How to Create Emotional Connections with Your Customers and Employees with Kevin Scott

INTRO: Helping community bankers grow themselves, their team and their profits. This is the Community Bank Podcast.

ERIK: Welcome to the Community Bank Podcast. I’m Erik Bagwell, director of sales and marketing at the Correspondent Division of SouthState Bank, and with me today is Caleb Stevens—and I say with me, I’m stealing your thunder, Caleb. It’s been at least a year since I’ve been on here. But you’ve pulled me in in a moment of not a lot going on, and so here I am.

CALEB: I think you need to reintroduce yourself to the listeners who haven’t heard you in a while or who are new to the podcast.

ERIK: No doubt. They’re like, “Man, Caleb, sounds like he’s got a cold or something this morning.” So, alright, so we are here. We just held our Elevate Forum over in Birmingham, Alabama. Had a good crowd show. About 30 different banks, and it was last Thursday and Friday. We had some great speakers come in. And while we were there, we took advantage of those guys being around some of the speakers, and you did some interviews with them. Let’s talk about a couple of them. Kevin Scott is with ADDO Worldwide. He’s an author, speaker. Talk about what you guys talked about on the podcast.

CALEB: Yeah, one of the benefits of being at a conference is you’ve got all these speakers that you can get content for your podcast. Kevin was one of our keynote speakers at the event. He has a company, as you mentioned, called ADDO. They work with Chick-fil-A, Coca-Cola, Delta—a lot of big brands—helping them create emotional connections with both their employees and their customers. And so, Kevin’s whole keynote, the thesis of his keynote, was that you need to be making an emotional connection with your clients, not just a logical connection. So many consumers today buy things based on their emotions and the connection that they have with the brand. And so, when people think about your bank, what emotions come to mind? What emotions do they experience and feel when they think of your bank? And so, Kevin and I talk about his talk. We kind of talk about some of the highlights and some of the key points. And so, we’re excited for folks to hear it right now.

CALEB: Well, welcome to this special edition of our Community Bank Podcast. I’m sitting in—I don’t know if this is a green room or a little room—but I’m sitting here in Birmingham, Alabama, at the Ross Bridge Resort. Kevin, you just wrapped up giving a tremendous keynote on creating emotional connections with your customers and with your team members. You spoke to a group of about 30 bankers, and I was very impressed that you got a lot of questions and a lot of engagement from a room of bankers. You know, the stereotype is stale, frail, male, and pale. And you got them going. So, congratulations, you accomplished a feat not many people are able to do.

KEVIN: Well, it was a lot of fun. Emotions and banking—that it sounds like not the best idea for a keynote, but I think it was good.

CALEB: Where does that show up on my balance sheet? The emotions that my customers feel towards my bank. It does. And that was the whole crux of the talk, was you need to be creating emotional connections. Chick-fil-A has a term they coined–I don’t know if they coined it—but they used this term called “emotional connections marketing.” And what I loved about your talk … I don’t know how—I lost count of the number of stories and illustrations you gave to drive home the points, everything from car companies to Dude Wipes, the brand.

KEVIN: Is this the first time Dude Wipes has been mentioned on the Community Bank Podcast?

CALEB: I think so. I think so. I have to admit, I am familiar with the brand. They make a good product. But I mean so many different—Delta—so many different great brands. And it was really powerful. So, real quick, give us the summary synopsis. The key thesis of that talk and then we’ll dive into some other things.

KEVIN: Yeah. Something I said to you before we were recording—just a good preface for this. Number one, I do not believe, as leaders, that we should make all of our decisions with emotions. So, that is not what this is about. It’s not about how to be more emotional. The second thing is, I do not believe we should use emotions to manipulate people. That’s not what I’m talking about either. But I think we often discount and overlook the role that emotions play in decision making, and we do so at our own peril. The reality is the reason that people are leaving your bank, they’re not working—I’m talking about employees, even. It may be compensation, it may be the opportunity for a new role, but most time it’s related to how they feel about something. How they feel about the manager. How do they feel about the work environment? The same thing is true for your customers. I believe that customers make decisions first with emotions and they justify them with logic. Now, if they feel a certain way and the logic doesn’t back it up, it’s probably not going to follow through. But people are emotional creatures, making emotional decisions, and we’ve got to acknowledge that and figure out how to leverage that to build long term connections with our customers and our employees.

