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INTERVIEW
FOCUS ON
BuzzFeed: The digital marketing revolution
Edelman: The importance of customer trust
James Lamon shares how BuzzFeed effectively utilises social media to engage, market, and sell.
Gerry Wisniewski explores the insights the Trust Barometer provides in how different sectors are trusted.
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FEATURE
Samsung: The six characteristics needed to thrive in a complex work environment Nick Milne explains how Samsung navigates consumer engagement in a large, global organisation.
ENGAGE CUSTOMER C U S T O M E R
E N G A G E M E N T
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S U M M I T
R E P O R T EngageCustomer.com
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY
VIEW FROM THE CHAIRS
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Our Hall Chairs share their highlights from across the Summit’s four halls. With an overview of all 80 presentations over the two-day Summit, Martin Hill-Wilson, Gerry Brown, Manuela Pifani, and Jo Moffatt provide their key takeaways and insights from the event.
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER EDITORIAL Elizabeth Akass Editor lizzie.akass@ebm.media 01932 302 113 Steve Hurst Editorial Director steve.hurst@ebm.media 01932 506 304
MARKETING Katie Donaldson Marketing Manager katie.donaldson@ebm.media 01932 506 302 Sophie Smith Marketing Executive sophie.smith@ebm.media 01932 302 112 Hannah Mulea Marketing Executive hannah.mulea@ebm.media 01932 302 111
SPONSORSHIP Dominic Stone Sponsorship Sales dominic.stone@ebm.media 01932 506 303 Dale Ayliffe Sponsorship Sales dale.ayliffe@ebm.media 01932 302 110 Dan Moran Sponsorship Sales dan.moran@ebm.media 01932 506 303 James Baughn Sponsorship Sales james.baughn@ebm.media 01932 506 308 Jack Buchanan Sponsorship Sales jack.buchanan@ebm.media 01932 506 309
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MANAGING DIRECTOR Nick Rust nick.rust@ebm.media 01932 506 301
Welcome A very warm welcome to this year’s Customer Engagement Summit Industry Report. We hope you enjoy what’s inside!
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his edition has been a delight to put together as we have had the fantastic opportunity to speak with experts from a range of industry-leading brands in the customer engagement space. From the world of OTT television, Nick Macfarlane from Sky Spain explains his five steps to encourage positive and productive internal customer experience conversation. Gerry Wisniewski discusses Edelman’s Trust Barometer and how the data collected provides valuable insight into consumer trust in different sectors, and how to appropriately address issues highlighted. Sharing the tremendous success story of Tasty’s branding, James Lamon shares BuzzFeed’s digital approach to marketing and customer engagement. Nick Milne from Samsung invites us into the world of technology, talking us through the six characteristics needed to thrive in a large, complex, global company. Emphasising the importance of building a loyal, skilled workforce by hiring on merit alone, Richard Rowley and Nicola Whitbread from Census Life give us an inside look at the potential future of the contact centre. We also caught up with David Caton from giffgaff, who delved into his thoughts and expertise on customer engagement in his industry.
Furthermore, our fantastic Hall Chairs, Martin Hill-Wilson, Gerry Brown, Manuela Pifani, and Jo Moffatt, share their highlights from the Customer Engagement Summit, and you can find the event feedback from our delegates inside as well. In addition, we have included some key recent news stories relating to customer engagement that may spark your interest. In the digital age, the world of customer engagement is rapidly changing and evolving, whilst customer expectations of an efficient, easy service continue to rise. Shared ideas and knowledge from brands staying ahead of the curve with innovative and forward-thinking approaches, whilst excelling in building and maintaining trusting, positive relationships with their consumers, can be invaluable. With this in mind, we hope that you find this Industry Report informative, helpful, and interesting.
Happy reading! Elizabeth Akass, Editor
EngageCustomer.com Engage Business Media Ltd, Nicholson House, 41 Thames Street, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 8JG. Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy in the compilation of this publication, the Publishers cannot be held liable for errors and omissions. ©COPYRIGHT: Engage Business Media Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior consent in writing to the publisher.
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Monday 7 December 2020 Riverbank Park Plaza, London
Tickets £995
THREE SEMINAR HALLS • 15 TOPIC STREAMS • 800+ DELEGATES • ROUND TABLE SESSIONS SPRING 2020
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER NEWS
Buy now pay later consumer debt fears Buy now, pay later services for online shoppers are growing at 39% a year, a report says, despite worries that young consumers are sleepwalking into debt. Operators such as Klarna and Afterpay allow customers to delay payment or buy through interest-free instalments. Convenience and the ease to make snap purchases are behind their popularity, according to the report by payment processors Worldpay. But consumer groups say many young people are ignoring the debt risks. Klarna has announced that seven million people have used its services in the UK, twice as many as a year ago. Among them was Crystle Pearce, who bought a Peloton stationary exercise bike on Klarna after going into the store and asking about her credit options. “I do not have £2,000 to drop on a spinning bike. It is definitely a luxury, so you have to make sure, before you sign the piece of paper, that you will be able to pay it back,” she told BBC 5 live’s Wake Up to Money. “If you can’t, you will get yourself into so much debt. If you miss a payment, it completely affects everything. I would only recommend it to someone who is budget-savvy.” These debt warnings have been consistent during the rise of these “buy now, pay later” services, with consumer groups warning for some time about the dangers. Caroline Siarkiewicz, chief executive of the Money and Pensions Service, said that falling behind on payments can affect access to borrowing in subsequent years. “These schemes attract younger people and are pretty straightforward,” she said last month. “But many are not thinking about the future enough before they sign up to take out these products.” Complaints service Resolver said it had received nearly 10,000 inquiries about the issue since it began recording them separately in September 2018. However, the Worldpay report suggested that these services were set to double their market share of online purchases by 2023, compared with last year. “Buy now, pay later delivers a more intuitive level of convenience and access for consumers than traditional credit cards,” the report said. “As digitally savvy Gen Z consumers come of age, this is especially significant as younger consumers are more used to making snap purchases and then deciding later if they want to keep it.” Its research suggested this was the fastestgrowing online payment method in the UK, growing twice as quickly as bank transfers and more than three times the rate of annual growth in digital wallets. However, it said digital wallets – mainly involving payment via a mobile phone – were popular in stores and would account for more than half of online payments by 2023.
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Gambling site to pay £3million penalty Online gaming firm Mr Green, which is owned by William Hill, has been hit with a £3m penalty for failing to protect gambling addicts. The Gambling Commission also said the company did not have effective procedures to check customers were using legitimate sources of money. The commission said its investigation had uncovered “systemic failings”. It failed to freeze the account of a customer who won £50,000 and gambled it away before depositing thousands more. The company also accepted a 10-year-old document showing a £176,000 claims payout as satisfactory evidence of source of funds for a customer who deposited more than £1m. Mr Green is the ninth company to face penalties as part of a probe by the Gambling Commission into safeguarding failures by online casinos and poor measures to prevent money laundering.
The Gambling Commission has issued more than £20m in penalties since 2018. The money will go to the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms, which provides treatment and support for addicts. “Our investigation uncovered systemic failings in respect of both Mr Green’s social responsibility and anti-money laundering controls which affected a significant number of customers across its online casinos,” said Richard Watson, the Gambling Commission’s executive director. “Consumers in Britain have the right to know that there are checks and balances in place which will help keep them safe and ensure gambling is crimefree – and we will continue to crack down on operators who fail in this area.” William Hill bought Mr Green in 2018 for £242m.
Leasehold property buyers ‘misled by developers’ An investigation into the leasehold property market has found “worrying evidence” that buyers are being treated unfairly and charged unreasonable fees. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said many homeowners found themselves in “serious traps” after being misled by housing developers. It said it would take action against firms, calling for a change in the law and for refunds to be paid. But it has not disclosed any names so far as it continues to investigate. The CMA found some buyers were not told upfront that a property was leasehold and what this meant. By the time people found out the realities of owning a leasehold, including regular ground rent charges, they were often unable to pull out of the sale, or would have found it very difficult. In some cases, ground rents doubled every 10 years. This increase is often built into contracts, meaning people can struggle to sell their homes and find themselves trapped. George Lusty from the CMA told BBC Radio 5 live that people could be in line for refunds.
“If we can attack and challenge these unfair ground rent terms, then they’re invalid – all the money that was collected on them isn’t valid and that has to be paid back,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can to get people out of these really serious traps they find themselves in. “People aren’t able to take mortgages on these properties. They can’t sell them, that’s a terrible outcome and absolutely devastating for the people affected.” This could result in firms signing legal commitments to change how they do business, and being taken to court if they do not comply. The CMA said there should be a ban on the sale of new leasehold houses, while ground rents for new leases should be slashed to zero. Concerns have long been raised by MPs and consumer groups about unfair leasehold contracts, with costly fees or onerous terms, prompting the CMA to announce the investigation last year. Campaigners have called for leaseholds to be abolished, while some developers say they still have a place.
Consumers fear brand censorship of reviews A study from Trustpilot, has revealed an alarming distrust among UK consumers when it comes to brands removing or censoring legitimate consumer reviews across the internet, with four in 10 (42%) saying they are very concerned about their freedom of speech. The Critical role of reviews in Internet Trust report into the state of online trust highlights consumers’ concerns that online reviews are being tampered with by brands (71%) and that this is causing them to waste money they can’t afford to (45%). While the findings show that consumers are increasingly reliant on customer reviews – with nine in 10 (90%) saying they read reviews before buying online, and the average consumer spending £433 each year on purchases that were influenced or informed by an online review – they are also wary of their legitimate feedback being manipulated by companies. In fact, 47% of consumers said they believe that companies are manipulating their image by creating fake reviews online, while a further 40% believe they are doing so by deleting negative reviews. Peter Mühlmann, founder and CEO Trustpilot said, “The research is a clear sign that consumers are very aware of being manipulated in this era of fake news and
distrust in institutions. When it comes to their interactions with companies online, they want to know that their feedback is being heard, and that this feedback is helping other consumers to see the full picture of a brand – the good, the bad and the inbetween. Reviews are core to helping consumers navigate this complex ecommerce landscape, but there must be more transparency and explanation about how different platforms operate, including how they moderate, filter, flag, publish or remove reviews. Only then will consumers be able to feel confident they’re making informed purchasing decisions. “At the end of the day, companies must remember that customer feedback helps them to improve. It keeps them honest. It raises the bar. And it helps them to do a better job tomorrow than they did today.” Consumer review websites ranked second for trust and third for their perception of providing honest product and service reviews; only family and friends rank higher in both categories. Reflecting this demand for a more transparent, honest review process, the research also showed that six in 10 consumers (60%) say they’d stop using platforms if they knew that they were censoring reviews.
