Clare Muscutt talks with Anita Siassios, about Women in Cyber Security & building female communities
Episode #213 Show Notes
Clare Muscutt – host:
Welcome to the 13th episode of the second series of the Women in CX podcast, a series dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in customer experience. Listen in as we share our career stories, relive the moments that shaped us, and voice our opinions as loudly as we like about all manner of CX subjects.
I’ll be your host, Clare Muscutt, and in today’s episode I’ll be talking to a CX professional from Australia about CX in tech, the importance of communities for women, and the power of women supporting one another to succeed. Let me introduce you to today’s inspiring guest: she spent the best part of 30 years working for ANZ Bank in a range of technology and CX roles before starting her own CX consulting business specialising in cybersecurity; she’s leading the way in building communities for women in the space as the founder of Women in Cybersecurity Australia; and is working to create a more inclusive world for everyone.
Please welcome to the show our CX sister, Anita Siassios. Hey, Anita!
Anita Siassios:
Hello, Clare! G’day from Australia.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Ah, you’re my first guest from Australia on the Women in CX podcast. So, welcome!
Anita Siassios:
Thank you, Clare. Thank you for your leadership and for everything that you’re doing for women in CX.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Ah, you’re so welcome. And welcome to all the listeners at home, as well.
So, I’m really excited to have you on the show because we had our first conversation during lockdown when we were thinking about what we could do in terms of a podcast for women in CX in Australia, right?
Anita Siassios:
Absolutely.
Clare Muscutt – host:
So, it’s been a long time coming, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Today, we’re going to have a really interesting conversation about an area that CX doesn’t normally get talked about in, which is cybersecurity, but also, I know from our first conversation you do a lot for women in cybersecurity as a network and a community. And also, you’ve got some ambitions around what you can do to promote diversity and inclusion in Australia in terms of the indigenous population of women in tech.
Anita Siassios:
Indeed.
Clare Muscutt – host:
So, let’s crack on from that jumping-off point, then. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got into customer experience?
Anita Siassios:
Yes, indeed. Well, I guess the first thing I wanted to highlight was the fact that my background is Greek Australian; my parents migrated to Australia in 1956. And I grew up in small business, pretty much. At the age of 10, my dad said to me, ‘It’s time…’ I’m the oldest out of five children. He said, ‘It’s time to start to work in the shop and start serving customers.’ And that was at the age of 10, and I think that’s probably the key reason why I’m in this particular industry to date.
Following on from school, my first job was working in a bank in the customer service area, and I spent over 10 years working in that particular area. I then moved out into exploring other areas in the banks, and particularly in the technology space, and probably spent about 30 or so years in Australia’s financial institutions. But it was probably after about 20 years or so when I was in technology where I started to explore careers, and I discovered customer experience at that time. I remember, you know, I looked around and there was one or two customer experience managers, and now when you look around, everyone seems to have that title next to them. It just goes to show how important it is.
So, to date, I do spend a lot of time doing a lot of volunteering in several communities in addition to helping organisations uplift their capability with their leaders, doing a lot of training, but also helping organisations understand customer experience in different disciplines, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. But I do spend a lot of time supporting other communities and have also set up the CXPA Melbourne network and WiCyS, which we’ll talk a little bit about as well shortly.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Ah, I love it. Obviously, I’m a massive fan of communities, so…
Anita Siassios:
Absolutely! You’re a role model.
Clare Muscutt – host:
We are with you all the way on that one.
So, in terms of cybersecurity, now that is a really interesting space when it comes to customer experience. Can you tell us a little bit about the challenges that you faced in trying to bring customer experience to something typically very technology and data-oriented?
Anita Siassios:
Yes, indeed. I think it’s important to tell you, also, how I actually moved – sort of started to learn about the cybersecurity side of things. When I was working on an assignment at one of Australia’s large financial institutions, it was actually setting up a privacy centre of excellence, and during that period, I was involved in supporting a major data breach that had taken place. And what that means is that thousands of customers’ personal information was breached. And so, I got to actually see what it was like from a customer perspective – but also from an employee perspective and an organisational perspective – the actual impacts to customer experience.
And so, as a result of being part of that assignment, I started to explore why those things happened, and that’s when I started to get into the cybersecurity space. And again, very similar to the CXPA, I wanted to join an association to learn more and be part of a community. And again, WiCyS, which is actually headquartered in the United States, doesn’t actually exist in Australia, and so I took on the leadership and established WiCyS Australia, which we’ll talk a little bit about later on.
