Exploring Customer Experience and the BPO Industry with Lian Rowlands: Insights From Airport Operations to CX Technology

Did you ever wonder about the unique challenges of managing Customer Experience at airports? Lian Rowlands, an industry insider and founder of TAYMA Solutions, takes the hot seat to unpack this complexity and more. We explore the fascinating world of the airline customer, the critical role of recovery processes, and the necessity for lightning-fast reactions in the face of unexpected issues. Lian’s insights shine a light on the inner workings of airport customer experience that often fly under the radar.

Our conversation takes flight as we delve into the synergy between BPO and CX technology. Lian spotlights the importance of finding a partner who truly understands your brand and customers - not a one-size-fits-all solution. 

We discover how technology is reshaping customer journeys and the potential pitfalls of generative AI. Lian also encourages us to take the time to find the right technology, a crucial lesson she’s learned from her own experiences in the field.

Before we land, we make time for some career advice for the upcoming professionals in the industry. Lian shares her journey through the BPO industry, from her initial foray to founding TAYMA Solutions.

Plus, we side-step into Lian's personal passions - food and music, and her recent foray to the Big Festival. 

With this episode, you’re in for a deep-dive into customer experience and the BPO industry, garnished with fascinating personal insights from an industry veteran.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:33

Welcome to CX Viries. Cx Viries 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 shapers, the innovators, the disruptors and the people delivering in the real world who share their personal story of their journey through our industry. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Leanne Rowlands. Leanne is founder of TAMR Solutions, which she started four years ago, providing advisory services to both BPO's and organisations seeking to make a real step change in the customer experience. Prior to that, leanne has 25 years in customer experience with brands such as Co-operative Group and Shop Direct, before moving into BPO with organisations such as Vertex, capita, circo and Teleperformance. Leanne specialises in large scale client management and growth and, along with niche high-end retail, covers all sectors. She's also spent four years in software as a service and cutting edge with CX technology, such as LivePerson and Conversations by Amy Leanne. Welcome, it's a pleasure to have you with us today.

Speaker 2: 1:36

It's really good to be here. It's really nice to see you, Key.

Speaker 1: 1:39

Thank you very much. So tell us about your current work, what you're doing and some of the challenges and opportunities that's presenting, both for you personally and for the clients, and what you're seeing going on at the moment.

Speaker 2: 1:51

Yeah, so I'm working with quite a few different clients at the moment.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Some of the work I do is more on an interim basis and some of it is more ad hoc advisory, and it really does change depending on the industry. Some of the work that I've just come to the end of is with some of the major airports in the UK and it has been an absolutely fascinating few months because the challenges that they're having are really significant in terms of what we as customer experience experts see. Yes, we're so used to looking at the brands that we experience, so we're used to looking at, maybe, an airline brand or we're used to looking at a retail brand. But coming off the back of COVID, the challenges for the airports themselves are really significant because, when you think about it, we don't see. We go to an airport and we go to travel and it's a function of I'm going on my weekend in Malaga or I've got my two weeks in Antalya. The airport themselves don't own those customers specifically. The airlines do. So the challenges around the day turn around. Understanding those customers is really really different.

Speaker 1: 3:08

And I'd imagine that's not really contact centres, more CX and customer journey based and about the journey through the airport and the customer experience and also quite a lot of logistics and organisation goes into that as well. How have you found that?

Speaker 2: 3:24

It's really, it's a real challenge. It's a real challenge for them because where does the journey start? So does the customer journey start when you make the reservation? Does it start when you go online and you book your car park? We sort of talk a bit about it not having a customer experience or contact sensor sorry angle but actually has quite a significant one, because the minute you need to go away from that happy path, the minute you need to change away from the journey that you've either already booked or you've already embarked on, so you need to change your car parking, for example, or you need to find out something about how you're going to move through that environment.

Speaker 2: 4:02

So maybe I don't know assisted travel, for example, or a business class experience that you might be looking for when you travel and you need to have contact and you do need to have those interactions. And you know these airports are rebuilding the people and the agents. So, whether they're contact centre agents or whether they're the agents who are helping you through the journey, it's really, really interesting from an experience it has been for me as a practitioner. It's been really interesting for me to look at it from an angle that isn't just the contact centre. It's not just the customer, but that voice or that email or that chat conversational experience that we're used to talking about. You're seeing the physical experience come right back into the centre of the mix again in a challenging environment. It's summer again. We all know Nats failed yesterday and Air Traffic Control failed yesterday. I'm and I know from chatting to people that it was chaotic yesterday and it's very reactive like that.

