Clare Muscutt talks with Anne Gray about the stigma of infertility and her research in the field of customer-led digital transformation.
Episode #415 Show Notes:
Clare:
Welcome to the 15th and final episode of the fourth 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 an awesome community member from South Africa. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest. Now the Managing Director of Solutioneers, a digital transformation consulting practice, she started her career as a science teacher before moving into telecommunications. She recently completed her MBA at the Board Institute of Business Science, focusing her master's thesis on measuring the success of digital transformations. Consulting with organisations in South Africa on their digital transformation strategy, leading with a customer-centric focus, her personal mission is to lead impactfully and make a difference. Please welcome to the show, CX sister, Anne Gray.
Clare:
Hi Anne.
Anne:
Hi Clare.
Clare:
How are you doing today?
Anne:
I'm really good. It's a chilly day in Johannesburg, but other than that, it's all good.
Clare:
Well, welcome to the Women in CX podcast.
Anne:
Thank you. It's really nice to be here. It's such an honour to be featured.
Clare:
And welcome to everybody listening along at home as well. So we may as well just dive straight in with the question that I ask every guest that comes on the show, and that is quite simply, how did you find your way into CX and where you are today?
Anne:
So I think that if I look back on my life, I actually think I have always had a spiritual calling towards excellence. I have fine taste via budget for champagne taste. I'm that annoying friend that will walk into a venue and see all the things that are wrong and want to fix them. And when I finished school, I worked in a jewellery store in retail over Christmas, and I learned about the importance of keeping the glass counters clean, about cleaning the windows, about wrapping bows, about folding things and using double sided tape on gifts, and it kind of just went crazy after that. But I, you know, when after I finished university, I then worked, in a restaurant and it was a brand new concept that was just being launched and they were bringing it up to Johannesburg.
Anne:
It had been launched successfully in another part of the country, they were bringing it up to Johannesburg. And I got the very best training from those restaurateurs who had come up with this concept. And I got a glimpse into how brands are created, how much research had gone into the menu. I got an understanding for why brand, the representation of the brand through the people, through the food, through the menus to the cleanliness was so important, and how, you know, giving good service is fine, but giving consistent service, consistently good service becomes a differentiator. And I worked for that restaurant for one or two months before being promoted to the front-of-house manager, because I just got it. I just understood that consistently good service is a differentiator. So fast forward several years finished university and lived in London for three years, was the Service Director for Hillsong Church.
Anne:
Out of the [inaudible] road theatre and was responsible for delivering a lot of what happened behind the scenes. For three out of five services and lots of small details had to be taken care of and coordinating all of those moving parts. And I mean, Hillsong had a high standard, probably still does have a high standard of excellence back then. But formally in my career, I never really connected these dots until really this year, when I looked back and I realised that that sort of golden thread of excellence has been woven throughout my career. And in about 2015 I was responsible for creating a product in my company, Torch Telecom's Lifecycle Management, which was basically a managed services product, managing cell phones or mobile phones and data cards for large corporates here in South Africa and globally. So we worked with the likes of G4S, Ericsson and Afrox.
Anne:
So brands that are internationally known and we managed mobile phones and data cards. Now I have had a team that used to have to talk 70-year-old executives through how to change their wifi settings. If there's any way that you have to get customer experience right, it's there, because the networks don't do it for your customers. You know, the networks don't look after corporate customer users. And so the corporate customer came to us and said, please, can you guys look after our users, please? Can you make sure they have a great experience? And so we really had to stand in the gap between the experience you get from the networks and what the user actually needed. And so I had to create an experience for the user that was excellence while sometimes getting the same shoddy service from the mobile networks themselves.
Anne:
And that was quite something. So, we created that product formally in 2015 and that one, that product, the mobile managed services has really gone from strength to strength. And then one day in 2019, I was sitting with somebody who had been a loyal customer and she'd since moved on from one of the larger corporates that we worked with and she was working in a smaller organisation heading up the insurance division and she sat me down and we were just having a chat about where she found herself. And she was faced with a huge dilemma because she'd walked in and there was an established sort of parent business. And she was coming into something that was kind of a bit of a startup. They wanted to really get it going. And there was an IT department and they were getting going with their digital transformation.
