Clare Muscutt talks with Olga Potaptseva about female entrepreneurship and striking the right balance between CX strategy and implementation.
Episode #413 Show Notes:
Clare:
Welcome to the 13th 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 one of our community's founding members and the queen of Agile CX. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest. She's the founding director of the European Customer Consultancy, has been named among the top 150 wanted CX professionals globally and has managed, consulted, and mentored leading organisations and individuals around the world. She promotes best practice and sharing as the executive director at the customer Institute and is the inventor of the Agile CX implementation toolkit. Please welcome to the show, CX sister, Olga Potaptseva.
Clare:
Hi Olga.
Olga:
Hi Clare. So good to see you. How are you?
Clare:
I'm so good. How are you?
Olga:
I'm good. Thank you very much. You're looking very well.
Clare:
You're looking gorgeous. And I know I said this already but that blue top on you, it's just fabulous. To everyone listening, you have to go to our YouTube channel and take a look at Olga's colours today. She looks fabulous. And thank you to everybody who's joining us today and listening along at home. Welcome to the Women in CX podcast. And this is a really special episode for me because it's the first time we've had one of our members join for the second time, on the podcast. So this is Olga's actual second episode, but I was just reflecting on, you know, the first episode was before Women in CX as a community even existed. Wasn't it?
Olga:
It was, wasn't it? And what a journey, it's been a rollercoaster, it's been highs and lows and, I'm hearing you having great successes and the community is growing. We're all enjoying it very much, and you've just done a world tour of Women in CX, so amazing progress. Good, good results. Congratulations on that.
Clare:
We're getting there and I'm just so grateful to you for being one of the first nine founding members and helping me on that journey. The European Customer Consultancy, your business, being a big part of that and helping us with the research that kicked all of this off back in January 2021.
Olga:
It's my pleasure. It's a very rewarding community to be part of and myself and my company, which has now grown a bit, we're all thrilled to be helping.
Clare:
Oh yeah. And exactly the same for you, right? Like we were both in this kind of pandemic point in time where there needed to be a pivot, but actually, for you, it wasn't so hard, because you'd already built a fully remote agency and I'm going to come back and ask you more questions about that shortly. But, just for our listeners, you know, the question that we always ask is, is the opportunity to tell a bit of your backstory and how you got into CX and where you are today. Let the listeners know, who is Olga Potaptseva?
Olga:
Sure. So my personal background is that I'm originally from Russia. I moved to the US when I was 15 to do a year at high school. Then I came back then when I was at university, I went to Germany to study there. Then I moved back and that was sort of the start of my CX interest in my career because whilst I was in Germany, I was studying economics and marketing and a significant part of that course was connected to market research. And, some of you may know, GFK, which in German is, "Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung", is an Institute for customer research, later got rebranded as Growth For Knowledge because “Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung”, not many people can pronounce, I suppose.
Clare:
I did not know that. And yet it was a bit of a mouthful, wasn't it?
Olga:
Yeah.
Clare:
Great story.
Olga:
So that's a very well-established, well-regarded institution in Germany. And I got very interested in how they operate, what is it that they find out about customers that's so useful and so interesting. So when I went back to Moscow, I got a position at GFK and very quickly started leading a team there and it was all about customer research. There wasn't, in hindsight, there isn't much more to it, even though at the time we felt like we are taking baby steps towards customer-centricity and customer experience, we just didn't know back then that's what it's called. I got to lead a loyalty development program at GFK because I had a little bit of misfortune of promising to the client, as you know, fresh out of university. I got to lead a project and then I was presenting to the board with findings and I said, well, you really need to encourage loyalty for your customers.
Olga:
And they asked naturally whether that's something we could do for them. And I was like, yeah, sure. We have a loyalty program. And then I look at my manager and she was like, we don't. So I got put in charge to develop the loyalty program, which connected me very well to the bigger GFK community. And I found people in the UK and in Germany who were interested in the same subject. So together we worked on the methodology and it got rolled out globally, which is one of the kind of stepping stones in my career.
