CX Diaries - with Keith Gait

Mastering Cultural Transformation and Leadership with Steve Bent from Gallagher Culture Change Consulting

February 14, 2024 Keith Gait Season 2 Episode 16
Mastering Cultural Transformation and Leadership with Steve Bent from Gallagher Culture Change Consulting
CX Diaries - with Keith Gait
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CX Diaries - with Keith Gait
Mastering Cultural Transformation and Leadership with Steve Bent from Gallagher Culture Change Consulting
Feb 14, 2024 Season 2 Episode 16
Keith Gait

Unlock the transformative potential of your business's culture with the expert guidance of Steve Bent from Gallagher Culture Change Consulting. 

Throughout our engaging conversation, we examine the art of codifying a company's culture to replicate success across expanding or new locations. Steve offers a deep dive into the methods of assessing organizational culture, from interviews and focus groups to behavioural analysis, to isolate the unique attributes that define top performers. 

We also tackle the integral components of successful cultural transformation, emphasising the pivotal roles of leadership clarity and the everyday support that empowers staff to excel.

As we explore the wide-reaching effects of remote work on organisational values, we uncover strategies to ensure company principles aren't just words on a wall, but living, breathing aspects of every employee's role. Leadership's role in exemplifying and communicating these values becomes clear as we discuss overcoming resistance to change. 

The conversation shifts to the power of positivity and understanding every individual's contribution to the overarching mission, drawing a line between effective leadership and mere management. 

Concluding with an eye toward the future of customer experience, we propose that the key to success rests in strategic consistency that prioritises customer satisfaction over the allure of the latest technological marvels. 

Join us for a compelling exploration of culture and leadership that just might redefine the way you view your role in the workplace.

Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Unlock the transformative potential of your business's culture with the expert guidance of Steve Bent from Gallagher Culture Change Consulting. 

Throughout our engaging conversation, we examine the art of codifying a company's culture to replicate success across expanding or new locations. Steve offers a deep dive into the methods of assessing organizational culture, from interviews and focus groups to behavioural analysis, to isolate the unique attributes that define top performers. 

We also tackle the integral components of successful cultural transformation, emphasising the pivotal roles of leadership clarity and the everyday support that empowers staff to excel.

As we explore the wide-reaching effects of remote work on organisational values, we uncover strategies to ensure company principles aren't just words on a wall, but living, breathing aspects of every employee's role. Leadership's role in exemplifying and communicating these values becomes clear as we discuss overcoming resistance to change. 

The conversation shifts to the power of positivity and understanding every individual's contribution to the overarching mission, drawing a line between effective leadership and mere management. 

Concluding with an eye toward the future of customer experience, we propose that the key to success rests in strategic consistency that prioritises customer satisfaction over the allure of the latest technological marvels. 

Join us for a compelling exploration of culture and leadership that just might redefine the way you view your role in the workplace.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to CX Diaries. Cx Diaries from the Customer Experience Foundation is our podcast where we talk to 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 the journey through our industry. This week I'm delighted to join by Steve Bent, who is Client Director at Gallagher Culture Change Consulting. Steve, good morning, welcome. Pleasure to have you with us today.

Speaker 2:

Morning, keith, great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

So talk to us, for those that are perhaps new to this space, what a culture change consultancy does and why in 2024 it's still important, or even more important than ever.

Speaker 2:

Right. I do like to think that we're a little bit unique in terms of what we offer, and I think the critical part of that after years of performance improvement for me is that it's not just codifying what culture is, which I think we have done in the last decade, it's more. I would say that we've codified how to code your culture. So if we go into organizations, it's looking at, your culture is going to be different from somebody else's, so how do we find the best in that? How do we amplify it? How do we make sure everybody understands it, so that you can then replicate that culture as your business grows or as you open new sites or anything like that? We believe that it's really important to codify who you are, how you do, what you do on a good day, your Baraka day, how do you know what does it look like on a really good day? And we try to codify that and come up with a methodology for doing that at multiple levels of leadership. That's kind of where we play.

Speaker 1:

Right, okay. So how would you and anybody else assess the culture of an organization? How do you find out what that looks?

Speaker 2:

like there's a really quick answer and there's a longer answer, but it depends on the size of the project or the sort of work that we're doing. Often that can be just if we're working with the top leadership to shape the story that they're bringing into the organization, the narrative of where they are today, the mission that they're going on. That can be as simple as interviews with top team focus groups, with individuals throughout the organization, and you're there, you kind of get a good read of where that organization is using the questions that we've used for more than a decade. So therefore we've got a good sense and can kind of benchmark that against other organizations of similar size, similar industry. Yeah, and the deeper dive would be.