Speaker 2: 5:09

So it's super, super interesting.

Speaker 1: 5:13

That must be interesting for, as a stay-ex practitioner, is it? Because quite often you'll go through an airport and everything will be seamless. It reminds me of a quote from Christopher Brooks, who was the best quote I've ever heard. He said customer service starts when customer experience goes wrong. Brilliant. So I can imagine in an airport that the recovery process is if everything goes seamless or hunky-dory. But if something starts going wrong, then there must be quite a machine that needs to step in and behind the scenes that nobody sees. What's your? What can you tell us about that?

Speaker 2: 5:50

It's, it's huge. I mean, one of the airports is is Manchester, which is my. You know the airports very close to my heart. I did all my travel from there as a kid, you know, I know it well and the desire to do the right thing by the management of that airport is phenomenal. But the reaction times are required. They've got a hundred people who are just there in case anything goes wrong, and it doesn't matter whether it's baggage handling, it doesn't matter whether it's queuing, it doesn't matter. They are just there for service, recovery and and your, your point now is there was really really spot-on, because when we talk about, we talk about customer experience, talk about experience of you know kicking in when, when something doesn't hit your expectation.

Speaker 2: 6:37

So when your expectations are met, whether it's you know whether you're you bought a dinner service from a you know Mock's, aspencers or somewhere or whether you you know whether you're traveling to an airport, everything goes according to plan. You don't give it take. You don't give it too much of a second thought. If you don't go, that's brilliant. I got my dinner service and it's amazing, isn't it fantastic? And aren't like the person I bought it from? Astounding, you actually go. It's a great dinner service. You met my expectations. Same with an airport if you go through and nothing goes wrong, you're going, you know what, it's all okay. Same with public sector if you want to pay your council tax, and it works and everything happens Brilliant. But that point at which things go wrong is the point at which everything we as a customer experience industry, that's everything we're here to do, and we wouldn't really exist if everything went right all the time.

Speaker 1: 7:29

We wouldn't, and I'm thinking about customer expectations. Is there, from your experience, a level of customer expectation when they're traveling through an airport? And that probably varies people by people. But also, how did that? What's managed that? How do they measure that?

Speaker 2: 7:49

It's again, it's something that's quite new. We've been man, we've been measuring it in the contact center industry forever. You know I've been in this in the industry longer than I care to mention, but a lot of this is the measuring of it is quite new In the airport industry. They have their own, but they have their own body that actually Produces airline surveys and does a really great job of comparing airports across the world. And but it's all literally it's all done Predominantly by asking people at different points of their journey how they're feeling about it and when you're, when you're talking about that interaction, and this is where it also gets. This is where there's there is a very again, a very direct comparison to Whether you're talking about retail or in the public sector or in utilities, it doesn't matter which is if you ask someone during their journey, how do you feel about this? So if I ask you how you feel about it in when you're having a pint in the airport lounge, or ask you how you're feeling about it when you're at the gate, I'm going to get very different answer to the one that if I send you a survey six weeks later and say, hey, how was your whole journey to the airport and I think we do the same thing quite often when I talk to you know other clients and other customers who Produce surveys and wants to know more about how their customers feeling. You get a version that might be triggered by, for example, a AI at the end of a conversation. If you've had a conversation with a chatbot or you've had a conversation with a human, it might trigger an immediate survey. Then you might get a survey I don't know a couple of days later or a couple of weeks later in an email or via an SMS message. And those distances between you know how I feel about something and how I feel three days, four days, a week later can be fundamentally different.

Speaker 2: 9:44

That's one of the things that we discovered over the last. You know, look, just comparing customer answers at different points, at different points, not just in their journey, but different points when they've had time to process how they felt about what they experienced. And it's much more interesting to see how you then turn that insight into action. You know, what do you? Do you knee jerk to something that's been told to you straight at the end of a journey because someone's emotional, or do you wait and hear how they felt when they've had time to reflect and they've had time to do other things and there is no right or wrong answer to that. It's just a really interesting, you know, watching an industry that's quite new to looking at things from an insight perspective, because airports are very different airlines Looking at that it has been. It's given me a new perspective on some of the ways that I look at, how we look at journeys in a contact center as well.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Yeah, we learn something from every job right, Absolutely so. You've also spent a lot of time in BPO work alongside them. Now, what's your take on the state of the sector currently?