Clare:
So like, so serendipitous though, right? Like if you hadn't made that mistake in that meeting, none of this would've happened, maybe sliding doors moment, Hey.
Olga:
Ignorance is bliss sometimes
Clare:
And the, just youthfulness, isn't it like the belief in yourself at that moment? Yeah, we can do that.
Olga:
Yeah, we can do that. Might not. So then when I moved to London in 2008, I took a position again at GFK and I was again, very fortunate to lead an account for an amazing individual and an amazing company, Thomson Reuters, which demonstrated that customer experience is something very practical. So, they took our research findings and they completely informed their contact centre transition from St. Louis in the US to Manila, based on those results. So the way they did it, they wouldn't shut down a team in St. Louis until customer ratings and customer feedback were at least at the same level for the team in Manila. And that was a very, very dynamic program. Very insightful, informed lots of coaching, lots of skill-building for Manila agents and generally, very successful call centre transformation. Which then got me interested to explore how insights could become something bigger and how we can drive real business change with that. And I moved into the kind of practitioner issues and led the customer experience function for one of the UK insurance companies, Domestic & General. And this is where I've learned so much about being a CX practitioner, not just building theories and constructing strategies, but actually doing it and implementing and what are the real-life challenges there. And that kind of kick-started my interest and my career in CX.
Clare:
Yeah. So just picking up on a few things there. So obviously amazing businesses and brands with GFK and D&G insurance. But yeah, I totally agree with you that kind of practical grounding and having done the job is super important, but also the realisation that whatever kind of company industry or sector you work in, it can look completely different, right? So a lot of the theories or the widely held beliefs about customer experience don't necessarily apply everywhere and trying to approach things from a strategy down as opposed to action up, approaches a lot of the reason, I think, why so many customer experience initiatives fail, and I, like you, very much, you know, experimented learn like on the job, what worked, what didn't like, what the way in to influence the organisation was as well as the approach we needed to take. And fundamentally it is all about using what we do to deliver business results, right. And fathering, and finding your own way to do that wherever you are is way more important than trying to shoehorn a strategy that has been kind of marketed somewhere or maybe a digital or technology solution that's at a parent silver bullet for customer experience, like being in there.
Olga:
Yeah.
Clare:
Really listening and understanding and finding out what works, what's not working, there isn't really a theoretical approach to be able to do that very. It’s very hands-on. But I love that story. That was a great story. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, so like now kind of like moving into this entrepreneurial world and setting up your own company. What was one of the biggest challenges or barriers you've had to overcome to become the woman that you are today?
Olga:
Well, I'll tell you another story that, you know, my personal and professional life seemed to be very closely interconnected. So what prompted me to establish my own company is a range of personal circumstances. At the time, I was happily living in London, after D&G I moved on to work for the bank of Cyprus and then for a London-based consultancy. And I wasn't planning to move away from London at all. And then on one March day, my sister called me and she is like, well, I'm really fed up living in Russia. I don't want to do this anymore. So I'm going to move to Georgia. Well, what the hell are you talking about? Where is Georgia? Why would we move there? And she's like, no, no, no, I've got it figured out. And you know, I'm telling the stories if it was an easy decision, but obviously, I've been living away from my family for a while. And it's always been at the back of our minds that we'd like to reunite at some point. And the decision has been made then, then I was like, oh okay, if you're moving, I'll move too and then she was like, oh okay, if you're moving, then we'll convince the parents to move as well. So we all packed up, with children and whatnot and moved to Georgia in Southern Europe. And that presented a specific challenge for me because that was pre-pandemic. Remote work was not on the agenda.
Clare:
Wasn't even a thing, was it?
