Clare Muscutt talks with Lauretta Campestre about contact centre technology and empowering agents through conversation analytics.
Clare:
Welcome to the 5th episode of the sixth 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 incredible community member from Tennessee, in the US. She has more than 20 years of experience in contact centres across various verticals and functions and has a passion for conversation analytics as a necessary technology on the path to improving business performance for any organisation. She marries both her operational knowledge with her innovative thought leadership to guide and consult with top brands on how to achieve their business objectives and is driving transformational change within Customer Success. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest, CX sister, Laurette Campestre.
Clare:
Hey, Lauretta.
Lauretta:
Hi.
Clare:
How are you doing today?
Lauretta:
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
Clare:
You're welcome. Welcome to the Women in CX podcast. We're absolutely overjoyed that you're joining us today, and welcome to everybody who's listening or watching along wherever you are in the world. So, we may as well jump straight in and ask the first question that I ask all of my guests, how have you found your way to the Women in CX community, and how's it been going so far?
Lauretta:
Well, as you know, my marketing team is getting ready for a London users conference, where we're going invite all of our users together, and we've had great success in establishing a women's summit. And so we actually, I think we reached out to you, Claire, to come and join us there. And then as a result of that, our team and your team worked out a lovely corporate membership. So, many of my CallMiner friends are now also members. And so that's kind of how we got here. Since being in the community, I've already dove in and the first thing I found was there's so much, and that's a good thing, and the content and the resources are expansive. It's not just, you know, journey mapping. It's not just how I look at customer effort.
Lauretta:
It's not, it really is truly touching every point of CX. And that just took my breath away. One of the things that I'm working on right now at CallMiner is journey mapping and so I got to listen to Yana's effective journey mapping webinar, and it was just brilliant because she had very simple best practices, so they're easy to implement. And so it's just, you know, listened to that for about 20, 30 minutes and had actionable things that I could take away and implement. So, so far so good. And I think it's only going to go up from here. So, thanks for having us.
Clare:
No, yeah. Amazing. And I'm very much looking forward to speaking at your conference. It's June 20th, isn't it? Yeah, not long to go.
Lauretta:
I know it's coming up.
Clare:
Yeah, I'll have just got back from speaking in South America. Yeah, well, during the pandemic, I never, you know, I wasn't out and about speaking. It's so lovely to be back doing that, but yeah, thank you so much for being our first technology company as a corporate member, I think it's so important, isn't it? You know, talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion and putting your money where your mouth is and doing things like having women’s resource groups that you then buy memberships for. I think it's a really great signal of intent. So, thank you, CallMiner.
Lauretta:
Absolutely.
Clare:
So, I'm sure the audience would love to know more about you, who you are, and your career journey to get to where you are today. Tell us your story, Lauretta.
Lauretta:
Well, I don't know that it is an exciting one, but it certainly is mine. So, essentially I broke out into work life as a frontline agent on the phone. And don't hold this against me, but I worked for a collection agency for about a decade. And so that gave me incredible perspective. What I found through doing that, because those are really tough conversations to have. What I found was, is there was a passion and a skill for helping people, right? And, and so what that then led to was, all right, if I was the frontline agent I'm helping my consumers resolve debt, right? And then I found a way to help my fellow collection agents on the phone by jumping into the quality assurance program. And then I went into the training program, and then eventually I started helping our clients realise the value that our agents were providing, right?
Lauretta:
So I came into client services and in client services is where I started asking the question, how can we do this smarter, not harder, right? This is a little while ago. But even then, you know, technology in the contact centre and making those operations easier and more efficient was definitely top of mind, still top of mind today. But that journey led me to CallMiner, and so I actually implemented the CallMiner platform in my contact centre to help us get inside the call. We were held in the collection industry to very high standards in terms of privacy, financial care, and being able to assure that type of quality and compliance we needed to be able to do it at scale. So, that's when I found CallMiner and I couldn't ignore that.
Lauretta:
There was an interesting alignment between my own values and the need to help, right? With their values, right? And their need to help drive business performance. So, I like to tell people that instead of, you know, maybe some people run from a bad situation at work, I was running towards my next big opportunity. So, I joined CallMiner, which was quite scary because I was a contact centre junkie, not a software tech person by any stretch of the imagination. But that drive, that passion to help just served me very well. And so now I am helping our broader customer success organisation map out the right engagements and activities to get our customers to success. So it's been a wild ride, but quite fun.
