Clare Muscutt talks with Marina Bezuglova about the connection between well-being and customer and employee experience.
Clare:
Welcome to the 8th 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 Moscow. She has over 20 years of experience in market research and CX, starting from GfK and joining Ipsos 4 years ago, she holds a PhD in Medicine and is a certified mindfulness trainer. She’s also the author of the book ‘Well-being: Stress Management and Development of Creativity’, and frequently delivers masterclasses and lectures on emotional intelligence and empathy, the prevention of burnout, and customer-centricity in healthcare. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest, CX sister, Marina Bezuglova.
Clare:
Hi, Marina.
Marina:
Hi, Clare. Nice to see you.
Clare:
Wonderful to see you. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Marina:
It's a great pleasure to be here with you.
Clare:
And welcome to everybody who's listening or watching the podcast, wherever you are in the world. So, to get us started, the same question I ask all of our guests on the Inspiring Women in CX podcast is, how exactly did you find your way into Women in CX and what kinds of things have you been up to in the community?
Marina:
Yes. It was an interesting story because first I met you and it was because I was writing my new book about stress and burnout, and I was collecting stories about burnouts from leaders, entrepreneurs, and one of my friends, Olga, she's a member of the community, and she decided to help me and posted a call to the community to share the stories about burnout, about stress. And as a result, I got to know you, and your story, and I learned about the community and for some period of time, I followed the community from afar and I understood that I have a lot of values in common with the community. And also, I'm involved deeply in customer experience as a topic. Because I've been working for a market research and consumer researcher for many years, and especially I was, I'm now interested in the topic, the connection between customer experience and employee experience.
Marina:
And it was also topic for the community. And, as a result, I understood that we have a lot of common interest to the community, and it should be a perfect fit for me to join the community. And I did not regret it. And because, yeah, because from the very beginning, I felt the value and warmth of the community, this wonderful community, and the welcome puts immediately you at ease. And you feel that yes, you are surrounded by caring people, and you feel that you are in a safe place. And it's very important because in our complex world, to have feeling of safety, it's a great privilege. And also, when I asked my first question on a presentation I was working on, I got so many valuable ideas, interesting and useful links to articles, to studies. And I was convinced that yes, I was surrounded by caring people and great professionals. And this is great to be here and to share knowledge, to share my experience also and helping others and celebrating successes. And I would say that this community is not a formal organisation of people. This is very warm and living organism with an open heart where all your requests will be answered and I'm happy to be here.
Clare:
And thank and thank you so much, and you've contributed so much as well. We loved your recent webinar on well-being as well. So, being able to share your thoughts and insights and experience with the group and that being able to go into our resource library for people to watch in the future. I think that's what community's all about, isn't it? Giving and receiving in equal measure.
Marina:
Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely.
Clare:
And just wonderful to have you here today. Yeah. So, in terms of your career journey, I'm sure the listeners would love to know a little bit more about how you've ended up where you are today, working for this massive market research agency. So, yeah. Give us the backstory of Marina.
Marina:
Okay. I got several backgrounds and educations. A PhD in Medicine, I've got an MBA also, a background in psychology and coding.
Clare:
So, Dr Marina, I should be calling you.
Marina:
Yes. And it was my old story from my youth. And, actually, I'm a big fan of the interdisciplinary approach because I'm sure that this intersection creates new knowledge, new value. And my first career was in medicine, in a scientific institute, where I got my PhD in medicine, and then I went to a healthcare organisation. I worked a little bit for The Ministry of Public Health, but it was very boring for me because I was young, energetic, and I did not like all sorts of formal procedures. So I found a good solution where I can combine my interest for research, for medicine, and for people. And I went to social and market research and I started work for GfK. It's an international company. And I started doing research for healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, consulting pharmaceutical companies, and then for all other markets like automotive, banks, retail, telecom because over time I became a top manager of GfK.
Marina:
And my responsibilities expanded and I was deeply involved in the development of customer experience research, building metrics for CX, KPI system building, customer journey mapping, and continuous improvement of customer experience based on a continuous study of client voice, both employee and customers. And then, five years ago, I joined Ipsos, and now I'm responsible for the healthcare business unit in the region of central and eastern Europe. And my interest is now in patient-centricity in healthcare and customer experience in medicine, and I believe that this topic is very important for society, but it's not my only interest. I'm very interested in the trend of well-being, both, corporate well-being and personal well-being, and generally I start my masterclasses and educational events about well-being from personal well-being.