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER NEWS
Airline bookings hit by coronavirus British Airways owner IAG has warned that bookings in 2020 will be hit by the effects of coronavirus. The airline group said flight suspensions to China and cancellations on Italian routes would affect how many passengers it carried this year. It said it was not possible to say how much profits would be hit in 2020 because of uncertainty about the impact and duration of the current outbreak. Rival EasyJet is also cancelling some flights because of the virus. The budget carrier said that following the increased number of coronavirus cases in Northern Italy, it had seen “a significant softening of demand and load factors into and out of our Northern Italian bases”. “As a result, we will be making decisions to cancel some flights, particularly those into and out of Italy, while continuing to monitor the situation and adapting our flying programme to support demand.” British Airways-owner IAG has suspended and restricted flights as the virus spread out from China to Europe and beyond, with Italy as a major centre of infection. At the end of January the group suspended all flights to mainland China. Flights to Hong Kong have been reduced, and from March there will also be fewer flights to Seoul. IAG chief executive Willie Walsh told the BBC’s Today programme that in the first three weeks of February, mainly Asian bookings had been affected. “Clearly we had announced the suspension of flights to China. We took that decision at the end of January, and we had seen some impact on our other Asian routes, but it had looked like it was stabilising. “But earlier this week we had the issues in Italy, and that’s clearly led to a significant falloff in demand in Italy and in some of the surrounding countries as well.” The number of passengers carried on Italian routes in March “has been significantly reduced” and “further capacity reductions will be activated over the coming days”, IAG said in a statement. Mr Walsh added that general business travel had been affected by the cancellation of large conferences, as well as by the introduction of travel restrictions by some big companies. Shares in airlines have been among the hardest hit in the global market sell-off seen this week, and IAG’s shares have sunk 17%. “I don’t think it’s a surprise that investors are cautious in the current circumstances,” Mr Walsh said. He added that IAG had a “very strong balance sheet”, but that it was “natural in the current circumstances that people will be cautious”. Rolls-Royce, one of the world’s largest makers of aircraft engines, also warned of the impact of coronavirus on its business. Chief executive Warren East said the virus was a “macro-risk for everyone”. “It’s not sector specific, or company specific. It’s a known unknown,” he told the BBC. “This is something that is developing daily, and the impact is going to depend on how long disruption lasts for, how wide, from a regional point of view, the disruption spreads, and of course for us as a business, our ability to mitigate against that.”
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Connected customers want effortless experience NTT Ltd., a world-leading global technology services provider, today revealed the findings of its annual Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report titled “The Connected Customer: Delivering an effortless experience.” According to the research, only 5% of organisations in Europe are delivering a fully functioning experience, yet more than half (51%) consider CX to be a primary differentiator. Organisations struggle to align their CX strategies to voice of customer (VoC) feedback, with 59% having no formal process for considering this data and 14% which capture no feedback at all. Only 16% fully define, and track the value contribution of CX and less than a third (32%) are able to connect data relationships between channels – leaving the rest operating ‘blind’ with no full view of the customer ecosystem. That said, the collection of VoC feedback by organisations is improving year on year – there has been a 45% improvement globally since 2019 in those capturing some form of feedback and 7% now perceive their VoC programme to be at an advanced level across all channels. “Customer expectations are higher than ever – businesses cannot afford to fail in CX,” said Rob Allman; Senior Vice President, Customer Experience at NTT Ltd. “However, most companies are missing valuable insights that are integral to better connect with and stay relevant to customers across every touchpoint. By listening to the voice of the customer, integrating data across systems, in addition to adopting emerging technologies like AI and RPA, companies have the unique opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.”
Listening starts with strategy A successful CX strategy is proven to improve customer and brand engagement, and drive commercial performance, yet many organisations are still stuck in the developmental stage due to siloed technology systems, inconsistencies in experience, and a lack of clear processes. Specifically, challenges include: • Faltering technology systems: Nearly one in three (29%) say their technology systems are failing to meet current needs and many teams still struggle with legacy systems (40%) and the integration of multiple technology systems (44%). Additionally, the inability to secure budgets (44%) remains a concern and skills shortages is seen as a growing concern (28%). • Siloed channels and internal business organisations: Almost two thirds (65%) of organisations agree there is only partial collaboration between functions when it comes to designing CX, and 14% don’t collaborate at all. Nearly two thirds (64%) still have no crosschannel contact management strategy and less than a quarter (21%) claim to have good or complete consistency across contact channels. • Inconsistent priorities: Personalisation capabilities have surged from 55% to 83% in one year, but just 17% of organisations place “customer delight” as the top driving force behind their customer journey design strategy. This may account for why over a quarter (28%) of assisted-services enquires fail to be resolved during first contact, while automated channels fare worse with a 38% fail rate.
Creating a smarter CX with data analytics While almost three quarters (73%) of organisations indicate that they are satisfied with their customer satisfaction capability, only 10% of their customers rate customer experience at ‘advocacy’ level. Worryingly, just 2% of AI and robotics users say customers rate their experience at advocacy level, exposing the gap between
emerging technologies and satisfaction levels. This demonstrates that businesses need to create a smart strategy which bases AI on optimum data, organisations must learn to fill the gap between data management and integration, and prioritise an efficient data management platform. As it stands, less than half (41%) of data capture needs are defined and aligned to desired business outcomes, and just 26% have a dedicated team managing the company’s entire data lake. In fact, 18% have no data management strategy at all. Because of this, data is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. More than half (54%) of all teams are evaluating and learning how to use available data and over a third (34%) do not have the required data management skills or resources to do so. An increasing number of organisations are moving towards the use of smart data to inform CX decisions but are often overwhelmed by this transformation. Half of businesses confirmed data analytics and data management will be one of the top three tech initiatives prioritised by the CX team. Analytics (54%) is expected to be the top factor in reshaping the CX industry within the next five years. This is closely followed by artificial intelligence (49%), technology integration (43%), and service personalisation (44%). Overcoming business organisational structure challenges Many organisations believe AI and automation is the future for creating operational efficiency, hyper personalisation and providing an effortless customer experience. Rules-based robotic solutions “are the preferred option both now and in the short term with AI being the top five year priority.” The vast majority (78%) of organisations also believe customer operations will be positively impacted by AI and CX robotics in the future, followed by business insight and customer intelligence (53%) and workplace management/operational productivity (51%). However, the implementation of AI remains difficult. Looking forward, businesses must find a solution for the current lack of skills across the business, which is currently considered a challenge for more than half (57%) of organisations today. “Businesses must look at how technologies such as AI and RPA can work as part of their organisational team structures,” said Allman. “But to do this successfully, AI needs to work with the voice of the customer data which is collected by advanced social listening tools. This data must also be compiled from across the business’s value chain in order to help AI realise its potential. Therefore, design thinking and an ecosystem focused approach is imperative.”
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER VIEW FROM THE CHAIR
Martin Hill-Wilson: Chair’s Report 2019 Customer Engage Conference One of the themes across the world this year has been trust. It seems in short supply and bad actors are everywhere. Yet it is a precondition for enduring relationship and so matters in any context which features people. Naturally the issue impacts customer engagement and so it was a primary theme for this year’s conference.
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Martin Hill-Wilson, Founder Brainfood Consulting
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Helen’s advice was to learn how to become more systematic around spotting when trust matters and what drives it.
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ur plenary session kicked off with a macro view of trust from that trusted research source Ipsos Mori represented by the equally trusted Helen Wilson. She painted a more nuanced picture than the impression I just gave. Her conclusion was that it all depends. Business apparently is not suffering a decline in trust. For reference business leaders are pegged with a trustworthy score of 22%. Not as bad as politicians languishing at 9%. Nor as stellar as scientists at 60%. On the other hand, trust in the internet as a news source has unsurprisingly fallen off a cliff. Helen’s advice was to learn how to become more systematic around spotting when trust matters and what drives it. Next to grace the stage was Andrew Hall from Odigo who always provides well considered insight. Andrew tackled a topic close to my own current interests – meeting the emotive needs of consumers and agents. There is increasing recognition that the emotive matters as much as the functional. Our daily decisions are heavily influenced by subconscious emotional drivers. Whether in our role as consumer or employee, decisions to stay or move are made on this basis. Andrew argued it is therefore important to accommodate generational biases in how customers adopt or avoid new ways of engaging. Likewise, there are key generational differences in customer service teams in terms of what motivates them. This matters because technology is going to be central to the way we deliver customer and employee expectations. However, we must start with the assumption that each generation will react in quite different ways. The next presentation from Jess Poore at Virgin Media returned to the theme of trust and transparency. In a marketplace focused on product and price, triple/quad play customers have learnt to game the system and use the threat of churn to get the best prices. It’s a transactional model the industry traditionally runs on. But it is one Virgin Media has decided to break out of by resetting the customer relationship. Their new goal is to focus on what makes customers love the brand which turns out to be trust and transparency. Might sound simple but it transforms everything when fully followed through which is what Jess is currently doing. The plenary session concluded with a high energy session from Claire Sporton at Confirmit who always comes to the stage with fresh insight for CX professionals to consider. In summary, she is fearful for the future of the industry because it is not delivering value. Too many are stopping at the point of gathering insight. More specifically goals are not being set. Leaders are not being engaged and therefore no demonstrable ROI is being witnessed. In other words, CX needs to get out of the box of “measuring reality” and make the shift to “changing reality”. Claire argued we need to extend our traditional skills of analytics and research with business acumen. We need to extend our influencing and storytelling skills into making stuff happen – getting change started and delivering. Claire delivered an important warning to the industry that it is time to make much more of a difference. Or face the consequences.
