Transform Customer Experience

Introduction

A chance encounter in January 2001 changed my life. As fate would have it, meeting a guy at a party sent me in a new and exciting direction. Sounds like a romance novel, doesn’t it? It’s not, obviously, but this meeting is where my love for customer experience began.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and I’d arranged to pick up a friend at her family barbecue to go shopping. When I arrived, she wasn’t ready (of course), so I took refuge from the heat with her family. I’d been listening to their banter for a while, enjoying their animated stories, when her uncle asked me what I did for a living.

I explained I was a speech pathologist working with people with disabilities to improve their communication and swallowing. When I told him a little more about my area of specialisation, namely speech recognition, he offered me a job on the spot. He said, ‘Our clients want more customers to conduct business over the phone. We need your help to work out how that can happen.’ He said his company was building internal capability to help clients do this, as well as designing speech recognition applications for businesses. He gave me his card and told me to send my résumé.

At that stage, nobody was talking about customer experience. The focus was on doing business in lower-cost channels. Contact centres, then referred to as call centres, were seen as cost centres in the organisation, so it was a priority to keep costs down, even in that channel. The management world had set out to ...