Episode 6 | MICHAEL KILLEEN | Managing Director, The CX Company

Welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Today I'm really excited to be joined by Michael Colleen, who's the MD of The CX Company. And it's interesting, I was at a briefing, and we'll get Michael to tell us a little bit more about The CX Company in a while, but I was at a briefing recently, or a debriefing, I guess, where they were talking and Michael was presenting the results of their 2017 Ireland Customer Experience Report. And what struck me in that was that a number of the things that Michael touched on that we'll perhaps review as we go through this podcast were very, very specifically related to people and how we manage our people and how we lead our people and the impact that can have on our customers and on the experience that they have when they interact with our businesses. It also struck me that having come from the granddaddy of customer service in the last podcast, in episode 5, which is available on iTunes— cheap plug— coming from that with Fergal Quinn, who of course is the granddad of customer service, that it might be interesting to build on that today with Michael. So, Michael, good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure.

Lovely to be here. Let's maybe start off by giving you the usual easy kickoff question. Tell us a little bit about yourself, about where you've come from, and about the CX Company.

I started my career in the early '80s in the States. I was very lucky. I landed a really interesting job with General Electric in the Midwest, and I spent a number of years in my early days in the whole customer experience space. So this has been going on for many, many years. I was also lucky to work with some really cool American brands. I would have worked with Harley-Davidson, FAO Schwarz, Hilton, American Airlines. So I really got engaged in that whole kind of customer space, particularly in the loyalty territory. I came back in the early '90s and I set up a company called Dialog. And we had noted certainly in the last number of years that marketing wasn't really being taken as seriously as it once used to be. So we looked to re-engineer our business and we focused on the whole CX because I always had that link to CX and I was keeping an eye on what was happening in the customer experience world and it was just booming again. And, you know, customer experience is now the fastest growing business discipline. So we were like, okay, let's get in there. And we decided to move into that space with a piece of thought leadership, which is the annual CXi Report, where we interview approximately 40,000 Irish consumers each year and determine which Irish brands— we cover about 170 brands across about 10 sectors— and we ask the consumers to kind of rank these brands across a range of different kind of emotional customer experience values. And that's really what brought us into this territory, and we set up the CX company, is a year old, and And we've been doing some very interesting work and talking to some very interesting people. So, we're learning every single day, which is really exciting again. It's been quiet over the last number of years in that marketing space, and it's always been our goal to kind of be in a space where we can get respect for the work that we're doing, and CX is driving that for us right now, which is great.

Okay, interesting. And I know that having looked at the report and having been in the debrief, that in the top 10— and you can feel free to plug in a while where people can get the report from, Michael— but at the moment in the top 10 you've got brands like the credit unions, you've got Lush, OnPost, which as a previous chairman Fergal Quinn would be pleased to see, Amazon, Boots, Parcel Motel, of which I'm a user and I think it's a fantastic service, Netflix, M&S, all up there, and brands that you would kind of expect to see there in many ways, And at the other end of the spectrum, then right toward the bottom of the list, the AA, Irish Life Health, PhoneWatch, Insomnia, PrepayPower. What is it that sets those top ones, those top 10 apart from the ones that are lower down the list?

Yeah, it's a brilliant question. We've done a lot of work to kind of really unearth the insights around that. I think when we first ran this report, I was very surprised. We had the credit union in number 1. That wouldn't be a huge surprise to you coming from your background in the financial services sector. I think they seem to expect that. But for most of us, that was a huge surprise. Údán Posten there, which was also a tremendous surprise. And in the early days, there were no digital brands in our top 10. And I think what it was telling us in year 1, and the report's been going for 4 years now, it was basically that the Irish consumer had a real appetite for the human touch. You've heard me talk to you in the past about, you know, you'd go into a bank and you get an interview. You go into the credit union, you get a hug, that type of thing. Or with the post office, it was, you know, here is a monolith of a business that is very much ingrained in the Irish culture.

Very old school.

Absolutely. And, you know, why are they a CX champion in Ireland? Somebody in that organization knocks on your door every single day and they don't sell you anything. And there's huge implications around that type of relationship in terms of trust, etc. But interestingly enough, this year, you mentioned there are a number of digital brands that have come in and we've been monitoring the slowness of these digital brands to come on board. What's keeping them back? We noticed in the US and the UK, which are far more mature markets, that the digital brands such as the Amazons, etc., have always been in their top 10. So it's good news that they're finally being trusted in the Irish market. And I think it really comes down to time and effort. Consumers' time and effort is so valuable today. They really are making huge strides, and the Irish consumer is starting to respect that. The report, I will plug it, it's on our website, www.thecxcompany.com. And you can download a PDF free of charge, of course, for the last 3-year reports and some interesting insights there if anybody's interested.

