Your Customer Experience Needs To Be a Little More Punk

Foreign.

Well, the question I'm going to be asking today, is everybody happy? I don't know. That was the buzzcocks there from I think 80s or something like that. My name is Adam Durrell and I am originally of the Account Experience podcast, which is where people who like B2B and customer experience meet and we're creating some open source content here. Last week I was really delighted to have Fred Reichelt on the podcast. If you get a listen to that, that's fantastic. Talking about his new book. But today I could not be happier to welcome. Just turn the music off. Oh my God, it's live. Ladies and gentlemen, it's live podcast Avatar here and I'd like to welcome Adrian Swinscoe. Hi, Adrian. Now just, just introduce Adrian. You've got a background in cx, which I really want to get into today. You are a book publisher. You've published how to wow. And one of my favorite books is holding up here PunkCX, which is terrific. I've got my signed copy here complete with safety pin and everything like that. Now we're pretty much the same age, same sort of background. Well, we're old white guys who are going to talk about punk rock, I guess the cx. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Adrian Swinsco to the Account Experience podcast. Hello, Adrian, how are you doing?

I'm very well, Adam, and thank you for having me on the show. I am really looking forward to this because we have been trading kind of punk references for a while now. Given that you, I know that you are probably not. I mean, you probably label yourself as number one fan of the kind of Clash. Because when I think when you first kind of like heard about punk says you were like the Clash. And I was like, yeah, that's kind of completely spot on. So, yeah, and I'm really looking forward to digging into this today.

Well, why don't we start by saying is, you know, in the words of the Boscox, is everybody happy nowadays?

Well, it's a good question. I mean, I'd like to pull in another kind of almost like post punk sort of reference with Claire Grogan, because Claire Grogan was like 110% happy all the time. This is like a happy, happy character. I like to think myself as quite positive and optimistic kind of character, but I'm also quite realistic and I'm quite skeptical. And the thing that frustrates me is how do I want people to do better? My role is to, I guess, advocate for, explore and agitate for sort of better outcomes, really better outcomes for both customers and kind of people. Because it really frustrates me when I see or organizations doing stuff which one doesn't feel connected to their customers are rooted in a customer's reality, or they put obstacles in the way of their people delivering good service or good experience to the customers. And so I get like. I end up being a kind of graying, cantankerous kind of man, but with a kind of a punk cloak on. I think that gives me a kind of like a veneer of, I don't know, believability, let's say.

I'd like to dig into that because, I mean, you've got a really great serious body of work behind you. You're one of the best experts I know on customer experience. And yet you come out with this book a few years ago called Punk cx, which is so much fun and really throws up, get rid of some of the BS out there. What led you into that? What was the genesis of that whole project?

Goodness. Quite a lot of it, actually. So I was speaking to a friend of mine, this is back in. I go back a little bit. So it tells you the story that I've been frustrated on this kind of arc for a while. So as you said, I published this book with Pearson, second book, self published a book back in 2010, published another book with Pearson called How to why in 2016, which he did really well. And then was thinking about doing something else. And I didn't really want to write another theory of everything, you know, And I was thinking about the whole space and I was talking about it with my friend Oisin in the pub one day in December 2017. And we were really excited about the level of activity, enthusiasm, investment and everything else in the space. But I was just a bit frustrated with the lack of significant improvement or continuous jumps forward. And I was a bit like, oh, I wish I would do a bit more. Something a bit more punk. Now it might be. It probably would have been the Guinness talking, but I promptly forgot that idea. And then it popped back into my head sort of summer of 2018, when I started to think about it more seriously. And being a fan of punk music, I started to think about where punk came from. Now, the hypothesis behind the book is that, well, punk exploded at the back of prog rock. In the 1970s, prog rock was being popular, was also self indulgent, ornate, all about kind of how many kind of notes you could play. Oh, crumbs like and, you know, simultaneous synth playing and Stuff. And punk was like, no, no, we'll just do ourselves, do kind of something different, do it ourselves, anybody. You don't need a PhD to play, right? And it made me think about that sort of development arc and then made me think about CX and this space. And it made me think that actually there's a possibility that the CX space is exhibiting some of the same characteristics as the prog rock space did in the 1970s. Overly complicated, overly elaborate, self indulgent, more interested in itself rather than its constituents. And I thought, if that's true, then what would a punk version look like now? As a punk yourself or former punk? I don't know how you describe yourself. You'll know that punk is not about the answer, right? Punk is about how you approach something where you're looking to be different and you're daring to stand out. And that's what the book is about. It's about going, that's crap. That stinks. That could be better. How do we improve that? And asking kind of big, provocative kind of questions, trying, if you like, in short, just as an invite for people to do better work, because people are waiting for the results.

