‘Does culture eat strategy when it comes to customer service transformation?’ with Leonie Williams
Episode #708 show notes:
Clare:
We’re back with another episode of the Inspiring Women in CX podcast!
A series usually dedicated to real-talk conversations between women in customer experience and technology, this series we’re putting some of our awesome allies in the hot seat too!
No longer rehashing the same old conversations, in series 7, you can expect us to challenge the status quo on CX topics, provocative discourse, and naturally, plenty of healthy debate!
I’ll be your host, Clare Muscutt and in today’s episode, I’ll be talking to one seriously inspiring lady from right here in the UK.
She’s an enthusiast of customer service culture and spent seven years at The Institute of Customer Service before taking a leap of faith and co-founding the Customer Service Solutions Group.
Dedicated to implementing practical solutions and sustainable change within the organisations she partners with; she collaborates with leaders to define goals and discover creative solutions to build high-performing front-line teams who deliver excellent customer service.
Her dedication to elevating the customer service experience is underscored by her recognition as the #14 CXM professional in 2023.
Allow me to introduce you to today’s inspiring guest, Leonie Williams.
Clare:
Hi, Leonie.
Leonie:
Hi, Clare. How are you?
Clare:
I'm awesome. Welcome to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast. It's so awesome to have you with us.
Leonie:
Oh, I'm really, really excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Clare:
You're welcome, you're welcome. And welcome to everybody listening or watching wherever you are as well. So as always, we're going to jump straight in with the first question, and that is, can you tell us a little bit more about how you found your way into the WiCX community and what you've got out of being here so far? And I know this is a really fun story.
Leonie:
Yeah, no, it is actually quite a fun story. So, when I finished working for the Institute of Customer Service and wanted to set up Customer Service Solutions, I knew that I needed to go out and get a bigger network. And I decided that LinkedIn was going to be the place. And I stumbled across LinkedIn and I stumbled across this lady that I recognised and I thought, oh my God, I know her. We went skiing as a group of people ten years ago. We've got some mutual friends and it was Clare, right? So then I thought, I wonder if she'll help me kind of unearth a few things around, like running my own business, that kind of thing. So, I reached out to you, didn't I, and asked you for a little bit of help? And you helped me with a bit of positioning and understanding how to run a business and what was going on in the CX community, but also invited me to be a part of your community at the time.
Leonie:
So, I joined and I haven't looked back. So, it's been brilliant in terms of. It's funny how we got there. Different story to most, but it's been brilliant. So, I've been on lots of the networking, I've been in lots of the masterclasses. Masterclasses were absolutely brilliant because CX is such a massive beast, isn't it, in terms of the start to the finish? So, some of the CX masterclasses have been awesome for that. And also, the network of people.
Leonie:
So, learning from people that have got their own businesses, but also people that are still in corporate, same challenges, different challenges, that kind of thing and I've been to a couple of the conferences, and I loved the one this year with all the banging drums. I thought that was awesome, really good, really high energy and really quite different as a conference for the day. So, I've really enjoyed those. And, yeah, I've also been on a couple of panels and done my own masterclass, so, yeah, it's pushed my boundaries as well, which has been brilliant. So, yeah, it's been great.
Clare:
Thank you for all your contributions and, yeah, like, thinking that skiing holiday would be like twelve years ago probably now, won't it?
Leonie:
Probably.
Clare:
And led to this. I love those kinds of little connections, serendipitous occasions that lead to future friendships. So, you mentioned your time at the Institute of Customer Service. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about your career journey and how you've ended up where you are today with your own business?
Leonie:
Yeah. So, it's quite a long story for everyone now that I'm in my forties.
Clare:
Forties are the new thirties though, right?
Leonie:
Yeah, I'm literally 41 next week. I'm hanging on desperately to my forties. Thanks. So, yeah, when I first started working, I guess my very, very first job was for Waitrose when I was 16 years old. Right. And I guess being enveloped into a business that was actually already very customer-centric and customer-orientated was really good in terms of laying those foundations. So, I did that for a number of years and then I did loads of other jobs at the same time as when I was going through my A levels and uni and all of that sort of stuff. So, I’ve pretty much done everything to do with frontline customer service.
Leonie:
So, I worked in retail, I worked in pubs and hotels and I even did a stint in an Indian restaurant. I was a drinks waitress when I was at uni and I did contact centre and all sorts of things. And then that paved the way for my next kind of adventure, which was, I didn't want to get a proper job yet. I'm going to go and travel. So, I went to Australia, and I did this charity stint with Rally International for a few months and I still didn't want to get a job, but by the time I came back from that, I was like, oh, my God, I'm really skint. I just need to get a job. I'm 23, I need to get a job. I went to Office Angels, and they gave me two days at the Hilton Hotel's head office in Watford because that's where I used to live.
Leonie:
And I went thinking, oh, this will be just a couple of days. And it ended up being about five years.
Clare:
Wow.
