Episode 5: How to build a customer-centric culture that actually lasts with Michel Stevens

In this episode of CX Matters, host Bram De Vos sits down with Michel Stevens to explore one of the hardest questions in business today: how do you actually embed customer centricity into an organization, instead of just talking about it?

From leadership mandate to micro CX leaders on the front line, the conversation digs into what separates organizations that genuinely live customer experience from those that treat it as a quarterly report. Michel challenges the idea that CX is a "grassroots" movement, makes the case for capabilities over maturity models, and explains why following your gut still matters in a world obsessed with data.

Through stories about claims processes that should take two days instead of ten, B2B leaders who read customer feedback every morning before opening their inbox, and the difference between leaders who say they care and the ones who prove it when things get hard, the discussion reveals what real customer centricity looks like inside the walls of an organization.

A candid and practical conversation about leadership, culture, training, and what it takes to make customer experience part of the daily rhythm of a business.

Key findings from the episode

• Customer centricity needs both top and bottom. Senior leadership has to endorse and live it, but it also has to live in the walls of the organization through everyday decisions.
• CX is a moving target, not a destination. You don't "become" customer centric. You practice it, the same way you practice agile.
• Think capabilities, not maturity. Maturity implies an endpoint. Capabilities can be built, stretched, and applied continuously.
• Leadership mandate is non-negotiable. Without it, CX projects burn energy and go nowhere. Michel walks away from projects without it.
• Watch what leaders do, not what they say. The "go to gemba" test reveals whether a leader actually walks the floor and engages with real customer interactions.
• Follow your gut sometimes. Data is powerful, but over-reliance on dashboards can suppress the human judgment that makes great CX possible.
• Train continuously, not once. CX training is a series of interventions and nudges, not a single workshop. People need course corrections to stay sharp.
• Build micro CX leaders. Empower individuals to make the right call in real situations rather than scripting every interaction.
• Use feedback in two loops. The inner loop solves the individual customer's problem. The tactical loop tackles the top three recurring issues, week after week.
• Introspection is the new differentiator. As efficiency and innovation become easier to copy, the organizations that know who they are and what matters to them are the ones that will stand out.
• Customer centricity is the most fun strategy. Cheapest is a race to the bottom. Most innovative gets caught up in an instant. Closest to the customer is where meaning and competitive edge meet.

Learn how Hello Customer turns feedback into business improvements: https://www.hellocustomer.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Hello, welcome to CX Matters, the podcast powered by Hello Customer. My name is Bram de Voss, and I'm your host for today. At Hello Customer, we help organizations truly listen to their customers. We bring together feedback from surveys, reviews, and customer interactions, and we analyze that input to understand what really drives satisfaction or dissatisfaction for that matter. Most importantly, we help companies prioritize what to act on first. And in the course of that work, we've seen something interesting. We see organizations measure a hell of a lot. They are measuring delivery times and response times and, of course, satisfaction scores, MPSs, and so forth. There are dashboards all over the place. And yet, very often, that measuring becomes just measuring. It is something that happens once a quarter. It's something that needs to be ticked, some box that needs to be ticked. It doesn't always shape daily decisions. It doesn't always change behavior or even culture. And so the question we're going to explore today is: how do you embed customer centricity into your organization? Not as a report, not as a project, but as a way of working. And to delve into that matter, I am joined today by a distinguished guest, Michelle Stevens. Michelle is co-director of CXM Academy and managing partner of GoSyX. And he works with organizations across Europe on real customer-centric transformations. He's also the host of a podcast called Table 7, warmly recommended. And he combines strategic thinking with hands-on operational change. And I think he's the perfect person to discuss how CX can become embedded rather than simply discussed. So welcome to the podcast, Michelle.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Thank you so much, Brahman. What an introduction. That is very kind of you. I'll hope to live up to it.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

