Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 13 Episode 2 - Using data to decode customer behaviour - Richard Hammond

There have been break through technology solutions in customer experience which have really raised the standard. Behind them are pioneers looking to create more reliable outcomes for organisations. Richard Hammond of Uncrowd is one such CX Superhero. 

Podcast host, Lexden CX's Christopher Brooks caught up with Richard to discuss how their 'friction and rewards' model helps retailers understand the significance of the experiences they provide across various touch points. Using primary data gathered to inform both the effectiveness of what they are doing now, and its comparative strength versus the competition.

Richard explains how conventional metrics in CX blindside companies to what really matters to their customers. Whilst these sentiment metrics move, colleagues in companies struggle to identify what they have changed, meaning it's less reliable. Richard unpacks the importance of diving into the detail for meaningful results. 

Listen to the very charismatic and hugely passionate Richard as he encourages us all to join the customer analytics revolution in this latest CX Superheroes podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:10

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Customer Experience Superheroes Podcast. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your host throughout this series, in which we bring you the ideas, the insights, and some inspiration from some of the more interesting characters we find in the world of customer experience. Today's episode is no different. We introduce you to Richard Hammond, already well established in the world of analytics in customer experience. Richard's organization Uncrowd has come to market with a really interesting proposition that works on a very simple principle, but it's helping retailers to better understand what really matters to their customers. So without further ado, let's go over and meet Richard. So Richard Hammond is someone that I think if you are uh in the world of customer experience and you're not following, then you're missing out really because Richard has uh a really interesting narrative and it comes with a massive authority, but you know, he's got one foot in the future, and yet one foot is from the past realizing the mistakes that we've been making. So a really interesting character. I'm delighted to have him on the CX Superheroes podcast. So, Rich Hammond, welcome to the CX Superheroes Podcast. Thanks for asking me, Christopher. Delighted to be on. You're very, very welcome. And and um the topic we're going to talk about is one that probably whenever I get into talk about insight sources and how we use them in years' time, we won't be having this conversation anymore. Who knows? But uh it is it is one that I'm sure is not one that's uncommon to you, and it's the challenge of trying to get organizations comfortable with using more work that your organization's doing. And and it's not just you know, here in in the Oxford area, it's all over the world. Um, and I want to I want to tap into a couple of the really interesting points that I've been uh wrestling with with some of the organizations we deal with. But you know, you didn't start this on day one, you've got quite a history which has kind of led you to it, and it does feel as if you know it's an it's an accidental career, but it actually is almost everything has led you towards it. I'm not sure this is your main act, if I'm honest with you. I think this is still a rehearsal for the next big thing. It'll be really easy to see where you go next. But could you share with us kind of your journey of how you've got to here where you are with Uncrow, please?

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, absolutely. And it's very kind of you to make it sound like uh that there's a there's a career coming out of this. Um I it's so I describe myself still as a retailer, um, even though I've not run a retail business or even worked in a retail business now for I suppose 20 years. Um, I started as a retailer 38 years ago, maybe 39 years ago now, uh, as a 15-year-old in Comet. Right. It's it's not my fault that it's no longer here. I was out how long before then. But I did I did manage to blag my way into the head office at Comet when I was 18. So I got to see how a major retailer worked as a as a naive kid. I was the one who would um walk around the business, including into the chief exec's office, including into everybody's, and just point at stuff and ask questions because I didn't know how stuff worked. And I figured the best way to find out was ask people. But but that first impulse when I was 15, um, I wanted a Mitsubishi video recorder. And if you work for Comet, you got a 20% discount. So I thought I'll go and do that and I can get I can afford this video recorder because it was all the rage in 1986 or whatever it was. And uh first couple of weekends uh that I started right back then, I found myself standing in the middle of the store asking myself this question why are people coming here? There were at the time, and I did this for one of my books later on, there were 19 places in Oxford where you could get a 14-inch portable tell, you know, so 14-inch portable colour telly. And I mentioned the word portable TV to a youngster in our team the other day, and they didn't understand what that meant. It meant you could put it in another room and add its own area, and they were like, Well, you could you know in 1986, you could take a TV to the park, yet no. Um it was um it was 19 places where you could buy a portable TV, and they were pretty similar costs. Why would somebody come to my store to buy that instead of somebody else's? Right from the start, that question of of what role does the experience, what role does the price, what role does the choice, the communication at store, what role does it have in making a difference to the answer to that question? And if there is a common thread in the career, it really has been that. But I've been endlessly fascinated by the idea of answering that question. Why does somebody choose experience A over experiences B, C, D, and so on? Excellent.

SPEAKER_03 5:01

And um, you you you say you've worked in in retail, but some of the positions you've had have you know, you've been on the shop floor, but you've also been kind of advising or working into the retail sector. I mean, are there any particular industries that you're you're you feel you've got more of an affinity to?