Leonie:
Yeah. It was just, honestly, if I look back at that very first couple of jobs that I had, on paper, they were the best jobs I've ever known. I was enveloped in the leisure sales team, which is essentially us working with UK tour operators to get individuals out to all of their international hotels. So, I was working with hotels in Mauritius, Italy and America, and I got to go on all these amazing trips. Like, you couldn't have planned it any better for someone who absolutely loved travelling.
Leonie:
It was just absolutely brilliant. So, at that point in time, I could use all of my customer service skills, but it was all about retention and growth and building relationships with people and learning about people and it was absolutely brilliant. But that leisure sales side of hotels was very insular to London. So I thought, I know that something was telling me, I knew that I was never necessarily going to want to live in London. I might want to live in Australia or Gloucestershire, so it transpires. And I went and moved over to corporate. So, I moved from Hilton Hotels to InterContinental Hotels.
Leonie:
So the other powerhouse of intercontinental hotels, each of them has got about 4000 hotels in their gift. And I went to work for them over in Heathrow. Very sexy. And it ended up being an amazing transition because I went from off-property to on-property hotels. And then you get enveloped into this culture where everybody is responsible for the customer. Every single person knows their role and is visible and transparent, and everybody is talking the same language and they know who the customer is. They don't know who the customer is, but they know that they're really important, right? They could be a VIP, they could be a regular guest. So, everybody is just within this bubble of having this customer-centric culture, I guess.
Leonie:
And I worked for them for a bit and then I had the opportunity to go and work in Australia and I got sponsored by IHG to go and work in Australia. And I do have to say that I had my, I don't know, my reservations about whether it was going to be the same. And actually, because it's a massive hotel, all of these insular little kind of businesses are being run by their own personal GMs, and they're all almost like tiny little micro businesses, all in a bigger business. And I had my reservations about whether it would be the same. And it absolutely was. Like everyone's just culturally, as a massive organisation, they still put all of the same reward and recognition schemes in, all of the same moments of truth in, all of the same responsibility sets, all of the same objectives. It was just really amazing how they take such a massive organisation but bring it down to a very grassroots level and that message still carries across. So, yeah, I went out there and then came back to a national role in the UK, where I was looking after some really big corporate organisations.
Leonie:
But the difference between, I guess, this and maybe another role is you're looking after the massive corporate contacts and the relationship over here and all of the negotiations at a very top level. But you're also really responsible for what's happening at that kind of hotel level. And at this point, I was looking after, I don't know, a 10-million-pound portfolio, but also across 60/70 hotels at the time. So, you've got to forge relationships across all of those hotels because you need them to do a really good job for your own job. So it's constant, like working with your internal employees and your external clients to make it all come to fruition. So that's kind of where I got to. And then I didn't want to become institutionalised in hotels either, because that's really easy. So I moved over to the Institute of Customer Service because I wanted to work totally pan sector.
Leonie:
… and that is exactly what I got across my seven years at the institute, I worked with probably 75 organisations. And it was brilliant because you're working with organisations that are either brilliant at it already or they really want to be, and they're there for the right reasons. So that was a really nice kind of segue into working with businesses that I kind of got enveloped in, again to these businesses that shared everything. I was sitting at these CEO tables and talking to the boards and really talking about the importance of this stuff and leaning on our research and really looking at their best practice and being able to take that into this role has been absolutely amazing. So, kind of went over there and I was doing all sorts. I was working with insight, putting surveys in place, and kind of trying to get the boards’ buy-in to all sorts of things. And I learned an awful lot. However working within the institute, I found my ability to go outside of what the institute had to offer quite restricting.
Leonie:
So, it wasn't necessarily that I could always do the best thing for my customers because we were quite restricted in what we could do. So, at that point, I thought, I want to do more things practically to be able to help these organisations that I'm working with. How can I do that? And Covid came along and kind of expedited my view of what I wanted to do because I had to prioritise my kids. And I decided to quit my job at the institute. And then that gave me a really good opportunity to then start Customer Service Solutions. My business partner, Rebecca, she had very, very similar age kids, she was feeling the same thing. Actually, we both quit at the same time, but we didn't really have a plan to go off together and do this. It just transpired that we were like, oh, let's do it together because we've got the same values and the same ethos around practical support in a very, very sustainable way.
Leonie:
So, then I guess Customer Service Solutions was born a couple of years ago and that's kind of the story.
Sponsor Message:
And now for a quick word from one of our sponsors.
We are proud to be supported by Kantar, the world's leading evidence-based insight and consulting company. Kantar CX helps clients define customer and employee experience strategies, better understand their customers via measurement and in turn improve business outcomes, driving true commercial ROI.
To find out more about Kantar's CX practice, please visit the sponsor links on the homepage of womenincx.community. Now back to the episode.
Clare:
Wow. I don't think I knew all that about you, actually. But I'm sure we'll get to talk more about what you learned at those big hotel chains in relation to what you do today. I thought it was really interesting that it was that dynamic of kind of B2B with the corporate client, versus B2C with the actual execution of the experiences that would happen for the people that they were sending off to those hotels. Also, just like that really familiar story, kind of during the pandemic, a lot of women made the same decision, didn't they? To be like, actually, my family and my work life aren't really balancing and taking that leap, actually, and strangely, a really difficult time into starting their own businesses and flourishing by taking all their learnings from business and industry into then being able to provide client service. So well done, you. That's so cool. But there must have been some challenges that you've experienced or barriers on the way to becoming the woman you are today.
