A CX and customer insights conversation with… series will feature video interviews with leaders in CX and customer insights, sharing learnings, trends and challenges from some of the region’s leading organisations.

What do you love most about working in CX?

N: Well, I’m a psychologist and a technologist. So CX, for me is a lovely collision between the two, and is always an endlessly fascinating area in terms of people battling technologies in order to get what they need from organisations, and then often organisations battling technologies in order to serve customers. So it’s a fantastic area when you’re a people person.

What are you most excited about over the next 12 months?

N: The next 12 months, I think, are going to be an interesting and challenging 12 months, so not only do we have sort of a lot of things to decide about hybrid working, for example, so trying that. Certainly we’re looking at in certain parts of the world, including mine, probably a recession, which brings with it anxious customers. And we’ve already seen a sort of buildup of anger in customers over the pandemic. But when you have anxious and angry customers, obviously, the pressure is very much on your agents and your frontline staff to be able to deal with that. And of course, they need to be able to deal with it as well. So hybrid working as well, adding a little bit of extra complication in there in terms of communities and support. And how do we support people doing an increasingly complex and emotive job to do that job? I think it’s gonna be an interesting 12 months.

What are the most pressing challenges facing CX leaders today? 

N: I think the most pressing challenges, I mean, it’s doing more for less. But to be honest, we’ve been trying to do that for a long time in the CX world. So inevitably, I don’t think budgets are going to be booming, I think, often, particularly on customer service, we often see that people don’t regard it as a cost centre, it’s a cost centre, not something that makes money which actually is crazy, because it does make money. If you provide bad service, inevitably, your customers often leave you. So I think it’s that sort of how do we move it into a profit centre mindset rather than a cost centre mindset. And in that way, we ended up not having to continuously battle cost cutting, there needs to be investment, for sure, I think we’re going to see a lot more automation, but we’re all kind of at the bleeding edge of that. Often, it’s, it’s the frontline functions that get automated, I think we’re also getting a certainly our research is showing that maybe some of that automation isn’t working as well as it should.

So the sort of the digital side of CX, I think is going to mature in terms of how do we deliver a great experience? How do we connect that into the human when that digital experience apps fails? And bots being a good example of that? So how do you then transfer it seamlessly, hopefully into a human interaction? And I think that’s where often, if you’re looking at the bot experience, for example, that’s where a lot of the backlash is. It’s because it’s disconnected to the customer has to start again, if the bot fails. So how do we make sure that that’s connected together? How do we transfer the conversation across? How do we skill space routes, all of that stuff, to make it a very, very much seamless interaction from a human perspective?

What’s your one key piece of advice to CX leaders?

N: My one key piece of advice, I guess, is always know thy customer, for they are not your myself, which is something I’ve always said. And I think from a CX perspective, we’ve always kind of thought customer first, but that isn’t necessarily what the organisation broadly thinks. So we think as CX people, I think we need to act as customer champions. But we also need to articulate the fact that customers are very different and we can’t just say do a one size fits all solution and assume it’s going to fit everybody so you know, in terms of accessibility and inclusion, certainly we need to think about how do we create those experiences for all customers rather than necessarily a small niche so yes, know thy customer.

What has been your proudest moment in your career so far?

N: Oh, my proudest moment, I guess I mean, selfishly, it’s it’s, it’s getting my PhD, which btw, very kindly sponsored, but I slightly crazily decided I was going to do in two years, part time, which is I wouldn’t recommend it. It nearly killed me. But, you know, I felt like I climbed a really, really high mountain. But I have to say that when you get to the top and you put that little flag in it felt great. So yeah, I think getting my PhD was my proudest moment. And by the way, my PhD was around contact centres. So I looked at, again, a fusion of technology and people looking at how do you motivate contacts Enter agents by using technology. And yeah, there’s there’s a lot of things you shouldn’t shouldn’t do. Some of the obvious ones like gamification doesn’t necessarily work. But getting into the deeper psychology of what really does motivate people and creating those communities with hoping to help people get through a very tough job. So yeah, that’s my proudest thing, getting my PhD.

What can Customer Connect attendees expect to learn from your session at the event?

N: My keynote is called “Taming the Zedonk”, and you’ll find out a little bit more about the fascinating animal that is this adult because it’s my favourite hybrid. And obviously, hybrid working is kind of the the buzzword of the moment. So it’s exploring the hybrid workspace, in particular, looking at the contact centre experience of hybrid. And I keep saying, you know, home working and contact centres. One of my first jobs in BT over 30 years ago, was was home working contact centre advisors. But it’s, I mean, then it was very expensive to do because we didn’t have technologies like, you know, connect basic connectivity. And we didn’t have the collaboration tools that we have. Now, when we didn’t have ploughed. So all of it had to be kind of manually built. And literally, we were digging people’s front gardens up. So I mean, the pandemics taught us an awful lot.

So what I’m going to talk about is we actually did a one year long study with agents, team leaders and centre managers get tried to capture their experience of the pandemic, but rather than dwell on that sort of go forward face and say, Well, what have we learned? How do we think the contact centre is going to be developing into the future? And in particular, how do we how do we make sure that hybrid working, if you want to go that way, which I think a lot of organisations are for many, many reasons. If we want to go that way, how do we make that work a lot better. So yeah, that’s basically hopefully you’ve learned how to tame the Zedonk.

Customer Connect, 10 November, will bring together 150 CX and customer insights professionals for a day of conference featuring inspiring international keynotes and the best local case studies.