March Newsletter – an interview with Michelle Spaul

This month we are absolutely delighted to bring you an interview with the wonderful Customer Experience and Change Management expert Michelle Spaul. Michelle is a collaborative problem solver with a catchphrase ‘Not for Tech’s sake’ and a love of strategic planning…. Enjoy the interview!

• Michelle, you are currently an independent CXM Consultant and Mentor.  Can you tell us what this entails?

How long have you got! I come from a place of believing I would be hypocritical if I had a cast in stone playbook, when I help clients understand and meet customer needs. So I offer ‘styles’ of service. My support can be as low key as a workshop or mentoring or can be a big fat CXM project. Either way it is my goal to give clients skills and confidence as well as results. My clients ask for fixes to CX that are hurting their business, they seek insights into customer experience and how to manage it, they often ask for new capabilities. As an independent, I bring in other consultants and specialists when I cannot do a client justice alone.

As you will see with my answers there is a common theme. I am interested in making CXM a lever for sustainable growth. I believe we can only do that if we get the basics right for customers and for employees. So, I often work with risk, governance, business case, strategic alignment and a bunch of other stuff that many people find a little bit dull ☹

• 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?

My favourite role doesn’t have a CX label. Though it was almost pureplay Customer Experience Management. I worked with a huge IT project migrating around 5,000 of my colleagues between operating systems, devices and software. I balanced the needs of the project and the business. I love the strategic planning aspect, the logistics and communications, and the personalisation of every single migration. I switched between advocate and advisor, problem solver and cajoler multiple times an hour. It was immensely satisfying. My mantra was ‘no-one left behind’ and we did it.

• Using Voice of the Customer services to drive continuous improvement is at the core of your approach.  Why is that and how does it work?

VoC really is at the core of my work. And that is because I believe it is at the core of CXM. We can only understand our customers, their needs and perceptions if we listen to them. VoC is also quick to results and can be used to fix, improve, transform and disrupt. It illustrates (underpins?) journey maps, north stars and empathy maps.

 How does it work? I talk about four steps to good Voice of the Customer. Gather, Analyse, Share and Act. The first step is about listening and we can use any listening posts where customers are talking about us. I recommend a blend of solicited and unsolicited feedback, though I feel it is important to start with one listening post and implement the whole process before getting too clever with the data. Analyse is where we turn feedback into insights. Or to be less jargony, where we work out what the feedback is telling us. For individual customers, this might be ‘Fred is unhappy, sort out his service’. Systemically it might be Fred is one of 120 customers who complained about their service and like 86 others he didn’t renew. We always say CXM is a team sport and now the CX team need to pass the baton. Share is where we communicate to create empathy and inspire action. I want to see fewer charts and dashboards. We need more stories and ‘so what’. Finally action. Never ask for feedback if you won’t take action. Action can repair and revive individual relationships, or can resolve a systemic issue that is driving away custom. It can also transform a touchpoint or internal performance and, most excitingly, it can lead to innovation that disrupts our market.

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

I must be getting old as no project has lived up to the challenges and thrills of my first. In 1992, I worked for Philips as a University intern. My role was to prevent product returns.

 Guess what! I listened to customers, determined issues and opportunities, shared information with my colleagues and drove so many actions I can’t remember them all.

But there were fixes – largely resolving quality issues, thought in one case I worked with purchasing and a supplier to agree a huge cost reduction by sharing my insights and evidence. We made improvements in the near term. These were largely around packaging, communications and other quick wins. But over a longer timescale we changed the colour of an entire product range and massively reduced so-called ‘no fault found’ returns. I also made recommendations implemented as design good practice and introduced in future product lines.

I won the Chairman’s quality award, saved millions and was awarded an MSc by the University of Brighton. I also got to speak with high profile retail customers and helped build stronger relationship. What I learnt on that project has been invaluable. And from a VoC perspective there wasn’t a survey in sight!

• Not all CX initiatives go to plan! Have you ever had something not be as successful as you may have hoped and what did you learn from that?

I really want to help founders get CXM right. Doing so halves the risk of early life business failure. So, I am involved with several accelerators. In January this year I attended a ‘meet the mentors’ session. We took turns to introduce ourselves and then each mentor hosted conversations in individual breakout rooms. During the introductions I realised I was the only person not talking about finance and funding. During the breakouts no-one visited my room ☹. In fact, the session host put out a request for people to visit me because I was all alone. So I guess I still have a way to go to demonstrate the value of CXM when competing with the lure of funding…

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

I think the most important is business acumen. CXM cannot deliver value if you don’t understand what your organisation and stakeholders value. Start by learning about your organisation, its history, what makes your colleagues tick, how things get done… Use these insights to work out how to support and influence stakeholders. The rest falls into place.

I also believe all CX Practitioners need change and communications skills and that some understanding of project management can’t go amiss. These skills help deliver value. Even if you are blessed with a project manager, knowing how to frame opportunities is vital to winning support, building a business case and changing how people act.