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Yeah, I you can't help but come back to grocery pretty much constantly. Um, consumer electronics is where I started. So uh it's it's lovely anytime we we work around those sorts of brands. And I ended up working with Sony uh for eight years when I was on the uh consultancy side. So we we helped Sony to understand how to position product in the interface between a customer and a store on the shop floor, which again was a great project. I enjoyed that enormously and great friends from that business, and then subsequently Samsung as well. But mainstream apparel is one that I love because the margins between the the offers are so tiny, you know, the the the competition is so tight, that's exciting. But grocery, you keep coming back to it because that's the engine room of global retail and always will be. Um and particularly in the last five years, the grocers have almost they've almost exploded up from a from a little bit of a sleep. You know, that that's the sleep would I would characterize as the competition, endless competition on nothing other than price and choice. And in the last five years, they've suddenly seemed to have realized actually that's not enough. One person can be cheapest, one person can offer the biggest choice. So, how do we find our way behind that? How do we be how do we chart how do we carve out our share of the market if we can't be the very cheapest and we can't offer the highest choice today? That's been phenomenal to watch. And then seeing that in the US in the last two years has blown my mind anew.

SPEAKER_03 6:55

Well, I'll come back to that because I'm really interested to understand your take on what I would call the confusion of uh grocery retailer with the arrival of the deliveries, the delivery company. So I'll come, we'll come on to that in a little while. But now you you obviously uncrowd is something that you you created. Um, I'd imagine it was well, we were talking earlier and you said it was in a you know salubrious start from where it was. Um, give us a shape of what it looks like now. Where where are you now?

SPEAKER_00 7:24

So we we we we set out six years ago now to do two very simple things to uh test the methodology that we we have a methodology that generates experience data in a totally different way than all of the current orthodoxies. Uh so we use empirical objective observation of an experience online, in-store, app, doesn't matter what it is, to be able to uh put a mathematical basis on the delivery and value and reality of that experience versus others. We'll get to the nitty-gritty in a minute, but uh uh essentially we wanted to test out that methodology, and at the same time, we wanted to build a digital platform that anybody could buy into that was enterprise grade. And so we had these two parallel needs in the business to do that. We achieved both of those things within about 18 months of starting. So within 18 months, we had confirmation from the marketplace that this methodology made sense, and we had managed to get the product into Microsoft's uh application store Frazier, the the Azure application marketplace. And to do that, Microsoft actually crawled through your code. A physical guy or girl sits there and goes through uh the quality of your code, and then if it's good enough, you can be sold under Microsoft's contract with existing customers, which is where we are. And what that means is we've now got customers all over the world who are buying access to our data. So the data's ours and we capture it on various sectors. So we capture it on the UK and US grocery, we do mainstream apparel, we do all sorts of interesting sectors. And if a new customer comes to us, we'll often agree to create a data set in their sector, and then we'll go and find other customers to subscribe to that data in that space. Um, but it means we can now be an authority with quite a significant heft and weight behind that data in any of those areas.

SPEAKER_03 9:23

Brilliant. And this and this feels like very simply, what it provides is that answer to what types of people are going to where and why they're going there, which is this curiosity that you've always had. So, so in essence, that's what the platform is giving to organizations.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

Yeah, it's exactly that. There's two layers to it, and you know, we might end up unpinning, unpicking some of how we got to this position later on. But essentially, what what what the methodology does, and actually, I'm talking about this from an uncrowd perspective, but anybody can apply this methodology. Uh, I've written a book about it that anybody can buy if you want. It's um it's$16.99, which is a lot less than an uncrowd contract. Um and but you can do it on the back of an envelope, you can apply this. But essentially, what we we do is we break down the customer experience into things you can observe. Basically, um things that exist, in what formats they exist, and how much of each of those forms those those things exist. Uh, we send a whole bunch of qualitative researchers, uh, quantitative researchers rather, out into the those, uh, those experiences, digital, physical, and they capture a bunch of of data in grossly 1200 individual observations, uh, times dozens and dozens of people doing it over and over again for us in lots of different locations, so that you can eventually have a center point for a data set that you can be comfortable with. Uh, but what that does is that gives you an unemotional mathematical comparison set.

unknown 10:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

So you can say, this is the maths at Walmart, this is the maths at Target, this is the maths at Mayo. And that gives you part of the story. But what we then do is the bit that makes this really human, is we then overlay deliberately synthetically the customer story. So, what is a customer trying to do? What kind of mindset might they be in when they're trying to do it? And are there any overriding contexts? Like, for example, when we were doing uh things under lockdown, COVID and fear of COVID would be a massive contextual modifier. But with those three sets of modifiers, mission, mindset, context, you can apply those to the maths, and each of those will alter the value of those results in different ways. So a very simple one. If I'm time poor, anything that relates to queuing or getting to a selection or finding something easily, anything in those areas immediately become more important. So my scores for those index upwards. But actually, if I'm, I don't know, putting together a really special family meal, let's say, I might accept that I'm going to go somewhere that's a bit more difficult to park or that I'm going to have to queue, or that there's a bit more hunting and rooting through. Because actually, inspiration, uh, exotic product, description of what things can do for me, those things suddenly become more important to me. So you can take the base layer and you can apply those differentials to it. Um, for me, it doesn't even seem very, very complicated, but you made the point earlier on, which is to get to get anybody to think about interacting with something so different as, well, I just put surveys out and people tell me what I've done wrong. Um, to get to a different point from that, yeah, it's been quite a journey.

