Clare Muscutt chats to Katie Stabler about women supporting women and influencing the CX agenda.
Episode #013 Show Notes
Clare Muscutt – host:
Hi, Katie.
Katie Stabler:
Hi, Clare.
Clare Muscutt – host:
How are you doing, today?
Katie Stabler:
I’m great. It’s a fantastic Monday.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Well, the listeners will be listening on a Friday.
Katie Stabler:
I’m sure Friday is equally as good.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Hope they’ve all got the Friday feeling right now.
So, Katie, as one of the up-and-coming women in CX, you’ve had some awesome recognition this week: making it into the Top 50 Global Influencers. Many congratulations!
Katie Stabler:
Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s fantastic to be featured alongside you and some amazing names. I don’t know how it’s happened, but it’s amazing.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Because you’re creating great content, that’s why. Also, today, your second collaboration book has been released: CX2.
Katie Stabler:
Yeah, it’s absolutely epic. This past couple of weeks have been amazing, and having the book go live today is just an absolute dream.
Clare Muscutt – host:
And then the last few months, leaving corporate to go self-employed during a pandemic.
Katie Stabler:
Yeah, it has been an absolute whirlwind to say the least. But honestly, it’s been absolutely amazing. So much greatness has come out of it.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah, I’m so super proud of you. I have a special little place in my heart for you because you were one of the first women that I met on Instagram, and I count you as a founding member of this Women in CX community that we’re building because right from the start, you were so supportive of me and other women in CX on social media. It really inspired me about if we can show more women supporting women in CX, just how much momentum we could get going to create a better community for each other.
Katie Stabler:
Wow. To hear you say the words that I inspired you has just blown my mind because it’s exactly how I feel about you. I remember the days that we first connected on Instagram, and how just invaluable your support constantly through my transition has been. You’ve always been there. It’s been fantastic.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Aww, feeling the love right now. Got a little love heart for you! Women in CX love.
I think women supporting women to be awesome at CX would make a really great topic of conversation today. What do you think? You up for it?
Katie Stabler:
Absolutely, let’s go for it.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Let’s go for it. I saw that you spent time in CX in some pretty unusual places to say the least, in fact places you probably wouldn’t think CX would even exist. Could you tell me, and the listeners at home, a little bit about your time working in regulated services and how you were supported there?
Katie Stabler:
Yeah, so I spent around a decade in the not-for-profit sector, particularly in the debt sector. That was all about helping people manage debts, working for charities and housing associations. Then, I suppose my first ‘official’ CX role was when I completely turned from gamekeeper to poacher, as it were, and stepped into the world of debt collection.
You’re absolutely right: you wouldn’t normally associate customer experience with debt collection. But a role came up which offered me an opportunity to be a customer advocate in an industry where customers do not typically have advocates, and it just seemed too good to miss. It was absolutely amazing.
But it wasn’t without its trials. I started in that role in a customer experience capacity, but it was also managing the quality assurance team, so instantly you felt that there was some CX buy-in but not enough to actually create a full role focused completely on customer experience.
I was really fortunate to work for an amazing customer experience director who, after year one, I actually eventually did report directly to, and you could feel the culture start to change. But it was a really heavily male-dominated environment with the senior leadership team pretty much run by males. Sarah, my old customer experience director, was one of the few female directors. Customer experience – not only, obviously, was it a very difficult environment to operate in, but it definitely had that kind of ‘fluffy’ sense around it, where not everybody in the organisation culturally accepted it, accepted that it was needed or really accepted that it was a thing.
Clare Muscutt – host:
I think I remember you saying to me it felt like CX was the girls’ corner of that business. Is that a good way to describe it?
Katie Stabler:
It was, absolutely. Yeah, a hundred per cent.
Initially there was three people on the team; we were all women. I’m pleased to say before I left, we did stretch out to the one gentleman who joined the team, but it was majority female-led, absolutely. I found that my key allies in the organisation were typically department leads who were female and not necessarily the guys who worked in the collections department, for example.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Oh, okay – sorry, what did you say there? I missed that – the non-allies or the allies?
Katie Stabler:
The allies were typically female-led departments.
Clare Muscutt – host:
I don’t know what it is about customer experience in male-dominated industries and then women being able to combine together to drive specific action around improving customer experience. Do you think it might be because quite often we work in the departments that are responsible for making change happen, for example, when it comes to people?
Katie Stabler:
Quite possibly. It’s funny you say that because thinking back, one of our strongest allies was in the learning team – the team who essentially curated all of the internal learning and development and training – that was female-led, and it’s unsurprising that she was a massive advocate of intertwining CX with employee experience. She was a fantastic support, but you didn’t find that from all the departments, that’s for sure.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah. So, CX and EX are definitely two halves of the same coin, right? Can’t have one without the other.
