Today’s interview is with the winner of the MyCustomer 2020 CX Leader of the Year competition: James Scutt, Head of Customer Experience Strategy and Deployment, Post Office. This interview is slightly different this week as I am conducting it with Chris Ward, Editor of MyCustomer. The original interview can be found here but I thought it would be worth re-publishing here too. In the interview we discuss James’ journey to where he is now, why he applied for the competition, how he felt when he won, the biggest lessons that he has learned along the way and how the pandemic has impacted the business among other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Where the magic happens when it comes to improving customer outcomes – Interview with Stacy Sherman – and is number 374 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.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with James:

• Here’s the link again to the interview on the MyCustomer site.
• Here’s more details about the finalists in the 2020 CX Leader of the Year competition.
• You have to be very resilient when you’re talking about improving customer experience at scale and across a large organisation.
• The Post Office has over 170 products and services.
• James learnt a lot about what it means to deliver a great customer experience from his background as an award-winning chef.
• As a chef you’re in service to somebody else’s experience.
• It’s the very small things that matter.
• Customer experience is an enabler to the end result that you want, which is loyal customers and increased sales revenue.
• We focus on a set of six customer drivers (friendly, professional, knowledgeable, understanding and appropriately efficient) that we have been able to identify from five years worth of customer feedback.
• We major on emotion. Within our voice of the customer programmes, we ask customers directly about their emotions (delighted, satisfied, neutral, irritated or disappointed) and also run text and sentiment analytics on the freeform, verbatim comments that come back from customers too to really get under the skin of the data.
• The pandemic has taught us that we can do things faster than we’ve ever done before and we can innovate faster than we have ever done before.
• Bring customer experience initiatives forward in times of crisis or times of a downturn.
• In times of a downturn or a crisis, it’s not the time to take your foot off customer experience. It’s the time to push your foot down.
• Have others ‘goals at the heart of your focus.
• Think about creating organisational social capital before you do anything.

About James

As CX Leader of the Year 2020, James is recognised as one of the UK’s leading Experience Management experts. James is a Customer Experience strategist and Business Transformation expert with a unique value add proposition across Sales, Operations, IT/CRM/Digital, Strategy and governance.

A Non-executive Director, Chair and keynote speaker, James is Head of Customer Experience Strategy & Deployment at the UK Post Office where he directs the nationwide CX transformation programme. James is the founder of CustomerXM.org and CXaccredited.com.

Check out James’ personal site at Jamesscutt.com, say Hi to him on Twitter @ScuttJ and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.