Marina:
Because all of us are people, and if on our personal level, we don't follow principles or values of health and well-being, it would be very difficult to build a corporate culture of well-being in your company. So I believe that personal and organisational are very much related. And that's why I try to teach about that also. And also I strive to develop mindful leadership because I believe that mindful and empathetic leaders can make our world better. And I give lectures, masterclasses, educational events. So that's my journey up to now.
Clare:
That's amazing. And I can definitely see there's that thread of health and well-being that kind of started really early with your PhD and has continued throughout. And it's great to see that you're kind of bringing that full circle again to well-being more broadly. But I loved what you said there about, you know, it starts with you, doesn't it? And you can't pour from an empty cup. You can't make these big changes, and you can't influence the well-being of others unless you are in touch with your own. And I know that you've been very instructional to me about how important...
Marina:
Now I can see that there is this trend in my life that I'm sticking to this topic from the beginning and in different ways, but I came to the same point.
Clare:
Yeah. Yeah. And it is funny, isn't it? Because that probably wasn't intentional, but when you look back, you go, "Oh, that was the journey I took". I know for me, people always ask me, you know, what was your strategy? I was like, "I didn't have one". Just kind of life evolved. And you can look back and go, it looks like a load of really [inaudible] moves, but it definitely wasn't. So I feel you on that one. And obviously, so much experience that you've gained along the way. What was one challenge or barrier you had to overcome to become the woman you are today?
Marina:
Okay. It's a very good question because I believe that we grow from difficulties and adversity and I believe in stressful growth because you have no reason to change if you are in a comfort zone. So, if you are out of your comfort zone, you have to change something and grow and my career was a situation of difficult and maybe some changes and challenges. And it was several years ago when my company, where I worked for many years, was facing a transformation process. The matter was that investment finance corporation, the majority owner decided to restructure the company, and they decided to sell a part of the business and I let the business that was decided to sell. And of course, I worked for the company for many years as a top manager.
Marina:
It was stressful news for me, not only for me but for the whole team. And the team, 100 employees. We leave during one year. We did not know where we'll be in a year as a result of the deal. And of course, it was stressful for the team. And I understood that it's very difficult to maintain normal business when the team is stuck in stress. So, my first instrument, management instrument, during this time was psychological support and empathy, because first we had to get rid of stress in order to continue working, and it was very interesting because it was also a very fruitful period in my life. I got additional background in psychology, I became a coach. I also was deeply involved in all sort of mindfulness practices myself. And I was able to return my state to my normal state.
Marina:
Because based on meditation, and yoga but I also wanted to help my team to be in a safe place, to get rid of stress. And it was my main job during that period. And also it was very productive because during this period, I started to write my book about stress and about creativity. And it was the book 'Well-being, Stress Management and Creativity Development'. And also I prepared an educational program for well-being skills, and development and my life changed. And I began to work for my company only four days a week. It was my wish because I had a lot of new projects and I got additional time for writing books for educational events, for coaching, and I would say that my life changed and I expanded the boundaries of my life.
Marina:
And I guess that this crisis was useful for me because it changed my life. It's interesting. And, my book in the Russian language was published some time ago. And it's interesting that maybe a couple of weeks ago, this book in the English language was published on the Amazon platform with the new title 'Finding Serenity Amid the Chaos'. And by the way, the community helped me with this book because together we were choosing the title and some friends helped me with recommendations on the manuscript. So again, I got huge value from the community. It's great.
Clare:
Oh, we're so happy to help. And we'll come back to the book again in a second because I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into that. But I just wrote down a couple of things that I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into. And I think first of all, it's this kind of concept of change, transformation, restructuring, reorganising, mergers, acquisition. And I've been through that myself. And it definitely created so much stress for individuals, for teams, just not knowing what is the future going to hold. Even the way that, you know, with redundancies, having to interview for basically your own job or a slightly different job, knowing that a couple of people are going to make it through the process is exhausting and it's so disruptive. Right. But that's like, let's say merger acquisition or restructure or like whole scale.
Clare:
But I think even with transformation, this term that is just thrown around constantly, everywhere now, creates a similar level of stress, particularly when the transformation is mainly targeted at saving cost and becoming more operationally efficient as opposed to a better, stronger, more resilient business. And, I think, you know, what the conversation about the vision that's happening at a really senior level, very, very rarely filters down to people in lower management or frontline and definitely requires more consideration about employee well-being during those times. But it seems to be an afterthought or not even considered in so many company reorganisations.
Marina:
Yeah, and I would say that before I was the leader who was more caring about the business, and after this situation, after this merger acquisition process, I became a leader who was caring more about people and I understood that this is very good. When you care about people, they open their potential and in case you care about people, you develop both business and people. That's why I believe that a mindful and empathetic leader is the best leader in terms of making changes in the organisation in terms of both people, well-being, and business success.