Olga:
It wasn't really a thing. Yeah. I always made a point to work a couple of days a week remotely from home, but still, that's, you know, very much of a physical presence in the office. Being fully remote wouldn't have been a solution. So I started then thinking about what could I do, and I guess that's where the entrepreneurial mindset comes in. I, okay, well, can I do something in Georgia? Probably not because that's not really a market focus customer experience at the scale that I need. And I started building partnerships with individuals and consultants that I knew, trying to see if I could do things for them as a subcontractor. And that's how the remote story started. And coming back to your question, what was the biggest challenge is convincing people that it could work. It actually is okay to be based somewhere else.
Olga:
Which sounds really funny now, because now I think we are all convinced. But at the time that was the biggest barrier and I had to work quite a lot. I had to work at a lower rate than I usually would, just to prove myself and add value wherever I was. I had to travel a lot as well, which is fine by me and that's how the concept of my business started. I don't work in the region where I live. I'm one of those digital moments, I guess. Yeah, but I do go and visit my clients in the Middle East or UK or Europe, the US, will always work remotely or have been so far, wherever business takes me really.
Clare:
Wow. Again, another serendipitous moment that changed the course of your entire life and career, your sister saying, hey…
Olga:
Let's move. I guess that comes back to having the belief in yourself. Anything is possible. Whatever career path you'd like to have. Whatever lifestyle is suitable for you, you can make it work.
Clare:
Yeah. Well, I guess like reflected on my own experience. I did exactly that. I left corporate knowing that I didn't want to be in the corporate world anymore because I was disillusioned by having this big job that I thought was everything I ever wanted that turned out not to be what I wanted, because I loved being hands-on running workshops, doing all that kind of stuff. I figured out like the thing that really flipped my switches was being a CX designer or being in the CX design space rather than in the management and leadership space. And then yeah, like similarly took the risk and ended up living and working as a digital nomad for two years before the pandemic and having the time of my life. Like if I'd have kind of like sat there and tried to plan out how I'd make that happen, I wouldn't have had a clue, but I just followed the opportunities as they came and looked back and I was like, oh my God, I'm actually a digital nomad. Like they've been working as a global consultant and keynote speaker with a fully remote agency behind me. I didn't design that. It just happened. It just happened over time. Yeah.
Olga:
I guess we both had a bit of design behind it. So you kind of design and iterate as you go along in the best practice of service design. And you know, I always had an aspiration that I would like to have my own company not continue working as a subcontractor for other people all the time. And I took steps that made sense to be who I want to be. And as they say, you know, if you start behaving as your future self, you become your future self. And now I work with global corporations and governments around the world and I'm happy to involve other people as well into what I do.
Clare:
Yeah, no, you're totally right. And it is a moment that I've not really had a chance to pause and reflect on until like right now the similarity between like desiring your life and your lifestyle and delivering it, being something iterative that happens quite experimentally, just like customer experience and CX design is, you know, kind of establishing a vision for what you think you want it to be. It isn't necessarily a blueprint at that point, but testing and learning about what works and experimenting and allowing the path to unfold in the direction where there's demand for the work, for example, or understanding your own wants and needs even more and how you can fulfil those. I just never really made that connection that we next designed and architected our own life experience with agility
Olga:
And you know, hopefully failing past if you have to fail, recognise that and move on.
Clare:
Yeah. And do you know what, that's been my biggest issue. I think you now in this start-up space about to kind of go after the big leagues and get investment and the VC route and stuff is like, I've always been absolutely petrified of what would happen if I fail. And that's, what's held me back from doing that until now, because the higher risk of someone else's money, I just thought I didn't want to shoulder that responsibility and I wasn't entirely sure that I could do it, but it was a conversation with one of my mentors where he's a founder and sold his business and said, you know, you're only seeing that I've sold my company for X million multimillion dollars. But you didn't see the million dollars or so that I lost in getting to that point. Yeah. So being able to take those risks and experience, failure on the way to success, I guess it's something that I'm not yet accustomed to or comfortable with, but I'm prepared to now and I wasn't before.
