Fasten your seat belts as we embark on a fascinating journey through the world of CX with our distinguished guest, Vinay Parmar, a Chief Customer Officer who boasts over 30 years of leadership experience in this field.
As we navigate the twists and turns of his illustrious career, we'll delve into the challenging and rewarding aspects of delivering effective CX in the travel and public transport sector, punctuated by Vinay's incredible achievements at National Express.
Our exploration extends beyond the surface, probing into the profound connection between human emotions and customer experience. We'll examine how stress and happiness, two key emotions, significantly steer the customer journey and how understanding them can mould behaviour. Furthermore, we’ll take a unique look at how technology can be leveraged to manage these emotions and generate positive customer experiences.
Vinay also recounts his own expedition in customer service, the invaluable experiences that have shaped his career, and his unique insights that promise to enlighten and inspire.
Whether you're a budding CX professional or just an inquisitive listener, this episode promises to be a captivating ride!
Fasten your seat belts as we embark on a fascinating journey through the world of CX with our distinguished guest, Vinay Parmar, a Chief Customer Officer who boasts over 30 years of leadership experience in this field.
As we navigate the twists and turns of his illustrious career, we'll delve into the challenging and rewarding aspects of delivering effective CX in the travel and public transport sector, punctuated by Vinay's incredible achievements at National Express.
Our exploration extends beyond the surface, probing into the profound connection between human emotions and customer experience. We'll examine how stress and happiness, two key emotions, significantly steer the customer journey and how understanding them can mould behaviour. Furthermore, we’ll take a unique look at how technology can be leveraged to manage these emotions and generate positive customer experiences.
Vinay also recounts his own expedition in customer service, the invaluable experiences that have shaped his career, and his unique insights that promise to enlighten and inspire.
Whether you're a budding CX professional or just an inquisitive listener, this episode promises to be a captivating ride!
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 Centres, the movers and the shakers, the innovators, the disruptors and the people delivering in the real world who share their personal stories, their journey through our industry. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Vinay Parma. Vinay is a Chief Customer Officer with over 30 years of CX leadership experience and deeply committed to driving improvements across the customer journey that help organisations create experiences leading to business growth and customer loyalty. Throughout his career, he has led cultural change, encourages collaboration and challenges status quo, deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Speaker 1:He also has a proven track record of using data and insight to identify root cause and implementing digital technology to drive innovation and efficiency, while operating strategically and tactically to deliver the results through customer satisfaction, advocacy, revenue growth and brand reputation. Vinay, welcome Pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you, keith. So you've just ended your time recently at National Express. You were there eight years. You also had a number of roles there, so tell us about your career from National Express and some of the diversity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had a great story start. It was a bit of an accident really. I was a freelance consultant for about 10 years before I ended up at National Express. I spoke at the approach division conference in 2015 and did a session on customer experience and out of the back of that I ended up taking on what should have been an interim role and then it got extended and then before I knew I was around the board table as part of the leadership team and coach, leading customer experience, which was at the time very much focused on contact centre and customer service.
Speaker 2:But actually the journey that we went on was to kind of make it more expansive and look at the entire end to end. Customer experience so started in the coach business as the CX director in there. I then, as the then MD, moved to take a role to take to sit over bus and coach. I then take a more UK role which kind of sat across both, and then we added digital experience into my role as well, so it became customer and digital experience and that was kind of, I guess, two parts.
Speaker 2:One was, as I've just said, about really driving that customer experience thought process agenda, bringing the voice of the customer to the centre of the organisation and really helping us to drive a better end to an experience, and the other was helping the journey from what we had was a traditional outsourced software development I guess for one of the better word with our website and our apps and stuff to bring that in house and bringing our own agile way of working, to kind of build our own stuff in house and that's like from a one you know, one squad, one team doing something very specific on a on our booking engine, to now it's a quite formidable team with products owners, product managers, squads and all the whole shebang. So it was the journey of bringing that through. So, yeah, that's, that's really where it all started.
Speaker 1:And what do you think are, and what did you find were some of the challenges in delivering CX in travel and public transport in particular?
Speaker 2:Yeah, interesting. So I think that there is no doubt that everybody I met in that organization heard about customers. So whether you spoke to a driver, whether you spoke to someone in the contact center, people got there was a customer, that we care about them. I think part of the challenge is understanding people, understanding how their role impacted on the customer. So an engineer sitting in a garage fitting a new window that was broken or fixing something in an engine, how do you help that person understand that they have an impact on the customer in real terms in the work that they do? And those kind of things were the more difficult things.
Speaker 2:So I think public transport probably has got, or would have had, a reputation that did very operationally focused. Don't really get customer. They do that, just need help understanding that to a great degree, and so the big part of the job was really helping to bring teams together that were naturally working in a more siloed way around a more collaborative way of speaking about the customer, sharing the journey. I mean, you know sometimes you've got to understand that the problem is not them, it's you, and when I first got into the organization there was lots of all other people don't get customer. They're not listening to what we say.