Clare:
Yeah. That is that issue of psychological safety, isn't it? Because we've talked about, you've talked about this loads already, the community, psychological safety, the experiences that you had in your own career. And with the amount of bureaucracy that exists, particularly in big corporate organisations, especially when they're going through change, there's so much that's kept out of our view, isn't there, about what's really happening, because it takes months to organise these things and people know they feel unsafe before even the big news comes, because everyone can feel there's something coming. And then with redundancies especially, I think there's so much bureaucracy from a legal standpoint. You just can't have certain conversations with people. And I think it can end up being a particularly lonely place, especially for those people who don't end up staying within the organisation.
Clare:
But that's painful and yeah. Very, very disruptive and unsafe. But the second thing I wrote down was, I'm going to quote this useful crisis because you said, you know, sometimes it takes for things to break in order to rebuild better, and on a personal level, I really identify with that. My own journey, I'm sure the listeners probably know this already, but you know, Women in CX wouldn't have existed if I hadn't basically lost everything in the pandemic because it opened up space for me to be able to start a podcast and amplify the voices of women that I knew because I had the time to do it. None of this would've happened if there wasn't a useful crisis of my own. And don't get me wrong, it was incredibly painful, but even my own experiences of burnout I think, has been this kind of continuous, getting to the point of breaking in order to recognise that change is required.
Clare:
And I'm still kind of in the midst of figuring out how to live sustainably with my own sense of resilience and anti fragility, and as a start-up founder, have not got the answer yet. But, you know, really working to understand what lies below the surface of being the kind of person that ends up getting burnt out through my own patterns of behaviour that I'm identifying and things like therapy. Why do I push myself to that limit without recognising my own needs and putting myself first? I still don't know the answer, but when I do, listeners, I will definitely share it with you. But, yeah. Having to get to that point where things feel like they've broken apart in order to build up better. So, the book, 'Finding Serenity Amid the Chaos: How Managing Your Stress Can Enhance Your Creativity and Well-Being', and as you said, the community helped with the translated title because it was Russian originally, wasn't it?
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Marina:
It was the title that you helped to choose if you remember.
Clare:
I know that's what I'm saying, yeah. I remember helping, what was the title in Russian?
Marina:
Well-being. In Russian, it was the English word 'Well-being'.
Clare:
Okay.
Marina:
Because it's a very universal word. That's a word that we use also in the local language.
Clare:
I think the reason I ask is that when I went to Russia when I was travelling I realised you can't read any of the signs because actually it's just a completely different alphabet. So, are English and Russian interchangeable with some keywords?
Marina:
Yes, absolutely. Different alphabet, but it's absolutely in the Russian language. But ‘well-being’ was English, I wrote in Latin letters, not Russian. So it's well-being, stress management and creativity development.
Clare:
Ok, so let's dive into this a little bit more though. So, you know, you're writing about stress and creativity. Why did you combine these concepts? So please, let's take a step back and look down on this. What is the relationship between stress and creativity?
Marina:
It's interesting because, firstly, originally, the book was conceived as a book about creativity and decision-making, and it relates to my profession because we help our clients find non-standard solutions, out of box ideas, and we use a lot of creative techniques in order to find these solutions. So I understand how to be more creative. Also, I like neuroscience and I'm deeply involved in this because of my medical background. And I was interested in how the brain creates new ideas, so I decided to combine my understanding of creativity and neuroscience in order to understand this topic better. And, it was very good because I believe if you understand how your brain works, you can better manage your life and your decisions. And also, in terms of customer experience, maybe you know that one of the very good approaches for the improvement of customer experience is the design thinking approach.
Marina:
Design thinking instrument. And the core of design thinking is empathy and creativity. So I decided to be deeply engaged with this topic. But when we experienced this crisis with my team, understood that if you're stuck in stress, you can't be open to high needs, like creativity, and self-actualisation, just look at the pyramid, Maslow's pyramid. So, if your basic needs are not satisfied, you can't be open to higher-level needs. So, I understood that first part of the book should be dedicated to stress management because when you get rid of stress, you can be open to creativity. That's why the first part of the book was dedicated to mindfulness, well-being, mental health, and health in a broad sense. And the second part was dedicated to creativity and decision-making, and it was the more professional part. But of course, in our world, there are so many, so much stress and mental health crisis in the world. So, the first part proved to be very relevant to nowadays context of stress management, but I was very happy that I got the first reviews on my English book, and it was very good feedback on the part on creativity. And I'm happy that some people found this part useful, not only in stress reduction but in stress management.