CALEB: It reminds me of the Donald Miller “StoryBrand” framework, where he says that every character in a story has an external problem and an internal problem. The external problem might be, “I need to hit my sales quota, and I’m behind this year,” but the internal problem is, “Do I have what it takes?” And so, if you’re selling a product to help a salesperson be more successful, too often we focus on the external problem. “Hey, this product’s going to help you hit your sales quota for the year.” And that’s true, and that’s not something to discount, but the internal problem that you got to put your finger on for that person is, “You’ve got what it takes, and if you use this product, you will have what it takes, and you will be successful, and the numbers will take care of itself.” But it’s focusing on that emotional connection that’s going to make the difference.

KEVIN: That’s so good. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And again, because it’s internal, that means we don’t always see it. And because we don’t see it, we often discount it. And when you look at the brands who have found a way to create long term customer loyalty, they do it by that internal, unseen, emotional piece.

CALEB: Yeah. So, I think this is your third time on the podcast, which is crazy to think about. So, I got to come up with material that we haven’t talked about before, but for folks that are new to the show or missed the last couple conversations, tell us who you are, what you do. A little brief summary of Kevin Scott and ADDO.

KEVIN: Kevin Scott. I live outside of Atlanta with my wife and our three kids. Helped start a company called ADDO—wow, about 13 years ago. Now, more than 13 years ago. ADDO is the Latin word for “inspire,” and we exist to inspire people today to impact tomorrow. How does that show up? It really shows up in inspiring customer and employee loyalty. So, how do we create that? And we do it with companies like Chick-fil-A, and Coca-Cola, and Delta Airlines, and even some good banks.

CALEB: Speaking of Chick-fil-A, David Salyers, who is a mutual friend of ours, he’s a board member at SouthState. I can’t remember if he came up with this or maybe you came up with it, because I heard both of you guys say this quote before.

KEVIN: It’s likely that it’s him.

CALEB: Maybe so. Or maybe you know, who knows if he got it somewhere? I don’t know. I’ll give him credit. He said, “I kind of view marketing and culture as two sides of the same coin. I sort of view marketing as the way our customers experience our brand, and I view our culture the way our employees experience our brand. And they both have to complement each other. It’s a two-way street. My customers will never be more excited than my employees and potentially vice versa.” And so, that kind of sounds like what you’re talking about is, as you’re making emotional connections with both your customers and your employees, it’s got to be both. And there’s a mutual—it’s a two-way street.

KEVIN: Yeah. When David talks about that, he often talks about them being opposite sides of the same coin. And I think we often focus on opposite sides. But I like that he says the same coin, which means they’ve got to be congruent with each other. And I think too often we have divided. We’ve got customer experience that lives in our marketing department, our sales department. And we’re busy telling one story to our customers, while our HR department is telling another story to employees. And for sure, the way that the story shows up is different, but it’s got to be the same story. You know, we talked about emotional connections, but I think you could take out that word emotional and put the word authentic. They have to be an authentic connection. And those stories have to be authentic to each audience.

CALEB: So, listeners that have listened to the show for a while will know that I love talking about company culture and how companies can do it more effectively. And it’s funny, from time to time, I’ll get people that will say a comment to me like, “Hey, have you ever thought about being like head of HR one day or something?” And I’m like, “No, not at all.” Not because I don’t like HR. I think HR professionals are wonderful, and we’ve got great HR professionals here at SouthState. But to me, culture is not limited to the function of HR, and if that’s your view of culture, I don’t think that’s a very accurate view of culture. Culture is everybody’s job. What would you say to somebody that sort of says, “Yeah, Kevin, we really are trying to prove our culture, so we’re going to hire a new head of HR.” I’m not saying that might not help or that might not move the needle in some capacity, but that’s such a limited view. But what would you say to somebody?

