Clare Muscutt talks with Thirza Schaap about working motherhood and building sustainable CX culture.
Episode #406 Show Notes
Clare:
Welcome to the 6th episode of 4th 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, re-live 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 will be talking to one of our founding members, a seriously wonderful woman in CX Training and Education from the Netherlands. Let me introduce you to today’s inspiring guest: She is a human-centred design fanatic with over 15 years of experience in the field, having helped create better customer and employee experiences at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines as Customer Experience Director, Dutch Railways, Guidion and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2021 she founded CX Unraveled and now offers dedicated CX training and consultancy, alongside lecturing in design thinking and entrepreneurship at the University of Amsterdam. Please welcome to the show, CX sister Thirza Schapp.
Clare:
Hi, Thirza
Thirza:
Hi, Clare How are you?
Clare:
I'm good. How are you?
Thirza:
I'm doing great.
Clare:
Yeah. You over the COVID now?
Thirza:
Definitely. Yep.
Clare:
Oh good, good, good. I was a bit worried about you cause I know you've been poorly recently, so thank you so much for making it today. Super excited to have you, welcome to the Women in CX podcast.
Thirza:
Thanks. Super excited to be here.
Clare:
Yeah. And welcome to everybody that's listening along at home as well. So, let's just jump straight in here. I'm sure the audience would love to know a little bit more about you. How exactly did you get into CX and how did you end up being the Co-Founder of CX Unraveled?
Thirza:
Yeah. I learned about CX on the job actually. So, I worked at KLM Royal Dutch airlines for 13 years. And at the end of my career there, I was actually given the opportunity to set up CX within the organisation. And that's when I realised that customers and focus on customers was really my path in every single job I had had up to then. And I really enjoyed doing that. It was, I mean, it was very challenging, of course, multiple departments, different silos, a customer-centric culture, which wasn't really there and after I spent three years doing that, I decided, yeah, I wanted to do that for more organisations and companies, and I freelanced for a while by myself. And then last year at the beginning of the year, I set up CX Unraveled together with some former colleagues and yeah, now we offer masterclasses as well as consultancy as well as inspiring talks on CX. Yeah. That's how it went.
Clare:
Awesome. And how's it all going?
Thirza:
Really, really good. Sometimes I say I actually produced two babies last year, a real one, and then this company and, you know, knowing that I did all that and how we're doing business-wise, I'm really amazed, but also enjoying it so much.
Clare:
Yeah, of course. And I guess we met in March last year, didn't we? A year ago. So, yeah. You were just building your business. I was just building the community and you managed to have a baby. You had a busy year.
Thirza:
Yeah.
Clare:
So, I'm sure we'll come back more to talk about kind of your previous experience at KLM Royal Dutch airlines. But I always ask my guests the same question around what was one challenge that you overcame to become the woman you are today?
Thirza:
Yeah. I think there are two important ones actually. So the first one is leaving KLM, starting for myself. And yeah, for some reason that feels like an immense barrier, you know, who's going to hire me to do what and I really had to get over that obstacle. But it's made my life so much more inspiring, actually taking that chance and seeing how it goes. And the second one has to do with my family, with my kids. So, I have three kids and I remember when the first one was born, I had this whole ideal picture of how I would work four days a week and spend one day with her and making a long weekend. And I realized doing that, that I did enjoy being with her at the time but that I also really enjoy my work and that sometimes I prefer spending five days a week working so I can give my kids a better time because I'm more energised and I'm much more happy than when I take time off to do that with them. Yeah.
Clare:
That's super interesting. Yeah. I think speaking to a lot of women with children that are experiencing this kind of mum guilt of not being able to feel like you ever can dedicate yourself fully in one or the other place. So, how exactly did you come to peace with this then?
Thirza:
Well, first you realised it because you're not feeling great and you're not having the time you'd like with your kids, you know, it's irritating, it's frustrating. You wanna do other stuff on the side and that's when the guilt sets in. And you're like, okay, you know, I need to either focus fully on the kid or focus fully on my job and I actually had some sessions with the psychologist to discuss this where we looked at, you know, what were my expectations? I had pretty high expectations of what I was going, what I should do as a mother. But it also was about how, for instance, my husband and I, raised our kids together and who did what and what you needed to leave. Let's say that, personally, to make sure that everyone is happy and having a fun time. So, I had some external help for that.
