The Customer Experience Podcast Sullivan & Stanley

Hello and welcome to the Customer Experience Podcast with host Emma Dark.




In the final episode of the Customer Experience podcast, Emma chats with Kate Birtles from Biffa.




Whilst almost everyone won’t deem waste management as something all that ‘CX:ie’, the way we think about it has never been more important when you think about its environmental impact and how it affects the customer.




Kate outlines how her new customer team ensures they are always walking in their customer's shoes, getting out on the frontline and getting to know them, whilst cascading the customer's voice right across the business.




Lots to take in here so with no further ado, here’s Emma and Kate.




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Shownotes:




Introduction 




- Meeting Kate Birtles Customer Service Director at Biffa

- Introducing the topic on driving customer experience in waste management 




How is Kate driving the customer experience strategy? 1:40 




- Where ever you have a customer interaction, it is important to have a customer strategy to ensure the best CX

-  improving the customer experience team within Biffa during the restrictions of the past couple of years




What does Biffa do to perfect the customer experience? 3:40





- Covering the basics, Biffa being an invisible service to customers, picking up waste at the right time, efficiently, sustainability, improving the environmental impact of waste management.




How does being sustainable and looking after the planet benefit the customer? 5:55




- Our purpose is to change the way people think about waste

- what can we do to prevent waste from being waste, looking into recyclables and recovering energy from waste, minimising landfill, encouraging education, keeping things as simple as possible.




How do you approach the complexities of waste management within the organisation and externally to the customer? 8:20





- Understanding who the customer is. 

- Having a sensible conversation and understanding what their need is and then finding solutions first before imposing needs.

- Managing local council needs and customer needs.




How does digitalisation come into play within waste management? 9:55




- We are still learning but eager to further develop with customer portals to offer feedback.

- Making sure the customer experience is as flawless as possible.

- Making sure the service is customisable so customers can choose what they do and don’t want.




What does the new CX team do at Biffa?




-  Management spending time with the front line going out to understand customers and the company voice face to face.

- Understanding the customer journey from start to finish. 

- Understanding if there is a process problem looking in from a customer perspective.




How do you manage your customer maps? 14:45




- Initiatives and methodologies on how to prioritise tasks.

- Needing to start from the beginning with a blank piece of paper and mapping out what the ideal customer experience should be and spring boarding from there.

- Understanding what the customer pain is and offering solutions as soon as possible and implementing them as trials. 





How to cascade the customer voice across the organisation? 16:20




-It is a challenge as always especially due to the recent challenges; people are change fatigued.

- Increasing the positivity and transparency about the customer journey and experience. 




How do you approach customer centricity? 18:30




- It helps that everyone is customer centric. It is a challenge that everyone’s idea of what the customer needs are slightly different. 

- It’s good to celebrate the wins with customers but equally it is important to recognise the problems customers can face as well.

- Focus groups from various areas of the organisations, bringing ideas to them and discussing the pros and cons.

- Making sure everyone is apart of the change.




How involved is the customer in those changes? 20:40




- Getting customer

Welcome to the Customer Experience Podcast with S&S Chief CX Officer and host Emma Dark.




As leaders, how do we successfully approach digitisation in the retail industry? In this episode, Emma has a chat with Heidi Reynolds, Retail Director at WHSmith - one of the oldest retailers in history established over 200 years ago. This is a true heritage brand and while its core values have remained, the organisation has had to continually evolve and transform their customer experiences over two centuries.




So how has WHSmith embraced the shifting sands of digitisation? How do they pair physical and digital experiences? What about under the hood, internally with their people - how do they bring them on the digital journey?




A fascinating discussion that is valuable for anyone in the retail space, learning from one of the biggest and best.




Enjoy.




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SHOWNOTES




Introduction - 0:54





How their leaders approach digitalisation in the retail industry
Meet Retail Director Heidi Reynolds, she talks about her experience in retail and the movement to digitisation.