I Really, I, I 100% agree with you on this. I also went through this whole thing at school. You know, you decide what tribe you're on. And there were the prog rockers who were listening to like early Genesis albums or, you know, Pink Floyd and things like this would have kind of grown to love over the years. But I was on the other tribe. I was really like, I'm just going to pick up a guitar and thrash some chords out. And I think so. I think there was that time in the, in the late 70s that opened up a world for many of us who weren't particularly talented but could really, you know, burst the creativity. And in fact, as I think about your story going further, even in Customer Gauge we entered, we had a few years ago, a lot of clients doing different things and in very different areas. And it was impossible to tie them together to make learnings. And we had, I had a revelation about two or three years ago, which was like, no, let's stop this. I want to stop with a free form jazz improvisation wank.

I really like some jazz, do three.

Chord rock really well, you know, because there's something about that whole energy and just doing the stuff. And if you get it right, it's, you know, if we think about punk or even going through the Nirvana, what is it? Nevermind's 40 years old this week or something. Like that this is. And this is really world changing because it's simplicity that really works. So I think I completely lean into you on this.

I think you're absolutely right. So I've known about Customer Gauge and your story. We've been in talks for like a long time about kind of some of the stuff. And when you decided that you were, you know, rather than trying to do this kind of feedback voice, the customer type thing, like trying to please everybody, as it were, you were like going, stop the car. Let's go that way. When everybody's going that way, you went, oh, we're going to go that way. And you were like going, we're going to go B2B. We're going to go hard kind of B2B. We're going to specialize. And so it's almost a case of like going, we don't care and we don't need to be liked by anybody. We are going to be this way. We're going to pick our tribe and we're going to be attractive that way. And I think, yeah, I think that's cool and I applaud you for that because there's too many other kind of people that are trying to please everybody and it's just not working.

I think probably for some of our customers, when we told them this, it's a bit like probably when. When Bob Dylan went electric. Of course, that's way before my time, but apparently the fans, you know, the fans were expecting to play as folkset and he said no. And it was. Saying no to customers because they want to do this improvisational ad hoc stuff is tough. But, you know, we really now believe that you've got to stick to. Stick to our knitting. Anyway, it's not about me. Adrian, how did Punk CX get accepted as you started to spread the word?

Well, I mean, I don't know if it has been accepted, but it has. Or rather it's been accepted by some and that's kind of fine. It's sort of like, you know, what's interesting is like, I never wrote it to be liked by anybody.

Yeah, I got that feeling. But it was a statement about you as a person. Right? It's about.

Yes, it's an art project. You know, ostensibly, that's what it is. It's like going, this is what I feel like I created this thing, which is almost the antithesis of what you'd expect from a business book. And it's a. It's a, quite frankly, with the kind of. A kind of parental advisory kind of content bit on it like an F you to kind of like to kind of the status quo. You'll see the kind of some of the stuff and then you've got some of the artwork behind me from the book. And it's. The interesting thing about it is I did it because I thought it'd be a fun thing to do and I didn't know if it would work. And it started to attract and it resonate with a bunch of people. But it also, funnily enough, it actually started. It actually ended up being a really interesting branding exercise for me, which is completely unintentional. So you end up with a lot of people that are quite vanilla doing the same thing. And I'm a little bit like going, nah, I'm going to call crap out when I see crap. Right. Or I'm going to ask the next question because I'm not happy with the way things were at now. So it doesn't need to be liked by anybody. It doesn't need to be accepted by anybody. But accidentally and tragically as well, it's become more relevant over the last 18 months because of what we've gone through with the pandemic, which has just put constraints on everything that we've done and what we focus on. And it's basically kind of gone well. Punctcx is basically a boiled down, back to basics, do better work that matters. And it's taken all the kind of all the extraneous stuff away and got people to really focus. So that's. It's got to a point where its relevance has increased over the last 18 months because of the situation we find ourselves in now. I'm not sure whether the tone of it, the timber of it would fit together because there's probably too much agitation kind of in there. There's a quote from the follow up that's coming and we can talk about that if you want to a bit later. But it's a quote from Woody Guthrie and he was talking about folk songs as the role of folk songs, particularly as protest songs. Yeah. And I love this quote when I found out. This is beautiful. And he said the role of folk songs as protest songs is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually all of you, beautifully, beautifully said.