When it comes to the CX toolkit I don’t expect anyone to be an expert at it all. So, the skillset is to be open to learning, to asking for support and for recognising there is no such thing as best practice. There are things that work well and less well and the skill lies in choosing the right one for your situation.

• You are a voluntary NED with The Customer Institute – what does that involve?

Fun! I have a lovely team of three (including me). We are responsible for helping members find the right technology for their needs. I surveyed the other directors to understand their aspirations for this service and designed a knowledge hub structure to give this support. I own the VoC section and will be populating it shortly. My lovely colleagues Rolu Adebola and Gökhan Kaya will be adopting technologies, and we are on the lookout for more volunteers.

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

In CX we come from an array of backgrounds and I think this is our strength. I enjoy nothing more than getting my CX geek on and learning from others. But the sad truth is that networking is also part of Business Development and I am not very good at that. I have to psyche myself up for in person events. So you will continue to see me online and will see me more often in person. So please say hello!

• How do you see CX evolving in the future?

Oh the big question. I would like to see CXM recognised and managed as a business discipline. The CXPA is moving us in that direction but doesn’t enjoy universal support. We might end up with several bodies like accountants, but I think that would be a shame as I believe we need consistency and transparency in what we do and recommend.

• How do you see AI influencing CX beyond the call centre?

I’m glad you said beyond the call centre as CX innovation there is too late. Firstly because it is late on the customer journey and secondly because it has a narrow scope. I’m interested to see AI drafting customer descriptions. Whether that is a persona, empathy map or customer journey. But these outputs have to be tested internally and with customers. I am also a little concerned about the biases and assumptions that can be reinforced with these methods. Nonetheless a great deal of work can be eliminated and the quicker we can use these tools to share understanding and evoke empathy the better. I’d also like to see better orchestration of our part in customers’ journeys from marketing to support. Can you imagine a website that is blank except for the question ‘how can we help you today’?

But I’d like to share a cautionary tale. With LLMs we have a serious issue of garbage in garbage out. I am working with a tech specialist to create an AI Agent that can summarise the capabilities of VoC platforms. But all it does is repeat marketing. In fact no matter which platform we test it on, the results are the same. And that is because marketing is similar across all these platforms. To my despair CX colleagues looking for the right platform have to speak to sales to get pertinent information. Multiply that by every question our clients ask of AI and we quickly see why knowledge management is key to AI success in CXM.

• Can you describe your perfect client?

I have three ‘Ideal Client Profiles’ but their common characteristic is a desire to do better and a recognition that the way we manage customer experience make a huge difference to organisations, their customers and their employees.

For the record. I help CX Practitioners who are stuck, or feel alone. And I support two type of business leader. Those who are managing established organisations and are tired of that sinking feeling when they realise they have let down their customers (again). As I mentioned before I also support founders, helping them build strong CXM foundations.

• If you were setting up a CX team from scratch for an organisation where budget was no object, and nothing was in place –  what roles would your ideal team consist of? 

I misread this as ‘no budget’. That answer was easier because I answer it so often…

In CXM we spend money in three ways (but if I can also have a gelato cart, I would be happy).

1. Investing in the CXM team. These people co-ordinate the setting of strategies and roadmaps. They include data analysts and story tellers. There are people setting vision and goals (maybe even managing governance) and those tackling the issues that are in our face right now. If they don’t exist elsewhere in the organisation, I would like some project and change managers too.

2. Friends of CX. People in larger organisations are used to the idea of ‘buying’ time from other teams aka asking Jamail to be on our project team. In smaller organisations we often battle for resource, as there is so much to do and so little time to do it. So, I would spend a good chunk of my infinite budget on the gift of time for the people who design, make and deliver products, services and touchpoints. Here’s the controversy. I don’t know if journey design, orchestration and management belongs in this group or in the core CXM team. This also includes external spend for design, prototyping, upgrades etc.

3. Technology. I think I have just coined a phrase – NTS!! Not for tech’s sake. The purpose of tech is to give people more time to do the fun, human stuff. To manage huge amounts of data. To remove or expose biases and assumptions. So, it is important. I would prefer that organisations temper the temptation of IT managers to buy all singing all dancing solutions to build tech stacks using the right technology for the organisation. Oh and a decent data warehouse.

I think remember these three costs is vital, because the business case for each is different and we run the risk of cannibalising our, not infinite, budgets when we justify expenditure. For example, if you say I need to employ a data analyst and the justification is an improvement in CX, churn, costs etc, then any financial person worth their salt will not give you more money to make the changes needed to improve CX, churn, costs etc.

So I like your infinite budget question because the truth is building a team to manage customer experience is largely a leap of faith. Hence my ideal clients…

Kate Baird and Jo van Riemsdijk would like to thank Michelle Spaul for making time to speak to us and sharing her insights and thoughts.

We intend to continue producing these interviews with Senior Leaders throughout 2025. If you have a desire to hear from someone from a specific industry or there is 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 on future editions.

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