How Sure is Changing the Game in Telecom Experience

Dave, it's you and me again.

Back at it.

How are you doing?

Doing pretty good. I'm no longer under lock and key. I'm free to explore in the world, which is fantastic. So, yeah, all things are looking good. Looking forward to our chat today.

Yeah, me too. We've got. Our guest is at a telco called Shaw. You and I have known Charlotte for a few years and she keeps. Keeps that programming exciting. Sure. So I really want to find out how she does that.

I'm really looking forward to it. I think we had probably the. The longest day trip ever when we went to visit them a couple of years ago with four flights in a day, which is good. So, yeah, really excited to see how they're, you know, operating in a place that people like to complain about.

Yes.

With a healthcare provider.

Yeah, I'm interested in doing that. I don't know if she's going to talk about that or she dares to, but you remember that post I did earlier on in the year about the. The Telcos in the UK? I found some great stats from the. From the UK regulator and, you know, the average NPS is 12 in that market. I'm wondering how they do it, you know, if that's good or that's bad. So maybe she's got some views on that, you know, how does she keep working with staff? Because, as you say, she's been. Charlotte's a real professional. She's been in this industry. She was with Virgin and Orange and now she's with Shaw and she's also got this wider remit. So how does she keep people engaged? I'm interested to find out. She bonused on it. How did she do this stuff? So plenty of stuff I think other customers take away. So without further ado, let's go to our guest. Hello, welcome to the Account Experience Podcast. My name's Adam Durrell, I'm the CEO of CustomerGage. I'm here today with Dave Barber, who's the Cornwall number one premier customer experience person. Bit of a mouthful, but he made me say that. And I'm joined today by our guest, Charlotte Dunstable, who's the Chief Customer Officer of Shure Telecom Group, based out in Guernsey now. Sure is. I think it's a play on words, by the way, but it's spelled sure S U R E and I think it's like sure as an offshore. Right, Charlotte, we can come back to that in a second. But sure is for telecom communication services in Channel Islands, the Isle of man and various other British overseas Little bits of land and it's part of the Batelco Group and Charlotte's been a customer of Customer Gauge for some time. We've known each other, I think, for three or four years. Her experience really goes back for many years in the business with Virgin and other companies like that. I'm really excited to speak to her today. Charlotte, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Adam. Great to be here.

We're really excited to talk to you. So we've gone through this whole Covid thing and just before we came on over, we're talking a little bit about how things are transformed in your business. So how's it been? How have you been able to cope being on an island and working in the telco business right now?

Well, I think, like everybody, it's been a challenge, hasn't it? And actually, I have to say, our kind of three main islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, so offshore islands of British territories, we've actually got off quite lightly because in Guernsey we've just had two periods of lockdown, both quite short. So three months last year and two months this year. And apart from that, we've been lucky enough to be pretty much living restriction free. So that's been great. And, you know, we do feel lucky. Obviously the periods of lockdown were pretty difficult, particularly last year, like for everybody. It was very unexpected. It kind of arrived very quickly. We were making contingency plans to close down the shops and get people working from home. And I think we made a plan where I was thinking, oh, this will happen in a week or two weeks and the next day actually we had to close all of our shops. So that was quite a challenge. And, you know, so we had retail people working from home still selling phones and services that worked well. What we found though, is because customers couldn't go into the shops, our contact center suddenly took kind of a double load and we found it very difficult to cope. So alongside all the queries that would have gone into the shops because people were working from home, we also had broadband upgrade requests and all kinds of broadband queries that people found actually that their broadband wasn't working as well as they wanted. So our customer facing staff did an absolutely fabulous job. But even so, I'd say kind of, you know, customers gave us benefit of the doubt to start with. But as it went on, and it was obviously, you know, difficult throughout a longer period, we did see that our NPS took a bit of a dive. And the other thing we did off the back of COVID really was we took the opportunity not to reopen some shops. And we decided to consolidate to one flagship store in each of the three islands. And again, that's had a not unexpected effect. But our retail kind of satisfaction is absolutely flying high because we've got single shops and we have really focused on sales in those shops rather than dealing with all of the suite of customer queries around, handset problems, paying bills, etc. We made a conscious decision decision that we would give customers who were buying something a much better experience. And that again has shifted that kind of non sales transactional workload into the contact center. And again, you know, we did our best to get ready for that. But you know, like everybody last year, it's been difficult. So we've seen a bit of polarization really where NPS in the shops is really flying sky high. Customers are very happy, they're not waiting, they can make an appointment. You know, they go in straight away and kind of come out with what they need. On the other hand, people trying to get through to the contact center are waiting a bit longer and just finding it more frustrating. So that, you know, that that's been interesting the whole kind of when, when you shift channels, whether you mean, you know, whether that's kind of a conscious decision or you almost your hand is forced a bit, then what, what the impact of that is and what it does to customer satisfaction. Yeah.