Clare:
Yeah. And just such a valuable experience, isn't it? Starting at the frontline, understanding operationally how these things work. And, you know, technology's technology, isn't it? But like, understanding how people work and how contact centres operate and what's important in terms of what they're trying to drive, and the real challenges and barriers that the frontline agents have, I think stand you in such good stead, isn't it? No matter what you go on to do, because you have the customer and the employee reality, especially from debt collection as well, that's not the easiest.
Lauretta:
No.
Clare:
Place to drive experiences. I'm always fascinated as I've spoken to about four or five women in the community who've all come from this debt collection background. And it wouldn't have been a place, I would've thought much customer experience thinking happens, but apparently it does, because...
Lauretta:
You get, you get an interesting set of conversations that happen. Folks generally, you know, fall out from a brand and in collections, for financial reasons, but there's a whole host of CX reasons, right? So, having that frontline experience within that industry, I think is really kind of, to your point, right, given that unique perspective of operationally, what does it take and what kind of conversations are actually happening, right? And that's what, that's what gets me excited because I know what kind of conversations are happening, and I know if someone can just look at that, at that 50,000-foot view, then there's a whole host of intelligence that should drive how a brand serves their customers.
Clare:
Got it. And what was that transition like then? It sounds like it was a bit of a challenge, was this one of the barriers that you had to overcome to become the woman you are today?
Lauretta:
Yeah, it is. Well, so, when I think about some of the challenges or the barriers that I've faced over the years, you know, mine was more of a doozy because it was kind of a trifecta. I came into the workforce quite young because I knew everything, right? So, I quickly dropped out of high school, got my general education degree, and hit the scene. And essentially, I was a woman, so I didn't act, look, talk, or behave like my male counterparts. I was young, so I was inexperienced Yeah, and I was undereducated. So, it was a challenge when I made the jump from contact centre to software as a service, I found the same things that served me in that arena, which was leaning in on my resourcefulness and leaning in on my resiliency served me well when I made the leap into software. So, essentially I started in the workforce not knowing a whole heck of a lot of anything. And so I was quick to look at any of the industry associations or groups and communities like this, right? That were out there actively trying to serve, you know, their industry and market. Google became my friend.
Clare:
Yeah, it's still my best friend to this day. And now Chat GPT-4.
Lauretta:
See, well, exactly, exactly. Look how that's even evolved in the last, you know, so many years. But yeah, so like, I kind of got Google educated right along the way. And so I think the resourcefulness definitely served me well in that scenario. And then resiliency, you know, as a woman, I didn't, as I said, behave, act, talk like my male counterparts, and that definitely shook them up a little bit. And so there were oftentimes when I was the note taker or I was the one coordinating beverages and whatnot, and that's unfortunate, but the silver lining or the lemon made out of lemons there is, I was in the room and I was hearing the conversations. I was actively listening. And at the end of the day, she who controls the pen, note taking, controls the objectives, the outcomes of the meeting, the actions...
Clare:
The actions!
Lauretta:
You know what I'm saying? So, it was looking at it from the, I can't control how they perceive me, but I can control what I do with it. And I tried to just keep that front of mind and, so far, it served me well.
Clare:
So, just picking up a few little bits of what you said there. So, how old were you when you hit the workforce then? So, after high school, how old's that? 18?
Lauretta:
17 and a half. I came out early. Yeah.
Clare:
Wow, that's so young, isn't it? Gosh. But you do, at that age, you do think you know everything. I remember...
Lauretta:
My gosh, you couldn't have told me anything.
Clare:
Yeah. I thought I was a full-on adult at about 15. Now I look back and I think, oh my God, I was like such a baby. But the experience of being a young woman in business really resonated with me and the struggle to be taken seriously because of your age. It seems to be the thing that happens with women now, doesn't it? You're either too young or you're too old, or you're, you know, something. But that feeling of being expected to be the note taker or to make the beverages that also happened to me on my way up. And being very different to your counterparts. So, I started on the frontline, but in hospitality, worked my way up to be a General Manager at 23. And when I was a general manager of restaurants and hotels, pretty much everybody in my region were all white middle-aged men, and I was 23, a very girly girl as well.