Olga:
Yeah. That's very good. Congratulations on that.
Clare:
Yeah. Oh.
Olga:
Very important step.
Clare:
Yes. That's to take, yeah. So be, be ready listeners. You're going to be hearing about many more of my failures along the way. Yeah. But it's true. I guess even failing my way to success, like with customer experience, it's totally true. I'd always be running into barriers and roadblocks and have to figure out a way around it. I didn't come up with the model that I apply for customer experience design overnight and it just worked, it was 15 years in the making of figuring out actually from what didn't work, how to get around the problem. Yeah. Or, to architect that. So, yeah.
Olga:
And that it comes back to our point, doesn't it on one size doesn't fit all in CX. You can't just take a strategy that someone else designed and put it into your organisation and it works at best. It becomes a wallpaper and you know, at worst, everyone just ignores that. So it's, it's really fitting in with your environment, your organisation, ways of doing things and applying critical thinking, failing sometimes succeeding more of the times.
Clare:
Fingers crossed, hopefully.
Olga:
Paving your way to success, it's hard work to become a customer-enabled organisation. It doesn't happen overnight.
Clare:
Yeah. And I love that word that you, I get uniquely, I've been talking about this. I've not heard anyone else talking about customer-enabled organisations before. And you know, like we are clearly very much aligned on the CX practicality action orientation, but please do tell the audience more about customer-enabled organisations. What does it actually mean? And how can customer experience be seen as a capability like marketing or finance?
Olga:
Sure. You will certainly be hearing more about this because I love this term and it's not something I came up with singlehandedly, it's a collaborative effort with partners of mine, ICG who invented the customer needs system. So it's a tool that we use for customer insights that is unique in itself. So it's not looking at your propensity to recommend which is a retrospective experience assessment. It's not looking at your satisfaction. It's purely looking at what is it that the customer needs from your company in their own words. And then it puts it into a system, a hierarchy of needs and a hierarchy of drivers. And it's very practical. So everything I do is very practical and that so for example, if you find out that customers core needs group is communication. That's useful, but not very actionable.
Olga:
Because communication could mean many different things, but what's important is that you get the top three to top five to 10 drivers of communication. So what can you do specifically to improve their perception of communication? And this is where your enablement starts because it resonates with the company. It resonates with the objectives and it fits into the system. And that kind of brings us to an important point that whatever you're trying to achieve in customer experience has to be aligned with the way your business operates and the business objectives and general brand and business strategy. And I always talk in knowledge sharing and education sessions, I always cite an example of Ryanair as one of the, I shouldn't say…
Clare:
Best customer experience, I know what you mean.
Olga:
But, you know, customer-enabled…
Clare:
Brands, expectation management brands…
Olga:
Precisely. So the business strategy is to get passengers from A to B safely at the lowest possible price. That's it. So, if you came in with the experience strategy that said, carry everyone’s luggage for them. It's just not going to fly because that's not part of the business strategy. It doesn't fit with the brand. So, if your experience strategy says, okay, buy, you know, not charging people for using the toilets on the aeroplane, we are going to minimise the damage to the brand, or we are going to minimise the number of rejections or negative publicity that would really resonate, that would explain to the business why we shouldn't do such a thing. And it's a, you know, it's a little bit of a made-up example, but, what I'm trying to say is that make sure there is alignment. And if you can achieve that, then CX becomes an instrument for the business, not an add-on. Sadly we saw many CX teams being made redundant during the pandemic because businesses saw them as a nice to have, you know, it's all about hugging our customers and being nice to them.
Olga:
It may be if that fits with your brand strategy, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. So, it's another lens to look at your operations, just like marketing, finance, and IT and if we, as CX practitioners deliver that, then we have the right to sit at the table. We are doing something useful for the business by being aligned to our customer needs and expectations.