Clare:
What would you share with the audience about that?
Leonie:
Actually, I would say it largely is the focus around, I think in my early kind of professional career, I didn't really come across any barriers or any challenges. The challenges were around time. And when you're working in hospitality, you are working lots and lots of hours. But because I didn't have any dependence, you could do that. And I loved it. And you're working 70, 80 hour weeks. And it was all good, really, where I think I've come up against the biggest barriers and challenges have been around having kids.
Leonie:
So, I don't ever want this to come across as me being ungrateful for my kids because I absolutely love every hair on their head. But I have come across a number of different scenarios since having them that I wouldn't have had if I didn't have kids. So, the first one was when I went on my first maternity leave with my son, Sebastian. I desperately wanted to come back part-time, but the role was not part-time, the role was full-time. And I was told very explicitly that I couldn't come back part-time. So, I came back full time and every day I felt guilt over putting my son into childcare for five days a week. It was just awful. I had no family locally to lean on and he had to go five days a week.
Leonie:
And that was really hard. I felt this tremendous amount of guilt. And then when I had my second son, I knew that I couldn't go through that again in terms of the guilt. So, I was adamant that I wanted to go part-time. But in the time frame between Sebastian and Spencer, I'd been given a promotion and I was a senior leader in the organisation. And it was great. I had a team, but I was told that senior leaders couldn't go part-time. So, I then had to revoke my senior leadership status to be able to go part-time.
Leonie:
So that was then another thing around the kind of kid thing that I had. And then the third thing, which was probably the biggest catalyst for me kind of having a challenge, was during COVID I had a one and a four-year-old and they. I mean, my four-year-old had literally just gone into school three months and you know, chucked out again. Homeschooling. We managed to get through the first lockdown. Okay, James was here an awful lot, but James didn't get paid if he wasn't at work. So, by the time the second lockdown came in, he'd already had ten weeks off work. And it was then kind of.
Leonie:
And that was really stressful, me working and then having my kids at home that always want their mum. And then Boris Johnson gave the announcement that we were going to go into that second lockdown. And, oh, my God, I cried for two weeks. I was just like, I can't do this. And then the homeschooling came in. So the first lockdown, we didn't have any homeschooling. And it was just like, keep them alive. Second lockdown, it was like, right, we've sorted this out and you need to do homeschooling.
Leonie:
But you can imagine like an hour's worth of homeschooling with your four-year-old takes about 8 hours. So how am I supposed to do the job at the same time as doing the homeschooling? So, it just became really stressful. And I think that was the first time in my life where I thought, I feel like this might be starting to affect my mental health. I'm really, really stressed about this. I can't continue doing this. I have to make the decision to be the best mum I possibly can be. I'll get another job. I'll figure that out.
Leonie:
But I needed to be the best mum that I could be. And I just gave up the job and I prioritised my kids. So those are the kinds of barriers and challenges. But what I want to say is that although they've been the biggest barriers and challenges, that last one has given me the biggest opportunity and the catalyst for actually running my own business. And they gave me that. So, I don't want it to be all like, they've been a burden and they've been this. And it's not like that. It just happens to have been a raft of things that came in and that last one gave me the really big push to do something that fit around them flexibly.
Leonie:
But also it gave me the opportunity to do all the things that I'd always wanted to do. I'd always wanted to run a business, but I didn't know what it was going to be. I'd always wanted to practically support those organisations more than I ever had. So, it all kind of came together in a bit of a kind of fast, unplanned way, but it was definitely for the best.
Clare:
Wow, that's a lot. I know. Talking to other members of the community, obviously, we started during the pandemic too, and you definitely weren't alone with that. How can I do this? How can I work from home and home-school my children? And I think the guilt and the fear around all of those things. I certainly heard that regularly from lots of women and then feeling bad that they were feeling like that. This was a challenge and having to make choices. I just reflect and think it still shows, doesn't it, how systems and organisations aren't set up to provide genuinely equal opportunities for women. And that question of can we have it all? We can't, can we? Ultimately, if senior leaders can't work part-time, women have children until things like that are changed.
Clare:
And I know there are a lot of companies that are really changing the game on this. So, some of the big banking businesses, particularly the ones that are run by women, it's equal parental leave. So, it's not just all on the mum agnostic of whether or not you're same-sex couples, because I know that's also a big issue when it's not a typical heterosexual relationship. But yeah, women having to make that decision between being the best mum you can be and being successful in your career and work doesn't affect men in the same way, does it? Because the expectations on child rearing and care also aren't the same.
