Breaking the Blueprint

Why are organisations still making this massive mistake when it comes to Customer Experience?

• Vinay Parmar & Iqbal Javaid • Season 1 • Episode 7

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In this special review episode of Breaking the Blueprint, hosts Vinay and Iqbal look back at the first six episodes and share what they’ve learned about the brutal truths and big opportunities in customer experience.

From banking revolutions and the trust crisis, to the hidden costs of speed, AI’s real role in CX, and why culture matters more than metrics, this conversation ties the whole series together. It’s a chance to reflect on the lessons so far and look ahead to the future of CX.

Vinay and Iqbal explore the recurring themes across their guests — including efficiency vs experience, customer psychology, digital trust, and the balance between human empathy and technological progress. The pair also discuss where they think businesses are still going wrong, and how CX leaders can use these insights to drive change.

If you’ve followed the journey from the start, this episode pulls it all into one place. And if you’re new to the show, it’s the perfect way to catch up before the next wave of conversations.

#CustomerExperience #CX #Leadership #BusinessGrowth #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #CustomerSuccess #AI #Culture #Strategy

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Vinay:

​So welcome to episode seven of the Blueprint, episode seven. today's episode's about reflections, realities, and what's next in cx. We're gonna have a bit of a walk down, a short memory lane, six episodes in that reflect on some of the conversations that we've had in previous episodes, and just talk about the road ahead. A little bit in terms of CX because over the last six months we've had some really interesting conversations and both been involved in different projects and all that kind of stuff. So I think it'd be good to bring that out as well. But before we get into all of that, how does it feel to be at episode six?

Iqbal:

Seven.

Vinay:

Seven, sorry, seven. We're losing

Iqbal:

count. Are we? I think it's been quite a journey since we began discussing this in January. And, it's, for me, it's been the guests that we've had on, the experiences that they've shared. We've obviously been on a journey as well. In regards to seeing the industry kind of change from a technological standpoint and just CX as a whole. so, and learn so much I think during that time. So, yeah, it's been, it's, been quite, quite an amazing kind of journey so far. And it's nice to come. And do this in a different setting today, as you can see where not in our usual podcast studio, so we thought we'd be a bit more relaxed before we get back into having those conversations with guests again. So, it's been really good. And

Vinay:

yeah, practice what we preach feedback, look at how we can make little marginal gains. And this is where this new environment has come from. So we'll see how today goes. So hopefully, well, I'm sure it'll be, I'm sure it'll be great. So we are in for a good conversation. So let's kick off and talk a little bit about CX and what we think about it and stuff as, and I was thinking about, the journey of customer experience. I've been involved in it now for 30 years. I started my career at egg.com or the main part of my career at egg.com. I'd been involved in financial services and, other stuff before that, but my career really started at egg.com. And for those of you that won't have heard of it, it was the UK's largest, in fact, it was Europe's largest online bank for a while. It was a, real mover and shaker in the financial services industry. really predicated on delivering exceptional customer experience because back then, banks just weren't doing a great job. And you might argue they're still not doing a great job, but, but things have moved on. and for me, experience was all about that human connection, how we make customers feel, and how that drives them to make their future choices, to come back to tell their friends and repeat. And I think somewhere along the way on the journey, that term seems to have got lost, misunderstood, hijacked. Certain companies, there's a badge to go. This is a great way of getting the conversation in maybe selling technology or whatever. and I think it's lost its real meaning, it's started to become synonymous with, well, CX is at the contact center, is that NPS surveys is that voice of the customer. Yeah. All of these functional tools, and they're all contributors to driving customer experience. But for me, customer experience is simply that it's all about human experience. It's all about understanding how there's an emotional connection between the people that are buying from you, interacting with you, working for you. how that emotional connection is created and how that emotional connection and the feeling that we have towards the organisation drives our future behaviour.

Iqbal:

Yeah. And I think as you've said that the, this, the word hijacked, comes about because everybody, wants to join the bandwagon or has been looking to join the bandwagon. And in recent years we've seen technological companies really go into overdrive. But I think what it's done is it's, a lot of these kind of technology vendors recognise that there's a huge market here, total addressable market, which they wanna, try and go after naturally. And in order to do that, they've got to solve the problems that these companies are facing. and in some cases we see vendors pretend to understand what they, how they, their technology can help contribute to delivering better CX for organisations. a and some are getting it right, some aren't getting it, so, right. It, you get, 2, 2, 2 sides of that coin. But I think in recent, last two, three years, we've seen organisations. Provide real feedback into these tech companies. In fact, we've, from, my own experience, I'm finding that a lot of these tech organisations are recruiting people from within organisations that have been doing this all their lives. And their, feedback has been really valuable. In fact, one of our recent guests, James Achuk, was, previously worked in HSBC, really focused his efforts around delivering CX into organisations like that. Zoom recognised that in order to really build a platform that can deliver against what customers actually want, they recruited the likes of James who've come in and really, influenced how the product is being developed. That's just one example of it, but we're seeing a concerted effort and that effort means that there's so much innovation going into it.

Vinay:

There is, and just a couple of things on what you picked up and I do agree, with some of the things you said. I think. Often customer efficiency is confused for customer experience. So a lot of the time the problem that the vendors are solving, or from a tech perspective, is speed, efficiency, reduce, employee effort, customer effort in some cases, but it's always about speed. And efficiency, which is then translates into a reduction in head count, reduction in cost, et cetera. But speed in efficiency isn't the same as delivering an experience. And I was reading a piece earlier this week in CX today that was talking about. The metrics changing in contact centers. And it talked about, a world where agents are, incentivised, and I know we're focusing on contact center here, but in specific in contact centers, agents are incentivised to speak to customers longer because 80% of the calls are being handled by agents are in as in AI agents. So therefore it doesn't matter if your humans are speaking for longer. And on the one hand you go, yeah, that's great, but on the other one, it's quite sad that's the behaviour that's been driven, that it's make the call as short as possible or the contact as short as possible, make it as efficient as possible. But you could be handling 95% of your contacts in 20 seconds with an average AHT of 380 seconds, but not solving the customer's problem. They could be calling back. So I think there's that part of CX being customer efficiency versus customer experience. And then I do think there is an opportunity and anyway, we've seen it a little bit with in AI around how people are just badging everything. AI Now, in a similar way, people start to use that CX term'cause it was another, like a sexy term or a thing that to get you into the conversation and jumping on that bandwagon to go, this is to do with CX in the scene. Know, I think I saw, I said to you, I saw a clip on social media. Somebody went to one of these tech conferences and they had a company that were water.Ai and they were What's AI about your water? Well, we used the AI to analyse that and there was nothing AI about it that just put AI on the end of it. It sounds good. So yeah, it sounds good, right? And people are doing that. So I think there is that, but I do think genuinely we are at the cusp of a huge opportunity because to go back to the. Connection with human beings, emotional human beings, that all is predicated on our ability to understand people. And understand what customers really want. And I think part of our ability to really understand has been handicapped by the sheer scale of contacts you have. And touch points you have and our ability to assimilate all of that information, understand it, make sense of it, and then share it within the organisation in a way that everybody else can understand what's going on. And drive decision making. And I just don't think, well, we, haven't been, because you were, we were still in that daze of listening to 10 calls. Quality, monitoring calls, or we're using contact center tagging or transactional tagging to try and help us to understand what customers are saying. And often that's, a tag of a reason once or a headline reason, and you, don't get the bottom line stuff that comes out so that richness is missing. So I think that is a real opportunity that's coming.