I'm sure you will. I have no doubt whatsoever. Michelle, we've been um engaged in the project together uh recently. And a question that arose according or along that project was: what is actually needed to have customer centricity truly embedded in an organization? What does it need for an organization to bring customer centricity to actual results? Is it something in the leadership that should change? Is it rather distributed over all the employees? What is it that makes it successful according to your experience?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Yeah. That's a great question. I really like that. And I get them, I get I get that question quite often because it is a vital one as well. I think it's uh it's both. It's uh you need the uh leadership uh to really endorse it, to really live it and believe it. Uh whereas you also know that customer centricity is everybody's responsibility. So you it also needs to live in the walls of the organization. And that is not easy. I think that you need to start with a good vision. What do we and what is customer experience for us? What does it mean for our strategy? Because if, for instance, uh your focus is on acquisition as a business, then that should be reflected in your customer experience strategy as well, of course. And also looking further, what does that mean for us as an organization? What does it mean for our brand? How do we position customer experience and how does it add value? Because CX for me is about three things. First of all, it is about value for the customer, and that is something that everybody understands rather easily, right? It is, yeah, it needs to bring, it needs to add something for our customers. But we are not philanthropical organizations either. We are also a business and we try to deliver value for the organization as well, and that needs to be in balance. And if everything goes well, that customer experience is also delivering value to your brand. It needs to strengthen your brand. And that is only something that you can do from a leadership position. That is not something that Joe at reception will actually be able to do on his own. Uh, but I do believe that everybody in the organization, whether they work on the front line or they work in finance or in marketing, it doesn't matter. They also need to live that customer experience promise, what it actually means for our organization. And I always tell organizations that you need micro CX leaders. Micro CX leaders are people who really understand what customer experience is, what it is for your organization, and they live it. They are able to make decisions for their own and actually bring to life that vision that a leadership has and bring it to life in the organization. And that one is vital.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

How how often do you see those three elements combined? Or is there kind of a maturity curve? If you if you if you go into a new project, a new organization, can you assess really quickly, okay, they've got this, they haven't got that, that's what we should work on?

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Yeah. I get that that's also a question that I get very often. Like, what is the maturity of our organization? I like to think about uh capabilities instead. So it's not a maturity has that promise in itself that it there is an endpoint. But in CX there is no endpoint. You cannot be customer-centric at the end of it. It is something, it's a moving target, and that is something that people need to understand as well. It's the same with agile. You cannot be agile. It's something that you practice, it's something that you believe in, it's something that lives inside the walls of an organization. Same with customer experience. It's not something that you apply. There are principles that you apply, there are things that you do, but it's not that one day all of a sudden you wake up and you go, Yes, we are customer-centric and we have a great customer experience. It's a moving target because your customers are changing, other organizations are changing as well, and you as an organization, you are moving as well. And that's also the reason why sometimes people can get really frustrated when they are measuring their NPS, for instance, and after a while they do a lot of things and the NPS doesn't really move. And I said, very often that's a good thing because that means that you're keeping up with your competitors or staying ahead, depending on what your score is, but you're actually progressing as well. So that's actually also a good thing. Um so yeah, it is something that moves, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

And if you if you go into an organization and you say, okay, it's a moving target, in a way that's demotivating because people would like to reach something and indeed become mature. Do you give them kind of milestones, give them some something to reach for and that they can obtain that could that they can get to that point and feel motivated, like, okay, let's now take the next step. Do you use that strategically or tactically in what in your work? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

So there are things, of course, as I said, it's about capabilities, right? And that is something that you can build on. Very often when I enter in an organization that has a low maturity, as you would call it, or low capabilities, then you see that uh customer experience are really about projects, right? We run a project here, we run a project there. Uh, this project will improve our CRM, for instance. I don't know. Uh that when will allow us to personalize our communications on the website, for instance. So they're all our uh yeah, projects basically. And then the next step is that when these things become standardized, right? So it's not just about uh initiatives on their own, but it's something there is there is something uniting them, right? Uh and that is a second phase. And in the third phase, of course, then things really fall together, fall into practice, and you can see that people are actually living it. And and of course, you don't go from two to three in like five days or even five, not even five months, in all honesty. It's something that just happens because people don't know the alternative. What is the alternative, right? And I think that that is when you have a customer-centric culture, when people are so deep in it that they don't see the the alternative anymore. Yeah, it's something that we do, it's something that we apply every single day.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