Speaker 2:

I know that you guys are contact centers, are close to the heart, so if you're into that sort of environment because I think people understand it, so if I can just use that as an example we get right into behavioral analysis of what drives the top performers at the front end. So right into what do your top performing agents do to drive sales or service performance and what are your lower performers doing? And I know it sounds really obvious, but subtract what the low performers are doing from what the top performers are doing and you're left with the magic secret sauce of what actually drives performance in your organization, which I think is a really important jigsaw piece in the bottom up driving of what is your culture. So I think I think that's the that's the sort of longer answer on it, Keith, but it's analyzing what's going on in the business today that is replicable and is represents who you are, to allow you to amplify that culture and to make it really sing.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so take that a bit further. What are some of the key factors that contribute to a successful culture and a successful culture transformation?

Speaker 2:

And answer the sort of second half of that culture transformation. You need a really clear direction from the top. So we talk about the tone is set to the top. The first job of leadership is to set the direction and tone for your people, and I don't care whether you're a CEO or a team manager, a team manager running frontline teams, a frontline manager. For me, one of the key things is always to have, when you sit down with a new team, the chat with your people and just say this is what you're going to get from me and this is what I've expect from you and here's what I'm not good at and here's what I think we're going after as a team. Even a team manager for me frontline manager can be doing that, and CEOs and MDs and people who run divisions absolutely need to let their people know what it is we're all running at and what is the part that everybody can play in it. So there's a really.

Speaker 2:

The first element is that tone setting clarity from the top about what it is we're running at. The second element, then, is around the having the climate. What are people doing every day? What are the second line managers, the third line managers, your ops managers doing in the organization every day for people performance to thrive, and so everybody's getting what they need. And then the third level for me would be around what are the mindsets and the behaviors that demonstrate what performance looks like in any business?

Speaker 2:

And I used contact centers, keith, because people get it. But we've done this behavioral analysis in everything from disability assessors through to engineers going out to service customers, through to people in people's homes trying to sell them boilers. We've done the analysis in the exact same way. Sometimes you have to go to use role plays, we've got to use actors, or sometimes you can just go and get in the vans with people. But every single time when you're trying to codify what top performance looks like on the front line, it's about getting under the skin of what are the top people doing, subtracting what everybody else is doing, and then you're left with the magic pixie dust which allows you to perform, and I think performance is such a critical element of culture.

Speaker 1:

Okay, this is probably a question that you get asked by the organizations that buy your services. How do you measure the impact of culture change within an organization?

Speaker 2:

It has to show up. We're all about performance, we're all about culture. Culture change. We're not at that end of it that says culture is just something nice. We're at the end where it has to. We're at this point the end where it has to drive a result. So one of our principles, in terms of anybody in a leadership position, if they're trying to coach their individuals and drive performance, if the coaching you're doing regularly is not making a difference to performance, it might still be coaching, it might still be mentoring, it might still be helpful, but it is not performance coaching. So it's got to be something which is driving performance.

Speaker 2:

So we expect, through our programs, to see optics in engagement. We expect people to see the return on investment in sense of attrition and retention of staff. We would expect to see cultures yielding performance uplifts in productivity now more than ever. And that wasn't something we used to focus on 10 years ago. We were like that's a tricky one to measure, but now I think that's more important than ever. And then your obvious answers like what is the CX scores? What are your customers saying and what are your sales figures looking like? What's your margin looking like? What's your discounting looking like? Whatever it is. You want to get an outcome from that culture. We look at what that outcome needs to be and work backwards from that and then design codifying your culture around the outcome that you're trying to get to.

Speaker 1:

Really interesting. So perhaps give us some examples of some of the elements of culture that are often overlooked but are crucial for developing a fostering and positive work environment. What are some of the things that often get missed?

Speaker 2:

I'm going to give you, off the top of my head, three things. One, an exact strategy pack which determines the direction of the business is not the communication that's going to engage the 30,000th individual on the frontline. So how do you lift that? Those packs are important, right, the strategy is important. You've got to know what you're running on and what it is you stand for. But what is more important is ensuring that people at the frontline know what that is.