Can I take a couple steps back, Charlotte, and just dive into exactly what channels that you do have as shure and the kind of things that you are selling? Are we just talking your mobile phones and your graw band? Is there more to it than that and how does your work with all those channels?

Absolutely. So we're a full suite telco, although obviously on a small scale. So we're actually present in seven territories including kind of Falkland Islands, Ascension, St. Helena and Diego Garcia, which is a tiny speck in the Indian Ocean. So just to focus on kind of Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, we're a full suite telco. We sell all kind of consumer solutions. So mobile broadband, fixed line, mobile broadband as well. And then on the corporate side we sell a lot of cloud and we obviously sell kind of customer equipment as well and things like mimecast, which is kind of a, you know, well, it's a kind of storage system and data protection system. So yeah, we, you know, all kinds of products really and we've got a very wide portfolio and a reasonably small market. So we're positioned really as an island specialist telco and used to working on islands and that kind of Scale and those kind of challenges have sometimes been quite isolated.

Yeah. And so then how do you track all those many different moving parts? Are you engaging with customers in terms of surveying and things like that on every single one of those transactions? Are you just doing it more in a relational kind of way?

We do both. So we've got quite a comprehensive program which I set up now back in 2015. So it started actually with Batelco deciding that NPS was the new thing. I think they'd had some consultants in. Well, I know they had, and that was something that they wanted to add into financial KPIs. And I kind of put my hand up and volunteered to be the pilot for the program at Shure, which was really interesting. So we went out really setting up a program which had a transactional element and also a relational element. And that's the same today, but we've added to it quite considerably. So I think we came on board with you guys in about 2017, something like that. So all of our transactional NPS is through Customer Gauge and you know, we're pretty happy with that platform and all of the real time stuff that we see. And then we do a relational survey as well, which is four times a year. And that gives us more of the top down view of, you know, what our brand is like in the market. So. But that will survey ourselves obviously and our competitors as well. And we look not really at schools so much as what our position is in the market and how the market has shifted and what the trends are. And that relational survey is really quite detailed. So we'll obviously look at kind of customer satisfaction in general nps. We also delve down into network satisfaction, website, retail, other, and not just channels, but also areas where we know that customer satisfaction is kind of made or broken, if you like, by certain elements. So I always say the first touch point of a telco really is network because it's the one thing that customers use every day. You use your mobile every day or your laptop or your data. Whereas actually you probably aren't calling the customer services every day, or at least I hope you're not. And you're certainly not going into the shop every day. Although actually we did in Guernsey have a lady who lived on her own and she did used to call every day just to get kind of an account balance. And I think it was really just to have a chat with one of our friendly operators. So you do get that side of it as well.

That's a lovely story, I have to say. I use T Mobile in the Netherlands here, always really good service in the stores, back end of the service, not so good. And in fact, let's lean into that because I did a post earlier on this year about the net promoter scores of UK telco providers and it was one of my most read posts from this year. I'm just putting it on the screen now. The average NPS for UK telcos is 12. Charlotte, what's going on in this business? What have you got to say about it?