Yeah, great. And for me today in this podcast, and all of these podcasts have very much been about insights, and I think other organizations who maybe are at the bottom of that list, who maybe aren't in that list, or maybe at the top of the list who want to keep doing more to begin to build and retain that position. I think today I'd like to be about what are some of the things, practical things, that they can do. And I guess one of the things that you talked about when we did the debrief was very specifically around leadership and the role of leaders in organizations and the impact they can have on their people to make sure they have maximum customer experience impact on customers. Yeah, maybe tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's interesting when you, when you talk about leadership within the customer experience discipline, Really, you start out by referencing that without the leader of an organization, and we tend to be, we talk about the CEO, if they are not ingrained, if they're not supporting that culture, it is going to fail. They have to be the main driver within the organization. It starts at that level and then it works its way down through the whole organization and it's actually delivered by staff, front-facing staff. But also support-facing staff have a huge role. We see across, if you look at all of the true champions, those that are delivering best practice CX around the world, you will have a leader in there that's driving it. So the Amazons of this world, I mean, they are absolutely fixated with the customer. It is very much part of their culture. And I think one of the issues that we picked up in the Irish market is that you get a lot of large companies who talk about the customer is first, but there's a big disconnect between the top of the organization and the people on the floor. And they will talk a lot about it. And you walk into the reception and you'll see on the wall that customer is number one in here. And when you sit down with the leader of that organization and you ask about maybe the board's investment policy You'll pick up feedback that maybe 90-95% of their investment as an organization still is going into building infrastructure, etc. So you have to sit back and say, guys, hold on a sec, are you truly behind this vision of the customer is king? Because a lot of those investments are invisible to me, the consumer.

And I think also, I think when you look at it, oftentimes people are confusing marketing with customer experience. 'we put the customer first' is a fantastic marketing strapline, but if you don't back that up, then you lose integrity and you lose the trust of your customers. And I know from having seen some survey results recently from an internal staff survey in a financial organization, that whilst that's the talk they talk, it's not the talk they walk. Because what happens is process, procedure, red tape, and culture all get in the way of them actually delivering that.

Yeah, and it comes up time and time again. We have people questioning us and they'll say, Mike, what are the key issues in terms of driving that? And you're right, the biggest blockers are going to be, particularly in larger organizations, will be the internal politics. One of the questions that we're always asked is who should lead CX within an organization? We would support the global insight, which is the CEO needs to be driving it. However, who is going to actually deliver that is always a good question. And our view is that it needs to be led by a separate independent CX department. And that department's role, that person's job in essence, that director of CX, is to work with all of the other departments within the organization.

To cut through the silos.

Absolutely. Getting them to work. And funny enough, We even see it that in certain cases you're better off hiring somebody from the outside to come in with a fresh blank piece of paper because it's very hard for an individual who's currently in that organization. They may come from a marketing department, they may come from a sales department or an HR department. They will always bring that bias to those discussions.

And the baggage of the organization.

Absolutely. And people would say, well, look, we got to get this thing up and running very quickly. You're ideally better waiting because Six is a long-term journey. So going externally may slow things down initially, but you will get a really independent person coming on board. And that would certainly be our approach. The smaller your company is, you have less of those issues. And generally the CEO is now delivering the work himself. Because he or she are on the front line. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it works. But certainly from a cultural perspective, the only way the CX program is going to get traction is where the CEO is in charge. And in fact, there's a lovely study out at the moment which is basically follow the money. And it basically says that CEOs today, they're under such pressure to deliver quarterly figures. So the champion companies in the world, if you take somebody like Amazon, They were never expected to make money. So they had that, that timeframe where money, making profit was not key on their agenda. It was just growth, growth, growth. Now, to be fair, they have delivered, I think, 10 in a row quarters of small profit, but they are seen as a champion because they didn't have those pressures. And there's many, many companies in the same boat that are now ignoring the concerns around delivering profit on a quarter basis. And they're saying to their shareholders, guys, if you're in this to get profit each month, go somewhere else because we're taking a long-term vision and approach to how we're doing things. And that's starting to pay off.

