December Newsletter – an interview with Barry Day

Welcome to the final newsletter of 2024. Jo van Riemsdijk and Kate Baird have loved bringing you these fascinating interviews from Senior CX Leaders over the course of 2024, which we hope that you have enjoyed reading as much as we have enjoyed asking the questions. We have tried to bring you different views and ideas from Leaders from different sectors and experiences.

This month we bring you another differing viewpoint from the amazing Barry Day. Barry has over 20 years of experience redefining how businesses engage with their customers. Drawing on a career that spans Ed Tech, Cyber Security, Telco, Finance, Utilities, and Retail, he works with enterprise technology leaders to create tangible improvements in customer and employee experiences. At the helm of LoveIT Works, Barry applies his blend of consulting and client-side expertise to help organizations embed customer focus into their operations, delivering results that matter. Based in the South East of the UK, Barry is known for his straightforward approach and deep understanding of what makes businesses—and their customers—thrive.

Barry, you work with tech leaders and teams to embed customer focus.  What are the main benefits that this entails?

I’ve recently gone all-in on working with Technology leadership and their teams to embed greater customer-focus. I spotted a trend where technology was coming under greater pressure from a variety of sources to be customer-focused, but were struggling with how to go about it. The why, the benefits of doing-so, have always been clear. Technology is like a mini-business with a purpose, vision and value proposition to its internal, and sometimes external, paying customers. Embedding customer-focus helps build stronger relationships with technology’s key business stakeholders, enhances the department’s reputation and proves technology’s value to the business. It provides data to prioritise key initiatives, empowers your service owners to think and act in a more customer-focused way, and drives continuous improvement across the service offering. These then ultimately contribute to increases in employee productivity and end-user satisfaction, reduce IT support costs, and can boost overall financial performance through reduced churn rates and increased revenue. What’s not to like?

You’ve got some fantastic experience across a wide range of sectors. Please can you tell us which role you’ve enjoyed the most and why?

Well, that’s very kind of you to say so! It’s hard to select one. The ones I rate the most have been the ones I’ve learnt the most from. You know, those moments when you are under pressure to deliver in a new context and you have to think hard on how to achieve the outcomes. I worked for a small consultancy developing a group level customer experience vision, travelling between operating companies in Tunisia and Qatar. In many ways this was my first true CXM role. Prior to that I had been very much in the digital UX space. I learnt so much about executing CX during that time. More recently at bp I have been measuring the value and adoption of an enterprise Generative AI technology, which has been fascinating because it required first getting clarity on how to measure value of such a new technology. Broadly speaking, what I love the most is working with leaders to make sense of the complexity they face, bringing clarity and breaking things down into actionable steps, and this has permeated so many of my roles in the last decade.

What has been your biggest success in terms of CX initiatives in your career to date?

I worked with a workplace technology team for nearly 3 years in a diverse range of activities, from running workshops on purpose and vision, to defining their customers and coaching on how to measure what matters in a technical service. The biggest success came after we developed a global technology survey for employees which we ran every 6 months. In that time we used the data to drive up the main technology experience metric, NPS, by over 40 points, and that happened because we distributed the data to accountable owners, and ensured the analysis and solutions off the back of the data were committed to in the existing governance forums and the annual operating planning process. It became BAU. In one such forum attendees were commenting on the richness of the conversation and content. It’s at this point you know people’s mindsets have begun to shift, and for me that is a great outcome.

How challenging is it to get IT professionals to apply human centred design methods?

Well, IT professionals are not unique in this regard. I would say from my experience IT professionals get the concept of being customer-centric and are motivated to be more customer-centric, but the main challenge to help them overcome is how to be in the context of an IT service. It is important to couch this in the wider context of technology that these IT professionals find themselves in. Technology has not traditionally prioritised the experience they provide their internal and external customers because it hasn’t been a strategic objective. I do believe this is changing. The implications of it not being an objective is that the customer’s experience will always remain an afterthought – a consequence rather than an intention, an add-on at the end, tactical not strategic, not well planned in or budgeted for – and therefore the level of maturity around customer experience practice remains low.

In my experience it’s tough selling customer experience at a leadership team level. It is rare there is wholesale buy-in and funding to transform, and technology is no different. Everything I have tried that has worked has been about taking existing capabilities and existing governance forums and integrating small elements of CX into them and then building on that over months and years. I often think about the double-diamond model and how people come in and sell design thinking as the way ahead. It’s too big a leap. The reality can be found in Zendesk’s triple diamond model, with the third diamond as the execution piece. You have to start in that third diamond on simple CX practices such as collecting experience data on existing products and then work left through the model to introduce more and more strategic components of CX over time as the value is proven. I would also say that often only top customer-facing services get squads with human-centred design expertise funded within them, much less for internally critical services despite these being relied upon by 100s sometimes 1000’s of people in the business. Instead of trying to convince leaders to give more money to hire designers, offer instead practical tools that can be self-administered without too much expertise required, complemented by a small change program to drive attention to and adoption of such tools. This is much more cost effective and the reach and impact will be more significant.

