Challenging the C-Suite to Get On the Phone With Customers

But if there's one top tip you can pass on to people with billion dollar clients like you have in the world of customer experience, what would it be?

Get out there and ask. Just don't be afraid to ask. How are we doing? And if it doesn't work, fail fast, learn from it, move on, try something different. But just keep asking.

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. And if you're a regular for the Account Experience podcast, you know that in every episode I love to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers who like to best practice and tips to help you develop your very own B2B Account Experience program. You know, one of the popular topic I keep getting asked about is how we can get over the fear of feedback. And today I think I've got a really great story to share, really about how to get senior executives involved in the process of doing customer experience. So today I'm delighted that I'm able to speak to Gerard Hutchings. He's the head of Business Development Strategy, RBC Blue Bay Asset Management. Hi Gerard. Welcome to the podcast.

Adam, thanks for having me.

Hey, thanks. Look, I just want to introduce this by saying I wrote, I put in a LinkedIn post about how I've got a good story about CEOs following up for feedback and you put such an interesting response on that, I thought I need to follow this up with you. So we'll get into that a little bit later. But first tell us a little about you. How did you get into looking after this customer experience world?

Well, it's a long and winding road. I started in a very different world in, in the life sciences a long time ago. Came out of the academic world and into, into IT and management consulting. Got involved in lots of kind of obviously client work in the consulting arena, sales, sales management, and then ended up in financial services, which is where I am now. And my responsibility now is really making sure that we are going to market in a coherent and structured and organized way. And one of the most important things that informs that is hearing back from our clients on how well we are doing, how well we're doing in terms of taking new ideas to them, how well we're doing in terms of servicing them. Yeah, so that's where we end up.

Okay, now you skipped over a really big part of that is that you were working on gene mapping and You've got a PhD. PhD in computer science.

I mean, yeah, that's that in the distant past.

Well, hold on a second. Maybe we can get into this a little bit about, you know, how you're experiencing that and about computer science. I mean, so does that at all help you in, in your life these days in your current role?

I mean, I, my sort of personal strap line, I describe myself as a scientist who ended up in sales. So. And I think kind of joking aside, that kind of rational and analytic way of just thinking about and understanding the world is fundamental to how I do what I do now. So, you know, in all clients, especially kind of high end professional services that effectively we're in.

Yeah.

As in financial services, very high touch, very relationship based. You know, you've got to have very high EQ when you're on the front line. But I've always argued that sales is an art and sales management is a science.

I think it really is. I would go further and I, I think that there's a lot of science that we can apply to business, to business relationships. Yeah, not many people didn't really think about that. So I think actually, and we'll get into this a little bit about how your analytical mind is driving this.

Absolutely. So the data informs where we deploy our emotional skills.

Yeah, yeah, that's it. So it's art and science, but a lot of people just think it's art or just I'll blunder through it. But the science part, measurement, you know, figuring out how you can deploy stuff, I think is really key to it.

And also, and this is kind of part of this story as well, experimentation. Yeah. Have a hypothesis, test it, see if it works and if it does develop it. If it doesn't, try again.

Well, I'd love to, if you can swap some gene mapping stories, we'll get onto that later on. But let's bring it back to where we are today in business. Now you're at Blue Bay Asset Management. Can you explain a little bit about what the business does for people who don't know what you're doing?

Yeah, of course. So asset management can mean a couple of things. So we're not in the business of kind of monitoring and tracking and recording IT devices out there and on networks. That's a different kind of asset management. We are part of the financial services world. We are investors. So we invest other people's money for them in financial markets. And for us that means large institutions, predominantly on the one hand. So we invest a lot of money on behalf of pension schemes, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, those sorts of institutions. And then the other part of the business is working through what I suppose in some other industries would be called distribution channels. So ultimately it ends up with you and me investing our personal pensions and our savings pots, but through wealth management firms, private banks and those sorts of. Those sorts of entities. But our relationships are only always the B2B part of that. We never get to the B2 B2C.