Clare:
But that sensation of like, you know, looking and being different and also being judged differently even for the same behaviour as guys happened to me. So, I would be speaking up and putting my ideas forward and I get the feedback you need to tone it down a bit. It's a bit much. And I was like, but he was sat next to me doing exactly the same, but he got praised, he's assertive, he's a leader, but I was a bit too much. So I think, you know, think, oh, times have changed and there's a lot more awareness around equality. But that has really stuck with me. And I know it still happens to women today because I talk to them a lot. Especially women in their early careers. So, Yeah. So, yeah, be super conscious of not being dismissive. So, and now you are the VP?
Lauretta:
Yeah, so now I'm the VP of Success Strategy here at CallMiner. And I get to spend my day helping to essentially orchestrate all the activities and engagements that our frontline success owners need to navigate to get our customers realising value from the platform. And if I look back, right, every single step along the way to here to the point you made earlier frontline agent and the perspective that it came with that to leading the operations, to training them, to all of that, has built a unique experience belt that now I'm in a position where I'm good at what I do, I'm enjoying doing it. And I'm doing it with a platform that I just feel really, really passionate about. So, it's just, it's all kind of come together now, right? It's fun.
Clare:
Yeah. Self-Actualising. So, just to kind of move the conversation forward a little bit, I think there are two things I'd really like to dig a little bit deeper into. And I think this is in part going to be about connecting the dots between the conversations that happen at the contact centre and customer experience more broadly and in terms of what's happening in the CX industry, and how quickly it's evolving. I'd love to talk a little bit more about the influence that women have on this because I suppose AI is male-dominated, and tech and SaaS are typically male-dominated. There are definitely a lot more women in non-technical roles, but in terms of leadership and driving the agenda, it tends to be more male-dominated. So, let's start with the CX aspect.
Lauretta:
Yeah.
Clare:
To begin with, and obviously, just kind of sitting on the technology side and specifically, you know, got your finger right on the pulse of what's going on in contact centres. How do you see CX professionals leveraging contact centre interaction data into their CX strategy? And I think just for the benefit of the listeners, maybe giving us a bit of a 101 on what kind of data is coming out of the contact centres about conversations, just so we can all start from the same place.
Lauretta:
Yeah, no, that's great. So, the way I think about conversation analytics is, you know, contact centres for a long time, were able to get some pretty good insights in terms of when a contact, you know, when the customer contacted a brand, how long did that contact happen, and this could be call, chat, you know, web, email, what have you. But all of these, all of these data points were outside of the interaction, right? Nothing inside of the interaction. The closest you got to inside the interaction were one of three ways. One, survey, which is good because you do get feedback, you get some verbatims from your customers but the scale or the scope is quite small and sometimes the results are a little polarizing. The other way was old-school QA methods, right?
Lauretta:
Where you have someone actively listening, but again, the scope's quite small. And then you know, finally just looking at the contact centre agent notes, right? And trying to do some kind of text analytics maybe over the way that the agent summarises. So, that's generally speaking how the contact centre was able to yield data. Now, conversation analytics essentially says, great, good, all of that stuff is lovely, but now let's dive inside of the contact, right? Let's get inside of that call. Let's get inside of those email exchanges. Let's get inside of those web forms that the customers are filling out. Let's get inside of those chat interactions or the texting so that you can start categorising aspects of those interactions, eventually scoring and overlaying things like sentiment, right, at the beginning or the end of the interaction.
Lauretta:
So, that's what conversation analytics is for me, right? It's an ability to get inside of the call and start to pull data points up that can basically give your CX professionals actionable data. So that's a bit of a baseline there for conversation analytics. Some of the results that they see out of conversation analytics are at the tactical agent level. If you're in a sales environment, if these are the objections that prospects typically give, what are the rebuttals that are most effective, right? Or if a customer calls in and wants to return a product, again, you can look at this in aggregate because you're looking at across a hundred percent of your calls or your chats. If they're returning product A, what are the top three reasons why? Do they not like the colour? Right? Is it just a little bit wonky with how it closes? I mean, whatever the product is, right? But being able to distill and aggregate that information across a hundred percent of the contacts is really, really, really valuable to the CX professionals. So that's what conversation analytics does.