Iqbal:

It is. And, I think we're still at a stage where everybody's, addressing things in silos in that. They have a particular challenge, as you've said, maybe they are capturing some, conversations. They're analysing those conversations, but are they joining the rest of the dots together? context around, customer history, what, where they've purchased, if it's retail, when was the last time they visited one of our stores? Are we capturing that level of detail? And then really analysing why this customer's called in. And as you've said, yeah, we can, we, metric wise, we can capture average handle time, but actually what really matters is the entire customer journey, in, within a period of time, maybe even lifetime. And really figuring out how often we've solved their problems.

Vinay:

And, I was having a, an online conversation with Alex Mead, who's a leader in the CX space that a lot of people that listen to this podcast may know. And Alex and I were bouncing around and, he, has. driven this idea and I buy into it as well. I completely agree with it. Is that one of the limitations is we're only focusing on those customers who have managed to buy from us and got through. What we're not looking at is what about those customers that haven't got through? So either haven't got through to the contact center or to get support, haven't made it through the buying funnel, to actually buy from you in the first place and have abandoned and disappeared and gone elsewhere. And you could say, yeah, people look at websites, look at conversion traffic and all of those, but do at a granular level, do we really understand what stopped them buying it? So those points all help different teams to create a better all around experience. So product development, pricing, market positioning, all of those things through that intelligence. And we've used. And I'm not saying that these methods aren't useful in the future, customer forums and surveys and all of those things. But the hub of where most of the contact happens is your contact center channels, whether that's web chat, whether that's voice, whatever. And going back to the ability to then dive into 30,000 calls a week.

Iqbal:

It's impossible.

Vinay:

a human is impossible, but with ai it becomes possible. we've got some great technology out in the market that can do that. So I think that's a real exciting opportunity. For CX leaders, contact center leaders and CX people in organisations who are interested in really, how do you turn that data into real insight that's usable.

Iqbal:

So, so insight. Yeah, you're right. so, but you still gotta do something with it. Yes. So, AI's. Providing you this kind of information and actually what we are finding is it's quite overwhelming for many organisations because it's constantly feeding you summaries of what's going on, but who's actioning that? And that's still, there's still a bottleneck.

Vinay:

Yes.

Iqbal:

and the bottleneck is individual teams who aren't really talking to each other. You end up with the same problems. So you're still not solving the problem. Even though you've got a better view on it. It's just you are stuck in BAU and you just, you're just not progressing because you,

Vinay:

I'm, laughing because as you're saying that, I'm thinking about a lot of us have smartwatches and apps that monitor our sleep patterns and are eating and we get all this rich data that's telling us we're not sleeping enough, we're not walking enough, we're not moving enough. I've

Iqbal:

given up on that.

Vinay:

But actually, how much of that are we using as real insight to change our lifestyles? At, really embedding level. We might go, actually I need to eat better this week or walk a little bit better this week. But for long term change, how are we using that data and actually collectively if we've all got smart watches in the family, if we're all tracking stuff, how are we using it collectively to make collective decisions in the family? There's no point in me saying, to my wife, I need to reduce my calie count, which clearly I do, my calorie count and eat better foods if she still goes out shopping and buys the same foods that she was buying before. But'cause we're not sharing the data. And I know that's a, a small example in family, but in organisations the same thing. It's all very well developing the dashboards and the insight boards and the metrics and all of these things. But if people haven't got the space to think about them, apply them or the environment where they can share them and bring people together collaboratively to do something about them. And do something about them to, and also understand what would be the impact if they did do something about them. Because there are lots of things we can fix. And some will have. Real great short term benefits and improve things immediately, but not for the long term. Some will have longer term benefits, but you might not see the dividends. In the short term. And some will sit in the middle, but if we don't understand where they sit and if we don't understand what that difference is gonna be, it makes it really difficult for us to become committed to doing those things. Yeah,

Iqbal:

it does. just, one of our episodes was all about metrics, for example, as well, right? And, just reminds me of a conversation I was having with an organisation and, they basically wanted me to mimic all the metrics that they generate on the current system with a new platform that they wanna migrate over to. and, I've never taken this approach before, but I was pretty bold in that I'd, be like, so what? You've got these metrics. Why, are these important to you? and 80 to 90% of the people couldn't really answer the question like, we've always had these metrics. Tell me what you do with those metrics. Like what does it actually deliver any end outcome to you? Are you, seeing any improvements, if you're seeing your calls being abandoned, like, at this time of day or this week or whatever. so what, do you just throw people at? Like, tell me more about how you solve the problem. Maybe we can get to the solution quicker than these me metrics surfacing and that, that actually, we, ended up doing a number of workshops to get to the bottom of actually what the outcomes are, and then the, solution itself was completely different.

Vinay:

And, I think that's the point, isn't it? It's being focused on what the outcomes are. Because I think some of what that, what you're experiencing there is that we fall into this place of. Reporting. So we want to keep the KPIs and measures the same so we can do a trend line over the five years. We can do a year on year analysis. And then it becomes about statistical analysis as opposed to insight. And both are valuable in their own right. Yes. You want to do some trend analysis and see things and, understand if things are getting better and whatever over a period of time. And you need that consistency of what you're asking and measuring, but also those other metrics that need to sit side by side. So understanding the things like, okay, well let's have a look at churn rate. Let's have a look at if you wanna measure an effort score, what difference does that really make to customers? let's have a look at segmenting NPS, not just by an overall, but can you see NPS by new customers, existing customers. Customers in certain valuable demographics versus certain customers who are lower value demographics? What can you, what are you seeing across the piece, if you've got a national and international business geographically, all of those different things, and how are you looking at. that in the round instead of a high level number that tells us that we've got an NPS of 46. And everyone pats themselves in the back and goes, great, but don't really understand. The nuances of what it means. So I think that there's, stuff in that and, you're right, we did have a great conversation with James about the metrics and challenging some of that. One of the other great conversations that we had was when we talked about cybersecurity Yes. And, we had Anish on and we were talking about, how cybersecurity security can sometimes be a, friction point in the customer journey. And you talked about your kebab shop experience and the data

Iqbal:

fill out my personal life.

