Transcript: Martin Dowson Discusses Customer Experience Maturity

Martin Dowson is a recognized CX expert, with specific focus within Financial Services. Having led several failing banks back from the edge of customer ‘blowout’, and developed marketing leading customer experience for others, his insight into the problem areas Financial Services can fall into is second to none. He spoke to us about measuring maturity in customer experience.

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Call Center IQ: Hello everyone and welcome to this IQPC podcast. I’m Gerald Clarke. Today I’m joined by Martin Dowson, customer experience, strategy and capability builder. Martin, it’s a pleasure to have you here.

M Dowson: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Call Center IQ: Martin, you’ve been a consultant for many leading banks. What are the common challenges in customer experience?

M Dowson: One of the biggest challenges that banks face is their historic legacy and often the banks will tell you that one of the biggest legacies they have is their IT infrastructure and therefore the silos that build up around that. But I think it’s also a cultural legacy as well and what that means is that they are slow to make a change and slow to make innovations. So those legacy issues crop up when they see new ways of working or new ways of being or the need to change technology in order to be able to, for example, join up to the customer journey and they often perceive that as one of their biggest challenges. I think that some of the more mature banks in the space of customer experience are evolving away from those legacy issues but they definitely still remain. Those are probably the biggest ones. Other sub-issues are around regulation and compliance and its impact on things but I think there are far more easier ways for them to push through those challenges than the banks perceive with their silos of IT and culture.

Call Center IQ: What would you say are the key trends in this sector and what will be their impact from now until 2014?

M Dowson: So the key trends at the moment is that every single bank is working on trying to create some kind of joined up experience with customers, so multichannel or omnichannel. We can argue whether there’s a difference between the two but in an effort to differentiate people are talking about two different types of that. But the end result is to try and join up the experience for the customer such that what happens in the branch between people and what happens on the phone between people, customer and colleagues, is also something that is kept, retained and is consistent when they go online, so the information they gave you in branch appears in an application form that’s half complete that I can finish off online for example. Or when I call the call centre they know who I’ve talked to, where I’m at with everything that I’ve been doing online or in the branch. So this idea of multichannel is what all of the banks will be doing.

What I think is interesting is that individually a lot of the banks are saying we’re going to differentiate ourselves through better customer experiences, better joined up customer experience, and my experience so far is that most of them are just aiming for a new base level which is a joined up multichannel experience. Getting to the next point where you can actually truly differentiate, this is where it will be interesting to watch perhaps emerging trends which customers won’t be seeing yet around transforming the culture within a bank. And culture I don’t just mean the softer side of things about how the brand is reflected in the colleagues, I mean some really hard aspects of culture like actually are we measured and performance evaluated in a way that’s lined up to how we want to deal with our customers. And some banks are addressing that well and some banks are still addressing it in what I would call the old style which is perhaps not going to take them where they need to be.

Call Center IQ: With regards to the three focus areas of capability, insight and culture, could you tell us a little bit about each and where companies can go wrong?

M Dowson: Yes. In a customer experience maturity model I look at three pillars and one of the pillars is insight, one of the pillars is culture and one of the pillars is capability. And these three pillars you can think of as being on a level between one and five in terms of your maturity index. And insight is about our ability to be close to customers, to understand customers and to have the right kind of information about how our customers are experiencing our services, how they rate us; this is where our customer satisfaction or net promoter score information is, this is where we understand complaints and feedback.

Culture is where we are linking the brand value of the company with the perceptions that people have of us in the marketplace, with the organisational design and makeup of the company, with performance management measurement and critically with leadership, and I’ll come back to leadership in a second. And capability is where we have the right skills and talent in our company and the right methodology, processes and resources in order to actually execute on building the customer experiences that we want to build. So a lot of what sits in capability is around service design skills for a forward-looking company and also lean and agile aspects come into that as well for many.