Clare:
So, just for my own benefit, I think. So, what you're saying is it's so there's the actual telephone conversation and voice analytics about what has taken place. So, I'm assuming that's some machine learning processing the conversation. But then it's also pulling in data from contact records and texts and messages and everything. So that just aggregates like a view of that customer in that conversation, and then those conversations are aggregated up to give you data about the operational side. Is that right?
Lauretta:
Yep. Absolutely. And from there, calls are happening all the time. You know, conversations are happening all the time. A customer may call in for I need a new shipment, right? I need a new product shipped to me, but along the way, that agent and that customer are having conversations about the brand, right? And you're not going to miss any of that, right? And so you get stakeholders that are interested in the data out of conversation analytics, like Chief Product Officers, right? Because they want to know how to improve their product, what are their customers saying? They can look at the surveys and that's going to tell them you know, some information. But when they marry the surveys with inside, of getting inside of those calls and those chats and texts it's quite the scope and scale of it all gives them the confidence to make decisions on how to change their product.
Clare:
Okay. So, how are great CX professionals integrating this kind of technology into their CX strategies? What are they doing with it? This data? Because data is great, but if you don't do anything with it...
Lauretta:
That's right. Well, and you know, and I liken our platform, like our platform can do so much, and conversation analytics can do so much. But to your point, if there's not action derived from that, then what are you really doing? What we're seeing is in CX and the way I've always thought about CX is it's kind of the marriage between customer satisfaction and customer effort, right? So, customer satisfaction being is that customer satisfied with your brand, your product, your service, et cetera, right? And then effort being, are you making it easy for that customer to engage with your brand and do business with, right? And what we're finding is because, conversation analytics can kind of, or does unlock that black box of inside of the call, CX professionals are now creating scores because they're able, through machine learning to categorise every element of the call, they're able to create predictive scores on customer satisfaction and on customer effort. And once they have score predictors that help decide whether or not our CX is at a red state, a green state, or a yellow state, then they're able to use those predictive scores as smoke alarms.
Clare:
For customer attrition or?
Lauretta:
For Yeah. For all of it, right? So they're able to say...
Lauretta:
If my customer experience score is red, right? I'm going to go and do a deep dive into those conversations across any channel, digital or otherwise, right? And from there, they're deriving insights that help them improve people, processes, and technology, right? And so it becomes a continuous improvement mechanism for CX professionals. So, the ones that are truly trailblazing are taking the contact centre data, and wielding it in such a way that they get a CX prediction score, right? That then allows them to point their root cause analysis efforts at something that has the scale and scope that gives them the confidence to make business change. I'll give you an example.
Clare:
I was going to say, can you give me an example?
Lauretta:
Sometimes it's a little nebulous, you know, a little ambiguous when we're talking about. But there was a brand earlier this year and late last year that I was working with and it was a fun handbag brand. I didn't get any discounts or anything, but, no free bags. But we were working with the brand and, you know, one of the challenges that they had were costs associated to sending new products back out, right? So, a product was sent to a customer, but the customer never got said product. The customer calls and they're like, I didn't get my bag or wallet or what have you. And as part of a good customer experience, that brand just automatically sends, you know, the new product right back out, right? No questions asked.
Lauretta:
That way they don't put their agent in a really bad scenario trying to troubleshoot something that they have no control over or insight into and they don't put their customer through a bad experience of trying to sort out what the problem was. Yeah. They just get the bag. Well, the brand was able to leverage conversation analytics to get inside of the calls at scale, right? So a hundred percent of the calls, they were able to understand that when a bag was ordered from their outlet online system, that system was not equipped to handle apartment numbers. So, every time somebody ordered a bag from their outlet online store if they had an apartment number right,
Clare:
It just got lost.
Lauretta:
They didn't get their bag.
Clare:
So there's just loads of little bags lost all over America.