So do you call those intermediaries?

Yes, yeah. So there's the institutions and the intermediaries. Yeah.

So you've got two sorts of relationships. You've got the relationships with the institutions, the sort of end user, I suppose, although of course they manage other wealth parts and then the intermediaries who are also groupings of other customers. But underneath those.

Yeah, although, although our relationship with the intermediaries is still very much a kind of customer supplier. We think of them and treat them as clients in, in a very, very similar way.

Yeah.

To the institutions.

And can you give some sense of scale for our listeners? Is it, is it in the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of the customer, the institutions that you work Y.

So, so RBC Blue Bay is the, the non North American part of RBC Global Asset Management. So we have business all over the world and obviously not surprisingly being Royal bank of Canada, that's the RBC part. Yeah, huge business in Canada and in the us we look after everything that's outside of North America.

And you're based in London?

We're based in London. We have offices dotted around Europe, in Hong Kong, in Australia and quite a big business in Japan as well.

Okay, so great. So we should be thinking about putting our money with you because you're a safe pair of hands, but only if you're good at customer experience. So why don't we, why don't we.

Absolutely.

Why don't we switch to that part? So first of all, let's sort of zoom out a bit. And how do you think about customer experience in the company? How do you deliver a good customer experience? What is it like for an intermediary or one of your customers to experience interactions with your.

Well, it's important to, to, to kind of recognize and acknowledge that fundamentally your experience is, is not defined by, but massively influenced by the what we do with your money. If we look after it and we grow it for you, then by and large you're a happy client. And if we don't look after it and you we don't grow it for you, then you're an unhappy client. So there's two major components to your experience with us. One is that fundamental investment performance which I suppose In a manufacturing environment, that'd just be product quality. But the other part of it is the service that we kind of wrap around it and the way that we look after and service the relationship that we have with you now. We're never going to stop you from taking your money away if you're unhappy with the returns that we're delivering through good experience, through good service. But we know that we can increase the likelihood that you will stay longer, that you will add to your investments. So cross selling in particular is a key objective for us as we, we're very much in a growth, growth mode with the firm at the moment. And the client experience is a central tenet of everything we do. So as an industry, I think historically it's been very easy to be very focused on just the investment proposition. Give me 100, I'll give you 105 back and that's all that matters. But that's not true anymore. That may have been true for the last four or five decades, but it's not true anymore.

Yeah, yeah.

So the service and the experience that wraps around that 105 is, is crucial.

But I am fascinated. If I, if I could dig into this, I'm old enough to remember what we used to call the big bang in the city in the, in the 80s. Before that, investing was very much a kind of a personal experience. You knew your broker might have gone to school with him or something like that and you know, but, and then it changed. We brought computers in. Where are we now? How can you add to a relationship that's not, you know, just looking on the, on a computer screen to see what your return is?

Well, there's two aspects to it. I think the sort of institutions that we have as clients are long term investors. They're not day trading, you know, so they give us millions, Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars.

Yeah.

To invest on behalf of their pension fund members, to manage their insurance liabilities, or to look after and protect the results of natural asset sales. For example, you know, there are sovereign wealth funds in, in the Nordic regions which are all about oil.

Yeah.

It's that kind of money. And so those, those mandates as we would refer to them, will last for many, many years. So typically the minimum time that an institution will invest with us is probably three years.

Yeah.

And we have clients who've been with us through thick and thin for, you know, north of 10, 12, 15, some of them nudging 20 years now.

Yeah.

So the investment returns are a part of the story, but making sure. That we are able to effectively kind of hold their hands through that investment journey and through the inevitable ups and downs of the financial markets is crucial. So, you know, making sure that they understand not just what we're doing with their money, but what's happening, what we think is going to happen in financial markets, what we plan to do as much as what we have done.

Yeah.