Speaker 2: 10:55

I think there is a real opportunity at the moment that I'm talking to some large BPO's, but I'm also talking to some, lots and lots of SMEs and when I talk to my clients and when I talk to customers as opposed to BPO's, there's so much opportunity in the sector at the moment for those small, medium players, the players who are agile, the players who have less red tape, the players who can pivot to do something the customer wants without going, oh no, well, this is my tech stack or this is how we do things. That doesn't mean to say there isn't space, that there isn't still massive markets for your mega players that are, particularly with some of the consolidations that we all know have gone on recently. But what I'm just seeing is this opportunity coming through for people who might who've never considered BPO before, but will, if they can, outsource 10 seats or 20 seats or, and those agile small players are really reacting so much better than the big players. They're just some of them have just nailed it. But what I'm also seeing, when I talk to some of the players as well, is there's a danger of two things really.

Speaker 2: 12:18

One is that everyone's playing in the same market. If you imagine kids kind of running around. If you imagine, lots of young kids are running around after football, or I will watch young kids play football and before they learn how to play the game properly, they all chase the ball and everyone's chasing the same ball and nobody's working in the space on the wings and nobody's working in the space behind it, just behind the forwards right. And that's kind of how I describe some of the conversations I have with some very good friends of mine, even who we have chats and, oh, we're going for this or we're going for that. I'm thinking there is space in the wings for people to play here if they're prepared to be agile and pivot. And look at the requirements of some of those clients.

Speaker 1: 13:00

Really interesting insight, Thank you. What's your take on the buyer side of it? What should buyers and clients of BPO be looking out for? Be doing differently themselves?

Speaker 2: 13:13

I think if I was advising buyers at the moment which I do they've got there are enough options out there for them to really take their time and look for synergy. It's not all about the price point. I mean and it can be I did the same advice when people are looking for I don't know different SaaS platforms, whether it's chatbots or a conversational platform or some sort of generative AI conversational engine Take your time and find the one that fits you. So the price point might be important. It might be the difference between your business going under and your business staying afloat and I get that and there is a space for people to play in that arena as well, which is that low price point labor arbitrage space. But if that doesn't have to be your driver, then really take your time and look for the partner that gives the best synergy for your business. So think about what from a buyer, what does your brand stand for? What does your customer expect? Who gets you? I think that's the key thing. And when you go around you're talking to. You've just come back off a brilliant trip to South Africa and seen some fantastic, absolute fantastic BPO's out there. If you were walking around there and you had a particular brand, you'd be looking for the one that got you and it would be different BPO's for different brands 100%. But that's the biggest piece of advice.

Speaker 2: 14:47

Otherwise, the challenge going forward is you're never on the same page, you've never got the trust, you've never got the synergy. You know we again I think we as practitioners, have to persuade sometimes and as BPO providers, we have to persuade the people who we'd like to work with that we genuinely care about their customers as much as they do. And I think sometimes they don't believe us. And you know, those of us inside the industry know that we do. We know it's why we exist. We know that's what we drive for. We want to be as good, if not better, in fact usually better than their internal capability would be. You know, let them go away and be a public service provider. Let them go away and be a retailer. Let them go away and be an airline. Yeah, leave us to look after the customers because we're the experts. But you can't do that if you don't have the synergy, and you haven't, you haven't found that person that gets, that company that gets you. It's like any relationship you need to find the one who gets you.

Speaker 1: 15:50

Yeah, really interesting. Somewhat unusually for people in the space, you also work in the tech area. Tell us about that. Tell us about some of your experiences and also what's coming next. What do we be looking out for?

Speaker 2: 16:03

So I did a. I know this is a strange thing to say. I see X and the BPO heavily watched a podcast, but I needed a break from BPO. I'd spent 20 odd years in it and I was kind of out.