Speaker 2:But part of the problem is we weren't helping them by not presenting the data and the information in a way that people got it. So how do we take ownership for how we communicate what? What is important about customer and why other people should care was the first step of the journey. So developing a better reporting pack of developing better information, bringing in customer quotes and bringing it to life from just a table on a page to a better pack was one of the key, the key journey points and developing that storytelling capability. Yeah, it was really really strong. So, you know, going out to depots and to stations and to different teams and being an evangelist for one of a better phrase was really key to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what would you say looking back on some of your biggest achievements there? We most proud of Um.
Speaker 2:I think there were lots of things that I did and I posted about some of them on my LinkedIn, and we launched an onboard entertainment system like airline style. In the coach business, I implemented Salesforce in the contact center, which was the catalyst to start driving more 360 view of the customer with a drive to bring data together. Obviously, the data stuff that I've talked about sorry, the digital stuff that I talked about, that digital team there's a whole range of stuff in there, but I think the thing that I'm proud of probably more than anything is getting to the point where I didn't have to be in the room in order for somebody to talk about customer, and that, for me, was the telltale sign that we were making progress. So, you know, and they might not have talked about customer in the way that I would have or in the same way that I would have, but the very fact that you would have people that were naturally more operations focused on hang on a second. But what about the customer? That, for me, was the right. There's something happening here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fabulous. I mean you touched on digital experience. How do you do that? Fairly traditionally operation focused organization.
Speaker 2:I think, similar to the customer piece. Really, I think, first of all, it's about not making it as a thing outside of what people do, but bringing people along the journey. But now, in the very beginning, of course, it was focused on the website and the buying of tickets and the app and all those kind of things. But then, you know, I led an innovation lab at National Express where we started to bring on startups and small businesses that would work in and sprints on specific problems. Some of them would to do with engineering, some of them to do with back office and those kind of things as well. So really bringing people on that journey and, again, in a similar way, telling that story as to why digital should matter for them.
Speaker 2:It's not just the website, it's not just about tickets, but it's also about how do we use better technology to help empower people to do a better job. You know there's a lot at the moment going on about AI and how AI will replace people's jobs and stuff, and whilst that might be true to a degree and there's no doubt that AI will change the shape of the landscape, rather than use the words replace jobs, I think it will release people from jobs that are mundane, that they don't need to be doing, to empower them to do jobs that would add more value in the organization. And I think you know the digital transformation was the kind of the step change that's happening now and that will be empowered by AI and machine learning to a great degree. But it is about helping to release people from things they have to do that keep them locked into something and having to take a step back and add more value.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I'm thinking more personally. I've seen you write and I've heard you talk quite a bit about human behavior and psychology, etc. That's not a subject we've covered before. Tell us what we need to know about that.
Speaker 2:So I have a view that actually, customer experience the label that we use for it, when you peel it all back actually what we're doing is managing human emotions. That's what we're doing, and if you want to peel it back and simplify it, even to an even more simple level, there are two key emotions that we're trying to manage here Stress and happiness, and across the customer journey, there are points in the journey that are opportunities to either increase stress or increase happiness. And how well we manage that stress or happiness in those key moments and people will refer to them as moments of truth or key journey points is really the magic of customer experience. It's helping to understand what that is and helping to understand that it is emotion that drives behavior. It's emotion that drives behavior. How you feel at any one important time has a greater influence on how you will behave going forward than anything else. We like to believe that we're logical thinkers and that we'll make decisions based on sound logic and sound judgment, and we might do some of those things in the process of making the decision, but we all know, when it comes to making that decision, there is a gut feel, there's an instinct, there's something that we get that's more emotive that helps us to make that, whether that's a recommendation from friends and family, whether that's a previous experience where they seem in the company but there'll be something in there that's more emotive that will drive me to make that decision. And it's understanding that and understanding that actually the job of CX is to deliberately design the experience in a way that enables us to have a greater chance of driving that positive emotion in those moments of truth, then allowing that stress to overtake.
Speaker 2:You know it's the. If you look at, if you remember the, you know simple anchoring or the Pavlovian dogs, you know when you're running the ball and they would salivate in the same way as every time you have a bad experience with something. It creates a. You know you're, you're, you're wiring in. Your brain locks in to create a new and you will association with that. So when you then see that brand, you have a positive or negative emotive connection. Sometimes you might not have even experienced that brand, but you might have heard something about them or you make it experience a similar brand that will do a similar thing. So that's why I talk so much about human behavior. I think you know we can talk about digital transformation. We can talk about customer experience and other, but essentially is about how well do we understand our customers, how well do we understand their behavior patterns and how do we design our experiences to better to give us a better chance of driving that positive association.