Anne:
And she said to me, how do I measure the success of this transformation? How do I know that the IT department are going get this digital transformation right? From the perspective of, is what they are trying to transform actually going move the dial on the organisation's strategic objectives. And so as an insurer, the organisations strategic objectives is sales, retentions, and service. But she wasn't sure whether or not what they were doing was actually going to achieve anything there. So we had a chat and we decided the best way to do this was actually going to measure the customer's journey and say, well, where are those customer touch points that could be transformed digitally? And where are those service inflections that could be enhanced through a digital transformation to sort of up your game? And, so from that experience, working with her, it turned into a major customer journey mapping and touchpoint testing project, which lasted about four months. But at the end of that, we had a very clear picture on what they needed to change in terms of the customer experience to move the dial. And we were then able to put together a sort of three-year digital transformation strategy for them. And from that experience, I developed my customer experience-related digital transformation strategy methodology, which is now what I consult on and also offer coaching to CXOs on.
Clare:
Wow, what a journey. I think I really recognise that commitment to excellence appearing early on and the desire to make things as great as they possibly can be, or know it's in my own work or the work I've done through customer experience, but also hospitality. We have that in common. I also worked in at the first pilot concept of a branded restaurant. I was a general manager at the time of that one. But getting to see kind of how brands evolve and brand standards have created and like this, because they're kind of like innovation labs, aren't they at the start figuring out how you can scale out that brand, that really resonated with me. And, like founding and building your first company that's super exciting. And the fact that it led you to developing your own model of customer-centred digital transformation. Super cool. And I'm gonna ask you loads more questions about that model specifically later on. But, when you joined the community, how long ago is it now? Five months.
Anne:
Yeah, I think I joined in January or February of 2022.
Clare:
Yeah. Do you remember when we first met?
Anne:
Yes, I do. You were looking after Buster.
Clare:
So, my horse got sick over Christmas for anyone who doesn't already know. So, yeah, I was having to nurse the horse, but continued to grow WiCX at the same time. And I was having our onboarding meetings literally from the stables. So Anne got, yeah, So Anne got to talk to me and Buster, who was next to me in the stable when we met. So, not sure what you thought about that as an onboarding experience, but you're still here, so must have been good. And what's it been like for you kind of like now being around lots of women on a similar path?
Anne:
Sure. I think I've really, really benefited from being part of the community because I struggle to find a lot of information on customer experience sort of out there online. There's not a lot available and there's not a lot of customer experience professionals yet in South Africa creating that sort of forum or that buzz. So I must say what I've really enjoyed as well, being challenged and being held accountable. So I joined this because of the Solutioneers start-up. I joined the solopreneurs group and I sort of meet with Amelie once a month. During one of the, I mean just during the usual solopreneurs sessions, but I found that sort of able to sit with her, create some goals and then work towards achieving those goals.
Anne:
So it's great to have somebody who understands what it takes to be a solopreneur in this space. And it's great to have somebody who understands, you know, what the next thing is, they're just sort of three or four steps ahead on the journey, but they know what the next thing you need to do is. I've also found it to be an incredibly supportive space in that people aren't trying to hide the information they're not being, there's that abundance mindset, you know, there's enough for all of us. And so we can share this information openly with one another, because the success of you is as important to me as my success. And I think that's something very valuable and, you know, well sort of a, that abundance mindset is something to really treasure, you know, within the group. And then obviously the access to all that content, the content in the academy has revolutionised my marketing approach.
Anne:
And since joining the forum, I've had more speaking engagements in the last two months that I've had in the last five years.
Clare:
Wow.
Anne:
You know, which is one of my objectives. So I've definitely benefited. And I know that there's still lots of untapped value for me to uncover in the forums. And I think that's sort of, as you ask the question, people direct you to the right article because they know what you need to go and read. So you don't have sort of, I mean, you can sometimes feel like you're swimming in an ocean content. Right. But you ask a question, you get pointed in the right direction. So yeah. I can tell you here that my annual renewals already been budgeted for next year.
Clare:
Amazing. Well, very happy to hear that. But yeah, like I think that the point that you made around, like finding someone who's just a few steps further on the journey than you is one of the most valuable things that you can experience whether you are on the business side or on the self-employment journey. And that's been a like true pleasure of mine is now because I get to meet everybody as they join being able to connect women together where I hear similar stories and being able to be that kind of matchmaker has been, has been phenomenal and yeah, big shout out to Amelie Beerens who does an amazing job leading our solopreneurs.
Anne:
She does.
Clare:
She's a fabulous woman indeed. So let's talk about kind of some of the challenges then we talked about, you know, a lot of the great stuff there, but what's one big challenge that you've had to overcome in order to become the woman that you are today?