All of your work is about that. It's about, you know, getting angry and feeling your customer emotions. And so let me tell you, let me tell you about some of the things that we've come up with recently, you know, or rather we've still not tackled. I Think as an industry, and that is that how do we help people deal with difficult feedback?

This happens.

This. I mean, you know you, I know you preach this the whole time when you're implementing customer experience programs. One of the things that we're resistant to as humans is feedback. We don't even like good feedback. We're British, like you and me, we're very embarrassed about it, but especially bad feedback. How do we deal with this? Does it mean we're going to get sacked? Are we going to be judged on it? So how have you helped companies get through that kind of fear of feedback way?

So I think there's, I think there's, there's. For me, I think there's. No, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not so unkind and insensitive that I'm going to go pull the plasters off everything and go, ah, it's all there. Just deal with it. There is a real, an element of reality to it. Like, so when some people, you know, and I think there's also this kind of. There's a cognitive dissonance that goes on in some of the language that we use to describe some of this stuff. Like, for example, people talk about being agile, kind of test and learn, kind of fail fast, break things and fail fast and all this sort of like, stuff. You go, okay, that's fine. And yet if I ask kind of many people, when was the last time there's a piece of, a piece of graffiti kind of in the book which says, which is that I took a picture of and put it in the book and it says, dude, sucking at something is kind of the first step towards getting kind of good at something. Right. And if you ask kind of many executives or business leaders, when was the last time you sucked at something?

Yeah, that's a good. People have got egos. It's a whole bunch of answer, Right?

Well, exactly. And then people kind of start, don't talk about. And I've heard people actually start to massage the language and they start talking about, it's not fail, we don't fail, it's learnings. And you're like going, well, how does that work with this kind of break things, fail fast, test and learn sort of language you look at, like in turn, subconsciously. I'm like, I have no idea what's going on. We can't talk about failures, we have to talk about learnings. You're like going, oh, please talk straight now. If you've got to build up resilience to that feedback You've got to start slow, right? Because I think we've got to build up the resilience. It's like building a muscle to things. So you've got to create the environment so it's safe to hear these things and support the people around it. But you don't kind of just turn everything up to 11 straight away. But you might turn it to one or to two and go, here's some stuff. I wonder what kind of how you feel about that. What we could do better and so what can we take forward? Because we've got to make it okay to fail. And I think I don't know if we do that well enough.

I like that analogy. I mean, if again, if you think about through our lives and through the lens of punk rock again, is that, you know, the early punk rock gigs I went to, well, they were, you know, people gobbing at the band and you know, throwing bottles and shouting at them. Actually that's definitely a non Covid activity, isn't it?

But I tell you what, I went to a gig absolutely kind of like that and it was absolutely spot on. It was a Fugazi gig. Brilliant. Out in Leeds back in the. In the 90s and. And Fugazi is like one of my favorite kind of bands. I think they're just brilliant. And there was a bunch of almost like oi skinheads kind of. They're doing their pergoing things. So like not completely carefree, not even thinking about anybody else and trying to get everyone else in. Bouncing around and then elbows and stuff and everybody's face and he makai the front just went wait, stop. So the whole band stop you lot. If you want to do that, do it over there where you're not going to mess with other people. Other people want to kind of enjoy the music and do this sort of thing. They don't want to be pouring around, you know, poking around, poker around is fine. Is as long as it's not messing with somebody else's, you know, experience. And I was a bit like, that's super cool.

Yeah, that is cool. Yeah. The other thing I was thinking about is that those bands, and we can all name them but they got much better because of that terrible criticism. You know, they developed a thick skin and like, oh, that does not work. Come back to your point about failing. This was a really important part of. Of surviving for many of these bands was it was to get that scar tissue. And I think that is more the analogy that we're talking about is that the only way you get Better is to face the hardest criticism from, from your customers who probably want to be your fans, but they just want to help you get there. So I think there's.

