Dan Gingiss Of The Experience Maker On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
You need to practice in a way that makes sense to you. For some people, that means scripting out every word and practicing over and over again until it’s just right. For me it means constantly trying new things, knowing what I want to say but not being afraid to say it differently each time, being willing to improvise, and not over-rehearsing lest I start worrying about missing a bullet point.
At some point in our lives, many of us will have to give a talk to a large group of people. What does it take to be a highly effective public speaker? How can you improve your public speaking skills? How can you overcome a fear of speaking in public? What does it take to give a very interesting and engaging public talk? In this interview series called “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker” we are talking to successful and effective public speakers to share insights and stories from their experience. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Gingiss.
Dan Gingiss is an international keynote speaker and customer experience coach who believes that a remarkable customer experience is your best marketing strategy. And he doesn’t just talk about experience; he creates one for the audience every time! His 20-year professional career spanned multiple disciplines including customer experience, marketing, social media and customer service. He held leadership positions at McDonald’s, Discover and Humana.
Dan is the author of The Experience Maker: How To Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can’t Wait To Share and Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media. He also co-hosts the Experience This! podcast. He earned a B.A. in psychology and communications from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. in marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Dan is also a licensed bartender, a pinball wizard, and he once delivered a pizza to Michael Jordan.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I grew up in a town that unfortunately gained international recognition for the wrong reasons on July 4th — Highland Park, Illinois. I went to school there, worked my first job there, and still visit frequently. It’s a wonderful community that is still picking up the pieces. In college at the University of Pennsylvania, I was the managing editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper, though I never thought seriously of becoming a journalist. I majored in psychology and communications, though I never thought seriously about a career in either. However, after several years as a marketer, I realized that psychology + communications = marketing.
Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?
I remember exactly when I began working in customer experience. I was recruited by the Chief Digital Officer at Discover Card to a role called head of digital customer experience and social media. I asked him at an introductory lunch why he had chosen me for the role, given that I had never worked previously in either digital customer experience or social media. What he told me next changed the entire direction of my career: he said, “I’ve been watching you in meetings, and no matter what the business problem is, you always try to solve it from the customer’s perspective.” He was right of course, but I had honestly never perceived that trait about myself. That role taught me about the power of customer experience and how it can actually become the best form of marketing — word of mouth. Today I like to joke that if I never have to run another marketing campaign again, it will be too soon. Instead, I teach companies how to focus on their existing customers, who are the best marketers in the world.
Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One of the things we focused on at Discover Card was what the Harvard Business Review called the number one influence on loyalty: reducing customer effort. In one particular case, we learned from website analytics that the top reason for visiting the Discover Card site was to review recent transactions. But it took several clicks to get to that page. We decided to create a Facebook-like feed on the homepage, immediately after people logged in. It showed each customer’s 10 most recent transactions. What happened next surprised everyone: tens of thousands of customers logged in and logged right back out without clicking on anything. In an e-commerce environment, this would be a colossal failure. But at a credit card company that understood that nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to visit their credit card website, this was a huge win. We were delivering exactly what customers wanted simply and immediately. It was not a coincidence that we won the coveted J.D. Power Award for Customer Satisfaction for the first time that year — one of my proudest career accomplishments. It is also not surprising that virtually every other credit card company now does the same thing.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I hate to throw a colleague under the bus, but this mistake wasn’t mine. At my first job out of college, there was an unwritten rule that you could make any mistake once. As long as you learned from it and didn’t do it again, no one would get mad at you. My buddy who sat next to me placed an order for full-color printed brochures that contained an extra zero in the quantity. This was a costly error that likely cost the company more than his annual salary. Sure enough, our boss walked by and said out loud, “just don’t do it again.” And guess what? None of us ever made that mistake again!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
In the story above about recognizing my knack for customer experience, the Chief Digital Officer was Mike Boush, who now works for Goldman Sachs. He also encouraged me to “get out there” and start speaking at conferences. He clearly didn’t know at the time that he was unleashing a beast! But I still credit him today for helping me fall in love with both public speaking and my chosen topic, customer experience.
You have been blessed with great success in a career path that can be challenging and intimidating. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path, but seem daunted by the prospect of failure?
You have to start somewhere. I started speaking as a “side hustle” while still fully employed. I remember having to beg my way onto panels at events. After being a panelist a few times, I started to get invited onto panels. Then I had to beg my way onto the stage for my first solo presentation. After some time, I started getting invited to speak solo. Then when I went off on my own and started my business in 2019, I learned how to get paid for speaking. Each step I learned along the way, and each time I got on stage I became more comfortable as a speaker.
What drives you to get up every day and give your talks? What is the main empowering message that you aim to share with the world?
I feel so lucky to be able to do what I love every day, so it’s become a lot easier for me to wake up each day and go to work. I like to say that I get to work for The Dan now instead of The Man, and that alone inspires me to work harder. I also love making a difference for people. I teach that a remarkable customer experience can be the best sales and marketing strategy. Everything I teach, from my proprietary methodology to all of the real-world examples I share, is put through three filters that I learned while working in Corporate America: simple, practical and inexpensive. So when audiences leave my keynotes or workshops, they feel inspired and empowered. I’ll never get tired of hearing stories of people going back to work the next day and changing how they do business. When we focus on our existing customers instead of always worrying about selling to new ones, our customers stay longer, spend more, and refer their friends and colleagues.