KEVIN: I’m probably gonna get in trouble. Make some news on this podcast. First of all, let me say, we have worked with some heads of HR, some heads of training, who are incredible and effective at what they do. But as an outside company that is hired by larger companies to help them on customer and culture initiatives, what we find is that—and sometimes this is not the HR person, so this person may send this to their CEO, because in most businesses, the marketing function is viewed as an investment center. Which means we are going to spend dollars knowing that we’re going to have a return on them. So, we’re going to invest in this initiative because—and we think about customer acquisition or customer attention. But even for employees, how do we reduce turnover costs? How do we make our company a talent magnet where people want to come, and we’re not spending all of our time and energy on recruiting software to try and get, you know, bottom-level talent.

CALEB: Right.

KEVIN: Okay, let’s go to HR side. And sometimes this is because of the leaders of the bank, but the HR function is typically viewed as a cost center in the business, not an investment center. And so, it’s how do we find the lowest price, the most effective option. And they’re typically unwilling to spend on something because they don’t connect it to a larger return. Can I just offer this? My advice. If you are in HR and you’re listening to this podcast, and you want to sell your initiatives more effectively internally, how do you connect them to the outcome? How do you connect even that employee experience to lower turnover? How do you talk about cost to acquire new employees? Or even talk about how this training initiative will increase our customer experience, which will increase our loyalty.

CALEB: And it’s amazing, especially during the “Great Resignation” over the past few years. It’s amazing how many stories I’ve heard where I’ve heard companies say it is much cheaper to give somebody, in some cases, a very large raise than to find, recruit, train a new hire, and then pay them with the new market value is. We could give somebody a nice raise, and that’s actually far more beneficial for the company long-term. A, because we want to find somebody new and, B, because that person is more engaged because they feel more value because we’re taking care of them.
KEVIN: Yeah, that’s for sure. So, I think all of that really comes to if you believe, as you and I do, that culture is a key component of customer experience, I think leaders of banks and any business should be really strategic about where the culture function lives inside of their business. By the way, at Chick-fil-A, there’s a function called “team member experience” that lives in marketing. And those team members are not employees of Chick-fil-A, they’re employees of the individual operator. But they are thinking about how do we resource owner-operators in a way that allows them to create the culture that makes people want to work here?

CALEB: Yeah. So, at the beginning of your talk, you shared a General Motors ad which, you had the whole room, you know, in tears. It was a 5-minute-long ad or so. Super emotional. It reminded me of a couple other similar ads I’ve seen in the past where it’s like the speaker just sort of, yeah, it’s like a little landmine thrown into the room. But what was fascinating to me about that is a cynical person could watch that ad—and maybe we can link to it in the show notes so people can see it—but a cynical person could watch that and say, “Well, we don’t have a big advertising budget to pay a big film crew and record sappy advertising. So, like, great job, GM, on an emotional connection. But you know, at a bank, we’re a small bank. We have maybe one person in marketing, maybe two. We don’t spend a lot of money on advertising.”

CALEB, continued: I like what you tried to hammer home though, which is don’t limit your emotional connections. Don’t limit this thinking to just running ads. There’s all kinds of creative ways that you can make an emotional connection through your customer experience, whether it’s your salespeople being creative. If you’re a bank, it’s your tellers, it’s your FSRs, it’s your lenders. This is everybody’s job, you know. Culture is everybody’s job. Well so is, in a sense, is making emotional connection through your sales and your marketing and your customer experience. That’s everybody’s job. Talk about that. Because I think a lot of banks would say, “Well, we’re not this huge retail brand like Delta, or Chick-fil-A, or GM, that serves the masses and serves millions of people.”
CALEB, continued: I work in B2B marketing, so Chick-fil-A is trying to get a million people to spend $10. I’m trying to get 10 people to spend $1,000,000, so the emotional connections that I’m trying to forge are with 10 people, not a million people. So, I’m not going to blast the airwaves with sappy ads, but for those 10 people, I could be doing something. Any thoughts on that?

