Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 11 Episode 4 - The Human Experience - John Sills

John Sills, author, CX consultant and former head of customer innovations, is the latest in a line of illustrious professionals who have guested at the Lexden CX Book Club. John has been a crusader for better customer experiences for many years. First within a global corporate in the world of banking, and now with his consultancy helping clients ensure the experience they provide have a human connection, whether in person, on the phone of through digital contact. 

As Jon shares where the idea for his first book came from, we hear many of the themes that we've long emphasised on the CX Superhero podcast series as stand out traits. In conversation with series host, Christopher Brooks they explore common principles and uncover some of the reasons why CX will work, versus what holds in back in organisations. 

This provides the perfect introduction to John and his latest book, 'The Human Experience', and the perfect close to series 11. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Customer Experience Superheroes Podcast Series. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your host throughout this series. A series in which we introduce you to some truly exceptional people from the world of customer experience. We bring you their insights and their ideas, and hope to inspire you to create better outcomes for your customers too. In this episode, we meet the author and consulting practitioner, John Seals. John, who has held the position of chief customer innovation officer for a large financial services organization, has worked with many clients from a consulting perspective, and has also written The Human Experience, a really interesting book in which he explores the importance of human interaction in customer experience. We caught up with John to understand more about his passion for writing, where the idea for the book came from, and just what he's trying to convey with his book. I'm absolutely delighted that we've got John Seals with us today. John, hi, how are you? I'm well, I'm enjoying I'm enjoying the uh seasonally great two or three days weather we have here in England. I can see you've got some bright sunshine too, so uh we'll make the most of it, eh?

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Yeah, definitely. First time I've been inside the house all day. I thought I couldn't quite do this out in the sunshine. Spring in the egg chair.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

John, you are the latest author to join our CX Book Club. So we're very grateful and we're really excited. You bring a different dynamic in terms of the book that you we're going to be reviewing, which is the human experience, which is seems to uh in in all corners of the world seems to have been a hit. I hope you're enjoying the uh well-deserved praise you're getting on it.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Yeah, it's it's really lovely, actually. I think everyone should get to have this little period of time in their life where people just seem to say nice stuff about you for a while. Uh, and then people that aren't your friends and family read it. So then I have to brace myself for that. But no, it's been really, a really lovely experience.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Excellent, excellent. Well, look, when we run the book club, we invite a number of interested um participants to join you and do a QA to really gruel you in a kind of respectfully challenging way. And to be honest, it's gonna be difficult when you read the book. There's not much in there you could go, I disagree. Well, there's hardly anything you say I disagree with, but it's just very straightforward and very, oh my God, we shouldn't forget this stuff type, you know, book, which is wonderful. But we're not gonna go into the content today because that'll be reserved for the Q ⁇ A session, and then we'll be running a principles to practice session with you where we demonstrate this isn't a book for the shelf, this is a book for the office, where you can actually take the contents, the models, the structures, and apply them to businesses. So we're looking forward to doing that. But today, I'm really interested in getting behind the book and hearing more about the author. This is a topic that others haven't landed on, and there's a path that's led you to that. So I'm really interested in understanding that. And perhaps the first place we need to go to, then, John, is your first engagement with customer experience because it's been your world for some time, but there must have been a point where you've stepped into it. Can you remember what that was?

SPEAKER_02 3:26

Yeah, I think you're right. It has been a world for quite some time. It's one of those scary things when I keep kind of updating my LinkedIn profile and it becomes 15 years and 20 years and 25 years, and all of a sudden I feel rather ancient. And you're right, I started out on a market stall in Essex working directly with customers. And so when I look back on my career, I can see that thread all the way back to that point of spending real time with real people through the retail outlets I worked for, the bank that I worked for. Probably the moment though, where I first realized I was properly a customer experience person, there actually came a long time after all of that. It was when I'd moved into head office for HSBC and I had the opportunity to go and work for the global team, and they were setting up a new global customer experience team. And up until that point, once I'd been in head office, I was working in innovation and propositions, and I thought that was my thing. And I remember reading this job description for this global customer experience role and reading it again and thinking that's perfect. That's the perfect job role for me. That's exactly the thing that I want to be doing. And then was luckily enough to get that role and spend a year and a half working with 20 countries at the time around the world, five different continents, understanding what customer experience looks like across those markets, what's the same and what's different. Things like in Mexico, there's loads and loads of complaints all the time, but in Taiwan, no one ever complains, but they will just leave. And so you look at the data and you think, well, Mexico's bad and Taiwan's good, but that's not necessarily true. So I think it was that job role that probably almost put the words customer experience into my lexicon of that's really what it is that I want to be working on, even though I'd had that experience before.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Sure, excellent. So, I mean, obviously, to land the position of global head of customer experience, I think the word you use was luck, but I'd like to think that HSBC isn't predicated on luck. What were you doing at that time that kind of got the attention of the uh interviewing committee?

