---
title: "How a Trip to France Will Change Your Customers' Experience"
url: https://stacklist.com/card/d6582852-8762-41c8-9dfc-d42b47661f97
source_url: "https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-trip-france-change-your-customers-experience-david-m-aferiat/?trackingId=HFwq%2BAgkQ%2B2%2BoxBcyU6UUg%3D%3D"
stack: https://stacklist.com/c/education/stack/3701d09f-5d84-426c-aef0-e129d294445b
summary: "Transforming Customer Experience explores how cross-functional team roles at Trade Ideas led to the creation of \"Surf Mode,\" a dynamic feature that improved user engagement by replacing static chart views with continuously changing market insights. The article demonstrates how stepping into colleagues' roles, inspired by a vacation in France, can drive organizational innovation and break through operational obstacles."
tags: "customer-experience, organizational-learning, innovation, team-dynamics, fintech, trade-ideas, cross-training"
key_entities: "Trade Ideas (organization), Dan Mirkin (person), Barrie Einarson (person), Ryan Pearson (person), France (location), Paris (location), Vancouver (location), Israel (location), Jerusalem (location), Surf Mode (technology), Actionable Intelligence (technology), cross-functional-learning (concept), French Open (event), New England Patriots (organization), Yad Vashem (location)"
classification: "analysis"
content_hash: "sha256:7015768c52fd8d78dc63b9785acdf2161371f7e8b94fd2593d700534b96376cb"
acp_version: "0.2"
token_counts_approximate: 1204
visibility: public
agent_accessible: true
status: "final"
---

# How a Trip to France Will Change Your Customers' Experience

Photo by @atl10trader, https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmarcel/34887535584/in/album-72157682731477492/ Last week we took a giant leap forward in improving the current customer experience at Trade Ideas and it came somewhat accidentally when my Co-Founder and partner, Dan Mirkin, filled in for one of our colleagues who joined me one evening during our overlapping vacations in France. What we learned from team members stepping into each other's roles can help you and your organization break through obstacles (known and unknown) as well. I connected with Barrie Einarson at Trade Ideas who was visiting Paris from Vancouver with his lovely wife. We had dinner at a new restaurant, called NOLA, along the canals of St. Martin. Image: Le chef Ryan Pearson, NOLA , 72 Quai de Jemmapes. Photo Donald Van Der Putten Barrie expertly moderates the free Trade Ideas Traders' Room each day during market hours . Average attendance in the room is 500+ and growing. To keep things on track and on topic Barrie firmly steers the conversation to market opportunities and changes the view of his screenshare by scrolling through charts discussing different trading scenarios . He's a 1 of a kind that makes Trade Ideas technology come alive for those in the room deciding on whether to subscribe to the Actionable Intelligence Trade Ideas publishes. Before hired by Trade Ideas, Barrie was a customer who created his own position by demonstrating a better ability to answer support forum questions than us! With Barrie out on vacation, Dan agreed to open the room each day. However, with little time to moderate much less scroll through different set-ups, the screenshare was often static for hours - not very engaging to an audience accustomed to crisp, color commentary on the market's activity. Dan's inspiration was to task development to create a "Surf Mode" to continually surface interesting activity monitored by Trade Ideas' A.I. Periodically the Surf Mode changes Trade Ideas' charts, annotated visually with trade plan parameters like Profit Targets, Smart Stop Losses, etc. The experience changes from reading a book to watching a movie. What was a problem experiencing a static view of the technology, is now a changing, dynamic path towards further innovation as we work to improve the A.I. logic behind the next opportunity shown to each subscriber. The New England Patriots under Coach Belichick at one point used to have players learn the key aspects of other positions to not only substitute there in case of injury, but to bring new understanding of their main role from a different perspective . I now see the big advantage of doing this in an organization of any size. Thank you France, but I won't wait until the next vacation to apply this lesson! Quick backstory: Our recent family vacation in France & Israel saw my two young daughters play virtual tennis matches at the French Open, consider the abstract art at the Centre Pompidou (interesting selfies ensued), as well as plant trees in Israel, float in the Dead Sea, and visit Holy sites in Jerusalem. The trip's theme was about connections - with an employee who I don't get a chance to see often - and much more. We connected with elements of our family heritage, connected with friends and family, and solemnly felt the historical impact one connection we made among the places we visited. While visiting Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial museum, my 13 year old and I noted on a wall sized list of concentration camp victims from Paris, that a 16 year old boy who perished was taken from a house two doors down from our Airbnb rental where we stayed days before. Feel free to share a similar experience in the comments below. Thanks. About Trade Ideas LLC Trade Ideas creates actionable market intelligence for institutions, advisors, and self-directed investors to make consistently informed decisions mitigating risk and capturing alpha. As a SaaS Fintech innovator for over 13 years, Trade Ideas leverages algorithms derived from recursive, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence to develop trade plans and produce statistically tested, optimized performance results. Trade Ideas' inputs include Big Data sets from U.S. and Canadian market feeds, technical, fundamental, and non-structured data sets such as news and social media. Trade Ideas' client base is from around the world totaling more than 8,000 with operations in the U.S., Canada, China, and Europe. Sign up to receive Trade Ideas’  Trade of the Week  every Monday with the trade details, charts, and the reason it’s chosen.  Next step: Schedule a demo or find out more about Trade Ideas LLC by calling (760) 230-0713 or visiting  http://www.trade-ideas.com/professional/ . Twitter:  http://twitter.com/TradeIdeas