Clare:
Yeah, no fair play. I'm like all about getting external help when we need it. But there's a lot of conditioning isn't there. As young women growing up, we are told what this role of motherhood is, but if we also have a career, like you said, it's like having a child in its own right, isn't it? Especially if you've got your own business but being able to make room for all of these different things that we want and not kind of ending up with this guilt of thinking, it has to be one or the other and being able to have both. I'm sure everybody listening will feel super inspired by that as well. Yeah. I also really feel for you around that sense of identity loss that came as a result of leaving the corporate world and deciding to go it alone.
Clare:
I know mine was in 2017. I knew I didn't wanna be there anymore, but the security of having like the job title as a Head of Customer Experience at a big organisation, I didn't realize just how much my identity was tied into that and that, you know, kind of what you said then, who's gonna employ me to help them with stuff. I had that exact same question myself, you know, having to separate my identity from a previous company and rebuild myself as this new version was super challenging emotionally, but again, the feeling of, what a happy surprise when people did wanna work with me. And having that background was, you know, a real advantage. Just because I didn't work for that company anymore, it didn't really take away or it didn't take away at all from the fact that I gained all that experience working in big businesses. So, yeah. So I'm with you that anyone who's feeling the sense of, oh, maybe there is something bigger outside of the corporate world. Maybe I could try start my own business, that I encourage anyone who's got the motivation and the fear to definitely give it a try because it's so rewarding. Isn't it? When you, when you get there.
Clare:
It is. I mean, I would say I go for it, although it's, you know, it does make you feel very anxious, but go for it and, you know, step over boundaries every single time. I've done things I'd never dreamed I would do. I wrote a book recently, so never thought I would do that when I was working at KLM.
Clare:
Yeah. No, absolutely. And speaking of the book, that would be a nice segue into our next question. So you recently published a chapter in CX4, the collaboration book series with Naeem Arif, and in that you wrote about strategy and culture. So, for anyone who's not read it yet, or thinking of buying the book could you give us a little bit of an overview of your perspective on this.
Thirza:
Yeah, sure. So, I find culture one of the most interesting things within Customer Experience because it's not tangible, it's, you know, if you have set up metrics and you have a KPI framework, something you can see and you can measure, a strategy you can put on a wall and people can talk about it, but with culture that's more difficult. And what I wrote about is that I feel, after looking at numerous companies, there are seven things you can actually do to create a more concrete thing, you can do to make that culture more customer-centric, or I like to use the word 'customer obsessed', and those seven things range from having a really clear CX strategy and making sure all your employees, not only know it but also know how they can contribute to it.
Thirza:
It's about the hiring process. It's easier to hire people with the right mindset than to put a lot of energy and effort into transforming people who don't have the right mindset, who already work with you. It's about training. It's not only about onboarding, but training people throughout their careers at every level. It's also about rituals, instilling small things, daily things, which make people think about a customer much, much more and much more easily. It's about rewards, informal, so, you know, making sure people are put in the spotlight when they do something cool with the customer, but also making sure their financials are according to the way they work with customers and last, but not least it's about sharing the progress of Customer Experience within a company and making sure everybody has a feeling they're working on that together. So that's what I write about with examples from either KLM or other industries I've worked in.
Clare:
It sounds super interesting. I read it cause you sent it over to me. Thank you. But yeah, definitely recommend CX4 being a great book to read and especially this chapter. Just thinking about some of the things that you mentioned there and reflecting on my experience. The first part of my career in CX was very much about the kind of people and culture change programs around customer service. And for me, I think it all really starts with understanding and listening to employees at the frontline, because no matter how much you understand the experience you want to create, if you don't understand the barriers that are in their way of being able to do that, actually, it can still fall on fallow ground. So, I remember when I used to start those kinds of projects, my discovery would be to hold focus groups with frontline teams.
Clare:
And just to ask them, you know, like kind of nobody comes to work wanting to do a bad job, do they? But the service scores were, you know, testament to the fact that we weren't doing a great job. So, why, and a lot of the time there was operational issues, like policy and processes that have been instilled from the support centre that actually tied people's hands around their back So, for example, like I think a great hallmark of CX culture is being able to deal with customer problems effectively. And, you know, you use the word customer-obsessed, like Amazon just don't even question, do they, they say, you've got a problem. We'll fix it, send it back, we'll put the money back in your account. They don't quibble about it. They just fix it and a lot of the barriers I've seen over time had been about the tiny percentage of customers that might take the mickey and try to take advantage of policies and processes that the actual service process was built around that tiny percentage, not the 99.9% who actually just want to get that problem solved.