SPEAKER_02 5:21

Yeah, that's right. I think I'd had the first seven years of my career at HSBC, as I say, working frontline. So I was running branches during the financial crisis, and that's horrifying, eye-opening, interesting, and all of those things. And that led me to move up to head office to go and look after the premier proposition and the international proposition. And while I was there, I also accidentally launched our first mobile app. So we had this situation where the IT team had decided to send out these little secure keys to all of our customers, these little digital devices. You had to tap in your number to get into your online banking. And it didn't go down well with customers. This was just at the time when all the other banks were launching mobile apps to make it easier to get onto your online banking. And our digital satisfaction dropped by about 30% in three months. It was really quite bad. So me and a couple of the other team, we went to look at the data and we saw that 91% of customers only ever logged on, checked their balance, and logged off again. And we'd given them this bit of security. My balance doesn't mean anything to you, but it means everything to me. So I can tell you the numbers now. So we went to the CEO at the time and we said, look, we think we can build you an app that just lets people check their balance within about 60 days. It won't be pretty, it won't be the best app on the market, but people will really like it. And he said, Yeah, you can have a million pounds, go and do it, but don't go to any of the committees because they'll just slow you down. So we had a little team of eight of us, squirreled off to the side. We launched this app, we called it Fast Balance. It became the most used mobile app in banking at the time, six, seven million people using it a week. And that for me was a really big lesson in designing around what really matters to your customers, not designing around what technology there is available. And I think that was the thing that then probably caught people's attention in terms of uh me and the way I approach things.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

And that was probably the thing that I think, in fact, this is probably the story I told in the interview that helped me then, but very very much connecting back to you being customer-centric and human-centric. So obviously, working in a bank, it's as much as a bank wants to be customer-centric, it is all about transactions. So, how did you start to connect with the topic of your book? Or does it go right back to you know that first interaction of a few notes exchanged for a product on a market still and seeing just what that felt like? I mean, where where did you? Because you know, it would have been forgiven for this book being called the digital experience, how humans don't need to suffer in a digital world or something, but you've not gone that way at all. And as you go into the depth of the book, you'd be forgiven to hear you've launched digital app, you go, what, this guy? Really? So you've pulled yourself into this space. How did that happen, or when did that happen, or what was the motive?

SPEAKER_02 8:02

Yeah, I think it's interesting. So I suppose it's um, I suppose I'm quite, even though it's called the human experience, I'm always quite keen to talk about humanity rather than humans necessarily. There's an easy thought that what I'm advocating for is to have more humans in customer experience. That's not necessarily true. I'm advocating for more humanity even in digital experiences. And you're right, right back to those market still days, I think you can really see the need for real humanity. And I probably challenge what you said a little bit about banking being about transactions. Well, please do. You know, when I was certainly on the face of it, it is, but when I was branch manager at Reading and Woken and branches down the road here, we had real deep relationships with a lot of the customers that came in, and we were really supporting them through tough times, particularly during the financial crisis. And absolutely at the sharp end of that is the transactions. But what was behind that was this relationship, this trust, this kind of conversation we were having with them all the way through. Now, what was interesting, which I think led to part of the book, was how those customers disassociated the people that were in front of them with the bankers and organizations. People would often come in and tell me about how much they hated bankers, how evil all bankers were, how bankers were ruining their lives. And I'd say, Hang on, that's me. I work for a bank, like I'm a banker. And they'd say, No, not you, not you people here, but them. And they'd always point upwards to this mythical them. And so then I went and joined the them when I went to head office, and I realized that pretty much everyone, H Speed is a great company to work for. Everyone in that organization was really trying to do the right thing for customers. But what was getting in the way was the culture and the regulation, the ways of working in a big organization that detach people from what really matters to customers. So that was probably the background of it. And the actual genesis for the book was I was on this steam train with my son and my wife going through the UK, this lovely kind of day out on a steam train. And my son, and you know the type of mean, like big deep leather seats that you fall back into, a nice big oak panel table to spread your food out on, and a lady coming down, handing out home-baked food and home-baked goods. It was really perfect. And my son turned to me and said, Oh, Daddy, is this what it's like when you get the train into London every day for work? And obviously, I've laughed and said, No, emphatically, it's nothing like that. I'm lucky to get a stranger's sweaty armpit and a cold weapon. But that that got me thinking, this is back in maybe kind of 20, 2018, 2019. That's what got me thinking, isn't that odd? Because really the sign of progress should be that you make things more efficient while you keep the level of quality the same. And with all the technology we've had in the past 20 years, it's as if we've focused on the functional experience, making more things more quickly, more readily available in more ways than ever before, but we've lost that real emotional experience, that real human experience. And it's from that that the idea from the book started to come.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Excellent, excellent. And at that time, you said you'd left HSBC at this time, Edge. You set up on your own?

