Today’s interview is with James Dodkins, who is commonly know as the CX Rockstar, is a former rockstar but is now the CX Evangelist at Pegasystems. James joins me today to talk about his journey, why he’s joined Pega, what he’s going to be getting up to, extreme fandoms, hyper-fans and what’s stood out for him regarding customer experience over the last 15 months.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – A good customer experience starts with having the right tools – Interview with Liat Bycel of Airtable — and is number 397 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:

• James got his love of customer experience from being in a touring band.
• Putting on an amazing show for fans night after night is exactly the same as delivering amazing experiences to customers day after day.
• The biggest stand out things over the last 15 month months or so was how woefully unprepared a lot of companies were and how the pandemic really highlighted flaws in their customer experience strategy.
• Customer experience isn’t really about the stuff that you do. It’s about the way that you think. It’s about the way you approach things, about your mindset, your principles.
• There is really only a few steps to get customer experience right: understand your customers, understand the outcomes they’re trying to achieve, understand the needs that have to be delivered to achieve those and then build experiences that deliver on them. That’s really all you have to do.
• Joining Pega is brilliant. It’s a great match. It is like the perfect marriage of what I’m trying to do in the world and having the capability to actually make it happen.
• Most software companies start with the software and then think….Okay, how do we try and cram this into people’s lives. Pega isn’t like that. They start with customer outcomes and then work backwards to the technology.
• Thinking a lot at the moment about the idea of fandom and how there is this next level of fandom emerging that I’m referring to as the hyper fan. This isn’t a person who just likes another thing. It’s not even just a person who loves another thing. It’s a person who makes that other thing a key part of their identity. It becomes part of them.
• Check out when Dave performs his track Thiago Silva at Glastonbury with a fan, Alex, who he plucks from the crowd.
• Relationships are just collections of memories that are the way that we store emotions. These are created by experiences that are just collections of lots of little moments.
• We are all one moment away from creating that hyper fan.
• Check out the Foo Fighters – Sonic Highways documentary.
• Very excited about the plans that Pega have in the pipeline and their plans to change the world of customer experience.
• The future of customer experience is going to lean heavily on technology, and the biggest hurdles are going to be technology.
• I think we are going to see some revolutionary stuff happening around personalisation and the achievement of hyper personalisation.
• Most companies out there have quite an industrial age mindset. It’s quite a process mindset and when we try and apply it to the customer experience world it doesn’t always work because it was never created for a world with such complexity.
• You can’t get to that hyper personalised state with hyper standardisation.
• No matter who you are, no matter where you are in the world, no matter what you do, no matter what the size of your company, no matter what the maturity of your company is go and talk to some of your customers.
• James’ Punk CX word: Aggressive
• James’ Punk CX brand: Aldi

About James

🤘 James used to be an actual, real-life, legitimate, award-winning rockstar. He played guitar in a heavy metal band, released albums and tore up stages all over the world, James is now the CX Evangelist at Pegasystems where he researches extreme fandoms to understand how companies can create their own ‘Hyperfans’. He shares those strategies through transformative training, engaging video content and inspiring keynote talks.

🦄 Pegasystems is revolutionising how leading organisations optimise customer experience and automate operations. A worldwide leader providing ‘Better Business Software’ which enables Digital Transformation across a range of key industries including Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications, Public Sector, Manufacturing and Life Sciences.

🏆 James was awarded The UK’s #1 CX Influencer by Customer Experience Magazine in 2020, The UK’s Most Outstanding CX Keynote Speaker by Corporate Vision Magazine in 2021, The World’s #10 Customer Service Guru by Global Gurus in 2021, as well as countless other notable mentions in industry publications like Business Insider, The Times and Forbes.

🎥 James is also a two time #1 Best Selling Author and the Ex-host of Amazon Prime’s weekly topical CX show, ‘This Week In CX’.

🏡 James lives in Solihull in the UK, with his wife Phillipa, daughter River, son Oakley and dog Polo. He loves listening to and playing music and is still a recording artist today in the new alt-rock band ENDSCAPE. https://bit.ly/endscape

Check out Pega.com, find out more about James here, investigate his books here, say Hi to him on Twitter @JDODKINS and connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Image by scartmyart from Pixabay