Interview
The Gist
- Friction identification. Todd Unger emphasizes the importance of identifying and reducing friction at every stage of the customer journey, leveraging technology like behavioral analytics and AI to automate friction detection.
- Team collaboration. Effective customer experience (CX) requires integrated efforts across marketing, product, commerce, and service teams, demonstrating the value of cross-departmental collaboration.
- Tornado Funnel concept. Unger introduces the "Tornado Funnel," highlighting the rapid, integrated customer journey from awareness to purchase, stressing the need for seamless, frictionless processes in modern marketing.
Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire, sits down with Todd Unger, chief experience officer at the American Medical Association (AMA), to discuss strategies for customer experience (CX) and insights from his new book, "The 10 Second Customer Journey: The CXO's Playbook for Growing and Retaining Customers in a Digital World." He explores how to eliminate friction in customer journeys, the importance of cross-departmental collaboration and the impact of emerging technologies on CX.
Table of Contents
- Introduction 0:01
- About Todd Unger and the AMA 1:25
- Friction in Customer Journeys 2:55
- Learning Lessons and Reducing Friction 4:43
- Team Collaboration 7:19
- Emerging Technologies and Reducing Friction 9:50
- Friction Data Set and KPIs 13:13
- Educating the Organization on CX 16:55
- The Tornado Funnel Concept 20:12
- Key Goals and Insights for CXOs 22:47
- Final Thoughts and 10-Second Customer Journey Information 24:04
Introduction
Editor's note: This transcript was edited for clarity.
Dom Nicastro: Hey everybody, welcome back to the digital experience, our latest installment for the CMSWire TV series. I'm Dom Nicastro, managing editor for CMSWire, and I'm joined by a repeat guest. I say repeat because he was with our old conference back in Chicago, the DX Summit, a few years back. But he's with us today in the digital world: Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer at the American Medical Association.
Todd, what's going on, my friend? How are you doing?
Todd Unger: It's great to be here today.
Dom Nicastro: Great to be here with you. Welcome back.
Customers' journeys — we're going to be talking about how to get it done all in 10 seconds, right, according to the title of your book. That is in fact part of the title of your new book. Congrats on rolling that out in June, by the way: "The 10 Second Customer Journey: A CXO's Playbook for Growing and Retaining Customers in a Digital World." That is a mouthful. There it is. I love it. I got a copy myself. Perfect. Thank you for sending that in the mail to me in sunny New Hampshire here.
But yeah, Todd, we're gonna play off the themes of that book, right? How do you get that done? Who's involved? What are the challenges, roadblocks? It's gonna be a fun conversation. But first, tell our listeners more about Todd Unger, your role at the AMA, and what you do day to day.
About Todd Unger and the AMA
Todd Unger: As you said, I'm Chief Experience Officer of the AMA. My team here at the AMA is responsible for membership, marketing, and a lot of things across digital platforms, including digital publishing and digital marketing. I've been here for seven years now, and I love it because I love helping doctors do their job, which is taking care of people. It's pretty gratifying.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, tell me more about the AMA. Where does it sit in that ecosystem of helping doctors, and what are you charged with as the CXO there?
Todd Unger: The AMA is the physicians' powerful ally in patient care. We represent physicians with a unified voice, help them get rid of obstacles that stand between them and patient care, drive the future of medicine, and address public health crises like the pandemic. My role involves ensuring our membership keeps growing, that people are happy with their membership, and making sure the great work of the AMA reaches its intended audience: physicians, resident physicians, and medical students.
Friction in Customer Journeys
Dom Nicastro: Alright, so let's get into it. Describe to me the most common types of friction in these experiences that you're seeing as a practitioner and from your colleagues in the industry that most businesses overlook, costing them in the customer journey.
Todd Unger: The key thing, and it's something I contemplated in the book, is that friction occurs at every level of the process, even before the ones you typically think about. Most people focus on product improvement without going back to the beginning. You can't be customer-centric unless you start with the customer. The playbook in the book starts there: if you can't identify who you're targeting and describe them in behaviorally predictive ways, you're already introducing friction.
