Clare Muscutt talking with Jo Boswell about actionable data, and making CX a commercial discipline.
Episode #010 Show Notes.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Hi Jo.
Jo Boswell:
Hi Clare. How are you?
Clare Muscutt- Host:
I'm awesome. Welcome to the Women in CX podcast.
Jo Boswell:
Thank you for having me really delighted to be here.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
And welcome to all the listeners too. So Jo, you've had an absolutely fascinating career journey spanning 27 years with British Airways.
Jo Boswell:
Yeah, I know. I couldn't believe it ended up being quite that long. I certainly didn't intend to stay that long when I joined.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
I'm really looking forward to hearing more about your career journey today. I'd also, we're going to be tackling the challenge of proving the value of customer experience and especially one of the biggest challenges that we hear CX-ers talking about, particularly on LinkedIn.. And that Is proving that return on investment. Does that sound good? Absolutely. Yeah. So let's kick off then. If you could tell us a little bit about how you started out and what you learned about yourself in those early days at BA.
Jo Boswell:
Yeah, so I joined British Airways on a graduate training scheme and actually my very first role was as a check in agent which was a great place to learn about the airline and to learn about customer service and some of the challenges around delivering great customer service. And in those days you wouldn't believe the old fashioned tech that you had to learn as a checking agent, to check somebody in. So it's a really important lesson actually in removing those points of friction, even for employees to enable them to, to deliver great service. But then my second role on the grad program was a jump that I called the 'Bob job'. And that was a newly created role at the time as an assistant to the director of marketing and operations. And his name was Bobby Ayling. He subsequently went on to become quite famous as a CEO, but I was offered the Bob job. And there was no JD and it was quite daunting cause it was no one to learn from. And to a degree, everybody around me was a lot more senior. So it was quite difficult even to, to figure out who I could even ask, , if I was uncertain about something and really I feel that actually that role was probably quite a defining point in my career because I had to learn to be reasonably pushy because in order for the job to work for me, I needed to ensure that I was getting into shadow Bob in some meetings and getting to see how he was running the business. But equally I had to find ways that I could add value for him. And , I had to spend quite a bit of time for instance, with his PA really working through, , what his diary looked like for the week and spotting those opportunities where I could step in and maybe , do some preparation, , write some notes, brief him for a meeting or even identifying forthcoming speeches that he had and then going away and researching and starting to draft those things for him. So it was, it was a really interesting early lesson in shaping something to find a way to add value both to the business, but also to ensure that I was learning as well. But by the same token, because I was working alongside all of these really senior people who were a little bit suspicious of me because they knew I was his assistant and he was the big boss, so I had to strike that delicate balance of helping him, but also ensuring that I earned the trust of his direct reports as well. So it was a, it was an interesting political situation. Yeah, absolutely. But it was yeah, it was a great, it was a great learning experience, , to see , the great, well subsequently at the time he was Sir Colin Marshall was subsequently Lord Marshall. I got to see him at close quarters in action and he was just a fantastic leader. He had such a human side to him. And, and that was really great to see. And I also had some great experiences. So I remember, I was in my mid twenties and I accompanied Bob on a business trip to the U S and because of the schedule and timing, we got to fly over on Concorde. Oh my goodness. Can you imagine, , so there was me trying to be super cool and acting like it was an everyday occurrence for me travel on Concorde I was just so excited and yeah, I was sitting next to the big boss, , I'm trying, trying to keep it all in check. And and the lovely thing is actually, and it shows his human side is he went around the aircraft, chatting to all of the crew and so on. And then when he came back to my seat, he said I've arranged for you to sit in the flight deck for landing at JFK, which was just lovely because he had, obviously he did realise just how super exciting that was for mr e. And that was an experience I'll never forget. Wow.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Oh, that's awesome. You're the first person I've ever met that actually has been on Concorde.
Jo Boswell:
It was a beautiful aircraft Concorde. I was so sad that it had to retire.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
So we're talking about 30 years ago, pretty much in the early nineties. As a young woman. I'm assuming that a lot of those executive roles were filled by guys. Where there any women at the top at that point?
Jo Boswell:
There were some, yeah, there were some women in senior roles at the time. So Val Gooding who subsequently went on to become the chief executive of BUPA, she was actually in charge of cupping crew at the time. So there were some, the some good role models. And it was, yes, it was, it was interesting. And it was great to learn from, from those people. And I think certainly at an early stage of my career, I felt, I mean, BA was quite a diverse, had quite a diverse management team. And I really felt that, women were supported and, you had every opportunity to learn and develop. But there are times in my career when I realise that men sometimes react in a very different way to women than they do to men who are perhaps behaving in the same way. So an example of that was when I was in sales and I was working for a male manager. There were seven of us in the team, four women who were all very feisty and quite challenging of, of the manager, but in a good way, , wanting to, to improve things and find ways to make what we were doing better and succeed. And as a result, that manager nicknamed us the four horse women of the apocalypse. And I think he thought we would take it as an insult, but we actually, we wore it as our badge of honour. We were so proud of of the fact that he felt we were so challenging that we had to have that nickname and those, those other three are actually still really good friends to this day. So yeah, I had an opportunity to be able to, , watch senior women and learn from them, but also, learn an awful lot from some of my female colleagues that I've worked closely with over the years,
Clare Muscutt- Host:
It's lovely to hear that you still ride with the four horse women of the apocalypse. Now, again.