And it's interesting that it's Jeff Bezos that has— excuse me— Jeff Bezos that has that 13th chair. Table in his boardroom, which is the customer, and there's nobody sitting in it, but it's just to have that voice in the room. What would the customer think about that if the customer was sitting there? It's an interesting take on it, isn't it?

No, it is. And it really works. We've used similar strategies with different corps in our experience. And when you start a meeting with what's in this for the customer and you finish that meeting to say, have we addressed what what was in it for the customer, it has such impact. It really is, because it's very easy to start a conversation wearing your customer's shoes, but to maintain the conversation for more than 10 minutes, it's hard. So constantly referring back to that, I love their approach of the empty chair in the room. It's a great approach.

Yeah, it's nice. When you did the debrief a couple of months ago in the concert hall, you talked about a number of things that organizations needed to be doing. In 2018 to really bring customer experience to life in their organization. And I noticed there were 8 that you talked about, and 5 were particularly specific to people-related issues in organizations, or leadership or culture-related issues. And I wanted to just explore those each for a few minutes. And I've actually written a blog post on this previously with a picture of Richard Branson and about not putting your customer first, because he really, he came from there. That was a place that where he came from, and he almost coined that phrase of, you know, it should be staff first, not customer first. Probably pretty unconventionally and probably pretty unfashionably for a large CEO, I would think, to say something like that. But that was one of the 5 things that you had in place.

No, I totally agree. And, you know, it's funny, we've worked with Richard and we've worked with his team in the UK, and I remember they shared with me His vision, which is about 40 years old now, funny enough. And when you read it today, it's like, oh my God, they really got it. I think Richard Branson is probably one of the greatest consumer champions on the planet. We never had that in Ireland. We had Fergal and his work with Quinnsworth, but that model changed so dramatically that the customer kind of fell backward. And I always refer to companies like Aer Lingus. They were real champions to the Irish consumer, particularly when you were abroad getting on that plane. You felt that you were home before you even left the foreign airport. But their model changed and they kind of pulled away from that. And what I like about the Virgin approach is they do genuinely support that initiative that staff are king. And this is something that really hit us about 5 years ago, hence us moving away from the kind of the customer is king into the staff member is king. Ultimately, you cannot deliver CX excellence if your staff aren't happy. That's what it boils down to. And there's this lovely line which is basically happy staff equals happy customer equals happy business. And I would even add to that equals happy shareholders. And it's really important to understand the other two, the last two. We all understand that If you go in and there's somebody smiling at you, you'll smile back as a consumer. You know, it's just a wonderful position to be in. But that has an impact positively on the business, and they can now invest more and more in that whole happiness within that organization. And if you have shareholders, they're very, very quick to support. So take for instance our friends Amazon. I mean, they have been getting so much support from their shareholders that they're able to do things that you would never dream of. If that was the opposite, they would be nowhere close. So back to the very basics, you know, you just look at that happy staff. And I know that one of the big challenges we have in Ireland is that we hire staff, really good people. When I say we, I'm talking about companies across all sectors, and we spend far too much time training them. And in essence, what we do is we take— we train their own personalities out of them. And if you look at some of the larger banks, for instance, or telcos or utilities, what they're doing, they're investing a lot of money to be less robotic in their response. I walk into retail stores every single day. It's part of my life now, going in. And even then, you get a sense that we have failed miserably in the retail space. Where you won't even get any eye contact from people on the floor. And then you go to the UK or the American market would be the one we'd all giggle about, have a nice day type of approach. But they are brilliant in allowing you and affording you to have a really remarkable shopping experience. When you shop in America, you're going to enjoy yourself. Are there many shops in Ireland that you would have the same experience? Really good shopping experience in places like Tiger. I know Gillian, she's been a fantastic advocate of hiring the right people, but what they do amazingly and have done is they've hired some of the most bizarre personalities you'll meet. I remember going in there one day and being greeted by a guy with blue hair and studs down his nose and the big tattoo on his neck, and I just loved him because he was himself. I love going into that store.

And he was really representative of Tiger. Look at what they sell. It's random, mad stuff. So you kind of need somebody like that to authentically sell that.

Absolutely. But she could, they could easily train the heck out of them so that he loses his own personality. Hire them for the personality and then you train them around the specifics. There'll be product training that you need to do, systems training that you need to do. That's all they need. But don't turn them into robots. And I think we get too much of that in the retail sector here in Ireland.

