The Economics of Customer Service. Insights From Seán Keane

Episode 33: We continue our series of episodes focused on answering the critical question –What Is the State of Customer Experience Today? 

As 81% of the UK's economic output comes from the service industry, understanding how to improve customer experience has never been more important.  We will be asking guests for their perspectives on the following questions:
 
 What's the state of customer experience?
 Why do you think that?
 Who provides a good customer experience?
 How would you improve the customers' experience?

We are lucky to have insights on these questions from Sean Keane who has led, grown and sold CX technology and consulting businesses, and has a strong background in Op Model design, technology and process. He’s led complex programmes and teams for companies like Davies Group, Ember and Capgemini on behalf of brands like RSA, Tesco, BUPA, The British Council, Thames Water, Disney Channel and HMRC.

With all of that experience he's definitely worth listening to!

Sean has recently set up a consultancy to help organisations lower costs via smart service design. Follow this link for more information

Service Economics (service-economics.com)

Transcript

0:03

Hello, I'm James. Hi, I'm Jimmy. Welcome to A Job Done Well, the podcast about the world of work and how to improve the daily grind.

Jimmy: 0:15

Good afternoon.

James: 0:16

Good afternoon. How you doing?

Jimmy: 0:17

I'm doing well. How are you doing, James?

James: 0:19

I'm doing very well. Thank you very much. Very excited today. We have a visitor with us

Jimmy: 0:22

We do because today we are interviewing Sean Keane. Sean will introduce himself shortly. This is the next in our series of podcasts about the state of customer experience. where we are discussing what's the state of customer experience in the UK and what can be done about that. Sean is going to give his expert views on that, but before we get Sean to introduce himself, James, what have you been up to this week?

James: 0:51

Well I haven't been up to anything but very exciting, my wife and daughters went to see Olly Murs and take that Big concert in this weekend. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then they came back raving about it. And I'm not a big take that fan, I have to admit. I'm not entirely sure who Alimo is, but. they showed me some videos and it was just fantastic the way they'd done it and just a really good example of when somebody does something really well, yeah, and you sort of leave your customers begging for more, so very impressive.

Jimmy: 1:20

Olly Moore's not been in the Guardian recently, I think, clearly.

James: 1:23

Clearly not, no.

Jimmy: 1:23

Yeah, my oldest went to to take that with her mum on, on the Saturday and liked it so much. They got tickets and went back on the Sunday, each their own. Whereas my foray into culture was slightly less successful. I went to the theater on Friday night to see a play. called Cluedo 2, very well reviewed, and it was absolute bullshit. I can't tell you how bad it was. Yeah. It was, like, half the audience thought it was funny, I was in the half that was just like, Oh my God, I can't believe I paid money to see this And come the interval, I'm embarrassed to say, I left and didn't go back. I just, like, I had to escape. So that was, that was me out of culture, out of culture for a little while.

James: 2:04

So the cultural critics in Nottingham, take that one. Cluedo too, nil. Definitely, definitely. Anyhow, welcome Sean. Without further ado, do you want to do a quick introduction, tell our listeners who you are?

@Sean: 2:16

Yeah, very happy to do so. Thanks James and Jimmy for the invite. I'm still mentally processing. How much you must be rolling in it. If you've got family members that are able to afford to go to concerts, two days and a weekend running, but we'll come back to that one later on. So yeah, really delighted to be invited on onto your podcast. So for those of you don't know me I've been working in and around the customer management, customer experience space for about 25 odd years started off in and around technology, got interested in how stuff really fitted together and worked particularly our business use the technology. So. went into a career in, in management consultancy, general management, and fast forward, here I am, I'm still in the same patch.

Jimmy: 2:58

So definitely deep expertise in this, this sphere. I just have to clarify, Sean, just for, for the record, I paid for none of the concert. It's all, it's all self funded. Fortunately. So customer experience, first question then for you, Sean, what do you think the state of customer experience is in the UK?

@Sean: 3:19

I would say probably the unhelpful answer is getting better, getting worse and quite mixed. So the, getting better bit is, is I would say in general you know, across our lives, I think we've got a customer experience has sort of changed. It's, it's sort of the bar I think has broadly been raised and I think, you know, we can all think of the obvious brands that people cite as having contributed to that, you know, Amazon sort of raising the bar and keeping up with them. I think in general, it's got better. The getting worse bit is, or maybe not, or it feels like it's getting worse, is still some of the fundamentals just don't work. or. thinking about the nature of customer experience and, and what is it you're doing when you, you experience something as a customer, I think it's morphed and changed a bit. So probably more of the basics work work well in most of the, most occasions, probably the way that we interact with, with brands and service providers in our lives has also changed. So in general I'd say that Most service providers are allowing us to do more things ourselves online on our mobile, and it probably works.