SPEAKER_03 12:45

Yeah. So I mean, I've worked with things like um ZMAT and EXQ, and you know, I describe them at best as spiky. And and it, you know, so I so I know that these are really not these are kind of very predictive um behavioral models, but actually you put that on the table and you say, Well, it's okay, no, it's not one question. You know, there's there's 300 drivers in here that we've got to analyze, it's gonna take the X all of a sudden it becomes can where's that one question we had before on satisfaction that I used to prefer? You know, so it's it is it's great having the the product there, and thank you for unpacking kind of how how it's built. Um, but still tell me about that that moving people from being not not, I mean, and I guess it's interesting to know where they start. Are they doubting their current approach? Is that being unreliable? Is that kind of their starting point? Or or is it kind of this is quite fascinating? Can you help me understand it better? But how do you switch people from that kind of let's trial it to we're now dependent on it?

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Do you know what the the biggest help for us was, and it illustrates how how other people come to similar kind of conclusions in other ways, is I think most practitioners that use MPS, there's a bit of their brain, net promoter system, there's a bit of their brain that knows it's bullshit, that knows you can't possibly boil down an experience to a single number, and knows that the very idea of us recommending shops to each other is ludicrous. Most people know it, but investing in MPS is not it's not a daft thing to have done. It shows a desperate desire, the right desire to become customer-centric. But most people have that bit of their brain that's telling them it's massively gameable, it's a weird omnibus. I know that my people are starting to push customers to give them better scores. I why do I discard anything that's less than an eight? That doesn't seem to make sense. And worse than that, I know that my Yorkshire friend will only ever give a seven because he wants to give somebody he'll not give him an eight, he'll not give him a nine, I'll not give him a ten because you know people get big heads with it. Yeah, my seven is different from your seven, all that kind of stuff. And and so people have that nagging away. And when you come along and say, Do you know what your impulse to apply that? That's you've you've done the right thing. How would the world look if we can give you the causality that sits behind those scores? How useful would that be? And that's a really simple question. Again, with with voice of the customer, with CSAT, with customer feedback, and I'll tell you about how we got to the the the metric in the first place because it kind of tells you what the purity of the thinking behind it. Um, when you look at those things, who complains to me? Who feeds back to me? Is it all my customers? Is it all the type of people I've got? How much can I really understand about what they were trying to do and why they were trying to do it? Why is it that every survey I run, price and choice, price and choice, price and choice of the top two? And maybe the third is a little bit, I think, insightful. Um, when people tell me in feedback that they need to give me to give me more choice, do they really mean give me more choice, or do they mean I fail to show them the right thing? Yeah, what do they actually mean? How do I unpack that? When I put together a survey, how do I avoid my uh my pre-existing hypothesis from being within it? But the flip side, Christopher, is that as I think we all we all know, a lot of of insight has been abused in the past in that people have really just used it to support hypothesis, knowing that if I go to the board and say, hey, look, I'm gonna spend 20 million pounds reducing queuing times, and I've got a metric, which is my average queuing time, and I've got a load of research that says people don't like queuing very much. Right. So I'm gonna invest that 20 million and I invest that 20 million, and then nothing happens to my revenue. I don't get fired because I get to go into the board and go, hey, we rolled the dice based on the data. If I go in on a hunch and say, Do you know what I'm just gonna spend 20 million on reducing reducing queues and nothing happens to revenue, then I get fired quite rightly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so you have that challenge in the background that a lot of insight has been used for that. When you go to a marketplace and you say, There's a better way, I can give you insight that genuinely identifies the things that move the needle because they show you your relative performance against all those competing alternatives, and they show you whether is your queuing better or worse than everybody else's? Is your queuing actually really important or not terribly important to your key customer stories? You know, those it's not about us telling the marketplace, it's about us asking those questions. That's how you get people on board, is you say, How would you feel if you could? What is it that keeps you up at night? What worries are you about the tools that you currently use? Because weirdly, those worries were the same worries I had as a retailer when I decided as an academic exercise to create the metric.

SPEAKER_03 17:54

Well, I think in there the word that you used, which I think is probably one of the biggest, the most underplayed words in what we do, is context. Because, you know, it's to under identify those drive drivers, that is one thing. And you know, I've worked with uh I work with um this experience quality measurement, which is kind of 300 drivers. But to actually be brave enough to look at the ones that aren't relevant to your customers and say, What why look at these ones here that they don't seem to inform, yeah, but everyone does this. I know, but they're not important to your customers. And yet let's have a look at the investment lines you're spending in these areas. Why are you investing all this? Well, because you want to be better than you want to be better than than your competitors for something your customers don't value. Yeah, you know, and so you need to, you know, it needs to be a really I felt it needs to come down to kind of a financial commercial discussion, first of all, doesn't it, to actually demonstrate the value that you you can achieve. And do you think that often in in the space that we sit in, the people who have grown up into these spaces are not equipped or not prepared or don't appreciate that is the discussion they've got to have in order to get to permission to do more of the great stuff they want to do?

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah, I don't I I think I don't think it's so much that. I think I think the biggest challenge it tends to be that um we've always had to use the tool set that we've got.