KEVIN: Yeah, three thoughts. The first is, you know—that ad is really sad, by the way. Every time I show it, I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to show because it makes me sad.” I like try to tune out, so people should go watch it. It’s about a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and they use something that’s called memory reminiscence therapy—that is actually well studied—trying to trigger this thing, and it’s compelling. It’s emotional. But the premise is, I use that to tell people General Motors is spending a bunch of money on an ad that doesn’t talk about a product, how much it costs, what are the features, or where to buy it. They’re doing that because they believe that if you can create an emotional connection, that better feelings lead to bigger profits. So, that’s the first premise: is that emotions work.

KEVIN, continued: The second thing that I want for people to see is that emotions aren’t only those sappy emotions. Because when you and I say emotional connections, even you say Chick-fil-A like, “Oh, yeah, Chick-fil-A, it’s feel-good.” But it was interesting in the audience today, one of the attendees in the Q&A talk talked about insurance commercials use humor that tell nothing about their product, but you know, different characters that have different things that just try to make you laugh. Because they believe if they can connect you—there used to be a thing called the Newseum in Washington D.C. And they’d have the Pulitzer Prize winning photos or something. And they would say this, “If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it tears your heart out, that’s a good photo.” And I think that is a good emotional connection. If it makes you laugh, makes you cry. It doesn’t have to only be sad. So, one emotions work, number two, emotions aren’t just sappy, and number three.

KEVIN, continued: As much as they happen in marketing, the interaction, the moments are more important than the messaging. And it’s actually more important that your employees understand how to connect emotionally on a one-on-one level than it is that you have the right advertising campaign. And I’ll actually you this, if you’re thinking of one or the other, you will actually do more harm than good if you create a marketing campaign that is not congruent with a customer experience.

CALEB: Because you’ll be found out.

KEVIN: You’ll be found out! Then people will be like, “Then I’m more frustrated.” Because we all know that our expectations when they’re met or not met create a big problem. So, you know, it’s one thing if I expect the bank service to be bad, but if everybody tells me how great it is and how this is the most caring bank in the world, and then I don’t feel cared for, then not only am I going to be dissatisfied, I’m actually gonna be resentful.

CALEB: Yeah. So, I mentioned the “Great Resignation” earlier. I’d love to get your just general take on—you talk to companies all the time that are in the war for talent, as they say. And you know, interest rates have been high in the bank world and companies are maybe starting to cool off with their hiring to some degree. Although, we had a jobs numbers report, recently, that was actually higher than expected. But as you are sort of observing the post-COVID landscape, whether it’s work from home and hybrid or in the office, whether it’s that whole “quiet quitting” phenomenon that you would hear about, or “I’m going to do the bare minimum just to get by.” That was sort of, you read a lot of articles about that. What’s your general temperature check on just how companies are thinking about hiring, recruiting, and training the best talent and retaining the best talent? What issues are they saying? What are they trying to navigate?

KEVIN: Well, it’s a couple of things. One, I do believe the market is trending back a little bit more favor of employer than just employee. I mean, we were in a situation a couple of years ago where the reality is, the employees had all the power. And that’s why we were seeing people paying a lot of money. And yeah, “You don’t have to come back to the office,” and, “You don’t have to do this.” And that dynamic with the economy is shifting a little bit. I believe something that companies are continuing to do wrong is focusing primarily on money or like what I’m going to call “fringe benefits,” instead of some of the key issues. You mentioned David Salyers earlier. Have you heard him talk about missionaries and mercenaries?

CALEB: Yes.

KEVIN: Okay. Just that concept if—just for people haven’t heard it—if you talk to somebody who is a veteran of the United States military, and you ask them if another army of an enemy paid you $5,000 more to leave the US Army and go work for them, would you do that? And then sit back ’cause they’re gonna punch you in the face. Because they’re gonna like, “Of course not, you moron. I wouldn’t—”

CALEB: Just the question is offensive.