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Yeah, that's right, not quite. So I'd left HSBC in 2014 to join an independent consultancy called the Foundation. So I'm now one of four partners there. So we're independent, the four of us co-owning the business. That was actually set up by Charlie Dawson in 1999. So we've been around for 23 years, but it's just in the past few years we've expanded it out to there being four of us as partners. I was actually a client beforehand. I really didn't like consultants. When I was in the bank, we always had the big consultancies come in. They all had about 50 people, loads of backpacks. They gave me PowerPoint slides with triangles on. They told me what the answer was before I asked them a question. But someone said, Look, you should really meet Charlie. And I really didn't want to, but then I did, and he just sat there with a blank piece of paper and asked me some really interesting questions that made me feel a little bit stupid. And I thought I quite like that. And then I went to visit the office and it was full of big post-its and bright people, real energy, really people that really cared about making things customer-led. And so I thought, yeah, I could do that. So yeah, I left HSBC. I was head of innovation, the head of customer innovation there, left end of 2014, and I've I've been at the foundation ever since.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Excellent, excellent. So moving from that banking environment, having had an international perspective on customer experience and seeing how context and expectation set the path of what you're going to do. Nothing, nothing else matters as much as those two things. Moving into a foundation, did you deliberately keep away from financial services? I mean, how far away from it have you been? Because you're talking about retailing there. You're talking about B2C. Did you keep in that space or did you venture into production and B2B and patient experience, all different areas? Where did you go?

SPEAKER_02 12:35

Yeah, real mixed. Part of the reason for my moving was that I deliberately wanted to do the same kind of thing, but across different industries. I didn't just want to move to another bank and just do the same again in another big organization. I think if you're going to work for a bank, HSBC is an amazing one to work for. So I probably over, and this is probably over the whole time there, probably still about 30% of the work I do is financial services. I've got the expertise and the experience. So HSBC remain one of our biggest clients, Metro Bank and Virgin as well. But no, I've spent time working with Morrisons and Asta and the Body Shop and Volkswagen and Booper, currently working with Booper, which is fascinating, and some quite random projects as well. Sunseek yachts, understanding the real kind of luxury end of the market, working with a debt collection agency on how they can be more customer-led, working with a company called Samworth Brothers, a food manufacturer on the future of Ready Mills. So we're very lucky that we very deliberately uh try and spread the clients we have across a number of industries because that helps us keep the outside in perspective and helps us to then realize what's going on in one industry and how that might impact another industry. So I spread away from financial services, but I do retain a real interest in money, or I should rephrase that, in how people use money. I think is really at the heart of so much behaviour and so many people's decisions and so many people's lives. So that's what I always found fascinating about banking, not the products necessarily or the market or the regulation. I don't understand a lot of that, but how people react and deal with money, I think it is endlessly interesting.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

And that point around bringing humanity into the experience, when you move from sector to sector, you're finding that it's neglected or it's got forgotten about or it's been compromised. Do you find that everywhere you go that it's ready to be reviewed and brought back into the fray?