Speaker 2:

So I'm on a sort of personal mission. One of my personal missions is to help people feel better about work by ensuring that they're engaged in a purpose, and if there isn't a purpose that they can get behind in the business. It's about helping them find that purpose for themselves. But that's hard work. It is much easier although it requires the little gap that you're saying that gets missed of making sure that if we're on this mission, that 30,000 people or 3,000 people or 300 people in your division all know the part that they play in that, and I think that that can get missed. We can have really great strategy packs that everybody up here can talk about. But what does that mean down here and how do we know that everybody on the team is running towards that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and how do we get buy-in for that? How do we get buy-in from the people frontline and the frontline managers? How do we get buy-in for that during this culture change process?

Speaker 2:

The answer to that's really easy. The trick of your bet is how do you get buy-in from the top team that it needs to be done? So we have what we call questions with teeth or survey with teeth. To what extent do you feel comfortable right now that everybody in your business knows how they contribute to the mission and to what extent do you feel that everybody in your business right now is working on the right thing today in the right way? And normally when you ask most leaders, even of divisions or business areas that they slightly go white or there's a kind of like. I don't actually feel massively confident that everybody in my org is working on the right things today or doing it in the right way, so I feel a bit nervous. So it's creating that buy-in that the work needs to be done and there needs to be some effort put into that and it's not huge. Off the back of that, but with zero focus, you should expect to have zero focus from the frontline in terms of what that looks like, and zero engagement or understanding of the mission that we're all on. That's the first of three. Okay, I'm one of the others, so the other one would be very similar.

Speaker 2:

But values. If you've got values in your business, to what extent do people really, if they're just on the walls or on pieces of paper or in the induction pack, what does that really mean? That people know how that shows up? So, doing that matrix work, the HR, the really important HR framework that says this is one of our values. This is what it looks like for leaders. This is what it looks like in terms of the mindset that we expect to run through our organization and this is what it looks like at every role. As long as there's something positive intent at the heart of it, it doesn't matter what it is.

Speaker 2:

And easy examples going right out there would be. Is it the Richard Branson thing People at the heart of everything, because if you focus on your people, customers will be served? Or is it the other end which just says customer is the most important thing and we'll live and die by that's the Bezos thing. So I'm infinitely curious and passionate about how do we drive that customer service. You take those two guys and you and I both know people come and grind. I'm not going to share too much, but some businesses just say customers are everything. So if you're not focused on the customer. If that phone rings, I want you to pick up the phone. If it's one of our customers, I want you to pick up that customer, no matter what meeting you're in. It doesn't matter whether you're in a feedback meeting. That's one end of the spectrum and I think that's totally okay, because everybody getting their nose, that's the job to be done. So how do you lift the values off the page into people knowing what good looks like, so they can deliver on it every single day?

Speaker 1:

Okay, how do we handle resistance or pushback from people or leadership when we're trying to develop a culture and do a culture change, transformation? Okay, that's pretty good.

Speaker 2:

Okay, we can go here. Simon Sinek does a thing right. He keeps saying I'll use Apple because everybody gets it. So I'm going to use sales because everybody gets it.

Speaker 2:

How do I tackle pushback and lack of buy-in? To me is like people saying how do you handle objections in sales conversations? It probably means you didn't do the stuff right earlier in the mean. So you need to know if you're in a sales conversation we all get it. You've got to open the call nicely or open the meeting nicely. You've got to have done your due diligence and all your questions so that you understand exactly what's going on and understand the people in front of you, and you've got to pitch the product back to them in a way that is relevant to what they need. And then, guess what? You don't get as much resistance. They might ask challenging questions or whatever.

Speaker 2:

So I think, similarly, if people are getting are resistant to the culture you're trying to build, what I'd be looking at is so what was the communication that we use to get them to buy in? Is the mission that we're on something that is being focused on them, or is it focused on the business? So, therefore, does it create buy-in and what steps have you taken to demonstrate, as a leadership team, that you believe in this mission and you want to act on it every day. If we say that customer is the heart of everything we do, but all we focus on is profitability, every day, Well, you can't expect people to believe that we're going to go into this culture chain. So one of the big symbolic acts, one of the visible, demonstrable actions that the leadership team can take that demonstrate that this is the mission we're on.