SPEAKER_03 19:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Because because not just organizations, but people, we're we're broadly risk averse. That's just a human condition. Um does it, you know, it differs slightly in different mindsets, different marketplaces, but broadly we are risk averse, and organizations are broadly risk averse. So, in order to be able to make big decisions, you have to bring a tool to the table that can help to establish some form of certainty behind it, even if it's just to support a hypothesis. So I think people have been hamstrung by the fact that really the tools that were there to support them to do that were often not doing it in the right way. And I mean the mainstream tools, particularly the tools that are based on customer feedback. The problem that we have is we we have that one thing that that looks good at the annual conference where we do the vox pops in the film. We we have 15 real customers and they say these 15 things that on the surface you go, that's profound, that's real, that's that's but they don't tell you how they feel about your competitors, they don't tell you whether that thing they've just told you about changes their behavior. Yeah, you know, uh, and again, a part of being risk-averse is we're very we will tell people about pain, we will tell people about things that frustrate us, and there's actually a you know, it might a tiny bit of a tangent, but it's very related to it. Culturally, human beings are better at negative than positive, even if we're positive, optimistic people, for example, and this is part of where the thinking originally came from. It doesn't matter what culture you're in, most cultures are really good at criticism of each other. Imagine in the workspace. And I don't mean really good as in uh we know how to do it very well, we make people feel great. I mean we're really good at being precise. We'll say, that thing you messed up, you've forgot this and you forgot this and you forgot this. Don't do it again. Well, as the as the being on the receiving end of that, I now know exactly what to change. Very helpful, yeah, yeah. But on the other side, when we say, Great job, we'll often do an omnibus thing. We'll say, Hey everybody, we've all pulled together this week, it's been fantastic. For five seconds, you go, Oh, yeah, I feel great. And then you go, what behavior do I repeat? Because I don't know what I did differently than last week. It's exactly the same with customer feedback generated uh research and measurement of metrics because customers will tell us what we're doing wrong, whether it's relevant to a bigger, wider group of customers or not. But it but to be able to even understand what we relate to as a positive in our customer experience is almost impossible. And we'll end up resorting as customers. To things like, well, so well, I really like a blue logo. Yeah, a blue logo, or um, this particular bread you sell, I love that bread. But then you watch that customer and their real behaviors, and it's got nothing to do with them preferring a Tesco's toasty to a Sainsbury's toasty. It's because this bunch of other stuff that they can't vocalize, they can't bring to the surface.

SPEAKER_03 22:20

As you say, that's human conditioning. I mean, we are conditioned to spot the things that will cause danger to us, and therefore we can move away from them.

SPEAKER_02 22:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:29

We we filter out the good stuff because we know we don't have to worry about that. That's okay. And you know, it's the same with feedback, isn't it? I can't articulate. I mean, we've we've tried before, we've looked at interesting expressions rather than you know, how how great is it? Just um, is it okay or is it is it good enough? And and actually, you know, they're the sentiments people want to say it's good enough. You don't need to go any any further here. When you leave them in a box, which is, you know, how satisfied are you? And you have to tick a box and say, I'm satisfied, then underneath it you give these reasons, you then get a ton of investment go into this is great. Do more of this was good enough. It was honestly, it didn't bother me enough to worry about it. But uh, but I can I can see how. So let's let's take me to that situation that when you come back and work with a client and you've got the first wave of data that comes in, yeah, because that must be both well, for you it must be very exciting, but for them it must be a little uncomfortable because it looks very different to what they've seen in the past and probably where their investment is going in the future. So, how does that play out, that session?

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Well, that you know, that was one of our biggest learnings, uh, because we used to get that completely wrong. Um, in the early days, we would excitedly turn up with a billion data points. You know, for example, in our in our mainstream apparel data captures, we end up with if we've got if we've got 10 competitors in a in a data set, we'll end up with one and a half, two million data points. Sure. And we're kind of like, oh, isn't that amazing? Is it fantastic? And we're nerdy about it, and it's amazing. We put it in front of people, and we give them this overkill. And they used to sit there and go, yeah, but what? Go from it. You go, well, you can do all these things, and here's the and we would lose customers doing that. And I've written about this, you know, we would we would have customers who we love to bits, who who really were part of it, and we just give this complexity. What changed and what made us into the business we are now is when we learnt to be able to triage the data first, both in our platform and in the way we talked about it, which is now we'll go to somebody and say, Do you know what we've identified 200 potential work orders that these three are important, and these three are important because of this, this, and this. This one's important because you've said that you're under pressure to solve that. So this is good. Good news is the observation set that we've uncovered tells you exactly how to do that. This one's important because you've said it's a big thing for the business, and this is exactly what you just said, Christopher. You've said it's a big thing for the business, but good news, none of your revenue are so this one you can treat as either an opportunity to take a competitive advantage or frankly move the investment elsewhere because nobody's beating you on it. And this one here turns out to be the thing that people in the business probably suspected was holding back your market share. But good news, we've now got evidence that it is, and those internal conversations you need to have in order to solve that. Finally, here's your evidence for that. And it was a great example of that. One of our customers uh was in the the drinks business, the high-end spirits business, and duty free is incredibly important to those people. And we did our analysis of three of their brands at duty free versus various competitors, and it's amazing. And one of their brands, it was really clear that they were losing out because they only had a single expression of the brand. Everybody else had an airport version, and uh we could see from the observational data what that was doing to the customer selection process at shelf. You could see it in the data, and so we were able to go back to our customer and say, forget everything else. There's one thing in here that has a big implication for the performance of the brand across global duty free, and it's this you need an extra expression of this particular brand. And we had this wonderful moment where the guy went, Oh, I can't tell you how extraordinary that is. I have been having this argument with the brand team on that brand for three years, and every single time we get to you think it's right. I was gonna say his name there, but I better not. You think it's right and we think it's wrong, prove us, prove us, prove that you're right.