Think about it this way and how institutionally that we're not set up to deal with this. Because if you think about the worst type of criticism is going to be a complaint, right? And like trying to make a formal complaint to many most organizations is like getting sent. Sent to Dante's seventh level of hell. Ridiculous. You know, it's like, it's all, it's almost Kafka esque. Kind of like how bureaucratic some of these processes kind of, you know, meant to. And so I would think for me personally punk approach to that sort of thing would be like, can we flip it on its head? Can we create a process that celebrates complaints that actually kind of makes it easy to complain and it blows away this irrational fear that sits in people's heads that we've encountered over time with all sorts of other kind of things which goes well, if we made it easy to complain, then everybody would complain. You're like going, that's a crock. It's not going to work. That doesn't exist. That just exists in your head. It's a bit like go back before, kind of like people were asking customers for feedback and they were like, we can't ask them for feedback because they might come back and tell us a whole bunch of negative stuff. Stuff. You're like going, customers aren't stupid. You know, and so when you try it and then the opposite kind of happens. You're like, oh, people are actually telling some good stuff and some positive stuff and some constructive stuff as well as some of the negative stuff as well. And we can work with the negative stuff to get better. Brilliant. Why don't we apply it to kind of all parts of our business?

Yeah, I think that that's something that we really noticed that some of the teams we work with, they're really surprised to get some positive feedback. Hey, if anyone knows before, well done.

There is anything about that that's good because it's a culture of fear. Right?

There is a culture of fear. And I think that that comes from the top. So, you know, so how do you. Can you give us some positive examples of where you've seen the, you know, the line go straight down from the top where the company is really focused on the customer.

So I mean one of my favorite examples of a company that I think just does well because it blow. They do, they do all sorts of things. Just, they just don't follow the rules. And it's quite a mundane example because it's Coventry Building Society and I've used them before. And they're interesting because they're one of the highest performing financial services organizations. They're not very big, but one of the highest performing financial services organizations in the UK and have been so consistently for the last like, 15 years. And they don't. None of their people operate with metrics and targets. None of their salespeople operate with metrics and targets. Now they do measure customer feedback and they gather nps, but it's never. It's only there as taking almost like as a temperature check to make sure that they're on the right course. Right. And to keep learning to create that sort of like osmotic membrane between them and the outside world. Right. And the key to their success is everybody knows what they should be doing, why they're doing it and what they need to do in order to deliver the right outcomes. Beautiful, beautifully simple, easy to talk about. Generally harder to do because you've got to go, I'm going to put my ego, all my egos, and park them in the ego cupboards at the door. And we're now in service to the brand and to our customers and we're all going to work in concert to that kind of like that objective. And I think they're just a beautiful example of not going down the way that everybody else is going, because everybody else goes. The majority of companies I talk to, they all talk about targets and targets and targets and targets and targets. And you go, well, are you in business to hit your targets or are you in business to do good work? And if you do good work and hit your targets, is that fine? But if you chase your targets, does that mean you're automatically going to do good work? Not necessarily. There's an old thing that I talk about called Goodhart's Law, comes from Charles Goodhart, an economist, professor, lse, former governor of the bank of England. And he was writing about financial instruments back in the 70s and there was a quote in his paper that said it became known as Goodhart's Law. He said, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

When a measure becomes a target. Yeah, I agree. Fred was also talking about this the other day. The one thing you wanted to take out of Net Promoter was targeting people on a Net Promoter score. It's crazy, right?

Well, exactly. It's if you cross that line, rather than it just being an indication of how you're doing. It's like a sense of a, you know, a source of intelligence about how you're doing. And it'd be a guiding sort of force, as it were, but not something you're trying to reach. And you're doing everything in your power to reach and including gaming the system and everything else to reach that, because that's what your reward is tied to, rather than the outcomes that everybody's working together.

So, I mean, having no metrics on that stuff is tough. How does that happen? How do you communicate that across the company?

Well, I think, again, it starts with the kind of the top. It starts with the idea that everybody is collectively focused on the same things. You know, you're not splitting, you know, you end up with this, this. You're not splitting people into departments or teams or silos or whatever. Everything where they have their own different, you know, separate targets, which ends up mean they might end up kind of pointing in different directions because they've interpreted. Interpreted how they're going to achieve them in their own way that you end up going, oh, can we actually try and coordinate our activities and work together, truly collaborate to try and achieve these kind of events? Now, it's not easy. Coventry Building Society is not a huge organization, but the number in the north of a thousand people. So they're not small. But when you do things at scale, like real scale, when you're talking about tens of thousands employees or hundreds of thousands of employees, yeah, it's hard. But I think it starts with the top and it starts with almost a philosophy of how do we want to approach things? What is the work that we want to do?

