Customer

They're beautiful.

And then I met these folks who had been building out the technology for dealing with customer experience, customer engagement, customer service.

And I saw what they had built that I was blown away by what they had done.

And I said, I want to go do this with you.

And I said, what do you guys think about making this a public service that anybody could use, not just for all the teams at Amazon who wanted to use it? deliver great customer experiences.

And they were really excited.

And so these folks who I consider really the founders of the service, some of them, the first person who wrote the very first line of code is still on the team.

And it's almost a bit like taking an internal capability and then making it available to clients.

They're seeing footfall numbers come down.

They've done research with their customers and many of their customers have switched to digital banking.

But this really doesn't take into account, for example, older customers, vulnerable customers who really like to do their banking face to face, particularly when they want to do more complicated banking, stuff like power of attorney or anything to do with mortgages or anything that's a bit more complicated than just withdrawing and depositing money.

And it isn't just older people or more vulnerable people who require in-branch banking.

Faye, I imagine, you know, we or you have had scenarios where you want to just go into a branch because you kind of want a bit more reassurance face to face.

So you cannot close that branch down.

So what this review is looking into essentially is...

Do the rules that we have at the moment, do they go far enough? And it takes a particular view on older and more vulnerable customers.

So I went on some sort of search.

to say, how do I now, owning on what I have done, and strengthen this process? And in doing that, I kind of found a name, or what you've done is customer experience.

There's been an element of that in your career progression.

And so because of that, I went on to apply to the CX Academy in Ireland and decided to take an actual course in it so I did a professional diploma in the CX from the CX Academy and you know finished that last

I don't build another one until I get over the line.

But I'm constantly in that state of wanting to solve CX problems and not just at an enterprise level.

I want to bring beauty into how the customer experience is because I think there's an art to it.

I think there's beauty in how the experience of any solution, of any product, of anything that you're interacting should be.

And the cultural nuances of global clients long before, I guess, the industry caught up.

So that was quite unique.

Clients had an entry point directly through into added value for marketing and strategic brand work.

or directly into design through Brown Inc.

Or you got a combination hybrid of the two, one plus one equals three, by working with this thing called the Added Value Group that we created.

I wrote testimony about utility collections, procedures, and service levels, and did research.

But 50% of the job was working on the PSC's consumer hotline and answering customer phone calls and investigating their complaints.

So I really got that start at the commission, working with customers who had disconnection notices, overdue bills, maybe they had deposits that they couldn't pay, or they were having a medical emergency and needed to stop a disconnection or get a reconnection, um, and working with those customers, working with the utility, working with the assistance agencies, um, that, that was a large portion of those calls.

And those were, um, the most challenging and the most rewarding part of that job.

Um, it was, uh, I loved that job.

I had great coworkers and, um, amazing mentors who really showed me the ropes at the commission and really believed in me.

And I think one of the interesting things about it was all of these complaint investigations, you really learn the A to Z of water service, electric service, gas service, very in the weeds, but you learn it from the customer describing to you what their struggle is and what their pain point is and what they're the problem they're experiencing is.

So I feel like just having that opportunity to get introduced to the industry through the eyes of utility customers and those challenges are pain points.

Hyperscaler, Mr.

Customer, you bring your equipment in.

and you'll use it.

But we don't get exactly to see what's happening in there, but we see just so much scale going to feed that, that the perception is that the nature of what's being done in those cabinets, in those buildings is changing day by day as the need for AI, as the demand for AI just increases.

It was always about their moment.

This was based on an article from the Tech Help Canada blog, and you can find the full article in the description.

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