So the area where you can fall down in each of these is probably more to do with how you can fall down between them. So a truly customer led organisation first of all will be starting out with a customer led strategy, and that is not a strategy that says we aim to deliver differentiated customer experience. They really want to know what that means tangibly to a customer. And if it’s a customer led strategy that’s fundamentally in the organisation then that will be a part of the leadership and performance management raison d’ëtre in the company, so that’s in our culture pillar. But we’ll only be able to know if we’re being successful at that and if this is actually what customers want from us and we’re approaching the right market with the right proposition and offer if we have our insight capabilities mature enough, but also if that insight is reaching out into the right parts of the organisation such that leadership can react to it and such that people in the capability side of things, who are actually delivering experiences, know what they’re delivering and why and also getting a feedback lead from customers on whether or not that’s working. So really it’s across those pillars, integrating the insight into the culture and the culture into the capability and the insight into the capability. It’s that crossover. It’s the failure to do that crossover that is one of the trip ups.

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And there’s one other fundamental thing. I was at a CXPA meeting in San Diego just a couple of months ago and the 200 practitioners in that room are all responsible for customer experience in one form or another across many of the US companies, including some of the leaders in customer experience delivery. And I asked each of the people that I met – it wasn’t a comprehensive survey – but I asked each of the people that I met some form of question that said how is your customer experience program going? Mostly people said either that it was a real struggle and they weren’t quite sure what to do about it or it’s going really well but these are the things that I want to do next. So there was a split between people didn’t really feel it was working, they felt like they might be failing in their customer experience program, and people who were being successful but had the next challenge they were looking at. Those who were successful had one thing in common and those who were not successful had one thing in common and it was the exact opposite and that thing was board alignment. If people had board alignment, and this is the culture pillar, if it had board alignment, they had the backing of their CEO and their program was on a successful path. If they did not, their program was not on a successful path. I found it to be the single key differentiator and that culture aspect there, that pillar where you actually have board alignment and CEO buy-in, to be the single most important factor to being able to transform a company, to be a customer led company.

Call Center IQ: Do you ever come across companies that you’ve mistaken as to how well they perform in these areas?

M Dowson: All the time. So what happens, and this is why I love the maturity model because what happens is people go and grade themselves across these pillars and say we’re brilliant at insight, I’ve got a really great insight team. And that’s good, so they want to score themselves as a three out of five. And then you go and actually find out that people who are building things for that company are actually not using any of that insight, are not involved in it at all and actually all of the insight goes towards marketing. So the company is positioning itself as great but not delivering itself as great and I see this a lot.

Another executive has talked to me and said we have a great customer centred culture. I said fantastic, that’s really good to here. Again I go into the IT part of the organisation where they build and deliver solutions and they’ve never seen a usability test, they’ve never seen the results of a customer focus group on anything that they deliver and they have no idea how they impact the CSAT or the MPS of the company. So let’s talk about this culture thing that you think is so great and they’re really talking about there are fantastic people who answer the phones or the people that meet customers in a store, in a branch. And they’re not lying; they’re absolutely right. Those people are excellent people. In fact is actually really rare to find people, that when you really talk to them, don’t care about the people that they interact with. They may have bad days and they may not know how to deal with them and you may get bad service from them but it’s not that they don’t care. So it’s very easy to think that your culture in a company, when you go and see the frontline is strong, and confuse the level of care people have for other human beings with your culture being strong and effective.

And then I also sometimes get people who are saying on the capability side we’re very strong and they’ve got some really innovative unit that are off doing really cool, great new things and doing what they would call innovation. However, it may be innovation that’s misdirected. So it may be innovation for innovation’s sake, so we’ve got a cool bunch of people building new tech for us but actually what we haven’t done is link that back to our core strategy and understand whether or not within our core consumer market they care about that or whether they actually want us to fix the fundamentals first and we don’t yet have permission to deliver innovative stuff because we haven’t got our core absolutely right.

So when they’re looking at the individual pillars, depending on who you’re talking to in an organisation, people will end up rating them quite highly because they’re misunderstanding the extent to which you need to be crossing over and following a customer strategy while you’re doing it in order for that to be a truly level two or level three on the maturity scale. So I see it quite a lot and it’s really by trying to take a look across the whole of the organisation and see how we’re crossing over the silos and following a customer led strategy, engaging our employees and our customers in the design of experiences and then following results led implementation that actually moves us towards a company that is being customer led fully.