Clare:
So, especially kind of the contact centre, empowerment of employees that if you want to create a culture where people do use their initiative and do, you know, take those kinds of steps to do the things that they don't have to do, but customers really love and appreciate, and remember you for, there's also a bit of a responsibility around unblocking some of those things. So, some of the biggest cultural changes from my experience in creating Customer Experience culture was about creating a culture of trusting employees more and empowering them to do a great job.
Thirza:
Yeah, no. I recognise that and for me that goes a bit hand in hand with that customer experience strategy and so one of the things I find really important there is that that's created together with frontline staff because they are an enormous power of knowledge regarding what goes well and what is difficult with customers. So, you know, creating that CX strategy together, thinking about what you, as a company, want your customers to feel, and then empowering your employees to able to do that. And exactly as you say, those processes and procedures, what I've noticed at KLM, but also at other companies we've worked with is that at a certain point, they'll say, in the company, you have a free hand in, you know, fixing customer problems. You have a budget of a hundred euros per customer, go for it. And then people freeze because they're not used to it. And for them it's scary also. So, that trust you're mentioning there, it goes both ways. If for years you've been managed as not being able to put a sense towards a customer, if there was something wrong and just, you know, handling their issues in a specific way, it also doesn't change overnight. When you do have the budget available. It takes time. It takes lots of conversations with each other and building that trust together.
Clare:
Yeah. Practice. And you see, I think you said, didn't you, like reassuring when you see the right behaviours, being able to reward and recognise them and shout about them is real distinct way of speeding up some of that change because when people read stories, I know we had like kind of an employee communication magazines, we'd be running stories all the time about these great things employees had done for customers to help set more of an example of, well, what does great service culture look like? And you know the thing that really sticks in my mind, I guess from my experience, is the actual investment in engagement with the frontline when you're trying to change culture. I used to run these programs and they were heavily invested in engagement with the frontline teams, but I found the most effective way to change culture was about creating these champion groups. So, one Regional Manager from each of the zones then kind of taking responsibility for being the person to lead the charge in this change. And then them training 10 of their General Managers from their patch to then cascade it down to their teams themselves was way more effective than kind of external training sessions. And I've tried both.
Clare:
But it's kind of that kind of peer leadership down cascade of this is actually what we all want to do and being visibly leading that change and having a budget to be able to do that. So, to run the sessions, I think that's what quite often, one of the first things that's cut when people are deciding where to spend money. So, especially now we're so technology obsessed with Customer Experience and actually reducing things like labour costs that actually the return on investment you can get from spending some money on employee engagement, training, cascading reward and recognition is a significantly higher return on investment than you could necessarily get from just implementing a straight technology. So, yeah, like super cool. So, would you say that the things that you mentioned are the specific pillars that you'd recommend?
Thirza:
Yeah, I would. I would look at those different pillars and see what you have in place already and where you can actually do better. And they go hand in hand like you mentioned, I mean, it's important that leadership shows it and, and stands behind it. But at the same time, there are also things that are not super costly, which you can do, which really helps, for instance, frontline staff engagement. So, for instance, at KLM, we supplied the call centres with little postcards, and if they'd had a conversation which was memorable for them, and they wanted to reach out to the customer, they would send the postcard. The crew on board had what we call, gifts of care and they had small gifts and depending on what they'd caught, you know, what they'd caught in a conversation with the customer, maybe it was someone's birthday, or someone was travelling for a really sad reason. They were able to reach out and really touch a passenger at that time. And those are things we created together with frontline staff, looking at what they did in their daily work and what they could actually do and what would help them do that?
Clare:
Oh, you just reminded me of another one. So, it was a Christmas campaign when I was working in retail and we developed this concept around random acts of kindness. So, similarly, said, you know, each store has a budget. And when you see these opportunities to, you know, really make somebody's day, or if they're in a difficult situation, like you said, to help them more than you normally would. And let's just see what happens and the social media impact of that was huge. All of a sudden, like 190,000 employees in this business, all of a sudden these stories of kindness were just popping up all over social media and in comparison to brand strategies and advertising programs, that kind of advocacy and genuine, just people saying really nice things about your business, you can't buy that. So, just how kind of valuable it is to be able to do something like that. So, agree and a very practical way. So, where should listeners really be focusing, do you think? I think you mentioned, you know, being able to do an assessment around where you are today. Where can we start with this?
