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Join Calabrio as we talk with Clare about the role of technology in CX, and why the current approach may not be working.
In this series we will discuss Contact Center industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. Join us as we learn and grow together in order to provide world class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
Clare Muscutt Podcast
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[00:00:00] Dave: welcome to working smarter, presented by Calabrio, where we discuss contact center, industry trends and best practices, as well as sharing success, stories and pain points with some of the most innovative professionals in the industry. We're glad you're joining us to learn and grow together in order to provide world-class customer service to each and every one of our clients.
My name is Dave Hoekstra product evangelists for Calabrio. And my guest today is Clare Muscutt, founder and CEO of women in CX. Hi Clare thanks so much for joining us.
[00:00:35] Clare: Dave, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:00:39] Dave: That's wonderful. And first off, let me just say, I could listen to your accent all day long.
I love it. I wish I had a British accent that I could bring forth my normal, boring American homogenized accent.
[00:00:54] Clare: It's crazy that anytime I'm in America, I hear this exactly the same thing. What is it with you guys [00:01:00] in British accent?
[00:01:02] Dave: It sounds so much smarter than our accent. That is. God's honest truth.
You know, I have many colleagues that I work with that speak with, with their lovely English accent. And they always sound smarter than me, no matter how hard I try. So Claire, I'd say let's get right into it as we can. We can probably chat for a long time. And so in the, in the interest of our listeners and getting right to it I want to ask you, first of all what is women in CX?
And kind of, how did you get involved? I think I know the answer to that question. And then kind of, how did your journey bring you to where you are? Okay.
[00:01:42] Clare: So women in CX is the world's first online membership community for women in customer experience. And it began as a result of me losing everything in the pandemic.
I'd been a very successful consultant and keynote speaker who did everything in real life. [00:02:00] So overnight I went from having a book tour and international speaking gigs and work. Booked on an, almost every single continent to nothing. So it started as the need for me to find connection. So I started reaching out to women that I've met online, like as in, on social media, but we'd never had a conversation.
Like teacher this stuff and said, Hey, do you fancy using this new fangled zoom thing that I've just discovered and hanging out? And, and they were like, yeah, sure. Why not? And, and what amazed me was, although we'd met under the premise of talking about customer experience, actually much more of the conversations stemmed from our experiences of being women in this industry.
So after a few of these calls, I said, I've been to a couple of, of the ladies I've been speaking to you, would you be brave enough to maybe have these conversations in public? And they said, yes. So the community actually started as a podcast and I religiously week after week [00:03:00] for. The best part of seven months, I didn't do anything other than published a podcast.
And a serendipitous moment occurred when a guy who was based out in Silicon valley and really successful entrepreneur said, I've been listening to this podcast, Claire. And I think it's incredible what you're doing. If I gave you some. What would you do with it? And this guy called Jonathan Choi, and I said, Jonathan, I'd build an online community because I knew how valuable these conversations were.
And although it was kind of a broadcast thing that we were doing, I thought if I could build a community platform, women could be having these conversations. Well the time. So he gave me $10,000. We became a startup and then I embarked upon what I call the best customer experience design projects of my life, mainly because I didn't know how to build a community or an online platform based business.
And it started as bringing women in. So for research to understand their challenges, what our community might be able to [00:04:00] help them with and evolved into a small group of as designing a, an MVP product that we took to market within eight weeks. And I then moved into a beta test where we recruited. 30 women from across the world.
And they helped us to co-design what is now a women in CX as a platform that is a social network where there's nothing but kindness and support and people can crowdsource questions, answers to their questions. Anytime the night we were at events on a weekly basis. Keynote speakers from around the world who will more than happy to give up their time to share their insights with the community and help develop women.
We hold all kinds of networking events and help amplify women's voices on social media too, with the purpose of helping women's collaborate with one another to succeed together and hopefully use our voices to reshape the future of.
[00:04:55] Dave: Wow. That's pretty awesome. And I have to say as a hashtag girl, [00:05:00] dad it's, it's great to, to hear the success that you guys have had and knowing that you're empowering a lot of people to kind of find the success where, where it drives this.