How to reinvent the store of the future - 3:50 





Will there always be a place for the high street?
Know your customers and who's not your customers

The essential component to truly understand your customer - 4:50





How to use as many methods as possible to reach out to all types of customers
The critical aspect of making assumptions of who your customers are based on their purchase - you might miss out on their actual needs
Work out what it is you are seeking to understand in order to meet customer needs

The partnership between physical and digital - 8:20





How to have a customer perspective  to understand if you are meeting their needs
Understand your customers' shopping habits
How to adapt to support your customer 
Meet the needs of a customer experience online

How can you bring your 'in-store staff' on the digital journey? - 11:15 





Supporting and encouraging people to take these steps is difficult and change can lead to retention issues
How to offer support to less digitally able colleagues to make them feel comfortable
Be transparent and open about why it is important to go on this journey
Ensure that people feel confident and safe in their abilities and the support systems around them to go forward with the change together

What are the biggest change skills needed? - 16:36 





How to communicate and understand where the support is needed
Understand that customers are going on this journey with you
Be prepared for the physical and technical development of moving online

What is the purpose of a physical store when everything is moving online? 19:50





In-store colleagues need to keep the relationship with the customer
Conversations need to focus on more alternatives for the customer and can offer insight into their needs
Fewer people in-store isn’t always a good thing, it can compromise the customer experience
Customers are more likely to go into the store to ask questions when they can't find the answers online
Cultivating a culture of caring for the customer is important 

How to take the customers along with you on the changes - 21:55





All organisations will have to adapt according to their customer base
How to understand customer engagement in-store VS online 
How to understand the role of your marketing and how it direct customers to the products

How have your teams set themselves up to manage different customers? - 31:35





Understand how to appeal to customers of all ages
Don’t overcomplicate your offer
Connect with all your customers - IKEA caters for young families with food and play areas 

How retailers can ‘get it right’ - 35:35





Inspiration, innovation and value
Managing expectations 
Do what you say; the ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the 'ugly'

What obstacles have you had to face? - 37:50





How to stay relevant and live harmoniously between High Street stores and online
How to keep

“Customer-first, not digital-first. Work in the shoes of your customers and figure out what they want for today and tomorrow.”




Those are the sage words of Andrew Clayton, Head of Customer Experience at Close Brothers. Having previously worked as an executive across multiple sectors for the past 30 years, Andrew provides us with some great insight into how organisations can handle the gap between those who benefit from the Digital Age and those who don’t.

Emma and Andrew discuss how to create a ‘design tribe’ that sits within teams and units across the business, how to identify, approach and support ‘vulnerable customers’ and some of the future challenges for organisations going through this transformation.




There is loads of value for any CX exec leading teams in the digital age, so we hope you enjoy the show.

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SHOWNOTES:

Introduction





Been leading transformation for the last 15 years across financial services, utilities and healthcare
Focused on how to drive sustainable customer organic growth


How to bring brand and purpose together





Purpose is the new buzzword, but how do you bring it to life for your customers and people every day?
Make the purpose resonate with everyone in the organisation
Reinforce it through your comms channels every day
How do you bring purpose to life every day
Put your customer at the centre of your decision-making


Bravery to say we let the customer down





That covers not just the customer, but your wider brand
It covers your people experiences as well
It all works together as one


How has the digitalisation of the financial services industry impacted CX?





You need to be sensitive where digital makes sense in a relationship-based business
You need to dissect the customer journey end to end
Augment the journeys, not replace them
And involve the right people to make that change


Deciding which journeys need humans, and which should be digital (or both?)





Walk in the shoes of your customers
Understand how the journey feels for each segment
Where can digital demonstrate value
How do you manage and govern those journeys


How do you involve the customers with the testing?





Different industries are at different stages of test and learn
It’s a critical part as they experience the outcome
Customer labs can really help
But the caution is- make sure you’ve got the right team so they’re ready to be implemented when they can scale


What skillsets enable digital customer experiences?






You need to democratise skills in the organisation
It can’t be done with a centre of expertise
I’ve created a ‘design tribe’ that sat within teams and units across the business


Getting cultural buy-in across the organisation





It’s a daily job of leaders to reinforce the purpose
Make sure you pick out highlights of great work
Are we ensuring the changes we are making are positively affecting the purpose around customer?


Going from bricks and mortar to fully digital





They need to be humancentric AND digitally-enabled
There are touchpoints where we can digitalise and remove friction
High volume transactions that don’t bring value to the customer can be alleviated by automation
For B2B - how can we use digital tools to enable sales and accounts (internally)


Employee journey for that digital transformation





It’s always hard to change peoples behaviours in day to day work
Engage and involve them so they can see the value early
Lots of training, support, coaching and communication
It’s a change project in itself


Ensuring customers are embracing the changes





Your ‘listening post’ needs to always be on
You need the ingredients and accountability to own the feedback and action it
AI is great for high volume simple transactions which make things easier
The biggest challenge is to make omnichannel works 


How to identify, approach and support ‘vulnerable customers’ 





You need to identify who they are first and in what fo

Join Emma Dark, S&S Chief Customer Experience Officer in episode 004 of the Customer Experience Podcast, with our guest Amy Farrer on the jump from Telco to Tech-co.