Yeah, I completely agree. Really have that vision from the top that goes down. And I can think of big and small companies. Another one from the UK that was speaking to recently, Briggs Equipment is about as big as you can get high company and rental. And they really actively want to get feedback from their customers.

So.

They work through the staff to say, look, embrace the feedback. It's going to make us better. And what we're going to do is when we get a piece of feedback, we're going to give five pounds to a charity, in this case a prostate charity, because it's a demographic and they've raised £3,000 for charity in the last quarter. It's really amazing to see how they did it. They really actively want to listen to customers and they act on it. I think that is such a great coordinated program.

I love that. I love that story because it's almost a bit like you're doing something that's going to drive the success of the business. That kind of, that internal kind of learning, listening and learning function. But at the same thing, at the same time you almost create. The incentive is to create an outcome, also an externality, as it were, that matters to people and particularly to the customer demographic, the primary customer demographic that they're dealing with. I think that's genius. That's brilliant.

So I think that. And you know, the customers now, they want to give the feedback they know, you know, it's like they look forward to the closed loop stuff. It's one of the best programs I've seen and it's small, but really, Gemma up there's doing a wonderful job.

Love it, Love it.

Hey, I like you. Also the, the building society thing. And so what you're saying is if people are having bad experiences in building societies, you would send them to Coventry, right?

Well, yeah, but. There you go. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. But I'd also, can I say in defense of Coventry, it's the home of two Tone and you cannot knock two Tone.

All right, well, I come back. I'll come back to Punk in a few minutes. I've got a few, I've got a few questions I want to follow up on. But talk about the new project because you did, you did punk CX, what, three years ago?

Well, yeah, 20, 19. It came out. Yeah. Okay, just over two years ago.

Then we hit the pandemic. Now you got a follow up coming up. So what prompted that?

Well, I guess I got into the cycle of kind of going, oh, maybe you need to think about something else. And then it also felt like there's such a lot happened over the last 18 months to two years and we've seen the development of this experience space. Whether we talk about, I mean, I think it's probably bigger than this, but I think there's a quad frication of experience going on.

A what?

A quad fercation. It's a thing, look it up.

That's like qualification only twice as split.

So it's almost a bit like kind of the experience is split up into at least kind of four different domains. Right. There's a customer bit, there's an employee bit, there's a stakeholder bit. And then there's. I think there's an emerging thing which is sort of the connective tissue kind of between a lot of them is. Which is the leadership experience bit. Right. Which is as separate from employee experience because I think it's separate because it connects A lot of these different things. And so because of that, our challenge is that many of these things are getting talked about separately. And I was thinking, well, actually, the people that are going to win are the ones that are going to think about it holistically. And so I was thinking about that and going, well, actually, what does that mean to lead in that space? Because we talk about brand leadership, we talk about market leadership, technological leadership, all these different sort of things, industry leadership, but we don't talk about experience leadership and what that means. And so the new book is called Experience. Well, it's called Punk xl. XL stands for Experience Leadership. And it's basically an exploration of what that could mean. And I feel like the way of talking about it or thinking about it is that it starts with the individual, explores what it could mean for them as a leader, goes to the team, goes to the organization, goes out to the customers, and then goes beyond that. And so it's just exploring kind of what that kind of means, is almost starting, trying to start a conversation about what that means. And in order to, I feel like, enrich that and add different perspectives into it, I've invited a whole bunch of collaborators onto it to add different voices. So borrowing from hip hop, where I have, like a track featuring kind of certain kind of person, which is brilliant. And because of that collaborative nature, and brilliantly, we've got people that have from everywhere from, say, San Francisco all the way through to Sri Lanka. So it's almost covering kind of a large part of the world, which is awesome. And because of the collaborative nature of the book, because of, you know, I produce kind of most of it, but because they've input and adds a whole bunch of richness to it, we're going to do it all for charity. The proceeds are going to be done for charity.

Fantastic.

And the charity is going to be Medecin Sans Frontier or Doctors Without Borders, because one, I think they're a wonderful organization doing kind of great work in places that many people don't go to or pay attention to, and helping people that really need help. And it's an acknowledgement of what we've gone through, what we continue to go through, and what many parts of the world are still going through. And so anything we can do on the back of kind of like the book, and we can send a few quid their way, then jobs are good.

Oh, that's wonderful. That really is experience leadership right there. I really like the sound of that. Some of the content of the book, I mean, you gave me a sneak preview earlier on, another word I learned today, multivalent. What the bloody hell's that?