From, and I love that it, I couldn't be prouder and happier for you guys that you're seeing success in that. And it's, it's really great. And that's why you're here today with us is to kind of talk about not only that journey you had, but you know, Tap into some of the things that you've learned in your conversations with some of your, your, your women in tech.
And I love that very much. And you know, you and I have talked about, you know, my daughter and and how she's a very empowered young woman and is out there. And it's really great to see things like this that continue to kind of amplify the message. And it makes me, makes me very happy to know that you're seeing that.
So if someone wanted to join the community, how, how does that work?
[00:05:57] Clare: Yeah. So if you just head over to [00:06:00] www.womenincx.community you'll find a link to join one of our intro events and you can come along, meet some members, have a little sample of our experience. Kama lemon.
[00:06:11] Dave: And I'm sure you're looking forward to having these events in person.
[00:06:15] Clare: Yeah, we already have. So we had four meetups on the same day on CX. They actually, and Barcelona, Dublin, London, and Dubai. So. Yeah. W we're in 43 countries already. I can't believe it. You know, you've been around for it. It's crazy.
[00:06:30] Dave: That's amazing. And it's, it's kind of feel good to kind of look back at the journey and and, and see where it's led you to so far.
In speaking of that, I, I understand your journey to get, there was a little bit weirder than most.
[00:06:43] Clare: We had, maybe it's a bit of a strong term.
[00:06:46] Dave: Alright. That's fair. Okay. It was, it was, it was off the beaten path. Let's call it
[00:06:50] Clare: that. Well, I think, you know, I talked to so many women who were joining the community about actually I think it's very common.
Yeah. None of us kind of [00:07:00] woke up and said, I want to be a CX professional. One day, we all kind of fell into it. And my route was very much viral operations. So my university days, in fact, I started working when I was 15. Cause I just really wanted to work. We spent actually paying for my college tuition.
By working in hospitality. So I started on the shop floor as a waitress, worked my way up whilst I was at uni. By the time I graduated from my master's at the age of 23, the company I was already working for, put me on their graduate scheme and gave me my own hotel and restaurant to run, which was incredible experience.
And all the time that I'd been working in hospitality, the thing I loved the most we're serving customers. And the thing I loved the most about working in operations was leading people. So for me, very early on in my career, I figured out kind of the combination of, you know, focusing on people, customers and employees was what creates.
[00:08:00] Great service experiences. So for example, I was a 23 year old girl, fresh out of college, surrounded by a group of peers who were all middle-aged men. And their advice to me was always about control of the profits. Restraint the margin focused on the numbers. And I was like, nah, I'm going to focus on people.
I'm going to take care of my employees and ensure that we're really focused on the quality of our food and the quality of our service and customer experience. Not that I knew that that was a term back then. And it, you know, Hey Presto, it works. It was. The results that I got were surpassing that pretty quickly because of that focus.
So so then when I went into the office, I, you know, it was. Interested in the data side, then behind how we measured and evaluated things like experiences. So I got this job, basically my job was to report all of our data and insight points to the executive team. [00:09:00] But I uniquely for an analyst could say why these things were happening and what we needed to do about them, because I understood the operation.
And my career kind of went off on the trajectory of, of customer experience initially and proposition and marketing, developing products and services based on feedback. I got my first job with the word customer experience in it. A couple of years later in a new company working in B2B. And then I got headhunted in 2012 to join Sainsbury's, which is one of the UKs largest retailer.
Where I landed with the first person and the companies have customer experience and module title, no team, a blank sheet of paper and the opportunity to help Sainsbury's evolve its view of customer experience, not just being an interaction on, on the shop floor, in a store, or I'm a complaint being handled.
During the five years I was there, I'm had, I had customer experience, design introduced all these new tools, got [00:10:00] some huge projects going that delivered a great return on investment. And before I left was head of their CX team.