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER
After the first break John White, Consulting Director, CX at Kantar, continued this theme by offering his own first-hand perspective as to why so many CX transformations still fall short. Here are his beefs: • Feedback surveys are far too long and equally boring. Make them short and relevant • CX platforms suffer low adoption outside the core CX team because operational colleagues have little exposure to the data • CX programmes stagnate because they do not evolve in line with customer needs and expectations • Analytics is not the end point. Delivered ROI is. So, a great presentation that chimed with the core themes covered by Claire. Hearing it from two sources makes the core message resonate even more. We then returned to trust which was explored by the well-known Moira Clark of Henley Centre fame. Her take on the set of stats and examples she had assembled on trust was a less comforting one for businesses than Helen’s version earlier in the day. In short, consumers are much less disposed to trust brands than the brands themselves believe. The reasons are pretty straight forward. It comes down to ongoing poor public behaviour. There have been multiple high-profile examples of trust-breaking episodes from Enron onwards. All have had a corrosive effect on society at large. We are now more skeptical than ever about believing what brands would like us to accept as reality. So, if a brand wants to win the right to be trusted, it needs a constant focus on the following: • Trusted brands do the right things • Trusted brands enjoy an “us = them” relationship with customers • Trusted brands have empathy • Trusted brands never fail customers • Trusted brands are transparent. Next up was Nick Macfarlane from Sky with the exotic theme of ‘mining CX in Spain’. As chief CX honcho, Nick describes his mission as: ‘Understanding our customers and making sure we deliver a consistently brilliant end to end experience’. As a contact centre guy, he gets its importance to that mission. ‘The contact center is the nucleus of CX’. It is where you get to hear the issues and see the impact of improvements. In effect, it’s your CX lab. I wonder if this is something that is being missed given the feedback John and Helen provided the CX industry earlier in the day? But that insight needs to translate into measurable benefit. So, Nick has developed a closed loop improvement cycle to deliver on that. Or to put it in his words: • Create a “CX conversation culture” • Check your assumptions at the door • Remember that content is king • Keep it simple. Keep it human • Focus on delivery. This is how it works. Inspire customers to open up and share the GOLD by getting advisors to truly engage. Then MINE those expanded conversations using powerful analytics to surface what matters. To spot opportunities, we have to learn to assume nothing and fully absorb what the feedback tells us. Rather than rely of the filtered views our cognitive biases provide. Always use the feedback! Inspire your team with the impact they are making. Make analytics visually engaging. Stay focused on delivering value and in the middle of making things better remember that customer are people not problems. Tons of gold in that presentation I reckon! Then we moved to a topic that really does need more airtime here in the UK. The role of messaging. Of course, messaging is yet to be global like email. Platforms have achieved regional dominance. Here is the UK we have gone for WhatsApp and Messenger in almost equal measure. In Eastern Europe it’s all about Viber. But the real reason we need more airtime is that we are behind the adoption curve relative to many places such as Africa and South America where mobile engagement is the primary means of connectivity. Birgit Bucher took us through some use cases from her own organisation MessengerPeople. She left us with some important points. If we subscribe to the omni-channel principle that we should be wherever our customer are, then UK consumer behaviour tells us we should have already adopted messaging. Secondly, make sure that customers are aware of any messaging service being offered. Promote it so they can find you. The third tip is to make the contact experience as simple as contacting a friend. Next one is to leverage messaging’s rich media and multi-modal capabilities for a more compelling UX. Finally, blend virtual and human assistance within messaging to improve cx and reduce costs and integrate into legacy and payment platforms to increase utility and value. Every couple of years, BT polls 6,000 consumers across its global footprint asking
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about their customer service behaviour and expectations. We were lucky enough to catch Dr Nicola Millard just at the point of rummaging through the latest insights before full publication early 2020. There were some nuggets. • Customer effort remains highly relevant. ‘Make it easy’ is still a hill to climb • In terms of channel movement, voice has come back with a significant uptick. Both as in live assistance and self-service (IVR). Something to do with the impact of bots and RPA maybe? But issues remain making voice conversations as effective as consumers expect • App use to engage organisations has also increased. Even though the messaging evangelists would have us believe it is on the decline • Video is growing albeit as a niche channel • Use of social as service channels is declining. I see this driven by Facebook’s strategic decision to go private and so vendors have followed with ‘social messaging’ • Chat has stalled. My guess it will merge with messaging • Bots can become the new IVR without the necessary service design input • Unsurprisingly, proactive notification is appreciated by customers. Email remains the go to channel to deliver that – something digitally impatient brands might want to ponder over. Anna Wilcox, Head of CX at BUPA has been providing regular updates on her progress over the years and earns my praise for her honesty in saying it as it is. Eighteen months of hard work has produced solid results. For instance, pre-Authorisation customers now average an NPS of score 57 up from 25. Anna’s story this time was empowering advisors to offer acts of kindness. These are being used to generate an emotive connection with customers to counteract the abiding memory of process orientated interactions such as claims. The gifts that are offered are appreciated for their kindness factor rather that their monetary value and the feedback shared from customers radiate the impact Anna had wanted. A clever idea well executed. So, what I heard this year was trust, emotive connection, and acting on what matters. Things are getting interesting.
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER VIEW FROM THE CHAIR
Gerry Brown: Chair’s Report 2019 Customer Engage Conference This year’s conference theme was Trust and Transparency and had many stimulating and inspiring presentations.
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ollowing some fantastic plenary sessions, Matt Hale from South Bank Centre gave us some great examples of both in his presentation Creating a Culture of Caring. He shared how by allowing colleagues to write their own job descriptions, create new ways of working and develop a stronger, more demonstrable understanding of their customers personas, they totally changed the vibe of the centre and the experience that each patron enjoyed. Truly a triumph of personality over functionality. Next up was an old friend and regular presenter Andrew McGuigan from Microsoft who segued smoothly with his story Technology, Customers and Colleagues. Andrew introduced us to the concept of BIG HAIRY GOALS and in particular creating their own disruption, the importance of trust and earning it and that by protecting customers from fraudulently activity and finding heroes as well as villains. He concluded by stating unequivocally that customer and colleague trust are critical, remain constant and must be closely protected thus empowering advocates to deliver better customer experiences. Andrew handed off smoothly to Stella Creasey from Fidelity International and her presentation Helping Drive Customer Centric Culture was highlighted by a powerful video showing senior executives getting down to action and handling calls in the contact centre. This was tremendously powerful in showing the value of leading from the front and building trust with colleagues by “walking a mile in their shoes”. We were then entertained by Ricardo Brenna from chocolate maker Ferrero, with a spirited and engaging trip through the world of consumer goods with his presentation Mass Brands and Customer Experience. Authenticity at the Core. His central themes, aligned to trust and transparency were, be real, be consistent, be authentic, tell stories and the customers will (literally) be eating out of your hands! Carly Gibbs from Enjoy-Work, clearly demonstrating that it wasn’t an oxymoron and that work or the environment where you work, could be fun, introduced us to Chiswick Park and the array of top brand guests that reside there. It was a fast-paced visual trip through this exciting new business park and showed how a carefully crafted and executed service design program can bring lasting benefits to a community that pays off in employee satisfaction and customer retention. Following the lunch break Marc Thornborough and Bethany Hibbert from Auto Trader kept the trust theme going with their presentation enticingly entitled Car Dealers aren’t all like Matilda’s
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dad. With trust in car dealers on shaky ground they showed how the value of data and insight, carefully curated, authentically presented and with a strong and long history of credibility, dealers can rebuild trust, develop long term relationships and be profitable. A win-win for all. Then, a moving and inspiring presentation from Will Travers, CEO of the Born Free Foundation. His Power to Shock presentation shone an uncomfortable but necessary spotlight on why we need to control social media and not let it control behaviour in the wildlife space. He focused on the damage being done by callous and selfish people whose anti-social behaviour towards animals through keeping exotic pets, illegal hunts, and trophy kills that was endangering species and having a negative impact on so many lives. Next on the stage was Richard Stollery, from the Share Centre, who shared his story about The Service Profit Chain in Action, with vivid examples of a branded customer experience from companies such as M&S and Disney that showed that humanising the customer experience and catching people doing things right were the secrets to moving from good to great. Another welcome returnee, Mark Billingham from Shop Direct, gave us an update on their automation journey in AI with a Human Touch. The key themes were developing capability and mindset, operational excellence and a culture of continuous improvement and the results speak for themselves. Significant increases in chatbot usage, reduced costs, increased colleague engagement and NPS scores to be proud of. A truly winning combination. Keeping the retail therapy theme going, Pete Doyle, CEO Social Retail Group, gave us a lesson that a certain leader of the free world might find useful with his
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER
• How to achieve customer and brand alignment across large scale and remote workforce • Harmonising the Employee Experience and Customer Experience to drive sustainable growth/performance • Aligning HR, Brand, Comms and Marketing functions to enable the organisation • Principles for success and practical examples. presentation, Think Twice Tweet Once. Pete gave some great visual examples of how not to respond on social media, especially if the responder is neither listening nor watching. He then introduced us to the “art of conversation – on the shop floor” and how the shop floor heroes at Hobbycraft working with the Social Retail Group fine-tuned their responses to such a great extent that they were awarded a Retail Week Customer Experience Award. And that’s not fake news! Listening to customer also featured prominently in the next presentation from Anna Fenten, Head of Brand, Marketing and Communications at Searcys. As she eloquently shared with us, Searcys really is an institution, having been founded by John Searcy in 1847, who famously came out of retirement in 1874 to create Princess Maud’s wedding cake, Searcy’s created an enviable reputation of becoming experts in all they do, by truly understanding their customers’ need. But they’re not stuck in the past and use the latest methods including semantic sentiment analysis and actionable insight to continually keep on top of their game. They have been able to uncover the secretes to personalising their guests’ experience and, as is vital in the restaurant business, to keep coming back for more. Dana Zabet a digital anthropologist from John Lewis clearly showed us how important it is to go beyond the surface when creating a great retail experience. Her presentation Towards Supporting Difference, identified inclusive design as “that considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference. The theme she explored was that it what we don’t know about customers that can lead us to the most interesting and relevant information to ensure that new product opportunities and differentiation can be delivered to all John Lewis customers. They won’t just knowingly be undersold, but also not knowingly underinformed! Gerry Brown from The Customer Lifeguard finished off the day’s proceedings with a fast-paced presentation that showed the importance of aligning Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee information and how by combining this critical data, companies can better service customers and create an engaging and inspired workforce. Day two started with more inspiring plenary sessions, and then Luke Adebiyi from Capital International Group got us off to a great session start with is presentation on the importance of Creating a Culture where both Colleague and Customer voices are heard. The presentation was brought to life with his visual depiction of how a new bank was started and that from the earliest days both the customers and colleagues played an active and leading role in creating the experiences, that would define the bank’s reputation. This theme carried over to a panel discussion with Niall Cluley from Dragon Fish, David Wales from Shared Aim and Ian Naylor from Booking.com, chaired by Gerry Brown and discussing Dragonfish’s latest research Cracking the Culture Code. This looked at the links between Employee Experience and Customer Experience. It produced a lively and inclusive debate that included:
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Gerry Brown, Chief Customer Rescue Officer, The Customer Lifeguard
It was obvious that the audience were very keen to continue the debate, but that was before they were thoroughly entertained and inspired by Sophia Pilkington-Miksa from Bought By Many, whose sparkling, dogfriendly presentation, Building Lifetime Value showed us we would be barking mad not to buy pet insurance from them as they trod a very different path to conventional insurers. Recognising that all pet owners have a very special and different relationship with their animals, Sophia showed how personalisation, random acts of kindness and special treats such as “Woofins” on their pet’s birthday and a caring and emotional response to a pet’s demise, really did ensure that the name of their company was a reality. The final act of the day in Hall 2 was a special treat for all football fans and in particular those that follow Brighton and Hove Albion FC. Former Brighton Chief Executive Martin Perry took us on a rollercoaster ride over the last 25 years of Brighton’s journey from their near-death experience in 1997 to their rise and success in the Premier League. He spoke passionately about the move from their small drafty and often very wet, athletics facility to their new home, the state-of-the-art American Express Community Stadium – The Amex. In particular, how they had galvanised existing and new colleagues, fans and the community that led to great fan experiences and awards from the Premier League. Martin also shared the financial benefits that the whole Brighton community has received and the reputational values that the City of Brighton continues to enjoy and the affect that their charity Albion in the Community has had on changing the lives of many people. In reviewing both days it was clear that despite many of the challenges that we face as a society when it comes to trust and transparency, all of the business represented showed us that they were serious about inclusivity, diversity and authenticity, and that the benefits accrued by both customers and colleagues would win in the end. Very encouraging and inspiring. And from a customer engagement perspective, the world is not going to hell in a handcart!