It was interesting, Fergal touched on that in the podcast that we did with him where he talked about when they hired staff, what they would do is they wouldn't give them a handbook with the rules and regulations. It was a case of do the right thing. And what they would do is they would mentor you up or pair you up with somebody else. And when I challenged him and said, well, and that person's going to show this person what to do? He said, no, they're not there to show them what to do. The person that's joining the organization is there to watch. Because in theory, the person that they're watching should just be doing the right thing. And they learn from watching and they learn and they're able to still bring their personality, but they're able to see what we do. They're able to see how we deal with customers, how we walk and we pick up a piece of rubbish off the floor and put it in the bin, not because it's in our objectives or because the store manager told us to do that, but because it's just the right thing to do.

It goes back to that. I always talk about really super companies. They give a damn. They really give a damn. And there's that great line, which is there's very little traffic along the extra mile.

Extra mile.

And when we talk about this is the customer journey, people who really give a damn, they tend to want to work for companies that care about their customers. And in fact, if you look at the number one brand in the UK last year was First Direct, and they're hiring all of their staff now from the caring industry.

Nurses.

Absolutely. So here are all these kids coming out of, after doing a nursing degree and now they're working in a bank and they're loving that. And then you have, there are companies in the US, Zappos, for example, they've moved to Vegas, the biggest hospitality center in the world. That's because they can find staff there that understand that. So again, you're right, trying to find people who genuinely give a damn about their customer's experience, it's always going to pay dividends.

And two things 2 things that spring to mind. One is that Zappos have been so successful at creating customer service culture and customer excellence culture that they've now started a customer service excellence school.

That's right. Yes.

That you can go to and learn the Zappos way, in inverted commas, for customer excellence. So they've now branched out into teaching other organizations how to do what they've done, what they've achieved. I was flying to, I was flying to Edinburgh for the Easter weekend and we had a bag. We checked in, I don't know why, we checked in a bag. We paid the €25 each way and we checked in a bag. Anyway, we went up, we weighed the bag on the self-service machine. The ticket didn't come out. We tried it again. The ticket didn't come out again. A guy came over, very pleasant chap, came over. Having a problem? Yeah, we are. Ticket won't come out. He said, oh, I'm really sorry. You can't check the bag in now at another machine because technically the bag is kind of on the plane. So you can't check it in again. It would be 2 bags. So I'm gonna have to check you in at the desk over here. Can you just come to my colleague? And there's a girl there, probably in her early 20s, maybe checking in. Didn't even look up. Tapping away, tapping away, tapping away. Puts a label on the bag. And like you, I travel a bit, and I saw that the code on the bag was CGN. And I went, that's very odd, because that's not Edinburgh, because Edinburgh is EDI. CGN. And in my head I'm going, perhaps that's just a code for a different process in the airport because I don't know what I'm doing and she clearly does. So I was kind of— I was deferring to her, to her superior knowledge. And I said to her, this bag's definitely going to Edinburgh, isn't it? She went, yes, without looking up. We walked away with the baggage tag then. My wife said, did you see that? That said CGN. I said, yeah, I noticed that as well. And I looked up on my phone and lo and behold, CGN is Cologne. And that's where our bag was about to be going.

Oh my God.

Because she hadn't bothered to look at the tag, to listen to my concern, to do something with it, to wonder, he might just know what he's talking about. She just hadn't bothered. So anyway, we traced back to the desk, supervisor, show her the tag, and she suddenly, you know, the face told her, told a thousand stories that yes, our bag was indeed going to Cologne. She fixed it, she got the thing sorted, she gave us free access through the fast track so we'd make our flight, all that stuff. She did her part of the job really, really well. As she was doing all that, I walked back over to the girl who was on the desk and I said to her, "By the way, although I did check twice with you, you had tagged that bag for cologne." And you know what she said to me? Absolutely nothing. She didn't look up, she didn't look at me, she didn't apologize, she didn't say anything.