Jo Boswell:
We still laugh about that anecdote. And also I can remember one time I think when he was trying to encourage us all to hold our nerve and not give away too many deep discounts and used the phrase, keep your knees together. It's just so inappropriate. But yeah, it gave us quite a few things to laugh about.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
That is hilarious. I'm just picking up on something that you said there about the behaviour of women being perceived differently because we are women. So for example, women who are assertive, getting labeled as bossy or aggressive, when, if the same behaviour was coming out of a guy that would not have been any kind of negative comment about that. Or in fact, if men show emotion, it's praised because they're empathetic, whereas women, are labelled as emotional Yeah. It's just really fascinating to reflect on that point of gender, even in really inclusive companies. Still occasionally surfacing itself as an issue in being treated differently, albeit not with negative intention or anything militias, but it's still to this day 30 years on, in many of the conversations I have with women is a similar, similar circumstance, but I love the fact that know something that was said it to you in fun 'the four horse women of the apocalypse. You claimed it as your own. That that is really, really cool. So leading on from that story, can you tell us a little bit more about how you ended up getting into these really commercial and data orientated roles, but still put the customer at the heart of how you were driving such a hard edge within BA.
Jo Boswell:
Well, I, so I think the commercial side came because my career progressed through a variety of different commercial roles and at an early stage, as I said I was in the sales team. And so I've always been very comfortable in those roles where figures are very much the central piece of it. But by the same token I started my career in check it. And so , customer service and the ability to really delight customers and resolve problems in a in a way that can turn a negative into a really great experience has been really important parts throughout my career. So yeah, it's interesting really. I don't think I ever had a particularly well thought out career plan. I was quite opportunistic with some of the roles, , I knew I had an idea of how I wanted my career to progress, but I was opportunistic with certain things that came my way that might not even have been roles that existed that 12 months beforehand. And I see those take the opportunity to prove that I could take a project and carve it out and find the value. So I did that in a number of difference commercial environments. And then I found myself that would have been in yeah, the early two thousands leading the pricing activities for the UK market. And along with that, the team that did all of the commercial analytics for the UK markets and that expanded then to supporting the commercial commercial decision making for the whole airline, including needing to forecast the revenue for the entire passenger revenue, 9 billion pounds of turnover for the airline. And the irony was actually when I was at school, I thought I wasn't very good at maths. And all of a sudden I found myself managing a team of analysts. Yeah. Like these super, super bright people, all really, really smart able to code and use Excel in ways I could only dream of but what I did realise is actually I I've got a very analytical mind. So and yeah, I forged this this name for myself really as being, quite a numbers woman and I would be reporting to the board. And to the leadership team on the revenue outlook and so on. But I've I've always had it at the same time, a keen interest in customer experience and wanting to make the experience better. And that opportunity came along. After it, a few years, when I've been looking after customer data, I inherited the responsibility along with my commercial analytics responsibilities. I was looking customer data. And what I realised is that actually the airline was sitting on a goldmine that hadn't been looked after. It was like one of our most important corporate assets had been neglected for quite a few years. And the data was in a bit of a mess, the definitions weren't consistent. And so, , the data didn't tie up from one system to another, which is familiar familiar a problem that you tend to find with, with CX projects. And and I had, I was just identifying some little quick wins that we could do that in using some of our operational data and service data, actually we could have smarter conversations between the account managers, the salespeople, and some of our corporate clients, for instance. So identifying how good the punctuality had been for a certain corporate clients and identifying whether or not there were any major service issues. And that absolutely transformed the conversation from being one about just how many sectors they'd flown and what revenue they were generating. So being a much more holistic conversation that was about the service levels that BA was delivering to that organisation. And so I think after, I've been beating on for probably a whole year to my boss at the time was the the chief commercial officer to say, we really need to be investing in doing something much more intelligent and smarter with our customer data. Eventually my bluff was called and he said, right off you go set up a program and see what you can do with this. So suppose, coming full circle from that