Leonie:
Yeah. I think that if you were to ask my mum about the differences between my mum's and dad's life and mine, and you know, James's life, there is mammoth movement between my mum didn't go to work and my dad was the full breadwinner and he did nothing, whereas James is much more hands-on. But James still doesn't have that guilt and the necessity to be a… It's not the same feeling, but what I have noticed is there is a significant shift in terms of how many dads will be at pickup and drop-off and how many more dads are at shows and stuff. It's getting to the point where it's more equal in terms of those sorts of things. But mums still pick up the vast majority of the mental load when it comes to knowing everything about what the kids are doing.
Leonie:
And it's really highly pressurised when you've got a job, a big job as well. So maybe in 20, 30 years’ time we'll see a significant shift again. Who knows?
Clare:
Let's hope.
Leonie:
But, yeah, I think it's not helping me right now.
Clare:
They'll be grown up by then, but it'll be like equalising that parental responsibility, isn't it? As well as making it possible for women to be more flexible in the ways that they work. I think it's a combination of those two things, isn't it? So more shared responsibility of the child rearing in the home and work policies that enable that for both sides rather than just one.
Leonie:
Yeah, but I think what we might benefit from is our children now seeing us working and therefore having this respect. The generational change of actually, my mom went to work and actually, this is what she needed, and she didn't get it. Maybe I'm going to make sure that my female employees get it. I don't know. I'm hoping that there's a strong ethic there that they'll take forward.
Leonie:
Currently, my son's saying he's not going to have any children. It's too much hard work.
Clare:
That's hilarious. Okay, so let's head back into the customer experience domain then, for the next part of our conversation and today, I know you wanted to talk about customer service culture, and unsurprising, given the name of your business and your previous history, I think it is widely understood that culture can make or break the efforts that we make in trying to deliver change within organisations, right? And from a customer experience and service point of view, there are certainly clear relationships between how we lead and manage people and ultimately what we deliver and execute from the customer's point of view. So, I know you mentioned big international hotel chain brands like standards and consistency. Everybody feels this responsibility and there is this kind of training and measurement and embedded service culture into everything they do, right?
Clare:
But the reality of a lot of businesses is they are not like that. So why do you think it's so important? Why do you think culture is so important when it comes to delivering excellent customer service and experience?
Leonie:
Well, I guess to all those points that I raised earlier as well, and to the ones that you just said, I think that, I guess I'm so passionate about culture and how instrumental it is because I have seen those organisations where it is running to a very customer orientated culture. So, whatever you want to call it, customer-centric, customer-obsessed, customer-led, customer-centred, I don't really care what you want to call it as long as everybody is facing in the same direction and facing north to actually supporting the customer in the best possible way. Right. But what I think is interesting about culture is that if you've got a really brilliant culture, you don't even have to speak about it. You don't have to say, you know, I don't think the Hilton hotels of this world, maybe they are now, but they weren't at the time. I don't think they were desperately wanting to create a customer service culture or customer-centred culture because it was just the way that they did stuff. It's just the way that their leaders lead them. And I genuinely think it's that tone from the top.
Leonie:
If you've got a leader who truly believes that focusing on the customer is going to drive brilliant business performance and they live and breathe it, then that is what sparks your culture. And it's the conversation, isn't it? It's everything. There's no one tiny thing that cements a culture. It's multiple different things. It's the water cooler conversation. It's the reward and recognition. There are so many different elements, and we do a lot of work in talking to people about this.
Leonie:
But I think that the culture is something that dictates the feelings that your employees have and therefore how they're feeling, then dictates how they interact and want to interact with their customers. And then actually, if you get the EX and the CX right, then you get all of this amazing, like, productivity and discretionary effort and going the extra mile and wanting to be proud of the business that you work for. And that then comes out in terms of business results because people want to come, customers want to be loyal to you because they believe in your brand, and they want to advocate for you, and they want to come back and they want to repurchase from you. So, it's the whole cycle of this cultural piece, which is why I think it's so important because it just touches so many things and so many elements.
Message from WiCX Founder & CEO, Clare:
Sorry to interrupt your listening, but I just wanted to take a break to tell you a little bit more about WiCX. We’re the world’s first online membership community for women in Customer Experience, our mission is clear, and that’s to unleash the power of women to lead the future of human-centred business.
Working in CX can feel lonely at times. We’re often singlehandedly trying to change the way that organisations think and behave about customers.
On our paid platform, discover a vibrant tribe of female professionals, find support from knowledgeable peers, learn best practices from experts and practitioners, and be inspired to up your game through leading-edge CX/EX thinking.
If you feel like you aren’t making enough progress with your CX objectives, are unsure what your next move looks like or are struggling to achieve your career ambitions, you’re not alone.
To learn more about membership, see how women are progressing personally and professionally with the support of the #1 community in CX, and apply to join us today, visit www.womenincx.community/membership.
I really hope I get to see you there soon!