Speaker 1:And where does it? Where or how does it go wrong? What can we learn from organizations that are not looking at it?
Speaker 2:that way? Yeah, great question. I think there's several things in here. I think one, I think, if we go back to the beginning of the conversation where we talked about, you know, driving change at NASA Express, when people think customer customer experience is somebody else's job, that it's a team, it's a department and it's a set of people, they'll take care of that. But aligning ourselves around a collective and I really hate the term customer centricity I think it's awful, I think I get the intention of it, but really it's about aligning yourselves around caring about the customer experience, knowing that that customer experience will drive loyalty, advocacy and trust the three key behaviors that you're always trying to find. So, aligning yourselves around that, I think so there's that part about where does customer sit and that collective ownership that everyone has a role to play in there. I think, then, the next layer is that we get magpie syndrome around. Technology is the answer, new and shiny is the answer, and whilst the technology absolutely will help organizations, it's always in the application of that technology and, to take it to one stage further, it's then how you change the culture around that. So an example being if all you do is provide better technology to people and don't do the stuff around the culture and how they behave. They will use the new technology in the same way as what they did. So I'll give you an example. I'll give you a real example In one of the businesses that I worked in, where we digitized the back office and we gave people access to Google Sheets.
Speaker 2:So he said you don't need to put stuff on paper and you put it into Google Sheets. It's a shared sheet, so you don't need to download it as an Excel and just send it anywhere. It's real time and people can do it. I still found people taking a piece of paper, capturing data off that spreadsheet and then sending it in the internal mail to another team. So they did not change their behavior. We just gave them a more expensive platform to use. So you have to do the cultural change with it. You have to switch off the stuff they used to do. So I think that's the other bit that organizations get wrong. And I think probably the fourth thing is always working on the basis that everything has an expiry date. You know, nothing is permanent. So you need to work to a position that, just because this is how you do it right now, that is not the way you're always gonna do it. So everything has its expiry date.
Speaker 1:And CX is a journey as much as the customers are journey.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, without going off at a tangent, I think we talk about people experience and employee engagement and customer experience. They're the same thing, inverted a different way. You know, in the same way as you pay attention to how we attract a customer, how a customer buys, how a customer stays loyal to us and how a customer will recommend us to friends and family, paying that same attention to how an employee joins us, how we onboard them, every touch point they have with somebody in the organization, how does that make them feel? How does that? How does that? You know, either put credit in the bank or take it with draw or not, and having that same approach, you know it's reflected. You know there's lots of studies being done right now, lots of research being done about the fact that your employee engagement reflects externally in your customer experience and vice versa.
Speaker 1:Definitely, you've done a lot of public speaking and I've seen you speak a few times, and that's something you do a lot of and you seem to enjoy it. A lot of people, me included, get daunted by that and find it very uncomfortable. What?
Speaker 2:can we all learn?
Speaker 1:from you.
Speaker 2:The very first thing I would tell you it's not about you, it's about them. You're there to serve. You've got to get yourself out of you and worrying about how you will look, how you will be criticized, what people say about you. Focus that you are there to give value to that audience. That is what you're there to do. The second thing I would say to you is is remember it's a conversation, it's telling stories.
Speaker 2:You know your stuff. So it's about creating whatever you're talking about in a set of stories and again focusing on making about them. Lots of people start with a long introduction about. This is me. This is what I do. This is where I've been. You take up 10 to 15 minutes of the presentation and then you go onto the meat of it. Don't do that short introduction. Go straight into adding value to your audience and practice, practice, practice, practice. Like anything else.
Speaker 2:I didn't suddenly get up one day and go right, I'm gonna be great at public speaking. It took an investment. I learned some skills, I got coached, I had mentors, I went and learned the art of public speaking. I have a natural passion for it, as you can tell, and if there's one thing I could do for the rest of my life, it would be public speaking. There's no shadow of it out. That is what I love to do. I really enjoy doing that, but I enjoy it not for being on the platform speaking. I enjoy it because it's about sharing knowledge, ideas and information with people to help them in whatever it is that they're doing and trying to achieve in their organizations, and that's where you get. That's where I think the focus should be.
Speaker 1:Incredible stuff Thinking back. How did you get started in customer service and call centers all those years back and how did you do? What's your journey with?
Speaker 2:Customer service I got started with when I was tiny, probably about eight, nine years old. My dad was an immigrant from Kenya, had a grocery business in Birmingham. We were one of the first green grossers in Birmingham to import pickles and spices directly from India and sell them to the community that was there and I worked in the shop with my dad. I would watch him on the till my grandfather when I was a little bit younger. I remember a few memories of him, but I was just involved in the family business and then, you know, I saw how customers would come back, how they would converse with my uncle and my dad and the relationship they build. I didn't know at the time it was customer experience. It was just all kind of unconscious learning going in here. And then I didn't do great at school and then I, by accident, I, one of my aunts, worked in a bank and she was speaking to my mom Well, if you're not going to go off and study, you're not seeing at home doing anything. Go and work with your aunt for a little while. So she gave me an application for my field in.