Lauretta:
Somewhere. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so, and so, what the contact centre was able to serve up to the CX professional before that, right? Was it's happening a lot in New York, or it's happening a lot from the outlet store, right? But there was nothing ticking and tying these things together. And when they were able to get inside the call, it was found that every time that apartment number was present, the bag didn't make it to its end destination. And so now the brand was able to, with confidence, right? Go to their CIO or technology, right? And say, Hey, X percent of our bags are having to be re-shipped. Of those, and it was, you know, X percent is because this outlet online store isn't caring for apartment numbers appropriately. And so they were able to make a systemic change that had a measurable impact on their CX scores. And that was how a CX professional was able to take contact centre data and make a business change and take it to like I said, the CIO or CTO or whomever it was to say, we need a new system to care for this because we're losing X dollars because of it.
Clare:
I wonder how long it would've taken to identify that...
Lauretta:
You know, being in a contact centre, you know, and an agent on the phone. I can tell you I remember, you know, being part of focus groups, right? They, you know, QA or continuous improvement would take us off the phones and they'd say, all right, anything, you know, new challenges coming up for the customers lately, this kind of thing. And you know, that's always as good as the most recent call that the agent had because it was, you know, top of mind or what have you. So, I don't know, I don't know the answer on how long it would've taken them to get... Maybe too long.
Clare:
Yeah. And I just can't get over it, there are all these little bags out there somewhere, homeless.
Lauretta:
And so one of the ways we clued into it was there was you know, this day and age when folks have the cameras attached to the front of the door. So, they have video of, you know, a driver setting the bag on, you know, a stoop that had nothing to do with their, you know, and so I'm like, oh, these bags, they really are just out there in space somewhere not getting utilised.
Clare:
So, yeah. Oh, that's a really good example. Yeah. And I think I'm getting asked more and more frequently about like the connection between being able to leverage data across customer experience, and typically it's being used for things like personalisation and marketing, isn't it? So, it's really interesting to see at this end which is kind of when customers are making contacts and looking for support, how that's being used to inform business decision-making. Because I remember when I was Head of CX at a huge retailer that didn't have any kind of technology like that, I remember having to go in and because we knew that there's a problem in a department because their sales were declining and they were like massively overspent. But I had to go into the contact centre and ask them to download like every single contacts and conversation that had happened. Obviously, you would never have seen what was inside the conversation, but they had to manually categorise whether these complaints were about food, environment, service and being able to take that back then to a Senior Director and go, yeah, there's definitely a problem and this is what it is. But that took me weeks to be able to do that. There was no kind of alert service. So, I can really see the value of that.
Lauretta:
Yeah. So now that predictive score that the CX professionals are creating really do, like I said, act as that smoke alarm, right? And when they conduct root cause analysis, they're able to come out with a people, process or system recommendation for the business to make change. And they're able to do it in a fraction of the time that they were able to do it before.
Clare:
Yeah. Because the smoke alarm goes off.
Lauretta:
That's right. That's right.
Clare:
Well, it wouldn't be The Inspiring Women in CX podcast without bringing a focus back to women again. So, just to lead on from that, I just was wondering a little bit more about how women are actually influencing the uptake of technology and connecting the dots between contact centre and CX. Because I've got a few statistics, like 70% of the frontline workforce in contact centres and customer experience more broadly, are women, but only 30% of those ever make it into even frontline management. And then when we think about SaaS and tech companies, only 28% of the total employee base are female. Sorry, 28% at above leadership, senior leadership, senior management level. So, women are massively underrepresented, not necessarily at the frontline in contact centres because loads of women are there at the frontline of customer service.
Clare:
But so few are kind of getting into those positions and I know I go and talk at a lot of tech vendor kinds of conferences, and most of the time I'm talking to men. In terms of the room, the buyers, the CTOs, the contact centre leaders, the decision-makers are quite often male. So yeah, I just wondered like what's your point of view on how women are shaping this. Sorry, one more to add, sorry. So, I think I said this earlier. So, only 12% of AI professionals are women as well. So the people that are designing, developing, delivering the technologies, it's very male. Basically being developed by men apart from Chat GTP-4 four, I found out the CTO was a woman. I was very impressed with that little statistic. But she's one of only 8% of female CTOs. But she did a great job, right? She brought like one game-changing product to market...
Lauretta:
Knocked it out of the park. I mean, I don't know very many people that don't have it as an app on their phone or on their desktop, right? I mean, she's knocked it out of the park. But your point's valid, you know, the stats are saying, and they're true because like you said, you go to an event and you're talking to a sea of men with the male bias. And the reality is we've got a long road still yet to go to get that kind of equilibrium reached. But what I'm finding is where the women have broken through and they've got a seat at the table in CX leadership and specifically CX tech leadership, they are bringing that desire to understand and know more from more perspectives.
