CX-EX Mastery on the Greens: Gautam Patankar, Chief Experience Officer, Bobby Jones Links

The Gist

• Emphasis on employee experience. Gautam prioritizes employee well-being, believing satisfied staff leads to superior customer service.
• Culture integration. Merges client and staff cultures for seamless service, ensuring consistent and unified interactions.
• Personalized customer experience. Tailors CX to each club's unique identity, enhancing customer satisfaction through customized services.
• Measuring employee impact. Success gauged by employee satisfaction and retention, indicating the effectiveness of EX strategies.
• Empowering frontline staff. Encourages employee initiative to improve both EX and CX, fostering a proactive and engaged workforce.

This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio.

Dom Nicastro: Hello, everybody, Dom Nicastro here, managing editor of CMSWire and host of this CX Decoded podcast, our latest we're gonna have an experience officer talking about the connection of CX and EX. Love it. And he is Gautam Patankar, chief experience officer at the golf course and resort hospitality management firm, Bobby Jones Links. Gautam, what's going on?

Gautam Patankar: Dom, How are you? Thank you so much for having me that sounded way fancier than than what I do. But thank you.

Dom: Oh, no, we're gonna get right into the trenches of what you do. Everyone's gonna love it. And listen, we got to preface this conversation. I mean, you have gone through a few hoops to get on CX Decoded. Today you are holiday traveling with the family, and you drag them to a golf course. To do this recording. You are my new fave.

Gautam: I'm your new fave. That's so good. But I don't know if I'm my family's new fave, based on where I am. But you know, we booked this a while back and yeah, Nov. 21. Tuesday, I got nothing going on. This is going to be easy peasy. And the next thing I know it's Thanksgiving week. And here I am saying how am I going to stop on the side of the road and do this podcast. And so I have a very good friend shout out to my buddy Mike Riddle, who is the mayor of Charlotte basically in the golf business. And I am sitting at Highlands Golf Course outside of Charlotte, in a very little office with a bunch of strangers who are becoming my friends pretty quickly doing a podcast and my family is sitting in the grill right now waiting for me to do the podcast so they can go have a good time with their cousins. But anyway, we're here.

Golfer-Turned-CEO Transforms Company Culture

Dom: All right. Well, listen, let's get into it. So I want to know, first just kind of how you arrived in your role, your background. I'm fascinated by backgrounds because a lot of experience officers, Hey, what did you go to college for? Oh, to be a chief experience officer, you know, that doesn't really map out like that. So I'd love to know the background quickly and how you arrived in your current role? 

Gautam: Yeah, so I am a born and raised golfer. Basically, my dad came to America in 1973, falls in love with Tom Watson. Obviously India has no idea what golf is. And my dad's chasing the little white ball around the golf course. Here comes his son, I start playing golf. I played through high school. I played in college over at Rutgers in New Jersey. And just like everybody else in the world, if you think you can break 75 You think you're gonna be the next at the time. You know, Greg Norman, there was no Tiger Woods at the time. I graduated college, I moved to Florida, I thought I was going to be the next like I said, Greg Norman, and I realized that you can't so I was a cart attendant man, I started as a cart attendant. I was a caddy when I was 13. I have all golf jobs in my experience background. And I was super lucky just in life in general. But super lucky that, man, I got my first keys to a golf course, at the age of 25 to be the GM. I was not the right person for the job. But somebody obviously thought I was. Fast forward a few years, you know, I've run several clubs, I end up working for the company I do now, Bobby Jones Links. I've been there for 18 years. I started when I was 29, I had a whole lot more hair. I'm 48. Now, and I'll tell you the reason why I'm in this position is we actually changed the name of the company. When I started with the company, we had five clubs, and we were called Affiniti Golf Partners, and that we're now Bobby Jones Links. And we became Bobby Jones Links. Because long story short, the family of Bobby Jones, the golfer, allowed us to license the name. And so when they allowed us to license the name, we were just one of three licensees. It's us, it's the clothing apparel company. And it's the whiskey distributor. And when we became the name, we're just like Club Corporate, Troon or any of those other companies, obviously a little more boutique because we're smaller. And when we changed the name, we said, what are we going to do different than everybody else, everybody else tells you, we're going to raise your revenues, we're going to cut your expenses, we're going to make your greens the best we're going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