Vinay:

I still. But one of the things he said in that podcast, and one of the things he talked about was the zero trust approach. And I know, he was talking about it very much from a technology perspective about devices reconnecting the network from a zero trust perspective. But you could translate that into customer experience from a perspective of every time we're interacting the customer, we're reestablishing a level of trust. In sport we always say you're only as good as your last result, in, in and things like that. So I thought that was a really interesting thing. And actually if we adopted that mindset about every interaction is an opportunity to reestablish trust, or to re win trust. Then you might approach things a bit differently. It

Iqbal:

just reminds me, I think this was after the episode, there was an incident that was reported in the news, with M&S. There was a cybersecurity that they went through and, it transpired that, the. A lot of customer personal information was, was leaked as a consequence because of the cyber attacker. I think it came just after that episode. Funding our fe. so, so look, it took them a good few months to recover from it, but, share prices went down 12%. they lost a lot of money. We don't know the ramifications of actually customers now signing up to M&S as a, as a loyal customer, whatever. Well, does it stop them from doing that? I, still looking at the stats, like there was a survey done in the us asking customers, that if there was a possibility that your data could get leaked, would you still, share your, information just to receive loyalty benefits and things like that. And 67% said they would actually we've almost become accustomed to. The fact that actually these things just happen, the data leaks happen, but it, I wonder if it really impacts the trust side of things. Like you said, loyalty. Ultimately, right. Does it impact that?

Vinay:

I think, in the, example of M&S, one of the things that was in their favour is that they have physical store. And when you go into the physical store, the experience with their members on the ground was fantastic. I wrote about an experience I had around that cyber attack and how brilliant the staff were in store and really helpful. But if you're a purely online business Yeah, Then you can imagine that might have a very different impact'cause you haven't got anything. Yeah, that's true. To really to counterbalance. Right. So I think there's partly that. I think also. You know that sharing of data's interesting. I think I start that said the average, US citizen has 15 loyalty programs at any one time, but only actively uses. Three to four or something like that kind of percentage. What?

Iqbal:

In? As an individual? As an

Vinay:

individual, okay. 15 loyalty programs are rolled into, and you think about it, every credit card company sign up fee, you you're getting, I'm with Amex, I'm in Radison Rewards, I'm in Hilton Rewards, I'm in all of these programs.'cause they automatically, you enroll you into them and then you go to a hotel and then they go, oh, do you wanna sign up? And you go, okay, I will. So I've probably got about 50 to 60 different apps on my phone that have just got different, but honestly, how many of them do I use? Really? Around the loyalty. So I think there's partly that, and I think the third bit about sharing the data, it's a bit like. What, tap and go or contactless has done for payment. It's so easy to tap and pay for something now without feeling the consequence of actually handing over cash that it, it doesn't feel real. And in a similar way, it's so easy to tap, accept all on cookies or, yes, I'm gonna share my data with you to, it's so easy for people to do, especially when they're, signing onto public wifi or services that people are often sharing the data without realising that's what they're doing. And we have to become more savvy as an org, as a, as individuals to do that. And I think, some changes, legislation and designing design changes are making it more, visible for customers to choose better. But for the most part, I remember somebody else told me this story, so. Let's take it with a pinch of salt, but I could imagine that it's quite true. I'm sure when we launched Egg back in the day, this is, and we again, this is 19 90, 19 98. After the we launched bank, we did a survey about what would you have to give a customer to give up their password. And I'm sure there was some kind of weird experiment where we did, where we, they would trade it for a bar of chocolate Oh wow. At that time. Right. You'd give em a chocolate and they tell you what the password was. And I still think people haven't quite always realised what they're giving people access to.

Iqbal:

The

Vinay:

implications of it. So I think that kind of thing. Anyway, we can digress a bit. But, the point was that the zero trusting for me was really interesting. Cultural adoption, if you could put it into your organisation, if all of your people really understood that every time you're reconnecting with the customer. Just as you are with the device, you're reestablishing trust. So how do you do that? How do you make sure, that from a technology perspective, the platforms are designed to allow agents to do that and people to do that. Correct. But from an emotion, but from a training and people perspective and cultural perspective, people are empowered and brought into doing that. And again, just to, I think this morning I was having a conversation with someone on LinkedIn about, the importance of understanding why behind policies and procedures that are put into place. And there's a difference between being compliant and being committed. Alright. Okay. Right. So when you're committed to a process and a thing, you actually understand why you're doing it. You understand? I get the logic and get why we're doing it. But when you're just compliant, it's almost a passive, I'm just gonna follow the rules. And an example of this, yesterday I was talking to the planning department or the one of the third party planning. Portals that, Birmingham City Council have put in. I'm looking for some planning permission for a charity building that I'm a trustee of. And, we had a planning call and it all are going really well. And the lady was lovely, gave me some good advice, and then said, we've made notes on your account. so that when you call again, when I'm like, great, could you just send me an email to summarise what we talked about? Because you've given me some advice in the direction that I need to go into and I'm on the trust board and I need to share it with my Yeah, you want fellow board members and I just want it in writing. Sorry, I can't do that. Oh, wow. What do you mean it's not in our processes and policies? And I said, well, if I did any information, freedom of information request, you'd have to give me everything you hold on me. So what's the difference between you sending me an email? She said, ah, don't make the rules. I just follow them. I'm just told, I just do what I'm told to do. And I felt really sad for her that she felt she needed to say that. But it's also a, reflection of the culture of that organisation, that somebody's not gone actually. Let me just go and check, or let me see if I can make the request on this occasion, or whatever the thing might be. And it might still be a no, correct.

Iqbal:

But

Vinay:

it was just another one of these computers says no moments.