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER VIEW FROM THE CHAIR
Manuela Pifani: Chair’s Report 2019 Customer Engage Conference This event never lets you down. I have been attending them for a few years now and they always prove to be an immense source of inspiring speakers and insightful case studies. Also, this year’s topic of Trust and Transparency brought a different angle to traditional CX stories and put the focus on areas which are often overlooked as ‘given’, despite representing key ‘make or break’ elements of the experience we deliver to customers on a daily basis.
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n both days, the plenary sessions were excellent, but it is not my role to comment on those here. After the coffee break, I took up my chairperson role in jam-packed Hall 3. First up on stage was charismatic Joe Rice from Twitter, who put the spotlight on one of the biggest challenges currently facing CX practitioners: the increasing inefficiency of traditional customer surveys, which is hampering the ability to get actionable customer feedback. Growing survey fatigue, decreasing response rates, risk of interference with customer journeys, rising costs… you name it. And yet, Joe’s answer was simple: listen to what customers are saying online, for free! Nowadays people are communicating more than ever, especially on social sites like Twitter, offering on a silver plate a large amount of valuable and unique insight, because it is unprompted and inthe-moment, authentic and deeply emotional. Customers blend their work and personal lives while searching, reading, watching, playing, listening and connecting to share experiences, opinions and information – giving us the possibility to measure each step of their journey, identify unmet needs and even the next big thing. But Joe’s conclusion is that, shockingly, most organisations miss it all and stick only to traditional customer surveys. A fair challenge! Next on the agenda was the Live Poll on Trust and Transparency. Despite the inarguably small sample of participants in the room and therefore the statistically unreliable results, a couple of clear messages emerged. Firstly, that recommendations and reviews play a key role in people’s purchasing decisions and very few would trust buying something with bad write-ups. Secondly, that most organisations are improving their ability to understand customer needs and set clear brand promises and CX strategies in line with that, but most are still behind the curve in their ability to deliver the experience that customers expect. This is totally in line with one of my main observations when working with my clients: most organisations focus on the functional elements they need to deliver to customers, like product features and service quality, but fail to take the next step towards understanding and designing how they can achieve the more emotional outcomes customer actually expect from those products and services. Organisations focus on what they have to do, instead of thinking about why the customer needs that and what they want the ultimate outcome to be, like being treated fairly, being in control, and feeling confident. I honestly believe that the organisations that make this shift will strengthen their customer relationships and put clear blue water between them and their competitors. Matt Jenner then took the stage to share a perfect example of the importance of truly understanding who your customers are and what they need. Their strategy at FutureLearn started with the ambition to bring the US-born MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)
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approach to Europe and the mission ‘to pioneer the best social learning experience for everyone, anywhere’. But they soon discovered that this focus on democratising education through a ‘one size fits all’ approach was taking them down the wrong path. Deeper research on their customers led to creating a series of target archetypes based on learner motivations, which enabled the development of content more tailored to the specific needs of individual customer groups. The 2,000 courses they can now offer to over 10 million learners are a testimony to the success of this more targeted approach! The charming Alan Whitaker, CEO of Billion Child Foundation, moved the conversation to the power of listening skills and shared a masterclass on understanding decision making styles. His twoby-two matrix built around the axes of degrees of ‘domination’ and ‘formality’ defined four personality types with very different leadership attitudes and information needs. Crack these, and you‘ll be able to influence them to a tee. By 2044, the Foundation wants to enable one billion children around the world to attend schools which are centres of excellence. They believe that transforming education in low scoring district areas will radically change the lives of those children and communities. This is why winning hearts and minds of investors is of critical importance to attract the right level of funding – and Alan identified his most receptive audience in the ‘promotors’ quadrant, i.e. people with high degrees of charisma and informal passion. I believe that by the end of his presentation, he found quite a few more promotors in the audience willing to support his excellence cause! Sunny Singh reinforced the role of trust as a key driver of customer experience. Based on a careful balance of tangible elements (linked to specific features and delivering on expectations consistently) and intangible elements, it remains the key to engage customers more deeply with the brand and differentiate it from others. He also pointed out that trust doesn’t ‘just happen’, but is the result of focused experience design and innovation and investment in the right technology. Charming Keith Gait, Customer Service Director at Stagecoach and a passionate customer advocate and friend of mine, led the audience towards the lunch break with an honest and personal look at what it takes to be a successful board member. He shared a number of tips based on his personal experience and learnings – far too many to do them justice here, so I will stick to the three that resonated the most with me. Firstly, ‘beware of single-issue evangelists’, as they will drag you down their pet complaint, potentially taking the focus away from more important issues. Then, CX leadership is ‘about conducting the orchestra’, as every instrument is critical to the final harmony it delivers and only one
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off-key note can ruin its impact. And finally, ‘work on your EQ’, as indeed too many leaders leverage their intellectual capacities in their decision making, without applying enough of their emotional intelligence. After lunch, Eliška Docškalová was first back on stage in Hall 3 to share how customer experience transformation was at the core of Kiwi.com’s mission to ‘make travel better’. In particular, I loved the focus on defining a clear customer strategy and creating a ‘CX tribe’ at the heart of the business to be its guardian and defender. Clear focus and people power – the two key ingredients of any CX effort! Jozef Brodala reinforced the importance of understanding the needs of different customer groups. At Forza Football, they identified three different types of fan profiles, around which they build their business model strategy and transformation. The ‘commoner’, ‘true fan’ and ‘connoisseur’ have different content and data needs, which cannot be met by a one-size-fits-all solution, but require the ability to manage different layers of content in the platform in terms of its breadth and depth. Their strategy now uses a balance of crowdsourcing (content submitted by users) and clubsourcing (by the clubs themselves) to enable Forza Football to meet those differentiated customer needs at scale, taking them closer to their mission ‘to cover every single match in the world’. Next up was David Caton with a powerful case study on how a clear focus on customers can disrupt a sector like telcoms. From day one, giffgaff’s strategy clearly aimed to cut out redundant business complexity like call centres, shops or selling phones, to ‘make mobile better’ by building on the simple concept of ‘mutuality’. Indeed, ‘giffgaff’ is an old Scottish saying that means ‘mutual giving’ – and it is the core of their business model. They have members, not customers. Members help others, not contact centres, because they believe in a mutual and collaborative way to run their business. And every decision is made with members, which builds mutual trust, in turn creating value. Transparency is another key factor in giffgaff’s mantra. Not only they offer total flexibility and transparency, without contracts or small print, but also they adopt an honest and proactive approach to the relationship with their members. For example, they clearly communicate any price increase, explaining the reasons behind it, and proactively contact their members with remedial action and compensation should they experience any network issues, independently on whether they were caused by giffgaff or their partners. Needless to say, this level of transparency further reinforces trust – which explains why giffgaff are the fastest growing UK mobile operator! Then Antony Antoni shared a moving example of purpose-driven marketing. The multibillion-dollar dolphin entertainment industry uses over 3,000 captive animals around the world and generates up to $5bn dollars revenue per annum. Tourist operators’ campaigns masquerade this cruelty as innocent family fun, fooling the public into believing this is acceptable or even better for the animals. World Animal Protection’s latest campaign is now trying to dispel these industry lies, working with the travel industry to call for an end of captive breeding of dolphins for entertainment. Companies like Virgin Holidays and British Airways have already stopped selling tickets and are leading the way towards higher industry responsibility. Rafael Espesani from Mondelēz International moved the discussion to the more traditional role of marketing to increase brand awareness. The new ‘give me strength’ social campaign for Trebor uses humorous customer centric content to create an appealing brand personality. The underlying insight was generated through social listening and resulted in a series of short social films designed to be mobile-first, to better reach the target audience. Loyalty can mean different things to different people: this was the key take-away from Richard Spencer’s presentation. He explained that loyalty is the combination of emotions that drives what we do, so organisations need to understand their customers’ feelings and emotional drivers. About Loyalty has identified 12 key driver dimensions and evaluated each with a number of charities. This showed that trust, commitment and satisfaction are the strongest drivers for this sector – and charities can use this insight to predict customer behaviour, including propensity and intention to buy more. Couldn’t agree more! Do you know what your customers’
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Manuela Pifani, Founder and Managing Director, CXellence Consulting emotional drivers are? Next up after the break, Daisy Donald started with a challenge most CX practitioners will empathise with: “It’s great that we are listening to our customers, but the disparate sources of information make it hard to know what to prioritise”. Daisy shared how the FT devised a QX (quality experience) Score to create a single source of the truth and prioritise the areas which matter the most. Neil Gregory closed an insightful day by reminding the audience about the importance of building cultural awareness and engaging all colleagues behind the customer mission. A company like Naked Wines, with already strong customer and employee metrics performance, could take their service to the next level only by totally aligning the customer and colleague agenda. They now work on the principle that colleagues deserve, and benefit from, the same approach they give to customers. Built around the 4 key pillars of Empathy, Action, Honesty and Consistency, this parallel focus on External and Internal Customers has strengthened communication between teams and promoted a service-led culture throughout the business. I admit I was particularly jealous of Naked Wines’ ability to engage customers and people in research activities… by taking them on blind wine tasting tours! Certainly beats any free vouchers and stale sandwiches most of us can offer at focus groups… The second day of the Summit was opened by another battery of powerful keynotes, after which the audience resumed their pilgrimage in the quest of insight and inspiration across three different parallel streams. Susan Stockwell was first one up with me in Hall 2, reiterating a key point we had already heard a few times the day before: the importance of research to understand customers and what they truly need. I couldn’t agree more with Susan that often organisations take for granted that people know their customers, especially when they have been there a long time ... but do they really know them? The Hyde Group, operating in the social housing and utilities sector, didn’t want to fall into that trap, especially at a time when,
in the wake of events like Grenfell, they had to strengthen customer trust. Indeed, the main lesson they learn from that was that customers felt they were not listened to. Therefore, through research, they created behavioural personas to enhance their data and demographic insight, and they defined their customer strategy and target customer experience around them. But their focus now is on delivering the proof points to turn the strategy into reality, to achieve the desired high levels of satisfaction and strengthen customer trust. Herbert Verschuren took the stage next to share how Air France KLM transformed their call centres from operational, costdriven units into customer-focused contact centres, which deliver differentiated services based on customer needs and value. They started with answering the key questions as to ‘why do we exist’, which enable them to define their key focus to ‘create effortless and memorable customer interactions’, as well as the customer proposition on how to deliver them, differentiated for different customer value groups. But having 30 contact centres around the world working in 30 languages, with over 3,000 staff covering 200 markets with different cultures and over 20 million customer interactions annually, consistency of delivery was an unquestionable challenge. And an additional one was posed by the fact that they were serving two brands with very different personalities (Air France and KLM). The answer was engagement – working with the contact centre people to translate the CX vision into reality by designing the touchpoints and the overall culture required to implement them at scale, worldwide. This also led to the creation of a new ‘we care for our customers’ programme, which achieved symmetry between the customer and the people proposition, embedding customer-centricity across the organisation. Aimee Symonds then turned the ‘trust’ spotlight from customers to the core or the organisation, outlining the added value generated when people feel trusted. The Intellectual Property Office started a new project called ‘adaptive’ to build a high trust culture, which listened to its people to progressively drive changes to the overall ways of working and environment. Rosie Bailey’s presentation was perfect to end the day in Hall 2, as she reminded the audience that the right strategy is important, but even more important is the organisation’s ability to deliver it in a fast and agile way. Rosie shared some of the lessons they learnt at CitySprint, from not choosing partners who are not in line with your culture, to not singing success too soon before results emerge – and concluded with the wise words that, very often, passionate people and elbow grease are the key to success. And to conclude, I would like to personally thank all those people who are passionate about the customer and attended these super-insightful two days – and may that elbow grease be with you!