You have such impressive work. What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? Where do you see yourself heading from here?
I am thrilled to be working on a new keynote with a co-presenter on how diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is actually a customer experience issue. Much of the content around DEI focuses on it being a hiring issue, which it certainly is. We can’t truly understand our diverse customers without having a diverse employee base to help us interpret. Our keynote focuses on how companies can develop products and services — as well as marketing and customer experience — that is inclusive of everyone. After all, in almost every business the customer base is diverse in almost every way you can define diverse. But marketing, product development, and customer experience often focus on only on generic persona, ignoring the incredible intricacies of how different types of people look at the same product or company.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite business quote isn’t a business quote at all, but actually a baseball quote. It’s “Do Simple Better” and it’s from former Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon. He was talking about making the basic plays every time so that you can afford to sometimes miss the more difficult plays. But “Do Simple Better” is also an ideal mantra for customer experience. The more we simplify, the faster and more convenient we make doing business with us, the more loyal our customers will be.
Ok, thank you for all that. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public Speaker?” Please share a story or example for each.
- Talk about what you know. The best way to become comfortable as a public speaker is to talk about topics where you are already an expert. I never get nervous talking about customer experience, but if someone asked me to talk about astrophysics I would certainly be more than a little afraid. I remember getting the chance to give a 5-minute presentation at an all-employee meeting at one of my jobs. I was sitting next to a very senior executive who was going on before me, and I noticed that he was very nervous. He was sweating profusely, and he was literally writing notes on top of his notes on a little card. I asked him what he was talking about, and then casually asked him if he was our company’s top expert on this topic, which I knew he was. Then I told him to just talk about what he knows, and to forget the notes-upon-notes. After all, no one in the audience would ever know if he missed a bullet point! He went on stage more confident and nailed his speech.
- You need an effective niche. Saying that you are simply a customer service or leadership speaker will get you lumped in with hundreds of other people who speak on the same topic it is important to differentiate by creating a ”niche within a niche.” For me, that’s about the intersection of customer experience and marketing — how to generate word-of-mouth marketing by creating remarkable experiences. This leverages my corporate background that makes me more credible, as well as my brand — The Experience Maker™.
- You need to understand what your clients and their audiences need from you. What problem are they trying to solve, and why are you the person to help them solve it? For me, it’s my corporate leadership experience that allows me to empathize and say, “I’ve been there” and to share both my own experiences and real-world stories that I know will inspire people to take action. I look for organizations that are bought into customer experience but may not know exactly where to start or where to go next.
- You need to practice in a way that makes sense to you. For some people, that means scripting out every word and practicing over and over again until it’s just right. For me it means constantly trying new things, knowing what I want to say but not being afraid to say it differently each time, being willing to improvise, and not over-rehearsing lest I start worrying about missing a bullet point.
- You have to be at least somewhat entertaining. Think about the best speakers that you’ve seen at industry conferences. They usually have effective content, and are good at communicating that content, but they’re also usually fun to watch. That doesn’t mean you have to be to juggle or sword-swallow or anything like that, but when I am teaching audiences how to create remarkable experiences, I look at it as my job to also create a remarkable experience for them.
As you know, many people are terrified of speaking in public. Can you give some of your advice about how to overcome this fear?
Get on as many stages as you can. Every time you speak on a stage, you’ll learn something about yourself. You’ll learn which stories you enjoy telling, and which ones trip you up. You’ll learn what gets an audience reaction, and what gets them to start checking their phones. You’ll learn about cadence and timing and choreography. And you’ll get a little bit better every time.
Watch as many speakers as you can. I love learning from other great presenters, and on several occasions I have adopted attributes of other speakers that I found to be effective as an audience member. An “attribute” might be something like how the person stands on stage, how they interact with the audience, or how they design their slides.
You are a person of huge influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would like to get everyone, no matter what their political beliefs, to start listening more to people who don’t think like them. We have all become entrenched in our own opinions, which are amplified in the media we choose to consume and the social media “friends” we choose to engage with. It has become popular to demonize the other side, to call anyone who doesn’t agree with us “the enemy,” to assume they are wrong before even understanding their point of view. Most political issues could result in a reasonable compromise if we’d all just listen a little more. For example, I read a statistic from a poll recently that showed that the vast majority of Americans fall somewhere in the middle on hot-button topics like abortion (i.e., not “100% ban” and not “100% allow”), yet the entire debate is being held at the far left and right edges. That leaves no room for compromise. By listening to others, we don’t have to agree with them. But at least we can understand them a little better, and they can understand us a little better. That’s the first step in learning how to compromise.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!
My personal business hero is Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks. I love what that brand is about, how it focuses as much on the experience of having a cup of coffee as on the coffee itself. I love how each store is a little bit different, bringing in design elements from the local community surrounding it. And I love all of the opportunities it provides for its employees, which is reflected back with how friendly they are to customers. After all, happy employees equal happy customers, every time.
Are you on social media? How can our readers follow you online?
I’d love to connect on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I publish a regular blog and newsletter on all things customer experience.
This was so informative, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!
Dan Gingiss Of The Experience Maker On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Public… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