SPEAKER_03 26:45

And he hasn't been able to, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

He had to walk away. This time he was able to put the evidence down, and brilliantly, we spoke to them the other day, and they put this this uh this expression out there, they did what the data had told them to do, and it has generated millions in additional revenue. And it's it's that kind of you know, focusing on one thing. There were another 300 things we could have said about that brand.

SPEAKER_03 27:10

Yeah. Well, what what's really interesting there is I think the discussion you're having with the people you're having is exactly where customer experience needs to be. It's it's a it's a legitimate alternative business practice to what you've been doing. You know, you can it can be complementary, it can be an alternative. But you landed on something that I want to just come back to, which is trying to figure out the value and the contribution of customer experience or improve customer experiences. And I think probably, as you say, we're using metrics which are around sentiment, you're you're standing with kind of wobbly knees trying to you know demonstrate to pricing or to the branding or the underwriters that you've got an alternative. But you spoke about their market share, you take you know, you're demonstrating we can get more market share. So all of a sudden, customer experience management becomes a more bona fide alternative as a business practice. How important is it to speak the language of, you know, I mean you spoke about you know investment into new strategies. How important is it to speak the language of the business in order to get traction with what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 28:16

That's a really good question because I I I'm a natural chameleon because I've had to be uh writing the books on retail that I've done. So I I naturally I always do that. I always make sure that if I'm gonna sit with somebody in a particular sector, I found out as much as I possibly can about that sector before we had the conversation. But we've had that experience most starkly with starting work in the US a couple of years ago, where you take for granted that the lexicon you have for the UK for a sector is the same in the US. You know, we all know there are differences in language, but when somebody looks blankly at you and you go, right, we're measuring your range here, and they go, What? Well, it's in a slightly different accent. The Americans don't use the word range, they use assortment. I didn't know that. That could be quite challenging. Although one of our uh US customers, uh, the CEO is a Brit, and we had this wonderful uh meeting the other day where he was talking about queuing, and the Americans generally don't talk about queuing, they talk about line and line management and being in the line, uh, which was a new one to me. And and this guy said, uh said, No, I've been here 10 years in this role. I I use Q, they're interchangeable. And his colleague, who's American, she looks at him and said, You know, we've been humoring you. What? Yeah, we don't use the word Q. We all use the word line. We just we just convert it in our heads. The poor son, you could see him just going, do that. Um, but but they the the thing about uh Lexin, I think you have to know, I think you have to know pretty intimately the problems that a particular sector are trying to solve. You also, and I think even more important than that, you need to know the the received wisdoms in their industries so that you can break them. And there's a great example, and I'm gonna name the supermarket, Audi. Um, we talked to Audi a lot. We love the Audi people. I'm an Audi customer. Um, I don't it's a fantastic business. It's rightly gained 9.3 mark percent market share in the UK. But we're having a conversation with a very senior person the other day, and they said it's it is it's it's just price, price is what matters. And we said, okay, that's an interesting perspective. Price is just what matters, is what matters. Our research and your own research and witches research prove that you are the lowest experienceable price in UK grocery. Why don't you have a hundred percent market share? Oh well, well, you know, of course we we're expanding our our estate, our estate is growing. Uh okay. Slightly different question. In an area where there is an established Aldi and a Liddle and a Tesco and a Sainsbury's, and you are still the lowest price in that established town. Why do you not have 100% market share if price is the only thing that's that really matters? Oh, okay. So you might have slightly high market share where you have got the estate, so you might have you know 11% market share there. So let's talk about the 89% that price is not talking to in quite the same way. And when you start to do that, you have a chance that I'm I'm I slightly did it a little bit um smugly there. We try not to be smug with clients because clients are human beings as well, they'll just tell you the fuck off quite rightly. Um but uh so there we might say, Have you thought about? But it's a valid, it's a valid point, is that too often you'll hear that we've already won, we've won this point, and all it takes now is for us to roll the estate behind it and to upgrade all our stores to the current. And you say, Well, actually, if that price is a massive percentage, a massive part of it, really, if it is the only thing that's important, nothing else matters. So the rest of the customer experience doesn't need addressing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Turns out it does.

SPEAKER_03 31:57

Yeah, excellent. And in and in so we've got a really good appreciation that you're presenting a different picture, and clearly, you know, you work with some enlightened leaders because they're getting the value of this. Now, how do they apply it? How do they convert it? And I say this is a leading question because I've seen in your toolkit customer journey mapping, for instance. Yeah, how are you because because you know the visualization of it so that people can go, I get the picture, and you're not always going to be there with a narrative either, are you? You're gonna it's gonna need to exist without you there. So, how are you using things like customer journey mapping to bring the data to life?