Clare:
Yeah. And I obviously wholeheartedly agree with this. We talked about, this subject so many times offline. But I agree, I guess the way I practised with on the business side and with clients was always this intersection between different departments and divisions, where we could provide a line of sight and a perspective that they didn't have that could increase value. So for example, like customer experience, feedback about like the proposition itself, like what do we need to do differently with our product and service? You can see that from the lens of experience, or even, you know, kind of operational efficiency you can look at well, where are we overinvesting in something that doesn't matter to customers that much and where are we like completely missing stuff that we should be invested in? How do we rebalance that equation? Like that's useful, isn't it, it's practical, it's pragmatic.
Clare:
Where should we be heading? Like with propositions and services, you know, like there's an intersection. And it's super interesting with like research and customer experience and being able to, you know, move forward from having data sets and insights into being able to redesign something that can have a span that informs the work that's being done in proposition product, digital, multiple departments, because it's an experienced vision for what the end customer wants, needs and we can deliver, in the future because of who we are as a brand. Like we've got a set of tools that can help to do that. Like, who wouldn't want that? But like you say, you know, so often it's being seen as like, let's go and hug all of our customers and make everything amazing. Like, yes, that's not valid. That's not valuable. That's why people and teams get made business, right?
Olga:
It's just driving more costs into the business from, you know senior management perspective. You know, we are operating our right at the moment why you are asking us to do more and invest more and what's the return on that investment. It's a very valid question. We can't just come up to the board alongside marketing and all the other departments and say, okay, marketing are proposing this project. They need a hundred thousand investments and they're going to deliver 500 000 return in a year's time. And then CX people come and say, we need a hundred thousand investment. We don't know how long it's going to take to return that, if it's going to return this all, but it's all going to be fine. Trust me. That's not a good business case. We really need to start thinking about it from, solutions perspective. So that's so, but
Olga:
Yeah. I'm just very excited to tell you about a case study that I'm working on.
Clare:
Go for it, go for it. Sorry.
Olga:
With the awards international, which is a very successful company, they are delivering, you know, what they're meant to be delivering the customer satisfaction is high, but we are working on their customer journeys and just the alignment between the teams and the ideas that they come up with really highlighted to us that the way the business is operating now, and the level of personalisation is great, but it's not scalable. So we can't scale all of their awards consultants to serve many, many more customers. So where is it that we need to keep that and where we can afford to automate things, make the journey just as smooth, but remove the interactions that don't matter as much to customers. So designing that service proposition's been great because it's looking into the operating model and really generating more for an already successful business.
Clare:
Nice example. And again, preaching to the choir here, because that's how we built WiCX, right. Co-design, establishing what's most important and scaling our business model over time. As we learned, and like marketing automation, I didn't have a clue about that. I knew it was something that existed, but as a kind of startup founder, having to be really super hands-on with, learning how to do that and figuring out actually there's, there's so much that can be done that doesn't remove value just because it's not a person doing something manually yes. But being able to establish that from the outset is super important. I was just to catch on that thing, you know, when we were like trying to talk over each other, I was just going to add a bit more of an example from my background as well into what we were talking about then, because like customer experience, trying to claim its own budgets for CAPEX and OPEX might not necessarily, especially if you are not established and you haven't got the buy-in, isn't the best thing to do.
Clare:
It's how can we do as CX team or professionals or whatever support, another area of the business with the objective that they're trying to deliver, how can we increase their return on investment through what we do, was the route that I took initially. So I wasn't there asking for CAPEX and OPEX on my own projects. I was demonstrating how we could increase the return on investment of other projects with a bit of customer experience. And eventually, that led to me being able to ask for CAPEX and OPEX of my own, because we've proven that it works, but I didn't, it's a big leap for senior leaders to take, to believe in something that isn't proven. And it's just a mindset. I think we need to get away from that you know, I mean that, you know, proving return on investment of CX in isolation, isn't something that is going to be really difficult to do before you've demonstrated CX is part of the broader business proposition. Like we were talking about, you know, in digital, in marketing, in the established teams that do already have budgets, you're better off going over there and adding value to what they're doing than doing the other
Olga:
Way around. And we cannot be talking about CX in isolation because CX by nature is a glue that unites all of the functions to work together, to deliver customer outcomes. So by default, it cannot be in isolation. We don't have the skills to run the entire company. We can just be one of the enablers. That's why it's customer-enabled organisations that I talk about. And there are some things that you can even do with no budget, zero budget at all.