KEVIN: Yeah, the question is offensive. So, because they’re tied to a mission. And when he says, when we focus solely on money. Now this can be people can say, “Oh, this is naive.” No, money is very important, but when you focus on solely on money, you turn your employees into mercenaries who will sell themselves to the highest bidder. And so, you have to have—it is money plus. Not money, but not only money: money plus. And there has to be a component of mission. And what I am finding is even as this dynamic changes a little bit back in favor of the employer, they’re still often missing what employees are actually searching for, and it is money, but it’s also meaning.

CALEB: You cited this study in one of your talks I heard several years ago, and this is probably a little bit old now, but I think you cited something from the UNC Business School where they surveyed it was millennials at the time, which that sounds so outdated. We got Gen Z, and my sons are Gen Alpha, which is crazy to think about, so this is a little bit old and maybe the stats have changed for Gen Z. I’d like to hear your take. Like you said, at least among the millennials, personal and professional development far outweighed anything they were looking for. It wasn’t bean bags, and free food, and work from home and, you know, pay. All those things are nice. Pay is certainly important.

CALEB, continued: You got to be competitive. But it was an opportunity to develop personally and professionally. And the number of years, as you go down the generations, the number of years spent at a job goes down too. So, boomers, I forgot what the average is, it might be 10 years. Gen X is, you know, 8. And millennials is like 3, and Gen Z’s 2. I’m making those up, but the stats I’ve seen sort of reflect that. And Tim Elmore, our friend, likes to say the corporate ladder is now the corporate lily pad or hopping around. But it might be because they’re not being developed at those opportunities. And why would I stay if I’m not growing? Any take on that now with Gen Z? Is that still one of the top things? Is meaningful work and an opportunity to grow and develop?

KEVIN: The research that I’m seeing says that that would continue to be true, but the way it shows up is a little bit different. Gen Z is looking a lot of this like old term that we wouldn’t use a lot these days, called “being an apprentice.” Which really goes to the way that the personal development is done. So, when I tell somebody, or Caleb, you say, “You know what, we need personal development.” What people read is, “We need a training program. We need a class where they can sit down and learn.” And really what they’re looking for is somebody to come alongside them and invest in them. And what is interesting is where there may have been a lot more friction between boomers or Gen X and millennials about styles, that is actually a style that is more reminiscent of something that happened naturally with previous generations that we have to foster intentionally in this generation. So, you could do it through a formal mentoring program or otherwise. But you’re really looking for, they want to be developed, but they don’t want to be developed by a group. They want somebody to invest in them. And it does two things. It teaches them skills. But beyond that, it’s somebody saying, “I see you and I care about you.”

CALEB: Something that struck me as something that the Savannah Bananas baseball team did. We’ve probably talked about this before, but we had Jesse Cole on our podcast several years ago. We can’t get him now. He’s too big for our show.

KEVIN: He’s too big.

CALEB: But back when they were a little upstart, you know, baseball league or team, he came on the show, and he talked about how we ask every new hire, before we hire them, during the interview process to write a future resume. So, we don’t want to just see what they want to. You know, accomplished in their current job with us if we hire them, we want to see where they want to be in five years or 10 years because we want to know that they’re willing to grow and learn. And I thought that was an interesting way to sort of communicate to even a new hire or a candidate, I guess, is we’re looking for people that want to grow. Like the people that do well here want to grow.

KEVIN: Yeah, you know, we work a lot with large companies that have a geographically-dispersed, customer-facing workforce. Kevin, what’s that mean? Restaurants, retail environments, grocery stores, convenience stores. They got a whole bunch of people— banks—that are separate from the corporate office that are interfacing with customers. The ones we see that excel in the war for talent, they take pride in telling stories not only of the person who rose up through the ranks and is now leading at this company, but they will even tell stories of this person who started this business who’s now leading a different company or working somewhere else. Chick-fil-A. You hear about Tim Scott, who’s a United States senator. The guy ran for president. He was a Chick-fil-A team member. You hear stories like that. McDonald’s is trying to tell a lot of stories of how many people that are in leadership that got their first start at McDonald’s. A lot of times we view those as losses. Like let’s talk about the person that started as a teller, and now they’re a vice president. But also tell the story of the person who was a teller, who then went to this place, who’s now the CEO in town, but they got their start at our bank.