James: 4:25

You said fundamentals just out there, so what do you regard as the fundamentals?

@Sean: 4:29

I mean, the, As you know, the cliche goes, but it's, it's, you know, I think, I happen to think it's true, is, is the best service is no service, right? So more and more, I mean, straw poll, put your hands up who looks forward to running a call center. I don't know if you're asking the listeners what would the reaction be. I think hands would be pretty firmly by their sides. In contact with a brand, Typically these days because something hasn't worked, or the nature of your query is more complex than, than arguably you'd want to try and design it to self service application, but you need reassurance, right, due to the nature of the transaction or the query. And the things that still don't work is things are still quite disconnected. So you spent a load of time telling the organization through the digital touchpoint who you are and what you need. You fall out of it, land in a chat bot, well guess what, you've got to repeat it all again. Go through something and there's still a very high burden of effort onto the customer, the consumer, to try and navigate all this disconnection across these different channels for service providers. And then you get through, if you're, you know, typically once you've navigated all that, most of the time you land with somebody who is pretty helpful, it's a human, who's trying to connect it all for you together. And then quite often they're still let down by disconnected systems, disconnected processes. And then the sort of killer for me is the is the management system, what they're focused and incentivized on doing. Are they actually given the time and the space to sort out what you as a consumer need to get it done? Or are they under some kind of pressure to get the, get off the call in, you know, within a certain period of time and get onto the next one?

Jimmy: 6:02

And is that why, as you said, that some of the fundamentals aren't there. As you say, technology has moved on. So therefore there's a lot more automation. Is that automation being done effectively? So is that why the some of the basics aren't working? Or is it? To your point, the management system that surrounds the people, because I, when, when we were discussing these questions, one of the things that we found out was that, and this is an average, but 20 percent of people's time in the service industry is spent fixing things when they go wrong. So which, which, which would back up what you're saying about the fundamentals.

@Sean: 6:39

Yeah, I, I think it's a combination of factors,, but, but my view would be understand what the customer is trying to achieve, understand why they contact you in the first place. And then typically a lot of the improvements can be made without technology. So bring technology in last, right? Understand the system, understand the processes, understand, what those systems and processes should be doing designed around what a customer needs rather than a lot of the times around the way it's always been done with very good intention, right, and good intent, they are designing solutions piecemeal, right? No one's really seeing or understanding it end to end the way a customer feels and experiences it.

Jimmy: 7:18

Yeah, and we were, we did a case study on looking at customer experience, looking at Virgin Media, and one of the hypotheses we had was that actually they design their systems from their perspective rather than the customers. Which means they want it quick and off the phone or off the whatever the contact medium is where that doesn't necessarily resolve the customer's issue.

@Sean: 7:40

It actually costs you more to deliver really poor service. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And if, and if you understand what, you know, the purpose, the reason why customers are contacting your organization and then use that insight to inform how you do what you do, how you deliver services, then, then good things happen. Now, I know it sounds very glib and throw away. There's a couple of bits that you need to come, come down from here. So that's the first part is understanding, yeah. Is this contact what we would call value demand? Is it necessary? Is it something that's naturally and always going to be there through, through the customer life cycle? So, for example, with your, with your telco or media example, I'm becoming a customer for the first time, you know, I'm, I need to give you some information or I want to find out how to acquire new, new aspects to my service. And then you've got different ways of treating that demand. Sometimes the right way to do might be to automate it and other, other situations automation will be a terrible thing to do. So that's the value demand. That demand is always going to be there. And the other type of demand is, is your failure demand. So this is wholly avoidable and unnecessary demand, which typically being created by the organization. And it's creating a load of unnecessary burden on the customers. So for example, you told me my broadband will be connected. in seven days. It's now 10. Right. What's happening here? And quite often it's the inability to see what is happening in that end to end experience for a customer. that Causes a lot of the issues. And then it gets perpetuated, you know, it gets exacerbated by other factors.

