‘Could CX frameworks be killing innovation?,’ with Maria McCann

Episode #705 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 awesome woman from right here in the UK.

An early adopter of online customer experience, she’s spent the last 20 years working with digital brands, including ASOS and Spotify, building their customer service experience strategies and operations from scratch.

The Co-Founder of Neos Wave, an agency providing market-leading customer service solutions for digital brands and a partner at the Fellowship of Responsible Business, let me introduce you to today’s inspiring guest, Maria McCann.


Clare:

 

Hi Maria.

 

Maria:

 

Hi Clare.

 

Clare:

 

Yay, it’s so great to have you here. Welcome to the Inspiring Women in CX podcast.

 

Maria:

 

Thank you. Great to be here.

 

Clare:

 

Yes, and welcome to everybody who's listening or watching, wherever you are. I'm super excited that you're coming on the podcast for the first time today as you joined the community a little while ago. And we've been up to some exciting things together, haven't we?

 

Maria:

 

Well, conference for a start! Yeah, it's been really great joining Women in CX. I joined earlier this year and it's been really enriching, the whole experience and networking. I've loved it.

 

Clare:

 

Yeah. Why did you decide to join in the first place? What was your kind of motivation or how did you find us? How did that journey begin?

 

Maria:

 

Well, I had posted something on LinkedIn, I like to sort of use memes and pictures and pop culture, and I think I posted something parallel in customer service comparing it to Love Island and one of your early members, Laura, who had commented and then we decided to get a virtual coffee together. You sort of pick up these connections sometimes, don't you? And she had said that she had joined this Women in CX network and that she thought that I would find it really great. So, I thought I'd take a look and then I joined and the rest is history.

 

Clare:

 

That's such a nice story. And can't get better than word of mouth, right?

 

Maria:

 

Definitely, yeah.

 

Clare:

 

So, since you joined, do you want to share a little bit about the kinds of things you've been up to since you've been a member? What's happened for you?

 

Maria:

 

Well, other than meeting quite a few people virtually and then at the conference sort of in person, so definitely I would say my network has really expanded, which is brilliant. I kind of get to look at the feed as well to get to see what really is going on in people's CX lives and also beyond, which is great. I have had work out of it, which is fantastic, through a connection that you had, Clare, that's been brilliant. And I also did this sort of TED-style talk that you advocated so much for the first time this year at your conference, which was a big challenge for me. I'm normally one that likes to keep behind the scenes, not really get involved in that sort of front-of-house speaking. So yes, but I decided to set myself this challenge and yeah, I really enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it. And the conference itself was great as well.

 

Clare:

 

You did an amazing job. So, I'm sure we'll come back to talk a little bit more about the conference shortly, but would you like to tell the listeners a little bit more about your career journey and how you ended up where you are today?

 

Maria:

 

Well, I started out wanting to be an actor. I didn't have any sort of real conscience of going into business or the corporate world at all. And as a sort of 17-year-old, I got an audition at a really prestigious drama school in London. And you have to kind of go through these like three-stage auditions and I got to the final stage and I thought, this is it, my career is set, I'm going to go to drama school, going to become a really great actor and I hugely overcomplicated what I was going to do. You have to do a Shakespearean monologue and I decided to do Joan of Arc, but in an Irish accent. I don't know why. Clearly experimenting at the time and I completely overcomplicated it and absolutely flaked my audition. So, I spent this sort of summer being really lost, didn't know what to do with myself.

 

Maria:

 

My sort of dreams were in shatters and I got a job at a call centre, an outsourced call centre in London at the time that was called Teledata. And we used to call it all the agents used to call it ‘Teletorture’ because we hated it so much. But actually, I was pretty good at it. I liked talking to customers, I liked leading people, I liked figuring out how to do more with the resources that I had around me. And so, I started off a career through that, through being an agent and then moving up through there. And then I got into the energy market as it was being deregulated in the late 90s. So that was a kind of really chaotic time for customers, for the companies that were setting up.