It's almost logical. It goes without saying to reach that stage.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Yeah, why would we wait for five days to process that claim, for instance? I just had a conversation about claims management, and um, there was an argument, it was a very good argument, about um uh extending the um uh the claims process to 10 working days. Okay. And I said, well, yeah, sure, there are a lot of valid reasons to extend it to 10 working days because that is practical, et cetera, et cetera. But put yourself in the shoes of that customer, what does he or she actually want? Well, they come with a problem and they want to have it fixed as fast as possible, for sure, but they want clarity as well. They want to know where are my expects, what can I expect from this organization? And that needs to be in line with what the brand also promises. So I was actually making the counter-argument. I was like, yeah, well, you don't need to go to 10 working days. Basically, you should be going to like two at max or something. What was the reaction to that? It's easy for you to say they they've got to achieve that. That cannot be easy. No, that of course that's not easy. If it was easy, it would be called football, right? Uh but you need to strive to that. You need to uh put yourself in the shoes of your customer and understand, okay, so what does that mean for that customer? What is the job to be done for that customer, and how are we going to help them achieve it? Because it this was a this is a B2B organization, right? And the question, so the question was, what do customers do with us? And the question, actually, the answer to that is very simple. You try to make that customer as successful as possible in their business. There are also uh business owners, they're small businesses who try to make a living by reselling your products, basically. So, what are you trying to do? No, you're not trying to make another booking of product X. No, you're actually trying to make that person successful in what they do. That is the goal. And if you look at it with that perspective, then you realize, okay, then it doesn't make any sense that we have a very long claims process. We just want to make sure that the goods get returned. And of course, and if it's not justified, we'll have a discussion about that, obviously. Uh, but you need to think in a different way. And that only happens in in the in the third phase that I see what you mean.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Let me go back or circle back to to one of the questions from the beginning. Is you have many projects that you've you've done, that you've run over the years. With the expertise that you have now, is there some kind of selection criteria that you use to say, okay, this is a project I'm going to do, this is a project I'm you know gonna let pass by. Is there something like that happening in in the brain of Michelle Stevens when he's selective?

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Absolutely. Yeah. So back in the day, I was um this um this young guy, I still had my hair and everything, uh, and I believed that CX was a grassroots thing, that uh people on the front line could actually initiate customer centricity, because back then it was customer centricity. Uh we could we could initiate it and we could drive it through the organization. I had that very strong belief that this is something that you feel inside and you need to push it to the organization. You need to persuade marketing that they need to do the right thing, right? You need to uh persuade um the people from operations to do the right thing, et cetera, et cetera. So it was always about persuading uh other departments to chime in. In hindsight, I regret regrettably, I I realize that CX is not a grassroots thing. It is something that needs to be endorsed by the senior leadership. Uh you need that mandate.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

So they select that. You you really go for that in the beginning. You have to have that conversation with them. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

If there is no mandate, there is no point in running it. Um, I mean, yeah, with all the good intentions, uh, if your senior leadership and this could be the owners of the organization, uh, this could be the CEO, if they don't believe in it, if they don't see the value of a good customer experience, well, good luck. But I wouldn't bother. You can try, of course, there are there are plenty of people who will prove me wrong for sure, but that is not worth my my time and and and dedication.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Um okay, then I've got a follow-up question for you, because it that sounds really logical what you say. Um but I cannot count the times that I've met leaderships who uh claim that they really are into this customer-centric thing and they really mean it. But you're really not sure whether they really mean it because i finding out means it's going to have to hurt somewhere, and if you keep going when it hurts, then you know they really mean it. I find that a lot of leaderships are in a way suffocating teams because they say that they are all pro-customer centricity, but when push comes to shove, they are not, and they abandon their teams. How do you establish the the honesty, if you like? I mean, I I think that those leaders very often believe it themselves when they say that they believe in customer centricity, but how do you establish that it's actually for real that these guys or these ladies are gonna go the full the full mile, they're gonna really do it? How do you establish that?

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:39

Do you have a way to find out? Do you have some kind of uh machine that I can borrow from you?