Call Center IQ: How will your workshop at the Customer Experience Transformation event help people to identify their weaknesses and help them to improve?

M Dowson: So what we’re going to be doing in the workshop is we’re going to be using that maturity model and we’re going to be looking at an assessment of people’s maturity level. So we’re going to work through the model, through all of the pillars, what it means to be at each level, and we’ve got examples of companies that have got to, for example, level three and the challenges that they get at that point. We’re going to challenge people’s assumptions, so I guess we’re going to go through exactly what we’ve just been talking about there which is people are going to say this is what I understand about my insight capability, this is what I understand about my culture capability, and then we’ll start to ask some more probing questions about how joined up it is across. We’re also going to take a look at what it really means to have a customer led strategy, and there are a lot of assumptions that people have around their current strategy or vision about whether or not it’s fit for purpose.

I did a talk once about customer led strategy and I asked people how many people would have the following words in their strategy: differentiated customer experience, we put the customer at the heart of our business. And these are all statements that are great but they don’t actually tell us what the strategy is on how we’re going to execute on that. So we’re going to talk about the difference between having a very clear implementable strategy and then think about that kind of strategy for their business using the maturity level assessment. And that will allow people to understand where their weaknesses are in terms of maturity and where their opportunities are in terms of maturity. And one of the discussions we’re going to have is if you are genuinely particularly strong in insight, although it’s not necessarily hooked up to the rest of the business yet, but weak in capability and average in culture, is it going to make more sense for your organisation where it is right now, with the budgets that you have, to leverage the fact that you’re reasonably good at culture and make that better and quite good at insight and make that better, or are you ready to make an investment in capability which is going to require talent, skills and things like that? Some people may not be ready for that kind of budget or that kind of move. Others may be. They may say that’s great, I can recommend somebody that we need to hire and new people in that area or change our skill sets over there, and when they do that that will create more demand for insights and more proof of why insight is of value and therefore give more budget over to insight. There are different strategies for how to improve along that maturity model depending where you’re at as a company, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are and what you feel you can leverage best and that’s one of the things we’re going to be discussing.

Call Center IQ: Why do you think events like Customer Experience Transformation in Financial Services are important?

M Dowson: I think it’s important because you get to see that other people are also thinking about this. So one of the things as a customer experience professional, somebody who has got responsibility for customer experience in some form, is that it can often feel a little bit lonely; it can often feel like even within your own company I know I’ve got this board member supporting me or this is my job but I go out into the organisation and I’m struggling to show people the relevance of it. And sometimes you can be a little bit doubtful that are you doing the right thing or is this really going to make a difference? Seeing other professionals in other companies, comparable competitors or in totally different industries, either way really gives you a great sense that actually you are doing the right thing, that the challenges you are facing are not necessarily particular to your company and therefore there will be answers out there as to how to deal with them. The follow on from that is that it’s also therefore a great place to pick up new skills, new models to try out and an opportunity, especially in things like the workshops, to really delve down into your company’s particular issues and your particular challenges and actually work through those in a supportive environment. One of the things I like about the way that we’ve structured this particular conference is we’re going to be having those workshops upfront. So if we go through that maturity level assessment, you’re going to be able to come out of that workshop with an understanding of where it is that you want to focus on which is going to allow you to go to the content over the next couple of days and really pick and choose which content it is that you think you should focus on right now and want to learn about.

Call Center IQ: Thank you very much, Martin, for your insights and your time with us today. We look forward to hearing more from you at the event.

M Dowson: You’re welcome. I look forward to it as well.

Martin Dowson will be speaking further on this topic at the Customer Experience Transformation: Financial Services Summit, taking place 18th – 20th September 2013 in London, UK. For more information, visit www.customerexperiencefinance.com, call +44 (0)20 7036 1300 or email enquire@iqpc.co.uk.

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