But cybersecurity is huge. It’s involving. A lot of organisations have now moved to becoming digital, you know, they’ve transitioned from the paper forms to being online. There’s a lot of operational efficiencies in becoming digital. However, there’s also the implications that if things are not actually set up securely, databases can be accessed, and they can be broken into. And, certainly, you know, customers filling in a form with personal information, they may not actually even know how that, where that data actually goes, etc. So, there’s lots of opportunities for customer data to be breached and accessed by malicious attackers, as well. So, from a CX leader perspective, what that means is that when something does go wrong, there’s implications, there’s reputational damage, there’s implications with regards to customers trusting your organisation. If you don’t actually show that you can – in the event of a breach – if you don’t show that you have actually been supportive in helping them move forward and try and reduce the anxiety after a breach and helping them identify where they can get some support, then you actually lose the trust.
And so, a lot of things have evolved. And as more regulations come, it’s a lot stricter in how we actually manage and maintain the personal information. I can go on and on, but I’ll be able to provide some really great articles for the listeners to be able to read, just some basic articles for CX leaders to understand and get more an appreciation around that.
Clare Muscutt – host:
So, you mentioned about being a board member at – how do you say it… WiCyS?
Anita Siassios:
WiCyS, that’s right. Women in Cybersecurity, WiCyS… ‘We sisters’. So, for Australia, I established the Australian affiliate, and we have a leadership team, and we actually have some – the leadership team is really made up of our membership representatives. And what I’ve learnt with regards to our local community and really helping women advance in that particular industry is that there’s a lot of students out there who are actually studying the IT side of things, and they need a lot of mentoring to be able to actually progress and gain a career and a job in this particular industry.
So, one of the things that a lot of the professionals, industry professionals, in the association really focus on is really helping those young ladies that are coming out of university to really help them progress in their careers. Because even at university, they’re a minority in the classes, very similar to how it is out in the industry.
But I think what is happening now, Clare, is that – and very similar to myself – is that in the industry, cybersecurity is really coming into play in different disciplines across organisations. So, for example, the legal team are very much getting involved into that space; the risk team get involved into it. And so, it’s really starting to spread across the organisation, and more women are now starting to move into the cybersecurity space.
It’s a new discipline that we have to all learn about, and even as CX leaders – Dr Linden Brown, who’s the author of ‘Customer-Centric Organisations’, has actually said that one of the key disciplines that we need to really also have as CXers is what he calls the peripheral vision. And the peripheral vision is looking at things such as technology, the things that can really go wrong, the economic implications that take place, and environmental… I mean, this year was a perfect example of, as a result of the pandemic, how things have actually changed and people’s behaviours. And everyone is now revising their CX strategy because what their customers did 12 months ago is no longer the case; everybody has changed in the way they actually do their shopping, etc.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah.
Anita Siassios:
So, I think, you know, there’s lots of reasons why we’re a minority at the moment, but I think that’s going to change drastically as we start to diversify this particular discipline across the organisation.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah, and it really resonated with me when you were saying about that political, economic, social, and technological landslide, I think, of a landscape change that we’ve seen in 2020, and how much that’s affected not only, I guess, customer experience strategy but business strategies more broadly.
Anita Siassios:
Yes, indeed.
Clare Muscutt – host:
It also resonated with me – I talk a lot about how technology is accelerating at a faster rate than customer experience. So, that point around needing to have better peripheral vision, I think, for customer experience professionals and for us as an industry, we must get better at understanding tech and areas such as this – security, data, GDPR – because without having those skills and expertise to bring into the places where technology is advancing fastest, we’re just going to get more products that are built based on business requirements and not customer ones into the future.
So, I just wanted to move onto talking about – we’ve talked about diversity and inclusion from a gender point of view with the stuff that you’re doing for women in cybersecurity, but what about the mission that you’re on to drive and support inclusion of indigenous Australians?
Anita Siassios:
Yes, indeed. And I guess this year, again, in particular it’s been a learning for me, Clare. You know, we all learnt a lot as a result of the Black Lives Matter that occurred in the United States.
But one of the – when we set up WiCyS in Australia, when we sat together and wanted to develop what our goals were going to be, we really wanted to – one of our goals is to actually make an impact and support indigenous women in cybersecurity from a career perspective.
So, as part of that, though, what we have actually also learnt is that a lot of the Aboriginal and indigenous women have a lot of responsibilities at a much younger age, so they’ll be looking after families and young children and being mothers as young as 18, so it’s such a young age. And what we’ve learned – or what I’ve learned – is that, as a result of that, they’ve been disadvantaged. And so, them being able to actually have a career or actually be employed has been a lot challenging for them, and especially up north in Australia. And when I started to hear those stories, I really started to feel, first of all, how fortunate I was in my situation, and that it was really up to me to really try and make a difference.
I wanted to show you this, actually: for the first time in 60 years, Vogue Australia has published a beautiful Aboriginal piece of art on the front page. It’s by Betty Muffler. You know, 60 years, the very first time, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘These are the sorts of examples that we need to start seeing a lot more in.’ And it’s the little things that count to raise awareness and education about that culture that means we are then helping other people embrace our Aboriginal women in the workforce and in the other environment.