 

Maria:

 

And again, I sort of found my feet, went through the sort of that process. Did the same with Telecoms in the early Noughties. And then I sort of found myself in this online space and I got an interview with a company called Asos back in 2008, 2007 I think it was actually. And I didn't even know who Asos was at the time. They were just this sort of burgeoning behemoth, but I didn't know that the juggernaut that they were going to go on. And I got offered the role in my interview and I was kind of like, okay, this is moving at a bit of a pace here and was really fortunate to grow the customer care and the customer experience side of Asos at a time where Asos was really just breaking barriers in retail all the time. And I was able to do things, you know, free returns, first UK retailer to do that, first UK retailer to be on social media, solving customer care problems, things we take for granted now, looking at how to help customers self-serve better, how to make returns kind of easier, all that sort of stuff. So, I did that for a while and then I got headhunted by Spotify who were in a similar situation as Asos when they started and they said, would you come and do the same thing as you'd done at Asos, but for a streaming service?

 

Maria:

 

And I was like, I think they just launched in the UK, they weren't in the US yet. We're going to grow, they're going to be big. And I was like, all right, maybe you are, maybe you aren't. But yeah, and then did the same thing there. And then I sort of thought, I really, really like doing this stuff, I'd like to do it for more companies. And I had a desire to work for myself, I think driven by the fact that I'd realized I was a pretty terrible employee generally, so had this sort of desire to work for myself and do this sort of work with other companies. And that's what I've been doing ever since, nearly ten years now.

 

Clare:

 

What a great story. What a brilliant time to be involved with brands that went on to become household names and to have been there, setting the foundations for those. That's super exciting. So, what do you do now? Tell the listeners a little bit more about Neos Wave.

 

Maria:

 

Well, Neos Wave is sort of set up to be a chop shop for anything and everything around the service experience for customers. And by that, I don't mean the calling a contact centre, I mean how a brand serves its customers while they're having a relationship with them. That's sort of everything, really, from strategy to data to practical application of their business's ambitions, of how they want to serve their customers. And we do that in a few different ways, so we help clients with projects and changes that they want to make. We also take care of some of our clients' customers as well, but we do that in a way that isn't sort of outsourcer, it's more of a way of what's your end goal? So, if your end goal is to build a team, but you don't quite know how to do it yet, we'll take care of it for you. We'll help you, but we'll also help you build that team and then sort of help you get to where you need to be, help you navigate to where you need to be through the lens of serving your customers. So that's essentially what we're about, what we do.

 

Clare:

 

And would you say your customers are more like start-ups or businesses that are implementing in-house customer service teams? Or is it customer service team transformations?

 

Maria:

 

Yeah, it's a mixture. So, we work with quite a lot of start-ups. I really love small businesses, I love start-up culture. And during COVID we set up a free directory called Still Open for small businesses to let people know that they were still open trading during COVID. And so, yeah, I love small business, so we do quite a lot of work with start-ups, so we'll take care of their customers for them or we'll just help them kind of figure out how to do it, know some of them might be doing, serving their customers through WhatsApp? So, how do we help them do that? We do that in the UK and also in other countries as well. So, Italy, Mexico, for example, is a really great place that has a really good start-up culture and kind of low barriers to wanting to get stuff done as well. And then we have what I would describe as sort of heritage companies as well. So, we work in sort of luxury fashion kind of clients that are over 100 years old who are really, let's say, slower to change, have the desire, but lots of legacy, lots of legacy, lots of things get in the way, lots of rituals that they don't want to let go of. So that's much more of a sort of longer-term relationship and a slower sort of process to getting them where they need to be.

Sponsor Message:

 

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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:

 

And have you experienced any barriers or challenges on your way to becoming the woman you are today?

 

Maria:

 

Oh, gosh, barriers or challenges? I wouldn't… only probably in my own mind. So I think in terms of actually the career that I've had, I suppose if you want to call it a career, I don't think necessarily being a woman has held me back, but maybe my perceptions of how I should handle myself as a woman in certain situations, meetings, that sort of thing will have definitely probably affected me and held me back. Try not to let it. I think as I get older, I understand that more. Maybe you don't at the start of your career, understand how if you're in a meeting with a bunch of guys, which I am frequently, it's a difficult balance to get your voice heard sometimes without coming across as the bossy woman or the sort of meek and mild can be a tough balance. Not so much nowadays. But I think when I started out, definitely it was probably there.

 

Clare:

 

I was talking to Ian Golding on a previous podcast about the experience women have of other people's expectations of who we're supposed to be, particularly in the workplace. So, needing to be super likeable as people, where men aren't expected to be that or how differently our behaviour could get interpreted. So, like you said, being seen as bossy, actually the same behaviour will be being seen as assertive for a man because of this expectation of how we're supposed to be. And yeah, I really feel you particularly earlier in my career, really feeling the need to be liked in order to succeed at the expense of sometimes maybe sharing what I really thought and the frustration of saying something in a meeting that ten minutes later a guy would say. And what I'd said had kind of been glossed over, especially when I was just a younger woman, someone would say exactly the same thing and they were a guy who was older and everyone would be like, that's it. And really getting bored with what they're saying, even though we said exactly the same thing.