SPEAKER_02 14:23

Yeah, I do. I really do actually. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why I wrote the book, that I started to see this not as a thing that was an anomaly and there was some bad companies and you could find a good service, but actually the expectations across the whole of almost every industry we work in at the moment, expectations and ambition just seem to be lowering and lowering. And all of a sudden we're all as customers just accepting long wait times and do not reply email addresses and a huge amount of stress that's caused by getting a really bad experience or just having not a very good experience, actually. It starts to become quite endemic, I think, across every industry. You still see some industries where it's slightly better than others. So your travel and leisure and retail industries are always a step ahead of your kind of banks and insurance, but part of that's to do with the product they're selling. But I think the other thing that really drove me to that, that I do see across the industries is it's almost a bit of a microcosm of wealth inequality. Because if you're rich enough or you're educated enough, you can still get the best service that you want because you can afford to pay for it and everyone has premium services available, or you've got the network. So if something goes wrong, you've got the network to help you fix it because you can probably get to the CEO, or you've got the education to know that you can write a strongly worded letter to the CEO and they're probably going to resolve it. Now, the reality is most people in the country they don't have the money to be able to afford those premium services, and so they're increasingly left to feel like second-class citizens by a lot of companies, and they maybe don't have the network or the education, or frankly, the time. If you're a single parent with three kids, I don't have the time to deal with all of these issues, and therefore it just costs me money, and I just have to put up with a lesser service. I'm lucky in that I've a professionally interested in this, so I'm quite happy to invest the time writing big long letters to CEOs to try and get problems resolved, but most people would just give up. And I think that's a real societal issue and a societal problem. Octopus Energy have recently been running adverts saying in a crisis, service matters. Yeah. I think that is really true. So that was a big part of what was behind it, actually. I see this coming across industries and I see it having a disproportionate impact on the areas of society that are probably facing the most hardship at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Yeah, I can really emphasize you that I think that there is an infliction point where the value of resolving something is disproportionate to the effort you put in, and you just accept. And to your point earlier of Thailand versus Mexico, you look at the scorecard and you go, Oh, this didn't break them. This didn't break them. It was all right. It's just that I've run out of time, energy, importance in my life to actually complain. I take your point about writing the letters. I I think on a flip side, I've never claimed compensation for a train that's been delayed because I know from stories other people have told me how much time and effort that will take and how little I'll get back. It would be an insult to me to get that back. So I just let it go. But what that means is the train companies think compensation scheme perhaps could come down because some people they should be claiming for this amount.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Yeah, it's not believable. I mean, I yeah, two or three points off the back of that. So that delay repay compensation scheme. I've got a a bit of a direct relationship with one of the senior managers at Great Western Railway now about that because I did write to them and say, look, this is about helping me get to the outcome that I want. And I talk about the example in the book about Swiss Rail that we'll talk about another time, probably, but it's about getting me to the outcome. And my point to them was that there was a train that it was delayed, and I missed my connect. They didn't hold the connecting train. That meant I got home 45 minutes late and I was meant to be picking my kids up from school. And when I complained, they said, Oh, you can get five pounds back for the delay repay. And I said, No, I had to get a taxi to go and pick my kids up from school. So can you refund me for the taxi to£15? And they said no, and they wouldn't budge. And I said, This is the point. The point is, you're meant to help me get to the outcome I want, which is picking my kids up from school on time, not sending me a check for£3.30, exactly as you're saying. It just becomes more effort. So many people don't claim it. I'm not in the book. I had a situation recently with one of the big hotel chains in the UK, and I've gone on holiday for my 40th birthday. Believe it or not, this is a recent story, even though it looks like a retention. And there were 10 of us who went to York. And when we got to York, seven o'clock that night, we walked in and the receptionist said, sorry, the hotel's going to close because we've got no running water. I'm really sorry about that. They said, We can put you up in a hotel five miles away, or you can stay here anyway without the running water, or we can give you the refund. So took the refund, and then I ended up staying in a hotel about 10 meters down the road, rival brand for 70 pounds more across the 10 of us, so seven pounds each. And so I wrote to them afterwards and said, This was the situation, could you just refund me the 70 pound? And I presumed that would just be a simple yes. This ended up going on for three months, two letters to the CEO multiple times, people coming back to me saying they weren't going to budge, saying that I shouldn't have gone with a rival brand, saying that they offered me a hotel, but it was five miles away, and they would have paid for the taxes to shuttle us back in and out of the city center for ten of us. All of these reasons over what was effectively seven pounds per person. They then offered me a voucher for one of their restaurants that was 15 miles from where I was, which was£100, which was more than what I wanted. And eventually, after all this time, they went, okay, we'll give you the£77 back. And in that email where they said they were going to give me it, they said, I hope this has restored some of your faith in us as a business. And I thought it's done completely the opposite. And also, and this is this concept of failure demand. If you just said yes straight away, I would have been happy, you would have been happy. The amount of time they've had to spend dealing with it. And this is just an example because most people would have given up, most sensible, normal people would have given up. But because I really care about this and it's my profession, my wife kind of sighs and says, Oh, off he goes again. And I'm willing to push through, but most people wouldn't. And then most people would lose out on the money.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Yeah, but like their effort and energy that's gone into it, your effort and energy, you can't reclaim to put back into your kids or back into your business. You create yourself a decent case, but you've lost overall as well.

SPEAKER_02 20:29

Absolutely lost. Once when one of the energy companies we work with, I suggested that they change their average call waiting time for their contact center to human lives wasted, so that at the end of the year they would total up all the time that people have been on hold to them and convert that into human lives. And they nearly did it and they pulled out right at the last minute, I think, because they've saw the figure. But I think sometimes, and we talk about, I talk about this in the book, sometimes it needs that visceral moment, that visceral connection to the impact you're having on humans, on real people. Because you're right, it's not just the time, it's the stress that goes around it, it's the worry that goes around it. And I'm in a fortunate position. That 77 pounds, I was okay with or without it, you know, unfortunate enough what I earn. But for some people, that 77 pounds would be a big deal. That would be a week's worth of food, two weeks' worth of food. That'll be feeding the kids, that would be getting clothes for kids. It really matters.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

It really matters, and all of this just because it can't be easily measured, it gets washed away and forgotten. And organizations are protected, and leaders in organizations are protected from that within the layers of the organizations behind the PowerPoints and the PDFs.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

I think what's um important though is you're right, we need to have evangelists who do go after them because, in my experience, it is not willful, manipulated intent to deceive customers, it's just poor practices because Stan left and he used to know how to do it, and Jenny didn't, so she's done it differently. And Simon then had his own interpretation, and that's ended up where we've ended up. And it requires someone to kind of blow some cold air. Through it to help people understand this is not a good place to be. You need to improve this.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