Clare Muscutt – host:
There’s so much to unpack there! So, I think I just wanted to circle back on a couple of things. Obviously, the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement that happened in America, absolutely the impact has been felt around the world, so it’s really interesting to know about how that kind of cascaded in Australia.
But I think the word that we were missing in that conversation was ‘privilege’, right? So, saying we recognise how lucky we are, but actually it’s not luck. Being born as white and not poor, that’s the privilege that means we aren’t or perhaps weren’t aware of other people’s existence quite as much. It’s not luck; it’s privilege. I think we do have to, as white women who want to support our sisters from different races, not be scared of using that word and being really clear that we see it as it is.
So, it sound like diversity and inclusion is something high up on your agenda for customer experience in the future, but is there anything else that you think women in CX should be thinking about in terms of planning for the future in our industry?
Anita Siassios:
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things is, as I mentioned, I keep referring to that peripheral vision, Clare. I think that that is really, really important to have in your back pocket.
A lot of the CX leaders that I meet now are still very focused on just the basics, but I think in order for them to really uplift themselves – and also be recognised by other genders, how we can actually learn about other things – but having that peripheral vision and looking at the other cross-disciplines is really critical to be able to really be able to provide that upper level of CX, and it’s around preventing implications to customer experience.
But I think the other thing, as well, for women in CX is that – I guess one of the great things I mentioned earlier on is that we’ve got really great; we’re great at being very empathetic. I think for us, we should continue to be that way and to be authentic because that’s probably one of our greatest assets that we have and not everyone else does. So, I would strongly encourage to do that.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah, I love a bit of empathy.
So, in terms of thinking about that peripheral vision – so, we’ve picked up technology, broader business understanding – I think the only additions I’d make to that is actually it’s not just all about CX or technical skills. I think, personally, where we need to upskill our women is in leadership and mindset because all the frameworks in the world will not make a difference if you can’t get buy-in from your senior stakeholders in order to move things forward.
So, I think in terms of the community we’re building for women in CX, it isn’t trying to create a second CXPA – because we’ve got an organisation that helps with those CX technical skills – we need to build something that helps support women to support each other with that periphery, especially in terms of leadership and mindset in addition to customer experience.
Anita Siassios:
Yes.
Clare Muscutt – host:
And I think the theme that’s gone through especially the early part of this conversation, it was about community, and the community work, and the communities that you’ve built because I think, for me, it’s not about training, or courses, or qualifications; it’s about sharing experience, and mentoring, and having conversations where we’re honest about what we’re struggling about and women with more experience can support women that are on that journey and actually learn from the women that are on that journey perhaps in different industries. Like, you know – it’s a great example today talking about customer experience in cybersecurity – GDPR and data is going to be an increasingly important part of what we need to consider by bringing women like you to the table to help to educate us. We’re all going to be rowing in the same direction faster.
So, it’s been awesome to have you on the show today. If you wanted to leave three pieces of advice or three top tips, what would you say to women in CX?
Anita Siassios:
I think that in addition to what I’ve already said, this week there’s one qu- I like to always look for a quote for the week and this week, I was really inspired by a quote from Peter Drucker, which we all know about. And the quote was, ‘In order to predict the future, you have to create it,’ and I thought, ‘I love that,’ because I want to predict a future where every woman has the resources, the confidence, and the support to do what they want to do, and so in order for that to take place, we have to create it – and you’re doing that, Clare, and I’m doing my bit – but if we all do something to…
Clare Muscutt – host:
Together.
Anita Siassios:
… support that together, then we can really have a great – everyone can have a great future. So, I was really inspired by that quote, and I’m going to leave you with that quote, which is ‘To predict the future, you have to create it,’ and that’s by Peter Drucker.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah, and women in CX, let’s all rise up together and contribute to our success of all of us around the world…
Anita Siassios:
Indeed.
Clare Muscutt – host:
… in a way that’s not been done before. Awesome!
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show today, Anita.
Anita Siassios:
Clare, thank you for everything that you do, as well. You’ve been a great leader, and all your programmes have been outstanding. And I love how you actually really bring in the different perspectives of different women so that we could all be inspired by.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Ah, you’re making me blush! Thank you so much. We’re only just beginning; I’ve got a very exciting 2021 to come.
Anita Siassios:
Bye, Clare.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Bye!
Anita Siassios:
See you.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Thanks for listening to the Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the show, please do drop us a like, subscribe, and leave a review on whichever platform you're listening or watching on. And if you want to know more, please join us at womenincx.community, and follow the Women in CX page on LinkedIn.
Join us again next week, where I’ll be talking to a woman who certainly inspires me. She grew up in the townships of South Africa, founded the first black-owned CX consulting firm, and is now using CX to address social inequalities between townships and cities today.
See you all next week!