 

Maria:

 

Or being… sort of taking on and I still do it now, taking on the responsibility of sort of being like the peacekeeper. So, the one that sort of brings together “Okay, where there are different opinions around the table”, taking on the role of trying to find a way forward rather than actually being one of the opinionators. That's something I've definitely done. And that's my responsibility. As know, even at your conference, Clare, John, who was so brilliant, and I was aware that he went over his time hugely, and then I assumed it was my job, my responsibility to then bring back that time.

 

Maria:

 

And I think that's quite a female thing to do is to sort of that motherly kind of thing to do, to sort of go, oh, well, they've gone over there, I must sort of look after the herd and make sure that we kind of claw that back. That kind of peace-bringer or solution-bringer, I think works against us sometimes as women.

 

Clare:

 

Yeah. Because it's an amazing skill to be the facilitator. But it's a bit unfair that in the absence of anybody else taking on that role, that as women, we assume it and assume that responsibility because we want collaboration to happen. And that's a great thing about female leadership. But again, it's that kind of question around at the expense of what yeah.

 

Maria:

 

Sometimes it's okay to get involved in the fight and put on your boxing gloves.

 

Clare:

 

Yes, I agree. Let's just carry on talking about the conference then. What are your reflections on October the 10th, 2023?

 

Maria:

 

I think overall, just the sort of the energy was so warm and thoughtful and everybody I really felt everybody was learning in a really warm and thoughtful manner, actually. And what I also really enjoyed was that people who I'd never met before, but maybe I'd read a post or a feed, part of their feed. You felt like you sort of knew them a little bit in that sense. Those sort of introductions and I mean, I hate conferences generally, I really do. I'm always the one in the corner with the coffee, not wanting to talk to anybody. But I didn't feel that way at this conference because I felt like I knew people there even though I didn't know them. I felt like I knew them because we all had something in common to start with, which was women in CX.

 

Clare:

 

That's really good to know.

 

Maria:

 

Have common ground.

 

Clare:

 

Yeah, that's definitely the strongest thing that comes out of the feedback is this sense of safe space and psychological safety in a space that is a Women in CX space, whether that's online or in person, that you are safe to show up exactly how you … be yourself. And that warmth and kindness kind of radiates from everybody because we share the same values right, as part of this organization. So, yeah, I think that's really important. Does that mean you're a bit of an introvert, then, if you're the person sat drinking coffee alone most of the time at conferences?

 

Maria:

 

I think I'm just a bit maybe a bit introverted. I think the last time I did it, I was what they call an ambivert, which is sort of right in the middle. So sometimes it's great. I love hosting, I like being with people, but then I also really like that sort of alone time. I think I'm uncomfortable in a space that maybe I don't have any control over. Maybe that's more what it is. And I get a bit grumpy. I stand in the corner, someone comes and talks to me.

 

Clare:

 

That's interesting because I know that I love it. I absolutely love being around people, but I don't know if it's as I've got older, but I realized just how much it takes out of me being so present. Like the exhaustion that I feel sometimes it's like depletion from social experiences. And I don't think I used to be like that. Maybe I'm just getting old, but when I look at the tests that you do, I actually have a lot of introverted characteristics. But I don't know if it's to do with having ADHD and learning to mask a lot of my behaviours. That that's how it's enabled me to do what I do and be a speaker. Even though I'm absolutely petrified before, anytime I stand on stage, I am like, literally my legs go to jelly.

 

Clare:

 

But once I start speaking, then I feel like I'm in some kind of, like, yogic flow. The time goes so quickly, and I can't think about anything else. I'm just literally there in my element. What was it like for you? So, you said it was a challenge to do the talk. What was challenging about it? Why did you set yourself this challenge to do it?

 

Maria:

 

I think there were two main things that were challenging for me. The first was getting up and speaking. I'm much better with a script than sort of just getting up and talking. It's never been something I've been terribly comfortable with, but I wanted to test myself in that sense. And I think the second challenge was the format. Where I have…

 

Clare:

 

… the hardest one to do.