Well, I think that's really disappointing, Adam, because being in the industry, I see how much effort goes in from us and other telcos into really making that customer experience really good. And one thing I would say is that the telco experience of buying and supporting is actually quite complex. You've got different kind of networks, you've got all different kind of customers, you've got different devices, you're not just box shifting a commodity. It's actually quite complex and particularly when you come to corporate as well, where you might be putting together solutions which include international connections and on top of mobiles, on top of cloud solutions. I think the complexity doesn't help us in terms of customer satisfaction, but I certainly think it's a shame and we. One thing I would say is it really varies amongst the different things that we measure. So generally our retail NPS is pretty sky high, as you can imagine as a kind of consumer mobile customer. You go into a shop, you want the new iPhone 12, you walk out with a nice shiny box, you're really happy, 10 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 perhaps, and then if you try and call the call center and you have a bit of a wait or you don't like the answer or, or you find that you can't easily do what you want to on a website or on an app, that then is obviously taking the shine off that experience. But I honestly think that the 12 to 25 is unfair given the amount of effort that we put into it. But that's where we are.

It's really good to hear. I think you're right. I think the human interaction piece is the bit where you can really score highly. But yeah, any excuse to mark people down. Certainly in my. If the WI fi goes down for 10 minutes, it's always like, oh, dad, can you come and fix this?

Well, it's like a utility now, Adam, isn't it? The broadband people expect it to be on all of the time really fast. So yeah, I mean we have a very similar experience in that I think our people are What? Get the fantastic NPS from customers, because once you through to somebody, you know, we get great feedback about our staff, we really value that and, you know, and we make sure that that's passed on to the staff. I think maybe where we and other telcos fall down is we don't always make it easy for customers and, you know, you're constantly looking at processes and other broken links and what can we do to make it better? And particularly trying to streamline the online journey as well. So I think, you know, generally our culture kind of drives really good customer service from people, and the challenge is, how do you replicate that online, where you haven't necessarily got a sympathetic or an empathetic ear? So customers are very reliant on how you design that online experience.

I'm getting a bit deeper on that. You've been running your program for a while and your NPS is fairly stable over the years. Do you know how that impacts your customer churn or, or any of the economics that come out of that? Charlotte?

Yeah, I mean, I do. Adam. I mean, our customer churn is pretty low, to be honest. We're not in the uk, where, when I worked at Orange, I think the churn level for mobile was running at something like 25%. And what you found was you had a lot of value seekers that are just flipping, flipping all the time to get the best deal. So it's less about loyalty and service and it's much more about value. So, yeah, our churn is quite low. We do see a correlation, really, between when our NPS dips down a bit and what happens then. But also on the flip side of that, you can see, certainly you get a lot of customer grumbles. But then if you measure, if you follow up those customers individually, they haven't necessarily left. And that can be quite an interesting piece of work to do that, you know, you can have 100 customers who say they're definitely 100% going to leave you because they're so fed up with the service. If you look at them again in six months or 12 months, you will certainly not see that 100 of those customers have left. So sometimes I think it can be a bit of a threat to try and get better service. But, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, high chin isn't something that we deal with in the same way as a UK operator would do, but we're obviously very alert to it in terms of how we run our retention programs and what we do to try and get customers to stay with us.

How do you keep the motivation in the program going. As you say, everyone likes to have a grumble about their telco provider for a lot of time, probably reasons maybe out of your control. When you have your operatives calling people back. If the more and more negative feedback that you might get here and there, how do you keep everyone motivated to want to keep picking up that phone and saying, hey, let's solve your problem?

Yeah. Do you mean from a customer perspective or staff perspective? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the customer experience is really ingrained in the fabric of this business, I have to say, which is fantastic. So, you know, I sit on the executive committee, I have entirely got the support of every single person on that committee. And we talk about customer experience all the time. So we talk about it as much as we talk about financial KPIs. It's always we will talk about them hand in hand. So, you know, this is the revenue, this is the profit. This is where we are with our customer experience metrics and particularly our NPS and our position against competitors. So I think it's really ingrained. We actually are also bonused on customer experience, which I know is it can be quite a challenge. And I've read lots of things which say, oh, you absolutely can't bonus people on customer experience. And actually we don't bonus people on transactional because it's so volatile. I think that would absolutely be the wrong thing to do. But we do these quarterly relational surveys and we're then bonused on our position in the market. So I think that's much fairer because we've got lots of different levers we can pull. And because of that focus on the bonus, it also means that we're laser sharp on looking at the results which have come back from our relational surveys, particularly looking at the areas where we haven't done so well and seeing where we can improve. And we are very operational in then looking at that insight, pulling together an action plan plan and getting the whole business behind it. So you could ask anyone in the business, you know, what's our NPS position against our competitors? But they would pretty much know, well, we're first or we're second. And they would also pretty much know what we're doing about it because every two months I'm reporting what the scores are and I'm telling them the plan. And actually probably at least a quarter or to a third of the business are actively involved in that plan and the rest of them indirectly because they'd be supporting the people who are pulling that together. So I think that's one of the benefits of having had the program in place for so long. It's so ingrained. It's really in our culture and we really are good at closed loop action planning for continuous improvement.