I think it's exactly that. And I think it's combined with two other things. One is this kind of lack of perspective, seeing the world from the inside out, being closer to your colleagues and your procedures, this thing where you walk in through the front door of head office or you open your laptop for the day and you automatically forget what life's as a customer, as a real person. You know, you might have been just as annoyed as someone else buying your coffee 10 minutes before, but then you get into the office and you then also do things that will annoy other people. But the other thing is a lack of freedom, a lack of empowerment. People are, I think increasingly, humans or organizations are full of humans that aren't allowed to act in a human way, feel kind of really tied in, very rigid. And um, I talk in the book about AO.com, you have two rules for their customer experience strategy, which is treat everyone how you want your grand to be treated and make decisions that would make your mum proud. I think that second one is so important because whenever I tell these stories, if I was talking to the person on the other end of that email for that hotel company and I was telling them this story, they'd be thinking, well, that's ridiculous. Of course, you should have had the money back. I've got, as you said in the book, lots of stories about lots of ridiculous situations.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:09

All of which everyone knows is ridiculous, but they still happen because of this lack of perspective, because of this lack of freedom and empowerment. People just have got used to just doing the things that they're told to do, got used to doing the things that get them a pat on the back or don't get them told off. And we end up in this situation where everyone knows it's a bit silly, but it happens anyway.

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Many years ago, we had a thing called Vexfox and Fondfox, a couple of little Twitter characters we created, and we'd pick up on a story, and then we'd say, Has anyone else got it? And Vexfox, the amount of people who come out and say, Oh my god, same thing happened to me. My train issue was recent, such as yours, was a cab as well. I had to get an Uber back, and it's about 40 quid for a 15 quid train journey, but there was no option for a train. And you put a story on like that and you find there's so many people in the same situation. I love the idea, very red line idea, but I love the idea of human lives wasted. I remember um I'm gonna say virgin, but I'm not sure it was virgin trains. The stat about the percentage of toilets that were not working on the train, and it was something like 0.2%. And they said it's not really worth worrying about, there's many other things to worry about. And then they brought 130 or 140 people into the room, locked the door, and said, These people need the loo. Yours don't work, what are you gonna do? And it's like, what do you mean? Well, that's what 0.2 look looks like. I love those kind of red line activities because it it sometimes needs it. And this is maybe uh the the core of the book is that humanizing the data, the stress, helping people to understand what this actually feels like. The most impactful thing I remember I ever have had happen to me was many decades ago, as a smoker, going to something called the Alan Carr Clinic. And Alan Carr was a kind of guru who would stop you smoking. And you sit there and it's a start smoking, and then they say that's your last cigarette. And that feeling that's probably like losing your phone now. Everything being taken away from you is that you need to create in the pit of the belly of the CEO to understand that's a very uncomfortable feeling because that's what it feels like when O2 say, if you can't pay your bill, I'm gonna cut your phone off. And you're a mum who's perhaps separated from husband and therefore needs life 360 to keep a track of where the kids are. It's those sorts of things, it's really understanding the outcome you want to achieve. So, with the book then, so you must have started to collect stories. When did it come to a point of thinking I could turn this into something that others would sit there and nod at and relate to? When did the idea of it becoming a book form?

SPEAKER_02 25:41

So I started writing in 2014. Actually, as I was getting ready to leave HSPC, actually it was slightly cynical. I thought if I'm going to be a consultant, people are probably going to Google me. So I might as well have something that people Google and I might as well start writing my thoughts. But then it turned out I really enjoyed writing. I really liked particularly really enjoyed writing these stories, actually. But I find that much easier than writing an essay, for example, around a particular theory. So I really like writing these stories, and then people were saying nice comments about them and people saying they enjoyed them. There's a guy called Patrick Harris, he's a mentor of mine, he's a little bit older, he worked in a number of areas, he used to be head of creativity at Orange. And he said to me, probably back in 2017, 2018, right, you're ready for a book. Come on, you're ready for a book, get going on it. And so I'd always had this idea in mind that I did want to write a book from that point on. And the stories started to build up and up. And then what it actually was this trigger, like most things, of being in the shower. And I just thought about human. I just had the word human, and I thought, God, if I write a book, that's what I want to call it. I think that's the thing. I think that's the thread. Before that, I didn't have any thread that connected all these stories together. And and again, slightly cynically, I thought, I reckon I can write this book pretty quickly. Like I've got the theme. I reckon I can just gather together all the stories I've already got, put them in a book, give them a bit of a shape, and then I can get the book published, and that'll be great. And COVID was just kicked off, so I thought I've got a bit of extra time, I couldn't do it. So that was the kind of the genesis of the book. It didn't quite work out like that when I actually wrote it. But that was a pattern, I guess. Really enjoying writing, and then getting this thought of the human things tied together. And once I had that, I knew what it was going to look like then.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

When we spoke to Anetta, she said the best aid she had was her kind of editor's assistant who was brutally honest, really kept to true. I mean, at what point in the process did you let somebody else in?