Thirza:
Yeah. I would look at each of these elements and look at, you know, is there a CX strategy? Do people actually know it? Do they know what it means and do they know how they can contribute? If you, for instance, if your goal is to make your customers feel you're easy to deal with, go and analyse that, see if your customers actually perceive that and see what each, you know, discuss with different departments, what they can do to make life more easy for their customers. And you can go, you know, you can go through that for each of these seven elements. Leadership is a bit more difficult sometimes. I always say you have believers. Those are people you don't need to tell that much about customers. They believe that Customer Experience is super important.
Thirza:
You also have people who do not believe at all and who will be very difficult to convince, and you have in the middle and those people in the middle are the people you need to help, who will definitely tell the story, but who might need some convincing, but who are ready to go for it. And I would see and analyse, you know, what's going on there in your company, in the leadership team and what can you do there? If someone does not believe I would, yeah. I would not advise to really start because I do find it extremely important that leadership, yeah, we spoke about that, walks the walk. Otherwise, it's going to be extremely difficult. People do see leadership as role models.
Clare:
I remember this kind of living out in practice in some of the projects I led where we did talk about the people sitting on the fence were the ones to target and to really try to invest in, because you've already got the naturals who will continue to be champions for customers anyway, but that other side of the fence, the ones that are probably not the kinds of people that would ever fit into this culture that you're trying to drive, actually, this is about having really difficult conversations. This is about performance management, setting standards and when people don't meet them, actually holding them to account. So, I know one of the key metrics for these kinds of programs is actually employee retention. So, being able to invest in employees, so they stay for longer, you reduce the cost to recruit is great, but actually, sometimes there is gonna be a cost to removing the people from your organisation who are never gonna be able to deliver the kind of service that your customers deserve.
Clare:
And we see this, I think a lot with historical legacy. So, when companies are older, they tend to have a bigger pool of people around. But what I did see though, was when the people on the fence started shifting to the right side, that actually did have a positive impact on the naysayers, because they were starting to be surrounded by people who were actively saying, you know, we want to be part of this change, we want to do this and they started to feel, I guess, less comfortable being a negative naysayer about it. So, yeah. That's fascinating. So just to finish off then, what would be your kind of top piece of career advice or your top takeaway from this conversation for women in CX?
Thirza:
A couple of things. First off, you know, take a chance with yourself. If there are dreams you have or things you want to do out there, which look very daunting, go for it, step by step and see what happens. I can almost promise you that you, you know, things will happen that you'd never expected and that it will help and at the same time it might not be for you. And you'll figure that out then, and then no harm has been done either. So, I think that's one big lesson I learned. Then, the family-work balance, I think it's important to figure out for yourself what works for you there and not to feel guilty if that leans more towards work sometimes and less towards children. I think the most important thing I found out was that my kids are most happy when I am and figuring out when that is, gives me the opportunity to care for them in the best way I can. And then culture-wise. Yeah, I would look at these seven factors, see what you're already doing there as a company and brainstorm with the frontline, but also with other people within the organisation who are believers, on what you can do to improve it even further.
Clare:
Awesome advice. And is there anywhere our listeners could go to find out more about this? Obviously, buy CX4, but is there anything on your website that they might benefit from?
Thirza:
Yeah, there's definitely stuff on our website. So, that is cxunraveled.com where you can go to, or follow our LinkedIn channel, we regularly post, for instance, reading lists on culture or specific facts that we found out or things we've done with companies. So, I would say those are two good resources.
Clare:
Yeah and then you do free little CX events as well, don't you? That people can tune into. So yes, follow the CX Unraveled page on LinkedIn and yeah, head over to the website as well. Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show today, Thirza. Thank you.
Clare:
Thank you, Clare. It was a really lovely conversation. Very interesting.
Clare:
And yeah. Thank you for continuing to be one of the most wonderful founding members of the Women in CX community. I can't wait to continue to work with you in there too!
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 are listening or watching on. And, if you want to know more about joining the world’s first online community for women in customer experience, please check out www.womenincx.community and follow the womenincx page on LinkedIn. Join us again next week where I will be talking to another amazing community member about breaking gender stereotypes in marriage and CX in Kenya. See you all next time!