Well, I was thinking about this, so I was thinking about different sort of things in the whole sort of experience space and kind of thinking about kind of like how there's this almost this lack of shared understanding of what things kind of mean. Now if you think about what is data security or privacy or personalization or accessibility or, or equity or whatever it might be, pick your word. And all of those different things, we would all agree, put it to a poll, 10 random people ask about those words and say, would you agree that those things are important? Most of them, probably 90%, if not higher, of the people that you presented to would probably say, yeah, those are important. Then you ask them, what do those things mean? And you probably get 10 different answers. And so multivalent means a thing that can have multiple different values and different kind of meanings. And the one thing that I'm really thinking about right now, I'm thinking about all of them. But the one thing that's really kind of like crept up and I'm really thinking about right now is this is the idea around personalization and how personalization has been around for a while. Customers recognize it's important. Employers want to deliver it because they think it's important and it drives all these positive outcomes. But yet they're sometimes at cross purposes. I think the reason why these are cross purposes because they haven't achieved a common understanding of what personalization means that makes sense for both the business and also the consumer. What you end up getting is that businesses are almost like guessing, as it were, making educated guesses about kind of what would work for consumers, rather than actually checking out with consumers and going that, doing that little extra iteration or having that extra conversation and working it back into their models and then doing that sort of iteration almost to reduce the error kind of term or the error kind of like effect in some of these, kind of like these initiatives that they push out. And so I think it's just a really interesting kind of thing. But in many organizations, this stuff exists. It's like we need to almost like collapse the gap between people that are delivering and designing experiences between them and customers and achieving, not just that acquired, just not just acquiring the hard data, but also acquiring the soft data and insight that's going to allow them to take the hard data and go that little bit further, which will then end up helping them deliver the experiences that they both want.

Yeah, you have to have multiple different stories. And I guess multivalent is a Good way of telling the story as much as anything. So if you think back to the early days of your career in customer experience, what is the thing that you'd give, you know, the young. I wouldn't say punk rocker because it's a bit after that. But as you started your career in cx, Adrian, what advice would you give yourself that you've learned over the last 10 or 20 years?

Brahms. I mean, I mean, I think the thing, and it's something I've always kind of done, and it's not because I've been necessarily intentional about it, I'm just being interested about it is what happens on the front line, what needs to get done. Kind of like what, what, what, what do they, what do they. Don't try not to do things to them. Go and talk to them. And I learned that. Well, there's two things I would actually say. One is always going to spend as much time as you can with the people that are actually doing the work. They're almost the most important people in your organization. They're not almost. They are the most important people in your organization because they're the ones that are serving your customers day in and day out. And they are the biggest untapped source of intelligence. They're organic supercomputers that don't get tapped into as much as possible. And they'll tell you things that you would never hear from anywhere else about how things work and what doesn't work and what does work and what they would like to see more of. And you're also going to better understand what obstacles you as an organization or even you personally are putting in their way, in their way of them doing a good job. And the second thing I would say there's something I learned the hard way, not prior to my career in, in. In sort of specializing in service and experience is if you're going to. If you know your stuff, because I remember. I remember the biggest. One of the biggest lessons I ever learned, actually making a presentation in front of some people. I was doing. It was like a hardcore economics presentation that I had an economist in the previous life. And you can imagine me presenting in a boardroom where the tables are organized like a horseshoe and I'm stood in the middle presenting. And about halfway through, I just lost my place.

It will be there.

No escape, right? And I was floundering and sweating and kind of like. And eventually kind of like found my, my train of thought and I was able to continue and stumble through to the finish. It was the most horrifying experience. I would not wish it on anybody. And my boss was stood kind of in the doorway, leaning against the door, going, watching on, kind of like, not in horror, sort of like wishing, hoping I was going to get through it all, but not stepping in to help me sort of thing. And afterwards he pulled me aside and said, so, what did you learn there? He's like, well, when. At first he said, how are you? I said, I'm all right. So what did you learn there? And I said, know your stuff? Yeah, back to front. Because that's when you can let your own sort of passion come out of it and your belief. And I think that's part of the whole sort of, like part of this whole thing is like, we forget that this is not a mechanistic activity. It's a very human activity that's facilitated by a whole bunch of fancy stuff, which is brilliant. But actually it's your energy and your enthusiasm and your understanding and your belief that will carry people. And so that's the thing. So I can. I. I love this shit. And I could talk about this shit all day. And because I'm so. I'm not even up to my ears in it. I'm like submersed in this sort of stuff. It's probably swimming around underneath, because that's my role. My role is that I've discovered recently that this is my best way that I've come up with describing it is that I am in service to service. Now, whether you like me or not, I don't give a shit. But that's my role. And that's facilitated by the fact that I love what I do.