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Tickets £995
2020
Monday 7 December 2020 Riverbank Park Plaza, London Welcome to the industry’s largest customer engagement event, where you’ll join 800 peers as you witness 70+ speakers from world-class brands presenting a realm of case study content relating to the latest innovations in the CX world, helping you to go back to the office armed with an array of new, exciting strategies to delight your customers.
CustomerEngagementSummit.com #EngageCustomer
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER VIEW FROM THE CHAIR
Jo Moffat: Chair’s Report 2019 Customer Engage Conference Delegates in the Customer Engagement Summit in Hall 4 heard a lot of voices talking about voice. The power of voice, the impact of voice, the tone of voice. The voice of employees (VOE), the voice of customers (VOC) and even the voice of bots (VOB)! A recurring theme being how listening to voices and speaking with an authentic voice is a key driver of trust.
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hair, Jo Moffatt, Co-Strategy Director and Radio show host at Engage for Success opened the day’s session with ‘Engagement, Experience, Loyalty – Does it Matter?’ She argued that with low productivity, appalling trust levels and poor employee engagement UK plc should concentrate on taking action, rather than debating terminology. With examples from across a range of sectors, Jo outlined the Engage for Success Four Enablers model as a simple lens through which to address the problem and leverage the direct link between customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX). ‘A relationship? Engagement? Or a casual fling? What do customers really want from us, and how do we attempt to give it to them?’ Ben Kay, Director of Brand and Customer Engagement, Ex Thames Water shared his model for engaging customers – Context, Relevance, Value, Channel and Mode are all important, but trumping all of these for Ben was authenticity. As well as the obligatory Thames Water fat berg picture, Ben was all about building emotional engagement and trust with authenticity. Does your brand pass the ‘Dad dancing’ test? ‘In a World where Stores are Consistently Closing, how do you Empower the Entire Organisation to take Action with Customer Feedback?’ For Douglas Mancini, Vice President Sales EMEA, Critizr it’s about giving store managers real-time access to customer voice – what they are happy, or more importantly unhappy about, right now, right this minute. Store managers can then act immediately to put it right – really adding value to the feedback and turning a detractor into an advocate. Lilia Dikova, Head of Digital at Make It Cheaper, focussed on putting the audience first, front and at the centre of everything. Lily’s presentation was a thorough and methodical approach to applying an audience-first strategy to increase conversion and bring highlypersonalised journeys to customers. Lily’s Holy Grail being to deliver the right message at the right time with the right channel reaching the right person. ‘How Yammer is changing the way we communicate at ZSL’ Clare Bowers, Internal Communications Manager, Zoological Society of London had no shortage of cute animal pics – all the usual suspects and a few unusual ones thrown in too. Who identified the pangolin? Clare described how introducing Yammer has created a vibrant channel for colleague interaction around the world – and helped support their Press Office with content for external comms too. She proved to a sceptical leadership that content does not need to be moderated and that trusting your people is not misplaced; they in turn will then take responsibility, act responsibly and be trusted. ‘Building Culture: Is it the same on the Inside of the tent as the view on the Outside…’ Charlotte Tickle, People Director, Riverford told a story of how worrying trends in employee turnover triggered a radical overhaul of organisational culture. This concern had been masked by high levels of engagement with the organisation’s mission and values. But listening to employee voice identified concerns with leadership visibility and line manager support, so a programme of coaching and development was put in place to
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address this. This helped deliver Riverford’s ambition to be, not just a good place, but an exceptional place to work where what people say they are on the outside, aligns with what they really are on the inside. ‘Customer Engagement in the Education Industry’ was the topic for Angel Lozano, Director Of Institutional Advancement, TASIS The American School in England. Angel told how storytelling and a strong emphasis on traditional media and customer relationships is key to building trust among customers and potential customers. Trust is at the heart of the business model for an international school where parents may be entrusting their children to an organisation on the other side of the world. It was, not surprisingly, standing room only for the first session in Artificial intelligence and robotics. ‘Look Who’s Talking: Brand and Persona in Connected Devices’ gave us Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education, Google, telling entertaining and engaging stories about the VOB – the voice of the bots who serve brand content through Google Assistant. Who knew you could send a bot to butler school!? ‘Building an Approach for Success: The Samsung Analytics Story’ came from Nick Milne, Director, Customer & Marketing Analytics, Samsung Europe. Nick shared the challenges, and sometimes frustrations, of trying to really gain a single, consistent view of the customer and business data in order to drive insights. How to do that against an engrained culture of silos and secrecy, called for bucket loads of resilience and entrepreneurship. ‘Data: The World’s most Valuable Resource?’ Matthew Gardiner, CEO, Catch London kicked off with some scary, indeed terrifying, numbers. There are already in existence three million book’s worth of data on each and every one of us. He went on to paint a picture of our current and future world and the impact and implications of more and more data,
Jo Moffatt, Co-Strategy Director and Radio Show Host, Engage for Success
the challenges of regulating this or not, and the extent to which we as individuals are happy about where this is all going. It seems that across the board, the Rubicon which we as consumers are unwilling to cross is to accept facial recognition – there is increasing resistance to this which is seen as the last bastion of our individuality. We are not up for that being cloned. The closing session from Louise Ferguson, Executive Assistant to the CEO at Henshaws, a charity which helps people with visual impairment and other disabilities ‘go beyond expectations’, looked at ‘How Important are Staff Values in Improving the lives of those Living with Sight Loss? How have we Strategically Embedded these Values?’ Louise told a great story of employee voice contributing to a new rebrand and values which underpinned the way they work every day. The closing film of a young service user re-learning to walk ended the day with hardly a dry eye in the house.
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER FEATURE
Mining CX conversation gold Sky Spain explains the five steps to encouraging positive and productive internal customer experience conversation, and the challenges this helps to overcome.
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I have always felt that the people in the contact centre know so much – they have so much information back from customers.
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Nick Macfarlane, Head of Customer Experience, Sky Spain
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n a time when customers have several quality options for their OTT (over the top and internetbased) television services, providers need to think outside of box to stay ahead of the competition. British telecommunications company Sky boasts 24 million customers across seven European countries, with 31,000 total employees. Launched in September 2017, Sky Spain is the newest addition to the Sky Group and provides live paid TV channels and a video ondemand library of season box sets and movies. Nick Macfarlane, Head of Customer Experience at Sky Spain, introduces the company further: “We have always tried to do things slightly differently and act like a bit of a start-up in the bigger Sky organisation. That’s certainly given me the opportunity to do customer experience in a way that I have always wanted to. It’s been a great journey and we’re learning a lot in a challenging market. It’s a good time to be in OTT television right now.” Macfarlane continues to explain that he believes the contact centre is the ‘nucleus’ of customer experience. “I have always felt that the people in the contact centre know so much – they have so much information back from customers,” he says. “Often people think that they just deal with the complaints, but I firmly believe that in the contact centres you hear so much more than that. It’s the personable moments and bits of information that your staff who are actually speaking with your customers hear that can give you valuable insight into what your customers think of your business. It’s all about capturing that and turning it into something useful.” He says that many call listening initiatives and text analytics are done in the contact centre to measure how to effectively improve employee performance. “For me, it’s such a resource – it gives us the ability to tap into and understand what our customers are saying and how they feel. We track emotion, what they like and dislike, what their effort is in using your service. Relaying that back to the whole organisation
is really valuable.” Furthermore, Macfarlane describes the five key elements to ‘mining CX conversation gold’ that he has found in his three and a half years of leading the CX function for Sky Spain. The first is creating a CX conversation culture: “It’s about creating an environment where your front-line staff don’t feel they are pushed on every last second and need to get the calls done as quickly as possible. It’s about encouraging them to see their role as real people helping and advising other real people, and having great human conversations around whatever it may be. That is where you get that rich insight.” “A CX conversation culture also flows onto how you talk about what your customers say, do, and feel across the rest of the organisation. We have built a very interactive top-level view of all of these pieces of information from these great conversations which allow our whole teams to talk about customer experience. That’s the customer conversation culture that I’m trying to establish.” The second is checking your assumptions at the door. “Often when we are thinking about customer problems in business, we know our own product too well or we assume too quickly that we know how to fix customer issues. However, if you start listening to the small details and go deep into what your customers are saying you can build a far clearer picture of what is and isn’t going well. This means you can react to the important things and really take a step forward in making their overall experience better.” The third is that content is king. “This phrase is well-known in the TV and media industries, but I use it in a slightly different context. When giving our many different stakeholders across our organisation this rich customer insight, we have to make it engaging and give them a reason to want to interact with it and read it. You can’t expect them to read or get value from a spreadsheet mined straight out of your CRM system.”
