Punk CX: Customer Experience Insights with Adrian Swinscoe

This is the eleventh in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, I spoke to Duncan Cheatle about The Prelude Group, The Supper Club, ThanksTo, being one of the founding team behind StartUp Britain and his mission around Making Britain more enterprising. Today, I want to introduce you to Rob Pinkerton, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Customer Experience Management across at Adobe. Rob has been mentioned here before when I wrote about one of his blogs back in April in The growing search for human contact in customer experience and customer service. Recently, I had the pleasure to have a chat with Rob about all things customer, customer experience management, how CEM is not about technology, the fear that exists in many boardrooms about the changing environment, that most enterprises are built on a set of rules that have been in place for 60 years and are not set up to deal well with the changes that we are now seeing in our markets and how we are only just at the beginning of a huge change.

This is the tenth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, I spoke to Professor Patrick Barwise of London Business Schoo about his new book, Beyond the Familiar, creating long-term growth and change in a business, customer focus and Net Promoter Score (NPS) amongst other things. Today, I want to introduce you to Duncan Cheatle, founder of The Prelude Group, The Supper Club, ThanksTo and one of the founding team behind StartUp Britain, which is a new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, launched on 28th March 2011 that is designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK. Duncan has a great ambition to "Make Britain the most enterprising nation in the world" and in the interview we talk about StartUp Britain as an exciting new venture, why it's a great time to start a business, what it takes to succeed and what he would advise entrepreneurs of growing businesses to do grow yourself and your business.

This is the 9th interview of this year and I think you are in for a treat. Today's interview is with Professor Patrick Barwise of London Business School about his new book, Beyond the Familiar. Now, this is quite a long interview….a shade over an hour. I did contemplate cutting it into sections but there is such a lot of great stuff in there that I couldn't bring myself to do that. So, forgive me for the length of the interview but trust me it is worth a listen.

Earlier this year, I published a post called The Wow! Awards – The missing key to employee engagement and great service?. Following on from that post, I was able to interview the man behind The Wow! Awards, Derek Williams. In this interview we talked about his mission, changing the way that companies think, how you can measure how your company is feeling, customer service, customer experience and changing the world.

A few weeks ago, I was sent a review copy of Guy Kawasaki’s book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Last week following various via bits of email correspondence and travel coincidences, I was able to meet Guy in London to ask him about the book and that is the topic of the podcast. In our discussion, we talk about being enchanting, what it takes to create enchantment, the book writing process and find out what change Guy really wants to create enchantment around. I agree wholeheartedly with Guy when he states in the book that learning how to create real and meaningful relationships with your customers is the key competitive skill that will set you and your business apart in the coming years. Enchantment is a how-to book and also a manifesto for creating real change. It's like a 21st century version of Dale Carnegie's 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. In the book Guy explains how Enchantment comes about and shows us in very practical ways how to achieve it by thinking more about yourself, how we develop relationships with those around us and how we use various technology tools to tackle big problems.

This is the fifth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the 'customer' space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, I spoke to Scott Gould of Like Minds, Aaron+Gould and Scott Gould & friends about leadership, building communities and the world of social media. Today, I want to introduce you to Syed Hasan, CEO of ResponseTek, who is leading provider of integrated customer experience solutions focusing on automating and operationalising customer feedback and voice of the customer information within businesses. ResponseTek helps their clients to listen more, learn quicker and spend less on their customer experience programs. What I like about Syed is that he takes a very straight-forward, pragmatic and back to basics approach to building their business and helping deliver consistent and better customer experiences for their clients.

Late last month, I wrote a post called Three strategic pillars for 2011, where I explained the different themes I would be pursuing on the blog over the course of the year. One of them - Curate - was about finding and sharing content from different thought leaders, writers and entrepreneurs. I first thought that this would be only be via video interview but as it has turned out it will be via a combination of text, audio podcast and video. First up in the series is an interview with Grant Leboff, author of Sticky Marketing, that just came out on January 3rd 2011 and is already high in the Amazon charts.

This is the twelfth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, in Adobe, Customer Experience Management (CEM) and fear in the boardroom, I spoke to Rob Pinkerton, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Customer Experience Management across at Adobe. Today, I want to introduce you to Laurence Buchanan who is Head of CRM & Social CRM at Capgemini here in the UK. Our discussion focused on creating a customer centric business in the modern world.

This is the thirteenth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, in Social CRM, Customer Centric and Agile Business, I spoke to Laurence Buchanan who is Head of CRM & Social CRM at Capgemini here in the UK. Today, I wanted to Michael Hill of complaintsrgreat.com, a business that specialises in helping businesses manage customer complaints better.

This is number fifteen in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses. Previously, in What is a Chief Customer Officer, I spoke to Vala Afshar, Chief Customer Officer for Enterasys, is a premier global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions. Today, I am excited to introduce you to Mark Mullen, the new CEO of first direct, a bank renowned for its customer centric approach to its business and one that has won numerous awards, accolades and admirers over the last 22 years.