As a long-time leader in the customer experience management business, Rob Rush has come to understand quite a bit about how people think, act, and communicate. His company, LRA Worldwide, focuses on the hospitality, travel, and sports and entertainment industries, working with everyone from the NBA to Starwood Hotels to figure out what keeps their customers happy and how to create the best possible experience for customers. In the 20 years since he co-founded LRA, Rush has grown the company from a mostly North American client base to a truly global business that now counts international clients as about a third of its business. In Rush’s business, not only is it crucial to meet his clients face-to-face, it’s absolutely necessary for him and his staff to immerse themselves in the worlds of their clients’ customers. Winning the British Airways Business Opportunity Grant and Face-to-Face award in the past year made it possible for LRA to open up offices in Beijing and Singapore, greatly expanding their business in Asia Pacific. Rush talked to us about that process, why he puts an emphasis on meeting clients in person, and just how important it is for his company to be embedded in the culture in which it’s doing business.
Tell me a bit about your business—what exactly is customer experience management?
I describe LRA as a research and consulting company focused on customer experience management. We do customer satisfaction research to help clients improve the customer experience. So for a hotel, for example, we might help improve the reservation experience, for an airline we’d help with the in-flight experience, and so on. We started the company 20 years ago and now have about 160 employees and a global business. We’re working with clients in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Our focus is on the hospitality, travel, sports and entertainment industries, so we work with the NBA, NFL, airports, hotel companies (mostly high end lines like Starwood), and car rental companies.
Is it standard practice in your industry to meet with clients face-to-face before starting a relationship?
I wouldn’t say it’s standard, but it’s something we do in our company because it’s our desire—we believe that face-to-face interaction is important. I’m always telling my staff, you have to get out of office and get in front of people. Ultimately people do business with people they like, in person. That has always been my philosophy, both in starting business and now in growing the business. Could we pick up business without that? Perhaps. I’m sure that’s happened once or twice when we’ve been highly recommended by somebody, but even in those cases we like to meet and make sure we establish a good relationship. And we need to make sure we like them and want to do business with them, too.
How have you used your grant tickets?
Where the free tickets from British Airways have really helped the most is in growing our business in Asia Pacific. We were able to establish offices in Asia, attend client pitches, attend trade shows and conferences, and interview prospective employees.
Why is travel so important for your business?
As US-based company, for the first 10 years or so, we did most of our business in North America. Now about a third is international. To understand regional attitudes, customs and personality types, you absolutely have to immerse yourself in a place, get to know the people, how they act, their customs, lexicon, verbiage, dialogue. I call this the “bucket of intangibles”—it’s all part of how humans process emotion and engagement. Being able to learn how to engage people in different cultures has been the biggest part of being successful for us. You can’t just push an American viewpoint on everyone. Sometimes we benefit by being American because the perception of America is that we have an innovative business culture—for better or worse, we’re thought of by most of the world as innovative risk-takers and that’s generally admired. But at the end of the day each country and culture has a way of doing business and the best way to figure that out is to immerse yourself in their culture.
Your business is interesting in that you need to not only understand your client, but also their customers. How does travel play into that side of things?
Our whole business is about understanding how humans interact with products and brands and people so to be able to get out and see and touch and understand is critical. If you think about the travel space, for example, and compare customer expectations it really varies from place to place. The expectations in North America are very different from those in Asia, for example, and we really need to understand those sorts of things in order to serve our clients. We’ve discovered, by being immersed in Asia, for example, that the Chinese expect much higher levels of service and pandering than Europeans and Westerners for the most part, especially the more affluent customers.
Have changes in your industry or in the world at large changed how you do business over the last 20 years?
There are always changes, but as far as travel goes, ultimately I’m a believer that people need to travel. It’s in our DNA. Notwithstanding the recession, you can’t do everything through a phone or teleconference. Travel is necessary not just because it’s good business but because it’s in our nature. That’s why I think you’re seeing business travel starting to come back. You’ll see conferences and retreats coming back, too. People need to get together and we need to experience new things. We’re explorers by nature.