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“We very much think of ourselves as the curators, or the publishers, of customer experience content. With that in mind, everything that we send out looks beautiful and is targeted at a specific audience with key headlines that make them want to read it.” He says that in CX one cannot just be the ‘postman’ and deliver the content without being part of it. “We need to make sure people get it, they want to interact with it, and they’ll do something with it.” The fourth element is to keep it human: “There’s a lot of talk about customer experience and what it means. It often means different things to different organisations, or even different people within an organisation, you have to be able to explain that,” he says. “It goes back to real people understanding real people’s thoughts on
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what you’re trying to do, and really just trying to make their lives better when they interact with your service. We try to put a human touch on everything we do.” Macfarlane notes that this includes incorporating photos and quotes from his team in customer surveys to progress this more personable relationship. The final point is to keep it simple: “We use a very simple four step model, which is: Listen, Interpret, Act, and Monitor. We’ve set ourselves a target this year of 15 insights being actioned and monitored, which therefore demonstrates real value off the back of our CX work.” He says that this has been a success and ensured that these goals are achieved. Additionally, Macfarlane discusses that the biggest challenge Sky Spain faces today in regards to customer
engagement is ensuring it is providing the content that everyone is talking about, as most customers choose between a Sky, Netflix, or Amazon Prime subscription based on the content provided readily on each service. He says: “Big shows are what people come to and stay on your platform for.” Macfarlane emphasises further the importance of building and maintaining a human relationship with customers to overcome this challenge. He highlights Sky Spain’s most recent marketing campaign, ‘La Buena TV’ as a success story in this effort. “This positioned us as the TV service you can trust, the one that’s got your back, the one that offers you total transparency and tries to make your life easier,” he says. “This makes people want to stay with you because they like and trust you. We want to provide a range of shows on our one platform so our customers don’t feel the need to look elsewhere, and enable our customers to dip in and out when they want to because they feel they can.”
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER SURVEY RESULTS
How useful to your company was the information presented at the event?
28% Useful
Would you attend the conference again next year?
80% Yes
68% Extremely/Very useful
20% Maybe
Please describe your event experience in one sentence:
Amazing day with lots of different talks and information. Great opportunity to share and get best practise from across a wide range of sectors.
Very informative and thought provoking.
A great place to learn and network.
Very useful to understand the CX direction of other organisations. The Summit was a wonderful experience, delivering a blend of relevant themes and case studies. The event gave useful insights into the current state of CX and the chance to meet leading practitioners. Focussed and succinct presentations by a really good range of organisations giving great insight into how they manage CX.
It was inspiring to hear what organisations are doing to build trust with their customers.
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Which speakers were your favourite?
Marc Thornborough
Bethany Hibbert
Tanu Gupta
Moira Clark
Greg Reed
Henley Business School
HomeServe
Keith Gait
Mark Billingham
Aimee Symonds
Joe Rice
Dr Nicola Millard
Stagecoach
Shop Direct
Intellectual Property Office
BT
How would you rate the organisation of the day?
100%
Auto Trader Group plc
How did the event compare with what you expected?
51% 49% Much better than expected
Met my high expectations
Excellent/Good
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER INTERVIEW
The importance of customer trust Edelman, the world’s largest global independent communication firm, explains how the insight provided by its annual trust barometer can reflect and inform customer relationships with brands across the sectors.
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rust has never been more important for companies to develop and maintain. It affects every aspect of a customer’s relationship with a brand and can ultimately result in the success or failure of an organisation. Edelman works with brands and organisations to help build trust through communications and PR, with over 6,000 employees in 60 markets across the world. Edelman spans across the whole breadth of marketing and communications services, working across corporate financial and health, technology, affairs, communication, and has specialities in crisis communications purpose, employee experience, digital, creative, and content. Its annual Trust Barometer has been gathering data for two decades, exploring trust in business, government, NGOs, and media, and surveys over 34,000 people in 28 markets. Gerry Wisniewski, Managing Director at Edelman, discusses why this data collection is so important: “We have many proof points collected over those years to demonstrate why building trust with customers and stakeholders is so critical.” The first, she says, is that “trusted companies have greater license to operate”. The second is that “trusted companies have better relationships with consumers”. She explains this further: “Three quarters of people in our database say they actively recommend a business they trust. This means they’ll be willing to pay a premium, they’ll want to try your latest innovations first, and they’ll stick with your brand even if a competitor gets better reviews or is more innovative or greener. Customers who trust you are more likely to engage with, buy from, advocate for, and defend you.” The third is that “trusted firms have trusted employee relationships”. She says: “Our data says that seven in 10 people are proud to work for companies they trust, compared to half who are embarrassed to work for people they distrust. Trusted companies are also more likely to have employees that recommend them as a great place to work and advocate for them.”
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The fourth is that “trusted companies are more likely to receive institutional investment and investor opportunities”. She highlights that investors say that their trust in a company is the single most important factor when considering investment decisions, placing it above 17 other factors including financial evaluation and an engaged board of directors. Wisniewski also mentions that “trusted companies are more likely to out-perform the stock market,” detailing that “over a one-year period, trusted companies’ stock out-performed their sector indexes by more than 5%.”
Gerry Wisniewski, Managing Director, Edelman
The final proof point she notes is that “trusted companies are much more resilient in the face of a crisis or risk”, relating back to consumers and employees being more likely to remain loyal to and continue supporting brands that they trust, even in times of difficulty. “If you put these all together, you can see that there are significant benefits to being a trusted company and ensuring you have that strong customer reputation.” Wisniewski continues to describe the key industry insights that the Trust Barometer for 2019 showed. “The world has never been more divided,” she says, “of the 26 countries that we surveyed last year, 15 are distrusting. One contributing factor has been political uncertainty and upheaval.” “We saw a very modest rise in trust across NGOs, business, government, and media. NGOs and business are the most trusted, and the government and media
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are still generally distrusted with modest year-on-year improvements.” She says that trust in tech remains the highest of all sectors by a significant margin, which she finds surprising. “There have been data privacy scandals, electorate manipulation, crises in leadership, and the growing power and influence of large tech companies, particularly those in Silicon Valley.” Although, she acknowledges that this disparity might be due to the general public who were surveyed not equating their personal technological devices and the benefits they provide with the broader issues in this sector. Wisniewski explores this further, stating that the tech sector is in a precarious position behind the scenes. “We saw entrepreneurs and investors warning that AI may be the ultimate threat to humanity. We also saw employees walking out of tech firms, saying that they didn’t want to work for companies that sold to the military or had alleged harassment and discrimination and assault,” she says. “Our data also shows that people have concerns about the power of information tech firms have, with 65% of respondents saying technology companies have too much power to determine what news and information people see or not.” “There are also concerns that tech companies put profit before customers. Nearly half of respondents said they feared the pace of innovation, and they felt that disruption was happening too fast and they didn’t understand how this disruption was going to affect their lives. People were worried about losing their jobs to automation, and the tech sector needs to address these fears to build stronger trust.” However, she emphasises that there could be a positive future for trust around the
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There are also concerns that tech companies put profit before customers. Nearly half of respondents said they feared the pace of innovation, and they felt that disruption was happening too fast and they didn’t understand how this disruption was going to affect their lives.
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tech sector if they actively and appropriately work towards easing these concerns. “Tech needs to be a force for positive change. These sectors have a responsibility to guide society through the disruptions they are part of so people can feel better prepared. There is a global rising tide of people who say that profit and the greater good are not mutually exclusive. They want to see positive societal change in their communities and feel that tech companies are able to create this without sacrificing a profit. Firms need to show that they are adding value in their communities.” This is most relevant with employees in the tech sector. “People expect their employers to be part of this solution, and the majority say that it is critically important for their employers to respond and talk about challenging times and sensitive subjects,” Wisniewski says. “Employees want to work for companies with leadership that stands up for them and their shared values. Companies need to go back to their core values and have a strong view of how they can build trust.” Moving forward, Wisniewski says that the 20th Trust Barometer will also include the health tech sector as a new category for data collection. “This is an emerging sector where we’re seeing this combination of technology from AI and block chain and IOT and wearables coming together.” She feels that measuring how this newer sub-section of the tech industry will fare in trust amongst the general public, and comparing it to how people feel working within this industry, will add vital further insight to the existing Trust Barometer, continuing to develop and progress it each year.
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The digital marketing revolution BuzzFeed explains how it created and developed the number one food and drink publisher in the world, and how this platform is utilised effectively in the new age of digital marketing and consumer engagement.
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uzzFeed is a leading independent digital media and news delivers that company entertainment to hundreds of millions of people around the world. It first became known for its viral listicles and quizzes, and then its video content, and subsequently it expanded and launched its sub-brands. These include: Tasty, its food brand, Bring Me, its travel and experience brand, As Is, its beauty and lifestyle brand, Goodful, its wellness and lifestyle brand, Nifty, its DIY brand, Playfull, its brand for parents, and BuzzFeed News, its brand for serious journalism and world news. BuzzFeed has been a trailblazer in a new and digitally-led way to grow brands and sell products. James Lamon, Head of Content at BuzzFeed UK, introduces this further: “Social media is quickly becoming the best place companies have to reach their customers. As the marketplace changes and more and more commerce moves online, if you’re trying to reach a large audience that you can sell a product or provide a service to, social media is perhaps the best way to reach a large number of people at once.” He discusses the common issue brands can face when first trying to navigate this new marketing landscape. “In an effort to accommodate this, brands are bringing strategies that they have created for other places, such as television or in-store, to the social media space. This can sometimes cause problems in reaching their audience in an optimal way.” He explains that this risks turning potential customers off if they are not being approached appropriately in the social space, and can prevent brands from reaching the level of success that they could achieve; the same success that BuzzFeed and other media companies have achieved in the social space. Lamon explains this further, stating that BuzzFeed takes an audience-first approach in its content, which he says is what has allowed the company to grow to its current size. “What that means, plain and simple, is that when we make something and put it on social media we seek to address the needs of a single real individual who is using that platform.” He continues: “Working in the marketplace, I think sometimes we forget that social media is deeply personal. People create their accounts to entertain themselves and to connect with their friends and follow influencers, and it can be quite revealing and even
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embarrassing at times; it’s a little private window into our lives.” He says that approaching one’s audience with a productled approach won’t always translate in the intended way, and that BuzzFeed has found far more success in pausing and thinking about how its product, message, service, and brand fits into the life of someone on social media, and meeting them in what they are already looking at and engaging with. “That is to think audience-first.” Lamon relates this shift in approach to ‘The Connection Spectrum’, which is the shift from targeting the collective to targeting the individual. “This is something that social media enables.” He says that traditional advertising targets the collective, and uses the example of a TV advertisement. “It’s expensive and you’re going to make one ad, or several versions of one ad, and you need to speak to your entire customer base with this one marketing communication, so it has to connect with everyone.” He says that this approach does not work on social platforms, as it is too generalised to significantly impact the individuals that see it. “You can see evidence of this by the many brands that take a commercial made for TV or YouTube and put it on Facebook, and then don’t see anyone watching it or completing viewing or saying any nice things about it. Instead of going viral it flops because it wasn’t meant to go in that personal space,” he says. “Social media forces you to connect more one-on-one because it is a portal for users to connect personally with people that they have actively chosen to connect with and follow.” Despite this common mistake, Lamon emphasises that this is not something for brands to be afraid of, and instead it should be valued as a new an opportunity. “By virtue of media consumption on social media, you don’t need to spend millions of pounds in an expensive, high budget commercial. You can make many small bits of content that can connect to many different individuals in
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Social media is quickly becoming the best place companies have to reach their customers.
