CXFO – What We Can Do Tomorrow

This week we joined The CXFO for their inaugural London Launch meeting, ‘What We Can Do Tomorrow’, held at The Pirate Castle; a community boating charity and multi-use venue for water-based activities on the canal, as well as offering spaces for meetings and events.

The event was an informal, casual event and hosted by chairman Don Hales and Chief Executive Isobel Rogers.

After introductions from Don and Isobel, Morris Pentel took to the stage with idea’s surrounding customer emotions, staff, customer happiness and do we lose all common sense when we slip into our business attire?

It’s not rocket science but it is science….

‘Hands up who likes NPS (Net Promoter Score)?’  – Not many in the room today it seemed…..  Morris suggested there was a better way to gauge customer satisfaction than a metric based upon recommendation, just how difficult it is for us to give a recommendation based out of 10 and went on to introduce the concept of ‘OK centred’.

If we think of everything in terms of OK, better than ok, not ok, there is a very simple formula to measure customer happiness and the customer experience for today’s customers.

To bring home the concept, we the audience were asked to consider a good, or a bad experience we had had, then to score that in terms of ‘would you recommend’ using 1-10, or, the OK centred model and I have to agree it made a lot of sense.

We had a video conference with Dr Richard Claydon, from Organisational Misbehaviourists, dialling in from Hong Kong. Richard talked about strategy vs culture and how hiring for a cultural fit, is not the best recruitment strategy and that winning strategies emerge from experimental ideas, allow experiments, eliminate waste, test ideas and if it works, add resources.

No company has a single consistent culture, so build communication, understanding and critical thinking.

Carole Layzell, Digital Eagle & Proactive Engagement CX Director for Barclays, was up next.   Carole introduced the Digital Eagle, a voluntary movement from Barclays employees, which helps, teach and share a true omni-channel experience with their employees, customers and community.

According to Deloitte, 71% of us check our phones within 30 minutes of waking up, with young adults spending at least 5 hours each day on their phones and apparently there are now more mobile phone owners than toothbrushes.

The digital eagles run eagle labs and initiatives such as ‘tea and teach’ sessions across the UK, where customers are invited for a cup of tea in a place they can gain help and confidence with computers and the internet and ‘coding playgrounds’ which work with schools and communities to help children learn how to code – as well as how to stay safe online.

These digital initiatives, championed and supported by CEO, Ashok Vaswani, offer opportunities internally, as well as externally.   One local branch which closed as it received less than 1500 visitors in a 12 month period saw 15,000 visitors to its converted ‘eagle lab’ in 9 months.

Carole also shared a touching video ‘A Life Changing Challenge for Barclays Eagle Lab, where one of their Digital Eagles, Jon, took it upon himself to design and 3D print a replacement arm for Rilee, after her Dad, Adrian bought Rilee into the eagle lab for one of their half term projects.   This life changing initiative took about 24 hours and cost £7. Strong, powerful and suprising stuff.

For lunch we were given the opportunity to head out and about into Camden and their street food area, (we also got to see the original Banksy artwork, just outside the Pirates Castle for those who might be interested), as well as lock side bars and restaurants, with a view to when we returned, finding out how we rated our experience, bearing in mind, how we might ‘would you recommend’ 1-10, or, the ‘OK centred model’.

For this scenario, as with so many others, the recommendation model proved quite difficult.  When asking to rate our experience, there were many factors; the food, the company, the weather (it was a glorious sunny and hot day), the price and the service…Would we recommend…..and what is the opposite to recommend?  Using the OK Centred model did seem easier and less effort.  Isn’t that what we are all looking for?

Next up was a line of CX expert/consultants for a Q&A;

• Tim Routledge CX Lab.
• Gerry Brown The Customer Lifeguard.
• Manuela Pifani CXellence Consulting
• Adrian Swinscoe How to Wow
• Christopher Brooks Lexden
• Martin Dukes, Mpathy Plus
• Anis Qizilbash Mindful Sales Training

Each expert gave their two pieces of advice on the practical steps for tomorrow.  Some of which were:

• Use science in work and customer service to influence positively. Modern AI offers fantastic opportunities. Analyse data quickly. Science is the basis of everything (Tim)
• Let employees be themselves and use their emotions, everyone wants to be positive and a good Samaritan. Set guidelines but let them be themselves. (Gerry)
• Understand what customers value the most and what drives behaviours, most organisations focus on designing CX but this is functional, not experiential.  (Manuela)
• The difference between the top and bottom companies, is the quality of your  management. Invest in your management and being good with people is overlooked in many companies. (Adrian)
• Most organisations pay lip service to Customer Experience, it is listed in their values but the behaviours are not focussed on the customer. Digitalising an existing  poor service, is just digital poor service. (Martin).

The day finished with an electric guitar and hard rock message from ‘Customer Experience Rockstar’ James Dodkins.

Choose to be unique, choose to be unforgettable, choose to be a CX Rockstar! 

This was an interesting event, packed full of content and with some thought provoking messages, we have only covered a fraction of it here.    If you missed this one, definitely keep an eye out for the next and we hope to see you there.

Many thanks to the CXFO , Don, Isobel, Morris and everyone else.