But where the real lip service comes into is, we're going to take care of the employees better, and we're going to take care of the guests better. And at the end of the day, we said we're going to drive your bottom line Mr. Client through customer service. And customer service begins with employee culture and then involves obviously the guest culture. And so when we changed the name at the time, I was a regional manager. So I had like 10 properties or 11 properties that I helped oversee. And I raised my hand and I said guys, if we're real only going to make a run for this border. Right? Then we need a dedicated person who can kind of speak the speak and figure out the systems in the operation. And my two owners, Steve Willie and Whitney Krause, they anointed me this position, and we're off and running. So that's my story. But man, I dig the golf business. I dig people. And I just dig hospitality in general, I'm always in awe of how hotels and airlines and cruises and all those people do it. And we're just trying to bring that in the golf world, because it's missing in the golf world.

Related Article: Strategies to Balance Customer Experience and Employee Experience

Prioritizing Employee Experience

Dom: We have so much in common because I'm a golfer too. And I golf every 10 to 12 years. And I do it at bachelor parties. And I hit the first shot. And then I'm done. I don't do the second, third and fourth, you know why? Because I can't. I need a tee to shoot every ball. Right? I can't hit the ball off the grass.

Gautam: It's a hard game.

Dom: Yeah, you know, what else is hard, combining EX and CX. And you just, you know, you talked about a little bit how I want to know that title like chief experience officer, do you truly see like a 50/50 split in terms of employee experience and customer experience in terms of your role?

Gautam: Yeah, I would say it's a 50/50 split. But I would almost tell you that I spend more of my time on the employee side than I do on the customer side. And the reason I say that is because there's different layers of the platform that we kind of operate within the company. But the first platform is really what we would call our core purpose, which our core purpose for a company is to make a difference. It's got nothing to do with golf, it's got everything to do with using your head and your heart to make people happy, right. And so when you have a purpose, like make a difference, the most important thing you can possibly do is bring people into the organization that are aligned with you. 

And if you bring people in the organization that are just here to collect the check, punch and punch out, you're never going to be able to make a difference, right? So we have a platform that we put together, basically, really vets the people that come through, we do a really heavy form of training, not so much how to clean a golf cart and how to make a hamburger, we do that kind of stuff. But how do you deliver the hamburger to the table? Right? How do you run out to the parking lot? And grab somebody's bag and really make them feel welcome? Right? I think too much in the golf world. The price of golf has always been how good are the greens, or how good of a condition is it going to be? And what we've learned is the golf course product, it's obviously super important, but how you make people feel, and how they are is what actually pushes the bottom line, right? If we can make people feel really welcome, and make them feel really taken care of in a golf business. That really starts with the people that are working the front line. So that's why when you ask me, Do I spend more time on the CX or the EX, man that EX is the heaviest part of our whole platform?

Related Article: Unifying Customer & Employee Engagement

Enhancing Employee Experience at Bobby Jones Links

Dom: Yeah, I want to level set dial back just a tad. Because I want our listeners to be extremely aware of what Bobby Jones Links does give me the typical client scenario, like walk me through the challenge that a prospect has. And then at the end of the day, what your company typically does for them.

Gautam: Yeah, so our clients range anywhere from home builders, home builder says, I want to build homes on a golf course. Man, I'm so good at building homes, but I have no idea how to run a country club. But they realized that the country club is what's going to make the appraisal value of the homes go up, they can sell the home for more dollars, etc, etc. They call a company like us and say, Hey, Bobby Jones, will you run the entire neighborhood for us. So you're talking about golf, tennis, fitness, swim, accounting, human resources, the whole nine yards. So we have a lot of home builders, we have some individual clients that you know, dad on the golf course. Unfortunately, dad passes away, the next generation gets the golf course. And they say, I don't want to run this club. But the club does financially fairly well. They hire someone like us to do that. We get a lot of like I said, developers, independent owners, we get a lot of private clubs, where you look at the board. And it's like two lawyers, two doctors, three engineers, a guy who owns a subway and a librarian, and they're trying to run a country club. And they don't know how so they hire us to do that. So the actual scope of work, Dom, starts with the employees and human resources, creating the financials, running the day to day operations, which is really golf, tennis, fitness, swim, like the nuts and bolts of what you get. And then obviously on the back end of that is capital improvements, where are we going in the future, etc, etc. So we're really partners with whoever our clients are.