SPEAKER_00 32:32

Yeah, it there's a very simple um reason why that's so useful is that it's about the salami slicing of the size of a job. If you just say you're ahead or behind of your rival for this customer story, well, there's no, there's no get in point. There's no, I can't get my way into that job to do something about it. As soon as you look at customer journey, then already you're starting to break it down into phases and you can start to say, well, you can put together a project in that one phase there, where you can start with that, concentrate on the improvements you can make there, and start winning that phase in your key customer stories, and then look at the other areas that might be important. And that was we we kind of did it as a almost as an afterthought initially, and it's become one of the most popular ways we present, or rather, the platform presents data is the customer. And we we actually then said, and this is typical of our thinking. And I I'm trying not to to come across as as arrogant in this because we're not arrogant at all, we're innocent, we're naive. My approach has always been to ask really clever people questions, find out what they know, find out how they think about the world, and then see if I can put that back to reassemble that combination in a way that makes the most overall sense. So that's a that's a preamble to me saying we have got a just a wonderful customer journey default that we've created out of that process, but we kind of threw it in as an afterthought into the platform as a way of just showing a data visualization. But now it does a very straightforward thing. It says, actually, customer journey isn't linear for a start, customer journey has loops in it, and brand might be important in five phases of the journey, price might be important in all phases of the journey. Um, this one variable discovery might only be important in one, you know. Uh, and we we have this journey that has physical and emotional orientation in it, that has what we call selection loops in it, that has post previous experience is the is the second part of our customer journey phase. What did my previous experience of you do then to influence the way I experience you in the future? And presenting that journey in a way where you can look at it and say, Okay, I'm looking at a graph now that shows I'm above or below somebody in this phase. Right. Well, what that's why is that? And then you click it and you go, okay, there's there's there's actually 20 variables that sit beneath this, right? Which one of those am I winning in loot? Okay, I'm doing all right in 18, but that one's got a big red warning flash on it. Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, bigger. I mean we actually have a physical, there's an alarm is the thing on it with it. And if the alarm's flashing, do more. If the alarm's not flashing, you can maybe put it off until next quarter. Um, and if there's no alarm at all, don't worry about it. Um and uh, you know, so so the the alarm's flashing there, and you go, okay, well, that alarm's flashing. Why is it flashing? Oh, I'll click again. Oh, okay, so this alarm, there's there's three signals that have generated this alarm. And actually, out of those three signals, two of them are fine, but one of them is the problem one. Okay, I click on that again, and then underneath that, it then says, here's exactly what the experience across the entirety of the observation data set for that one single thing tells you about your delivery of that one single thing and everybody else's. From that, you can go, oh, it turns out people aren't noticing our price tickets. Yeah. Or oh, it turns out actually, somewhere along the line we've created confusion over what's an offer and what's not an offer, because I can see it in the data, it's right there. I'll go fix that. Yeah, and it's that it's that that reversal of the way that we used to do things. We drew a diagram for the team the other day, which was a typical iceberg. You know, there's there's a number at the top of the iceberg, and at the bottom of the iceberg are potentially 1200 different work orders, things we can do something about. So um, rather than just letting a customer crash into that iceberg and hope that the right work order lands on the deck and they can pick out of them and do something with it, our process has to slice the iceberg for them and has to take them on a very direct, narrow little whoop down to that one, go do this one. And we call it triage, but it is it is it's easy to say that that any data set, ours included, the one job it should do is show me my next best action. And that's what we do.

SPEAKER_03 37:00

Right. And I I see this with um teams struggling with this point around prioritization, and you know, they they then get impacted by others who say, Oh, we should focus on that because that will help me. So to be able to go from those, you know, a hundred or twelve hundred or fifty, and even if you've got 10 down to kind of, you know, what other two or three? I remember the uh CEO at um Barclays used to have kind of this meeting, you know, all top meetings were going to be about two things and nothing else. It's what you want to hear about the top two things, but to get to that particular point in a way which is um independent as opposed to has that bias, it's really, really powerful. I love the description of having the red light. I went with a client pre-COVID and uh we were going through a um uh a tender process to find them a VOC solution. And he said, Do you know what I want? What I really want is when I come in in the morning, I switch it on, it looks like my journey. There's a little red light that flashes, and if it's flashing, it's telling me I've got to work with it. And if it's not, I switch it off and I move on. So uh, you know, in a parallel world, there was this need hanging out there, Richard, that you've now fulfilled. I must go back and tell him about you guys because he'll be like, I knew it was going to be important, I knew it was gonna be important, but it allows you then to focus your energies and efforts in the right areas, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 38:19

Kind of as you as you totally and the the really important point about how not just how we do it, but how this method achieves this is that that red light only flashes if it's a problem relative to everybody else. Yeah, because there's no point fixing stuff that isn't a problem, isn't changing customer customer preference to choose you.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

No, no.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

We we actually we call the the the the top metric relative attractiveness, which is tell me my number relative to everybody else. That's that's what's important. If we're all doing badly, tell me if I'm and it has a flip side to it, incidentally, which is if I'm so far ahead of everybody else, maybe I can take a few millions of investment off that thing and put it on something where I'm behind. Yeah, and again, that's that's important, but it there is that real reality in it, Christopher, that you've you've got to essentially say, look, what is keeping the person in front of me up at night? Yeah, I'll I'll help steer them to that, we'll help set up their environment. So we it sounds daft, but we we use very simple personalized dashboards now. And a personalized dashboard, if if all you care about is one thing, we'll just show you one thing.

SPEAKER_03 39:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

And sometimes you'll log in and it'll never it'll never be flashing.