Speaker 2: 16:22

You know, I just needed some space and I had historically put a product called Live Person which is one of the world's leading conversation commerce engines into shop direct Long time previously and I was lucky enough to go and work for them and I spent almost two years working for Live Person with some incredible clients Absolutely incredible clients and to and spent time in the US. I spent time watching and developed these products in Seattle. I spent time in Capitino, spending some time with Apple down there. I mean, it really was. It really was a great experience. But transatlantic flying is only fun for so long. But it was great and it gave me a really good insight into the difference between BPO and how we talk about CX and how we talk about customer experience and customer journeys etc. And how you have to dismantle those journeys and look at them differently when you start talking about from a technology perspective. So Live Person was really interesting to see how important integration is when you're putting technology into your customer journey, into your customer function. And then that was taken a step further. I did a lot of work with a really great start up in the UK conversations by Amy and they are a great generative AI company, really, really cracking model and really cracking product. But again, it's that principle of think about the technology that's right for your business. Don't just think about what's the next shiny tool in the box.

Speaker 2: 18:02

People are very scared, I think, about generative AI and they're very scared where they've looked at chat GPT. We talk a lot about AI hallucinations. So the AI has the wrong information or it gets fake information. There's a fear of thinking about. Can it be fake information by, suppose, people with ulterior motives who want to train an AI to say something we don't want it to believe, something we don't want it to think. If you think of AI as a brain, we don't want it to think some of that stuff.

Speaker 2: 18:38

And the key things for me when I'm advising clients in this space and I think it's really important going forward is that principle of think about your integrations as well as what you want, as well as the journey that you want your customer to do, because we talk a lot about automating the simple stuff, but quite often the simple stuff is only simple because we're used to doing it. So if you've got an agent who needs to access six different systems just to tell someone where their order is, we go well, that's simple because that's a worse my order Right For a piece of technology that's really complicated because they might need to talk to the same six systems. The agent needs to answer. That piece of technology has to be able to hold a conversation whilst interacting with all of those different systems and having those integrations and having the ability to pull information backwards and forwards in the correct order. So it's really important when we're thinking about what we want our technology to do, we have to think about is it really a simple process or is it a complex process that we've just not got around to fixing yet and we've not got around to dealing with? So I think what we're going to see going forward is obviously lots and lots of people want to put in a generative AI and they want to use large language models, they want to embrace the technology.

Speaker 2: 19:59

But there's a fear I think Simon Chris talked about it brilliantly, actually at six outsources earlier on in the year these fears, as did Stephen Law into those fears of if we take this step, we'll be opening ourselves up to significant risk, significant challenge, et cetera. And I think the key is start with controllable data sets and start with those smaller use cases and start with the things that you know you can do, where you can build trust in that technology with your consumers and then build your integrations, do your more complex stuff and by complex it might just be, it might be a very, very complex thing, might be a where is my order, but that's going to take time and that understanding I think there's still a challenge in the software side of things but actually the software providers to understand the fear that people responsible for customer experience genuinely have in this space and telling them the story to help them overcome that fear and helping them understand what the path can be to get there successfully.

Speaker 1: 21:03

Really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that Very insightful. I'm thinking more personally now. Like some of our guests and myself, you've been in this industry a while. How did you get started? What's your journey through the industry?

Speaker 2: 21:18

Gosh by accident. I think, like most of us, that's a standard answer.

Speaker 2: 21:25

I don't think I ever signed up for a careers teacher and said I want to work in CX and customer experience. No, I left college in the uni and went to work for McDonald's. I'd been working there during uni. I'd been working there over time I'd been. I'd worked in the store and carried on working at McDonald's when I left uni because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Then I ended up moving into a pub company, more in single greenholes.

Speaker 2: 21:58

When you work in pubs I think this is probably I don't know whether this is quite a British thing, but I'm going to go with it when you work in pubs and you I used to install IT systems. I used to be a Microsoft certified systems engineer way back when when you work in that industry, you have to be customer facing, you've got to be customer centric, you've got to love people and you've got to love service, even if you're in the technology side. It becomes a bug really. It becomes something that drives you. I think there's something.

Speaker 2: 22:29

Whenever we get together as practitioners and business owners in this space, the enthusiasm and the drive for what we do is tangible. It's all we talk about. We're actually quite boring, I think, to people who don't work in our space. I think we're really probably quite dull. I got the bug there and I went and worked what's now Shop Direct, running projects, customer experience for them a long time. Then my boss, a guy called Philip Michelle, who's a Davies consulting now, who's been a great mentor to me all the way through, took me with him to Vertex.