Bob job in the early days, once again, I found myself with that blank sheet of paper and I needed to get the right resources start to attract a team to come and work with me to see how we could use our data in a way that could really create value both for our customers but also ultimately add value to the business. And yeah, I could remember those early months. It was super tough because BA at the time had just acquired British Midland , the other major UK domestic carrier. And so there were, everybody, all the resources that I was trying to get hold of, they had all rushed off to work on that new integration projects. And I was running around trying to find people who would be prepared to come and work with me and help me deliver the 'Know Me' program as we, as we called it. But yeah, I eventually, I found some, some brave people who were, who were willing to come and work with me, take a chance on that initiative. I brought in a little bit of external help as well. And we just set about in, in the early days doing a bit of test and learn really and, and just creating some tangible proof points around, if we start to work with our data in smarter ways, demonstrating to the business, the value that could have, and also the, the reaction that our customers would have to.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yeah. And I can only praise you for being able to balance that so, well, I frequently talk about finding that sweet spot between doing things that are great for customers, and that's the genesis of it using data to identify what those things are, but also demonstrating simultaneously the commercial benefit that can be driven through creating a better experience. I think you'll agree that it seems to be what are the biggest problems that the CX industry is facing? I can't go even one day without seeing a post talking about how do I prove return on investment of CX? How do I get by the board on board with the, the ideas that I have. And what were you always replying? , my, , you have this, my advice to it, but I have to just bring up something that I read on your linked in, which is a real rarity, I think, to be said of anyone in, in CX. And this is from the CFO at British Airways who oversaw all the capital investments at BA. And he said about you, 'Jo was very impressive in the way she led the significant program, including presenting a compelling vision for how BA could transform customer experience using data and technology, which was apparently one of the best board presentations he's ever seen bringing strong business cases, breaking the investment into bite sized chunks, reporting back on tangible business benefits, each stage adopting an excellent stakeholder engagement approach to ensure the leadership team are bought in and aware of progress successfully navigating the politics of the organisation and to deliver a truly cross functional transformation program that touched almost every part of the business. That to me is probably the greatest thing that could ever be said about a CX leader, right. Working within an organisation from particularly a commercial department and being able to drive customer employee business value in a way that resonates with the C suite, because you're talking on their terms is brilliant. And for me, I think it's something that we have to really embrace as a development need for many of the professionals in our industry, because not many of them came out of commercial like we did, the commercial organisations where if we didn't talk like that and we didn't create these cases, no one would have paid us the time of day. Yeah, absolutely. Especially where I CX practices evolving and growing and in a lot of countries that will be listening today, they're facing that stakeholder engagement at a senior level as the biggest barrier to doing anything at all. So I said a lot then, but my question in response to that was what is it about your model that you could share that enables you to have such incredibly powerful conversations that get stakeholder buy-in? What would your advice be to women in CX out there wanting to sharpen up their commercial thinking?
Jo Boswell:
Well, I think it is really important if you're in embarking on, on a program that is likely to require some significant investments, it's important to give confidence to your senior stakeholders or to the board by identifying what those quick wins could be. Now at BA I actually quite deliberately chose some commercial areas to demonstrate those quick wins. And in terms of the difference that that made actually to the end to end customer experience, it was probably negligible in terms of if you like 'improvement' in inverted commas to customer experience, because we were looking at how we could use the data to personalise our marketing communications, and that was all around just making them more engaging, working out, , which destinations to talk to different customers about whether it's be talking about premium cabins or non premium cabins or holidays, or just flights only and so on. And we were able to demonstrate a huge uplift by tailoring the in effect, the propositions that we were talking,
Clare Muscutt- Host:
That's what I was going to say. I was, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but you used the data to direct the offer, which ultimately will ensure a better experience because you're having the right conversations with the right people at the right time, which gives them what they need and drives revenue. Win Win!