[00:10:11] Dave: This is the point I've been waiting for here. Oh, is
[00:10:13] Clare: this the weird thing that you were,
sorry? I totally missed that. So, yeah. So then in 2017, I. Speaking career. It actually also taken off at the same time. So I've been flown out to Australia. I did my first solo trip. I got flown back out to go to New Zealand and I took six weeks off. And during that six weeks, I'd discovered how much I love to traveling.
So I went to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia. Spent some time in Bali and I'm just discovered this other side of myself that I didn't know existed. That loved adventure. So I watching the sun go down one night, having not really thought about work for the first time in my life. For a prolonged amount of time.
I've not worn makeup. [00:11:00] My I've worn shoes. Like I was having the time of my life and I realized I didn't want to go back to that corporate lifestyle. So I basically came back, quit my job, not knowing what I was going to do. And set up my own consulting firm that within the first six months, it didn't make a six figure salary.
So I recognized in actually. Yeah, it's not the only path to keep climbing that corporate ladder. There are there alternative pathways. That's how I ended up as a consultant and global keynote speaker. And you've already had the rest of the story at the beginning of what
[00:11:38] Dave: you were doing, but you were actually. Living anywhere in anywhere that anyone would have you, right. You were kind of living in that pneumatic lifestyle. Yeah.
[00:11:47] Clare: Full on digital nomad. So I, my life kind of looked like a go and get a speaking gig somewhere. Like let's say South Africa and there's real example, I'd run a workshop.
I don't relate to money really quickly. [00:12:00] And then I'd spend six weeks traveling around Africa. So you're going to like Malawi and Mozambique and Tanzania. And I have my laptop on my phone, admittedly, and didn't always have wifi. Okay. I could work wherever I wanted. And because I had the team back in the UK, it was amazing, like working in Asia Pacific.
So I'd be in Fiji. My team would be in the UK and I'll be working with a client in New Zealand. And we could literally like turn work around overnight before the client had even woke up. So yeah, like Yeah, and I client feedback, they just thought we were incredible.
[00:12:30] Dave: It is a really cool story. And you know, the, I almost hate to use the word bravery because it's not, it's not bravery.
It's following your passion. It's, it's finding the thing that makes you happy, but it does require a certain leap of faith to be able to kind of make that, make that call in your life. Yeah,
[00:12:49] Clare: well, courage, I think probably is the word ideas, but courage has become one of our values for women in CX. And I don't think without it, you can really succeed and let your definition of [00:13:00] success might be very different to the next person's is something that can only be intrinsically defined by yourself.
But yeah, it does take over. To walk away from the comfort into the unknown, but what you find there may well be the end of a rainbow.
[00:13:13] Dave: I'm glad you said the, the, the phrase like intrinsically within you, because as you were talking about your journey and you mentioned kind of in 2012 when you were brought on and you gave given this, you know, a budget and a blank piece of paper to kind of create this customer experience, it really kind of made me think that.
Up until about 2010 or so customer experience was a intrinsically individual. Trait, right. There were people who were good at customer experience and then everyone else. Right. And there was no real way to make that trait work amongst the rest of the [00:14:00] people. I experienced that early in my career. As my very first job was working at a blockbuster video, which I I'm assuming you have at least some, some flavor of a video rental stores in the UK.
Fantastic. And so I loved that job. I loved the rush of the Friday night. Everyone coming in, renting videos you know, LA fairly longer lines. And it was where I could put on my make people happy persona. And it wasn't until years later that I realized that. It was, it was a CX persona. It was, I not only have to make this person that is directly in front of me, happy with the experience, but I also have to manage the experience of those behind them.
I have to manage the experience of the people out, looking for videos, the people walking into the door, the people leaving, right. The whole journey of [00:15:00] how to create a good customer experience. And. When I got later into the contact center industry and I started training people, I realized that how frustrating it was to try and teach people what I think I naturally understood.
And I wonder as part of our discussion here have you seen that in your discussions with organizations creating a customer experience? And teaching people how to do it. How hard is that now?