And giving them confidence that we're doing the right things, the best things for them.

I'm going to go out in a limb. I'm guessing there's things like advising on the macroeconomic environment, but also things like regulations that might affect their, you know, their investments. And are there any other things that you can bring to the table to help your clients?

So there's a lot that we do around education. So, you know, you can imagine, you know, we have guys in our investment teams with brains the size of planets who are getting their heads around, you know, trying to work out what the, the U.S. federal Reserve is going to do with interest rates in light of Donald Trump. Well, how Donald Trump's going to wake up in the morning.

Yeah.

What's happening in Ukraine? Is China going to invade Taiwan? What's, you know, all those sort of macro, macro geopolitical events which inevitably influence especially government outcomes. Because this is as much about investing in government bonds and government securities as it is about companies and corporate securities.

Yeah.

So the educational piece and, and just the kind of understanding and insight and intelligence around what's happening in and around markets with the other players is a crucial part of that. And it's a lot of what people value in our investors.

Brilliant way of setting the scene. Thanks, Gerard. So let's move in now to the relationship part of it, which is really where you're measuring this. So maybe you can give some background on the program that you've set up to start to understand customer sentiment.

Of course. Yeah. So our industry has for a long time, I think, been in the habit of conducting big time consuming, expensive customer surveys, client surveys. And for a long time I kind of looked at those and thought, I don't really like this. And the biggest issue with them for me was the fact that they are annual or semi annual and they're backward looking. And so we get these great big reports that tell us how unhappy our clients have been for the last two years. And so I was kind of quietly scratching my head for a while thinking, well, how could we do something that's different that would actually get us some feedback that was actionable rather than just reinforcing what we thought we knew or too late to do anything with. And so I decided to just kick off a small little bit of a skunk works project to try and do the opposite of the big surveys, which is to find something that is small, quick, nimble, cheap and forward looking or you know, kind of real time and therefore actionable. So, and being a bit of a kind of academic, still having that academic mindset. You know, I read a lot and I read the McKinsey stuff and the Bain stuff and, and so, you know, kind of aware of, of NPS as a methodology and I thought, well, why don't we give that a try? And it's not something that is commonplace, common practice in our industry.

Really.

Yeah, not at all, not at all. And met a degree of skepticism. But I just thought, now come on, let's just push through and give this a go. Because that, with that kind of experimental mindset, I've always been a bit of a fail fast, fail fast and learn something kind of person.

Yeah.

So I figured if it doesn't work, it will find out quickly and we might learn something from it. So, so we went down the, I suppose the kind of obvious route of setting up an online survey and pinging out a thousand emails to, to contacts from our CRM system. And we got an absolutely diabolical response rate. So we were kind of in less than 1% territory.

Oh yeah.

Which was quite disheartening for all the work that went into it.

Yeah, yeah.

But what that, that told us something. It told us that emailing out. Yeah. Regardless of the kind of pre positioning that we did. So we sent out an email from our CEO to all these people that said, you know, this is really important to us, we value feedback, etc. Etc. All the good stuff. There's a survey coming, please take 2 minutes to fill it in. We built a really quick, snappy online survey and it still didn't, didn't land. So I was determined not to give in at that first setback. And I thought, well, how can, how can we do that? What does work then? And I thought, okay, well the, the big surveys we've done have always been telephone interviews. And I thought, okay, so what's, what can we do to kind of translate that at what we're trying to achieve here, which is short, sharp and detailed, but deliver that in using the telephone. So I decided we just start asking people if we could speak to them directly.

Yeah.

So I started going out to our client relationship teams and saying, I want to speak to your Clients. So, and the promise was we'll do this in 15 minutes. So short, sharp, shop, we'll be in and out quickly. No, no drag on time. And we based it, based the calls around the NPS methodology. So we're asking the likelihood to recommend question. Follow that up with a very simple. Okay, so what are the two or three things that matter most in your response? And then any other feedback? And then, so then we're, you know, we're in and out in 15 minutes. Those calls actually started going really, really well. And we started getting a really high response rate.