Related Article: Why It’s Time to Embrace Employee Experience 

Employee Experience Key in Merging Cultures

Dom: So when you're trying to get some great customer experience outcomes, some great employee experience outcomes. Are you talking about that from the standpoint of your clients and their employees or are you super focused on Bobby Jones Links employees as well? 

Gautam: Well, it's one of the same. So what happens is when we get called to be a management company, we actually take on all the employees. They all fall into our bucket, right. So what they do is their, quote, unquote, DNA is basically our DNA. So we teach them, the values, the service standards, etc, etc, of our company. And that's what we bring to the actual country clubs. So a lot of times, it can be a little bit difficult because you're used to one thing. And what we do is bring in something a little bit different. So there is a little bit of a transition that happens between, hey, I'm just here to deliver hamburgers to saying, hey, now I'm here to deliver hamburgers with a smile with a lot of curiosity, etc, etc. You know, so we do we take on all the employees. 

Related Article: Is It Time to Combine Customer Experience and Employee Experience Programs?

Balancing EX-CX Framework in Company Culture

Dom: Yeah. And it all comes back to a CX-EX framework, which we think a lot of companies say they have that or want to have that. And they're just not quite there. So, you know, the last guest we had on the show was actually in her title, it was customer experience and employee experience officer. So she was literally walking the walk on that last episode. So tell us about how you see a strong CX-EX framework developing, working and actually following through on those promises to combine both?

Gautam: Sure. So like I said, if I was to walk you through a very simple, let's say, tomorrow, you hired us and said, OK, Gautam, we want you to run our club, the first thing we do is we get with all the employees, and we immediately jump into the actual culture of our company, which like I said, is making a difference, right, and we get in there. And we kind of tell them who Bobby Jones is. We tell them what the man stood for. We talk to them about our company. And we dive in there and we start explaining to them what customer service is all about. Right? 

So we explained to them customer service. Now, that ties into the EX side, because we want to make sure that what we're doing with them is that we're onboarding them correctly. The orientation process is done with a lot of care and concern, we have a lot of different programs that we put into place for employees. But really, it starts with just a mindset change that, hey, I'm here to service my fellow coworkers. And I'm here to service the guests that walk through here. And the other side that we really hone in on is how do you take a $4, $5, $18 and $8, whatever the number is a dollar an hour person and actually give them purpose. So we have all these people, they look up at us in these orientations. I'm like, Yeah, you guys are just like everybody else. But when you start telling them what their true purpose is, right, whether they're here for a day, or they're here for the rest of their lives, you actually have a true purpose in the hospitality business, you start seeing that mindset change, right, which is really the EX side of the business, the employee experience. And then we start sprinkling all the different things that we do, like, I know, we'll talk about that later. But we have a real cool program called Freedom 15. And Freedom 15 means is that any department head in the club can tap any employee on the shoulder, and they get 15 minutes to go make somebody's day.

It could be bringing somebody cookies, it could be taking out cold bottled water on a hot day, it can be giving out mango scented towels to the customers that are golfing, it could be doing whatever they want, right? So you're taking this frontline team, and you're making them front and center in the actual customer experience now. But that's an experience for the employee too, right, because they've never been told, you're allowed to give away a beer to somebody, it's always about how dare you give the beer away. You're costing us money, we don't trust you. So we incorporate things like trust. I hate the word empowerment, but I'm going to use it. We really like to use word freedom, we start talking about communication and motivation for these frontline teams so that EX is super important. 

Once you solve the EX side, which is really for this frontline staff understanding that, hey, this is the culture of the company. This is what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm starting to feel valued. The next part about it, which is probably a little bit different than what you may hear from other guests on the show is because, Dom, we're not Home Depot or every Home Depot looks the same. Every McDonald's looks the same. Every Chick Fil A looks the same. Every one of our clients is different. We have private clubs, public clubs, clubs that charge $25 and clubs that charge $200. So what we do is we actually take the DNA of the club, and we start building customer systems or CX systems off of the DNA of the club. So if you and I said, Hey, Gautam, let's go play golf at a $100 golf course. You and I walk in there and the stuff that I'm going to work on, Dom, is going to be, we're grabbing bags in the parking lot. We're going to bring beer on a tray with a napkin serve from there right, right. So we build different CX experiences at each club based on the club's DNA. And that's what we train the frontline team to do. And then we sprinkle in all those fancy little, what some people call surprise and delight moments. And that's where the EX and the CX combine.