Clare:
Okay, let's dig in a little bit deeper there. So, I think I have a perspective on the limitations of trying to change culture in order to alter outcomes. So, for me, I think there's a part that's missed. If you imagine three rings like the culture and behaviour of an organization, the systems and processes that it employs and the outcomes that it delivers. And for me, just targeting the culture alone without targeting the systems and processes, either for employees or customers, means that quite often the outcomes still don't actually deliver the performance that we're looking for, because you're wholly reliant on asking people to behave in a certain way. But if the systems and processes they're asked to utilise, I don't know, for example, like contact centres with low knowledge bases or poor knowledge bases or systems or policies and procedures that actually prevent them from acting in this customer first way that we're describing doesn't really work for me. I guess it's what's the dominant culture today. If we're talking about the buzzwords, customer centricity and the ones that you mentioned, which I like the way you said don't really care what it's called, but it's this movement from where you are today to being more market-oriented, at least, isn't it? That there are humans at the end of this service or product or commerce that we're delivering. How do we understand their needs better? How do we deliver against those needs better, and what do we do as a result of that? So, I know typical dominant cultures might be like a sales-led organisation or a product-led organisation, or an operationally-led or data-led organisation that is recognising we need to be more market-focused. But for them, the journey having a legacy of not being to then expect that one day we're going to be able to just transform, to be customer-centric.
Clare:
Like actually that's a massive change, isn't it? Because the companies you're talking about, were built on that foundation, weren't they? So IHG, for example, or Hilton or Amazon or Apple, they started with this culture, whereas a lot of businesses have been around for like 50 or 100 years, and then they have this legacy culture that they're then trying to shift, and I know that I'm working on some projects at the moment with clients that are representative, more of the latter. So, we talked about kind of why it's important, why it's difficult. The only other thing I'd add is the amount of focus that some CX people put on trying to change the culture rather than trying to change something like systems or processes, for example. And then feeling this sense of, like, it's my responsibility to change that culture without kind of seeing cultures take a long time to build. Don't they? Are cultures because of the years and years and years that they've existed and that feeling of burnout that so many people get in this barrier, cultural barrier that they just can't get over and feeling that there's some sense of responsibility in trying to own the change of that. When I think to your point, it has to come from leadership, right? You have to start there, because if that team aren't behaving in a way that demonstrates to employees that they really care and they do the right things and they demonstrate great service leadership, it's just writing on the wall, isn't it? Or like, value statements or “customer at the heart of everything” bullsh*t that we see on so many business strategies, but it never actually translates to a reality. So, yeah, I'd just love to dig a little bit more into your thoughts on how we actually make customer service culture operationalisable.
Clare:
I don't even know if that's a word.
Leonie:
Yeah, there's quite a lot in there. So, I'd agree that the word “culture” is just huge, right? And it's not just about, I don't think that culture is just about how people are thinking and feeling and their behaviours. I think it's actually more than that. I think it's about everything an organisation does. So, I think it's all about how much investment that leadership team wants to put into something or how much empowerment they are able to give someone to break a process or a system, or…
Leonie:
It's so much more than just behaviours, but actually, the behaviours do come from the top. And actually, I think if you have got a leadership team that values the customer and understands all the nuances that come and all the nuances that come with what you need underneath that, then that is what breeds your culture. Where you're talking about the kind of businesses that have got this financial legacy or this operationally led legacy, I've worked with many of those as well. And it is tough, right? It's tough, and it's easy when the door is open, you know that. And actually, those are the most customer-centric organisations that I've worked with and it's brilliant. And you know, and I know for sure that's because they've got the tone from the top. But those other organisations you've got, there's an investment to a certain extent in the customer because otherwise, they wouldn't have CX roles or customer service divisions or customer success. But there's just not enough…
Clare:
If they have them though, at all. Some organisations don't.
Leonie:
Yeah, some organizations won’t, but the people that I would be talking to, we do talk to operational people and we do talk to general managers and they're still all beating this drum about we need investment or we need data-led decisions or we need whatever it is. And it's really, really hard to talk to those boards and talk to those managers about this stuff because it doesn't breed tangible results straight away, does it? So, it's that kind of, we all believe in it and we believe that if you invest in your CX then it's going to pay business dividends. But actually, it's really difficult for somebody with that legacy mindset, especially when you're in times of challenge like we are right now. So, they may, in times when things are good, and things are profitable and they can see green shoots…
Leonie:
They may be more likely to change their decisions, but in times of crises, they'll always revert back to what's comfortable, which is the finances and which is the operations and which is all of that sort of stuff. And they might not necessarily want to invest. And this is where you need to start talking in their language, you need to start talking about the finances and you need to talk about if we get many more complaints like this, this is how much it's costing, where actually we could be reinvesting that. So, I worked with a water company that did exactly this. They had loads and loads of complaints coming in, but they weren't investing in the root cause. But they worked out that every complaint was £2,000 pounds to fix. And there was a house builder that I worked with, and they said that their whole customer service department function cost 14 million pounds and 7 million pounds of that was paid out in compensation for failure demand.
Leonie:
So, you think like if they are really monetary led, then maybe those are the sorts of discussions you need to be having to be able to get them over the line. But it is really tough and those cultures, that's really tough to change a culture that is not being led from the top. I think it's nigh on impossible to change a culture that is led in a certain way without some significant change at the top.