Really interested. So in regards to that. So obviously you'll do a lot of reporting up to the high levels of the organization. Is that then fed down throughout the organization by the top level people. How is that then communicated throughout the company from there?

Yes, we have staff briefings every two months. So everybody. And that's on teams now, which is another kind of byproduct of COVID really. We used to have gatherings in each of the islands and it went on to teams and actually that's worked really well. So we present and it's, you know, the agenda changes, but you will always have, you know, latest projects, latest customer experience, initiatives and skills, and then financials. So it's communicated like that. And then I suppose day to day. Another thing I'm really proud of about the transactional program is that we're very good at the closed loop. So feedback will come in and it gets reviewed every day. And quite often what will happen is it's not just a customer service agent calling a customer back, but say a customer's got a complaint about price or a product or something to do with the bill. We actually get the manager from that department to give the customer a call back. And that's a kind of surprise and delight for customers because they get to speak to the person who's actually made the decision that has probably caused that problem. And at the same time, I think it's really good for the managers internally because they're not all customer facing, but actually they're all much more used now to speaking to customers and taking that feedback on board. And I would say we do incorporate that into the way that we develop products and services. So a couple of years ago, I kind of moved from being purely customer experience and took on a more commercial role. So I am responsible for revenue operations and customer operations. And that's led to some interesting decisions where you might say, with my customer experience hat on, I would go one way, but with my commercial revenue how hat on I might go the other way. So I think the challenge for me now is to try and find that win win action that what do you do that actually keeps your customer happy but also is contributing to your revenue. And that's been a new challenge for me over the last few years, really. And I think it can be win win and I'll give You an example. So we put our prices up now by RPI on an annual basis and a price rise is never going to be popular with customers. But you know, previously we've just come in and product have just gone right this the price rise and you know, the contact center had to kind of like it or lump it a bit. We take a very different approach nowadays so we'll start the planning for it six months before. We pretty much know, you know, who's going to be impacted, what price increase is going to be. And we have a think through segmentation of, you know, different customers, how we communicate differently, how we can sweeten the pill a bit. So we think about what we communicate in terms of increased speed or special offers. And that goes along with a discussion about what we've invested locally. For example, we've just invested 3 million, which is a lot for our business in a new subsea cable. So we would try and put the conversation about investment alongside the price rises and just put it a bit into context rather than previously we just would have whacked out a price increase with no explanation. We very much now are looking at from a customer point of view, how can we explain and justify why the price rises are coming in and look at it side by side with what we're investing in for the community.

Really interesting to hear. I love the story about closing the loop, Charlotte. I think it's actually quite unusual in B2C to get that happening. So well done for that. And you know, thinking about that, what are some of the learnings that you've had from the telco world that you could, you think could be applied to other industries? You know, CXP is fairly well established in telco and it's maybe sort of catching up in some of the older industries. What are some of the things that you think could be learned?

