A Note from YCASTR Founder, Pat Perdue
"We're Here to Make Things Better"
Solutions to difficult problems often come out of a convergency of smaller solutions to seemingly unrelated problems. YCASTR is one such example, having arisen from the solutions of seemingly different problems and realizations, occurring over different periods in a long-spanning career.
Let me tell you about source #1: I'm passionate about the art, and science, of measurable organizational results. Whether it's sales, C-SAT scores, or customer retention, I've had a career-long curiosity about what it was that made some companies wildly successful, and other companies less so. That curiosity has given me a very successful careers in Sales, Sales Training, and Customer Experience consulting. Today, my company, Socialicity Media, has worked with some of the best known brands in the world, helping them remove barriers toward improving key results.
Source #2: When I left my job at DraftFCB (as it was known then) and first started Socialicity, many, or quite possibly all, of my employee-friends took me aside and confessed how miserable they were in their jobs. They felt disconnected from the overall mission of the company. They despised getting company emails (which they never read), and subsequently felt out of the loop on their company's direction and purpose, and, by extension, their own direction and purpose. I craved a way to make things better for them, while sparing them the risks of leaping into the unknown of self-employment. They deserved to be happy, and engaged, in their job, and it pained me that I couldn't help them in a meaningful way.
Source #3: My passion for Customer Experience is such that I even have a podcast about it: Pat Perdue's Customer Experience Podcast. You can access it on iTunes here. While the intent of that podcast was to uncover the magic "thing" that companies do to create remarkable customer experience, the outcome of my podcast interviews was surprising. I discovered two things: Podcasts are an incredible way to communicate passion and transparency. In fact, podcasts that lack either of those ingredients are boring audio versions of emails and books. On the other hand, podcasts that are both passionate, and transparent in their content, are completely and utterly addictive (Here's a list of some of my favourites). Another thing I learned from my podcast interviews was more along the lines of the subject of the show. I found that incredible customer experience comes less from the right reports and the right meetings, and more from the right organizational culture. To simplify it a bit: Happy employees make for successful companies. And while it's entirely possible that happy employees can work for an unsuccessful company (lots of factors go into a company's success, after all), the converse is almost entirely never true. Miserable employees sell less, go above-and-beyond less often, and actually often resent their customers, leading to predictably poor results in every measure possible.
Which brings us to the point of convergence. A passion for customer experience and sales results, meets an understanding that podcast technology used properly can engage an audience like no other medium, and a realization that the shortest distance to great sales and CX comes from having a team of employees who are well-informed, and passionately engaged.
Welcome to YCASTR. We're here to make things better.