Related Article: AI in Customer Experience and Employee Experience: Finding Balance

Measuring Success in Employee Experience

Dom: Wonderful how you explain that because, at some point, you're going to have to measure that to the success. I mean, I think it's easier, it seems easier anyway, to measure things in the CX world, you've got sales, you've got surveys, maybe, customer experience, anecdotes, just walking around the courses and talking to people you can measure. And by the way, customers will tell you how they feel. 

Gautam: Absolutely. Oh, yes.

Dom: You can measure it with that data, employee surveys and data, though that's hard to come by. Right. It seems hard to come by anyway, like, employees are quiet. They're reserved. I mean, I don't want to say that I might get in trouble. So when you're trying to build that frontline experience, for the employees, for the staff, how do you at the end of the day measure that? 

Gautam: Well, there's a couple of ways that we do it, actually. So when you first join the company, you go through a pretty good orientation process, it's a weird word, but orientation, right? And we've got this, you get your name tag, you get your uniform, you get this little Tervis tumbler like you get all this cool swag, right? And you're like, Yeah, I'm Bobby Jones, and I'm this. But ultimately, what the onboarding process for us is, we actually do a cultural onboarding, which basically what we say is, you're being onboarded, you work for Bobby Jones, but you work at this property, right? So it's an interesting way of doing things. 

After that onboarding program goes through, we actually reach out to all the new employees, we, I shouldn't say all we probably reach out to, I would say a large majority of them through a program that we actually run through the office, and we just call you, and we say, hey, Dom, how's your experience going at your club? And you say, ah so far, so good, or maybe not great? And we'll say, Hey, did you by the way, did you go through the orientation? Yes, I did. What did you learn? I learned this? Are you making friends? Right? Are you feeling like you're doing work that's got some real meaning behind it. 

So we do quite a bit of just phone calls and kind of reaching out now. We don't reach out. It's not me, it's typically somebody from our human resources department that does it. And you'll be surprised how honest people are when you get these kinds of calls. So we definitely measure employee satisfaction very early on in the onboarding process, right off the bat, we get you within a couple of weeks, and it's like, Hey, how are things going? Right? We do a lot of that. 

The other thing we do is we do have a survey that we send out, the survey’s OK, and I never feel like surveys are the greatest things. But I can tell you, Dom, probably the best thing we do is at all of our general managers and department heads, they get a really good feel of how people are doing because of the programs that we put into place. You know, they're constantly asking how people are. But I would say the number one answer to your question is the reduction in turnover, when you start seeing employees that leave for the summer, because they're going back to school, but they want to come back, when you start seeing department head turnover, which are your key leaders not turning as often as they used to. That's a showing that the culture is breaking through. The purpose is breaking through that EX is really strong. So our turnover rate has really reduced itself after we introduced this program several years ago.

Related Article: What's Love Got to Do With Customer and Employee Experience?

Employee Feedback Spurs Meaningful Changes

Dom: Yeah so a lot of its employee retention is a metric you guys feel that's very important, which makes sense to me. With the employees, can you remember an example or two where employee feedback, as part of one of those phone calls you make about employee experience, sort of led to change? I would love it if Jimmy who makes $11, $12, $13 an hour actually had some input that went through corporate and actually produced some actionable change.

Gautam: Absolutely. And I give you this example because it hits home to me every time I even tell the story. I promise I won't be crying, but it's a pretty good one. So we were doing some work at a club in Nisswa, Minnesota, which is so far north, it's summer for like two weeks out of the year. That's all fine. But it's a resort. It's the biggest resort in all of Minnesota, believe it or not. It's called Grand View Resort, Grand View Spa and Resort. And we were doing consulting work up there and they have four or five restaurants. They've got two golf courses. They've got a spa, they've got a little chocolate shop. They've got a hotel, they've got two hotels, actually. They've got timeshares the whole nine yards, right. So I'm up there and we're talking about CX and we're talking about EX and we're building these systems for every single department to be able to improve their customer service. And one of the last rounds I had was literally with the property group. So these are the guys that are picking up trash. These are the people that are cleaning the bathrooms in the common areas. These are the people that are waxing the floor.