I mean, I think, you know, we started off with a fairly basic program and we've built on it since then and again with the help of you guys and your great kind of customer success management and you know, some of the conversations that we've had now and I'm not just saying that Adam, because you know, we've talked about various things that have made us think and you know, you're very revenue focused as well, which can be, you know, unusual in a customer experience environment, let's say. So I suppose what I would say for other industries is, you know, don't try and do too much too soon. I think there's a lot of discussion about is NPS still Fit for purpose, I would say. Well, absolutely it is, yes. Because as long as you are asking the question of what the score is, and then you're following it up with why, I think even if you just ask those two questions, there's so much you can learn from what your customers tell you about why they've given you that score. And that's really your starting point. You know, why your promoters are giving you a 10, and it is probably your friendly customer service, you know, your nice brand or whatever it is. And you will also know why your detractors are scoring you low, and that is because they had to wait on the phone or because they think you're too expensive or whatever it is. So I think that there's a lot to be said for starting slowly, getting those basics in place and then starting to layer on things like, you know, customer effort score. So that's more a kind of analysis of your processes, isn't it, and where that's working for customers and where it's falling down and where you might have those broken links. So I think lots of people think, oh, I need a customer experience program. I've got to have all of this insight. And I would say, well, you don't have to have all of it from day one, because, you know, even when I joined the company eight years ago, we didn't have any kind of insight, but we did really. You know, officially we didn't. But I just said, you know, in my first week, show me the complaints. What do people complain about? And what I actually found is that probably 80% of those complaints were about how if we got back to somebody when we said we would, it would never have turned into a complaint. So actually, then my focus initially was, well, let's improve how we communicate, how we keep people updated about if they've logged a fault. Let's then tell them every couple of days, well, it might not be fixed, but this is what's happening. So there's all kinds of insight. And I think, you know, even if you don't have a platform or any kind of program, you've got complaints and you've got your staff and your staff, especially your frontline staff. They are the absolute number one source of what is going on in your company and with your customers. So we make sure in our program that we have, you know, a lot of employee feedback and that employees feel that, you know, they can say something and they can feed up ideas and they can feed back when something's gone not so well and we're quite A small business. So I know everybody personally and I like to think I'm quite approachable, so people can come up to me and they do, and tell me about the poor customer experience that their cousin has had. But it's really great feedback because if you're not asking your staff, then there's lots of things that you won't know about. And I've seen a pyramid on LinkedIn recently and it's quite interesting. It's kind of like an iceberg type thing. And the top of the iceberg is what the senior managers know and the bottom of the iceberg is what the frontline staff know. And, you know, that is absolutely spot on true.

And there's like air gaps between there because people at the front line want the senior managers to know what's going on. But the senior manager's like, I just need to know. Give me the raw data. Noise barrier is really.

Yeah, I've got a really good way of finding that out because I sit right by the contact center so I can hear everything that's going on. Obviously, I can only hear one side of the conversation, but, you know, and the other funny thing is in Guernsey is obviously it's quite. We've got about 62,000 people here and we've got 180 people working for us at shore in Guernsey. So what happens is somebody, a customer, phones up and likely it's not. They know the person they're speaking to, the agent, so they start to have a chat. So that. So that's quite funny. And the other.

It's the very opposite of offshore call centering, right?

It's the absolute opposite. Ann.

Hello, Sean.

Very nice. Yeah. Oh, how are you getting on? How's your mother? So that's brilliant. I've actually got a really good story about that. So I hadn't long been in. I think I must have been here for about a year or something like that. And we had this big corporate contract that was with the customer ready to be signed. You know, six months in the making, big kind of pipeline. What's happening with this kind of one of our biggest customers and, you know, they didn't sign and they didn't sign and they were chased up by the account manager and nothing came back at all. And then finally our CEO picked up the phone to this customer and said, you know, anything wrong? You know, what's happening? Why hasn't this contract been signed? Anyway, just classic response back from this, you know, big corporate guy. Just waiting for you to fix my mother's broadband and Then you'll have the contract over. So, yes, an engineer got dispatched probably within the hour. I think on that one.

How does that affect when if I am calling up John from around the corner, who's incredibly unhappy about something a lot of the time, especially in Telco, I imagine as well, you must have a lot of complaints that aren't instantly solvable. So I guess how do we handle those instances when John from around the corner, whose mother's broadband isn't working and there's nothing you can do about it at the call center? How's that then approached? And how do you keep people excited about wanting to pick up the phone to those.