Clare:
Do you mean people change, different people or do you mean…
Leonie:
Mindset change. I mean, yes, people to a certain extent if they're never going to change, but yeah, a mindset change. So, you might find some of those legacy businesses. The people at the top don't even spend any time with their customers or are not visible to the rest of the organisation or just making some really simple changes about putting yourself out there. I've got a story about a guy who worked for a gas network, and he worked for this gas network, and they were a monopoly at the time. They didn't have to do anything for their customers, right? He came in very, very customer-centric and they are probably now, and he changed loads and loads of things and he has created this culture where they invest, they're data led, they've got the right systems, they got the right process, they got the right partners, they've got the right ethos, they've got the right reward and recognition. They are an incredibly customer-orientated and employee-orientated organisation. But they are very, very hot on high-performing teams. Their investment goes into their high-performing teams and if you're not high-performing, you're probably not suited to that environment.
Leonie:
And they completely changed the narrative around that organisation where people want to work with them. They do a lot of work in the community, but it took a really long time, right? So, I think it took about twelve years or something to get from not being customer-centric at all across the whole organisation to being an organisation that prides itself. But that's only because the conversation came from the top. I'm not saying that you can't do small elements of that, but that is like from start to finish. And they're still beating that drum now.
Clare:
Yeah, I like to think of it sometimes as if we're trying to land a plane and also building a runway simultaneously. And I think there's no getting away from, in these economic times that businesses need to see an impact within the year of any customer experience initiative. And as you said, some of these things do take a really long time to change in their entirety. But what are the minimum viable, biggest value-releasing opportunities? And I loved how practical you made that. You gave specific examples and use cases and were able to get right in there and say this is actually costing us £2,000 pounds every time we handle the complaint. Therefore, that's our business case to fix the root cause. But I think, for me, the leadership level, I think, has to start with strategy, right? So, what is your customer pillar in your strategy? What is your people and culture pillar within your organisational strategy? What are the key outcomes that you're trying to drive as an organisation linked to customer and people and culture and using something like OKRs, what are our objectives and key results going to be for delivering this? And I've seen some great matrices that have got finance and operations and all the really important stuff to businesses in there. But you can actually map to show the interdependence of people and culture and customer on all of the other financial outcomes at a strategic level.
Clare:
And yeah, I think it's that representation as well, isn't there in leadership teams? Is there a person who owns the customer pillar? Is there a person who owns the people and culture pillar? Are they around that table having those conversations with the other functional leaders? Some cases not. And then there's this bottom-up. So, thinking that's like kind of top-down and leadership engagement is what do we actually mean by customer-first culture or customer-centric culture or customer whatever the acronym or words that the business chooses to use? What does that translate as a set of behaviours for us as a leadership team and a set of expectations for our people? How do we communicate that? How do we monitor that we're doing that? How do we hold ourselves to account for doing that? And then at the ground level, is building the runway.
What strategic decisions would we make about investing in solving some of the root causes that create failure demand? It's a strategic question, really, isn't it? Where would we prioritise trying to actually pilot a program of change that involves our people, systems, processes, HR, embedding things into job descriptions and metrics and performance management to trigger that change? How do we do that in one area where we know there are problems and try to scale that forward rather than the thing we usually get asked is how do we create a cultural transformation program for customer service which is only really focused on changing the behaviours of employees on the front line to give our customers better service? And that's when, you know, there's like that lack of leadership engagement and understanding in what customer experience actually means. And that's one of the questions I quite often encourage people to ask, is like, well, what does customer experience mean for our organisation? How do we actually define it in the first place? And quite often, even just doing stakeholder interviews, you see how much variation there is in even what the senior leadership team think we're talking about here. So, I think it is like a maturity question, isn't it? Not that I'm a massive fan of maturity models, but the basics of success, or the foundations rather. What is actually already in place for our organisation, what is lacking, and how do we create that perspective and point of view for the leadership team before we try to change, necessarily employee behaviours so they can see the voice of the customer and the employee in this mix too, not just their perspective in those more difficult to change environments.
Leonie:
Yeah, and actually we do talk about that a lot in terms of, it's not necessarily about reinventing the wheel, because actually lots of these organisations have got some really great stuff, but it's not necessarily customer-focused. So, if you just take what you've already got in terms of, say, reward and recognition, you might have something that you can actually lean on. And actually, you just take a customer view on it. So actually, we've got these kinds of twelve building blocks that we utilise and actually, each and every one of those, even about recruitment. So actually, are you asking the right questions? Recruitment to attract the right people? So, there's just a number of different things. And actually, largely, most of these organisations will have it, but we just work on weaving the customer into this stuff. And actually, we try to really move away from transformation, as a word. And it's almost like more of an evolution.
Leonie:
So, I heard this really great story.
Clare:
The problem, not the solution, as I always say.
Leonie:
… this really great story. And it was First Direct, and I think they were rebranding, and they were kind of telling us a story about how they were moving from what they were. So, imagine this old house. You've bought an old house and you've got this amazing old brand, and it's called First Direct, right? We don't want to change all of the beautiful cornicing and all of the beautiful arches and all the doors and the fireplaces. We don't want to change any of that because we know that that's brilliant. But we need to evolve with time, because new systems, and new technologies have come in place, and we need to really.