 

Maria:

 

Yeah. When I have got up to speak before, it's been a case of either some sort of case study or sharing lessons. That sort of informative slide deck, guiding through presentation format. And that's quite an easy crutch then, to rely on. If you've got some slides behind you, even if they're entertaining slides, you've got that flow to help guide you through it. Whereas this was not about, as you pointed out to me a few times, not about explaining yourself. It was about here's the message and here's why you need to consider it. And how do you get somebody through some picture or story, some parallel examples to understand what the message is that you're trying to say.

 

Clare:

 

Yeah, it's more like conveying an idea, isn't it?

 

Maria:

 

Conveying an idea without but you can't be too conceptual about it either.

 

Clare:

 

I thought you did, you did absolutely brilliantly. I thought it was absolutely bang on. Thank you. Never would have known it was your first time doing that format.

 

Maria:

 

Yeah, I was glad I did. I was really glad I did it.

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:

 

Any tips for aspiring speakers out there?

 

Maria:

 

Keep it like the TED-style talk. Start with the end in mind. What is it that you want the listener to go away with? So, I had so many people after clock to me and go, “How's the weather, Maria?” Because a pivotal part of that talk was about the idea that what was meant to be a set of kind of, I don't really like the word empowering, but what was meant to be a sort of empowering exercise for a business turned into a nightmare because the same question kept being asked and it just got into a routine in the process. Rather than actually serving that customer properly.

 

Clare:

 

Probably have to tell the audience the “What’s the weather like?” story, they won't know because maybe people weren't there, they won’t know.

 

Maria:

 

So, the idea behind the message was around the company that I did some work with who decided that they needed to improve the quality in their contact centre. This was through feedback from their NPS surveys because their agents weren't considered to be friendly enough. And so what they decided to do was put a quality marking that was about the agents asking an open question to that customer. So, if the agents asked an open question to that customer, they'd get a tick in this quality score and that would improve their NPS. This was the leaps in logic that this company made. And so what the agents did, because they were still under all the other constraints of average handling time and dealing with several customers per day, was they started to sort of game the system organically by asking the same question, which was the simplest question to ask in a call, which was, how's the weather? And nobody really noticed this. The scores didn't really go up, but nobody really noticed this until an elderly lady phoned up to explain that her husband had died, and she needed to sort of settle the affairs of this particular company.

 

Maria:

 

And the agent ignored that and went straight into asking “How's the weather?”, and once that call was listened to, the kind of emperor's clothes kind of fell down and they realized actually what a sort of disaster this initiative had been.

 

Clare:

 

That's such a powerful example, isn't it? Because I remember everyone in the audience when you shared that story, everybody coiled, didn't they were like, oh, face plant.

 

Maria:

 

You know, what's coming.

 

Clare:

 

But a great way to describe, actually the reality of CX today I think, in that the motivation has become so about measurement, NPS outcomes, that people are gaming the system because that's what they're being measured against. So rather than genuinely empowered, empathetic, kind, compassionate service, which is what those results really said people wanted, it became, well, here's a really easy solution for us to tick that box and get a score, and therefore why it didn't actually really change anything. So, it's like disingenuous, but it's understandable why in this present day that's so obsessed with metrics, surveys, audits outcomes, rather than more focus, I think, is on measuring outcomes than on understanding customers and delivering action and genuine change that would make those outcomes a million times better. It's just how do we make that leap, as you said, from connecting this dot over here about a lower score to increasing that score, which isn't a great service. So, any more thoughts from you on the state of service today, or CX?

 

Maria:

 

Well, as I said to you, when I started out, we were in, and you would have been probably a similar time, we were in what I would describe as a sort of bootstrapped phase of CX.

 

Clare:

 

Nothing really existed, did it? It wasn't even a thing. We were doing a lot of the things that would be commoditized as a CX practice today, but it wasn't known as a word exactly.

 

Maria:

 

So, the goal was, how do we support this business to grow right through better engagement, better service, better experience for customers, and everything was really built around that and using the resources around us to try and achieve that goal. And then I sort of look today and I think, well, we've got so much more insight and data available to us. The barriers to technology are much lower than they were ten years ago. The cost of getting stuff done, the cost of talent, ability to sort of manage a project, should be much slicker than it is than it was ten years ago. And yet we still don't seem to be making the progress we don't seem to have made the progress that we should have done. So, transformation failure rates haven't really changed.

 

Clare:

 

They're still 75%.