Yeah.

Almost 100% response rate. And, and some really good, useful, detailed, client specific feedback which was in real time and which we were able to bring back into the organization and act on, which was fabulous. So that got. So that, that was going so well, in fact, that I was thinking, well, how I need to scale this up because I can't do all these calls and we can't speak to everybody and we're in danger of cherry picking our clients.

So at this stage you were doing the calls yourself.

Yeah. So it started off with me. So I'm the independent, independent voice. I'm not part of the investment team. I'm not part of the relationship team. So my, my, I'm able to position myself as, as completely independent. And I just want to hear the whole story, warts and all, good, the bad and the ugly is the phrase I use with, with clients. And they are, generally speaking, very happy to give us, give us that.

Okay. So that was. You got some great feedback coming back in and you were able to really sort of break through the email barrier by using that personal relationship. But, but it was just you doing it. So I guess that was harder to scale. So how. So what did you do next?

So I landed upon what's turned out to be a brilliant idea. But it was, it was a. Born of, born of almost desperation. I was like, where can I go to recruit a bunch of people to do these calls with me who asked who are suitably independent of the investment teams and, and the relationship teams. And it occurred to me that we had a leadership team, so the regional leadership team. The C Suite.

Yeah.

Which is populated by a lot of people who are responsible either directly or indirectly for, you know, for large components of, especially that servicing experience.

Yeah.

But who actually don't spend very much time at all face to face with clients.

Yeah.

And I thought, wow, I can kill two birds with one stone here. You know, I scale up because I multiply myself by 10.

Yeah.

And the proposition to them is speak to some clients, you know, do something you don't normally do. Get some real face time with clients. Yeah, so, so I recruited initially our head of marketing, our head of risk, our head of legal, and our head of product development and our head of hr. Then the CEO decided that he didn't like being left out. So Eric got in on the act as well. He loves these calls. And then our cfo. So pretty much everybody with a C is now, is now involved. So we're not, we're not just using the C suite to follow up, we're actually using the C suite to hear the feedback firsthand.

This is amazing because. And it also feeds really very common narrative that, you know, companies do feedback because they want to reduce the friction between themselves and the clients. Here you've reduced the friction to zero because it's really that one to one.

Interface and it works really well. So, you know, as I say, we, our chief operating officer gets involved, our chief financial officer gets involved and they, they just, it just puts a human face on clients which otherwise would just be names on a list, you know, organization names on a screen, you know, people in a database. It's, you know, it humanizes the whole, the whole thing.

So, man, it opens up a lot of questions on this. But let me, first of all, let me go into this. How do you persuade them all to say the same thing? Because that would, you know, with all the human interface in this, anything could go wrong. So how do you get everybody on the same program?

So as I said, we still start with. Every single call starts with the likelihood to recommend question.

You sort of scripted it. Have you?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So they, so they get a template which they're all, you know, now very familiar with.

Yeah.

And it's got three questions based on your relationship, based on your experience with us.

Yeah.

Either overall or we do touch point surveys as well for, you know, key events in, in the client journey. How likely are you to recommend us to peers or colleagues in a. 0. 10. And then the next question is, what are the two or three factors that most influenced your score and why. And then the third question, do you have any other feedback? For us, we're in and out in 15 minutes.

And you, and when you get the results in, how do you, what do you then do with it? Is it electronic? Is it, do people come together with their results and discuss it or.

So two, two things happen. So we, so we're a big, big salesforce operation here. So those call notes go straight into Salesforce. Our Salesforce is set up so that it automatically emails any call note out to the relevant relationship team and to the relevant investment team as well. So that direct feedback, obviously depending on the quality of the notes they take.

Yeah.

That gets undiluted straight into the hands of the people who are at the front line.

Yeah.