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many different ways.” He highlights that when brands think audience-first and prioritise what will appeal to specific individuals’ likes and wants, it makes the content more shareable and engaging to consumers within their social network, and the brand’s content will be shared further and have a larger reach. “This change has been happening for years now. I think this a watershed moment in the industry.” Once this audience has significantly grown and a positive relationship has been built, brands can then advertise more successfully to this community. Lamon uses BuzzFeed’s food brand, Tasty, as a key success story of this approach: “Tasty is now the world’s largest food network with over 100 million fans with different editions and languages across the world. From Britain alone, Tasty videos reach 18 million people a month with 54 million monthly video views, averaging 44,000 views per video.” The Tasty channel grew at an incredible speed, garnering 1.2 million likes in its first month alone, and in 2017 was named one of TIME Magazine’s best 25 inventions of the year. “But we didn’t stop there, and I think this is what people don’t realise about the future of media and brand-building on social media,” Lamon says. “Once we had a large and engaged audience on Tasty, we started developing products for that audience. Our first Tasty cookbook sold 100,000 copies in its first month, and we have now sold over one million cookbooks to date. We made a Tasty app that has millions of downloads and users; we have a onetop cooking appliance, which is an induction hob that talks to our app and makes cooking easier; we have a range of cookware, and we have Tastybranded foods in-market.” He continues: “What’s interesting about this is if we had gone straight to the market trying to sell any of these things no one would have cared, but once we had built the Tasty brand and that brand stood for something people were interested in buying our products. We’ve changed the way that brands can be built in the modern era.” This has completely revolutionised how consumers are marketed to. Tasty built a huge audience, and then successfully converted this pool of people into its customers through advertising within its content. “By using our products in our cooking Tasty videos we are marketing and advertising our own products at the same time as making content to entertain people. It’s the idea of building an audience first,
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James Lamon, Head of Content, BuzzFeed
and then being able to sell that audience products.” This has also had the knock-on effect of changing the landscape of social media itself. “Social media is serving more enterprise needs and the targeting is already very good, but now they’re rolling out tools that allow you to do market research and surveying of your audience. The buy button is also rolling out across all markets so consumers can buy directly from their social feed.” Lamon speculates that, with the increasingly growing market on social media and the decline in traditional shopping methods, there is a possible future where social media can become an all-in-one marketing solution. “You can find, reach, and target an audience on social media, and convert them into your customers by selling products in-feed. Then, once customers buy your products, if they have questions or problems you can speak to them using consumer management platforms all rolled into one.” He emphasises that these communities also help to shape the products sold. “These products are informed by our efforts in the media space and having a two-way connection with our audience, which is enabled by the features of social media like the comment box where we can get direct and ongoing feedback.” He uses the example of a spatula Tasty sells that was a direct result of customer feedback on a pancake video, which led to the BuzzFeed team developing a product specifically catered to address the needs highlighted by its audience. “This is how easy and linear this can be.” “At the heart of all this is creating a large footprint on social media. It requires you to play by the rules of the media companies and the influencers; if you don’t do that then you just won’t win,” he says. “It really changes the way that you style yourself, your brand truths and brand values, and how you present yourself to the public.” Lamon finishes by giving insight into what we can expect to see from BuzzFeed moving forward. “Tasty is a forerunner of a lot of the BuzzFeed brands, and we are thinking more about expanding into licensing our brands, developing products, partnering with outside brands to develop products, and ultimately evolving from being just a media company that entertains people, to being a company that has a large media arm but also sells products direct to consumers. As a business, BuzzFeed is moving broadly in this direction in a million different ways across all of our brands.”
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER INTERVIEW
The six characteristics needed to thrive in a complex work environment Samsung explains why being entrepreneurial, patient, smart, resilient, and skilled at negotiation are key to thriving in a large and complex work environment.
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amsung is one of the most successful electronics brands in the world today. It produces a wide range of consumer products, including: phones, TVs, tablets, cameras, smartwatches, VR headsets, computers, laptops, printers, home appliances, security systems, and many more. Founded in South Korea, the company has played an integral part in transforming the country’s economy over the past 50 years, helping it develop from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest, contributing over 17% of its GDP. Nick Milne, Director of Customer and Marketing Analytics at Samsung, introduces the company further: “Politically and economically, Samsung is very important in South Korea.” He notes that although Samsung is most known for its electronics, it has also played a role in creating some iconic landmarks. “Not many people know that Samsung built the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. The building of the Petronas Towers is one of the key reasons Samsung is known for the quality, and speed, of its work.” He explains the transformation that has occurred in his team’s work and objectives since he joined the company. “When I joined the Samsung European office two and a half years ago, we were in a position where we just had specific little projects that we were picking up from an analytics perspective, and this wasn’t
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Nick Milne, Director of Customer and Marketing Analytics, Samsung
creating the impact that we needed within the organisation to really sell what data and analytics could do for Samsung.” To progress from this, his team created a framework which informed the organisation that they were becoming outcome-focused in terms of their approach to analytics. “Then, everything you do needs to better understand how you drive acquisition, retention, customer engagement, and also that you can pull all of the analytics projects together to show how they are working to deliver to that end goal.” Milne explains that he had a two-year timeframe to prove the worth of this: “Samsung works on two-year cycles, so every local market, every business unit, has a CEO for two years and then they move on to the next job. You need to show your senior stake holders and leaders that you’re delivering value within those two years.” He emphasises the importance of being able to show a clear set of deliverables in reaching your end goals. “Having a North star, our marketing excellence framework, was great, but you need to show the organisation the stats and deliverables that you are going to be delivering which help you
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We need to become more customer-focused and really understand what that means, and then deliver those experiences and communications in a relative fashion and in an integrated way.
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get to that North star, and therefore show the value of each of those as you are progressing,” he says. “That’s what’s really important, because you need to have credibility with your approach, and you need to show that the approach is working. If you break it down into those smalls steps and you can say that each of those steps has delivered value along the way, then this gives you credibility, momentum, and the impact you want as an organisation to be able to say that you want to do more, and you’re going to deliver more and add value through doing it.” To help in achieving this effectively, Milne discusses six characteristics that have been key to his team’s success. The first is to be entrepreneurial. “You can’t just have one or two projects that you are working on, you need to have a number of different projects that are in different stages of growth and maturity. At any point the organisation is going to change, and the tools and the capabilities that you’re delivering and that have helped add value to the organisation is going to have to change as well. At any point we might have between five and seven projects on the go at different stages that we’re delivering, and then we’ve had to change direction depending on where demand is in the business.” The next characteristics are to be patient, be smart, and be resilient. “You need to be flexible
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when working with other departments within the business, and know how you add value on top of what’s already being delivered elsewhere. Over and above everything else, being resilient is the number one thing you need.” The final elements are to persevere and know how to negotiate. “When I joined Samsung, I took over a project that was a vision of our previous European president, but it didn’t mean much other than people saying that Samsung needed a business intelligence platform,” he says. “We needed to understand what that was, what it would look like, how we would get there, what we needed to do it in terms of investment and resource. Negotiation and perseverance were particularly important over the 12 months and four trips it took out to our HQ office in South Korea to get approval to launch the platform. There is always going to be back and forth, especially in an organisation as big and complex as Samsung. At every stage you have to work quickly and be able to show the value your work is adding.” Milne highlights that the biggest challenge Samsung is currently navigating is moving from a product-led approach to a customer-led one, and he explains the progress Samsung wants to make in this area. “We talk about the fact that we need to become more customer-focused rather than product-focused, but that’s quite hard to do –
particularly in an organisation like Samsung where you haven’t needed to be as customer-focused as other organisations because the attractiveness of your product comes through the great innovation and quality of the product that Samsung has.” He continues: “We’ve also got more competitors coming into the market producing equally good quality phones, but selling them at a cheaper price than Samsung or Apple. For us, the approach that we traditionally had was around the point of purchase, but now we as an organisation need to start thinking how we can operate differently, and create personalised experiences and communications for customers over their lifetime. If a customer buys a phone at month zero and they are looking to buy a phone again at month 28, then we’ve got 28 months of opportunity to talk to our customers in a way that’s relative to them rather than just bombarding them with sales messages.” “We need to become more customer-focused and really understand what that means, and then deliver those experiences and communications in a relative fashion and in an integrated way,” Milne says. “We don’t currently tap into emotional messaging with our customers as much as we could, and we want to start doing that more often across our customer touchpoints.”
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Breaking the mould in customer service Census Life, a not-for-profit social enterprise and part of Census Group, explains how it provides opportunities for people involved in the criminal justice system to change the direction of their life, whilst providing its partner businesses with trained, dedicated, and loyal staff.