Once that's done, you need a digital-ready brand proposition that communicates clearly, thinking like a landing page with one line and three bullet points. Skipping the first two steps and jumping into product development introduces a lot of friction. There's also a range of issues that follow, especially in the digital environment where various platforms are involved.
Related Article: Customer Experience Strategies: (Good) Friction Is Great for CX
Learning Lessons and Reducing Friction
Dom Nicastro: Any learning lessons yourself in your role where friction was happening, and your team determined, okay, this is a friction moment? How did you jump in and fix it? Any general or specific moments that stand out to you in your work at the AMA?
Todd Unger: There are many. We're going to talk more about the technology part of this, but one of my favorite new terms is something called a "rage click." This is detectable when people are trying to do something, clicking repeatedly, reloading the page, but not achieving their intended action. Through new technology, we can identify these instances.
For example, a big visual on your homepage with a "Learn More" button, but people are clicking on the picture instead. These seemingly mundane issues are consequential. They keep me up at night because, in the past, they might have gone undetected until accidentally discovered, creating significant friction at the top of your funnel.
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, keeping me up at night is wondering if anyone will read this piece of content. We can put all the muscle into SEO, our tools tell us it’s awesome, we’re going to score high, page one Google, here we come. Then it doesn’t do as well, and you check the analytics. With these shows, for instance, we're putting a lot of effort into marketing and optimization.
My question to you is, who’s the team that helps get this done? In your book, you emphasize the importance of integrated marketing, product, commerce, and service as a team sport. What are some strategies you see out there that are successful in terms of cross-departmental collaboration? The CX team alone can’t do this.
Team Collaboration
Todd Unger: No, and we can talk more about where the CX team fits in. Let’s take the problem you mentioned. We do a daily video and podcast, giving physicians a voice to talk about what's important to them and how it relates to our mission. We want to share it with as wide an audience as possible. This teamwork goes into making the most of it. What started as a video developed into a podcast, a transcript page on the site, a written interview, and more.
We produce multiple pieces of content with the production team and the editorial team working together. A channel development person optimizes for platforms like YouTube. We had more video views last year than the prior four, thanks to SEO and platform-specific strategies. Our health system team helps identify suitable guests, and it’s a team effort.
Related Article: How Cross-Departmental Collaboration Fuels a Customer Experience Model
Emerging Technologies and Reducing Friction
Dom Nicastro: My next question is about these emerging technologies that play a role in reducing journey friction. There has to be some kind of bedrock data center or something in the middle of it all, communicating to all your disparate technologies. What’s your journey been like, and what are you seeing out there?
Todd Unger: If you're involved in marketing or customer experience, it's an exciting time from a technology standpoint. We're seeing the convergence of marketing automation, behavioral analytics, and AI/machine learning platforms. The big opportunity is when these come together. We’re working on integrating these so they inform each other with less manual work. Each one has led to transformative insights and actions.
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For example, on the friction detection side, using a system like Quantum Metric to automate friction collection. Our denominator for friction was manually collected through our service center. Now, with automation, the number has increased, revealing more friction points that people might not report. Our CX people oversee this, create hypotheses, and fix issues quickly, sometimes within an hour.
Dom Nicastro: I love that friction data set. Is that one of the core KPIs for you? Where does it sit in your metric scheme?
Friction Data Set and KPIs
Todd Unger: In CX, the friction reduction goal relies on metrics regarding friction. We track automated friction detection over time as a standard dashboard metric. All our metrics ladder up to one goal: growth. It's about getting and keeping more members and seeing their engagement with our work. CX metrics are great at CX conferences but outside, no one understands them. I always say, stop talking about CX, start talking about growth. Let the team handle friction reduction and show how it ladders into overall priorities.
Dom Nicastro: I think there's a prevailing thought that CX is just the person who answers the phone. Hello, welcome to the AMA. How can I help you? That's it. That's the CX department, right?