Lauretta:
And it's just brilliant, right? They, you know, the CX women that I'm talking to are constantly asking, well, what does so-and-so think about this? Well, how are they thinking about this? Right? They're reaching out and grabbing a diverse group and pulling them in because they realise that their voice, right, wasn't present for so long. I think that they just inherently see value in collaborating, but collaborating with a diverse group. And so I'm seeing more and more of that. That's the impact that I see on our CX professional women in tech and the impact they're having on the industry is that they understand the value of diverse collaboration. And they are, for all intents and purposes, demanding it of their organisations. And it's just, it's amazing. The other thing that I'm seeing is, is more and more allies, you know, I don't have anything other than anecdotal, but I can tell you when I go into these CX workshops and we're trying to design a solution that's going to fit that brand and what have you, there are more and more men that are stepping up and looking for that collaboration, right?
Lauretta:
And stepping up and saying, I'll take the notes, right? So, I am encouraged, I think there's still a long road ahead because it is very, you know, male-dominated. And some of those folks don't necessarily have that ally viewpoint. But I am encouraged, at least in my immediate, you know. I'm seeing the CX women demand diverse collaboration, and I'm seeing more and more friendly allies take a prominent step. So it's exciting to see it. And I hope that, you know, in two years when we do this podcast again, and we'll do more before then, but you know, that the stats are going to have a stark, you know, incline.
Clare:
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. So, I can't remember the stats off the top of my head, but I've presented about this before, its the difference between how men and women in leadership think, and the point that you raised about collaboration is a very much more female attribute of leadership. So, looking for collective wins across the organisation, looking for broader representation for decision making, but also a longer-term view on return on investment, for example. So, men tend to think in shorter term payoffs...
Lauretta:
What's the problem right in front of me, yeah.
Clare:
Yeah, but also the impact. So, it has been proven with science, and I wish I had the statistics on me now. But women have a stronger value placed upon things like social benefit. So, you know, talking about people, employees, customers, like, we are just more attuned to that as something of high value, whereas men tend to be more data and numbers oriented. And not to say women aren't commercial because they absolutely are, but it's just how we would get there is much more collaborative, inclusive, and courageous when it comes to things like social benefit and a longer term view. So, I think, you know, that's the kind of core reason why this...
Clare:
Issue of diversity in leadership is so fundamentally critical. Especially in environments now where the social and economic and ecological impacts that the world is experiencing definitely needs more of that collaborative, longer range, broader benefit perspective on how and why we do things. So yes, I hope in two years time it changes. I suppose I'm just really encouraged with, you know, our community is for women in Customer Experience and Technology. We're being invited and asked, can you find speakers for these events because we want better representation. We're being asked, can you find me podcast guests because I want better representation of women. People coming to us and saying, hey, we've got this role opening at leadership level, can you help us source the right person from the community?
Clare:
I think the community's acting as a bit of a vehicle for people to come knowing that, you know, we've highlighted the problem of, you know, women are 70% of the frontline workforce, but only 30% are getting into even entry-level management. And now there's somewhere to come and say, can you help us? Can we collaborate together? Can we do more stuff? And yeah, just, and again, just amazing that CallMiner was the first tech company to see that, to come and bring not only your employees as members, but also five of your customers as well, which is even more.
Lauretta:
We had a brilliant showing at our Women's Summit last year. And it was, you know, one part CallMiner team members and leadership and two parts CallMiner customers. We've got some of the best customers around. And I'm happy to say that I see a lot of women in those CX leadership positions. So, like I said, I'm just, you know, I'm hopeful that this tide is turning. But these communities go a very, very long way. What we experienced at that first, our inaugural, if you will, event last year was a real connection with those women. Because one woman would say, this is what I've experienced, and I've seen this all over the Women in CX community, so I know it's catching like, you know, fire, but a woman would say, here's my experience and nearly every other woman in the room. Exactly. And there's empowerment in that to say that, oh, I'm not, it's not me.
Clare:
Yeah. It's the system. Yeah.
