged by climate change in the future. It’s quite easy to see this coming slowly but surely with all the science study we have done. We really need to push our government to take drastic measures now. It’s their role to lead the way on this to have a ‘’structured’’ way to change our behavior as a consumer, society, and business.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Discover the magic by visiting portablenorthpole.com, downloading our free app on your iOS or Android and Amazon device, or following along on social media via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. And please, share your experience and let us know your feedback!
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thank you from the heart! I really enjoyed contributing, inspiring, and being inspired!
Alexandre Berard Of Portable North Pole (PNP) On 5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