But there's somebody who's unhappy in their job. Absolutely. I tell you what, that's a really nice story to kind of move into that whole area of what is CX. One of the big issues out there right now is that people don't truly understand what customer experience is. We mix it up hugely with customer service, and they are night and day. And what you have just shared there is a great way to bring that to life. Customer experience is how you feel when you're interacting with a brand, and you can, as you're telling that story, with that airline, there's fumes coming out your ears. You are so upset, so annoyed, etc. There's a couple of things going on. Customer service is the functions. You have a desk where there's a woman sitting there and she's there to help you, or you can go to a bag area to drop your bag in. That's all function. The emotional element is what we're measuring, is the whole customer experience. From that perspective, we find that 80% of the companies we deal with believe they give an amazing customer experience, where only 8% of their customers agree with that statement. So there's a massive gap. And the reason the gap is there is because they don't understand the difference between customer service and customer experience. So that story that you've talked about is, okay, so if I'm in her boots, how could I address that? The first thing I would be saying, there's a huge gap. Huge opportunity to resolve this issue. So turning a negative into a real positive. So things like, oh my God, Scott, I am so upset. And I would even use the word Scott because it's nothing— the one thing that people love more than to hear in anything else is their name. So just even by addressing you by the name, it would suggest to you that she does care. And say, I'm so sorry, this has happened a few times. I'm being honest. And being empathetic and really understanding what's going on, but being able to resolve that issue there and then, that the staff member is empowered to do that. That's what customer experience is all about. And it is down to the people. And so if that was a caring organization, and I've grown up in the airline industry, I've worked with many airlines across the world, and they used to own CX, and now unfortunately it's just gone. And we always tell the story about your customer experience will be determined by your expectations. So if you and I are going to London tomorrow and you're flying Aer Lingus and I happen to be flying Ryanair, we both already have completely different expectations.

Absolutely.

If Ryanair smile at me when I go in there and greet me by name, I am over the moon. Bingo. And if Aer Lingus don't match that, so they're already under severe pressure. Their expectations are far far higher. And that's quite interesting when you look at certain banks or certain utilities. We're not expecting an awful lot from a bank. So if they turn around and smile and greet you and genuinely care, and back to that give a damn, already you've got me. And you only have to do that once or twice a year. It's not something that has to be consistent. There's a big issue that's always asked. We need to deliver a consistent consistent CX. Yeah, it's a real goal. It's very hard to do. It really is hard to do because some companies will give you an amazing welcome and then everything else beyond that then starts to falter and falter and falter.

Which almost makes it worse.

Yeah, you have to be very careful. Again, that's managing expectations. I'd love to get an incredibly good welcome when I come on board. A new company or I join or I sign up to something. But my expectations there will be that welcome will continue to improve and improve and improve in every transaction I have. And when it falters, I start to believe you no longer love me. And that's a huge issue. One of the big issues for companies around the world right now, we're all suffering the same, is that the consumer's expectations are growing so fast we simply cannot keep up with them. And last year, in fact, In fact, the Irish businesses overtook the UK businesses for the first time. And I'd like to say, isn't that amazing? Well done, Ireland, Inc. We've done a great job. Unfortunately, it's more down to the consumers' expectations in the UK being so high that the big brands over there simply can't keep up with it. And that's a challenge for our businesses here in the Irish market.

Okay, interesting. Let's move on to something else that you talked about in the debrief. Which was keeping staff in the loop. And from a leader perspective, from a communications perspective, from my perspective, that's huge. Having people aware of what's going on in the organization so they can then deliver that is critically important.

Yeah. And it's so obvious. It really is. But it is overlooked time and time again. The one comment we hear time and time again from companies who have invested CXs, they approach us and say, is there any chance you can help us refresh our program? And there's the issue. Refreshing the program basically means you have not been keeping staff in the loop. And what we tend to do is we will design programs with staff. And again, very logical. You get the staff who know more about the customers than we do, or the senior management team do, They're dealing with them every single day. And when you get them to design a program, it becomes very evident that they are going to keep an eye on its progress, etc. So simple things like keeping them up to speed on metrics, how we're doing, how we're scoring. Some companies will have NPS scores, or we have our own CXI report. Things like that are really important. But the beauty about it is that when you're designing the program, the staff have to feel that they are designing this program themselves.

So they own it.

Absolutely. And they will seek progress reports and they'll do that naturally. And unfortunately, what tends to happen is CX is really important out there. Let's have a CX program. Let's design it. Let's launch it. And then it dies.

There's no buy-in from the staff to keep it going.

Yeah. And then funny, I think Again, the CX champions out there, not only do they keep staff in the loop, but they align their bonuses around CX metrics as well. So that is another great way to— and we're seeing that happening a good deal now in Irish companies. So they're buying into it, which is fantastic.

And it's really interesting that, again, back to Fergal's podcast a couple of weeks ago, again, something that he advocated on the shop floor was sharing sales figures with staff because that was back then. Their measure, whether it be right or wrong, but their measure of customer service— how many customers have come in the door and come straight to your department. And they were figures that they shared openly with the staff because, as he said, that motivated them to want to do better. So even 30 or 40 years ago, that was happening.