SPEAKER_00 13:43

No, no, that's mine. Uh no, but there are some there are some telltale signs. Uh you can never know for sure if somebody is honest with you, yes or no. Um, so you will only know when when the the going really gets tough. That's when you will know for sure if somebody really uh is um yeah, walking the walk and and talking the talk. Um so that's only then. But there are some telltale signs. Like for instance, um I know that um I come from a Lean Six Sigma background, right? So I'm hardcore uh calculations about quality and everything. And one of the things I uh I learned very early on was uh go to Gemba, go to the work floor and see what happens. And that is something I practice myself. I I really live by it. Whenever I start a new program or a new project, I want to see where customer interactions take place or where things get made actually, if it's a manufacturing uh organization. I like to see that because that is where you will actually see what is going on on the workflow. So, for instance, if you are in a logistics environment and and somebody, I don't know, bumps uh an order of a customer, right? So the boxes are damaged and everything, what happens then? Are people going to proactively do something about that or not? So whenever uh a leader goes to the workfloor or shop floor and they walk around, I observe like, how is that person behaving? Is that person behaving like somebody who is a tourist in his or her own organization? Like, okay, so I don't see compliance there. Uh he's not using the script, uh, et cetera, et cetera. So they look for defaults or deviations from what would normally happen. Then I go like, I'm not sure if that person is really uh living uh the brand him or herself, but and is actually also knows what is going on on the front line, what people go through every single day. Uh whereas people, leaders who are there to listen and to understand and not just to reply, then I think, yeah, then you have somebody who is willing to go all the way, who is able to go all the way, because probably he or she has uh the endorsement of the of the people on the work floor as well. And uh yeah, I think that it's all about credibility, right? Um it's is it that a credible leader? Is that somebody that uh exemplifies our brand and um yeah, can show me what it's really all about? I've followed that version.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

I think that that's a great answer. I I can definitely relate to it. And it's a good suggestion to say, you know, just use your powers of observation, see it in in in real life. Now, give me an example, if you will, Michelle, of of you said, you know, it's only when the going gets tough that you see whether it was for real or not. Give us an example of the going that got tough when when it really became difficult to maintain the efforts to keep going. Give us an example of that and how you made it through.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Yeah. Um there is actually an example that I lived myself. Um it was very early on. I was responsible for the uh customer service, uh large customer service. And um uh we had this um this very uh difficult situation where we had a returns process and people were sending us stuff back, and this was pre-e-commerce, right? So this is ages ago. And I think chickens still had teeth and and stuff like that. Um but um so yeah, so our our returns process was very cumbersome. It was very long, it was very tedious, there were a lot of things that we need to do. And so people, whenever they return something, it took us uh quite a long time to actually let them know yes, we will send you a new device or we will uh refund you or something like that, right? Well, I'm ending up with all claims processes these days, but anyway, so but that's the that's reality. And then I had a this epic of epic fight with finance. Like I said, yeah, I want to I want to make that easier. I want it uh whenever that things, that parcel gets scanned in the post office, then we need to ship out a new one because that customer will either uh use our product or our competitors. And if we uh are able to do it in like only 10 days later, he will let you know, yeah, maybe we'll refund you or whatever. That person will already have another device of our competitor, probably.

SPEAKER_02 18:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

So I had this epic fight with finance to prove them like, hey guys, this is actually worth it. And they said, well, maybe we get um bricks sent back, right? It's like these concrete bricks or cinder blocks or whatever. I said, Yeah, maybe people will do that. But um, what's the 99.5% of other people going to do? Who wouldn't do that? Who wouldn't do that? Yeah, exactly. And they will still use our products. And actually, in the end, yes, there was a percentage of people that were sending us bricks or whatever they had lying in the house, but for the majority of people, we actually did the right thing. And that takes some kind of belief in the system because back then I couldn't prove that what I was saying, I was just I had this gut feeling. Um, and of course, you can make small tests and and predict what's going to happen, but the answer is not always in the data. Sometimes you need to follow your gut, your gut feeling. And I think that that is something that we don't do often enough anymore. We we rely on our data and we think we can measure anything, but sometimes you need to follow your gut and do what's right for the customer.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Yeah, we we have to we have to stay human, right? We are we are so totally ingrained in in data. We believe in that. Data is God, right? But yeah, the thing is sometimes you need to follow your gut to, you know, when the going guts tough, follow your gut. That could be that could be the tip. Um now I know that you've been you've been in customer experience for for a long time, and I think that you're you're a great believer in in good training, right? Train your people right, make them understand what is, and I know that you have a great program for that. What is your approach to that? What works when you want to train people in in being more customer-centric, and what doesn't work?