SPEAKER_02 27:30

So Stephen King talks about write with the door closed and edit with the door open, which I think is a brilliant phrase. So I tended to protect it for quite a while. And in fact, I wrote pretty much most of the book before I then approached publishers. And I went to six different publishers. I had two that said yes, two that said yes if you write a different book, and two that said no. And I was quite keen that I wanted it to be about 50,000 words and I wanted it to be stories. So the two that said a different book wanted it to be twice as long and a lot more frameworky, and that's not the kind of book that I wanted to write. But it was it was after writing that first kind of approach of the book that I thought, yeah, that's pretty good, that I started interviewing CEOs because I thought, well, I need to have some case studies that's going to bring this to life and not just be my stories. This was during COVID, so I was doing them all on Zoom, and I had a little post-it on the side of my desk. And as I was interviewing these CEOs and CMOs, I was just jotting down all the different traits they had in common. And after about the sixth interview, I remember looking down at this post-it with these traits on and thinking, yeah, that's a better book. That's a much better book than the one I've already written. Like there's a real theme here, there's some real traits here, there's a real story here. So I actually then went to my guy called Matt James at the time, he was my commissioning editor. And I said, Look, this is the current shape of the story. This is what I think better would look like. He then read everything I'd done so far and agreed. And he said, Yeah, I think you could reshape it like this. He said, The stories are great, you don't need to do much more with them, but you need to get the shape and the flow of it. So then I ended up effectively writing a second version of the book, reshaping it. Well, not the same stories, but reshaping it all, moving it all around to get to the point where I was happy with it. And after that, it was tweaking around the edges. But I really loved it, I really loved the process.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

You've got and it is laden with examples in there. John Pico has a lot of examples, but many of them are self-directed kind of things him and his wife have been through. Clearly, you've got a lot in here from organizations and things they've done. Did you have to get permission from them to publish it? Because they're not always presented, fortunately, for the reader, they're not always presented in the best light. And some organizations sometimes can be a bit prickly about that. How did you get around that?

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Yeah, so what I try to do with the less good examples, I try not to name the companies as much as possible. Actually, they're often hints that make it quite clear that might be, but I do try not to name them the bad ones, and partly that's because it could be any company.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Sure, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, on a different day it's a different company.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

On a different day, it's a different company, and there's real people behind those things as well. So I'm always conscious of that. So I do try not to name the bad ones too much, but I didn't get any permission around that because they're just experiences that I think it's fine to share. They're in the public domain, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. With the good examples with the CEOs, then I did these eight, nine interviews in the end across the UK, Europe, Australia, and America, all fully recorded interviews and all with people that knew it was an interview to go in a book. And then I wrote up the notes and I sent those back and I said, Look, can you correct any factual errors and confirm you're happy with this? And everyone came back and was like, Yeah, it looks good. And let me know if you want anything else in the future. That was a fascinating process, actually. It was really interesting as a side point. These were all companies I chosen because I thought they were great at customer experience. All of them, the leaders, were very open and very approachable and very transparent and very happy to share what they did. There was another group of companies that I wanted to speak to who I thought were as good at customer experience, but I didn't think were quite in that same echelon. But I thought I might contact them anyway. And interestingly, it was completely the opposite. For all of those companies, nearly none of them were open and transparent. One company put me through layers of process to try and speak to someone. And I thought that was just interesting in itself that the culture of the organizations I spoke to were very open, transparent, wanting to contribute. And the culture of the organizations that I didn't think were quite as good were actually much harder to speak to, anyway. I felt like there was a message.

SPEAKER_00 31:26

That is at least very interesting, very reassuring. We have this podcast, the customer-centric superheroes, is based on mindset traits. One of them is that CX leaders share everything in the spirit of progress. And you've just confirmed that. We find it it's incredible how you can put people into a one or two boxes, those who go no, and those who go of course, and those who go no think they're customer-centric and customer-led, but that decision helps you understand they're not at all.

SPEAKER_02 31:56

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was exactly that. I was I thought that I kind of contact some people and they want to be a bit cautious around what they want to share. They maybe want to strip some stuff out, they maybe wouldn't want to share their secrets, but no, they were for exactly that reason. In fact, there were two reasons. I think the first reason was exactly that. They just wanted progress for customers, for people, they wanted the world to be better for people. So they were more than happy to share. The second thing is, I think they were all really confident in their ambition that the people weren't going to catch up. Like the guys at Octopus Energy were happy to share because they're not worried about British Gas suddenly going, Oh, that's a good idea. Because everything they're doing, you can see what they're doing anyway, but the other companies don't do it for a whole host of reasons. They were so open and so helpful afterwards in terms of helping to promote, wanting to be part of the book launch. And it really did show that they meant what they said.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