I will say one more thing if I may. We cannot forgot the leadership team. You have to work on this group in parallel, and I’ve seen success come from building relationships and explaining or demonstrating how existing capabilities can be leveraged to better inform prioritisation and business planning. We can arm technology leaders with insights that give them greater clarity and therefore equity in conversations with the business. We can help make them more successful in their roles too.

What skillsets do you feel people wanting to pursue a career CX now need to really develop?

A great, but difficult question to answer. Here’s what I would say:

• Understand the context of the business and the stakeholders you are working with/for. How does what you do impact the success of what the business is trying to achieve or what the individual is trying to achieve. If you can get close to that, you can begin to determine how to create minimal disruption to existing ways of working and yet maximise the impact of being customer focused.
• Work hard to dig deep to get clarity on the problem you are really trying to solve. It is linked to the context point above, but my emphasis here is that we all too often get cracking with the day-to-day job and only later come to realise the bigger problem we are a part of.
• Try to develop skills and tools you can use to help you navigate ambiguity and uncertainty. As I said above, wholesale CX transformation is a rare thing, so this is about adopting CX to fit an existing business context and show value. Having a tool kit you can draw upon to understand and work through problems will help you. I mean tools like being able to carry out research interviews with senior people, to be able to design and facilitate workshops, to understand the relationship between purpose, vision, values, mission, strategy, and operating models. These are all about seeking clarity and structure in what is coming at you.
• Building rapport and networks at all levels.
• Patience and tenacity to see it through. It can take a long time.

 

How important has professional networking been for your career development?  And how much of this has been virtual or in person?

Honestly, I’ve never put too much emphasis on networking over the years. I find myself doing more now as I try and validate business ideas and sell services to others in the industry. What I have done in recent times is all online via LinkedIn. Outside of that intentional networking online, my network over the years has tended to develop as a consequence of my roles at different companies – I build those relationships, deliver value as best I can in the context and often win the support of that main stakeholder for future work.

How do you see CX evolving in the future?

That’s a huge question, and not one I have a clear answer to because it is so multi-faceted. Two aspects I would highlight with regards to the practice of CX are:

• A greater emphasis on doing business with greater purpose alongside profit. This is being driven by the macro trend of customers being more conscious of their choices and the impact they have on people and the planet.
• The greater penetration of customer-centred practice into the heart of business operations, with technology being just one department where this is already happening. Of course, the role of departments like technology is ubiquitous across the organisation that their impact on the employee value proposition, productivity and the retention of talent almost demands we take a customer-focused lens to it.

 

If you had to describe the ultimate CX role for you – what would that look like?

It would be someone whose job it is to bring greater alignment throughout the business. Stay with me, because this is very much about customers.

Here are the two main problems the role would aim to address:

• Lack of clarity of purpose, be that of the business as a whole, a department or any team. What follows a lack of clarity of purpose, is an inaccurate vision and inappropriate strategy to deliver the vision.
• Ineffective cascading of the business strategy down from the management team into the middle layers of the organization and below, leading to diluted and misaligned objectives.

 

So the link to customers is ‘purpose’. At any level in the organization there are either internal or external customers who we ‘serve’ with a proposition consisting of products and services and therefore an experience. For me, purpose equates to:

• The reason something exists, the ‘why’, the problem it solves,
• Something bigger than the business and just profit – a contribution to a common good, to improving people’s lives, and agent of wider change.
• Multiple stakeholders — customers, employees, partners, shareholders, communities, and even the planet.
• A fundamental human need(s) of the stakeholders being met.

 

Getting clear on who you are serving and why is something I find is often neglected at all levels and yet is key to everything that comes after it – your vision, strategy and operating model. Often, the purpose of an internal department or team is a function of their role in the value stream to the paying customer.

Alongside this process of clarifying purpose is the interpretation of the strategic objectives of the organisation to your department or team. Together, they will drive greater synergy and alignment across the business.

My ultimate CX role would be to develop and apply the tools for arriving at clarity of purpose and alignment to strategic objectives.

Kate Baird and Jo van Riemsdijk would like to thank Barry Dayfor making time to speak to us and sharing his insights and thoughts.

2024 has been a very hard year for recruitment and for CX. For those candidates still looking for roles – keep up the good fight! Something will come! To all of our candidates and clients and those involved in the wonderful world of Customer Experience – we at CX Talent Ltd would like to wish you a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous and successful 2025.

We intend to continue producing these interviews with Senior Leaders into 2025. If you have a desire to hear from someone from a specific industry or a particular Leader you would love to hear from – please do let us know and we will do our best to accommodate! To subscribe to these newsletters – please do hit the subscribe button to make sure you don’t miss out!

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