James: 9:09

Yeah. But a lot of that, you talked, Sean, about the management system. But I do think that's what's driving it. First of all, you talk about, you know, your website not talking to your chat bot and you having to type in the same information twice. Well, actually, the website doesn't cost me anything when I've got it, so it's cheap, and the chatbot, well, I'm not paying him a lot either, so that's cheap. So, actually, as the organization's concerned, there isn't really a cost associated with that. Frustrates customers, but there isn't a cost associated with it. And then your other point, I think, is poor service costs you more, but the way in which organizations measure cost, is they'll look at the cost per call but they won't look at the cost per interaction because that's probably much more difficult to get at. So they don't really have a very sensible view of what it is actually costing them I don't think.

@Sean: 9:54

And your two last points there are obviously inextricably linked so your point about they don't see that cost, well they don't see that cost in the way that they currently think about it and currently manage it. Yeah. That cost is there and it's hidden in plain sight. And it's just ballooning, ballooning in front of them. And I, I guess I mean to sort of, you know, help, help listeners understand the. The enormity and the potential opportunity of these sort of themes that probably sound a bit abstract around failure demand and value demand. So, let's just pick financial services. So my experience in across the board of financial services, if you're dealing with an organization that's really on the front foot, if they really understand the customer journey, if they really understand the customer's purpose and what they're trying to do, and if they're really taking that cross functional view of understanding end to end, We'd, we'd find that some of those organizations would get the level of failure demand down to about 10 to 15 percent. That's really kind of on the, on the front foot. But typically this level of failure demand can range from 35 to 80 percent, sometimes higher. When you start to think about it, let's just be, let's be generous here, let's say a third, 33 percent of your demand just shouldn't be there, right? And all of this unnecessary burden that you're placing on your customers, which in these days you might have heard of this little thing called the internet. Choice and alternatives are but are but a button click click away, right? So that's kind of keeping the brand dwellers awake at night. And the other element to this is all of this unnecessary cost in IT systems people the the activity that your people are spending your time on, right? Think about all the more valuable, helpful things these people could do if they, if they didn't have so much of their time taken up with, with repeatedly dealing with, with garbage at the, at the organizations. generating itself. So it's huge, huge costs hidden in plain sight. And to the management system bits, which is, well, okay, what do you mean by management system chaps? Well, these are the things that you measure your people on. This is how you decide and track whether you're being successful. So in contact center terms, customer experience terms, the big performance lever that people have been pulling for decades has been cost efficiency. How do we do this work faster, lower and cheaper at unit cost? We would say you should actually be looking at effectiveness, which is how much of this work just shouldn't even be here at all. Do the right things the right first time. I'll pause there because I know James, you'll have lots of experience about what this means in service environments and the way that we measure measure people's performance.

12:31

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Jimmy: 13:03

Just back to your point though, Sean, you mentioned about failure demand, which lines up with the, you know, 20 percent of the UK service economy is spent fixing things, which would fit into that. What would you do faced with that? if you're running a business that's got, Those, 80 percent failure demand or whatever you said, what would you do to try and reduce that?

@Sean: 13:25

Well, good news. If you are experiencing the sorts of levels of failures or nevermind, you know, the outliers that might be at 80%, you know, those, those sort of organizations are probably, if not ready or already over the cliff edge, you're heading towards it pretty, pretty rapidly. Yeah. The, the things that you do is go, go to where the work is done. You'll be in your, your people who are supporting your customers who are bathing the good, the bad and the ugly. They'll have a lot of the answers for you already. Okay, so what you need to do is understand, you know, some very simple techniques and tools and frameworks that are out there. So I don't know whether you put links in it to these things after your podcast, but the Value Irritant Matrix is a classic one, which is how much of this work shouldn't be here in the first place, how much of it could be automated. and how much of it requires specialist support from, from your people to, to help resolve that, right? How much of it could be outsourced. So there are ways of, of very simply, but very powerfully categorizing and understand, understanding this, all this balloon of demand that's coming into the organization, how much of it shouldn't be there. And then what you can start to do is start, is to then study that work and then, and then, and then start to understand, well, what are the root cause drivers of this failure demand? And you'll start to understand where, where are those issues actually originating in, in the system, because customer service is everybody's business. It's not just the contact center's business, right? They can only, you know, try and sweep and tidy stuff up. They can't, they can't cure the L's.

James: 14:51

And so I totally get that, Sean. I mean, I would just challenge. I don't think 80 percent failure demand is all that uncommon, to be honest with you. I mean, whenever I, there's a matrix, I think Vanguard Consulting showed it to me, but it was If you listen to a call, you ask your first question is, did the customer really want to make this call? and by want, it's not something you forced them to do because you screwed it up. That's not wanting to do it. It's because they wanted to do it. And then the second question is, once you've got the call, Did you manage to resolve the customer's issue? So you've got a nice little two by two, And all of a sudden you realize that there's huge amounts of waste.