 

Maria:

 

Yeah, still stuck where they were. Cost to serve isn't really coming down as it should do to allow businesses to then invest in the things that they want to, to support growth and loyalty with customers. NPS isn't really moving, but that might be sort of probably a whole separate conversation about why that probably is. So, customer satisfaction in the UK has gone down from where it was.

 

Clare:

 

All the indicators are saying it's worse than pre-pandemic, isn't it?

 

Maria:

 

If there are less barriers today than there were ten years ago, why aren't we making the inroads that we should be? And my conclusion is that we are at the moment on this production line of industrial measurement frameworks programs, and we're all kind of doing similar things. And then in our companies, working out how to make them work, and trying to rather than thinking, “What is the goal here?”, to grow customers or have more loyal customers. It's how do we bring in this measurement so that we show how good we are, and how do we then try and bend it somehow to our will? NPS is a classic example of, you know, there are so many companies that I speak to that sort of say to me, one at the moment, actually, that I'm working with that's asked me they wanted to increase their NPS score by not sending out any surveys until they were absolutely sure that they fixed it. They fixed the problems.

 

Clare:

 

Yeah, it’s that obsession with scores, isn't it?

 

Maria:

 

It's the obsession with scores, and it’s sort of like, well, the amount of effort you're putting into not doing that, or working out a way to not do the thing that you want to do, versus actually just figuring out, how do I fix these problems in my business better, faster for customers. That's sort of my conclusion. My question really is, why aren't we making more inroads if there's so much more available to us to be able to do so?

 

Clare:

 

I would use the example from my retail days, though, to suggest it isn't necessarily a specific measure, even though I have so many problems with NPS. In retail, they used to use, it's called ‘mystery shopper audits’, and that was on the scorecard for all the stores, and therefore the key service metric. So, the stores would spend more time trying to game spotting the mystery shopper than they would in actually improving store standards. They'd have phone trees where the mystery shopper was on the patch. Everyone beware this whole email chain came out. They'd, like, gone around stores. And some of the examples that I heard when we did actual employee-based research of this misinterpretation of what CX and service was, was to be a mystery shopper, not to be delivering great service to customers. And I think to some extent, NPS has become customer experience to businesses, and they're trying to improve that.

 

Clare:

 

Not customer experience to generate better outcomes, but just focusing on how do we move a needle, and it blows my mind, it really does. But I think, like, the amount of bad digital we've now got as well. So, 75% of transformations were failing five years ago. They're still failing now, but particularly within the contact centre industry, the rise of the value of companies that are tech vendors for customer experience. Not saying anything against them directly, but the solution to other operational problems about reducing things like cost to serve by deflecting customers into bad digital. It's not a case that people don't want to use digital, or over time, digital will not become the norm, but providing bad digital customer service is part of that problem. For me, I think the thing that needs to change there is, how do we use technology to solve problems for customers and even simple things like knowledge bases and queries. If you're going to use something like chat, making sure that that is really strong, but it's not.

 

Clare:

 

It's like turned on with very limited learning. And I know as a consumer that's the benefit of being in customer experience, isn't it? Because we're all consumers ourselves. We're still having those even with generative AI conversations where chatbots can't solve anything because they've not been given the problems people are really looking to solve and been trained on solving those problems or the knowledge base being built to give people those answers.

 

Maria:

 

Completely correct.

 

Clare:

 

I was going to say where do you think we're heading from here? What do you think is coming next?

 

Maria:

 

I think the obsession with AI and NPS and Voice of Customer is not going to dissipate anytime soon. So, I think we can expect a lot more of that from my side. I was just going to take the point about AI and learning is that within my company we're working more with small language models rather than large language models. Better for the environment, better for the customer, better for the business as well in many cases and where we look after the company’s customers, we actually integrate the agent with the AI. So, it's part of the frontline's job to work with the AI to make sure that it can provide answers, and that is starting I think to work quite well for us. So where do I think… was that the question? Where do I think it's going?

 

Clare:

 

Yeah, the last question I was going to ask you is where do you think we need to be focusing on today? So, feel free to answer both of those in one.

 

Maria:

 

Okay. So, I think where I think it's going is going to be definitely more technology, more AI. Right? And I think in some ways that's a good thing. Customers shouldn't be waiting on waiting to speak to I mean I had a technical problem with a website. It just kept bringing up errors and I had to wait two days for a response, for it to be a response of have you checked your cookies? I thought I could get that in under 2 seconds if that's all you've got to offer me, I can get that from an automated response. Doesn't necessarily help me, but at least I don't have to wait two days for it. So, I think more automation, more AI, more obsession with some of this sort of industry-sized production line tech and frameworks, I don't think that's going anywhere. What I hope is… my hope is that people will start to use it to actually think about the problems that they're solving and maybe things like more open-source technology will allow us to plug will allow us in companies to kind of plug and play more and interconnect more technologies or more ways of doing things that meets our own personal goals rather than having to adopt something wholesale.