Speaker 2:I started working in the contact center at HFC bank when I was about 18, 19. I worked on the GM card, the goldfish card, marbles, and then I moved into credit underwriting and then I moved into fraud detection and then I just I just had this curiosity of understanding how stuff worked and how teams work together. So I just went and I was a bit of a nosy side that I just go and ask questions about the teams. I started there four years there. Then I went to work at egg, which is probably where I had my most transformative experience of customer experience and understanding customer. Yeah, and I've been involved in in and around contact centers, customer service ever since, but Donald's was a short spin in my career as well, so I've always been in that space. Yeah, that's, that's really been the journey and just work my way through through the ranks working on interesting projects. But egg was a phenomenal phenomenal part of my experience.
Speaker 1:You would have worked with quite a lot of people, both good and bad, at senior levels. So who have been what? Who or what have been the biggest influences on your career and I?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, gosh, that's a great question. I mean there've been some awesome people, I think. I mean I'll just touch on it because it was such a big part of my experience Mike Harris, who was the CEO then Paul Gratton and the way he led that organization. Miss Hancock, who was my direct manager for a while when I was the egg. They're just all people that helped, whether they know it or not, shape my career, my thinking.
Speaker 2:I think there's been some other brilliant people along the way that I've worked with, that I've interacted with, that have really molded me. I think here, you know, I had a really great. I had a really great working relationship with Tom Stable, who was the CEO at National Express here, and I had a good working relationship. So there was some good support and work there. Yeah, I think they are probably in terms of people that I've worked with directly and managed some of the names, but God keep, there's just a long list of people.
Speaker 2:You know it's like an auspicious speech you always forget to mention someone. I don't wanna start going through names and then forget to mention people, but there've clearly been some cracking people. But more than anything, I think I mean you know it's gonna sound a bit cliche. The thing that's had the biggest impact on me is just the constant support from my family. Like I was lucky that my mom and dad were really hardworking, I never felt under pressure that I had to go down a certain path or whatever, and when I chose this path they were just really, really supportive and they've always encouraged me to be curious, to go and learn, to go and grow, and that's probably been the central point of my success, I guess Amazing, absolutely fabulous insight.
Speaker 1:So, as you know, we always like to ask our guests to reflect. Help those coming up through the industry today so you can go back to being 25 again. What advice would you give to younger self?
Speaker 2:I would say learn to get comfortable in a room escape, because too often we try to fit in instead of trying to stand out. And I would say that be brave, don't? You know? Not from a car. You better be brave, be willing to put yourself out there and take those risks and, you know, be willing to be wrong.
Speaker 2:You know you can't go through your career trying to be right all the time and play it safe. It's through your failures that you learn. It's through the times that you get it wrong that you learn. You know, in my career it's the times I stuck my hand up and said, yes, I'll do that and expose myself to stuff that I've never done. I've never underwritten a mortgage in my life. And yet I put my hand up to say I'll do it. And if I hadn't had done that and played it safe, I don't think where I'd be right now. So I think don't play it safe. Take risks, be who you are. You know, bring your value to the table. And I think the last thing I'd say about that, keith, is that one great piece of advice I got is that in an organisation, your value is in direct correlation to the size of problems that you solve. The greater you are at helping people solve problems, the greater value you have in any organisation, team or unit.
Speaker 1:I think that sums it up absolutely perfectly, and that thing about being brave and being curious and asking questions and being bold is a surprisingly common theme for nearly all our guests. Yeah, it's really lovely to hear that. How do you want to end an escape from it all? What do you do after you go outside of work?
Speaker 2:I love cricket. It's my number one goal. I fight kids. You know, when I finish speaking, when I finish my career, I want to go around the world and watch cricket. I could watch a five day test match quite easily without any problems. I was at the Ashes on Saturday at the Oval, which was a phenomenal day's cricket. So I used to play a lot more, but not so much now. I like to read, I love movies, I'm a bit of a foodie, but again I mean look, I have a huge extended family. Our social circle is massive. When I got married 23 years ago, my wife did warn me you realise that we have a party pretty much every other weekend. There's always something going on. So a lot of my life is spent socialising, spending time with my family. I've got wonderful nieces and nephews. I've got two younger brothers and a sister who I love dearly. I've got a wonderful extended family with my in-laws and that is the mainstay of keeping me here I am.
Speaker 1:Brilliant Vinay. It's been amazing having you with us today. I hope our listeners have found this as fascinating as I have. We thank you for joining us at the Kusper Experience Foundation and we hope you can join us next time on CX Diaries. Thank you very much. Thanks for.