@Sean: 15:26

Right, exactly. And this is where you start to get to grips with how do we practically, or how could we start to practically adjust our current measures and metrics? Something that has been around in, in customer service and contact since for a long time would be things like average handle time on average, our advisors should take eight minutes to handle a call. The so what to all of that is AHT is an example for a lot of organizations that people would be incentivized or more likely in contact centers penalized or punished, but performance warming do it three strikes and you're out. for not handling that work and an average of of eight minutes. So the, by being able to, as you perfectly describe that two by two, studying the work and understanding does it need to be here in the first place and then working out what's required to resolve it means that instead of creating a ticket, because you could deal with a 20 percent of that call and lobbying it into the, into a queue somewhere for someone else to pick up is Maybe you pull the experts into that call to resolve it first time. Better still, you are, you see, you assess your data and say, well, how many of these types of demands are we getting, right? And what could we do to remove the need for these contexts in the first place?

James: 16:38

um, We talked about investing in systems, but you actually said, well, investing in the system is probably one of the things you should do last. So what would you go out before that? So we talked about measurement, anything else that you think is more profitable than just investing in systems.

@Sean: 16:52

Again, if I give you an example of, of the beneficial impact of taking this type of very practical customer centered view, and understanding how your value chain is or isn't aligned to what customers need, is we worked with a very large high street retailer that wanted to replace all of their global contact centers around the world. So by understanding what is it that customers need when they contact the organization, how much of that is value, how much of that is failure, we were able to help this very large organization improve their processes, remove the failure demand out of the system. So when they came time, and this is, this is our original brief, by the way, is to help them procure new tech. As a result of taking this customer centered view first, where we're able to help them understand and prioritize what type of tech they needed to really deliver value to customers and to colleagues, helping customers, and it resulted in them with them needing to invest in a much smaller capacity IT solution, so they saved over 52 percent of their OPEX by doing it this way. Yeah, yeah, those are pretty big numbers

James: 18:00

What you're really saying is that look at the management systems driving the performance and then change the management system. Why do you think it is though that so many organizations are caught in this spiral of measuring the wrong things and targeting people and just missing the point altogether?

Jimmy: 18:21

So just a follow up question to that, Sean, as well as the, the, the caught in the measurement, but also then caught in the invest in tech as the first solution to problems. Why do you think both of those things are so, prevalent in today's service industries?

@Sean: 18:39

Yeah, good questions. And if I, if I start with the second one first, which is I mean,

James: 18:43

you think his question was better than mine?

Jimmy: 18:45

Of course it was.

@Sean: 18:45

No, I think his, his was a good warmup back to your much more much more intellectually rigorous question, both equally brilliant questions. So. Recognizing that technology does and can have an important role in innovation, right? There are some, some wonderful things that can tech can do for us I don't have a down on tech, far from it. but one of the things that I've come to realize. Is that the technology vendors marketing budgets outstrips the marketing budget of, of, of consultants and practitioners like you and I, they just get more mindshare and it's a very comforting thing to hold, to think of that I can bring in this new tech silver bullet and all will be well. Another part to it is that the technology intervention, you know, like automation, robotic process automation is a great example. That's a really clever thing to do. So why, why would you not do it? But it's a bit like outsourcing, You can do the work at a lower unit cost, but actually there's probably chunks of work, which you don't need to touch in the first place. Right. So why wouldn't you improve, understand your system of work, understand the processes and, and pay, pay net less. For higher quality, right?

James: 19:56

But therefore, are you saying that people are just beguiled by the idea that they can invest in the technology and the problem will go away? And it's because it is easier to understand what the technology does than really to understand what your problems are.

@Sean: 20:12

Kind of. I'm going to be, I'm going to take a slightly more diplomatic middle path through this one. And I find that often telling stories through, through what's actually going on for customers and how they're experiencing and who you use to tell those stories within the business can be, it can be a key part of it. So I think what you're saying is correct, but I don't think it, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that.

Jimmy: 20:34

Yeah, I think part of the challenge there, I think you're absolutely right. If you're, if you're sitting in an exec position and you've got often perhaps people explaining the process improvement way of doing things, which actually might result in actually stopping the work altogether, which is a win for you in terms of cost and a win for your customers in terms of what they need, that's a lot less. Sexy than, the, the guy who's sending you the latest AI solution, you're, you're going to be a hero if you start doing AI in your organization, more likely than you're going to be a hero doing some slightly, less exciting process work that, that actually could be marked far more effective. So I think it's, it's, it's how it looks, how it's sold as well.