I really like to hear that. I also love what I do as well. I'm in love with experience. And that's the customer's experience with an apostrophe. It's not the chat to me, but I like that. I mean, that's quite. I like your humility there. I think we've all been through that situation where we got where we lost our place. But of course, 10,000 hours of practice, whatever it is, does get you there. And you can riff off that. I want to come back to your first. Your first point, which I really love talking about the front line. The front line know the customer story. I think one of the best gifts that customer experience can give to an organization is to cut the noise of the middle management crap out. So the CEO or the people who can make some strategic decisions can actually check on what's going on with the customers. And too often you're right. The people at the front end, they don't know what to do with it or they're scared for their job or something like that. You've got middle management layers. Often their job is to stop the reality of what's going on because they're afraid for their job. They just got more power. So really I really lean into what you're saying there. That's a, that's a wonderful thing to talk about.

Can I make an additional point on that? Because I also going to want to put the, I want, you know, there's a kind of a, there's an idea that people that work in customer service teams or help desk or support teams or contact centers or call centers, call them what you will, right? The people that are there kind of fielding customer inquiries on a day to day basis. And they're always, they're often kind of pushed away to the edges of the organizations and possibly in other kind of parts of the country and so on and so forth and are often taken for granted. Sort of just like where people say, oh, they're not cost center anymore. Well, they sort of are because we don't want to hear from them. They're sort of like in some far flung place now. Oh, whoa. Those in the kind of service kind of like teams. But you can either, here's the thing I also like to say is you can either decide what you want. You have to decide what you want because if you don't decide what you want, you get what you get. Given my challenge to people that work in those service and help and support teams is also to smash down the walls and tell your own story because people will often take you for granted because they don't understand the scale and the scope of the work that you do. So you can take your data, like the NPS data and the qualitative feedback and all of these different sort of things and the themes and the categories and the memes and all this sort of like stuff, the good stuff and maybe some of the bad stuff and things. And you can take that and you can help. They can advocate for themselves to tell their own story. And guess what happens? People start to pay attention and you get, when you start doing it, you start communicating internally. People go like, oh my God. Oh, I didn't know. Wow, that's amazing. And then attention and focus and respect and everything goes up. And so that's the challenge to leaders in that sort of space is to go, don't just take it, tell your story. Because people don't know if they don't understand and they don't understand the detail of it. How do you expect them to care?

Yeah, I mean, that really brings us full circle, which is about the prog rock situation, the stale old rock dinosaurs. I've got to be a bit careful about this because there are many people I know listening to this that love that stuff, including my 14 year old son, by the way, you know, but there was something about breaking through that with, you know, really simple two and a half minute punk rock songs that broke the mold and really allowed us to go into, you know, hip hop, new wave, edm probably after that. It was a really interesting creative time. And of course we sound like dinosaurs talking about it. So let's really start finishing where we are then. So. So what was your. Let's start talking about your past. What was your best punk gig ever?

The best punk gig ever? Oh, I'll go back to the one that, that I am. That I mentioned before, the Fugazi one that was up in Harehills and Leeds, I think in the 90s. It just, it kind of resonates me. Oh, another one. Henry Rollins supporting the Chili Peppers in Glasgow barlands back in 98, where Henry Rollins stopped the concert because he was doing a quiet number and picked out somebody was like, who shouted from the back? Some wise ass kind of like shouted, bro. He was like, get on with it. It was like going. Henry Rollins in his own inimitable style just went, what the fuck? Stopped. And then basically like, do you have a problem? Like, let's you and me go. And he's like properly built at that time, you know, with a big eagle on his back and stuff. And the guy was just like, you know, this is a Pillywalli Scotsman. And he went even whiter when he got pointed out by Henry Rollins. It was absolutely classic.

I don't know what my favorite one was, I can tell you the first, the first concert I went to that I can remember was Stiff Little Fingers Hamilham's the Pavilion in, I want to say 1979, but it could have been 1980. So that was, that was a pretty early one.

I was. I mean, I was still a nipper in those days. So I'm more of a post punk sort of guy rather than original kind of punk. All right.