Clare:
Yeah, just thinking about... I'm not surprised that the book got great reviews because the bits I saw were brilliant, but thinking about the kind of stress impact on the body. So, the production of cortisol can affect so many areas of your life, including things like sleep, can't it? And then when you start to get into a sleep deficit, things just progress and get worse and increase the stress level. So there's a kind of neuro-physical connection between the body and the mind, and I think for me, that's the mental health issue, kind of merge pretty rapidly when you're in a state of physical stress and exhaustion because everything just seems so much harder when you are tired. I know, I've been working really hard on just really basic things like getting enough sleep and eating regularly and eating nutritious food.
Clare:
And the difference I feel in my mental health when I'm just doing the basics really, really well. You said meeting your most basic needs is definitely something I'm becoming more aware of now I'm on this journey to try to improve my wellness. But then the creativity aspect is, to bring it back to customer experience, I am a service designer by trade. I call it customer experience design now. But I think, you know, as you said, the empathy aspect of being able to listen to and understand, and then the creativity aspect of being able to respond with ideas that perhaps are less about improvement and more about innovation is absolutely my favourite place to be. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the connection with customer experience?
Marina:
Yes. But actually, this is customer experience. I like customer experience because the priority of customer experience is people, human beings, it's about human beings and their needs, and I believe that to be good in terms of customer experience, you should understand people and for this understanding, you need the skill of empathy. And if you understand and you feel the pain of other people, you are motivated to find a solution.
Marina:
Because you have energy, you have emotions to help people. If you feel the pain of other people, maybe they can't do something in customer experience. And if you understand, you need to make a very creative solution and this is the next skew because our brain is lazy and will not generate new ideas because we are very, I would say, we have a lot of blocks in order to create some non-standard ideas. And you need to use special techniques. Some may be associations borrowing from different industries to connect some pieces which are not usually connected. So, there are a lot of different techniques in order to make your brain generate new ideas, sometimes fantastic ideas, crazy ideas, but you can then improve these crazy ideas and find out-of-the-box solutions for your customer experience. That's why I believe that empathy and creativity are the core of excellent customer experience.
Clare:
And do you see empathy as truly being able to feel how someone else feels? Or do you think more in terms of cognitive empathy, being able to imagine?
Marina:
Both.
Clare:
Okay.
Marina:
Both. Cognitive and emotional, it's both. And sometimes when we go through tests for empathy, there are two components. How I can understand and how I can feel other people. And actually, cognitive empathy is very important for rational decisions regarding some things. But if you feel better pain of other people, you can find better solutions because you are more motivated. So, for example, now we create video films, movies about patients with some diseases and pharmaceutical companies or healthcare organisations use these movies about patients for doctors in order to maybe generate empathy towards patients because in interaction, doctor and patient, it's very important that the doctor can see a person with his needs, pain, and how the disease can have an impact on their lifestyle, et cetera. And if we see a person in the broader context of his life, doctors can understand and feel the pain of these patients and they can be more empathic, and it could improve the relationship between the doctor and the patient, and this is very important. So for me, empathy has both aspects. Rational, cognitive aspect, and emotional, emotional is also important.
Clare:
That's such an interesting example. That was a really good one. So, being able to make that patient a human with a life and understand the context of their experience to, I suppose, using storytelling in a way, isn't it, to give that person a narrative? I know in customer experience design, being able to put people in touch with the customer reality, if they're not that close to customers, was a really important part of being able to bring people together through your workshop around innovation or even journey mapping, but kind of moving beyond personas and user needs. These are ways of creatively bringing the customer into the room, or the patient into the room. I love the idea of the video concept.
Marina:
Yes, and actually storytelling is the main instrument of empathy, how we can maybe make other people be more empathic about other people.
Clare:
Yeah. No, I love that one, and I suppose that in your line of work now, that's what you are trying to do. Bring people in touch with the customer or patient reality and enable them to have a set of tools that can enable their creativity, because I guess you work with a lot of companies that are working on things like ad campaigns and brands and beyond kind of just general customer experience about how to reposition things in people's minds, and even connecting with the emotion, I guess, of the people that are going to be buyers to be able to come up with creative ideas to generate demand through marketing. I think it's all very fascinating and it all does come down to neuroscience, doesn't it? And the fact that people just aren't really that rational because we're so driven by emotion, aren't we?
Clare:
Yeah, I know with my background in retail, thinking about buyers and what, how people buy. And, you know, the urge for retail is just to be very kind of pragmatic and functional, but actually, the reasons why people buy things, when I learned more about brands and how brands are just like constructs in people's minds, and they can mean quite different things, and what they're actually buying is the idea that's been planted in their minds about what that product says about themselves. Just absolutely fascinating.