Lauretta:
The system, right. And then you get a bit more confidence. You get a bit more confidence, you get a little bit more jazz in your step and you're not as easily to back down or as easily to sweep your voice under the rug anymore. And I think these communities, like Women in CX are going only continue to support that and even hopefully get us to where we're gaining like ground exponentially because that confidence is built.
Clare:
Yeah, that confidence and feeling supported by a whole load of other women who are in the same boat and wanting to rise up together. I think my final point would just be about, you know, when we get there, so for example, as an AVP or when I was in senior management in retail, being able to extend the ladder back and be recognising opportunities to help bring the next person up. I think being like the role models, the role model that you are for women, the thing that we were missing when we were on our way up and looking up and thinking like, you know, I want to be...
Lauretta:
Where are they?
Clare:
Yeah, you know, being visible, being that person. And I think you're right, the role of guys in this, we can't solve gender equality alone. So, those men that are stepping up to say, don't speak over her. What was it you were going to say? Or asking, what would you like to contribute? Or seeing someone with potential just because they don't look like them or fit into the same mold. You see someone with potential, being that person that steps out on a limb and says, we should give this person a shot. You know, and there more women and minorities that men can do that for, I think the faster this problem is going to be solved. So, on that note, is there one final piece of advice or takeaway you'd like to leave the Women in CX audience with today?
Lauretta:
Yeah. Advice is always tricky. So, the advice that I'd like to give is actually advice that I received from somebody else, which hopefully makes it carry a bit more weight because it resonated with me and I'm trying to live it. There was a woman that we invited last year at our women's summit, her name's Whitney Hawthorne, and she is the creator leader over the Savvy Working Mom. You guys can look her up. Her mission, her passion is to ensure that women can thrive in and out of the office, right? And so she's got these guys and these amazing you know, frameworks that she shares with women. So, we invited her. What she started out her message with was so provocative, like it, my jaw hit the ground. And it was provocative one, because of her mission, right? Ensure women can thrive in and out of the workplace. And it was provocative because what she said made me go "No, that's not right."
Clare:
I don't know what it is. What was it? What did she say?
Lauretta:
I have to give you the build. She came in and she said, "All right, ladies, work-life balance is a myth".
Lauretta:
And that shook me to my core because that, up until that point in my mind, when someone asked me like, what's your goal in life, right? So, oh, I just want to make sure I'm balancing work and life, you know? And her point was, this, life is what you want balanced, work is an element of life. To suggest that work should be evenly weighted against every other aspect of your life is setting you up for failure. It's setting you up for burnout. It's setting you up for a host of things that you just won't be able to achieve, right? And so what that caused me to do is say, okay, what are my goals and how will I achieve those goals? And where does work fit in to help me achieve those goals? Versus, right, looking at my personal calendar and my work calendar and making sure that there's a 50/50 split, because what that did is it set me up for a lot of pain and heartache. And I'm happy to say that that advice kind of left me changed. I'm still working at it, it's a practice, right? Because it's a total mind shift, but that's the advice I'd give. Don't seek work-life balance. Seek balance. Work is an element of life, not your life.
Clare:
Oh, that was great.
Lauretta:
Not mine.
Clare:
That's, you know, paying it forward, passing it on, and now all of our listeners will know about that too. But yeah, it's so easy, isn't it, to make everything about work and trying to fit bits of your life in around that. And I think we're conditioned to just continually and perpetually just work ourselves harder and harder, aren't we? Because the capitalist mindset that exists in the world about what we're supposed to be striving for. But in a blink of an eye like, what did you do with your life? I worked and tried to balance my life with it. I don't want to be on my deathbed thinking that. So thank you for the reminder.
Lauretta:
Exactly. Exactly.
Clare:
So, Lauretta, it's been awesome to hang out with you today on the Inspiring Women in CX podcast. Thank you so much for coming.
Lauretta:
Oh, thanks for having me. It was awesome talking to you today.
Clare:
Yes. And thank you to everybody who listened or watched this podcast episode. We'll see you all next time. Bye for now. Bye
Lauretta:
Bye.
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the episode, 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 check out www.womenincx.community/membership.
Join us again next time when I’ll be talking to one of our community members from the UK about removing barriers to adoption during digital transformation by considering user well-being. See you all soon!