Speaker 2:

We've got some brilliant examples. One of the water companies we work with If you remember the ice bucket challenge back in the day, that wouldn't have been suitable for a water company because that's wasting water, but they did the no water challenge across the leadership team and they videoed it right. So really brilliant demonstration that services everything to us. We want all of our customers to have service. So for a weekend, a leadership team member would not go without water and he'd video blog it right. So all of the kind of not the actual argument with the family or the wife or the partner or whatever other kids, but he would be talking about the significant challenges of not being able to shower and not being able to flush and not being able to go into that.

Speaker 2:

And what was brilliant was people really got bought in. They were interested in, they could see what was going on, but they learned so much from not having it. They learned the things that mattered. So guess what? They changed the processes off the back of it. Customers got things like instead of just sending them a pack of bottled water, they got the bottled water which they would need but was never enough. But they got baby wipes and they got other things that actually made a difference to a family that have run out of water. So it's really critical, I think, that the leadership demonstrate that they mean it and it's really critical that you go out. First job of leadership is to set the direction and its own, be really clear about what the mission is going on and demonstrate that you're backing it up and watch how the resistance starts to fade.

Speaker 1:

And going further on that, as you know, I led the culture change program at a very, very large national transport organisation and you can sometimes get this disconnect between what the leaders think the values and goals are and what the frontline staff actually want to work on. How do you ensure alignment across all those things?

Speaker 2:

Well, again, the analysis, if we were doing a piece of work, I think it's different self-implementation versus somebody coming into support. If we were coming into support, we'd be looking at what is the right balance and what we'll have seen in different organizations. Is that actually what the leadership team are trying to get to? Maybe that is closer to the right answer and therefore the leadership team really need to think about how do they get their message across and explain to people that this is the right way or why they've taken the attack, not just because we say demonstrate to the people that, if it is the right answer, what that is.

Speaker 2:

But I think what happens much more often is that the frontline view can often be closer because they're closer to the customer, they're closer to what's going on. What is the most likely answer is, even if the direction the leadership team want to go is that we're borrowing from what the front line are seeing to help us on that mission, and once people see that their request, their ideas, what they want to get to, how they want to drive the experience for the customer is being taken account of, well, then you start to see that meeting of minds. But if it's going to be this. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a culture expert to know that that between the top and the bottom is just literally never going to work. So it's the responsibility of the leader to overcome that, regardless of who's right or who's wrong, or hard working to get it. It's the leader's responsibility.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so how has the rise of remote working and the hybrid working impacted on organizations, cultures and culture change efforts Must make it more difficult.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that the big thing is engagement. Right, and I'm not, I'm a proponent for remote working. I think that businesses that are able to drive performance in the remote working environment and drive performance through engaging people the Doomsday version of me says that the businesses that are going to do that will be the ones that succeed. And I do expect that in the next five years or less we're going to see giants in certain sectors vanish because the guys, the smaller businesses, that are able to do that engagement and able to get performance out of their people remotely are going to succeed. People want to work from home. So you've got.

Speaker 2:

If the mandates that say you need to come back to the office, from my personal perspective are not going to work, it's driven by sorry, selfishly or looking at it sort of negatively sorry is you know that is driven by the property owners. The property owners are kind of going this isn't going to work and that that that doesn't work for me. So the businesses that find ways to allow their people to work from home, find ways to get people to collaborate remotely and to get bring people into the office to do the work that is important to do together in the office or an assured space. I think those are the businesses that are going to. They're going to thrive.

Speaker 2:

Technology businesses are the biggest companies in the world today, versus 20 years ago, and I don't think that that's going away. So, ignoring AI and ignoring remote working, and thinking we're going to drag everybody back into the offices, I might be wrong, but ask me, in 10 years, I think we will we will not see that everybody's back in the offices like they were in in 2015. I just can't. I just cannot envisage a world, keith. Well, that's the answer. So I think the guys that manage to engage and get performance out of their people, allow them to work from home, get that balance and get the best out of their people, they're the big, they're the businesses that are going to win.

Speaker 1:

And that leads us nicely on to the next question, which is how has AI going to impact all this.

Speaker 2:

I'm worried about AI, and not in the same way that everybody else is. Again, I think it's inorgable. It's here, it's not going to go away. There are, if you look back over time and I know this is old news, but you know, people were worried about the internet, people were worried about mobile phones, people were worried about. You know, the AI is just the next step in that sort of journey, right, so it the the negative bit is, when people chase the wrong things, they're using it for what it's there for.