Anne:
Without a doubt, the biggest challenge of my life has been my infertility journey. So I put off having children for sort of five years after getting married and then around the age of 30, I realised that getting pregnant was not going to be as simple for me as it is for other people. And I mean, some people stop the pill, have lots of sex, get pregnant and it just all works according to plan. But and being an A-type personality for things to not work according to plan was completely devastating for me. And yeah, I mean, I'm going to be married for five years and then I'm going to get pregnant and this is what my life is going to look like. And so all of a sudden my wonderful five-year plan fell out the window. And my husband and I both had challenges.
Anne:
There were challenges of both of our sides. I had undiagnosed endometriosis that I've been living with for who knows how long as well as a luteal phase defect, which is basically that your body doesn't produce enough progesterone to hold onto a pregnancy. And what my lovely fertility specialist called implantation issues, which is just, you know, we don't really know what's wrong with you, so we'll call it that. And, then, yeah, so we had, my husband had been a professional cyclist, so he had some damage. And so we pursued every single option available to us. He had some surgical procedures and I had surgical procedures. And once the doctor had kind of said, we maxed out on the surgical interventions to kind of get our bodies into the right state to be able to fall pregnant.
Anne:
And it still didn't happen. We then did artificial insemination. We had two cycles of those. We had two fresh egg seed cycles, four frozen embryo transfers, one miscarriage and one successful full-term pregnancy over a 10-year period. So that was, that was a journey and a half. My daughter is now nine years old. So, you know, we did, we did have that one successful pregnancy. So at the end of the, you know, at the end of it all, I can sort of stand here and say, I have got a daughter. She is amazing. She's the absolute light of my life. It was so worth it. I would go through all of it again. But what IVF really taught me or that lesson that going through all of that taught me was that you never give up on the pursuits of peace.
Anne:
Once that mothering switch within me had turned on, there was nothing I could do to satisfy that sense of lack of peace that being void of a child brought me. I absolutely had to find a way. As financially costly as it was in South Africa, IVF is not paid for by the state and it's not covered under medical insurance whatsoever. So every injection, every procedure is paid for out of pocket. But as financially costly as it was, and as emotionally challenging as physically demanding as the treatments and injections were the special eating plans the endless research, there was just no way I just could not give up. I didn't have peace about giving up and once my daughter was born and then after several more failed attempts to have a second child at the age of 40, I decided I wanted my next 10 years to look different from what my thirties had looked like.
Anne:
And so I gave myself permission to be at peace with only having one child. There is, this is not the norm in our community. The majority of our friends have two or more children, you know, I, we have family members who have got four children in their family. And you know, we've been asked questions like why don't you adopt the second child? And we just didn't feel at peace with that either. And so we just gave ourselves permission to be okay, to be okay with only having one child because my heart is at rest. I am at peace with that decision. And I didn't want my forties to look like my thirties, so it was a struggle. And so I really have a sense of peace now about laying that down and about getting on with the rest of my life. But yeah, for 10 years, my life came to pretty much a standstill while I pursued that peace and, and got it, you know, we found it, but it came at a great cost, but I would do it all over again.
Clare:
Wow. That's one incredible story. And spending 10 years in that space of the pursuit of peace finding eventually, you know, a lot of people don't get to that point. Do they like getting the child, having your daughter was incredible and trying to go again, but like you said, you discovering endometritis that you didn't know you had. And I think for me, it really resonates as a single woman who is 40, who has put off having kids and getting married and actually even having a relationship because she's been too busy building a career and building the business of her dreams instead that you don't actually know until you try whether or not it's gonna be difficult. Right. So like I haven't had that mothering switch switched on yet, but I'm absolutely petrified that I will not have the option. And personally have been going through the early stages of looking at IVF, having that fertility test, things still look okay at the moment.
Clare:
But still being in that situation that I'm not going to know until they get my eggs out and try to fertilize them whether or not it's actually gonna be possible. And because of how old I am now, like every month that lapses, it feels like that's the ticking time bomb for me, like needing to make the decision to do something. But yeah, like, you know, yours is the pursuit of peace. Mine's the fear that like, I would not be at peace if I didn't have a family at some point. And I don't, and it's not now, it's definitely not. Now I'm about to scale up my business , but we aren't blessed with infinite time to make these decisions. And it's, and it's really you know, something that I think we should talk about more, but there's so much shame kind of wrapped up in women and fertility, right?