Iqbal:

Yeah, You just, you sometimes you just want people to apply the common sense, like I totally get it. But yeah, I think that the rules sometimes go a bit overboard and I, and what happens is it ends up causing friction and, what, with what you are trying to achieve there caused the friction. And, actually you don't feel too good about engaging the, council in regards to this. So I, think that's the thing. from a CX perspective, yes, there's a lot of effort being put into, secure personal data. from a technological standpoint. we're, seeing this now where we are able to re redact personal information so that, people dealing with customers, they don't need to see that personal information, for instance. All of that data's protected your credit card details when you're calling in. Nobody needs to be capturing that information. So the, that technology has come a long way to help deliver a, nice experience from a customer standpoint. And actually, you know yourself that this organisation you're dealing with ticks all of those boxes from a compliance standpoint because they claim to do so. And that your data's protected because of the technology's there to be able to deliver it, but at the same time, Going back to that human connection, regardless of all the rules and the regulations, if you can tell somebody's a little bit stuck and they just need a bit of help. Just show them that actually, do you know what? These are the rules, but lemme come and find out. And that's all it takes. Even if the answer, the computer says no.

Vinay:

At

Iqbal:

least it's not. The computer says no, it's the human says

Vinay:

no. If I got notes on the system, I was just asking for what she'd already written down. Nothing different. Anyway, so there's that. And then we had another conversation where we said we met metrics, we talked about that. We did a great episode on the airport experience with Matt Garner. and Matt really shared some incredible insights into how airports operate.'cause this was a whole conversation about how much does physical space affect customer experience? And he talked about how airports are designed and how they snake you through, a certain journey to get you through duty free and drive that revenue, impact and all those kind of things. But equally, he, also shared about that mindset shift that some airports like Qatar and Singapore have made and, other big ones that they've, understood that their airport's part of the destination experience.'cause they're a through, they're a through way to where the customer really wants to get to. So actually enhancing that waiting experience by good retail, good food and beverage, saunas, sleep pods, all of those kind of things to really help when they have a long layover, adds to the experience knowing that, if customers are gonna choose to fly through a destination again, they will probably choose to fly that airline and by their airport. So I thought that was interesting. And also the part that he made about. That I thought that was really, powerful was the fact that so many moving parts in the airport experience are not controlled by an individual. Loads of third parties, loads of people coming together. I think he used the term, miracles happen every day'cause it just comes together. And again, it reminded me in, in, in just within an organization that often the CX leader doesn't control the parts No. Of it all. But they are like the conductor of an orchestra and they've got to try and make an influence of the people to play to the tune that they wanna play and, that, that whole third party, you don't control everything. Thing was a real

Iqbal:

No, I think that was, it's amazing. He's a miracle for sure. And, I think the way. the only way you can really solve and ensure everybody's delivering a similar experience is understanding that you are responsible for delivering a good experience to every passenger that's walking through The airport. And that's incumbent on every single one of us to deliver a great experience. And I think if, that message is really delivered to every single employee, regardless of who you work for, we represent, we are here to service our, the passengers who are walking through. And I think that at a very high level, I think if that vision is clear Then, you can pretty much, assume that, ev you're gonna deliver a consistent experience. And then obviously the service is different with the products that you offer. That's not something you can control, but it's just how you show up.

Vinay:

Yeah, definitely. I, think that high level. Intention of look, we're, we might be different companies with different services, different KPIs, different whatever. But we're under a banner that says, collectively our goal is to do this and therefore we will act with each other and work with each other in order to do this. Now whether that happens, by purpose, by accident in organisation. I don't, know. But I think in some airports it's better than others.

Iqbal:

It

Vinay:

is, and some organisations it's better than others. It is.

Iqbal:

and I think, we touched on this with Matt. What I was really interested in is how do they drive improvements? where are they getting the data from? And, he gave, he provided us some really interesting insight into, biometrics that obviously, everything is captured on video. There's loads of different touchpoint with passengers and the way that they interact with different systems in the airport. So how do they collect that data to figure out actually the, these are the things that are causing the passengers need. And then, you talk about Qatar Airport, you know that's not happened by accident.

Vinay:

No.

Iqbal:

They've used the data that they've collected. Yeah, every from everywhere. No doubt. And they've now figured out actually these are the things that the passengers, their, needs and wants. And they're able to execute against that. And I think as you can really take that as an example, to try and drive improvements and identify opportunity. And I think that's the thing that a lot of organisations are missing. I've seen it done really well. Like in, working with an electronics brand in the past. They are constantly looking for trends in conversations that they're having with their customers. IE their contact centers and they've. Innovated their products and, actually introduced new products as a consequence of the feedback that's coming from

Vinay:

Customers,

Iqbal:

what they're saying, how they even use their products. And, that's where I've seen it work really well, but I don't think many do it that way. No, I haven't really cracked it yet.

Vinay:

No. And no that, and I think that, that, there are so many examples of where people have invented products or put products out and the customers use it completely differently. Tell their manifest, the most famous story of all of them is WD 40, which they never say what that actually does, but people have found so many different uses for WD 40. So they don't say this is what it is to restrict what people think. people use it in different ways and there's, all these novel ways to do it. So that was Matt and physical experience. And then we, had Melon, who talked to us about membership and I thought membership was really interesting.'cause that's a whole different experience.'cause you've bought into something you've normally committed to something for a year. And we, went into the whole kind of. Membership organisations don't really get about that whole delivering value throughout the journey. They're really good at the onboarding or good at the onboarding. Let's take your money, let's get you signed up and get you in. Yeah, But once you are in that ongoing personalisation, understanding you as a customer delivering constant value. So that when you come to renew it becomes an easy choice. And so many of them, you get a barrage of contact upfront and love upfront'cause you've joined and then there seems to be a hiatus. And then when you're about to leave, they suddenly pop up again and go, Hey, are you gonna renew? What's gonna happen?

Iqbal:

And, you know what? I'm a sucker for getting sucked into, our first three months, 90% off. And you, just psychologically it, gets you, doesn't it? It's like it's an

Vinay:

Asian thing as well. I don't, I think maybe that's

Iqbal:

what it is. I'm sure it, I'll get it from my dad for sure. and. You're locked in, but then obviously the price goes up. But by then, you're so busy with life that you haven't had time. And I think the frustration that I've had recently, and Mel touched on this, is, when it comes to renewal, I wanna just cancel the damn thing cause I'm not using it anymore. And I've got this experience right now with a mobile provider. I won't name shame them, but it, they're making it impossible. I don't know where to go. The only thing I've gotta do now is find time to call them to do the cancellation. And that's so, so frustrating for me. As a consumer, them deliberately making it difficult for me.

