November Newsletter – an interview with Vish Patel
A very warm welcome to the November 2024 edition of the CX Talent Ltd Newsletter. Kate Baird and Jo van Riemsdijk are very grateful to Vish Patel – currently responsible for the growth, strategy and experience of Meta’s biggest partnership clients in EMEA – for his time and insights in this months’ interview.
- Vish, you are currently Partner VP, Strategy (EMEA) at Meta. Can you tell us what this entails?
In real simple terms, I am responsible for the growth, strategy and experience of Meta’s biggest partnership clients in EMEA. It’s a blend of commercial, partnerships and customer experience packaged into one, really unique!
- You’ve got some fantastic experience across consultancy, telco, media and tech. Please can you tell us which role you’ve enjoyed the most and why?
This is a tough one, but I would say it’s my current role at Meta. Why you ask?
Meta really embraces cross-functional collaboration, allows people to have autonomy on how they work and the tools they use, which makes doing your job so much easier. The other reason is because I have learnt so much from the realm of partnerships which compliments my previous skillsets really well.
- What has been your biggest success in terms of CX initiatives in your career to date?
It has to be the 18pt improvement in Brand NPS which I achieved for CenturyLink within 12 months of joining. When I joined, the business had merged with Level 3 but had a really poor perception amongst customers and high churn. However, with sponsorship from a great leadership team, a solid 2 year-plan, digital transformation and a huge culture shift, we turned customer experience into a differentiator within the B2B Telecoms space!
- How valuable have professional qualifications been in your career? You’ve recently qualified for your MBA as well as having Prince 2, Lean and Six Sigma. Would you recommend any or all of these to CX professionals developing their careers now?
You can never learn too much, so I would 100% recommend doing them all. My recommendation for CX professionals would be to go for LEAN or Six Sigma qualifications in particular, as they as building blocks for problem-solving alongside practical execution. And if you want to fast-track yourself into the c-suite, think about doing an MBA.
- What skillsets do you feel people wanting to pursue a career CX now need to really develop?
Nowadays, I think people wishing to pursue a career in CX should focus on 3 things in particular:
Data analysis and insight
Strategy / design-thinking
Stakeholder engagement
Data is really the foundation of everything. Being able to understand, manipulate and tell a story from data is key for CX professionals. Strategy and design-thinking are also super critical because you need to inspire a vision that meets the changing expectations of customers and markets. Finally, stakeholder engagement is your ticket to success. You have to be a catalyst in getting buy-in from senior leaders/sponsors, collaborating with multiple teams across functions and driving customer-centricity internally. It takes a whole organisation to make the step changes in customer experience. Be the master of the orchestra.
- How important has professional networking been for your career development? And how much of this has been virtual or in person?
It’s a game changer. Professional networking, and personal networking with mentors, capitulated my career upwards in a short space of time. I would say it’s a 70%-30% split in favour of in-person networking for me personally, possibly influenced by the fact that I am a social butterfly.
- How do you see CX evolving in the future?
Over the next 2-3 years, I think we are going to see more around:
Hyper-Personalization with AI and Data: Real-time, predictive personalization using AI and ML will become standard, balanced with privacy.
Multi-Channel Experiences:Integration of physical and digital touchpoints, leveraging conversational AI, chatbots and big shift in native commerce experiences, for example Travel SIMs.
Ethics and Sustainability in CX:Transparency and ESG practices will heavily influence customer decisions, engagement and loyalty with brands
Shift towards Predictive Proactive Support:ML and Predictive-AI application in customer care will push organisations to re-think service SLAs and operating models.
Employee Experience as CX’s Cornerstone:Doubling-down from organisations on improving employee experience (EX) to influence customer outcomes, linking EX directly to CX success.
- If you had to describe the ultimate CX role for you – what would that look like?
My ultimate CX role would be a chief customer officer role at a multi-conglomerate organisation or an industry-leading organisation that oversees strategic, commercial and experiential aspects of customers across the entire journey for all brands. I personally would relish the chance the drive CX across multiple verticals and more importantly be the pioneer who keeps pushing the standards to new levels by innovating. Today is not tomorrow’s future!
- If you were setting up a CX team from scratch for an organisation where budget was no object, what roles would your ideal team consist of?
The key roles I would certainly have in my fantasy dream-team are:
– Customer Experience Professionals
– Data Scientists / Analysts
– Software Developers / Shadow IT
With these 3 roles, you have a holy trinity. A small but complimentary group that have multifarious skills capable of solving problems end-to-end in a timely manner, and could even be spun as a professional service, call it CX-as-a-service.
Kate Baird and Jo van Riemsdijk would like to give our enormous thanks to Vish Patel for making the time to answer our questions. We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this latest edition of our Senior CX Leaders series.
CX Talent Ltd produces a newsletter monthly where we interview a senior CX Leader on their views and insights about working in CX and the skills and experience that they feel candidates will need for the future. If you do not want to miss out on these incredibly valuable observations and views – do hit the subscribe button!
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