[00:15:32] Clare: So I guess you're talking about customer service element of customer experience. I think because digital wasn't really a thing either back then.
And when I started it, I was very much in the human domain of people delivering service to people. And the second company that I went to join, that was actually basically uh, my job was how do we create service culture and [00:16:00] how do we transform service levels through. People. So I'm so for me, I think there's, there's a huge misunderstanding about why people don't give great service.
It's not like lack of willingness or, you know, nobody shows up for things. I don't want to be an absolute word today. I usually there's something underlying that and no one. Well at the time, maybe it was listening to the employees and understanding all the operational barriers that were in the way, all the frustrations that they had, the poor leadership that they were experiencing, the lack of role models and the lack of standards for them to work to.
So I, a lot of the work in my, in my early days of my career was about great in a framework to be able to diagnose. The battery is engaged teams and deliver tools to help them change. But you can't just expect, it would give you some training, then you're going to be able to do it. It's about removing barriers is providing great [00:17:00] leadership as well.
So everything from kind of like reward and recognition, recruitment induction, all grand performance management, promotion opportunities, you know, how do I, as an agent. Or frontline employee have a path here for myself and I, and I think one of the biggest mistakes businesses can ever make is undefined undervaluing.
The people are not giving them enough attention and focus because you know, 99% of customer experience at the heart end. Dealing with complaints, the day-to-day service, the support is only going to be delivered by those employees. And if you're not taking care of them and they don't feel good and they don't feel engaged and they're not empowered and supported, what do you expect?
[00:17:49] Dave: And you know, it, it, the way you explain it. And when we look at it, it feels very, like, very much like a no-brainer. But my question to you is why. [00:18:00] Why are companies realizing that why are they thinking that the only way to solve this problem is to throw more technology at it, as opposed to you just listed about 10 bullet points of things.
And none of those bullet points that you said was technology. But when these companies go out and try to affect their CX journey, the first thing they do is call a company in and buy a piece of software. Why, why is that? Why, why, what are we missing? So
[00:18:30] Clare: I think the technology evolution revolution called it, what you will, there's been a bit of a tech race hasn't there.
So Amazon has single sign on. We need it. We need it. We need it. Cause everyone's going to expecting it. Oh, like chat bots. This is a near innovation. It's going to save us a lot of money. Let's just get it in there. And the speed at which you can deploy technology in order to deliver results is admittedly far quicker than transforming the [00:19:00] culture of people within an organization.
So I, so I think part of the reason slash challenge is. You've got to think how commercial organizations have to be and the way the people who make most of the decisions think isn't in a particular human centric way. It's looking at placing bets on things that can generate either the greatest return on the investment from saving or from driving sales.
So when technologies come along with great salespeople, espousing that this thing can, you know, tick so many of the boxes. I understand why. That is probably. Seems to be the easier path to take, but what we inevitably see and the reason customer experience is so disjointed now we've got the most amazing technologies out there and capabilities, but it doesn't add up to a great experience because it isn't integrated and it isn't.[00:20:00]
Thought through as a part of a, a planned and designed and visualized customer journey. So the experience now for a lot of companies and for a lot of customers is just simply the output of the technologies that they've implemented. You get what you're given based on the technology stack that we've decided upon.
Well,
[00:20:18] Dave: and you made a, you made a really great point when we were talking previously that you, you said, and I'm quoting CX is right-brained, but developed by left-brain. Can you expand on that a little
[00:20:31] Clare: bit? What did I say that? So I think so. I think there's like a right brain left brain difference in thinking.
And we know that women tend to be more right-brained men tends to be more left, but also the jobs that you choose tend to be more right or left brain, depending on who you are. So if you look at like finance it development, AI, that was a predominantly male workforce with a very [00:21:00] astute left brains. And you look at marketing customer service customer experience, you tend to find more, more women.
So when the decisions are being made. If you look at where the person, the budget says. Presently, it's probably more over in the technology side than it ever is going to be in marketing or wherever the customer experience it. So I, what I advocate is how can you bring right brain thinking in about stuff like customer experience design in order to give the people with the left brain thinking who can make really great choices using data and those kinds of Sources to make better decisions, but it's just about having right on brain thinking together.