Vinay:

And the logic internally might be let's make it difficult so they stay longer, we collect the revenue. But once you've canceled, you're never going back. And you, they know that and they know that. And you probably have told all your friends already don't bother going to the SIM provider. And I've had, I talked about membership organisation on the last, when we recorded the episode where I got my membership card to say, welcome to this particular organisation. Two years into the relationship 30 days before I was about to renew. I thought, well, how, have I got that two years into it? and another one that I've canceled recently, was, was with an organisation around, business community. And again, the onboarding was good. My relationship manager with the organisation was good. But that, it just seemed a very generic template of this is what we do and you flow through this. It didn't feel like there was really value and personalisation. And I think in years gone by, that might have been enough because you're part of a community stuff. But I think, platforms like social media, like LinkedIn and all these allow us to create our own communities outside of these groups now. So that networking opportunity isn't as valuable necessarily as it will have done before. And also we want people to, we want to be, we want to feel like things are. Not created uniquely for us, but there's some customisation and some ability to, you understand the kind of business I am. You understand that my needs are a little bit different from the accountant or the solicitor or whatever. So I don't go through the same sausage machine. But there's some difference there. And I just don't think that's really been looked at in that way and that regular beat of communication dialogue. I think we talked about it with Mel, which is there seems to be lots of broadcasting. But very little two-way dialogue, very little listening and really understanding and yeah, when they do wanna listen, you get to the end of it. And I told you this privately when we, had the conversation before it, so again, I won't name the organisation, but that same organisation, I canceled. I got no acknowledgement for a, I couldn't find out how to cancel. Then I emailed them, then I got no acknowledgement. Then I found an email from somebody I'd. emailed before in the organisation who put me in touch with the right person. Ah, so you got in

Iqbal:

touch with an individual? The individual, right. Okay.

Vinay:

Who helped me bless her. She was great. And then what I got back was, sorry to hear you cancel. Could you gimme some feedback? And I went, great. Look, I'm coming to an event that's planned for this week. I'm happy to sit down with you and give you the feedback and I help you explain. And what I got was, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna be there. Could you just put it on email? And it just felt like a bit of a, you're not really that interested, are you? This is almost, I'm going to ask you for feedback'cause I have to it's a process. But when you get it, am I actually gonna do anything about it versus what could have been a, listen, I'm not gonna be there, but one of my team is definitely there. I'll let them know that you wanna talk to them. And at least it would've given me the feeling that they were, actually interested. So I think there's, stuff to be learned in that hole. Making sure that, you convey that you that you actually care.

Iqbal:

I, think it's, just to wrap up that membership conversation, I don't think anybody's really truly cracked it yet. I, it's very rare that I come across a membership, service that I feel has delivered a lot of value. And, I think we touched on like, there's an energy company, that offers a lot of benefits, right. but as a consumer, I'm not aware of these benefits. And we, I accidentally came across it. They do free coffee and we you, we talked about it, right? I just stumbled across it a few weeks

Vinay:

ago.

Iqbal:

That's really like, I'm using it every week now, so I'm getting real value out of, actually now I'll think twice. Before changing energy providers, because actually I'm saving probably about 10 quid a month on coffee. Coffee.

Vinay:

But isn't it like there's so many of them that compare the market.com and all these different ones, when you sign up for them, you get two for one tick, you get But there's lots of multiples now, so lots of duplication now that other people do it. And you can end up being in three or four different schemes with have the benefits, but often it goes to the back of your mind.'cause once you're in the membership scheme, or once you're in the thing, or you're part of it, you, unless you remind. Now what I do like is when I've got the John Lewis app on my phone, when I get anywhere near a John Lewis, it knows I'm, and it reminds me that I've got a John Lewis go, oh yeah, I've got a, and then it also reminds me that I've got a benefit that's expiring. Ah. And Amex do the same thing. Amex, on their card will remind me that you have a benefit on your card that's due to expire. These are offers that are coming up. Add it to your card. and I think that's a great way of reminding, oh, I've got value here. Y and I think, those kind of things are little nudges that just help you to

Iqbal:

It does. And that's just going back to the kind of, the digital and physical experience that we, touched on with, Matt. I think that's where it comes to life, doesn't it? Where you are the, you've got an incentive to deploy their app. Install their app. I think that's another, there's some stat around, how many apps have we all have on average, but actually most of the time they'll end up get deleted anyway. Right? But, John Lewis as an example. You are not gonna delete that necessarily, because actually it's offered you real value there. You've benefited from a discount now. And that's your, it'll remain on your out. So I think that, again, we don't see much of that No. Too, often. No. No. But that's really where we, it's really interesting benefits.

Vinay:

Cool. So there, there's some of the themes that we talked about. We've got some exciting ones coming up that I'll talk to, towards the end of the episode. so deeper reflections then, let's just spend a few minutes talking about, we talked at the top of the podcast about shift. So what, thinking has shifted, either personally for you, during this process of recording this podcast, maybe from listening to our, some of our guests or some of the things you've been involved in? What, if anything, has shifted for you?

Iqbal:

I think for me, it's been a combination of obviously learning from the, guest staff come in talking about their experiences and their expertise. I think one of the key things for me, since I've been on the journey of, not. Being employed by somebody else is to really spend time listening to my customers, listening to, organisations around how they treat their customers better. I've always been, I've been in the industry, almost as long as you, but my, focus for most of that has been about, tell me what you want. I'll help you enable it with the technology, but not really spending the time to focus on the why.

Vinay:

And I'm

Iqbal:

starting to see real benefits around that. I'm still finding it quite challenging around, seeing organisations invested time and money to surface that more meaningful information and data to be able to deliver real value. There's always a rush, right? we live in a society at the moment where everything has to be in real time. We need to deliver things now. and that. there's a massive compromise. As a consequence, we're not taking the time to reflect. So for me, whilst this episode is all about reflection, I think it's really encouraging my customers to also take time to reflect.

Vinay:

Because

Iqbal:

actually the longer term gain is so much better. And, I think with, and then if you blend that with technology in the right way, you can deliver real magic. Like I honestly do believe that. But it takes time and patience to do that.

