Q: To kick off, it would be great to learn a little bit more about your career, and how you came to be in a CX role

A: I came into CX from a marketing background. There are different paths to CX, customer service being one of them, process and process re-engineering being another.

My perspective then was more around the sales and marketing of customer experience, so how we do we get better insights to run better campaigns to get better ROI. And then it evolved to taking customer experience to a more strategic level – the more we know about a customer, the better experience we can provide, and you create that positive feedback loop.

That shifted my eyes toward customer experience as a discipline, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out more about it and understand how it can make a genuine difference to businesses.

What do you love most about your job and working in CX?

I love the fact that if you do it right you can really make a difference, both for your internal and external customers. When you have success in customer experience, you are genuinely making a difference to people’s lives while getting a business outcome.

I think it’s clear we need a balance between pure bottom-line outcomes and customer outcomes, and that’s where I think a stronger customer experience discipline will help balance and find those win-win opportunities.

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

Last year was difficult and for many people it took away some of the safety nets around how the world worked whether it’s their own personal employment or how society at large works. But it is also presenting a once in a century type opportunity to drive change.

In a period of disruption, there is the opportunity to drive change at a much quicker pace. As customer experience leaders we should be agents of change within our organisations, so even if it’s scary, we should be walking into 2021 with a sense of optimism that this is the year when leaps forward can happen.

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

I love the fact that if you do it right you can really make a difference, both for your internal and external customers. When you have success in customer experience, you are genuinely making a difference to people’s lives while getting a business outcome.

I think it’s clear we need a balance between pure bottom-line outcomes and customer outcomes, and that’s where I think a stronger customer experience discipline will help balance and find those win-win opportunities.

What’s the biggest thing that you learnt from 2020?

I think the biggest thing I learnt is that change is a constant, and the biggest determinator of outcomes is your attitude. A lot of people have been disrupted and the industry they’re working in has completely changed. There are still people doing amazing things and growing and innovating in those areas, and it may sound like a cliché but it’s the mindset they have around ‘is this change going to happen to me, or am I going to be the driver of that change?’. And sometimes it’s taking risky and brave moves, but sometimes it’s just investing in being patient with yourself too.

It’s been really inspiring to see so many people jumping on development and upskilling platforms and doing continuous improvement, and yes there are people out of work but they’re using that time to reskill or upskill.

So I think that the lesson of 2020 for me is never stop working, never be complacent with where you are, and continuously look for opportunities to change for the better.

What would you say has been your biggest achievement or proudest moment?

There are two different buckets. I was with me past employer for eleven years, and the thing that I’m ultimately most proud of when I look back is the team that I helped develop. Seeing them grown has been amazingly rewarding.

The other is from finding an opportunity that improves the employee experience, the customer experience and the commercial outcomes for the business. I’ve been fortunate to have a couple of those throughout my career so far. In my new role I’m just about to launch an initiative where you can just feel the excitement from knowing that people will see a tangible outcome straight away.

What’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever received?

My previous leader was clear on the need to be brave, and to trust and believe in yourself. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the last 24 months, it’s to back myself and trust my own voice a lot more, and to care less about what people are saying when you have a new, innovative idea.

As customer experience professionals we’re all about feedback, feedback, feedback but sometimes it is better to wait until you’ve had a chance to workshop an idea through your own mind. It’s about being able to back yourself more and really push for what you believe in, and not to fear negative feedback to your ideas, particularly early on. We need to really push the agenda because sometimes some of the things we talk about in CX are not easy to change.

How do you continue to put the customer at the centre of everything you do?

Face time and getting out there. Post COVID, it’s even more important to get back into customer environments whether that’s a physical retail store or looking at user behaviour on the website. You must get on the frontline and spend enough time with both the customers and the people who are serving your customers, and that has to be a real commitment.

It’s also about the attitude that you bring to that kind of engagement, actively listening and not judging, and taking the opportunity to understand why things are the way they are. Typically what we say is “we need to improve how friendly our people are to customers”, but it’s looking at why they’re not friendly that’s important – is it how they were staffed or how they were trained, are some of our processes broken, are systems so old that everything takes 3 times as long as it should and our own team get frustrated?

Sometimes it’s about just coming in, being present, and listening to our people that are usually serving our customers. And if you have the opportunity, nothing beats talking to customers daily. Having feedback is great, voice of customer programmes are a must, but nothing replaces face time.

What piece of advice would you give to fellow CX leaders about being the best CX professional they can be?

Broaden the tribe that we speak to. To push customer experience we’re going to need to become best friends with departments like legal and finance, and we have to talk about experience in a different sort of way. I’m currently building up my own knowledge and skillset around those areas so we can have those conversations in a different way.

We need to continue to move away from a soft art to a hard science, and the more we can have conversations with those who have power at the table, the more impactful we’ll be as a community. That’s one of the big watch outs to ensure CX doesn’t become a flavour of the month, or something that’s attached to HR or marketing as a campaign. It needs to be embedded as a permanently value adding function.