Clare:
We need central heating…
Leonie:
We need to sort out our plumbing, our central heating, and our furniture and stuff. So, it's an evolution rather than a transformation because you're not trying to rip it all apart, you're just trying to take what you've already got. Yes, there will be nuances around getting creative and trying to implement new stuff, but largely it's about changing what you've already got and then moving with that. But we talk a lot about that.
Clare:
I think that's a brilliant example. I love how you use little stories of actual examples of brands and businesses to bring that to life. That's really powerful.
Leonie:
Yeah, I guess it helps that I've worked with lots of businesses.
Clare:
Yes, you've got those anecdotes…
Leonie:
I use them all the time. But talking about that seat at the table, some organisations, yes, are quite forward-thinking, and they do have that customer seat at the table. Some of them don't. Some of them kind of sit under marketing, some sit under sales. But I think it's becoming more apparent that the customer is more important. So, lots of organisations that do this really well have equal importance on customer metrics versus financial metrics, and I've seen that. So, there is that happening. I don't think it's happening across the board, but there is a consistent move, I think, towards being better at that.
Leonie:
But it was interesting, I had a conversation with someone recently about this whole, like, they wanted to move to be more kind of customer-centric. And I said, well, who's accountable for this change? And they said that's a really good question. I think we need to go and find out who. And also, to the point you made about what is it that you're… almost like your strategy, and what is it that you're delivering on? And actually, I was probably going to say this at some point in terms of the key thing that I would do if I were going to go away is probably, ideal scenario, collaborate with your wider team on what that looks like, but really decide what your promise is to your customers. Like, what is it you're trying to achieve, how you want your customers to feel when they interact with you, and then you can work out, actually, okay, so how do you get to that point? Is that behaviour? Is that systems? Is that tech? How do you need your employees to feel in order for you to fulfil that brand promise? So, it's all that strategic alignment in terms of getting your teams on board.
Leonie:
And I think that this is probably where those hotel chains did this so well. Without even really thinking about it. They just had this knack of kind of getting everyone on board and singing from the same hymn sheet that everybody knew that actually, our role in this person's day is to delight them as much as we possibly can. So actually, if you need to go the extra mile with this particular customer, just go and do it. You are empowered to go and do whatever it is that you need to do with that customer. That was very apparent. So, the empowerment piece is also a massive blocker, as well as systems and tech and non-investment and data and all of that sort of stuff. The empowerment piece for me is the top of the tree.
Leonie:
But a leader is not going to empower their teams unless they've got trust in the fact that it's going to bring financial return. So, it's kind of like a chicken and egg, isn't it?
Clare:
All the time. It's not one or the other, is it? It's both. And yeah. And depending on the organisation, where it currently is, where its ambition is to get to will massively impact the actions that we take. Right. I was just thinking about that. From where I see people quite often go wrong is not recognising that there's an outside in. Who is the customer? What do they want and need? What are their expectations of us? How we service those needs is like one side of the coin.
Clare:
But there is also this flip side of who are we as an organisation. Taking our brand, for example, what does that mean we would want to offer our customers and the culture that we have within our organisation from our employee point of view? Propositionally, what does that mean? What would the service experience look like? You can do a hell of a lot of that inside out to match the outside in and meet in the middle. So, for me, like experience, design, development of programs, metrics, data, all of those kinds of things is a combination of being able to take that outside in and inside out point of view collectively. And the results that you'll deliver in that way are significantly going to increase the value of any investment that's being made. But you don't have to 100% rely on, this is going to sound weird on a customer experience podcast, but it doesn't have to be 100% customer-led, does it? Actually, you can find what I call this holy trifecta of great customer experience. It's going to make people's lives easier, and it's going to deliver a business outcome and selecting opportunities or ideas that actually do all three is going to get you way further.
Clare:
Especially if they're looking for proof that this kind of thinking and behaviour works. Then maybe saying like here's a five-year vision and strategy and we're going to work towards building that from here outwards, as opposed to here's a view of where we want to get to. How do we reverse engineer from where we are right now to make that happen in the future?
Leonie:
I'm in total agreement with you because if I think you can sort out your own brand and your own proposition, then you can work out actually what you need from your employees. It's not all about how the customer feels, right? You can't have Ritz Carlton offering the same kind of proposition and service and compensation. And also, the customers are not going to want the same things either.
Clare:
And there's a massive pricing difference as well, right? Because of the value in the increase in experience, whether that's like service or environment, you're paying for that extra, aren't you, in a premium brand versus, I think Ryanair's a great example, isn't it? They don't promise anything, but they do promise the lowest cost. People are happy to exchange service and experience value for really low pricing, but yeah, that works for the Ryanair brand, that would not work for British Airways.