Clare:
Like that, because there's a societal expectation that because we can have children, we should, some people choose not to have them. Some people desperately want them and can't have them. Some people, you know, choose to have huge families and it's entirely like your own choice and your own volition. But I think it's something that kind of also resonated with me is like the expense involved in being able to pursue that peace, if you aren't blessed with natural fertility that automatically springs forth, then you know, the expense that you must have gone through for those 10 years of procedures and operations and multiple disappointments on the way to your success and peace but continuing to kind of go for that, like it's hard. But as a single woman there is no provision like in the UK facility, treatments are available on the NHS and non-health insurance if you are part of a heterosexual couple relationship where you've been trying for two years, but if you are a gay woman or a single woman, that isn't a option available to you. So whatever I decide to do with my fertility is gonna come and entirely at my own expense as well. And it just seems to be something like systemically wrong with that
Anne:
Definitely.
Clare:
That so many women are excluded from even having that option. But thank you so much for sharing that story with us. I know that it's a really important issue that we should be discussing with much more openness and yeah, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share kind of where I'm at with my fertility woes. But yeah, like yeah, it's great to hear the success that came out of it as well. Because it was a hell of a long way for you and I'm sure it did definitely shape you into the woman you are today with your tenacity and your type, did you have to let go of the type A personality and the plan to survive this or...
Anne:
Oh, I think that was probably the part of the journey that I can't claim to have been able to get control over my need to control. I think that's very much ingrained within who I am and I think that's probably what made it a little bit harder. You know, I had friends who would do, not friends, but, you know, women within the support group who became friends, right, who would do one treatment every year, because that's all their psyche and emotions could handle, or even their bodies. I mean, the simulation required to do to harvest eggs is you know, beyond this world, I mean, they basically put you into premenopausal state, pack you full of hormones and extract the eggs, you know? And so, I mean, and so some women just, just couldn't handle more than one cycle. Yeah. Then there were other women who would do three or four and they would just keep going until they got the, until they got the result that they wanted. And I mean, I think the important thing here is there was no right approach. There was no right approach to the way that you become a mother. It is just the approach that gets you there. If that's where you want to be.
Clare:
If that's where you want to be.
Anne:
If that's where you want to be. And again, I mean, the stigma about, you know, women of a certain age, you know, women are made to bare children, so they should that was, that's also something that an infertile woman needs to then confront and say, well, if I can't bare children, does that mean I shouldn't be having children? You know? So I mean it's a big topic. Infertility is a huge topic because it's confront who you thought you were, it confronts who you think you need to be. It confronts things that you're not able to do naturally, that you should be able to do. It really is. And I have a friend who went through 11 donor egg cycles to get pregnant once, donor egg cycles. So she was premenopausal from the age of 26. So she just couldn't make eggs. She went to 11 donor egg cycles. She got pregnant once she had her baby, but she had to go through PTSD counselling.
Clare:
Oh my God.
Anne:
It is traumatic. It is a trauma. So yeah, infertility is not for the faint-hearted and I really am here to speak to anybody who needs encouragement. It's a journey. It's a journey towards peace, you know?
Clare:
Thank you for sharing that. So I'm going to get us back onto customer experience now. But I know that you recently graduated from your MBA and actually that your research was into the metrics of digital transformation. So I just thought it's a great opportunity because it's such a lack of academia around some of this stuff, like please do tell us more about your research and your work in that space.
Anne:
Sure. So one day I was introducing my new customer experience lead digital transformation strategy methodology to a COO that we had been working within the Telecom's Lifecycle Management business, and he asked me outright, what qualifies you to be talking to me about the digital transformation? And I realised that even though it was a very patronising question, I needed to hear where it was coming from. And I was gonna need to put some credentials behind my name as far as the sort of career pivot goes. And so I'd actually started my MBA in 2016 and I deferred it after I miscarried. And so I was sort of on the fence about completing it and not completing it. And I decided to bite the bullet and to make digital transformation the focus of the research that I had to do as part of my MBA.
Anne:
So this is why I did it. Right. It was to sort of provide those credentials that the world felt that I needed that I didn't feel like I really needed. But in a nutshell, what I discovered was that there are four different types of digital transformation and that the intent for each one is different. And I said to myself, if there are four different types of digital transformation with four different intents, then potentially we have four different ways of measuring digital transformation success. And so the first one business process efficiency digital transformation, that one really looks at optimizing processes for cost savings and increased throughput. And so for me, I felt that financial performance metrics there would be what people were focusing on. Then you have the customer-oriented digital transformation, which looks at changing the experience of the customer, looks at enhancing the interactions with business.