@Sean: 21:23

Let me give you a practical example of this. So I did a lot of work with a well known UK multi brand general insurer and I went to the chief customer's office offices up in uptown and she was introduced to this dozen people and deeply impressive, super clever, super smart, super experienced people that had all these wonderful customer journey maps up on the wall. I kind of thought occurred to me, light bulb went off. I thought. Do you know what? No one in the call center operations is ever going to run up here, rip that customer journey map off the wall and run back and say, hey guys got the answer. Right? They were putting stuff together that kind of made sense in a bit of a fluffy abstract way for some marketing folk, right? But it wasn't, it wasn't the right tool for the right job. So where I'm going with this is off the back of that experience, we just created something that was a mashup of a, of a customer journey map and a high level business process map. But everyone from the top floor to the shop floor could look at that and could relate to it and could have a conversation that meant something to everybody around what were the big issues that are causing problems for customers. And what does it mean in terms of cost? Sometimes you actually need to spend more time setting the problem before you can start setting the solution.

James: 22:33

Yeah, but what you're really saying is a lot of the problem is about communication.

@Sean: 22:36

Correct.

Jimmy: 22:38

So just back to some of the key questions. Who do you think does this really well?

@Sean: 22:44

I will bang on as a massive advocate for people like GiffGaff. Right. Don't say GiffGaff. GiffGaff. They are the

James: 22:52

I was raving about them myself the other day.

@Sean: 22:54

Right. And why were you raving about them?

James: 22:56

Well, I was, they every month they send me a little text which says, did you know you're on this tariff and if you move to that tariff it will be cheaper for you?

@Sean: 23:04

You weren't supposed to give that answer because that was my one. That was it. It's perfect.

James: 23:09

It's as simple as that. So now all of a sudden they're not ripping me off. Yeah. And so now I trust them implicitly.

@Sean: 23:15

So a couple of key words in there, which, I mean, look, let's just analyze this briefly. We are talking about a supplier of what is a commoditized service. Yeah, still the same phone. It's a 4G, 5G signal. It works, you know, beyond the utility of, have I got a signal? Can I make it? Did they bill me accurately? I don't ever want to get in touch with my, my mobile phone provider.

James: 23:39

I know, and actually when they tell me I can do it two quid a month cheaper, I think that's interesting and just keep spending the money, because I don't, I've got better things to do with my two quid.

@Sean: 23:46

Yeah, exactly. You, you have just succinctly paraphrased why, why I, I will evangelize till the cows come home about our commodity service provider. To the exact same point, how many other service providers have I got in my life who will send me an email to say you could save money with us by changing your tariff? Answer, none. Yeah. Why? Why? It's a hangover for, from this Try ultimately a trust issue, which is how can we screw our customers? How can we make money out of them? How can we be a little bit devious? Which is sort of manifested itself in all sorts of trust issues. We, you know, with the digital economy these days, but basically it's that rare thing of thinking, you know what, they're putting my interests above theirs. Guess what? Good things happen. And I've been with them for donkeys years and let's do it.

James: 24:30

Yeah. And I never really thought about it. But trust, I think is really important here. So two organizations I would single out for that. John Lewis, whenever I've had a problem with John Lewis, they have sorted it out, bang, just like that, And then the other one, Amazon, if something doesn't materialize, if for whatever reason you ask for a refund, they give you a refund. Yeah. Consequently, you're very happy to go back and spend more money.

Jimmy: 24:54

But I think the the GIFGAF example, Sean, we had compared it to Virgin Media, who at the end of a contract back to the trust point an old age pensioner, how I know at the end of his contract, his, Cost went from 65 pounds a month to 156 pounds a month. And when they sent him a message, he presumed it was a scam because obviously that was ridiculous. And he actually went and canceled his direct debit because he thought somebody was trying to scam him on the back of Virgin media. Well, no, actually Virgin media were trying to scam him out of all of that money. So yeah, but that's complete opposite of what you, you described a gift gap.