Vinay:

It does. And ironically, sometimes that reflective time can actually speed up. The deployment, because you simplify, you understand the problem better, you're able to find a simpler solution. I think I, I dunno if I told you this, but I definitely posted about it. There was a, there's this famous story about a soap factory, I think it's a Japanese one, where they have this problem where they kept packaging up soap, and then when they looked in the box, the quality control would find empty packets with no soap in there. So they engaged in the process of going, okay, well we need to improve our quality control. What's the answer? A load of engineers looked at. The problem, what we'll do is we put X-ray scanners in, across all the conveyor belts. It'll scan all the soaps as they go through any empty packets. We'll be able to tell what they are, take them off the conveyor belt, refill them, whatever. It's gonna take X amount of pounds or yen or whatever the currency is. It's gonna take X amount of months. But we'll get there and it will do this. And one of the employees came up with a solution, which was actually, why don't you just put a fan blowing across the conveyor belt? Because if the packets are empty, they're gonna blow off the conveyor belt. And we'll know that they're empty and then only the four will go through. And the, that was somebody reflecting on what's the problem we're trying to solve and going, here's a really simple solution to solve that problem. And that was in low cost, fast, got the problem to solve versus longer term. So that reflective piece is really, important. I think for me. What shifted is, I've doubled down on this whole human experience piece and there's lots of fantastic customer experience leaders and authors and experts that talk about the frameworks and the tools and it's brilliant. But for me, the step back that I've really doubled down on is those are tools and ways of understanding what's going on and things that can help us to measure certain things or whatever. What I really doubled down on is the side of humans really understanding people, understanding what makes us tick, understanding the psychology, understanding how we drives decisions, understanding the role of memory and how memory drives our future decision making, and how we have the power to influence that. Yeah, and how certain situations allow us to do that to a greater and deeper level. So in particular, highly emotive, either highly stressed or highly excitable, but when you have a peak emotion and something happens during that period, that's embedded into your memory cortex much deeper. It's wired together much deeper, much harder, much more solidly than when you're in a low, emotional thing. So if you're not feeling particularly happy or sad about something, you're no, not really that bothered, and something happens. You are less likely to remember that. Then when you're in a state of euphoria or a state of anxiety, which is why a lot of people in travel in particular remember those negative experiences. When the airport has, something's happened at the airport, they missed their flight. Bags have got lost. Children have got lost, or something's happened. That's high stress. That memory association's really, key. So really understanding that psychology for me is. Has shifted. And the role of culture, I've always been someone who's believed in culturally strategy for breakfast is the famous phrase that's queen. But really the role of culture, and the thing that I've come to crystallise in my mind is one of the difficulties is customer experience looked as a function in an organisation. It's not a function. Customer experience is your culture. And, it feeds across everything. Stop boxing it as a department, as a team on an org chart to go. It's there. There might be a group of people that are tasked with flying the flag for it and helping people understand it, but actually it is a, it is something that flows all the way through. So it's culture.

Iqbal:

I think just on the culture thing, it's really interesting. I do strongly believe that. And if you've got a culture of, delivering. happiness to your customers and, all of that good stuff. You almost need CX in everybody's job title, because actually, if you are there to serve, truly serve your customers, then it's not a job of, oh, well it's, we've got the CX department, head of cx, and I feel that sometimes they, they they take it upon themselves and own it so much that it becomes their baby. And then they're almost not sharing the, actually, let's make it everybody's job to contribute to customer experience. And, actually tell us like, what should it be? What, it shouldn't just be on a subset of people. Because we all, have different touch points with customers.

Vinay:

Definitely. I think there's, it's a, it's a role about being an evangelist. Customer evangelist and actually an enabler. So what you're doing is you're sharing insight, data, perspective information with other teams around the business to help them to do their jobs better. But the step back to the culture piece is actually, it's something you said earlier on, and I was just sitting there and it's going through my mind, is, often the relationship is business to customers, which is, you should be privileged to be a customer of ours. You are here, you are buying from us. Therefore you should be privileged to feel that way. Or actually it should be the other way around. And we should be as a business saying, we're privileged to have you here attempting to be a customer with us. How do we best serve you to win your business? Because. It's taking money outta someone's wallet to spend with your business. That's an honour Somebody's choosing and, we should treat it that way. And we should look at it as we've done that to the extent that they've, chosen to spend 30 pounds or 300 pounds here versus over here versus something else they could have done in their life. So treating that with the respect it deserves, and then also every individual in the organisation going, how do we best now serve this individual? Now they're in the family. They're a part of our culture. Our loyal, our, they're in the mix. They're brought from us once. How do we make them feel they belong here? And how do we do everything possible so they stay here for a long time, continue to buy with us, continue to interact with us. And tell all of their friends how brilliant we are. So more of them come along.

Iqbal:

It does, make sense. And I think we touched on this last, offline is. what's in it for the employee? I think that's the thing. Like so what, yeah, like everything you've said there is great. Great for the business owner. Because actually they all make a ton of money.'cause this customer's gonna keep buying from us, but actually, me as an individual, my job title says I need to do X, Y, and Z. Yeah, of course. if I can serve the customer, that's fine, but actually it doesn't change my compensation or my direction within the company. how do we incentivise everybody to focus on this? I think that's the, for me, that's the problem.

Vinay:

And absolutely. we haven't got time to talk about it in great length on here, but that the compensation and reward in organisations. How bonuses are set up, how health tips are set up, how people's, how people are measured, how objectives, all of those things drive behaviour. They, people are not their behaviour. The behaviour is all context dependent. And therefore how you measure them, the environment you set up drives people to behaviour. We all know people that behave one way at work. And when you meet them outside of work, are completely different people. Pretty different. And that's because the work environment has caused them to behave that way. Because that's the way that they need to behave in order to get stuff done. So I think culture isn't just about let's have a vision statement. A set of values. Yeah, exactly. And, get their rs what out and do town halls and all of those. It's everything. It's everything from compensation plan, everything from recruitment plan, attraction, talent management, knowledge. Knowledge and training. it's, the whole bit. That's what everything you do is a culture.'cause ultimately it's, it's when you're in that environment, what are you compelled to do? And what standards do you hold around the things that you do? That's the sign of your culture. And I think, so that's really, important. So that's one of the things that has continued to shift for me. we also talked about, I think one of the things that you and I talked about was brilliant service doesn't always come from more resource. It comes from intent, trust, and follow through. And I think what we were talking about there was can you ever develop trust through digital? there's this whole thing about machine versus digital, human versus ai. And people say, oh no, you always need a human in the mix. And I would argue that actually what you just need is an experience that's designed that it, the customer goes away feeling tr they can trust you that can be delivered through digital tools. Because some of the time that's all you need. And it can also be done through a human and it can be done through both. So I don't think it is an OR conversation. It's an and conversation. But to say that you always need a human because that's the only way you can engender trust. I think that's a false narrative.