Katie Stabler:
Exactly. Particularly in that environment, EX, the customer experience link was just crucial. You could see intrinsically the real, tangible benefits it had. So, they did start to come around to the fact that customer experience could have massive impacts, but it was a really slow burn.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah, I was going to – I’m just really, genuinely CX-geek intrigued – when you say customer experience in debt collection, what actually is the customer experience? And if you were to deliver a good one, what would be the commercial benefit of doing that?
Katie Stabler:
That’s a great question because most of what customer experience is focused on is retaining customers. Obviously, in the debt collection industry, that isn’t the case: you don’t want people to stay your customer; you want them to pay their debt, and then that’s it, they’re done, their experience is done with you. But what you find is that these are captive customers. These are not customers who want to be your customer. If they had their choice, they absolutely wouldn’t be. But the nature of the beast is that they are. Unfortunately, people in debt tend to have more than one debt, which means they tend to be involved with more than just one debt collector.
It was amazing when we actually started to ask customers about their experience – who’d have thought it? We asked them about their experience and to hear their feedback was amazing. You would actually hear that if they felt supported and genuinely listened to and genuinely that there was flexibility around their repayment plans, if they were on a limited amount of disposable income, they would opt to pay the debt collection company which they felt cared the most.
So, actually, there’s huge benefits to having a great customer experience in this circumstance because the nature of the beast is that you don’t have to pay your debt – there isn’t the scary ramifications that people associate – unless it’s a legally associated debt, you don’t have to pay it. So, to actually think that a good customer experience would mean that these customers, despite not wanting to be a customer, would continue to be your customer is what it was all about.
Clare Muscutt – host:
I remember doing some work last year with a housing association, actually. They’d never really thought about residents that were council tenants, for example, as customers, and we were trying to change that. The benefits that you could see directly of treating customers, residents with care was that things like access didn’t stay a problem anymore. They’d be wasting money sending out gas engineers to do gas safety checks, and then not being allowed in or them being out. The more engaged the residents were with the company through the experience that the housing association provided, the better all-round things were.
It’s interesting, and I think it’s definitely an area in growth. Public sector are having to – because the government are insisting upon it – ensure that the people at the end of that service are treated with respect, care, and an experience. So, great to see that we’re leading the way that way.
You said about working in male-dominated environments that in the main, men weren’t very supportive in those male-dominated environments; you had more allyship from women probably than men. How has your experience of being supported by women compared? You mentioned you had an incredible CX director, leader, female role model – tell me a bit more about that relationship and if you’ve ever experienced anything other than support.
Katie Stabler:
I think I’ve been incredibly fortunate over the years. I’ve worked for a whole host of amazing leaders who I would really hold in high regard.
I did have a time period where I worked for an organisation, which, on paper, was the absolute dream job. It just should have been absolutely perfect. It was female-led. Unfortunately, the dream wasn’t a reality. I think the role was too big for the organisation, so the capacity that I went into they thought they needed; in reality, they probably didn’t, which meant that they didn’t really understand customer experience. They certainly didn’t see any benefit that I could really bring.
It was a double-edged sword, really, in two negative ways, in the sense that: one, I was getting no satisfaction because customer experience initiatives I was trying to employ, which would have made amazing difference to the benefit of the organisation, just were never recognised. They would never get over the door. You would just spend days, weeks, sometimes even months working with teams on big initiatives that would just be cut before they even left the starting line.
It was a completely different experience to what I’ve ever experienced anywhere before. The leadership, particularly the female leadership, was many, many, many miles apart from being supportive.
Clare Muscutt – host:
What kind of things happened – obviously, we’re not going to name names – but what kinds of experiences did you have of not being supported? What did that look like?
Katie Stabler:
I think one of the biggest things – I’ve worked in senior positions for a long time now, and I’ve never experienced such a level of micromanagement, where everything, even down to the writing of an email, was just so heavily looked over. It was very unreal. I’ve never experienced anything like it. There was no creative opportunity. You were led in every single step of the way. That wasn’t just myself in the customer experience role; it was, unfortunately, the majority of the team.
I felt it came from working for a person who was a founder and it was their business, and they’d put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it and, obviously, it was so important to them. But unfortunately, they didn’t have the capacity to let go and to delegate, and it just so heavily restricted the business in so many ways, but particularly from an employee perspective because you can’t have such tight restraints on your employees because without that creative ability, without that trust, without that empowerment, you’re just never going to move forward.
So, it was a very, very tricky role. Something I’d never personally experienced, and I hope never to experience again.