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t present, around 11.7 million people in the UK have a previous criminal conviction – just over 17% of the population. This is often the barrier finding individuals these preventing employment and becoming working and contributing members of society, and this number is rising. There are approximately 84,000 people in prison in the UK, an increase of over 50% in the last 25 years, costing the taxpayer significantly. It has never been more important to provide opportunities to people to help them break the cycle, change the direction of their lives, and reduce stigma towards them by employers. Richard Rowley, Managing Director at Census Life, introduces the organisation further. “Very simply, what we do is provide opportunities for people that are designed to deliver sustainable social and economic integration,” he says. “We’re really proud to be one of the largest employers of people in prisons, and currently we operate contact centres in 13 prisons across England and Wales. Our innovative approach has seen us win national and international awards over the last 18 months, including the Queen’s award for enterprise and the European Contact Centre and Customer Service Award in the ‘Giving Something Back’ category.” “We currently have 250 people working for us in our contact centres.” He notes that they only make outbound calls and therefore do not see the personal data of anyone they are contacting. “Our employees in the prisons work in a real-life commercial environment, delivering contracted work for real customers with targets to meet. We’ve provided employment and training for 7,000 people in prison, and we’ve helped over 300 find employment on release either as part of our homeworker network, or with our partners in the community.” He emphasises that Census Life’s vision is very clear: “Every person should have the opportunity to create a better future for themselves.” The idea for this initiative began in 2013 when Census Life’s CEO was working for a large-scale contact centre operation and was given the task of introducing retrospective CRB checks for existing staff. Consequently, one campaign lost 70% of its team overnight, leading to the termination of the contract by the client. “This highlighted a significant problem to our CEO who realised she had to let high-performing, well-trained employees go just because they had a previous criminal conviction.” He continues: “We started to think about specifically offering opportunities to the people that society often
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Richard Rowley, Managing Director, Census Life
Nicola Whitbread, Operations Manager, Census Life
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We employ people on merit, on the basis they’ve got the skills and the attitude to do a great job.
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overlooks. Our approach is very simple and unique. We employ people on merit, on the basis they’ve got the skills and the attitude to do a great job, and we really want other employers to do the same and to break the mould with their recruitment practices.” Rowley explains that evidence has shown that if someone has a job, a place to live, and someone to care and check in on them, they are far less likely to reoffend. Reoffending alone costs the UK £18 billion a year, so the economic benefits to society are clear. There are significant social benefits to be gained as well. He says: “The knock-on effect of the justice system is incredibly wide-reaching. For each person that is sent to prison, the impact is felt by 50 people around them. Children and families are affected, with inter-generational offending for years to come. This is why the work that we, and other organisations in this sector, do is so important. We provide the chance for people to take an alternative path.” There are also significant benefits for companies employing from this pool of people. Contact centres are notorious for having high turnover rates, which can be a strain on resources in continually needing to hire and train new individuals. “Our colleagues can be part of the solution; they want to work, and more importantly, they want stability and progression within their existing role. They don’t want to keep moving roles, and their loyalty shows in increased retention rates,” Rowley says. “For a lot of employers, this must be music to their ears.” Nicola Whitbread, Operations Manager at Census Life, shares her own personal experience of working for Census Life, showing how successful this approach can be. She says: “Census Life first started to help me when I was in prison; I worked in a call centre whilst still in custody. I learnt some basic customer service skills and worked in a real-life working environment.” “A company magazine came around asking if anybody wanted to be employed upon release.” She notes that everyone who works in Census Life’s call centres are offered employment on release. “I contacted
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my manager to put my name forward, and the CEO gave me a call and offered me a job in head office.” “I took the opportunity with both hands, and Census Life helped me find local accommodation and get a deposit as this required me to relocate. They helped me by paying me weekly rather than monthly, supporting me to get clothes that I needed so I didn’t look out of place in the office, and training me on the equipment I would be using,” she says. “They also gave me a lot of personal support. For example, bank holidays and weekends are quite a long time to someone who’s relocated to a new area and doesn’t know anybody. Just my colleagues giving me a call or text over the weekend to check in and make sure I was OK, that was enough to help me complete my job.” “I can’t stress enough how much this job has changed my life. I’ve been out of prison now since April 2018, and I haven’t reoffended. I’m clean from any substances, and I’m not on any medications anymore. I’m a PAYE employee; I have a car; I’ve been on holidays; I’m rebuilding relationships with my family, and more importantly, it’s made me a different person and given me a new chance at life.”
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Rowley agrees that this is a joint effort between Census Life and the employee. “We can certainly provide employment opportunities for our colleagues when they leave prison, but to do so we place a real emphasis on adequately preparing them for the world of work,” he says. “The hard work really is down to them. Whilst working for us in prison our colleagues are developing a work ethic, some of them for the first time. The work environment is exactly the same as they would encounter in the community, working on live campaigns, focusing on delivering a quality service, and achieving targets.” “They often feel that, in some ways, they’re on the outside looking in,” he continues. “When all they want is to be part of society and be accepted. For some, not everyone, they just need somebody to care enough to give them a chance. We firmly believe in second chances, which is why over 90% of our colleagues have a previous criminal conviction.” Moving forward, Rowley says that Census Life is continuing to grow and develop further. “we want to provides routes to employment for colleagues leaving prison. You’ll see us developing academies in the community to facilitate that transition once out of
custody. We’re already talking to businesses and charities, and importantly our colleagues themselves, about how and where we deliver this. To get this right, we need to consult and actively listen to the very people we’re trying to deliver this for.” They finish by emphasising again how important it is for this change to become more widespread for broader positive effects. “The work that we do gives people the chance to build a different future. One with fewer victims and a safer society, which ultimately benefits every single one of us,” Rowley says. “Imagine how it must feel to be accepted again by society – that’s a life-changing moment.”
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ENGAGE CUSTOMER REPORT
10 minutes with David Caton David Caton, Head of Proposition, CRM & Loyalty at giffgaff and speaker at our 2019 Customer Engagement Summit, gives insight into his case study and role …
What is your industry and how long have you been involved? I’ve been in marketing in the mobile industry nearly 20 years now, which took me by surprise when I realised. I woke up one day recently and I’d turned 40 and had worked in mobile all my career. How did that happen?!
What are the biggest challenges facing your industry? This year it’s probably 5G. It’s the bright new future for my sector but consumers don’t seem to be too enthusiastic about it yet. The challenge is to find and communicate compelling reasons to get 5G.
How much has the industry changed? Over the last few years we’ve seen a big shift in people ‘de-coupling’ their phone and their SIM, meaning they get their phone from one place and a SIM-only deal from somewhere else.
What are you working on at the moment? We’re trying to find ways to encourage more of our members to use the giffgaff app. It’s a cracking app and it can improve their experience with us if they download it. Members can track their data usage, flexibly change their goodybag (our name for their tariff) and do much more on the app.
How do you hope the future will pan out? I hope many people realise they don’t need a brand new phone costing more than £1,000, tying themselves into a long contract. Smartphones that are a generation or two behind are still awesome, and people can save a tonne if they get one of them and pair it with one of the brilliant SIM-only deals out there. At giffgaff we have a wide range of flexible tariffs with no contract to suit everyone, and this year we’re responding to the growing interest in quality refurbished phones by making a great range of those phones available.
How have customers changed? Here at giffgaff we call them members rather than customers, and over the last few years we’ve seen an explosion in the use of data. Even my dad uses lots of data now, and he’s 80. We’ve found members now usually choose a tariff based on the amount of data you get with it.
What has been your biggest success? In August of last year we doubled the amount of data in some of our most popular tariffs. Our members loved it: our NPS score shot up and we attracted lots more members to our network.
What has been your biggest disappointment? Alton Towers. (Sorry, this is a joke I’ve nicked from The Office).
What gets you up and out of bed in the morning? Office banter. The culture at giffgaff is the best of any company I’ve worked at.
Any advice on how to increase engagement? Be honest. Be authentic. Be yourself.
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INTERNATIONAL ENGAGE AWARDS 2020 MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER Welcome to the International Engage Awards Following on from the success of the 2019 Engage Awards, which saw Financial Services and Retail sectors as the big winners, we’re delighted that the 2020 Engage Awards are open for entries. This year sees 24 categories spanning every aspect of engagement, giving you more choice of categories than ever before. As the only customer and employee engagement awards programme, if you’ve achieved great things with your engagement initiatives, then the Engage Awards are perfect for you. We’re open for entries until Monday 13th July, so don’t miss out on recognising your efforts. We wish you the best of luck with your entries.
EngageAwards.co.uk
EBM Live Events INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE
ENGAGE FOCUS GROUPS
18 SEPTEMBER 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
25 SEPTEMBER 2020 I HILTON LONDON, HEATHROW
This Conference will take an in-depth look at the fast changing world of internal communications and how it is increasingly taking on the critical employee engagement role that has too often been neglected by those in HR.
Our exclusive Engage Focus groups allow senior individuals working in customer and employee engagement to come together and voice their thoughts and share experiences across a wide range of topics in a structured professional environment.
CX MARKETING SUMMIT 2020
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SUMMIT 2020
2 OCT 2020 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
9 NOV 2020 I WESTMINSTER PARK PLAZA, LONDON
Every interaction that a customer has with a company, be it online or offline, changes their impression of the brand. For this reason, there has never been a more important time for the marketing function to ensure a great CX through each touchpoint of creating awareness, driving conversions, and keeping existing customers happy.
Progressing into its seventh year, the Employee Engagement Summit is firmly established as Europe’s premier event, examining all aspects of work under the overarching theme of how technology is changing the face of employee engagement.
ENGAGE AWARDS 2020
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT SUMMIT 2020
9 NOV 2020 I WESTMINSTER PARK PLAZA, LONDON
7 DEC 2020 I RIVERBANK PARK PLAZA, LONDON
Following on from the success of the 2019 Engage Awards programme, which broke records across the board, we are delighted to announce the renaming of our programme for 2020 to the International Engage Awards.
Our flagship Customer Engagement Summit is back. Delegates will hear from 45+ speakers, and we’ll be covering the latest, hottest topics in the industry.
FUTURE OF THE CONTACT CENTRE
DIGITAL WORKPLACE CONFERENCE
12 FEB 20201 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
11 MARCH 2021 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON
Contact centres remain well placed to become the beating heart of an organisation’s customer engagement strategy. It is the contact centre that can deliver the customer insight that is needed in a business environment where our customers are in control of how they choose to interact with organisations and where the so called ‘customer journey’ is ever more complex.
Engaged employees are more important to organisations than ever before. Providing our people with a truly digital workplace environment enables new and more effective and efficient ways of working while improving engagement levels and at the same time relationships with our customers.
EMPLOYEE WELLBEING CONFERENCE 11 MARCH 2021 I VICTORIA PARK PLAZA, LONDON The challenges and opportunities relating to the mental, financial and physical health related wellbeing of our people are now firmly at the top of the business agenda, alongside increasing awareness and understanding of the myriad of issues involved.
EngageEmployee.com
For more information please contact us at:
tickets@ebm.media or 01932 506 300