So I'm not saying, and I never would say, you know, it's just creative about creative. It's just about customers and employees. I just believe and have demonstrate initiative proven time. And again, if you think from that perspective to start with, you're going to have far greater input into business decisions.
[00:21:57] Dave: So if I'll put some words in your mouth [00:22:00] and you tell me if I'm wrong here, if you were asked to come into an organization and evaluate and, and would, would most of your recommendations at that point, be to focus less on the tech and more on the people.
[00:22:15] Clare: So, I guess my first step, whenever I work with any organization, whether it's been on the business side or in my consulting days has really been to sit back and look at what's currently going on.
So I'm understanding the, as is customer experience, what's happening for employees? What are the business goals and the objectives? How far off are we delivering those? What, what does performance look like? And every organization is. So being able to establish where you are today is kind of fundamental.
So present in the business case for why a bit more thinking about people and the humans is going to be valuable. And if you don't buy into that as a mindset, everything else is [00:23:00] irrelevant. That makes sense. Yeah.
[00:23:03] Dave: I think, I think one of the things you said, and I, I keep throwing you things that you may have said that you don't recall.
You said you said start with the brand and not the.
Well,
[00:23:15] Clare: so in customer experience design, it's about having three inputs. So customers and employees and their needs and the human aspect, the brand, because that can be a key point of differentiation, especially in this world where consumers are much more interested in mission-driven businesses than I am.
The ones that don't care about people. And then thirdly is the business, but the businesses are good at thinking about the business because the business is good at thinking about technology solutions. They tend to just not be quite so good about, well, how do you bring people and the brands and technology together and operational efficiency and think holistically.
So I'm sorry. So we, we know [00:24:00] we can see it. The technology capabilities because of the pandemic have been invested in everybody has switched off phone calls. They've got apps, they've got web chat or websites. They've gone. Digital. Everybody wants to be digital first now with customer service, but how much of that was really driven by what people want and need and how well joined together.
Towards delivering service experiences that make life easier, or if we flip it on the other way around how much of it's been done, because there's a real operational efficiency, cost saving, no brainer on the left brain of we can switch all of this stuff off. Spend less money, high, high capital investment in the short term, but make that money back really quickly by implementing technologies.
[00:24:57] Dave: Yeah, it's, it's, it's such a fascinating way of [00:25:00] looking at it and I feel like you've awoken a small part of my brain or maybe a part of my small brain whatever that may be. Whenever I am working with an organization as a consumer, not, not, you know, in consulting or talking to them as a subject matter expert, whenever I'm presented with a piece of tech.
My brain always goes to, oh, they only have this in there because they're saving money. Right. When I go onto a website and it's like, hi, do you have a problem? And I get the little chat bot on the bottom. Right? Is that, is that because they truly want to help me? Or is it the, because they don't want me to call them because calling is a more expensive communication method for organizations, then chat is.
You know, and do I really feel like this is a great journey? I mean, I, I told you the story [00:26:00] earlier, but it's irrelevant here. How I went to enter to purchase something online and tried to enter a promo code and the promo code did not work. So I had to call and the call was significantly worse than the.
Experience because, and, and did they actually really care to give me a good customer experience? Whereas I just another person to get off the phones into the next call and it always kind of feels like that. It's very rare for an organization. Push through that. And so that's why I love the CX conversation is because in we're flipping the script, we're, we're really turning it towards a conversation of not let's, let's save money here.
But if you think about it from this perspective, you will save money. Right? And, and that's, that's probably a huge part of what you try to prove to organizations when you work with them is. Stop starting with the money and you'll end up with the money anyway. [00:27:00] Yeah.
[00:27:00] Clare: Yeah. The results take care of themselves.
They really do. I say, you know, in a, on paper, digital transformation makes sense. Doesn't it like you can look at, we implement these channels. Customers should be able to do stuff that people can currently do. Jobs are good, but the reality of the matter is. If you don't have a vision for what you're trying to deliver for as an experience for customers, then what you end up with.