Yeah, well, pretty much we can do something about it, David, because it's our responsibility. So at the very least, if we were going to escalate something, we could probably have an engineer out. I mean, it takes no more than 25 minutes to drive anywhere in Guernsey. So if you wanted to, you could have an engineer out straight away. But I think on the kind of more complex ones, it's about keeping the customer updated, isn't it? And just, you know, I'm a great fan of transparency and being honest and saying, you know, that is a tricky problem and this is what we're doing. It's gone to our engineers, actually. We've had to get our, you know, switch provider or something in more customer language probably. We've had to get somebody else to take take a look at that. They're going to come back to us on it tomorrow. So I think, you know, in terms of good customer experience, it's being empathetic, that it's a big problem for the customer and this is what we're doing about it and just trying to keep people updated. You know, that's the thing, it's communicating, isn't it?

Look, we're doing our best. And that's how I think when people are really human about it, you know, they recognize that there's another human at the other end of the line.

Yeah, I mean, I said before, you know, we've obviously like every contact center, you have ebbs and flows, don't you? Picks and troughs of times when, you know, you've got enough staff to answer the phones and everything's fine and you're managing to your SLAs. Of course there's peaks of traffic where you just can't do that. And we've had instances where, you know, we've had three or four people off sick and we just haven't being able to manage as well, because even one person makes a difference. And I've said to the staff, you know, you wouldn't do it all the time. But I've said, look, if somebody says to you, oh, so long to wait to get through, just say to them, I'm really sorry about that. We've got four people off sick today, so we're struggling a bit and you know, you can see the kind of conversation dissipates a bit in the anger because people just say, oh, okay, well I didn't realise, I didn't realise you had people off sick and you know, obviously it's not their problem, my staffing problem isn't their problem. But I think you can be transparent and you can be honest about your struggles and people are much more accepting of it.

Yeah, great.

Yeah. So I think as well, I just wanted to touch on a point you made earlier, Charlotte, around the different kinds of feedback that you're getting. I think I remember when you guys first came on board and we started building out your survey. I think our initial advice was right, lose 80% of those questions.

And really.

Shorten it up and to make sure, because I think the point you made earlier was, you know, start small, keep it simple and there's actually something you can build upon that. Did you notice a difference in your ability to identify problems more easily then and see the wood through the trees?

I mean certainly the shorter survey was the right way to go because I, I think previously we'd had a lot of people abandoning and that's obviously no good because you do want people's feedback. So yeah, I mean we do. I think the way we use your platform as well with the drivers of satisfaction and the drivers of dissatisfaction and asking customers just to pick from a drop down menu that does give us a really good view. So, you know, we know there's three or four specific things that drivers of dissatisfaction and probably more which are drivers of satisfaction around value for money or friendly customer service, etc. So I think being able to narrow that down is helpful with those drivers. But again we're of a scale where we can actually read every single piece of feedback. And I have to say I don't do it every day now, but I do go on the customer gauge site regularly and have a look and say, oh right, what are customers saying? What are the tens giving us a 10 for? And what are the detractors saying? And you know, and passing that on. So I think, you know, we're lucky to be of that scale where we can do it in A way where maybe a bigger telco would, you know, it's less personal and it's more difficult to do that because of the scale of feedback.

I'm going to follow that up a little, Charlotte, by asking, you know, you're part of a bigger group with other telcos and you have your remit allows you to look across some of the issues they're facing. How do you compare and contrast that, the issues that they're having as opposed to the ones that you're having in Guernsey?

It's a bit different, I suppose. So if I take Vitalco as an example, they are kind of fully fibered where we're still on a copper network. So they would have different issues, issues in terms of broadband. Also, the makeup of their contact center is quite different. So they largely use kind of temporary staff with a very high turnover, and we largely use permanent staff who tend to stay because, you know, we're a nice place to work and it's friendly, etc. So it's funny because some of the challenges are always the same, aren't they, about, you know, kind of speed of dealing with issues and, you know, speed of dealing with faults and things like that. But in other ways, you know, they have different kind of problems and they're different culturally as well, because largely our sister companies are in the Middle East. So it is quite a difference in culture from us being kind of largely British islands. Yeah.

Interesting. And so you've been doing this, I think, as we said it the same started the chat. Charlotte, you've been doing this for many, many years. What's the one thing you're most proud of in terms of what you've implemented in the organization?