Iqbal:

I, think it depends on the situation. I've seen a really interesting case study. I think what we're seeing now is like, when we started this conversation, we're still quite early days. Like everybody's experimenting and there isn't really enough, kind of reference point. Like we all think we know what we're doing, but we're starting to see some case studies surface. So there was an interesting one done in Japan recently where they've gone pretty aggressive on AI because they have a problem around people resourcing people for contact centers. Like that's a massive shortage of skills. So what they're gonna do, they're gonna have to rely on technology to do more. So, so they've, really gone in, hard, to, learn quickly and deploy AI to, to, as you say, it's not even a conversation versus you don't have humans available to do that task. And I think longer term, that's what's gonna happen everywhere because people. Those are the roles that people don't necessarily want to do. Yeah, they did them before because there were more of them, but actually slowly we're gonna see that, that, that really decrease. So whilst I agree with you, humans will deliver different value to to, customers, to end customers. we are starting to see, case studies like Japan for instance, who are actually delivering real value, where you've got agents deployed that are able to not just provide a bit of service, but make decisions. so simple things like, you're renting a refund. the cus you detect the customers had a, bad experience. The agent recognises that based on a load of history, maybe even in-store history, and then they've just given them, an extra. refund or whatever they've made the decision to be able to do that. So I think that those kind of things now we're starting to see implemented really well. In places like that.

Vinay:

And, in those touch points, things like, people say, oh, in mass, disruption, say getting travel or transport, you need to have humans in there. But actually, if the systems were designed that they kept the customer informed, the customer knew what was going on. They got confirmation that I've done this right, we moved you on to the next flight, it's all done. They don't always need to speak to a human. But it's in those really high stress, what I was talking about before. Well, they often do because there's a trust of I don't trust the machine. I need to speak to somebody for them to confirm they're gonna do it. The irony being, a lot of the time when you speak to somebody, they're just as hampered and can't do the thing that you wanna do, but you would get some comfort because you spoke to a human in the same way as, there's a pilot on onboard your airplane in the cockpit, even though most of the flight is probably flown on autopilot. you're seeing robo taxis being rolled out all over the place. So the role of the driver. Is, changing and what value the driver adds versus getting into a taxi that's got no one in there. And and for some people that might be the experience that they want. They don't want to talk to a

Iqbal:

A

Vinay:

chirpy taxi driver. And they don't want to have a human in there. Just want to get in and and go And that's just, so,

Iqbal:

just, get, into that.

Vinay:

But, I think it all comes down to being trust first versus tech first. So focus on how do we deliver trust? Is it human? Is it tech? Is it both? How do we design for that? And I think that's where you get. The right kind of answer. And then that, that all depends on the nuances of the situation and stuff. And then you have 20% of the cases where you do need a human to jump in and do something.'cause it's an edge case or it's outside of what it's,

Iqbal:

i, and I think this is where the, design element comes into it, right? It's really mapping out that customer journey rather than, just throwing technology at, a couple of years ago we were working with a customer whose objective was to basically eradicate their contacts into staff because they felt that actually a lot of what was being dealt with was pretty simple. And could be dealt with, a voice in a chatbot, for instance. So we went and delivered that. They got rid of everybody. And two years on, now they've come back and said, look, we are realising that our customers are asking or needing more from us than, we, we anticipated. Because we rushed into it. So they're having to rehire people And re-engineer their bots to, to accommodate. So what you could argue that. That experiment failed, but actually they learned something from it. maybe they'll lose customers, as a consequence, but it's difficult

Vinay:

to know maybe. But I think one of the things they will learn from it, and we touched on it earlier on, is that richness, that the lack of understanding of what's really going on. And part of the problem with the way that we currently approach customer journey mapping, finding friction points is the data we're using is normally what a customer's calling about and what's been coded as what are the top complaint reasons, what are they saying, which are all top level reasons and often categorised by human. So you've already got an error rate in there. Then it's the, what have I understood from this call? Oh, there's six things going on in this call, but this is the thing I think they complained about. But actually, and so you, you don't have full visibility of what they're doing. So when you are then designing the bot that says, oh, 20% of our calls around booking, let's do a booking bot so it can do it, and then you realise that of that 20%. There's another 20% of customers who start with, I wanna book a ticket for something. But actually they've got something else they wanna answer, and then the bot can't deal with the thing they wanna do. And then it goes into a loop of death, or they fall out.

Iqbal:

You gotta have deflection points and have the ability to, even if it's an email or something, but you gotta have a process in the backend to, to facilitate that. So I think it, it's, as long as you are, you've got a finger on the pulse as to what's actually going on, you can then pivot and react and you do.

Vinay:

I, think it comes down to understanding that it's not a transaction, it's a conversation at the moment when it's designed for a single, single linear transaction. I'm gonna book, therefore these are the steps it's gonna go through. Versus I wanna have a conversation about booking that says, I might want to talk about this, and this. Before I even get to the point of I'm gonna book. That's right. That's not always factored into the com, into the solution, and therefore the bot falls over because the human starts asking it things that it can't do. So, so I think that's, quite cool. Okay. So, practical value, let's talk about four key takeaways. What are the key takeaways? I've got a, if I, list the three or four that I've got and then you can jump on. So, it's not just about metrics, it's emotions. So emotions, beat metrics, we really need to understand how customers feel.

Iqbal:

Not

Vinay:

just what we're measuring to get done. So,

Iqbal:

so just on that feeling like, coming at it from a technological standpoint, it'll be like, yeah, we can detect customer sentiment for instance, based on what are the things are they saying? Is that, what you mean by is that. A way for us to take, detect emotion, because emotion can be detected by people dealing with customers. Right? That's fine. But actually as an organisation, like how do you know the emotions of customer? So I think there's two,

Vinay:

I think there's two parts. Think there's the in the moment sentiment. So how is the customer feeling during this call? And then, there's the monitoring of, okay, that happened. What was the next behaviour? What happened and how did we followed that? And, how much did this that happened do we think contributed to that choice and made, so I think understanding that to a greater level, you're never gonna, unless you're in living in the customer's head or heart, you're not gonna know. Well, exactly. But it's interpreting what's going on to get that feel for, it's not more than, it's going back to the, I'm not just focused on how long has this call been lasting? How many calls have you handled? But I'm, also, as well as measuring that I'm measuring. What's the feeling of the customer? And then have we solved it to the right level? Have they given us an indicator that they're happy with the resolution? Now that we've done that, what are we then tracking? Has that changed their future behaviour to what we expected, or have they upgraded or have they like that kind of stuff. I think that's important.

