Customer Experience Management with Tom Scantlebury

Shaun McCambridge is the Managing Director of Stellar Recruitment, a devoted husband and father to four spritely children. Shaun created the Debunking your Growth Mindset series to unpack practical ways to help people grow and build on current mindsets and challenge old habits, with a view to unlocking the potential within all of us.

This podcast features Tom Scantlebury – Expert in Customer Experience Management. Tom has 20 years experience in customer experience management, chaired customer experience forums, he has appeared as a keynote speaker and thought leader for Australia’s biggest brands and he has shared the stage with Obama, Branson and Opera. He is an expert in experience management for both Customers and Employees.

What is the elevator summary of what customer experience is and what your firm does in this regard?

Customer experience management is hard to measure and hard to capture, a customer experience is how people feel about that business through the entirety of their journey with you. Those interactions can start long before they become a customer and sometimes long after they leave. On the flip side – employee experience is the equivalent – how do your employees feel throughout the employee life cycle. That’s what CX and EX are and essentially what we do is, we provide the management to that, we put some methodology and tangle steps around how to handle that.

Why are companies doubling down on experience management? What are the tangible economic benefits of that?

Around the year 2000, a paper came out of Harvard saying the one thing you need to grow is NPS or Net Promoter Score. The sharing was that if you’ve got advocates for customers then you’re going to succeed. You had the GFC which saw companies trying to retain more customers as there were less out there, then you had the digital revolution of smartphones, which put power of information in the consumers hands. What we say now is that customers have a megaphone and super hearing. Over the last 20 years you’ve had a huge shift to the power of the consumer. Why are companies doing this? Because it makes money, companies that outperform the market are offering better customer experiences. More than ever they are disproportionately rewarded for it, if you do the wrong thing you are disproportionally punished for it.

What are tangible benefits of nailing experience management?

The Net Promoter System basically asks this question – ‘How likely are you to recommend x company or product to a friend or family?’ What that does is it categorises your customers. 9’s and 10’s are promoters, 7’s and 8’s are passive or neutral and 6 to 0 we call detractors. Essentially what happens is when you start measuring how people think and feel about you then you can track how they behave. So what we know is that if you have promoters, they are loyal, they are not price sensitive, they actually want to help you succeed. They will problem shoot for you, but most of all they are out their recommending and talking about your product. What people do is they believe strangers more than a company’s own marketing campaign. They will look on a review website and believe what a stranger says about a company before they make a purchase. You have more promoters; your business grows without you investing in things like traditional marketing channels which are becoming less and less effective. Your advocates are you new marketers. From a CX perspective, it reduces a lot of costs and you find a lot of efficiencies a lot of the time, a customer will tell you how you can do things better and faster next time. There’s an increase in productivity there’s an increase in customer retention there’s a decrease in churn, increase in loyalty.