@Sean: 25:33

So there's, there's two points there that, that the, the second one I understand that you, may be having one business partner's co-founder at service Economics Rob Wilson in one of your upcoming podcasts. Yeah. Rob has got some brilliant, really powerful examples from his time when he was running customer service operations at Aviva. Right. And it, and the journey that he helped take that organization on in their contact centers. They had. Oodles of different measures, performance measures, and they stripped that all away and they reduced it down to about half a dozen key measures and the overriding thing that they had that governed all of this here was, was, was about helping customers with customer purpose and their customer purpose was broadly along the lines of Help customers buy the right insurance products for the, for the things that they need to do in their lives. And it just shifted the whole emphasis around on what is it you can do for your customers to be genuine helpful for them, rather than how can we sell them some stuff? Right. And, and be, and dare I say, implicitly, it's not intended, but often it can manifest itself as tiptoeing around them and trying to pull a fast one on them.

Jimmy: 26:35

And beyond like the ones that we touched on Giffgaff, many more of you, any others?

@Sean: 26:39

I was just going to, I was just going to finish off with Giffgaff. There's sort of two parts of this coin, which is, well, it's sort of the. Sales, the marketing, the brand a bit, how we feel about them. And then the other one, of course, is, is the all important. Well, what if I need some help with something? That's a customer service environment. Giftscaff's really interesting as, you know, they were originally set up as a sort of digital incubator part of, of O2. and it becomes sort of a challenger brand. But what they have done brilliantly is really understand their customers life events. So what's, what's going on in my life when I need to do, use my mobile for something. And in particular, what, what's the implication of something not working right. And, and how I could help it. They've done an incredible thing, which is provide consistently high levels of, of customer satisfaction Not only with their product, but with their after sales service and support, without any contact centers. Even more incredible, they provide that service through a community. So it's actually their customers who love the product, who, you know, are technically minds, or get a kick out of sharing their knowledge with people, and the customers are providing service to other customers.

Jimmy: 27:49

Wow. So going back at a stage though, so our premise is that economy of the UK is a service economy with over 80 percent of us employed in that and 80 percent of the GWP generated from that. how would you suggest people listen to this podcast

James: 28:06

uh,

Jimmy: 28:06

go about improving customer experience in their organizations?

@Sean: 28:11

I opened up by talking about this real issue, which is one of disconnection, this sort of fragmentation. Lots of people with good intention, good intentions, trying to look at how to improve things. Quite often they're working in, in, in silos, and those silos, their departments are, are, are measured locally, local optima as we call it. all trying desperately to get a, you know, a green performance traffic light in their, part of the organization. Whereas the reality is, the customer is the only one that's experiencing what that experience is like end to end. And quite often it's a big red traffic light, right? So you can understand what the end to end customer experience is like, if you can understand the nature of that demand, and if you can make sure that you've got your customer facing people in there. Right, helping define the problem as well as potential solutions. And then to, to James's point about trying to work out how much of this demand needs to be here at all and then did we resolve that demand in the first place? Doing those fundamental things will get you into a really powerful place and then you'll understand where the right place to go next. It might be about automation, it might be about using outsourcing, it could be a load of different things. But the bottom line is, if you do those simple things, You'll have really insight into what matters to your customers and you'll be on a really strong path to be able to attack a lot of waste that's currently taking up a lot of unnecessary cost. Once you do that, you'll free up capacity to do better, lots of other things with.

James: 29:32

Excellent.

Jimmy: 29:33

Thanks for your time today Sean, it's been really useful some fantastic insights into a customer experience You've recently set up your own consultancy service economics. Do you wanna give us the the quick 32nd pitch on service economics in case anyone listening to us wants to find out a bit more? We will put a link, in the blurb as well.

@Sean: 29:53

Thanks very much. So, so service economics, our. Basic focus is, is helping our clients deliver better services at a lower cost. We've touched on a lot of the ways that we go about doing it. So our background is

James: 30:05

um,

@Sean: 30:06

Rob has come from industry side working in places like Aviva, Rob Wilson. I've spent the last 25 odd years helping lots of different brands and lots of different sectors improve that. We don't think that consultants can transform their clients, right? We think we can bring experience and capacity in to help those clients understand what needs improving. And then our job as we see it is to help equip them, help them build the skills, help them build the capability so that they can actually lead the transformation themselves. Because we've seen a lot of these types of exercises end up being very expensive, taking a lot of time, and Delivered by outsiders. Whereas we don't think that's the right way to do it. So that's a big part of what we do. And that's sort of three kind of focus areas are around people's and operations, business processes and technology. Okay, super. Thank you very much. Sean,

30:52

We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast from purpose to corporate jargon, but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well. Easier said than done. So if you've got. Unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck, if your backlogs are out of control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver, we can help. If you need to improve your performance, your team's performance or your organization's, get in touch at jimmy at jobdonewell. com or james at jobdonewell. com.