Speaker 2:

Right now, there's people out there saying that AI promises the earth. It doesn't. You know, I've seen it. I've worked in, let's call it, retail organizations of more than 200,000 people and if you want to analyze, I can give you a real example from 2022, I think it was the internal feedback that they had of their staff survey, because the company was so large, the comment section was the equivalent of, in word count, of all of the books of the Harry Potter series. Seven times, right, and everybody just goes oh yeah, just plug it into AI. Well, firstly, you're into really bespoke tools that do that, and actually in companies that size, they're not about to run out and chuck all of their internal information into a tool and getting past all the hurdles. So, again, this is the opportunity for the smaller guys that are able to be lean and agile and get in and use the cutting edge stuff will perform better. But also, don't be chasing the crocodile at the end of the rainbow.

Speaker 2:

What has always been true and I think will remain true for the next decade, is augmented human People are able to use AI to increase the performance of the individual. It is not AI is going to take our jobs. So I'm not worried about AI taking individual people's jobs. I am worried about her implementation, incorrect implementation, lack of implementation of AI destroying companies, which will destroy jobs. But I don't think people are going to lose their jobs because AI can do better. I do think companies are going to lose to the companies that are able to use AI in an intelligent way to augment the performance, engagement, output of the people in their teams. I just sorry bit of a soapbox, but that's. I hear a lot of noise about the minute and I just I just don't agree with a lot of it.

Speaker 1:

I think most people would agree with you there. So what advice would you give to an organization that think they might need to engage on a culture change journey? So a lot of organizations culture can be a difficult thing to understand. They might think they've got a bad culture. They might know they've got a bad culture. They might think they're doing well and they're not. So what advice would you give to anyone listening that thinks they might need to embark on this journey? Where do they start?

Speaker 2:

I'm a data guy, so I think the place to start is in some analysis. I think it needs to be have some depth, but it doesn't need to be complex. I think look at your, look at the headline things. What are your customers saying? What are your people saying? What is your customer engagement score? What is your people engagement score? I mean, who knows right at the top of the tree and go right and then underneath that, from the culture, those to me are the outputs, the lag indicators of what you're called how good your culture is, and but they're not the specific culture measures. The specific culture measures would be more, and some of them would be more anecdotal questions around.

Speaker 2:

To what extent, would you say, everybody in your organization understands the mission you're on and the role that they play? I think I've mentioned that already, but that's critical to me. If you can achieve that, I think everybody feels better about work. Everybody understands that the job that they do is important. Everybody rocks up to work feeling a little bit more positive when people are positive. If you look at all the research Sean and Core, all of those guys positivity drives a 31% improvement in productivity. It sounds insane, but it's true, right. So we got. It's been evidence. So it's really important that we understand the extent to which people understand the mission and the part that they play in it. And if we're not able to quantify that for people or to explain that to people or to detail that for people, that's the, that's the first job then Right, so you've done the data analysis and you've looked at your customer scores and your people scores.

Speaker 2:

You've asked the killer question that says do our people understand what mission we're on and the role that they play? And if the answer is no or low, then you just start doing that work. That says this is the mission. We thought we were really clear or bad. This is on us, not you, and this is what we're on. I just want you to know.

Speaker 2:

It may feel like you're just off doing that same thing and chugging through this, like you were five years ago, and these guys over here because they're in sales or because they're whatever or growth mission, whatever it is and these guys over here are kind of the spotlights on them. But we wouldn't be where we were today if it wasn't for this work that you're doing. So we just the part that you're playing. Our mission is the stuff that you're brilliant at that you've been doing for five years, 10 years. Please, please, please, keep doing what you're doing, because that's what's going to get us there. You know, whatever the message needs to be for the different segments of individuals in your organization, how do you motivate them and help them see that, once they may not be in the spotlight, or, if they are on the spotlight, what the focus on you are critical to our success and how we move forward. Helping people understand that, I think, is really really important.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, one thing I wanted to touch on is I've worked at a lot of big organizations, as you know, seeing a lot of people. A lot of people are in leadership positions, but they are actually managers, not leaders. Talk to me about what you see there and how we develop better leadership out of managers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's critical. All the books out there. There's a big difference in leadership versus management. Manages the task. Leaders is looking after the people and going into it. For me, the first job of leadership is to set the direction and tone. But the role of a leader for me is two things it's looking after the welfare of your people and looking after the performance of your people. That's kind of where I keep at it. So that drives a lot of answers for me in terms of how businesses should be set up and all design.

