Welcome to a revolutionary episode where we've got the inside scoop on shaking up the broadband industry with Rob Wilson, the man at the helm of customer service at the UK's largest alt-net fibre broadband provider, Hyperoptic. We talk to Rob about high-speed fibre, impressive customer service, and an in-depth look into the inner workings of a company that's set on disrupting the norm.
Rob's insights into systems thinking, his unique leadership style, and his passion for shaking things up are simply too good to miss. From his days in the Contact Centre world to leading the transformation at Aviva Direct Contact Centre, his journey is chock-full of lessons for any budding leader in the industry.
And if you're keen on getting a glimpse of the future, Rob shares his thoughts on AI, machine learning, and the future of customer experience.
Plus, we have a passionate chat about his love for Norwich City Football Club.
A truly insightful, inspiring, and thought-provoking discussion awaits you. Don't miss it!
Welcome to a revolutionary episode where we've got the inside scoop on shaking up the broadband industry with Rob Wilson, the man at the helm of customer service at the UK's largest alt-net fibre broadband provider, Hyperoptic. We talk to Rob about high-speed fibre, impressive customer service, and an in-depth look into the inner workings of a company that's set on disrupting the norm.
Rob's insights into systems thinking, his unique leadership style, and his passion for shaking things up are simply too good to miss. From his days in the Contact Centre world to leading the transformation at Aviva Direct Contact Centre, his journey is chock-full of lessons for any budding leader in the industry.
And if you're keen on getting a glimpse of the future, Rob shares his thoughts on AI, machine learning, and the future of customer experience.
Plus, we have a passionate chat about his love for Norwich City Football Club.
A truly insightful, inspiring, and thought-provoking discussion awaits you. Don't miss it!
Welcome to CX Diaries. Cx Diaries from the Customer Experience Foundation is our podcast where we talk to the people at the sharp end of CX and Contact Centers, the movers and the shakers, the innovators, the disruptors and the people delivering in the real world who share their personal stories of their journey through our industry. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Rob Wilson. Like many of us, rob stumbled into the world of customer service when he joined Aviva, which was then the rest of the Union, for a gap year in 1986. Working in the head office claims team, he rose to become head of sales and service over a 30-year career and was successful in winning Best Large Call Center in the UK two years running at the ICS Awards. He is also a leading systems thinking practitioner, spending time working with teams in Singapore, hong Kong, italy, poland, ireland and France. Rob has recently left the insurance industry and joined HyperOptic, the UK's largest alt-net fibre broadband provider, as customer service director. Rob, welcome Pleasure to have you with us today. Thanks, keith.
Speaker 2:Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Quite a long career. So you're at HyperOptic now let's start there. For our listeners that are not familiar with HyperOptic or Alt-Net fibre broadband, tell us all about that.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm still very much on that learning journey, keith, so I'm not going to be the expert telling you all about fibre broadband. But yeah, essentially HyperOptic, along with a number of other alt-net providers, we are kind of challenging some of those big boys in the broadband industry with our own fibre network delivering one gigabyte speeds to customers. But it's not just about speed, it's also about trying to shake up the industry from a customer service point of view as well. We want to be the best at customer service in the broadband industry.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and what are some of the challenges involved in running that kind of organisation up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting because I've spent most of my career working in big corporate organisations. Hyperoptic is not a start-up, but it's definitely a teenager. Now, as a business, is growing fast and so as an organisation we're kind of on that journey from start-up to being a more established, bigger player, and so, from a customer service point of view, it's been about maturing. It's been about growing, putting in place some of those operational disciplines you need when you start to become a bigger organisation.
Speaker 1:And I spoke to another organisation in your sector at one of our events last week and they mentioned that they've actually having to mature and adapt as a business because quite recently they've been pretty much an engineering business, digging up roads and putting the fibre in, and now they've actually got a customer base. They've now got to change to being a customer experience. Is that the same again?
Speaker 2:Yeah, very much so. I mean, I think the history of our business has been in that kind of infrastructure side, but you know we've got almost 300,000 customers now, so it's a sizable customer base and I think that shift to being, as you say, a customer service provider, looking after that 300,000 customers and making sure they're getting the best possible experience, as well as the new customers that are joining us and making sure they're getting the best onboarding experience that you can as well Definitely a transition time.
Speaker 1:Most of our listeners will know you from your time at Aviva and Norwich Union and Norwich Union Direct and all those brands. You were there 30 years. That's quite a journey. Tell us about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you mentioned earlier, I actually joined on a gap year in 1986. I was planning to go to university but started off in a customer service, customer facing role and really enjoyed it. And I'm one of those moments of reflection Do I want to go and spend three years back studying or start building a career in this industry, which is what I decided to do?