But that's and that comes on to another one of the traits that you're demonstrating there that we found is celebrating progress of others is your success. The fact that they want to support you in your book and your progress is their own reward.

unknown 33:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Because it validates the work they've done as of quality and value because it wants to be included. So therefore, they want you to succeed. And again, it's one of those things I find really with enlightened leaders, they get it straight away. And you have the other batch who kind of like, you know, hang on, no. I what if I promote, you know, you even find it on LinkedIn, you can have a whole swath of people who were happily like, brilliant, well done, yeah. And others who won't, but they'll promote their own stuff. You just go, oh, it's you know, these things are obvious to many people. Just go with it because you become more customer-centric just by living those, the traits that you talk about in your book.

SPEAKER_02 33:39

Exactly. And I found it as I've got into the book promotion side, which has been a whole new experience for me the last few months of podcasts and LinkedIn and influences and everything else. And again, there's been a real collection of people who are maybe clients or people I know in customer experience or elsewhere that have been so supportive, happy to share the book, even if kind of we both be consultants in customer experience, happy to share the book, happy to talk about the lessons, happy to have these conversations. And there's been another group of people that have been oddly cold and not wanting to be involved, not wanting to promote it. And it's interesting because then you start to think, do you really mean what you say about what you're trying to achieve for the world?

SPEAKER_01 34:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:14

Or is it you just want to be successful in your own right? And that's fine. But you do see those different traits.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

I think we say there are people who are in it to achieve better outcomes for others, and there are those who are looking to achieve better outcomes for themselves. If we know who you are, it's absolutely fine. But this business is about helping other people succeed and create better outcomes for others. So you writing a letter to a CEO is not because you're going to get£8.50 back, but because the CEO would go down to his operations director and say, we've got to change this for our customers. So you're doing it on behalf of other people.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

Yeah, it's exactly right. It's exactly that. There's a long way to go before we're finished improving customer experience. Yeah, there's a long way to go. So we need lots of people all working together to all make this big kind of sizable change that we want to make. And that is more powerful if more people are working across more organizations, sharing the same message, similar messages, even if they're slightly different, but they're pointing in the right direction. And as you say, when I write the letters to CEOs, my question is always, can you tell me how you're going to stop this happening again? It's very rarely like the money, it's very rarely the compensation. It's always, I want to know. I ironically, one of the bike shops I went to once where they refused, they broke my bike while they were doing a service and they refused to tell me how they've broken it. But every time I complained, they just offered me more and more money in terms of a gift voucher. And I eventually said, There's no point because I'm never coming to you again because you broke my bike. So it doesn't matter if it's a gift voucher or cash. I don't want my bike broken, but I do want to know. And they never, they refused, they never would tell me exactly how they've broken the bike. And you think you can offer me as much money as you want, but that's not gonna tell them to.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

Where that mindset comes or that mentality comes, isn't it? I had a situation with an insurance company where I wasn't very happy with the work the garage had done. And had exactly the same conversation. Can I, if I give you£50, can I close this complaint? I said, no, once you show me the garage has been trained in the areas that I said needed to be improved, and you said you were going to do that, you can keep the money and you can close it. In fact, I'd like you to give it to charity. We don't have the capability to give it to charity. Can I give you twice as much? And then I can no, and it's just and it became this really weird negotiation where, to your point, that it doesn't matter how high that figure was going to be. My outcome was really different. I was looking for because the idea of other people suffering what I'd been through was just because it was something really stupid as well. Just that you could fix that really easily, but it's back to that David Williams that kind of the computer says, No, isn't it? It's just I've got to go down this particular way, which is which is why I mean it feels as if this is the first of many books. I mean, stories last forever. You talking about you may be able to clear this up then, because I've always believed this to be a truth, but maybe it was a myth. But I remember hearing the story about First Direct opening up, and I've been a First Direct customer. I think I'm probably customer two. I don't think I got there first, but I'm customer two. And I remember being told that on a few days or a few weeks before they're gonna be open, the CEO of First Direct, you might remember who his name was. I can't remember. I think it was Kevin Newman. He invited all the competitors up and walked them around what he was doing and just kind of showed because it was a new concept. This is what we're doing, this is how it's gonna work. And at the end of it went, Boy, this is great. One, you're crazy because it's a crazy idea. And two, you've told us what you're doing now. And he said, if you think I'm prepared to share you what I'm doing today, imagine what's going on behind that door. It was just that sort of mentality I love when it comes to, you know, help the competitors improve their game, it helps everyone value that sector more, which is beneficial for everyone. It moves the standard and we just keep going up and up.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