Leonie:
Yeah, it's about you understanding what you're willing to give. So actually, I was talking about the whole compensation thing because Ritz Carlton has this almost like they gift their employees. I think it's like a compensation level of 2000 pounds or $2,000 to make that service… If there's a problem, they can spend that, right? Every organisation could do that, but not do it for 2000 pounds, they could do it for ten pounds, or they could do it for a raft of other things that don't actually cost any monetary value or whatever it is. But it's still about the empowerment and the trust in the team, isn't it? So, although you're not wanting to necessarily delight your customers in quite the same way, there is still a certain amount of trust and empowerment that you think you need to give your teams to actually have that service recovery quickly and efficiently, and all of those behaviours are still the same. You still need to listen, you still need to be effective, you still need to keep your promises, you still need to say what you're going to do, do what you say you're going to do, that kind of thing is still all the same, but it's just slightly different nuances at that kind of monetary level and how far you would go and how far you…
Clare:
And I agree with you there. It's just making me think in a really simplified version of the world, basically, how do you maximise the opportunity for the experience to be right the first time as far as possible and resolve failure demand in the first place, isn't it? So that's kind of systems, processes, procedures, operational stuff, and then accepting the fact that something will always go wrong. What's your service recovery approach and employee empowerment to be able to deal with that? So, it doesn't mean that you lose that customer or reputation or damage occurs. And that's quite a simplified view of those two priorities, isn't it?
Leonie:
Yeah, because it's different according to the kind of business that you're operating in. So, it could be really, really simplistic and service recovery could actually be really easy. So I ordered a pair of pyjamas recently from Marks and Spencer's. The trousers didn't come. That's the kind of problem, isn't it? I don't need to know all the backstory about where my trousers got lost. They don't need to do an investigation. They need to just send me the trousers at no extra cost. And that's exactly what they did. But that's a fairly simple thing to deal with.
Leonie:
Whereas we've been dealing with organisations which have got really long convoluted relationships with their customers that are not based on a transaction. They're based on, say, it's a housing association. That person might have, say, damp and mould. That's a big issue right now. They've got damp and mould. That's not the responsibility… And it touches so many things across the journey that maybe the contractor didn't turn up when they said they were going to, and then they've called into the contact centre. The contact centre is going to find that very, very difficult to recover very quickly, like the Marks and Spencer's opportunity.
Leonie:
So, then the contact centre is responsible for going to kind of potentially investigate all of this stuff. And that's not their skill set. They're dealing with someone who might have called in multiple times over this, but as much as you empower them, they can't actually necessarily solve the problem the first time. So, I guess, what do you call solving the problem the first time is another thing that a lot of organisations are, I guess, battling with, because actually in a Marks and Spencer's type scenario, you can easily solve that problem first time, whereas in the other one that I've given you, that's really hard. Like you can solve that interaction if you pass it on to someone else. That might be considered to solve the problem the first time, but that person might have called in ten times about that same issue.
Clare:
Acknowledgment is important there, isn't it? In timescale, though, and communication, where things are more complicated and difficult to resolve. And that is, I think, still probably a more elevated level of responsibility, accountability, training, and support for that employee to be able to do that kind of thing. I've just looked at the time. I'm really sorry, we're going to have to wind this up. I could talk to you about this for days on end. Maybe this would be a great opportunity for you to write a blog for Women in CX. Talk about some of the twelve building blocks in more detail. Share a little bit more insight into some of those examples that you've talked about today.
Clare:
Because I did want to ask, where would you start with all of this? I think you're going to have to come back and come on the show again if that's all right with you.
Leonie:
Yeah, no worries. I could talk about this stuff all day.
Clare:
Oh, no, me too. And I'd really love the debate around it as well. And yeah, I think my ultimate reflection of this is it's not one thing or the other, it's both. “And this and types” of conversations we need to be having. There's not one thing that's better than the other when it comes to culture, service and experience delivery. It is really a combination of different skill sets, capabilities, and activities that are the right size for the organisational, industry, environment, and level of change required to get them from where they are now to where they want to get to. But I really enjoyed that chance to talk about kind of inside out and outside in with you.
Leonie:
That was really fun.
Clare:
If you're going to leave the audience with one final piece of advice or take away from this conversation, what would you say to them?
Leonie:
Well, I guess my one thing is just don't stress. Life is hard enough and one thing that I've learned throughout all of my jobs is just don't sweat the small stuff. And we're not saving lives. I mean, unless you've actually got a job where you are actually saving someone's life, it's just not worth the stress. And I think that you do a job that you love, ideally because you spend a lot of hours doing it, but just only do what you can do. And if I've learned anything over the last year or whatever, it’s that life is short, and just do what you love and just don't stress.
Clare:
That's lovely and so true, and remember the limits of your own responsibility, especially in these customer experience and culture change programs, it isn't all down to you to solve. So that's it. Thank you so much for joining us today, Leonie.
Leonie:
Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure, Clare.
Clare:
And thank you to everybody who listened or watched along, wherever you are, and we'll see you all next time. Bye for now!
Clare:
Thanks for listening to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt.
If you enjoyed the episode and you don’t already, please, please, please do drop us a like and subscribe to our channel – the bigger the following, the bigger the impact we can create on our mission to amplify the voices of women working in CX and technology!
Well, that’s all for now! See you again next time!