Speaker 2:

When it comes to the upskilling, what we find works really well at higher levels of leadership who you're not going to put on a course. They've probably done MBTI or insights and all of that stuff. They know what their profile is. They know what their tendencies are. They're busy, they don't want to be in training. I think the things that can really help is understanding some of the specific cognitive biases that they'll have around filtering out positives, around the fact that they're much more likely to deal with absolutes rather than want to work in the grey, the fact that when they communicate with people because they're busy and they want to get the job done, that maybe the way they're communicating isn't going to be the thing that gets the best out of people. So that I think remaining human, remaining positive, generating positivity, is the only way that you can do the double job of welfare and performance.

Speaker 2:

I think it's that, and I think far too many people ignore, far too many leaders ignore, become blind to downplay or don't realise or haven't been shown that the way to do it is to get the best out of your people is to talk positively about what the work they've done is. That is right. You know what we call a hashtag 149s the things you've done really well and also the very next things that I need you to do. That will drive us performance the human tendency, what we are wired for, what we will do every day. I beg anybody to try and argue against this.

Speaker 2:

What we spot is the mistake. What we spot is the things that people are doing wrong, and it's too easy and I'm sorry, I call it the lazy leadership. It's easy to sit on a sofa and watch your favourite sports team or something on TV and go oh, why did they do that or why did I miss. How do you focus on what you need that person to do differently? How do you focus on what they did do well to get to that point, so that they can be motivated by their performance to date and motivated by some vision that's in front of them, that they can, that they, that is reachable, that they can get towards. So I think a lot of leaders miss that, even today and we see that all the time. Keith, in any leadership team you're going to have a number of people who don't tend to focus on how do I get the best performance out of people, because they somehow have become not tethered to that anymore as the key part of the role, but it always is.

Speaker 1:

Yeah absolutely fascinating, steve, fascinating insight. Leave us with your final thoughts. Where's culture change going? Where's what's the future for CX?

Speaker 2:

as you say it more broadly, I think the future for CX, like we said before, it's not somebody who's out there doing some ridiculous and seeing use of AI. It's somebody who is maybe using it in a way that drives the performance of the business. I think there are amazing examples of stuff. It's the difference between something which is overly clever and smart and something that just works, and performance improvement, which I've had born the scars of, is simply down to did it make a difference and did it work? That's the only thing that matters and, I think, a phenomenal example of a business that I've seen recently who are bucking the trend and I'm allowed to talk about them. I actually checked. I'm not allowed to show the secret sauce, but I'm allowed to talk about it. So I got the privilege of being in with Ovo, an energy company, just about a year or so ago as part of a tech launch that they were doing, and got to see this really simple and clever way that they've done let's call it customer segmentation to drive accountability in teams, and I thought, wow, that's amazing. But what you're going to love about this story, keith, is I forgot about it. It was 14, 15 months ago, maybe longer. I didn't even realize we were with Ovo because your energy company has changed all the time. And my wife, who's also ex contact center a long time ago, got off the phone to them on last week and simply just said you're not going to believe it, we've been overpaying. And I rang them up and I was raging, but I just rang them up and I didn't say it and the guys said general problem, I'll get that back to you now and, by the way, we've got this new tariff and just literally give us the money back, instantly, change the tariff that we were on to save money, said I could put you on an even lower tariff, but what you'll lose is your service. You've got services built into. Think, what, are boilers covered? Yeah, we can get a service now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course you can.

Speaker 2:

And then followed everything up before the call was finished in an email that came out. And that is something that I think all of us look at and say, wow, slick, simple, easy. Surely everybody can do that. But I don't think that is the experience for most of us when I'm ringing and it certainly isn't my experience when I'm ringing my bank, when I'm ringing my mobile provider, when I'm ringing my internet provider, when I'm dealing with other energy companies, so I think the future of CX is for the businesses that find ways to engage their people, drive accountability in them for customer, so that really great stuff happens, like the team at Ovo who I just so applaud so much, and I was so impressed back then, but to see the way in which it has paid off as a customer genuinely was just ridiculous and phenomenal. And yeah, that's my current passion story.

Speaker 1:

Amazing, amazing Steve. It's been absolutely wonderful having you with us today. Some great insights into a topic that we've not covered on CX Diaries before, so thank you for sharing your knowledge, passion and insight. I hope our listeners have found that as great as I have. You can find out lots more about Customer Experience Foundation at cxfoorg and also check out Gallagher Change Consulting. Thank you for joining us on CX Diaries. We'll catch you next time.

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