Speaker 1:And what were some of the different jobs that you did during your time? I'll say you started out as a GapB owner claims team, but you rose to be very successful there. Talk us through some of the different jobs you did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I spent the first few years managing claims and then I think the first breakthrough in my career came when I've been working in a head office motor claims department dealing with some referrals of fraud claims from the branch offices and I started to take a really interesting in insurance fraud, which wasn't really sort of managed as a thing in those days, and I took it upon myself to drop the draft, an email which back in those days involved dictating into a machine and sending off the typing pool and set out a business case to send to the big boss, the big claims boss, about why we should set up a dedicated fraud investigation team. And I sat back and waited for two days thinking what have I done? And then he picked up the phone to me and said I really like it, come and, come and see me and I was going to pluck from the job that I was doing and asked to set up and leave this, this fraud investigation team. I think it was one of the lessons I learned in life there that I've always shared with youngsters, which is to kind of never be frightened about putting those ideas forward, because that could be a thing that gives you that, that breakthrough, and that in turn led to becoming a claims investigator, which was one of the best roles I did.
Speaker 2:For a couple of years.
Speaker 2:My little Voxel Astra and I was going out on the mean streets of Norfolk investigating Well, you know, it's mainly mainly insurance fraud.
Speaker 2:In those days I was working with a more senior team of guys that I prefer to go to sit in the offices of health and safety managers and drink cups of coffee and investigate employees liability claims, and so I like to go out and investigate all of the the Bodgy motor theft claims and the suspicious mercury claims and so on. So that was that was pointed by, something, most fun job I ever did in insurance. And I then stumbled into the call center world in the mid 90s and Norwich Union Direct had just been set up and they they were advertising for a head of claims operations and bear in mind at this stage I've actually never managed anybody in my life and I applied for this job and was successful. And so I found myself running a team of, about time, probably about 200 people across two locations in Sheffield and Norwich, and that was my first, first leadership job. I like to learn about call sentence from that point.
Speaker 1:So let's unpack that a little bit your leadership style. Where has that come from? How has that developed? What is it? Because you have led a lot of people over the years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think my leadership style probably starts off from having a really strong affinity with people and the real respect for the people on the front line. You're having started my career there and understanding some of those challenges, so I think my leadership style is very open, very human, and I try to relate to people on a very personal, individual level. I think I've always been a maverick I've been described as such and I've never been one to follow the party line just because that's the approach. I think I'm very values driven and where my values cross sometimes with company policy, that can create some interesting challenges. I think that was brought to life really very much when we introduced systems thinking into Aviva, because I think systems thinking, which many people may associate with process change or engineering, but for me it was very much about customer service leadership and it was about trying to pick apart many of the things that I think really, from a leadership point of view, didn't work for people, didn't work for customers and fundamentally challenging some of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and systems thinking. That's not a topic we've ever covered before on CX Diary. So for someone that's new to that or not heard much about it, give us the idiot's guide.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a topic we could talk about for days, keith, to be honest, and in the world of systems thinking, you've only got to go on LinkedIn and say the word systems thinking and a punch up starts over what systems thinking exactly is. But I think from my perspective and from the work we did with Aviva, it very much started off working with a company called Vanguard, the guy called John Seddon, and what it was enabling us to do was to challenge some of the established thinking about the way that things should be done in service management, from a very kind of fact and data-led approach. So at its heart, it's about managers opening up their minds to this understanding that most of the things that go wrong in contact centres actually have their foundation in management thinking and the core assumptions that cause to do certain things. So because we think X, we do Y and it causes Z, we spend a lot of time trying to fix Z, but the hardest part is getting leaders but you've seen leaders to understand their thinking. That's driving that.
Speaker 1:Really interesting. And, more broadly, you're well-known and indeed, as we touched on award-winning customer service management, where did this CX philosophy and this customer service philosophy come about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think for me it starts from being a customer. I'm one of life's permanent customer service improvement consultants. Wherever I go, whichever shop I'm in, whichever restaurant I'm in, I'm looking at ways of doing things better. I think particularly the thing that really kind of frustrates me is where you can see that rules have been invented, things that have kind of somebody's thought were a good idea, that are fundamentally at odds with what delivering a good customer service should be. So, and I think once you it's like Pandora's Box and once you open it, once you see a better way, it's really hard to unsee it, and I think this is one of the challenges. A number of colleagues that I've worked with over the years that went through this particular kind of journey found it quite difficult actually to then work elsewhere where essentially that revelation, that kind of learning, hadn't taken effect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can certainly relate to that with some of the organizations I've been to. What are some of your biggest achievements? What are you most proud of through it? Corrie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean looking back. I think the transformation that I led of the Aviva Direct Contact Centre is definitely the proudest moment, for a number of reasons. You know the the, the team of around a thousand people that was historically split into sales team, customer service team, renewals team, and everybody had their individual targets and the sales guys working the sales targets and it was all the usual kind of bells and whistles around that. And you know, this is where we first started adopting systems, thinking and actually looking with a kind of critical eye at what was really happening from a customer point of view. And one of the first days I had in that job I was with a guy that worked in a renewals team and doing the usual leadership chit chat and I said I'm going to be here and it's been a few years, but I was in the sales team before and now I'm in the renewals team Very interesting.