SPEAKER_03 39:30

So you can get on the other, you can get on with the other things rather than focusing on this and you know not getting your your your hours on the right right opportunity. Now you won me before we started that you we could talk for hours on this, and I realize I realize we can. Um, but I'd like to get to understand where you're going next, because I get an appreciation that probably um all this great stuff that's going on, but being a curious fella, there's already a part of you kind of thinking about where you go next. So, what does the future for for Uncrowd look like?

SPEAKER_00 40:03

Yeah. So in commercial terms, it's the US, and we've already got our most important reference customer there. We do work now with the world's biggest standalone grocer, which is fantastic. Uh, we spend a lot of time in the Midwest. Uh, we have a little office inside their offices, which is lovely. Um, nice big whiteboard with Uncrowd written on that, which is terrific. Um, and we found that even just even just the act of doing that has already made a bunch of other people want to be part of the the data set. And so, you know, just in the next few weeks, for example, we've got another round of of process there. But we now have to build the US business. So we've been able to do that with kind of the the the like the power of the the keen founders, but now we have some wonderful people in market right now who are far better than Rocky's my co-founder, far better than Rocky and I at creating the commercial conversation around how to use this data and how to to take it uh into your business, which is wonderful. And they're generating lots of work for me and Rock, lots of work for me and Rock to turn up and be part of the conversation. But there's a there's a truth in if you're interested in retail and you're an English speaker, well, you have to apply your trade in the US at some point. And we created Uncrowd knowing that at some point the UK would effectively be a uh a smaller cousin to the US operation. I'll still I think I'll always do development, for example, in the UK. Um, I love UK development, I love our attitude towards it. There's an amazing talent pool. It's it's you can pull together brilliant people. The country's small enough that you know I can work with people in Manchester and Birmingham in a way that despite all of the tools that exist now to make hybrid working operate. Actually, if you if you're based in Austin, Austin's your your pool for your development. If you're based in San Francisco, San Francisco's your pool for development, and it's three times as expensive. But in terms of delivery, US customers, it has to be. I mean, we we we're currently there's three regional grocers that uh we're working uh around, and those three regional grocers between them are worth more than Tesco's. And these are guys who, in one case, they're only in two states. I think the the biggest one, even the biggest standalone grocer is is Kroger, who operate in 34 states in the US.

SPEAKER_02 42:25

Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

Imagine that. It's a one point uh 170 billion dollar organization, yeah, and it's still not covering the entire nation. Yeah, you know, that tells you everything.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

I mean, uh it's very exciting. I mean, obviously, you you've got the growth to contend with, which would be exciting, but bring new challenges to you. But if we were to um if we've got people listening today who are thinking, yeah, there's there's definitely something in this, what is the next step for them? Because as you as you said rightly so, you've positioned the product so that if you're serious, come and play, but we don't we don't tinker on the edges. So, what could they do to get that conversation going internally with their leaders?

SPEAKER_00 43:03

The first lesson on how I mean we we've not really expanded on the on the met on the metric itself, the methodology. So the the very quickest kind of um lesson, if you like, on that is at the heart of what we do with the uh the maths that we collect and with the customer that we overlay on it, is we're looking at two things friction and reward. What's in the way of the customer, and what do they get back for having pushed through whatever that friction is? So, for example, take Aldi again. Aldi's laundry brand, Almat, has a 5% market share in the UK, which is unreal for an own brand, private label, to be that powerful. And it it's done that for two reasons. One, because it's formulated really well, it works really, it's really effective, it's a good product. But the friction is quite high. You can't order it online, so you can't get big tubs of this stuff delivered to your house. You have to go to a location which is often a smaller car park, you have to go through. A tight set of aisles, and you have a payment uh experience which is notorious uh for its um let's say eccentricity. But that's the friction side. I have to push through that to go and buy Almat, and I can only get it at Aldi, which is another friction. But on the reward side, it's really good, it is low price, so there's a price reward, but it's also very easy to shop for. I'm not faced by an eight-meter run of a million different combinations. I've got the Almat for my white clothes, for my colored clothes, for my delicates, and I can have it as a powder or as a liquid. It's easy, it's straightforward. I can do other stuff. I don't really give a shit about laundry powder, but I can get a good solution in an easy way. So that friction reward consideration is what drives our methodology and our metric. Well, yeah, we we do 1200 individual observations in that across frictions and rewards, but you don't need to do that. You can get yourself an envelope on the back of that envelope, list the six things as a retailer or any organization, any vendor, list the six as a charity we were talking about earlier on before the call, as an organization. What six things do you do right now that make people's life slightly harder than it should be? What are the six things that are in the way? But equally, what six things do you do that deliver really great value, be it inspiration, discovery, an easy shopping experience, uh whatever, whatever it might be. What are the six things that get in the way? What are the six things you do? And estimate for yourself a number for each one of those. Between one and ten. Use a scale. Right. This this thing that I make, maybe maybe my payment uh process is a bit clunky. Right, how clunky? Put a number between one and ten on it. But actually, once people have paid, our um, I you know, uh, the quality of our packaging, the experience people get when they unbox it is unreal. It's brilliant. We're no questions asked for a refund. Put a value on that and look at the two totals. What am I scoring out of out of 60 for the friction? What am I scoring out of friction for the out of out of 60 for the reward? And look at those two sides of that. Work out whether you're easy to shop and more rewarding than the than the the the the uh the friction that you have to go through. Do a little have a little think about that. Run the same exercise on your two biggest rivals. Sit down now, you've got three envelopes theoretically. You could use paper, of course you could, you could use XL, but it works better like this. Back of a beer map, put those three alongside each other, and you've already just described the friction reward index of your business and two others. Now look at which of those frictions relative to those other two is a real problem. Go fix that. Go fix that and you'll make money. Which of these rewards is the one that really makes people overcome those frictions to shop me instead of those other two? Make sure you strengthen and celebrate that in the business. Where am I falling down? Who's beating me? Why are they beating me? Right, that's my second level of order. And you know, you could also, if you wanted to spend$16.99, you can buy my book on it. Friction reward, friction reward is uh it's the red red cover, it's very obvious when you go on Amazon. Friction reward. Do you know what? Book covers. Well, we're on this subject about expertise, and you're asking about how we persuade the people in front of us um to make what we know to be a good decision. Uh, I've got I've had five books out now, um, and I've hated the covers on all of them. And the thing about that is my publisher has always been the one to have the final say because they know better than me, and they've always been right. And you know, it's that thing where my ego, my vanity can get in the way, but actually the publisher, they're the ones who know what they're doing. And there was one example. The first time I got listed at um WH Smith Travel, which is weirdly, that was the first um part of the story of Unlocking America was Americans at Heathrow grabbing my book for the for the flight and going to get over to the other side of the world. Um, I'm just explaining air travel there, Christopher. Talking about patronising. But yeah, people get on aeroplanes to get on to go places. Um, but that that was the the first key to it. But but trusting that expert to make the right decision, and actually, the first time we're in a really big round about it, um we that in having pushed through that, he was able to show me the email from the buyer at WH Smith Travel, where they talked about how fantastic the cover was for their needs, and ended up putting it in the top 10 on their airport section, and that that was what caused it to fly. And if I hadn't trusted the expert, that would not have happened.