CALEB: So, the founder of Lululemon, I think he did the same thing. I think he had all their team members create five-year plan, and he said, “We’ve made it part of our purpose to help those employees achieve their five-year plan.” And he said, “I had somebody asked me one time—aren’t you just asking for turnover? What if the five-year plan includes not being at Lululemon in five years?” And he said, “I don’t, because what better marketing for new hires and for recruiting if folks can say ‘I got to where I wanted to be in life because I was involved with Lululemon’?” That’s what Alabama—that’s what Nick Saban always said in Alabama, is you’re more successful in life because you were involved with Alabama football.

KEVIN: That’s exactly right, yeah.

CALEB: Yeah. So, in a sense, yeah, it does create problems. But over the long haul, it’s just better marketing to get the next best people into your company.

KEVIN: It’s really good. It’s true.

CALEB: Tell us a little bit more about ADDO, what you guys are up to. I know you’ve worked with banks, you’ve worked with Chick-fil-A. If folks want to engage with you guys, if they’re listening to us talk and they’re thinking, “Man, we’ve got a culture problem,” or “We’re not creating emotional connections like I think we ought to with our clients.” What are some things that you all do specifically to serve businesses?

KEVIN: Well, let me tell them something that will save them a lot of money first. A lot of people come to me and they’re asking me, “What can we do to help our culture?” And the number one thing I believe is creating a common language. I think there are great banks— like Oconee State does that well. Chick-fil-A does that well. But that can be—somebody’s like, “Oh, that’s so expensive I got to go hire a firm.” If everybody on your team is reading the same book together, and they’re having the same conversations, and using the same language. An inferior program implemented with Fidelity is better than a superior program that you’re not going to implement. Yeah. So that’s the first answer. We are typically helping do this at companies that are growing or they’re thinking about scaling or especially if they’re thinking about acquiring other companies.

KEVIN, continued: And we communicate the goals of the leader and the language of the learner. We are going to take the content from the senior leaders and make sure they’re translated in a way that wins the hearts of the frontline and increasingly, we’re doing that in a way that affects customer-facing work. So, it’s not just culture or leadership development, it’s actually hospitality and customer experience. But you accomplish that, we would say right now we’re building brands from the inside out. So, we’re going to build your external experience, but it’s going to start with your employees.

CALEB: That’s a really key point about a common language. We had Mark Miller on our podcast. We’ve had him on several times, but one of the times he talked about having a common point of view. So, if we’re going to define what our purpose is, or mission, or ethos or whatever it is, we’ve got to all agree on what these words even mean, because you could have a word, and 10 different people think it means 10 different things so having definitions and a common language so that we can actually implement something is key.

KEVIN: Yeah, I don’t know if I’m allowed to share this. So, but it’s interesting. I remember, as SouthState Bank has grown through the years, and from CenterState to SouthState. That is one of the things that I think they’ve done an incredible job at is making sure they stay crystal clear on their core values and the way that they’re communicated. And making sure not just to say this is the value, but this is what that means. And that common language makes, when we’re having a conversation with each other, we can all agree because we’re using the same words about the same things.

CALEB: Yeah, that’s great. So, ADDO.is.

KEVIN: Yeah, ADDO.is. Yeah, we got that. And then, the other thing that we offer is, in addition to books, a lot of courses for teams. Because sometimes I find that leaders feel like they don’t know how to inspire their team. And I’ll let leaders off the hook right here. It is not the job of the leader to manufacture inspiration. They need to just be the one to fuel it inside of the business. And we have some courses around our books that allow basically, you can leverage other content and your relationships to build culture.

CALEB: That’s great. Well, Kevin, thanks for coming on. Thank you for being a part of our conference. Like I said, you got a room full of bankers excited, which is quite an accomplishment. And so, we look forward to staying in touch and appreciate what you do for the bank.

KEVIN: Thanks, man. Appreciate you.