But it was. And then, you know, seeing the Clash and bands like that just really, I think, changed my. Changed my life. I would love to link a sort of customer experience analogy to rock, but I really am struggling. I mean, these guys were not the, not what I would call customer experience people, but I would say that you see certain bands and you talk about the Chili Peppers, who I also absolutely adore. And I think the Chili Peppers really understand what their fans want. And I think if that's a sort of, you know, customer experience as a fan experience where they know what the fans want. I've just bought tickets to go see me NJmega next year. I'm so excited. I'm taking all my kids so that, you know, they appeal to different ages and you know that they got Fruscianti back. I just, I can't believe what that's going to be like. I'm so looking forward to it.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I mean, I've got tickets to go and see Skunk and Ancy in March of next year.

Wow. Okay.

And I cannot wait because they're almost like a post, post kind of punk kind of like band. They just, just do their own thing and have been at it for a while. And I think some of the stuff that they do and the work that they do is so, it's so clever, so erudite, so poetic and lyrical and, and so in your face of like.

My wife's a total fan of skin, you know. Yeah. Really great. I was going to. While I, while I'm thinking about this, I tell you, um, my 14 year old punk self would have hated this or at least the others would because I secretly liked him. But I. Elton John, I've always loved Elton actually, and I saw him a couple of years ago and I'm going to see him again next year. He's, he really delivers again. Talk about customer experience. He just belts out the hits. He looks like he's enjoying himself on stage. He's makes everybody feel great and I think that's. This is, you know, this is the sort of thing that we, that we, that we need to start communicating. I deal a lot with B2B. It's like somehow you need to bring over that fan experience, that two way communication to do that. And I really believe that if you do customer experience right and you get customer feedback and you go, oh, we listen to you, we've built this for you. And thanks. It's picking out a fan in the audience to go, hey you blue eyes. You know this song's for you or something like that. I think that's, that's why the punk ethic really resonates with me. Adrian.

Well, I think it's personal as well. It's very kind of, it's very kind of individualized, as it were. There's like. I think you're absolutely right. The kind of whole of fan experience, as it were. We made this for you, I think is. Is absolutely spot on because it'd be quite different. You wouldn't really. You don't very often see kind of like punk bands playing stadiums. I mean, there's a few that have. That have got to that kind of. That. That level. You know, people in the modern kind of era, like kind of Green Day and those kind of like with a Clash tube.

And then they imploded, you know, so that was right.

And it. Because beyond a certain kind of point, it loses its personal sort of touch. And I think that's the lesson for sort of experience. Particularly if you think about this, you know, digital technology and advanced, you know, advanced AI and all these different things. There's a challenge that the more and more we kind of inject that stuff into it, we lose the sort of personal kind of human sort of touch. And that becomes. Our challenge is trying to get that. How do we strike that balance between the, you know, the human and technology? Because we have to leverage technology to be able to do some of these things. But we also need to make sure that we remember that it's human beings that pay our wages.

Yeah, really.

And spend the money.

Let's leave it there. Adrian. What a wonderful way to do it. I've got to say, I love the punk ethos and the things you bring it, the energy that you bring to being a fan of customer experience. And now if people want to follow you, how do they. How do they get in touch or how do they follow you online?

I'm lucky. And that I have a name that doesn't seem to be kind of like replicated by somebody else. So it's Adrian A D R I A N Swinscoe S W I N S C O E. Put it all together. Adrianswinsco.com, you'll find me there with all my social links, blog, podcast, links to books, kind of, you know, my email and everything else. There's the book. It's available on, you know, on, you know, Amazon all over the world. And yeah, that's it. I mean, just send me, send me a note, say Hi.

Fantastic. Adrian PunkCX is a pretty easy thing to remember and they can find you through that. Adrian, thanks so much for being with us today. Look, there wouldn't be complete punk CXO without you nominating your favorite desert island track. What's it going to be.

Well, thank you, Adam. I would like to nominate a track called no Control by Bad Religion, came out in about 1989. It has a quote in there from James Hutton, from a book that he wrote in 1788 called the Theory of Earth, was the first acknowledged treatise on geology. And the quote is, there's no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. And I think it's a beautiful quote when we think about how we approach things like transformation, how we approach the improvement of the experience that we deliver to our customers. So think about it. There is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. 18th century wisdom, ladies and gentlemen, is now stand where the government's all a and the times is the end. We must raise the throws of use, but we don't wish to admit what it is we have to lose.