And they then are responsible for picking up the actions. They're all briefed. So they all know that the first thing they need to do is to go back, reach out, you know, say thank you, acknowledge the feedback and then say this is what we're going to do with it and follow up there. So we do try as hard as possible to stay on top of things and close the loop.

And have you been able to calculate a sort of a net promoter score as a result of this? You don't have to tell me what it is, but you're able to track this?

Yeah. So our net promoter score is initially really encouragingly good, strong and was growing as we surveyed more and more clients.

Nice.

We're now at the point where actually I'm a bit worried because it's really, really, really good. And I think I need to broaden the scope of this data collection because we're in danger of either actually, you know, kind of self selecting or appearing to be cherry picking.

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Let me just dive in Just for one thing about the fear of feedback because so I'm really amazed how you've got over the very hard bit because normally it's impossible to do follow ups or get senior people involved in this and yet you seem to really manage this. How did you get over the initial fear of possible negative feedback from clients with your, with your leadership team?

I think it's probably, without having designed it like this, it's probably gone well because of the kind of the progression. So the fact that I started the calls and I'm not that thin skinned so I'm quite happy with a very straight and direct conversation and I went out of my way to encourage clients to give us all the feedback, the good and the bad. And I think once it helped that by and large we are delivering very good, strong investment performance across the board. Which means that by and large the feedback from clients starts from a good place. And where the feedback that we're getting is, it's not how to make sure I don't leave feedback. It's good to great feedback. It's tweaking, it's, it's in the margins but it's, you know, it's tweaking to improve rather than fixing, don't you?

So you're not going to throw everything out.

Yeah.

How can we, how can we get that 1 or 2% better?

Exactly. How do we go from an 8, 8 to a 9 rather than how do we get, how do we get you out of the fours and fives?

So. Okay, that, that says that story, by the way. I think it's a really good example that the leadership team are setting. Like I said, you're doing all of the hard work I think at the beginning of your program to get that done. So if you expand it, I think it should be a breeze to do that.

Yeah. I mean, so let, let me, let me tell you, it's, it's not a bed of roses. We, I, I constantly battle actually with the frontline teams.

Yeah.

They're the ones who have the fear of feedback.

Right. Let's get into that because, because they go, ah, this client is not, it's not doing well right now. So how do you. Okay, so let's take that. So, so to walk me through the situation when that happens.

Okay, so, so I go through our client list every month and I pick the 10 or 20 clients that we want to ask for a call.

Yeah.

And basically that, that's, that, that's, that's based on size and how long it is since we last spoke to them because, because we want to make sure that we're covering, you know, the important parts of our business. First and foremost. I regularly, not necessarily frequently, but regularly run into the, ah, now's not a good time.

Yeah.

Objection. To which my immediate response is, in that case, now is the perfect time because who, which, which unhappy customer wouldn't want to tell the CEO.

Yeah.

Of their supplier that they were unhappy and why. And, and so sometimes that works. Sometimes there's a kind of a. All right, then let's give it a go.

Yeah.

Other times, if, if we really get to that point, then we basically kind of escalate it. Get, get the relationship team, their regional manager, me, and sometimes our head of sales in the room, and we just thrash it out. Sometimes there is a perfectly good reason not to pester.

Yeah.

But often there isn't and we just have to effectively overrule the client team. Say, no, this is something we want you to do.

Yeah, I think so. I also think the way that you're phrasing it works in the long term really well for both parties because you can also talk, you know, the customer. Look, we, we think there might not be something great here. What can we do to get around this?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, and we have had a number of clients who have actually commented on this program and the message that it sends to them about the culture of our organization and the place for feedback and, and where clients really sit in kind of the priorities for the firm.

Well, I love it. And actually the story you're telling is that the customers sit right on the desk of the CEO because he's also out there to some extent on the front lines asking for that feedback. It's a brave thing to do, and I really applaud you for getting there. It's really excellent. Let's talk a little bit about the way that you get the feedback in. What's been surprising about some of the feedback? Did you learn something from a client? You're like, ah, that's a good point. We must do that. Anything that's happened in the, in that domain.