Clare Muscutt – host:
It’s interesting because I don’t think that’s a particularly female problem; I think it sounds like someone who never graduated from manager to leader. I guess there comes a point in all of our careers when we have to learn to let go in order to deliver more. So, perhaps the experience of being a founder – and I’ve worked with some start-ups where the same has been true – and that inability to let go and feel the satisfaction when other people are smashing it rather than you having to control it and feeling you’re responsible for it is definitely one of the most stifling situations to be in.
It doesn’t sound like some of the experiences I had where I came across amazing female leadership – in most places; I’d say 99 per cent of the time. But I personally experienced going through hell, being micromanaged, but also actually, I’d say, being bullied by a woman in the workplace who became my boss overnight after we’d been on the same team for about a year. I thought we were friends, and then the first day of reporting in to this lady she was like, ‘Right then, Clare, things are going to change around here,’ and immediately told me that I needed to get into my place, get into this box that she was now saying was my role. Even all senior stakeholder communication would have to go through her, anything that I thought, said, or did would have to go through that process. But I genuinely think that wasn’t because she was a control freak; that was because she didn’t like particularly a younger woman in her team knowing more about the subject.
Katie Stabler:
Wow, that’s scary. I think you’ve probably hit the nail on the head. It’s interesting to hear you bravely saying that that was bullying because I can look back at my experience, and there were definitely times where – you know, I would just never dream of speaking to someone in the way that I was spoken to, not just in one-to-ones, but publicly and where there were other team members there. Actually, it could well have been considered bullying, but I guess you don’t want to…
Clare Muscutt – host:
Say the words.
Katie Stabler:
… ever really admit to that. Yeah. It’s not something you should experience in adult life, and certainly not in the workplace. So, yeah, it was an interesting time because it really should have been the place where I felt the most empowered, and it was quite the opposite.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah. So, you managed to go from debt collection – where CX is almost impossible to do but being really supported and sponsored to make all of these things happen – to then going to a company where you thought, ‘Ooh, this has the opportunity to work better because there aren’t the barriers,’ but then not being supported to do it.
Katie Stabler:
Exactly.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Do you think there’s something about female leadership that – I think like my experience – comes with an element of fear or jealousy of other women succeeding? Have you ever experienced that or seen friends experience similar?
Katie Stabler:
Yeah, definitely. I remember one of my first roles – actually, it was during uni, I worked in a call centre, did my time on the phones – and I remember the woman who led the team there I would definitely associate with that kind of situation because she was a difficult woman to work for, and it was a difficult environment, highly target-driven. Looking back now, I see her in a different light because she probably was one of the only female team leaders at the time. She was quite difficult to work for. I suppose I was one of the more confident, outspoken people who did achieve targets, and maybe that is one of the reasons why we bristled against each other, because there was that little bit of friction and jealousy. Which is such a shame because we should all be there supporting each other in the workplace; it’s hard enough.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Yeah, but I guess the reality is that it isn’t always women supporting women: us all running around giving power moves to our feminist sisterhood. On the flip side, of course, there are some negative examples. This series definitely has started to dive into some of the challenges of the illusion of scarcity when it comes to leadership opportunities and women becoming quite competitive. But it sounds like we could have a great conversation about the positive aspects of female leadership and what that looks like.
I’ll always remember the female leaders in my career who treated me like they wanted me to succeed, and the notion of support, which always came down to them rooting for me and absolutely wanting me to win, and performing the role of knocking any barriers out of my way that they could use their seniority to do that. If it wasn’t for those women that helped me on my way up, I never would have got there – well, perhaps not at all, but definitely not as fast as I did.
What does great female leadership look like to you?
Katie Stabler:
I think you explain it really well. I personally can see why I took that difficult year so hard because, just like yourself, I’d been privileged to be in positions where people had massively advocated for me: when I worked for the debt collection company, I was on what they called the ‘One to Watch’ list, which is an amazing feeling. And I wasn’t there just by accident – it was down to what I’d done and how I acted there – but it was absolutely also through the support of my senior leader.
The organisation I worked for before then, it was a male leader, but he showed such faith constantly in me. I remember the first public speaking event I did at that organisation: the chief executive sent me down to Westminster to do my first public speaking event. The amount of trust and empowerment you feel when somebody does that and really advocates for you, it’s absolutely amazing.
So, to not get that and to feel really quite the opposite, it’s not a pleasant feeling at all. I think despite that time working for that organisation, it hasn’t inhibited my feelings towards female leaders, for sure, because I know that that was hopefully just a one-off occurrence, one that I won’t experience again.
In my transition into the world of consultancy, I’ve just had no end of amazing support from amazing women from all kinds of different levels, different experiences, different times in their career, and I can 100 per cent say that part of my confidence in continuing to move forward is down to being just continually lifted by everybody else around me.
Clare Muscutt – host:
That was going to be my last question, actually, about stepping out into this entrepreneurial adventure.