Related Article: Improving Employee Experience in the Hybrid Work Era: Blum's Story

Employee Ideas Enhance Guest Experience

Dom: They have the most such an important job in a place like that. Because what did people say in those reviews? It was dirty. 

Gautam: Right? 

Dom: That's what they say. 

Gautam: So you got this group of people that are so undervalued in a way, right? As far as like when you hear the applause. It's typically for the people that come in contact with the guests, right? That's where you get the applause when you go back home, and you had a great time. You're like, Oh, my waitress, Judy did a great job. And she was the greatest server ever, right? No one's ever saying, I use the restroom, or I went to the beach, I didn't do all those things, right. So I'm sitting in this room, and there's about 50 of them. And we're talking about all these different things, and one guy just raises his hand and goes, Gautam, I'll tell you what you can do for me. I want a book of maps, so that when I see people getting lost, I can walk up to them, hand them a map and say, Here's how you get to where you get. And he goes, I would love to have just a bag of lollipops or something. He goes, I see these kids all day long. And I'd love to be able to just make somebody's day. And I was like, this is brilliant, because this is what they need to feel valued, right. And when they feel valued, all of that EX value goes directly to the consumer. Because now when little Joey's out there on the skating rink, and he's knocking his hockey puck around. But Pauley, the landscaper comes up and he's like, Hey, guys, here's a couple of lollipops for you to have, have a great rest of your day. The parents are like on cloud nine, right? So I always think of that story, because these are the people you don't think about right? Usually like what can the cart attendant do? Or what can the line cook do? And all of a sudden, it's like, this guy story hit home to me like never before? 

Introvert Employee Sparks Inspiring Change

Dom: Yeah, it's such a good example. And now I feel like I'm on “Undercover Boss” right now. Right? You're the boss, you're talking. Let's seriously though that show, we make fun of it. But it's a great show. It's all about employee experience and customer experience, and how those two worlds mesh for that employee to be passionate about wanting to do more. That's magical, right? Is not just going through the motions picking up trash and cutting grass, they actually want to go above and beyond. That's a great example.

Gautam: It was incredible. It was, I'll give you one more if I can real quick. So you know, in our world, just like any world, right? You have introverts, you have extroverts. And the extroverted kids and I say kids, because a lot of our teams are made up of young kids that kind of come and go through their high school and college years. So I always get an opportunity to talk about how do you engage with the guests, right? How do you do it? And I met this kid, he's from Atlanta, I met him and he was like, the most shy kid, the most shy kid you've ever seen in your life, right? And I'm trying to give this kid examples of blah, blah, blah, here's what you do, blah, blah, blah, here's what you do in Disney World, you're on stage. And he's looking at me like, Hey, old man, I don't even know what you're talking about with the stage thing. But I guarantee you, if I put the goofy mask over my head, I'd be way more extroverted. If you gave me something to hide myself, right. So fast forward, about a month later, I see this kid and, Dom, he is killing it out there. I was like, Mikey, what happened? He goes, sir, I realized that all I need to do is go onto ESPN.com every single morning, get a good look at what the scores of the games were. And I'm gonna keep saying the same thing to every customer that I grab a bag for I'm gonna say, Hey, did you watch the Braves game last night, they won seven to six. And I said, brilliant. He took something so small, because he wanted to be engaged with the customer. He figured out a way to do it. He's still an introverted kid. But he figured out how to do that. And I tell that story all the time, like I am today. Because that's all it takes is a little bit of inspiration from somebody and I can spread the word to everybody who's out there introverted or extroverted.

Dom: It's a big moment for an introvert to engage with another human. Right? 

Gautam: Yeah.

Revamped CX Approach Boosts Golf Course Appeal

Dom: And for him to want to do that. And use a technique to do that to make him more comfortable. That's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Let's move to the customer side and talk about an example. They're like, kind of like the same question, where can you illustrate a moment where customer experience was, you know, lacking? And in something data, or experiences or feedback from customers told you something or some of the employees were talking about experience of the customers? The two examples you gave just now kind of like that, too. But a big one where sort of a CX approach was revamped. What was the problem and sort of why was it revamped if you have one of the top you had? 