So a lot of our, A lot of our feedback is very, very client specific. Which is, which, which is interesting and kind of insightful in its own right because it does shine a light on the fact that however much we try to kind of standardize to, to be efficient, we are delivering in many, many aspects of our business, a very bespoke service. And I think it's important for us operationally to remember that and to keep what clients Value is that bespokeness. So we have to remember that that's an important part of our delivery and our value proposition as we're working in the background to try and do all the things that everybody else is doing. Drive down cost, drive up efficiency, automate, etc. Standardizedized, etc. So all of that stuff, that's a really important kind of general message. We have had a couple of, a couple of kind of thematics that have come out from the feedback. So when we are onboarding new clients, when we're bringing new clients on for the first time, and it's quite a complicated process and it can take, for some of our bigger clients, it can take 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks, sometimes longer to get everything set up. There's all sorts of contractual setup, all sorts of operational things. We get involved with the Swift payment system and all of that thing, account, bank accounts, all you can imagine, as well as the legal process of actually contracting. So all of that, it doesn't matter how hard we try, the consistent feedback from our clients after those onboarding events is no surprises. Please, you know, better sign posting.

Right.

Tell us what to expect.

Yes.

By the way, this is a common theme with all customer experience. I don't mind really, when it arrives. I just need to know when I need to be in for it.

Absolutely.

It's everything, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. It's not that much different from me and my Amazon delivery.

Exactly.

Just made sure I know when I'm. When to be in.

That's a really good learning. It's a good, that's a, that is a good insight. Yeah, of course, it's around project management, setting expectations, giving visibility into the process. Yeah, that's really good.

And, and we have, we have dedicated teams and, and obviously they spend all day, every day in this process doing, doing these things. And I think the message for them and the lesson for them to learn is that you can't assume that the people on the other side of this transaction understand it, know it to the level of detail that you do.

Yeah.

Even though you're dealing with the operational teams of very large financial institutions, you know, you have to assume effectively it's, it's that kind of explain it to your mum kind of thing, you know, so you can always add detail to a simple story, but you can't take detail out once. Yeah.

So that's a really good learning. It's okay. So you knew, you kind of probably knew a bit like that. But have there been any on the, on the positive side did you get some good news that you weren't expecting?

Yeah, I was, I was thinking about that. This certainly is a process that helps us to cement relationships.

Yes.

So I think I'd be hard pushed to point to new dollars in the door are directly attributable to this process. You know, but I think, I think it certainly gives some of us the opportunity to, to have deeper conversations and conversations that are actually outside of the feedback kind of process.

Yeah.

So I know that, that our CEO has, has used this as a kind of springboard, a platform to then go back and say, right, well now that we know each other. Yeah, I want to talk about this.

What. Let's come back to the sort of the science behind it there is the science of relationship is very much about building trust. And to build trust, if you're vulnerable and you're transparent, those, those elements really help to cement a relationship. And in a way it comes back to your point about sometimes when the news is bad, that is where we can really excel as human beings to go. You know what, I think we can fix this for you. And if we, and it's that. And in fact some of the, some of the stories around NPS is that if you can turn a detractor into a promoter, they are going to be much more valuable customer for you in the long run.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean to be honest, we, and we, we don't have many of those opportunities they bought by and large. You know, we've got, our NPS tells us that we've got broadly speaking a pretty happy customer base.

Great.

So our challenge is actually turning neutrals into promoters.

Yeah.

So the passives.

That's really good. Thanks for digging into the program. That was really great. Now as you think about it going forward, how do you think it will evolve and what are your plans for CX at Blue Bay?