Anne:
And so there I felt that you would probably find that your customer and marketing metrics would come into play more than anything else. And then there was the business model digital transformation. So this is where we are creating new products and services that are a value to the customer by leveraging emerging technologies and digital economies, creating platform businesses, that kind of thing. And here I felt that you would have, again, your financial performance metrics featuring as well as your innovation metrics, creating new competencies within an organisation. And then lastly you have your organisational digital transformation. So this is the fourth type, and this is where you creating a transformation that transforms an organisation so that it can leverage digital technologies and reorganises the organisation around digital technologies for its ongoing success. And so what I wondered was, you know, what will I find if I look at the success metrics across these different types of digital transformation?
Anne:
So I interviewed CIOs, CEOs, Chief Marketing Officers, Procurement Officers, across different organisations in South Africa, and what I discovered was that financial performance metrics are the primary metric utilized for any digital transformation. And that is the most important thing to the organization. And that's what they start all promising at the beginning, but unfortunately, you don't get to measure that until you actually launched it and that can sometimes be a three-year project. And so then your innovation metrics and your information systems, success metrics, project management metrics started to backflow where you couldn't measure financial performance yet. And the innovation metrics and the information systems metrics weren't secondary to financial performance they became as important because the success of that project couldn't be measured until sort of once it was delivering the value that it needed to deliver. But as a customer experience professional, what was interesting for me was that while it wasn't used to the same extent, it was customer and marketing metrics were used in any digital transformation that touched the customer either by accident or on purpose, but they did feature, but not to the extent that I expected them to even within in customer-oriented transformations.
Clare:
It's super interesting. And I'm fascinated by this stuff like personally, I think transformation and digital transformation are just two words stuck together and actually trying to do things on that scale that are transformative actually cause more problems and than solutions. And that's the voice of experience having worked business side, where projects take way too long to do, and by the time you've actually delivered that size of change, customers have already moved on and want something else anyway. But the financial metrics are always going to be lagging aren't they? So you have to kind of be able to move with agility, test and learn as you go. And there's so many input metrics that rely on marketing and customer to be able to indicate likely outcome to bigger financial performance metrics in the longer term.
Anne:
Exactly.
Clare:
But, but what we see in like the customer experience world is an obsession with customer satisfaction, for example, which doesn't really make sense, because like you could drop your price and customers would be more satisfied that isn't necessarily a customer experience metric at all. And without you know, meeting the needs of customers through products and services we offer even like customer experience is secondary to having a solid offer and proposition. So like, I really do get that, I'm going to quote your kind of terms here, but like I really do get business process efficiency transformation, you know, if there's a digital way to do it, that saves cost. Like I really do get that. I really do get, you know, finding the midpoint between doing that in a way that actually delivers better value for customers.
Clare:
So being customer-oriented in the approach to what you select to deliver the business process efficiency, but these kind of whole scale, especially within large old organisations that like it's an organisational transformation that's trying to transform a business model. I have never seen apart from with the exception of things like Apple and Steve Jobs and, you know, the amazing precedents that have had incredible leadership, very little success in comparison to the cost of the implementation of these long term strategic projects. So like I'd love to know more about the model itself and the kind of customer-centred transformation, sorry, and the framework. Can you briefly just give us a bit more of an overview about how you've brought those worlds together through what you do? And I assume that, is it searchlight, is that the name of your new business.
Anne:
Solutioneers.
Clare:
Solutioneers sorry, Solutioneers. Is that kind of what you're going to be bringing to the market now is this data and research backed approach to doing this?
Clare:
Tell us about it.
Anne:
So, what I'm pioneering in my approach to a digital transformation strategy is to, we start with the customer journey and we have a look at the journey and we map the whole thing out, you know, all of those touch points from the presale all the way through to post-sale experience. And you know, it depends on who you are and how big the testing is and how many product lines, how big the project's going to be, right. But you map out every single one of those touchpoints. And then what we do is we test them for what I call the three C's. Now, the three C's stand for, the first one is context-sensitive. So is this touchpoint sensitive to the customer in their context?