Absolutely. I mean, CX is not a new discipline. It has been around for centuries. So yeah, we accept that.

Let me talk a little bit about emotion because you talked, and again, from And from an employee engagement perspective, I completely agree that for a staff member, for somebody on your team to function at 100%, they need to bring their whole selves to work. And that means bringing some emotion, that means bringing some of themselves. And I wonder what was borne out of the study on that.

Emotions is a very difficult one to manage. We track a whole range of emotions in how we score. Certain brands out there. We have a framework that includes personalization, and that really is the emotion of knowing me, really making me feel like I'm important to you. Time and effort, understanding that my time is critical. Resolution, when something goes wrong, fix it. So these are critical areas, and it is— what I love about customer experience, it is so It really is. I remember when the advent of websites, etc., came on board and we were charging ahead with all that stuff. People found it really hard to understand. When you discuss CX with a board today, they all get it. They're all consumers. And again, it goes back to that emotional impact. You will remember how you felt rather than what you bought and what price you paid for when you went in that store. It's down to that. I mean, when you think about it, when I ask people, when was the last time you had an amazing customer experience? Particularly in Ireland, it goes, oh yeah, that's a great question, let me tell you. And they go, well, actually, I can't think of one now, but I'll tell you a lousy experience. And we fall into that whole negativity side of things because that's what you remember going out of a store. You mentioned you didn't even get eye contact in that communiqué with a lady across the desk on travel. Travel is stressful enough, and the successful companies recognize that when you're in an airport, your emotions are already stirring. You've got 2 kids on your side. Now they're just raised— 3, I bet you have. 3 kids. 3 kids. Even worse. I mean, your emotions are just getting higher and higher. So, you know, really good companies get into your shoes and they understand what's going on in your life right now and they're able to adapt and address that. But emotions are absolutely critical to delivering great success.

Let me look at one final question just in terms of time. One question I like to ask all people that come on the podcast, and given the career journey you've been on and where you've come from, from the Estates, through Dialog, and then it's the CX Company. What's the one piece of leadership advice that you know now that you would give to your 20-year-old self, particularly in relation to customer experience?

I think it comes down to respect. It really does. I mean, in my own business, we have always been about earning respect by doing incredibly good work, not to be too fixated with profit. And I think if you take that culture, that concept into business, I worked for one of the greatest leaders on the planet, Jack Welch, and Jack managed GE through fear. He was an incredible guy because he raised their value by over 10,000% in the time that he was in there, but everything was done through fear. And I think, you know, you look at some of the really great leaders today, you know, they are willing, they are risk takers. You have to be brave. You really have to be brave to win in the customer experience because it is a long-term approach. And that requires respect. And the respect goes down to respecting your customers, but ultimately respecting the people who work with you. And it goes back to unhappy staff, unprofitable company. You know, it's that simple. And, you know, I look at some of the large players in our market today and still getting away with murder, and, you know, their staff just not being happy. Now, you can— if I'm listening to this, I go, well, what am I running there? You know, an incredibly successful and profitable organization wouldn't be the greatest in the world of having happy staff would be, I suppose, a general consensus, particularly those in the air. They're not treated brilliantly, but yet they turn over incredible numbers. And for me, I think what Ryanair have always done, even from a marketing perspective, they were always very, very honest with their customers and said, if you're flying with us, this is what you expect.

This is what you'll get.

Yeah. So they make up for their lack of love for staff by being incredibly upfront in terms of sharing, this is what you're going to get. So from that perspective, they've done very well. But I do believe they are going to have to change that. They have acquired a significant number of new aircraft. They're going to have to bring the business passenger in to fill those aircraft. And they will have to do that by delivering great CX. It's an easy model. Their colleagues, Southwestern in the States, do exactly the same, but yet they deliver the CX on top of that. So that ultimately has to be a way for them forward.

Brilliant. So Ryanair, watch this space. Michael, thanks a million for your time. It's been really, really good talking to you. Some useful insights, some interesting insights. Give a quick plug for where people can get the report again.

Report is at thecxcompany.com, and there are the last 3 years' reports there. Interesting reads, and also the league table for Irish brands.

Michael, thanks very much.

You're welcome, delighted.

Thanks for listening. For more on Inspiring Change and to read our blog, please visit inspiringchange.ie.