 

Maria:

 

So that's sort of where I would hope we get to where I think we are today. The other thing that I think we are that I think will start to come out is this more need for more human interaction. I'm definitely seeing that more a swing back away from how do we deflect this? To actually engagement with the customer can be really powerful and good and valuable for both parties. So how do we just allow people who are talking with customers and serving customers to engage with them in a really healthy organic way that helps both the business and the customer get what they want out of the relationship? So, I think that there's definitely going to be some human connection there. And I think the insights will start to move away from that sort of structured reporting that almost has a lot of kind of confirmation bias attached. To it because you're sort of reporting on the things that you expect the results from into actually looking at more unstructured information and being able to pull out themes and nuggets from that to be able to do things with. But unfortunately, until businesses figure out how to take what customers are doing with their business and how customers want to transact with them as a backdrop of customers' lives and how they figure out how to solve problems and barriers to doing that in a way that is more of a team-based approach rather than through silos or through bringing in a big consultant to do it for you, none of this is going to matter.

 

Clare:

 

So where do you…

 

Maria:

 

Model in approach to it, but that's sort of where I'm at I think.

 

Clare:

 

So, let's think about our listeners then. What would be your advice for them to be focusing on in the here and now and trying to bring about that change? What would you say they should be doing next?

 

Maria:

 

I think if there's a way within their own company of… so I think that one of the most powerful ways to bring teams together is through experimentation and through sort of simulation of experiences that they would have for customers. So very simply getting into the customer's shoes, so, that can be done through simulation, it can be done through testing and learning things that you want to do. So, I think if there was one thing that I think could bring different teams, different departments together into a single cause, it would be having the space and time to come together to agree on something that they wanted to do and then experiment on it together and go through that learning together. Because that yields insight, it yields team building, it yields understanding, it yields a product, potentially, or a service out of it.

 

Clare:

 

Yeah, I'm a massive fan of basically doing desk research to understand complaint history, like actual stories from customers and amalgamating them together to create basically, a user story and a persona and then getting teams from across functions to map that so they can actually connect with the reality of what's happening and to look to what were the root causes of this? And most of the time, it's process, isn't it? Or ways of working.

 

Maria:

 

Ways of working, yeah. It's the rituals that a company builds over time that they then just sort of forget about. And the other thing I would say to that is it's really worth looking at how much effort goes into managing failure in your business. So, taking, like you say, an amalgamation of feedback, stories, and complaints against a particular scenario that customers, you know, retail might be a failed delivery or product might be not great, and then track that back to seeing how much effort goes into supporting that failed process or that failed product just because that's the way it's always been done. And then if you can apply a cost to that, you could then say, all right, let's use that money. Let's stand up that same money to test something else.

 

Clare:

 

Love that. So that's all we got time for us today, unfortunately. But if there was one piece of advice or a takeaway from our conversation today you'd like to leave listeners with, what would that be?

 

Maria:

 

If you're bringing in a framework or a piece of technology, just really consider, if I didn't have this, if I didn't have NPS for a month, what impact would that have on my business? Apart from bonuses that some companies do, what impact would that have on my business? What impact would that have on my customers? If you're running something at the moment you stopped it tomorrow, what impact would it have on your customers and on your business?

 

Clare:

 

Yeah, I don't know. What impact would it have on your customers is a really important one, isn't it?

 

Maria:

 

Yeah.

 

Clare:

 

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here, for being part of Women in CX, and I can't wait for you to come and do a webinar that expands on that 15-minute version on why frameworks might be killing your innovation in the community soon. So, yeah, great to have you. Thank you so much.

 

Maria:

 

Thank you.

 

Clare:

 

And thank you to everybody who's listening or watching, wherever you are. 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! 

Join us again next time when I’ll be talking to another inspiring woman in CX, this time from Finland, about the rise of the machine customer and how they’re set to revolutionise CX. See you soon!

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‘Are you ready for the rise of the machine customers?’, with Sirte Pihlaja

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‘If empathy isn’t the answer, what is?’, with Andreena Leeanne