I think how engaged the staff are. So if I come back to that, I think customer experience, obviously I came in to do customer experience and straight away, eight years ago, I was already on the board, the executive board, so there was a recognition that this needed to be come from the top. And I always say that, you know, I'm proud to represent the customer on the board and now I represent the revenue as well. But I started off just representing the customer, you know, and I really tried to foster that environment where staff feel engaged, they feel that, you know, they can raise up issues around customer experience and that will listen and that will. That will deal with them. So I think, you know, I've got a fantastic team around me and I certainly couldn't do it without them. But yeah, I'm really proud of the staff engagement and how passionate everybody is about the Customer experience, really great.

I think that's always one of the major challenges that, you know, our customers always face is how do you get people excited about it every day?

And I think that's a really great job. You know, it's not really. It's not kind of fed from the structure, but there's a lot of discussion about where should customer experience sit. And largely, you see, it either sits in customer service, which means it's just seen as part of service, and it's not really maybe joined up with the more commercial side of the business, or it sits in marketing. And then what you sometimes find with that is it's seen as kind of a shiny marketing thing. But actually, the customer service people aren't engaged with it because they don't feel involved. And they, you know, they feel that they own customer service, but maybe not the whole of the customer experience. From becoming aware of a product to, you know, looking at pricing and going into a shop and buying it. I think, you know, customer service can sometimes be seen as kind of the end of that process. Whereas, you know, if you have somebody in customer experience who sits across all of that and is driving action plans in lots of different areas, I think that does then lead to more engagement. And I've always been, you know, I mean, I'm quite an empathetic person, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this job. But I do try and kind of sit in, you know, stand in other people's shoes and think, well, you know, what's their motivation and what do they need from me and how can I help? And I think, you know, by doing that and having the great team that I've got, and we all take a similar approach. It's really been great for the culture of the business.

Really cool. What does the next couple of years look like, Charlotte? What's next on the plan?

Oh, there's plenty going on, David. So, you know, I have to say, you know, Speaking on a B2B podcast, we have been very, very focused on consumer. Because just to get, you know, to deal with those volumes and to look at our consumer customer experience, we've got a B2B program, which is really in its infancy, and the next couple of years is all about developing that. So we've got a new chief business officer on board just in the last kind of six weeks. He's really keen at looking at how we're doing account reviews, how we can use our insight better. So I think that for us, in terms of customer experience, it will be around B2B I think for the next couple of years and then also consolidating what we're doing in consumer. So I did say that Covid had been quite a challenge for us in terms of moving kind of workload to the contact center channel. So it's also looking at that and making some improvements over the next couple of years about streamlining the channels we use and really trying to get more efficient.

That was a great story. Charlotte, thank you so much for giving us the insight on the program at. Sure. I think from Dave and I's point of view, we really think of you as a world class operator in this. We've really to compare the way that you run the program and as you say, your empathy and bringing the communications to your staff. I think not only are the staff very lucky to have you and your team running the program, but also the customers. And I think this is, you know, if any of your customers also are listening to this, they'll get a sense of how they get cared for behind the scenes, which is not always brought to the fore. They, you know, as you say, it's all about complaints. So I really appreciate how you shared that with us today. Thank you so much for that and we love hearing from you. We hope you'll come back and tell us how the B2B program goes in the future.

Absolutely. Adam, it's been a pleasure. So thank you very much.

Thanks so much. We'll catch up with you soon. Charlotte.

Okay, thanks Adam. Foreign.

So I think that was pretty fantastic, Adam. I definitely know more now than I did before about the telco industry.

Yeah, it's interesting to hear, you know, who's got copper and fiber. I didn't think that would make a big impact on it. You can see how, you know, Charlotte said that she, she wasn't particularly affected by Covid being on the island, but it had allowed her to do that transformation and to do some of the stuff that they'd been putting off and they'd been put in. It was really good.

Exactly. And also how they're able to keep people motivated. Even when you just wake up in the morning and all you're seeing on your computer screen is complaint after complaint, removing the fear and making sure people still do call them up and send the engineer around to fix John's mum's broadband.

Yeah, that was a wonderful story. I can really see that happening. Okay, so great to hear that, Dave. I hope you have a great rest of the week. We'll catch up on the next Account Experience podcast.