Macfarlane’s 20-year CX career has seen him frequently embody the role of a Voice of the Customer (VoC) advocate.
As part of the customer experience team in Vodafone, Macfarlane brought his career’s customer service learnings to life for the rest of the organization to ensure its attention was being focused on the areas that actually mattered to customers.
“My role in new product launches delivered by the product team was to be that guy sitting by their shoulder asking what would our customer think about this, what does this service actually look like to our customer?” says Macfarlane.
See the customer engagment changes through to the end
On moving to his current company, Sky, in 2011, Macfarlane was tasked with addressing the fracture points around how customers were being supported with their broadband issues. This project helped shape one of Macfarlane’s key CX learnings in his career: Avoid being a CX postman.
“Back then, and remember we are talking about the state of play 10 years ago here,” reminds Macfarlane, “issues were encountered when Sky’s customer service advisors who were mainly familiar with hosting standard support calls were faced with assisting customers with broadband issues.”
This disconnect was breeding bad practices where customer service advisors would automatically send customers new routers thinking they were helping even though this would not solve the root issue. In this case, says Macfarlane: “The customer was happy as they left the initial call, but when they plugged the new router in and they were twice as unhappy as before because the issue still was not fixed.”
Instead of simply delivering this insight to departmental leaders and leaving them to action the changes, Macfarlane and the CX team worked with the relevant divisions to deploy automation systems that equipped staff with real-time assistance. These diagnosed the customers’ broadband issues and advised the agent on how to best communicate with the customer in an accessible way so they would understand.
Macfarlane reflects: “Where you often get tension in organizations is the resentment toward paying a lot of money for a customer experience function that only reports findings without actually doing anything with their discoveries.”
In Macfarlane’s eyes, this CX approach resembles that of being a postman: CX professionals just post the insight to the right location (department) and leave.
“That’s my biggest CX lesson over 20 years: If you are really tuned into your customers and you understand so much, CX teams have got to convert this understanding into making meaningful changes.”
He reminds that real-time technologies allow brands to bring swifter value to their customers.
“If you can tap into what your customers think in almost real time, you can be agile in making changes that will bring benefits quickly,” says Macfarlane. “If you always conduct lengthy research with customer segments around every VoC insight and then craft detailed delivery plans – your customers may well have gone by the time you implement the needed change!”
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