Todd Unger: That's part of the motivation for the book. Here I am with a title called Chief Experience Officer, and no one knows what I do. They can’t even define it. As I was working on the book, I looked up the title, and it says it's a person responsible for the customer experience plan of the organization. But it doesn’t define customer experience. My book and work aim to demonstrate the overarching idea of customer experience and how CX, as a set of tools and frameworks, minimizes friction and unlocks growth. It's another functional area that contributes to growth.
Educating the Organization on CX
Dom Nicastro: And you have the data to tell you why you're not growing in certain areas. Let's talk to the marketing team, let's talk to the other teams to figure it out. Analytics speak the truth. When you think you're rolling out something great, your audience will tell you how not great it is. Let's talk about educating people in the company about what CX is and implementing a friction-free experience. How do you get everyone in the organization behind the belief that reducing friction is crucial?
Todd Unger: It’s been a multi-year process. We started by getting our act together on my own team, demonstrating the power of integrating marketing, product, commerce, and service. Seeing the results, others became interested. We created pilot partnerships across the organization, redefining collaboration and delivering value to business partners. Viewing them as customers, we deliver value while achieving growth. This approach has driven forward, gaining permission to expand, especially in the relatively new CX area. We find pilot partners, tackle business growth obstacles, and show how our CX team can help, bringing systematic approaches and data to the table. One success leads to more interest.
Related Article: How to Design Your Customer Experience Organization
The Tornado Funnel Concept
Dom Nicastro: I get the concept that growth is important because we have a meeting called the Growth Meeting. It’s not the Story Idea Meeting or the Cool Headline Idea Meeting. It's about growth. What have we done lately? What are we doing next? I get that 100%. I wanted to bring up something from the book: the Tornado Funnel concept. That's new to me, so probably new to some of our listeners. Let's expand on that and how that buying process differs from traditional sales funnels and ties into customer journeys.
Todd Unger: This is a big change from when I started in marketing at places like Procter and Gamble or Leo Burnett. We thought of the marketing funnel as a sequential process: awareness, interest, trial, repeat. It was slow and unclear what was working. Now, think about this morning: you’re looking through social feeds, and suddenly see a brand you’ve never heard of. You watch a great 10-second video, click to learn more, see a special offer, click on Apple Pay, and you're done. I call it the Ariana Grande process: I see it, I like it, I want it, I bought it. That’s the Tornado Funnel in action.
The job of a Chief Experience Officer is to integrate and reduce friction between all steps of the process. It happens fast—from awareness to purchase in 10 seconds.
Key Goals and Insights for CXOs
Dom Nicastro: As we wind down, what’s one big thing you want to get done for the rest of the year? Maybe a big project that’s on your mind, not a day-to-day thing, but something substantial?
Todd Unger: For us, it’s about growth. We’re at a 20-year record for AMA membership, and I want to keep breaking records. I want physicians and students to feel represented and supported by the AMA. Seeing that number grow means I'm doing my job in helping them. My consistent focus is on growth and innovation, driven by better understanding our customers.
Final Thoughts and 10-Second Customer Journey information
Dom Nicastro: And one more time, the book is "The 10 Second Customer Journey: The CXO's Playbook for Growing and Retaining Customers in the Digital World." What's the big takeaway from the book if you had to summarize it?
Todd Unger: Number one, you need a real working definition of customer experience: the seamless integration of marketing, product, commerce, and service to acquire and retain customers. The more the CX world thinks about experience in these terms, the better off we'll all be. In the time it took to explain this, you might have lost a customer. The book helps you stop that kind of friction, unlock growth, and grow.
Dom Nicastro: I'm happy we caught up with you again, Todd. Real quick, where can listeners follow your story besides the book? We know we can get that on Amazon. Where else can they follow your thought leadership?
Todd Unger: LinkedIn is my main platform. I publish a lot there and love answering questions and meeting new people. You can learn more about the book at toddunger.com.
Dom Nicastro: Sweet. Todd Unger, thanks for joining us on the digital experience. We hope you have a good one.
Todd Unger: Thanks for having me. Bye now.