Basically just a load of technologies. Right? So in, in my, to my mind, as a consumer, I would be so happy if I could go online, see a chatbot, ask me something and it could actually help me. Now. That will be fantastic if they could do first time resolution on chatbot amazing. But most of the time, whenever I talk to a chatbot, they can't understand what I'm asking.
That gives me the [00:28:00] wrong answers and it takes way too long to before I'm connected to an agent and often the waiting time is still further, long, even longer. But if you don't have empowered agents, At the end of the line. So somebody that is empowered and able, willing, happy to help
it's pointless anyway, isn't it. But you don't just see what I'm saying. So, so like it all I'm advocating really. You know, if you've got these technologies now go and review it from the customer's perspective, what are the priority things that they want to do and how easy have you made that to do for them?
So that would be my kind of like top practical tip. Just go and try out your own service and see how easy it is to do 10 different tasks and where it takes you. And you probably be surprised. [00:29:00] How about it because you you'll be looking at your KPIs, right? You'll be looking at the metrics and measures that you've set up as success criteria for digital transformation.
And they aren't really about customer experience. They're about first time resolution or co handling times, or maybe even like survey scores. But if you're not asking the right questions, how do you really know? So I think just for your due diligence, just go and isolate 10 things that your customers want to do with you and see how well you can do them yourself.
[00:29:32] Dave: And yeah, I think that's a great kind of a final wrap up point here is, you know, and, and, and that's what we want to try to do here is to give practical tips and how people can learn. And, you know, I think this discussion has been amazing because. Tapping into some of the CX lessons that you've obviously learned and espouse over your career, and being able to give those to our users and customers out there is kind of the whole goal of this [00:30:00] podcast, which is great.
I really appreciate it. And so I'll let you as we get close to wrapping up here, I'll let you have the final thought. Is there anything what's that what's that one musket nugget of wisdom that we could, that we could, we could make sure to leave everybody with.
[00:30:15] Clare: I guess it's just about getting out of your silo really, and being able to step up and out and see things, perhaps my perspective that you don't.
So whether that's, you know, try and a customer journey for yourself or holding some listening sessions with your employees, or depending if you're in more junior management, trying to get some time with the senior stakeholders to understand. Well, this looks like from their point of view and using that insight and information in order to make a different, better, more informed decisions.
Everybody can do that, but it takes the, the mindset of maybe, you know, there's an [00:31:00] opportunity here to use a little bit more of the, the right brain and think a little bit more about the people and the human aspects of this. I'm not just place every single bet that we've got on technology being the golden or sorry, silver bullet customer experience.
[00:31:15] Dave: So the golden rule and the silver bullet all in one. Right.
[00:31:18] Clare: There you go.
[00:31:22] Dave: Okay. We're we're all about mixing metaphors here on the working smarter podcast. So. And this has been an absolutely enlightening discussion. I'm so glad we got a chance to connect here with everybody. I'm sure that we're going to have a lot of positive feedback from this one.
So let me first say to you, Claire, thank you for joining us. I really do appreciate you being here with.
[00:31:45] Clare: Very well, Ken, it's been a pleasure
[00:31:48] Dave: and as always thank you to our constant listener out there who spend some time with us. We really do appreciate you in your support in this as always, if you have any questions, you can contact us at [00:32:00] co collaborative.com and you can go to.
Correct. Actually, let me have you say it so I don't mess it up.
[00:32:07] Clare: Yeah. For anyone who's interested in joining the world's first online membership community for women in customer experience, where you can hear the stories of hundreds of women like me, who've been through and survived the bustles in customer experience.
WWE the weed up women ncx.community.
[00:32:25] Dave: Perfect. Wonderful. What a great closing, Claire, thank you so much. And to those of you listening, have a rest of, have a fantastic rest of your day, and we will see you on the next episode of working smarter from Calabrio. Thanks everybody.
[00:32:37] Clare: Nice.