Marina:
Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting to study the nature of people, how the brain works and what can influence our decisions. This is very interesting.
Clare:
Yeah, and designing for emotional needs as well as functional needs in customer experience. I think we tend to air more towards the latter in terms of functional, functionality, which is important, but I think the alchemy and customer experience, particularly in branded environments, is being able to get into that next dimension, which is meeting customers’ emotional needs. And we see it, I guess, in customer service, don't we? Or like, when things go wrong where customer's emotional needs are not met and being listened to when they've got a problem that needs solving, there's a functional aspect of resolving it. But what can happen in that interaction when you don't feel listened to or understood or recognised or even seen, can cause chaos, can't it?
Marina:
Yes, and it's absolutely clear that the shortest way to the consumers' hearts is through emotions because it's easier for us to react on emotion. Absolutely.
Clare:
Faster. Yeah.
Marina:
Yeah, yeah. So it's easier, but maybe it's not so simple to find a good instrument, how to resonate with the positive emotions of people.
Clare:
But thinking about empathy mapping or experience mapping through the lens of emotion, you know, not knowing what time your delivery is going to turn up creates confusion, doesn't it? And not being sure, which is a cognitive load that you could just really do without, then that's one of the reasons why Amazon is so good, isn't it? Because you know exactly what's happening and they send you messages, about what time things are going to be arriving, if there's a problem, they tell you about it, and it's all done via automation and great technical capability. But how many CX professionals are thinking about how do you reduce mental load and decision making and stress through the experience and designing for that?
Marina:
Yes. And actually, excellent customer experience is like good therapy for people because it provides maybe sort of filtering this information, and noise, and provides the proper service and proper time and proper place. And this is what we need in the world when we're overloaded with information and choices, and of course, very easy interactions, very simple missions we can make doing something. It's a great help for our mental health as well.
Clare:
Yeah. I'm loving this idea of stress reduction journey maps, how can we reduce our customer stress? Thinking that as a lens of an idea. So, yeah. So, final question. Why did you translate the book into English from Russian? What was the reason for that? Because that must have been a lot of hard work.
Marina:
Yes. I stand for the globalisation of thoughts and values, and I believe that people with the same values should unite, despite the fact they belong to different languages, nationalities, races, genders, and so on. And they believe that if people with the same values, people are united around humanistic values, we can overcome many crises in our world, including economic, political, climate, and mental health crises. And this is very important. And I would say that if you realise that it's easy now to have your thoughts, your voice heard through different opportunities, global opportunities like social networks, blogging, you can write...
Clare:
Podcasts!
Marina:
Yes. Yes. And you can write books and you can publish this book on a global platform in any language of the world. So it seems to me that we have to use this opportunity to be heard.
Clare:
Yeah. I love that. I think I'd summarized that in saying basically what you said at the start about Women in CX, wasn't it? A group of people who have shared values and a huge amount of diversity in terms of what they do, where they work, and where they're from, but coming together around a shared set of values really does make for better experiences for everybody. And yeah, I really love that, and I'm so glad that you published your book in English. So, for the listeners, is there any one final thought or piece of advice or takeaway you'd like them to take from our conversation today?
Marina:
First of all, thank you for the conversation. And maybe I would like to remember that we talked a lot about empathy, and maybe I have to mention that. Really, we live in an age of empathy, but empathy is not a business instrument to generate additional profit and capitalisation. Empathy is about putting people first, priority for people, health, well-being, and this is important, and I love customer experience because the core concept of customer experience is a person, a human being. And this is very important. And I believe that business success, profit, et cetera, this is just a consequence of the proper emphasis on people and maybe satisfying their needs. So, I would say that maybe it's important to remember that the main goal of the business, the meaning of the business is making people's lives better. So, it's about empathy and it's about customer experience.
Clare:
Love that, and thank you for reminding us of that. And staying true to it is so hard sometimes, isn't it? In a commercial world where everything is about consumption and capitalisation, it's as true as ever, isn't it? Without your customers, you don't have a business. Without your employees, you don't have a way of serving your business. So if you get too far off the tracks of being people-centric, your business is only going to go one way. So thank you so much, Marina, it's been lovely to talk to you today.
Marina:
Thank you. Thank you, Clare. It was my pleasure to talk to you today.
Clare:
And thank you to everybody who listened or watched the podcast today, thank you, everyone. We'll see you next time. Bye for now.
Marina:
Thank you. Bye-bye. Have a nice day.
Clare:
You too.
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 France about the benefits of inclusive research and design. See you all soon!