Speaker 2:And then the first call came through and it was a customer that says I want the quote for car insurance, which is a sales call. And the guy said hang on, I'll transfer you to the sales team. And I said what's really interesting? Because you've obviously spent two years and so you could have handled that call, couldn't you? And he said, yeah, but I'm in renewals team now I've got renewals targets, not sales targets, and it was a really powerful lesson for me. Have seen that how, the way that we designed the system you know, the the all designed the reward system was actually having an impact on the customer experience and actually was driving that inefficiency into the business as well.
Speaker 2:And so you're driving the ideas. Well, exactly yeah, and not because you know, as always, it's not because you've got bad people, it's just that people are learning to adapt within, within the system that you've, that you've built. And this is really kind of the other systems part systems thinking for me, which is about that leaders have to design the system in such a way that it's going to give the right outcome for the customer and be a people. So I ended up getting rid of all this nonsense of splitting teams. So we multi skilled our agents so that they were able to handle your sales, customer service and renewals. People said it couldn't be done, but again, one of the kind of learnings was that people, that people are pretty smart working in customer service and it was the same skillset. You know, again one of those myths that sales people and service people were different. Well, no, they weren't, because all of the good things that made a good sales person were actually the same behaviors that you want to see in a good customer service person as well that you kind of listening, empathetic, you know you got good product knowledge, etc. So so we've got rid of all of that, that multi skilling.
Speaker 2:I've got rid of all of the targets in the contact center, which again was quite a controversial thing because there was a lot of internal resistance to that from from senior leaders who thought that you couldn't possibly run a call center without targets.
Speaker 2:How would people possibly know what to do?
Speaker 2:Well, guess what? You know, most of the rest of the organization was running without having sort of daily targets on how long it took them to do different things. And so we took, we changed the reward system, we focused everything around delivering on our purpose for customers and we changed the way we measured things so that everything was about looking at measures over time, not looking at this kind of performance. So I have you know, day by day, week by week, month on month, it was great. Now we, over a kind of 18 month period, we saw our MPs stores absolutely shoot through the roof from what had been a kind of a negative number up to about plus 60. And I think one of the proudest moments was when our marketing team who have probably been a bit skeptical early on about getting into the sales teams when they actually produced a TV advert for us which the tagline was service, service, service, and we were actively promoting the fact that our call center colleagues don't have targets and everything is in the space around service as well.
Speaker 1:Absolutely fantastic story. Thank you so much. Let's talk about some of the challenges, what some of the biggest issues that come?
Speaker 2:I think, without doubt, the biggest challenge that I've overcome in my career has been the trying to change the thinking of senior leaders. So, having led that transformation with the call center team in Aviva and systems thinking was something that our CEO was really keen on and wanted to roll out across the whole organization Well, they led the team that then worked internationally in Aviva, working with different geographies, trying to get systems thinking put in place. And because what you hit was this kind of belief for a lot of people that systems thinking was about changing processes and coming to another process, re-engineering and it's when they realized actually some of the things that were really going to drive this were going to be those leaders changing their own mindsets and changing their own behaviors. And I won't lay them to protect the innocent being.
Speaker 2:I worked with one operations director over a couple of years who finally admitted that he is actively trying to sabotage the work that we were doing because it challenged so many of his core beliefs and values and processes and systems that he put in place that he was starting to see actually were causing the problems.
Speaker 2:And that's really difficult for a leader and it was very often easier to work with a new leader that had come in fresh and had no kind of baggage or didn't really have a skin in the game in terms of the processes. But when you work with someone that had been there for 10 years and the customer service isn't great or maybe they think the customer service is great, but actually by listening to customers, you demonstrate it's not great and you demonstrate that the things that are causing things to go wrong are the things that you've put in place. That requires leadership to put your hands up and go. I can see that and I want to change that and I think that's definitely been one of the biggest challenges. The unlearning is harder than the teaching.