I guess, for me, I take great joy now in seeing other women following their dreams, for one. I feel a sense of happiness when I can do maybe a small thing like, I don’t know – I was helping you with advice on tax at one point or something, wasn’t I?
Katie Stabler:
Yes. I couldn’t have done it without you!
Clare Muscutt – host:
Just random, random things. But that duty of care that we have to each other to help elevate others.
I didn’t experience that myself when I left the corporate world and went into consulting. When I reached out to the senior women or the women that were, in my eyes, the famous ones – it wasn’t on Instagram because there was no community there until we started one – and kind of getting completely ignored, I think, is the only way to describe it: not even getting a reply to my messages saying, ‘I’ve just come out, and I’ve started my own consulting business’. Whereas the guys were only too happy to help! Ian Golding, for example, was one of the first people I met, and I know he’s supported you in your career, as well.
So, I’m really excited that we’ve got this new breed of women in CX doing things like coming on the podcast, being part of the community, and just constantly cheering each other on because I think it’s going to be game-changing for our industry. We’re going to see more women like you following your dreams, not thinking you have to stay in corporate, people like Hannah Foley coming out and saying, ‘Actually, there’s enough room for all of us to have a piece of the pie when it comes to consulting, as long as we keep lifting each other up.’
Katie Stabler:
Totally. It’s really sad to say, but I think if I’d have experienced the same experience you did when you first started, I’m not sure I’d be here, because I went through the circumstance where I was pushed; I was made redundant. I’ve always loved the idea of setting up my own consultancy, but I hadn’t considered it to be quite so soon in my career; I thought a few years ahead. So, to not have that support at that time I think would have been really hard.
But I can say, instantly – my first client was off a recommendation from someone who I worked with so briefly. So, shout out to Laura Bartlett, the House of Coco founder, because without her I wouldn’t be here. And then, yourself, you’ve been absolutely amazing and completely so supportive throughout the whole process. And I’ve got to shout out to Sharon Boyd, who is the founder and director of Canoodle. She’s my accountability partner, and without her every week shouting at me and praising me and doing everything that we need to do to keep each other going, I’m sure I’d have had a very different experience and certainly wouldn’t have this big smile on my face.
Clare Muscutt – host:
I love Sharon, too! All the women that we’re talking about, they weren’t out in the community as independent CX women when I started. Long may it continue that we have more of us arriving.
So, my last question, bearing in mind you answered the one that I was going to ask you – was about accountability buddies, mentioning the lovely Sharon. I’ve recently got myself one, and it’s been a game-changer as a solo entrepreneur woman in business to hook up with and hang out with another fellow solo entrepreneur. Mine lives in Thailand. Big shout out to Rea George, absolute ledge! Every week, on a Monday, we’ll we meet and talk about our goals for the week. We’ll set our monthly and yearly goals together. We spend our time cheering each other on in our successes, but also counselling each other in our defeats. She’s become – bearing in mind this is a person that I’ve never met in real life – such an important part of my support network.
What does having an accountability buddy mean for you?
Katie Stabler:
Very similar. We talk about everything that’s gone really well for the week, and we’re really conscientious of cheering each other on. Equally, we talk about what hasn’t gone so well and, more importantly, what we need to do to overcome that next week. We share little messages to each other just to keep each other going throughout the week. And we keep each other accountable to those goals. You know what it’s like: time just flutters away from us, we want to do something, we don’t do it. So, we are constantly asking each other, ‘Why haven’t you done that? Get it done!’
It’s great. It’s just great to talk to somebody because, again, like you said, working as a solopreneur, you are alone, and especially in these times, it’s hard to see people. So, it’s just great to touch base, share ideas, talk about what’s working, what isn’t working. It’s a fantastic relationship, and I’d recommend anybody get an accountability partner!
Clare Muscutt – host:
I’ve had them for fitness before, going to the gym together and keeping each other on diets, but I’ve never even thought about it for business. I thought as a ‘solopreneur’, that was it, I was stuck with myself. And through the whole coronavirus thing, it’s been the most lonely time. I just can’t believe how many people I’ve connected with who I’ve never actually met in real life – you included – who have become such an important part of my business journey.
I’d like to end by saying thank you, so much, for coming on the show today. Thank you for always being relentlessly supportive of everything I do on social media and little messages to each other. You have definitely, in my mind, felt like the beginnings of what I wanted to create this community for and this podcast for. And you, and people like Sharon, people like Hannah, my Instagram fam are absolutely leading by example what inspiring women in CX and female communities look like.
Thank you, again, for coming on.
Katie Stabler:
Well, thank you for having me. I’m absolutely privileged. You are absolutely leading the way, so it’s an honour to be part of your community.
Clare Muscutt – host:
Ah, thank you. So, thanks to all the listeners for joining us again today.
That’s all for now. We’ll see you again soon, Katie!