Gautam: So we do just like any other company, we do secret shoppers. And what I'll tell you my problem with the secret shopper is, is let's just say you're Dom Nicastro and you're a multi multi millionaire and you come and play one of our golf courses. And the problem a guy like me has with a guy like you sometimes is, I'm never going to reach your expectations because you think everything should be perfect, because that's what you're used to. Right? So a lot of times those guest surveys are a little bit wonky, based on the expectation. I'm not saying they're irrelevant, and they're bad, but that they're a little bit difficult to kind of quantify as far as, I'm never going to reach your elevated level of service desired. 

One of the things we do have in the company is we actually do a guest experience audit. So what that means is it puts us on the employee side, not from a product standpoint, necessarily, but from an experience standpoint, which means when you walked into the golf shop, was the gentleman sitting on a stool? Or was he standing at attention? Right? Did he greet you right away? Or did it take a long time? When you got to the First Tee? Was it a lot of rules? Or was it a lot more like, Guys, you're going to have a great time out here today, when really we look at it from the other side, right. And so when you do an audit like that, Dom, you actually get to see what the guests are experiencing. 

And then you can start throwing really cool customer experience things in there. So the example really is something I talked about a little while ago, is these mango scented towels, believe it or not, listen in Florida, it's a million degrees, it's a million degrees outside, right, it's a million degrees, you know, your pricing everything super low. I mean, you got these people that are charging, like 80% off the greens fees. And what you're realizing is, these people will come out on the golf course, if you can figure out a way to cool it down for them. And this simple conversation was literally people walking in wearing white shirts, and they're soaking wet through it, right. And they're like, oh, man, we really wish you had more coolers on the golf course, or more water fountains on the golf course. And you're thinking, OK, how's a better way for me to beat this. And the best way to beat this is by saying, we're gonna have a guy who's going to go around the golf course, and you're gonna see him every three or four holes, and he's gonna give you this cold ice towel that smells like mangos. And when you implement something like that, now, back to the first conversation we had, I guarantee you, because of that experience, I can probably charge you and I'm not the economics guy. But I can probably charge you $2 more for that round of golf, just because I added that experience. And so that feedback was literally a bunch of people we’re watching walk in the golf shop going, it's hot, it's hot, it's hot. And I'm going how do we cool this thing down for people? Here's how we're going to cool it down. We're going to cool it down by doing these towels. Yeah, and all of a sudden, a million more golfers are going to come and play necessarily not. But is that guy going to come back in the summer? Yeah, he is. 

First Steps for Effective CX-EX Audits

Dom: Yeah. All right, the wife and kids are in the middle of a road trip. So let's wrap this up. I'm someone let's say I'm a customer experience leader. And I just feel like our employee experience needs work or that audit someone that's in the beginning of an audit phase looking at themselves, or whether it's golf course, whether it's any hospitality, whether it's any business, what's the first couple of steps if they want to do one of these CX-EX audits with the goal of actually building a framework that the two functions actually do work together.

Gautam: So the first thing that we did, and again, my recommendation here is to number one, look at it, take the employee journey first. Put yourself in the shoes of an employee, for X amount of days, whatever that takes. Watch where they park, watch how they walk in, watch how they do their job, because you're going to learn so many things based on what the employees go through on their entire journey. So you're going from orientation to the time that they clock out, what does that even look like? Right?

So once you figure that out, then you flip it and you go, now I'm going to look at it from the customer standpoint, what is the phone call sound like? What is the welcome sound like, what does all of its sound like? And when you start looking at both sides, separately, you figure out ways to make it better, you figure out what it is. I mean, there's literally things, Dom, that I've looked at over the years about just how we train the employees, sometimes how we train the employees used to be really weak, you know, it was really not well done. It was just here's a nametag and a shirt and go follow Peter around. And that doesn't make any sense, right? So really what you got to do, like I said, you start with the employees and build a customer journey for the employees because I think a lot of people in my position focus so heavily on the customer journey for the customer. And they forget about who's actually delivering that experience. 

Dom: Right. 

Gautam: So the first thing is employee experience. What does it look like, from orientation to the day they leave? What does that whole experience look like? And then you go on the back end of that and you say, OK, let me follow what the customer goes through. And then you start blending all that stuff together. And then obviously, and this goes without saying but, man, I would say, listening to both parties is extremely important. You could figure out a way to get all the ideas from the customers, a lot of those things, you know, you can't pay for it. It's too expensive, blah, blah, blah. But man, just listening to the employees and the burdens that they have, are going to go a long way. A lot of that listening is part of that, like I said, that employee journey, I absolutely start with employees first, and then I make my way to the customers.