SPEAKER_02 48:44

No, no, no, no, no, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 48:46

It takes it does take maturity to get to that particular point, doesn't it? I mean, and we run something called the CX Book Club, and it's incredible the conversations we have about book covers and to your point where you know you hear people say, Well, I put my foot down and I you know, and others who I've got one here, uh Phil Klaus, and he hates the cover, but actually it it stands out a mile and has done exactly the same things. He's found that the covers is made a fortune rather than the contents of the book, which is a bit difficult.

SPEAKER_00 49:14

There was one other tiny change we made, and this is this is you know, probably I don't know that was the right thing to admit, but um, my books didn't used to sell in America very well, they they struggled. And there's a little bit of that, particularly in retail, American retailers can quite rightly say, look, we're off the charts versus you guys. You can't tell us anything, you can't teach us anything. Um, but we for for one of the versions of smart retail, we changed the address of the publisher from Pearson in the UK to our imprint Financial Times uh business books in New Jersey, and sales rocketed in the US, and I now sell way more books in the US than I do in the UK. That one tiny change that allowed people to believe that maybe this was an American talking to Americans. I get it. I I'm completely on their side.

SPEAKER_03 50:05

I mean, that's the reward friction thing, isn't it? I mean, probably you process this when you see things like that, it makes you then start to, I wonder what the other things are that are kind of holding it back. Well, it's famous. I'm glad we did stop on that because I think to give somebody an appreciation of the simplicity, and I and I say that with the greatest respect of the methodology, that they could just draw it out in front of them and go, Oh my god, yeah, you're right. I can see some really interesting things I've not seen before. And then to recognise, well, what if you apply that to the whole of your business? It it gives it gives, I think, those who are thinking I need a better way, everything they need to go, right, I'm gonna I I get it, I'm gonna apply it, and then I'm gonna say to those who need to know, let's go talk to Uncrowd about what we can do here. Um, I mean, you've you've stated the sectors you're in. I think your biggest challenge is gonna be breaking out and going into the airlines, into the hotels, into the automotive, all of those sectors where this sort of stuff is so needed because it's so it's so predefined against a set of criteria which I don't think anyone can even remember where it came from. And it has no correlation with success, but you know, they're just sucking on this poison. So I will I wish you all the best. I'm really gonna follow your story with interest, Richard. And if there's an opportunity where I can um leverage what you're doing, help an organization to understand there's an alternative way, I can be sure, not just from this call, that it's something that I would certainly want to progress. Because I'd imagine there's two things to it. One is the quality of the what you do, but I get a feel you guys are probably great fun to work with as well.

SPEAKER_00 51:44

We we try to be. Uh, because you know, let's let's not take it all too seriously. That's the thing. We're talking about shopping, shopping's fun at the heart of it. Christopher, thank you very much for for having me on. I've really enjoyed talking to you.

SPEAKER_03 51:56

No, likewise, Richard. And I'll put a link to Uncrowd onto the uh description so people can go in and and have more fun finding out. What I recommend if anyone's going on, have a have watched the videos, they're really good fun. Really good fun. Richard, thank you. Wish you all the best in the continued success of Uncrowd, and once again, really grateful for being a guest on the CX Super Heroes podcast.

SPEAKER_00 52:17

All the best. Thanks, Christopher.