Anne:
So for example are you trying to communicate with your customer after hours when you're a traditional in hours business, and the customer's not going to appreciate that, or would this be context-sensitive to have this conversation with your customer? So if my electricity has gone out and you wait until the next morning to contact me with an estimated time resolution, that's not context-sensitive because it's an emergency for me. But if you are phoning me to reschedule an appointment that's supposed to happen in two weeks, and you're phoning me after hours, that is not context-sensitive, I'm not going to be appreciative of the fact you phoning me while I'm trying to cook dinner and I'm not in front of my diary. So it's about those touchpoints being context-sensitive for the customer. The second C is a cohesive brand identity. So all the way through that customer journey. Does it sound like you, act like you, does it feel like you, is it branded correctly?
Anne:
Like, is everything right? And are you building trust and loyalty through looking the same everywhere and sounding the same everywhere? So I mean, even down to sort of does your brand personality come out on Instagram the same way as it comes out on TikTok because it needs to and then we've got the third C is consistent experience. Am I having a consistent experience throughout the journey with you? So do you consistently return calls when you said you would, do you consistently communicate on email or is there communication all over the show? What does that look like? So we test every, every section of the journey and we give a rating based on each of the three C's. We also test that things work. So if you have a contact form does that contact form go somewhere? Does somebody phone you back?
Anne:
We do insurance companies. We go through those policy documents, we test every phone number. We test every email address. Do we get responses? Because those policy documents are voluminous and you can imagine things that, you know, we changed something here and we forgot that it was there. It happens. So we test all of that. And then we identify the moments of friction that need to be elevated. And that is where we start to find sort of three categories of things. Number one quick wins, quick wins are great, because they're building a coalition of support you know, change management, 101 kind of stuff. Number two, what's gonna take sort of six to 18 months to implement. And then number three, what's your longer-term strategy and your sort of third horizon strategy and through the implementation of the quick wins and people seeing good things happen and changes happen, it builds that impetus for change towards that third horizon. And so that's really what we, that's really the sort of nature of the framework that we've put together. And that we are working with organisations to start implementing.
Clare:
I love that action-oriented pioneering, solutioneering, I think from the Solutioneers over here. So, it was consistent, context-specific. What was the third, sorry?
Clare:
I missed that...
Anne:
Context-sensitive, cohesive brand identity.
Clare:
Cohesive brand identity. Yeah.
Anne:
And consistent experience.
Clare:
And consistent experience. Yeah, really refreshing to hear kind of like the practicality of actually analysing the touch points and being able to find those quick-win opportunities that build momentum. I think we don't do enough of that, do we. There's a lot of, actually not we personally, but the CX profession there's a lot resting on creating value for the organisation, you know, back to your initial point of delivering organisational objectives, perhaps through cost-saving or retention or revenue growth that if you don't kind of tackle that stuff first, we don't get to play or get the ticket to the game to do the bigger, broader stuff. So that's really, really great to hear. So we're out of time, unfortunately. Our listeners have to go. So just to finish off, what would be your one piece of advice or key takeaway for the women in CX listeners today?
Anne:
I have recently been doing some personal development work through my local church and there are 70-year-olds in the group that are trying to reinvent themselves and looking to redefine their callings for the next phase of their life. And I think my one thing is, it's okay to redefine yourself. In fact, it's normal. You don't have to stay the same person. You can grow and change and move into different areas. I studied fish and I taught science in my twenties and I worked in telecoms in my thirties, and I'm now a CX professional in my forties, who knows where I'll be in my fifties, but just follow your peace and you will be fine.
Clare:
I love that. Follow your peace and you will be fine. I really am feeling that vibe though right now as like new to my forties, feeling that this is a personally transformative stage of my life. I also don't want to be the person that I was in my thirties that just, you know, grinded away at career and business. I want to get to a point where I have some freedom. But I'm going through this kind of now, kind of discovering, defining who I'm going to be for the next 10 years. So yeah, I think that's really sound advice. Just follow the peace and you'll be fine.
Clare:
So that's it, everybody. Thank you so much for listening along and thank you so much, Anne, for coming and sharing with such candour and openness. If anyone listening wants to find out more about your model, where would they go?
Anne:
Our website is www.solutioneers.co.za
Anne:
And you can also hit me up on LinkedIn.
Clare:
You up on LinkedIn and you said anyone who wants to have a conversation about infertility is welcome too?
Anne:
Yes, definitely.
Clare:
Wonderful stuff. Well, that's it, everybody. I'll see you next time. Bye for now. Bye, Anne.
Anne:
Yes.
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the show, please 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 about becoming a member of the world's first online community for women in customer experience, please join the waitlist at womenincx.community and follow the Women in CX page on LinkedIn. Well, that's it for season four, join us again in September when I'll be talking to even more incredible women working within CX across the globe. See you all then.