Speaker 1:Yes, looking upwards, you must have worked with some great people over through your career who have been the biggest influences on you.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think I've been massively influenced by some really good leaders and some really poor leaders, and I think you can learn from both. I think the people I've always been drawn to have perhaps shared my Maverick spirit and there have been people that you can see are really driven by those same kind of values. And I think, if I look at my Aviva days, people like Darren Cornish, people like Hugh Hesse, who are really smart guys, really kind of commercially oriented, but at their heart, the thing that drives them is the customer, is their people experience, and they're prepared to put their heads up the parapet and speak up when they think that things are wrong. And I think that's just really important as a leader, because ultimately, that's what leadership should be about. It's about being prepared to call things out when you think they need calling out, yes.
Speaker 1:Next, what's the future? What should we be looking out for? What's the big things you think?
Speaker 2:in CX world. Yeah, it's all the talk and the conversation at the moment everywhere go. It's all about AI and machine learning, and I think that it's going to be about getting the right blend of human interaction and machine support. There's no doubt that AI can do wonderful things and can remove many of the dull administrative tasks that we ask our people to do, and can do things for customers that you don't really need a human to do. But there's always going to be the place for the kind of human empathy in the customer service world. So I think that's definitely going to be one of the big challenges, I think, for me as well.
Speaker 2:It's been interesting with the team I'm meeting at the moment, who is very Gen Z heavy, and there's definitely I've just noticed that difference between their approach to work, what they want from work, what they want from their leaders as well, and, again, I'm not sure that all organizations are really waking up to some of the changes that are required in HR policies, for example, towards that particular group, and that probably then leads in a little bit to this whole hybrid work versus office work, and this is what I really struggle with, because somebody that's spent a lot of my career, working in a big contact center with the buzz and the noise and the fun and the energy and, if you like, they're all the good bits about working in the cool center and I really struggle as to how you can replicate that with a young person now coming through sitting at home on their own.
Speaker 2:Yes, they can do the job from home, but I just wonder where over the next two or three years, you know that's going to, that's going to take people.
Speaker 2:You know that they're going to miss that and I just wonder about where the future leaders are coming from when everything is kind of virtual. So I do think we're going to see that kind of shift back to more office based working for individuals, because I think the human nature ultimately is going to kind of demand that. And I think the other thing that just kind of on my mind as well is this whole kind of globalization of the customer service industry. And again I look back to my own career and starting out in the customer service world. There's so much of the customer service that we get in the UK now is actually now provided from other geographies and I do worry sometimes where the future CX leaders are going to come from, there's a much, much smaller pool and I think one of the challenges about how we make the UK more competitive on both cost and quality so that we can build that that will maintain that industry here, I think is really important.
Speaker 1:Really fascinating, rob, really fascinating insights and, as you know, we are to ask our guests to also reflect and help us come up the industry today. But the Gen Z, so you can go back to being 25 again. What advice would you give to young cell?
Speaker 2:Well, if I was 25 again, I definitely wouldn't have gone into that tackle that ended my football career. That may have given me a few more years of sport. But yeah, I think that's a really interesting question Because, like I said, the advice that I've given to youngsters around being prepared to speak up, being prepared to challenge, always looking for better ways of doing things. As a leader now, as a senior leader in the industry I love it when younger people are prepared to kind of put the next out and not just complain about what's not working well, but come up with the ways about how we can do things better, and I'd probably encourage myself to do more of that, to be somebody that seems a positive agent for change as well. So, yeah, that's the really interesting question, isn't it? There's many things I'd perhaps do differently if I were 25 again, but both personally and professionally.
Speaker 1:Okay, and talk to us about your love of Norwich City. What else? I got to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, I'm a Norwich City season ticket holder. I saw my first game at Carreroad when I was eight years old and I've been going pretty much ever since. Both my daughters had season ticket holders when they were younger.
Speaker 1:You, could flick it on that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd flick it on them. I didn't let having daughters get in the way of inflicting Norwich City on them. And now with my young son, james he's four and he comes along to Carreroad with me One of the first things I did was put a Norwich City poster up in his bedroom so that right from birth he would know that was his team. I couldn't imagine anything worse than becoming a man news supporter or a Liverpool supporter. That would be dreadful. So yeah, I enjoy going to watch Norwich. Yeah, but these days that's pretty much it with my sporting career. I was injured, I got the cruciate ligament injury in my knee when I was 25. That kind of killed off my football career, unfortunately. But these days it's pretty much restricted to walking the dog out in the beautiful Norfolk countryside.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and you have a cockapoo, I understand.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, lulia, she's sitting down here beside me as well. She can sit here for hours while I'm working during the day. She loves her baby.
Speaker 1:Amazing and that's a brilliant way to end, rob. It's been amazing having you with us today. Our listeners have found this as insightful as I have. You can find out lots more about the Customer Experience Foundation at cxfoorg, and we hope you can join us next time on CX Diaries.