Golf Industry's Unique Hands-On CX-EX Approach

Dom: Yeah, and you're listening journey sounds like it's very hands on, like, it's very one to one calls with employees kind of thing. Do you find yourself in a position ever to have to measure that stuff digitally? Like, on scale, like, OK, we need to send out a massive survey blast and then upload it to our customer data platform, that kind of thing? Or you guys seem like you're truly hands on with each client?

Gautam: Yeah, we're more hands on, I think I should have said this way in the beginning, the golf business is one of the most archaic businesses you'll ever be a part of. Right? I mean, it literally took all the airlines and all the hotels to be able to book online before we were like, OK, I guess we'll do it too. Because we don't know. I mean, again, in our world, it was very different. We're just really in the last, you know, I don't want to say a year or two. But I would say in the last 10 years, we've started to get a little bit more into the technology. You can book online, now you can do all the things, you're starting to see the top golf and all the stuff that's coming out there. But nah, I would say, Dom, right now we do employee surveys, we get data, we kind of break down the data and see how things are going. But like I said, I think we do not have a very strong like, technologically based data capturing of really breaking it down, I would say, we're so into the people. And every club is individual, right? So it makes it a little bit different. 

Frontline Focus in Employee-Customer Experience

Dom: I totally get that. Well, it's good to hear even our digital customer experience leaders that are listening to this still get a heck of a lot of actionable tips and advice from this talk. So we appreciate you letting us into that world and, and bringing us right onto the golf course really, literally, literally where we stand now. So we're gonna let you go with your wife and kids, get back on that holiday road trip. But before you go, any place you feel like listeners can follow you. Are you doing any sort of blogging or thought leadership or you just kind of chiming in on important experience topics of the day on LinkedIn?

Gautam: Yeah, I do some work on LinkedIn. I have this just the minute moment that I do. And it really one of our training platforms is JUST and stands for Jones University Service Training like Bobby Jones, but it was kind of birthed out of the whole man, when you ask people what do they do for a living? They're like, Hey, I'm just a line cook. You know, I'm just this, I'm just that and I'm like, man, you're just the most important people in the whole entire company. You're doing all this heavy lifting, you know? 

So I do a video on Mondays. It's nothing crazy. It's just my thoughts. It's random thoughts. And I do, I'm lucky enough to do some podcasts with gentleman like you. I go speak every once in a while at different CX conferences. But Nah, man, I'm far less of a pontificater about this stuff. Because my job is literally building the systems. And one of the parts of my job I love is closing the restaurant down early and literally doing employee training on how do you make the table look, how do you greet the guests? I always take lottery tickets with me, we give out lottery tickets, we make it fun. 

But like I said, I'm way more hands on. I'm far from the technology guy, but I dibble dabble here and there. So that's why I dig stuff like this. But I'm a big proponent of the frontline team. I was part of that frontline team for so long and my business 90% of our company is made up of people who make less than $20 an hour. 

Dom: Such a good point. 

Gautam: Do the math on that right. If 90% of your company is not key leaders, who's the most important person and that's what I love to preach, man, I am all about that dude hustling out there, grabbing bags, slinging beer, giving out hamburgers for eight bucks an hour trying to make it go and those people are so important. So like I said, I'm not a pontificater on that. But I love getting in the trenches with them. 

Dom: Gautam Patankar. We appreciate you coming on CX Decoded. Very much so and hey, I wouldn't rule out more pontification after people listen to this. I gotta get that guy on my podcast. 

Gautam: Right? Right. 

Dom: We beat him to it though. 

Gautam: So I appreciate it very much. I always tell people whenever I get on stuff like this, thanks for taking the chance on a golf guy in a golf company and not somebody from some fancy company that's on the New York Stock Exchange because I think some of us get it too. And we do a lot of that heavy lifting, but I'm thankful for this and appreciate the friendship.

Dom: All right, you too. 

We encourage you to drop us a line at [email protected] And if you have comments or suggestions for a future podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Additionally, if you liked what you hear, please post a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you may be listening to this. And be sure to share CX Decoded with anyone that you think might benefit from these types of Conversations. Finally, be sure to follow us on Twitter @CMSWire. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.