Amy Farrer is the Digital Capability and Planning Director at BT where her responsibilities include mobilising squads to support the Consumer Strategy, developing BT’s Digital Capability with a focus on agile ways of working, and continuing to put customers at the heart of BT’s mission statement.

Amy and Emma talk about the importance of the customer sitting within every department, and how Amy is a champion of continuous improvement in BT, delivering customer and business value, quickly and sustainably.

Today she talks us through the challenges the pandemic presented, how the demands of the customer continue to change, and how adaptation and agile working is the new normal while supporting her staff's development in the process.

Hope you enjoy the show!

The importance of being a data driven organisation goes well beyond the world of customer. Making informed and speedy decisions and utilising customer feedback is imperative in today’s age where markets and economies can change very suddenly.

We were lucky enough to hear from the Global Data Officer at Specsavers Helen Mannion who has been leading the charge of building an internal culture that has data at the heart of everything they do.

Emma and Helen share stories on using data to drive a strong customer experience, the challenges of building that culture internally and even sheds some light on where the future of data and analytics is heading.

This one is not to be missed, so please enjoy the show and please hit the subscribe button to make sure you don’t miss another episode.

Terminator. Blade Runner. Ex Machina. iRobot. While Emma’s chat today with Mark Billingham of the Very Group isn’t quite as dramatic as some of those blockbusters, the topic of AI has been around for a long time.




Mark gives us some amazing insight into his learnings, practical tips and overwhelmingly positive results of building a bot to handle a huge amount of customer queries each month - 250,000 to be exact.




They dive into what capability you need sitting behind the bot, how they got customers involved using their UX Lab (which is as cool as it sounds), the opportunities it creates for your internal team and why the job is never done even after you have built your bot. 




If you are looking to build an AI chatbot in your organisation, here is a 45-minute practical guide from someone who has done just that. So please enjoy the show and don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast.







Intro - 1.20 


 250,000 contacts handled per month at The Very Group
AI frees up advisers for more complex and emotive questions for customers
Contacts have reduced by 23% and nearly 50% over two years
The bot is getting ⅘ stars for ease of use from customers







The catalyst for building AI functionality - 2.37


Previously navigated trying out a bot in Vodafone called Toby
Learnt how NOT to do it
Need to understand every single reason a customer contacts you
There were 10,000 different reasons they got in touch
Acts as a concierge service and fix it, otherwise will send to a human
Training a bot is like training a person - takes time




What was the goal? - 7.29


Don’t upset our customers
Put something on the web that got users to the right place and answers quickly
Ideally, people can self-serve which benefits both us and customers
Start with ease and simplicity 




The Capability that sat behind the AI - 9.43


Used our own web development team to create a look and feel
Then use tech dev team to build but use IBM Watson technology in the background
But all knowledge comes from the customer care team




Customer Involvement - 11.24


We have a UX lab where we get customers to come in and try out the bot
Kept it going during the pandemic virtually, but not the same as the face to face
Feedback can often be based on how comfortable they are with technology
‘I wouldn’t have used this bot before, but now I absolutely would’
40% of customers use our bot, so plenty of work to do


UX Lab Investment - 14.14


Need two rooms - can be really basic
Just need customers using the tech and giving you feedback
Doesn’t have to be Big Brother /MI5




Intentional Actions Delivered During Change Project - 17.07


Identify key reasons why they contact us
Understand what we need to build
Build the most important questions first
Make sure its useful straight away means the customers are on board
Where does the bot need guidance?
The balance between it being too ‘botty’ but also not too human and missing the tone




What are the next steps to perfection? - 20.51


Target is to go from 40% to 70% using the bot
Need to expose the bot to more people - only available for people who are logged in
The next step will be using them on the outside of the site
SEO needs to work for us to point to the bot
Teach it to answer more queries
25% have to ring contact centre after - so need to focus on them, get it below 10%




Biggest Challenges - 25.19


Hygiene - we are a digital business so web changes
Finding the right resource and prioritisation
Making sure the language is absolutely spot on
How far through the maturity curve is AI?
Have to make sure using the bot is optional for users




Managing the internal feeling that the robots are taking our jobs? - 29.11


The organisation has been continuously evolving for the last 90 years
We have a high tolerance for change
Give lots of notice and move onto other campaigns
Re-investing savings made and into your people




Biggest benefits for your employees - 32.21


The new set o