Clare:
Yeah, we've done it. Haven't we, yes.
Olga:
Yeah. And I'm going to let you in a secret, I'm working on this new CX Wikipedia product, which is going to have a library of useful stuff. And one of the sections there is kind of CX micro-actions, things that you can do just like that. You don't need permission. You don't need a budget. For example, one of those is in our contact centre at D&G, we put up a sign to say, “a customer can hear you, smile”. Those completely transformed conversations. When agents started smiling on the phone, that, you know, mitigates angry customers, that helps agents to feel better. And that really lifted up customer feedback scores so that, you know, I'm very excited about building this micro-actions library.
Clare:
So, super helpful. And so often it's the simple things that make the biggest difference. And we don't hear enough about that, do we, it's the big, complicated inflated intellectualisation around customer experience rather than just the, in the muck and bullets, the simple things that work and can drive, a return with zero investment. I love that. So, kind of just rounding us off then, like, you know, we've been talking about strategy, we've been talking about implementation. What are your thoughts on getting the right balance? Clearly, I'm an advocate of implementation over strategy that can buy you the ticket to the table to get the seat at the game where you can start to influence strategy. But what are your thoughts? Where do you sit on this continuum?
Olga:
I think, I don't know if there is, again, one size fits all. If you have senior management buy-in right from the start, you typically need to give them a sense of direction. So, you need to create the strategy, you need to have CX decision-making principles so what is it that we promised to customers and how do we deliver that? You may consider creating a C-suite engagement toolkit for them just to tell them how you expect them to leave that strategy. And then cascade that down. If you don't have a senior-level buy-in, then you should definitely focus more on achieving micro results, then micro results and then bigger results. And building your portfolio of successful projects before you can actually turn that into a coherent strategy that is going to be signed off by the leadership. So it really is a judgment call in my work, what I typically practice just based on the clients I work with, is 20% spent on what we call CX foundations which is strategy, journey mapping and research, and 80% implementing that.
Clare:
No, that sounds like a really good balance to have but yeah. And you know, kind of bringing that really into focus, one of the big dependencies about the approach you take is the maturity of the organisation and how customer-enabled it already is. So yeah, I think that's really super practical advice for our listeners as well. I'm sure they've appreciated this conversation.
Olga:
I hope so.
Clare:
Lots of examples in there. So, finally, Olga, what would be your one piece of advice or your top takeaway for the Women in CX listeners out there? What would you like to leave them with?
Olga:
I think I really enjoyed our conversation about the success path and on that I think, you know, being the future version of yourself is my top advice. Be who you want to be.
Clare:
Yeah. And quite often it's who you already are. Right. But being able to own your success at where you're at today, sometimes it's easier said than done. And not being held back by like previous experiences or beliefs is one of the most challenging things to do. So yeah. Get out there girls, own your success, be who you are today. Don't let the past hold back. And we are all good on that one. So that's it, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Olga.
Olga:
Thank you so much for having me. That was a pleasure and thanks. I'm very honoured to be the first one to be here twice.
Clare:
Yay.
Olga:
It's amazing. Thank you.
Clare:
And long may our friendship, relationship and community building experience happen well into the future. Olga, thank you so much. I'll see you all next time. Bye for now.
Olga:
Bye bye.
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 check out www.womenincx.community and follow the Women in CX page on LinkedIn. Join us again next time where I'll be talking to one of our founding members from Belgium about overcoming childhood trauma to become the women we were always destined to be. See you all next time.