Yeah, yeah. And that's it, and that's when it reveals how so much of great experience and great companies is the culture that sits behind it. And you can know functionally what you need to do, but if you haven't got the culture that enables you to do it, it doesn't matter. I mean, obviously, the biggest question around First Direct is First Direct's been around since 1989 and been top of the customer satisfaction charts pretty much since then, but HSBC has them. So, how does that work? How can you own a company? And I know the answer. That's another question, but you know, it's a culture thing. How can you own a company for 34 years that is the best at customer service that continually gets 30% higher customer service than you? And you know exactly what's going on because you know all the inner workings, but you can't replicate it. That's what shows the difference is not just a functional, oh, you can just do this and do that.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

Yeah, yeah, you can't you can't just twiddle, twiddle the knobs and make the changes. So, my last question to you is this this book is very different to most that are out there. We do have someone, which like John who has case studies and stuff in there, but you know, the focus on humanizing, keeping that humanized light, thread of steel through everything you do. Have you been able to put it down when it comes to your consultancy work? Because obviously it's in it's an important factor, it's part of it, or has it engulfed and become everything you do?

SPEAKER_02 39:02

No, it's definitely uh it's become a useful part of what we do. But customer experience, so it's the foundation, we do three different things. We look at kind of strategy work, we look at customer experience work, we look at broader cultural transformation. And so I've got the human experience book, my business partner Charlie wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Customer Copernicus, which is more top-down, looking from a leadership perspective. So it's definitely a big part of what we do, and it's been a big part of the last three months of talking to our clients and sharing the story with them. But the type of consultancy work that we have coming in is still very broad, still has really interesting questions. And so we can use that book to help bring a lot of it to life. And there is the practical element of the book that says, look, what you practically need to do as part of this is you need to build your vision, you need to have your system in place that helps lead to the behaviors. We've been doing work with a couple of companies on how you build a more human conversation in contact centers, for example. But there's a lag when it comes to books. I finished writing this one in November 2021, then tweaked it up until probably the middle of last year, then it came out in February. So I've kind of written quite a lot of other stories since then. I've got a newsletter, you almost feel like you move past the book in a way and you're needing to go back to it. So there's this old kind of lag effect, I suppose, as people catch up with what you've written and you remember what you've written, but then you're almost enhancing your own conversation because you're saying, I wrote that, but actually I'm thinking about it slightly differently now. It took a bit of getting used to, I think, with the process.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

But Anetta said that to us in terms of her second book. There's a lot from her first book that you go, Oh, I should have, you know, there's kind of and that's because there's a big piece of time between the two. And as a sector, things had moved on. I mean, what you'd really want for your book is to become redundant because it's just what everyone does now in customers. That would be that would be a great outcome, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_02 40:45

Yeah, it's exactly right. I think it's exactly right. You need to get to the point where you have a deadline because otherwise you can see how you can just continually improve and correct and improve and correct. So that's really useful. But ultimately, if in five years' time all of the things that I've taught about every company is doing, that's amazing. That's the outcome we want. Everyone will be happy. All that productivity back in the UK economy, all that stress gone. I don't think it will. But I do think the the advent of the book's kind of lucky in its timing with ChatGPT and this sudden big conversation about humans and machines and what does that really look like and how do you retain their humanity?

SPEAKER_00 41:17

I think it's always been there. I think it just becomes more and more prominent. It is a fantastic read, and it's really good to kind of hear hear you know from the author behind it. And I'm sure that when we start sharing it with the book club, they're gonna have some fascinating perspectives on it. It does lend itself. I mean, I know you say you like to talk, but unfortunately, what it does do is it does trigger emotive experiences that you've had as a reader. And I found myself not knowing I was going to do that several times today, that it's oh, that reminds me. I'm just pulling these up. So it shows how deep-rooted these are, doesn't it? They're really deep in the consciousness. They've they've stuck with me for much longer than I realized.

SPEAKER_02 41:57

Yeah, I think that's right. And it's very kind of you to say I write the stories because I really like writing the stories, but I think one of the things I like is telling the stories, but then getting the reaction of other people going, yeah, I've had similar, I've had that. And I did quite a lot of presentations around it as well. And it's a similar thing, people nodding along in the audience. And hopefully, what it does give people is a bit of a shorthand to certain things. There's a story I tell about the uh buying a yellow chair, for example, which is probably the most ridiculous experience I've ever had. And now quite a lot of people come up to me and talk about the yellow chair, or they talk about honest burgers because I've written about that recently and on my newsletter, and that there's all these different like little tags that people start to talk about that helps them remember, and hopefully, in organizations, that might, if the book gets a wide enough reading, that might make people go, oh hang on, this is getting a bit yellow chair, or this is getting a bit like this.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

That would be lovely, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? Wow, wonderful. Well, look, John, congratulations. It's a delight to uh spend some quality time with you. I really appreciate it, and looking forward to interacting again over the next few sessions. So, in the meantime, get back, enjoy the sun, and uh we'll look forward to seeing you again.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Yeah, great. Thanks, Chris. We really enjoyed it.

unknown 43:01

Thank you.