Speaker 2: 23:12

Then it just carried on from there. I was asked to be the client director of the Marks as Vences with Nigel Wood who I think a lot of people know who was looking after M&S's customer experience. Then, again, it was just exciting. We got to try stuff. We were still trying to work out how people were ordering online. There were only 5,000 SKUs online. We were trying to make everything work but we got to kick the boundaries.

Speaker 2: 23:39

I think those of us who are of a certain age I suppose we've come up through customer experience where we have seen so much change. We've been able to kick those boundaries down and we've been able to help our clients move those boundaries and move that technology and change the way we do things, yet still retain some of that origin. Or if I want to get to a human, I get to a human. We understand that side of it as well. I've been very lucky. I've worked for some great companies and some great people. I can say hand on heart, I genuinely not actually have bad experiences in the BPO industry. I've learnt something from everywhere. I've worked Very grateful.

Speaker 1: 24:19

That's incredible. What would you say is your biggest achievement? What are you most proud of through your career?

Speaker 2: 24:27

Oh my goodness, I don't know. That's really hard. I'm probably taking the risk to set up Tamar, I think, and actually deciding to try and move this into somewhere where I could take this advice to all the people. I guess that, and also doing some of the work that I did in the public sector as well.

Speaker 2: 24:50

So moving some of the technology into the public sector because I think you know we talk a lot about customer experience and I know there are big providers who do a lot of great work in the public sector but a lot of it is still in-house and a lot of it is still privately driven and to be able to try and take some of the technology that we take for granted in private and that we take for granted in you know where money is, you know where people are willing to take more risks, and to try and take that technology and apply it to a council scenario or apply it to a vulnerable customer scenario or a vulnerable person scenario, is really affirming.

Speaker 2: 25:30

It's one thing to put it in somewhere where you go great, you know people can buy trainers more easily or people can, you know, book a holiday more easily but it's something completely different when you put it into a public sector environment and you're doing it not because there's a cash bottom line in there, but you're doing it because it's a. It's fundamentally changing the way people interact with important services. So, yeah, that's probably that, and having the courage to sell my own business four years ago and I didn't quite know what to do with myself, probably the things.

Speaker 1: 26:02

I had the same dilemma when I set the foundation up, so you have my support there. So, as you know, we always like to ask our guests to reflect and 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: 26:18

Apart from drink less. Drink less, go to bed earlier. No, in all seriousness, be braver. I think you know I had some great ideas back then, I think, and I was too scared to put my head above the parapet and put them forward as ideas. So I went with a lot of ideas that I probably didn't agree with, and I think now, with hindsight, I think we could have pushed some people forward faster. I'm not sure if I'd have had more courage to stand up and say no, I don't think this is the right thing to do. I think we can do it better than this. So, yeah, I think that's probably. I'd say be braver. You know what you know.

Speaker 2: 27:04

And there's an interesting thing isn't there about? I'm sure it's something that's in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or something, and it talks about everything. If something happens between when you're I think it's when you're 20 and 35, you know that's when you can really, that's when you can impact it right. If it happens after you're 35, then you're just gonna go with it, and if it happens before, then then it's. You know it's not a same thing, but it's that sweet spot, it's that window where you are not only the provider, you're also the user of those services and you're also the one you've got the energy and the new ideas to drive it. So, yeah, I think, advice to younger, advice to people in that space, be courageous.

Speaker 1: 27:47

Fantastic. And finally, how do you unwind and escape from it all? Tell us a few things about you outside the work that we wouldn't know from looking at your LinkedIn profile.

Speaker 2: 28:00

I have a 38 kilo kilogram golden doodle called Keegan.

Speaker 1: 28:05

Wow, wow. Named after Kevin Keegan.

Speaker 2: 28:07

He's a big dog and I spent time with my partner and Richard and we do a lot of dog walking with our crazy stupid dog. We love that, and I've actually just got back from a three day festival, so which was all about food and good music. It's called the Big Festival, so Alex James' farm used to be the base plumber blur. It's on his farm every summer, so it has great music. This year there's Tom Grenner and Jake Shears and Rick Astley, which is great, but also great food. So you know I'm a big foodie so I love to cook. So yeah, that's me and my downtime dogs and food.

Speaker 1: 28:47

Dogs and food. Amazing, leanne, has been fascinating having you with us today. Hope our listeners have found this as insightful as I have. You can find out lots more about Customer Experience Foundation at cxfoorg and we hope you can join us next time on CXDirings.