Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

Today’s interview is with Micah Solomon, a best-selling author, hands-on customer service consultant, keynote speaker, trainer, and one of the world's leading experts on customer service, company culture, and the customer experience. He is also considered to be “the customer service turnaround expert”. Micah joins me today to talk about his new book: Ignore Your Customers (and They'll Go Away), what it’s all about, what we can learn from it and what are the main things that we should be doing to improve the customer's experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Insights from 100 of the world’s most progressive organisations on how to make work more fun – Interview with Pim de Morree of Corporate Rebels – and is number 332 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Anthony Abbatiello, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and global leader of Deloitte Leadership. He joins me today to talk about Deloitte’s newly released annual 2017 Global Human Capital Trends Report, some of the trends that emerged from the report and what they mean for leaders and entrepreneurs looking to build a business intent on delivering a great customer and employee experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Building a culture of good engages customers, employees and drives business results – Interview with Ryan McCarty and Scott Moorehead – and is number 209 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Rob Tarkoff, President and CEO of Lithium Technologies, a digital customer experience platform company. Their technology both powers some of the world’s largest online communities and helps some of the worlds largest brands with social customer care and publishing. Rob joins me today to talk about some recently published research, engagement, what it is, what it isn’t, what brands should be doing more and less of to help them engage more with their customers and the role of communities in all of that. This interview follows on from my recent interview – Creating a culture that stands for something and stands out – Interview with Tim Deeson – and is number 239 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with Pim de Morree, co-founder at Corporate Rebels, who are on a mission to make work more fun. Pim joins me today to talk about their research, their journey to date, progressive organisations, and the arrival of their new book: Corporate Rebels: Make work more fun. This interview follows on from my recent interview – A lot of organisations talk outside in but their systems are not designed outside in – Interview with John Seddon of The Vanguard Method – and is number 331 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Today’s interview is with John Seddon, an occupational psychologist, author and Managing Director of Vanguard, a consultancy company he formed in 1985 and the inventor of 'The Vanguard Method'. John joins me today to talk about his new book: Beyond Command and Control, the problem with current management practices and how we need to unlearn the way that we operate service based organisations if we want to improve the service and experience that we deliver. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The Non-Obvious Megatrends that will affect our ability to deliver a stand out customer experience in the coming years – Interview with Rohit Bhargava – and is number 330 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

This is the eleventh in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, I spoke to Duncan Cheatle about The Prelude Group, The Supper Club, ThanksTo, being one of the founding team behind StartUp Britain and his mission around Making Britain more enterprising. Today, I want to introduce you to Rob Pinkerton, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Customer Experience Management across at Adobe. Rob has been mentioned here before when I wrote about one of his blogs back in April in The growing search for human contact in customer experience and customer service. Recently, I had the pleasure to have a chat with Rob about all things customer, customer experience management, how CEM is not about technology, the fear that exists in many boardrooms about the changing environment, that most enterprises are built on a set of rules that have been in place for 60 years and are not set up to deal well with the changes that we are now seeing in our markets and how we are only just at the beginning of a huge change.

This is the tenth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, I spoke to Professor Patrick Barwise of London Business Schoo about his new book, Beyond the Familiar, creating long-term growth and change in a business, customer focus and Net Promoter Score (NPS) amongst other things. Today, I want to introduce you to Duncan Cheatle, founder of The Prelude Group, The Supper Club, ThanksTo and one of the founding team behind StartUp Britain, which is a new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, launched on 28th March 2011 that is designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK. Duncan has a great ambition to "Make Britain the most enterprising nation in the world" and in the interview we talk about StartUp Britain as an exciting new venture, why it's a great time to start a business, what it takes to succeed and what he would advise entrepreneurs of growing businesses to do grow yourself and your business.

This is the 9th interview of this year and I think you are in for a treat. Today's interview is with Professor Patrick Barwise of London Business School about his new book, Beyond the Familiar. Now, this is quite a long interview….a shade over an hour. I did contemplate cutting it into sections but there is such a lot of great stuff in there that I couldn't bring myself to do that. So, forgive me for the length of the interview but trust me it is worth a listen.

Earlier this year, I published a post called The Wow! Awards – The missing key to employee engagement and great service?. Following on from that post, I was able to interview the man behind The Wow! Awards, Derek Williams. In this interview we talked about his mission, changing the way that companies think, how you can measure how your company is feeling, customer service, customer experience and changing the world.

A few weeks ago, I was sent a review copy of Guy Kawasaki’s book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Last week following various via bits of email correspondence and travel coincidences, I was able to meet Guy in London to ask him about the book and that is the topic of the podcast. In our discussion, we talk about being enchanting, what it takes to create enchantment, the book writing process and find out what change Guy really wants to create enchantment around. I agree wholeheartedly with Guy when he states in the book that learning how to create real and meaningful relationships with your customers is the key competitive skill that will set you and your business apart in the coming years. Enchantment is a how-to book and also a manifesto for creating real change. It's like a 21st century version of Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. In the book Guy explains how Enchantment comes about and shows us in very practical ways how to achieve it by thinking more about yourself, how we develop relationships with those around us and how we use various technology tools to tackle big problems.