Iqbal:

I just, I think I'll just on that, what we're starting to see now is like, you can track sentiment throughout the entire customer journey, and then you can follow that up with a csat, for example. To be able to see if the sentiment truly matches The csat and that, that's quite an interesting one that, that I'm currently exploring for somebody. And, it, just shows where the, sentiment really means anything.

Vinay:

it's interesting, isn't it?'cause like you, we get surveys now that tell us about the service that you received. Here's a score of one or 10. Now those surveys have gone out automatically without any context of what the call was actually about. But imagine if it flipped on its head and it was personalised to the point that says. we're sending you a survey'cause you really, you recently contacted us about this. We've analysed the call and it doesn't feel as though you were completely happy with the resolution. Tell us more about the experience. Yeah, What could we have done better? Yeah, and imagine you received that in your inbox versus a set of questions that's irrelevant to what you, but you are having to answer them. So, so I think it's that's a good point. everything is the experience. you've heard me talk about this passionately. It's not after sales, it's not the contact center. It's everything from sales, marketing, operations after sale support, but be even beyond that. Even beyond that, I think recruitment, talent, attraction, all of those contribute to the experience.'cause the people that you bring into your organisation are the people that are making decisions daily about what affects your customers. So I think it has a massive impact. So experience is everything. And I think we need to be focused on, that's the outcome we are doing here.'cause if we deliver a, if we deliver experiences worthy of somebody repeating that in a story, they tell somebody else. Then we've done our job. In, a positive way. Obviously. balanced tech and human, we've talked about that. That it's not an and all con, it's not an all conversation, it's an and conversation. And I think, we talked about much more human centered design. So I think when we spoke, you gave the example of working with vendors where they just wanna get the technology project delivered. But you can see. There's opportunity here to deliver it and deliver it better and solve problems. But yet how do you bring that collaboration human part.

Iqbal:

And just on that, obviously I mentioned the Ja, the Japanese example case study there, of what, way they're seeing a lot of success with, the way that AI's, treating customers is they're using storytelling to teach the AI models so that the AI understands the company culture. Right. Understands the personality of the brand. All of these things are built into the storytelling. And, that actually has had the biggest impact.'cause whilst AI can never really mimic a human being, it can mimic certain traits. And the storytelling has made a massive difference.

Vinay:

I can imagine. it was funny, I was thinking about. you have to onboard the AI in the same way as you're an onboarded employee. Exactly. And that's, you have to train it, you have to induct it, you have to under get it to understand the company values, the language you use in the business. What you don't say, what you do say. Your, the attitude, the beliefs of what you have and when, and you have to teach you that as well as the knowledge part.

Iqbal:

Yes, exactly. In the past it's been, here's the knowledge. Here's my customer data. Go wild. And it hasn't worked. In all honesty, right. You've gotta spend the time to, to get this bit right, because actually that really makes a massive difference.

Vinay:

In the same way's just for human, when you join another organisation. You can't just bring in their induction that you had at their company and their values and their policies and go, I'm just gonna adopt that here. some people might do that, but you have to adopt where you are now and the culture there, and the way that they do things. And it's often where people don't fit in. To organisations, they find it a really difficult place to work because there's a clash of cultures, beliefs, and values. Okay. Cool. Alright, so, wrapping up then, things coming down the track. We've got some exciting episodes, so we've got a brilliant one coming up, that I think people are gonna love and it's all about getting behind the scenes of sports. And the fan experience we've got, a guy who runs a business that looks at data analysis and helping football clubs to really understand what their fans are doing. How that translates into opportunities to improve the experience, improve revenue, improve loyalty, and football's one of those things where the loyalty's there, once you support a club, you don't change. So actually what's the role in this? And, why do this? I think that's, gonna be really, I can't wait for that one. That's gonna be really great one. we've then got one scheduled around the role of sound. So we've been talking to a couple of brilliant guys. about a business that they run and the role of sound in dev in really, enhancing customer experience and what, and that kind of thing. So if you think about the sound that your Apple laptop makes when you start it up, the Netflix ping, the sound of the door when you close a Volvo car or whatever, all of those subtle sounds, but actually beyond that, how do you sound in that whole over overall experience? interestingly, I dunno whether you saw, I'd share that Cowgate story about how Cowgate Coco co-created a song that's scientifically proven to make babies happier. Because they used sounds from parents that said, oh, these sounds work for, and they created and they reiterated and, eventually came up with a track and used a psychologist as an expert. Where it's scientifically proven to increase baby happiness.

Iqbal:

Wow.

Vinay:

Through different sounds. That's,

Iqbal:

it's incredible. As you say, there's some sounds that are just like, I was just, I heard the windows 95, just the startup sound the other day, and it was just, it just brought back all these great memories, good and bad ones, to be honest. But it's, it's, just the, sound. So yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to the psychology. Good.

Vinay:

then we're gonna be talking, about, we're gonna do another dive into contact centers later in the year. with, a couple of guys that we know, who are in that contact center space, that will be talking about some of the trends in contact centers and stuff. I'm hoping to bring on someone, on board who, runs again data. So we're gonna a real retail lens on using data and insight to drive retail cha, change in retail and to drive insight and increase, increase revenue, sales and all those. But it'll also increase retention and loyalty and those kind of things as well. and then we've also got, a, real special one. With the folks at Zoom coming up soon as well. Right? Do you wanna tell us about

Iqbal:

Yeah, that's fine. We've got, Chris, who's, who heads up the CX business within Zoom. Has that experience a, nice previously, a CX one. so it'll be good to get, somebody with that stature to talk through what's happening on the technological side in that, industry. So excited to bring that episode.

Vinay:

a lot of, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there and many, more. We've got a lineup of, people, but if you are listening to the podcast and you think there's a topic that you would like us to cover, or a guest that you'd like us to get on,'cause you think that'd add a real in insight or in fact, if you want to be a guest on here and you're thinking, I'd love to come and talk to you guys about this, please get in touch. We'd love to have a chat about how we can get you on. but just wrapping up, just wanna say, look, both Icba and I are really grateful, for you if you've been with us since the beginning, since episode one. Thank you. If you are new. Thank you. if you've stumbled upon this by accident and now you're thinking, I really like this, then thank you. And if you stumbled upon it, you've listened and gone, nah, it's not for me. But thanks for stopping by and at least giving us a try. just tell us more about what you want to, what you want us to explore next. Any comments you can DM me, DM mc Bow. You can find our, contact details on there. But until the next episode, yeah, we'll see you next time. Thank you.