Jo Boswell:
Yeah, absolutely. But, but by the same token, at the time I could probably have pointed to a lot of points of friction in the end to end customer experience that we could have sorted out, but we deliberately chose not to with that because we wanted to create the revenue, the revenue upside and we were able to create some really stunning results. And it was I mean, the, the technology that we had to implement in order to achieve that was, was a huge challenge. In effect, we were going from mass marketing emails, one size fits all to a virtual one for one rendering of an email. And, and literally just choosing the four destinations to talk to that customer about. But yeah, it gave us the results that we needed that provided us with much needed air cover. We did also choose a in journey in person experience to test as well. And that, that was starting with finding little moments of recognition in the customer lifetime journey that could be celebrated face to face. So for instance, if somebody achieved that next tier in the frequent flyer program, we would ask a member of cabin crew to go up to them and just have a little conversation on board and find, find the customer and congratulate them on reaching that next tier. And the interesting thing with that is that we were able to observe a complete halo effect across the whole journey from, just from that one little recognition point. And again, that was through the data. So that was monitoring those customers where the message had been delivered versus customers of a similar ilk who haven't received the message. And amazingly we saw that just that little bit of recognition, whether or not they could even recall it provided this halo effect in terms of the net promoter score for that journey. So, so we had those two, one , really, really commercial and, and one with a link to the commercial outcome because, , we were, we had done some work at BA to, to equate points improvement in net promoter score to to a monetary value. And that was accepted thinking that had passed the test of the most rigorous finance directors at the time. So those things really helped and all the way through, I would say to the boards, here's my business case, this is how I'm going to invest the money for this next phase. This is what you'll get at the end of, and these are the, these are the results I'll bring back to you. And, I gave them the confidence, even though I knew that the program would be a multi year program. They had the confidence to know that if 12 months down down the line, I wasn't delivering those results. They could stop it. And they weren't effectively committing to, , investing for a five year program, but it was in effect, I'll come back to you with the, with the results, what we've done, how we've invested the money what that's delivered. And interestingly it wasn't, I think, I think it was about 18 months in when they started to challenge me on why we weren't doing the improvement in customer experience elements, which was the best I'd always want it to get to.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
That's great though, isn't it, because what you've demonstrated there is not asking for the permission to do that. You demonstrated so much value. It gave you credibility to the point where they started asking you for it. Talk about influence. I think that's a really clear strength of yours and it shining through. So our final question is just what advice would you give to other women in CX on their path to becoming more commercial or sharpening up that angle? What would you say they should be doing?
Jo Boswell:
Yeah, yeah. That's that's a good thought actually. Cause I think , it is important to get yourself comfortable with the numbers and what those can do for the bottom line. So certainly when I work with clients today, one of the first questions that I will ask is what metrics does this business run on? And what are the customer metrics that are going to add value to the bottom line? So whether 'what's the value of one extra customer retained' or 'what's the value of one additional product sold to an existing customer'. And I think if, if you're leading a CX program, it's really important to think about what are the dials that you can shift with this program? That are the metrics that your organisation runs on and every organisation is slightly different, but you've got to really tune into what those, what those metrics are and be comfortable. And, if, if there isn't a very clear link between what you're doing and what those metrics are, then you will always struggle. So you've got to try and find a way of creating that link, I think. And I think it's about surrounding yourself with the right skills. If that's not your skillset, then go and find it and make sure that you've got an ally sitting alongside you. And certainly when I was running the 'Know Me' program, I always wanted to have the finance team absolutely inside the tent and understanding what we were doing and even though they didn't report directly into me, I would make them an inclusive part of the team. Because the better they understood what we were trying to do the better they were then able to support us and help us navigate our way through the business case hurdles and so on, writing the post-investment appraisals. So, I always think it's really wise to get really close to your finance manager. They're not there to just challenge you and stop things. They're there for a reason. You've got to tap into their mindset and also help them understand what, what you're trying to do.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yeah. I think that is such a important point, enlisting the help of finance people, if it isn't your forte. I know for me, that was a huge turning point. One of the biggest projects I ever delivered in Sainsbury's days, I could say we had a 4 million pound return on investment. That was because I had someone in the team working with me who was absolutely bang on with generating the numbers, but I had to get really comfortable with the numbers and talking about the numbers and the language to be much more number centric than I naturally gravitate towards, because in CX we're all about emotion, but sometimes you have to interpret that right into the language that needs to salute your audience. And also just picking up on the point, you said, , the metrics are going to be different for every organisation. If you're not all over trying to drive those metrics. They will listen to you. And I think my only bill to that would be, you should be questioning if you're doing something that isn't laddering up to that. So, yes, that was so awesome to talk to you today. So great to hear your story. I found it personally really inspiring to hear about so many successes that you can actually put a price tag on. It's awesome to talk to a woman in CX who was so credible and distinguished and proven and has CFOs raving about her. I think what I really took from this conversation is you've always been about value, whether it was adding it in the 'bob job' days, creating it in the roles where you use data to bring value to customers and to the, at the same time, or even now, , as you've crafted this into a model that you use with your clients today, it is really, really inspirational. I think very forward thinking, and we need more of it in this industry. So my only ask for you, Jo will be, how can you make an online course?
Jo Boswell:
You've given me an idea there. Yeah. Maybe that's my little niche, but the numbers girl. Yeah.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Well I'd love to build something like that with you, for the women in CX community, perhaps a module to help women to capture some of that magic that you've clearly got in spades. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Jo Boswell:
Oh, thank you for advice. Me. It's been, it's been a real pleasure, great chat. And actually it was great just to have the opportunity to reflect a little bit on my career. Cause this week we don't do very often is that
Clare Muscutt- Host:
No, especially not the moments that shaped us. They're always hard think about, and thank you for sharing them with me and final. Thank you to our listeners. Hope to see you all next week. Thanks so much, Jo.
Jo Boswell:
Take care.