So the calling program I think is now well established and, and is a kind of a cornerstone about, of our feedback and out and our client experience efforts. So, so those, those calls will, will continue. And, and what I'm trying to do is, is actually to give everybody a few more calls because they quite enjoy it. Yeah. So, so that's, that's the first, first and foremost. But, but now what I want to do is try and scale, scale up and in terms of being able to cover more of our client base to get better, more data points.

Yeah.

And also to go deeper in some of our larger relationships. So we, we have relationship especially in the intermediary space with all sorts of different Touch points within those organizations. And the reality is that right now we, the, the people who decide if they are going to use us to invest with or for them are very different people from the kind of operational teams who then have to make that work. And to be honest, we have no idea if we have absolutely delighted those fund selectors and those chief investment officers and their operational teams hate us. We have no clue, no clue that, that that is a, a viable hypothesis that I want to go and test.

But it's an unknown world.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's definitely a don't know because, because we don't survey, we don't get feedback from, from a breadth of people within those organizations. Yeah, and that's really important.

I was gonna say I'm certain they don't hate you, Gerard. That's going too strongly. But where you can do better is. That's the point.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's really important because within that intermediary world that is a part of our industry which is consolidating rapidly and where they are reducing the number of managers like us that they use. And so our ability to interface with and to, and to, and to feed those in some cases, you know, really enormous machines is really important. So we have to understand how well we are delivering on that operational servicing element much better than we do today. And then the other part of it is we have a very long tail. So we're dealing with somewhere between 700 and 900 clients across Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. And at the moment we're surveying a very, very small slice of that. And I want to be able to, almost want to find a way to scale, to be able to understand the experience of that tale, who we don't speak to directly as much and who are kind of the silent majority in terms of number of clients.

If I can feed this back to you, what I love about is you're saying that there's something you don't know about. So you said there's the known unknown and I love that. And as you say, that's in the area of going deeper in those accounts, further down and in the longer tail of clients that you might not be able to get to with the one on one process. And I guess in an era of where we think that AI is going to take over everything, looking at that blend of automated feedback and yet the personal touch you've got to go to feedback, I think is that's where the gold is. And so I think you're really on the right track to follow that well.

That'S great to hear. Thank you.

Because as I said, having spoken to hundreds, maybe thousands of people in this business, it's so hard to get the actions done. And you've done that at the beginning and set the right example. So however you go on this journey, I really believe that having the CEO diving into these things and maybe, maybe he can also do it after the survey and some, some things to say, hey, I saw you said this, tell me more about this. You know, there's, that's, there are so many ways that you can play this, but that is the hard bit. And I really congratulate you and your team for getting there. That's really good.

Well, thank you very much.

And, and just before we leave this. So thinking about the industry, I mean, you've been working in the industry for some time. What you know, is this something that the clients can benefit from? I mean, this focus on customers, is it unusual or is it something that's catching on? I'd love to know.

So I think as an industry, we are catching up with the idea that we're not the most important part in this whole process. And so you're seeing, you're seeing a lot of organizations starting to talk about, and to do a lot of kind of talking about client centric operations and business models and the like. We still ask clients, does anybody else do this? And I think we're still in a pleasingly small minority in operating this way. It's a small differentiator for us. It's not going to change anybody's mind, but it does leave a good and I think a lasting impression.

I'm not suggesting that what you do is a commodity, but there are many choices out there and customer experience is one of the things that can make a, can be the differentiator. So more power to your elbow. It's a great story. Gerard, I really appreciate your time today. I know you're a very busy person, but if there's one top tip you can pass on to people with billion dollar clients like you have in the world of customer experience, what would it be?

Get out there and ask. Just don't be afraid to ask, how are we doing? And if it doesn't work, fail fast, learn from it, move on, try something different. But just keep asking.

Just get over that fear.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Gerald, I really appreciate today, you've been really useful in this, in telling the story of how to get a C suite to talk to customers. It is so unusual and I congratulate you heartily on doing it.

Thanks very much.

Thank you for joining us today.

Bye.