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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

How to optimise your customer service

Adrian Swinscoe is a celebrated speaker, author (Read: Punk CX) and advisor in the customer service and experience industry.

In this week's podcast, we were lucky enough to catch up with Adrian about a customer service improvement project he recently advised on.

Adrian was approached by an agile, fast-growing company that wanted to make sure they were running an optimal customer service operation.

But, they weren't really sure how well they were doing.

We find out:

• Adrian's approach to assessing the company

• How he discovered some quick wins

• What changes were implemented to take their customer service to the next level.

We then dive into the future of customer and the technological changes you can expect.

Full guide and youtube video on the sentisum website

Hello SentiSum followers, readers and newcomers!

We teamed up with an industry expert to create a video guide for customer journey mapping.

That expert is Ed Deason, the current UK Head of Customer Service at British high street chain, Pret A Manger (find him on LinkedIn here).

He's got a ton of experience behind him running customer experience and service teams.

And, customer journey mapping was actually one of the first things he did in his career.

Together, we wanted to make a truly actionable guide that would help both customer journey mapping newbies AND senior CX professionals navigate the process.

I suggest watching the full video lesson first, and then referring back to this shorter 'summary' blog post for a refresher.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn.

(Follow us on LinkedIn for regular actionable content like this)

In this episode of the State of Customer Service Podcast, I caught up this week with Heidi El Hawary, Head of User Support at trivago, the global metasearch company in the travel, hotel, holiday industry.

In this episode, we cover:

Join us on the SentiSum LinkedIn channel for short video clips from customer support leaders like Heidi every day.

This week we have an incredible business leader, Graham Johnston, the Head of Omnichannel at Three, the British telecoms and internet service provider with over 10 million customers.

Graham’s an omnichannel expert, so we talk about what that is and the common challenges to a true omnichannel customer experience. We dig into some of the projects Graham has led at Three, Three Store Now (customer support calls being directed to in-store employees on a video chat) and Three Live (the launch of a live stream unboxing and events channel that pivoted over the pandemic to one-to-many customer support sessions.)

My favourite part was hearing about how Three approaches customer feedback in an omnichannel way and what the future is for uncovering customer insights from multiple channels.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations

 This week, Sharad and I had the pleasure of chatting to John Ernsberger, the co-founder of Stella Connect (an contact centre industry SaaS platform that just sold to Medallia!)

The interview was short but high value, we covered topics like:

Phew, we covered a lot in that time. Safe to say this episode was thought-provoking and packed with insight.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

This week, we have another incredible guest, Ed Deason, the Head of Customer Service at Pret a Manger, the international sandwich & coffee shop chain with 500 retail stores.

Ed mainly worked in customer service & support in the travel industry for the past 13 years before moving to Pret in January 2020, right before the UK went into lockdown.

In this episode, we start off discussing the travel industry: the challenges facing holiday providers who don’t own all the touch points, why customer experience is so important in the holiday industry, and how to maintain an 85% response rate on customer surveys.

We then move onto Pret, which has had a crazy year this year. After building knowledge and experience for 30 years in high street retail, overnight Pret closed every store. They shifted from 100% in-store purchases to having no stores.

We learn how Pret responded, the impact on customer service, and how Pret quickly pivoted from customers coming to them, to meeting customers at their homes. 

We also get a hint of what projects are next for Pret and how they’ll continue to build experiences that fit their values and brand promise.

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This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

Hello and welcome to the On Hold podcast, where we interview people with unique experiences and ask them to teach us how to create wonderful customer experiences.

This week’s guest is Annette Franz. She’s been working in this space since before the words “customer experience” were a part of common business language.

Annette has held senior CX & VoC positions at companies like Medallia, CustomerSat, and Confirmit, and now is the Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association. In short: she knows the customer experience landscape like the back of her hand.

In this interview we discuss:

This week, we’ve got an awesome guest: Nicholas Zeisler, who is the founder of Zeisler Consulting, a CX development consultancy that brings the theories of process improvement to customer experience. 

He’s also been there himself as the Director of Customer Experience at HP, where he built a customer experience team driven by analytics, setting up the whole company to take action on VoC insights.

We get Nicholas to share his advice and stories, covering these key topics:

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.

This week's interview could not have been more interesting.

We caught up with Megan Bowen, the Chief Customer Officer at one the fastest growing marketing agencies in the US, Refine Labs.

Megan joined the Refine Labs team just three months ago, and it's her first time being with such a small, startup-style team.

She's previously led customer experience projects at some leading technology companies: spending time between customer service and sales at ZocDoc, leading corporate accounts at GrubHub, taking up the reigns as COO at Managed by Q, and acting as VP of Customer Success at Platterz, covering success and support.

The customer experience at everywhere she's worked has been a mixture of technology and reality: whether it's tech & doctors, tech & food, or tech and office management. This means Megan has a rare insight into what it takes to create incredible customer experiences in the mixed reality world.

Topics covered included:

- How to help your team be successful, as well as your customers. Creating the right conditions for everyone to be happy and satisfied

- Helping your customers get real value, reducing churn

- Framing customer experience initiatives in terms of business results

- Creating win-win situations to benefit your customer and your business

- Investing in the empathy skills of your customer support agents

- How you can use the acronym LAAARing to coach your team to build communication skills

- Using call shadowing & asking questions to coach your team

- Being at GrubHub during their IPO

- How Megan merged the customer experience of 3 acquired companies into one experience at GrubHub. How did they choose what features to keep? How did they try to stop churn?

- How customer experience differs between corporate and consumer accounts

- Why GrubHub CX was so complex: how do you deliver food to 1000s of employees at the same time in the same building across 15 floors?

- Megan weighs in on the debate: NPS, is it really useful?

- Megan's thoughts on why qualitative feedback beats quantitative any day

This podcast is powered by SentiSum, a SaaS platform that helps you get to the root cause of customer pain. Our customer analytics software turns qualitative customer data from support chats, email, NPS and surveys into quantitative insights that improve product and operations.