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This week's guest on the podcast is Sham Aziz, the current Head of Customer Service at Selfridges (the famous British department store).

Sham has 20 years of experience on the frontline of customer service. He's lead teams across companies like Natwest, Ocado, Net-A-Porter and Fab.com.

We caught up with Sham just as the UK is coming out of lockdown. The timing made it perfect to dive into Sham's experience of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted his work over the past year and what he thinks the future of customer service will look like.

For the first time in history, Selfridges closed their doors. Like much of the high street, they shifted their focus online, had to shift to remote work and hiring, and saw significant growth in customer contacts.

But, amidst this chaos, there is opportunity. Opportunity to make changes happen quickly and become an agile company again.

In this episode, we take a look at:

• The impact of the pandemic on operating models

• Importance of customer insights and how to get them listened to (we also wrote an eBook on this recently here).

• How should the profile of who you hire change?

• A discussion on whether customer service advisors should be sales trained

• Why there has been a shift in customer service careers outlook

• Sham's ideas for the future of customer service