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah. I think there is uh one thing that you need to know is that training is not a one-time event. Right? It's a series of interventions that you need to do um to make sure that uh you have enough course corrections that people actually understand what it's all about, right? So, first step, what I would do is to get people in touch with what is customer centricity, what is customer experience, what do we mean with that, right? And how does it impact you as a person and what is the impact of you on that customer experience, even if you work in finance, have nothing to do, right? Between quotes, nothing to do with the customer. You still have an impact on that customer. If you don't have any impact on the customer, then I would be very afraid of what you're doing because everybody has some kind of connection with the customer, right? Either you are serving a customer or helping a customer, or you're helping the people who are helping customers, right? That's that's very binary. One or the two, right? Either you help customers or you remove any obstacles or you add any value. That's what you do. So it's uh it's about a series of interventions. So it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen with a training and it doesn't stop with training. It is every single time you need to be reminded, okay, this is how I can put whatever I've learned in the past or with this training, and I this is how I can put it into practice. So it's nudging people over and over again to do the right thing. And the right thing that needs to be clarified, what is the right thing? Because if you say the customer is always right or the customer is the king, then I'm bel I believe that you set up your people to fail. Because they don't, they know that the customer is not always right. Right. Everybody knows that, but still that that thing is out there that customer is king and you have not gone beyond the cliches then, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Yeah. If you say things like that. So that means that the trainings that you that you provide are really tailor-made then for the business so that they know what to do in particularly the situations that they are in. Is is that the case?

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah. So um, as I said, I I always try to create micro CX leaders. And to create micro CX leaders, you need to understand what customer experience is, what your impact is on it, and it cannot be Very presprict uh prescriptive, right? It's not like I'm going to prescribe that you need to uh say the name of the customer three times, for instance. No, I think that you need to enable people to um make observations about what is really going on here, right? What is that client or a customer really telling me? And how am I going to add value for that customer, right? While also attaining my uh organizational objectives, right? So those need to be in balance, right? And sometimes it will favor the customer, sometimes it will favor the organization.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

But people need to understand like But you believe in the individual, you believe in the autonomy, the empowerment of the individual. They can make the choices.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

100%. If you train people, right, if you explain, uh if you if you explain what CX is, if you give them the opportunity to make mistakes and then course correct, obviously, then I'm very sure that you will achieve uh an organizational culture where people are able to live the brand and live for the customer while still helping the organization to move forward. That is my very strong belief.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Um And tying into that, how do you see the role of feedback in that process, in that kind of becoming conscious of what the impact is of what you do on the experience of the customer? How do you assess that?

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Yeah, feedback is vital. I know that some leaders uh wake up in the morning. Well, they don't wake up in the morning and then read their feedbacks, but it becomes very quickly. Oh, they should, they should. Yeah, yeah. I had I had this um this uh great uh leader in Belgium um who actually um uh talked about very openly about how she reads uh feedback every morning. Whenever she gets into the office, first thing that she does she does is reading the feedbacks. What come what came in, what are the issues. So it it helps you to understand what is living with your customers, right? And there are two things that you need to do. First of all, you have the closed loop, right? The inner closed loop, and that is about that individual customer, what is the problem, and how are we going to solve it for that customer? But it also forces you to think about the tactical closed loop, right? So, what are the major themes that I see come coming back here? And I personally, what I always did was with my team, I always tackled the top three of problems that we have in the organization. So this is the feedback that came back, all right? Perfect. What is the top three? And how are we going to tackle that? And every single week we talked about the top three. How are we going to eliminate eliminate eliminate uh number one, number two, number three over and over again until one, two, three were solved, and then we started with a new one, two, three, obviously. But I believe that continuous improvement is vital to the survival of an organization. That doesn't mean that it's the only source of truth, right? You also, as an organization, you need to understand what is our long-term goal. I mean, you are doing this not just to improve whatever you had yesterday, but also with a long-term vision. So it needs to go hand in hand to make a real a real difference.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Is there something that you would say that is changing, is shifting at this particular moment in time? I know that we as people always believe that we live in pivotal times, right? That's the way that we perceive things. That's a psychological thing happening. But in your expertise, can you see something shifting in the field of customer experience? Or in other words, you know, going forward two to three years, what do you expect to happen?

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Yeah. Love that question because that really ties into what I very strongly believe, and that is that we live in probably one of the most exciting times in uh in the history. I mean, probably other people of other generations will have said the same, but I really believe that we have every single piece of technology uh that we live in the right time, uh the right time to actually make a fundamental change in the life of people. I really believe that. I think that we have all the tools at our disposition to make a difference in the world. That means that if you would ask me, I'm really crappy at looking at the future because I try to look at what is in front of me and make something out of that. But if you would ask me, where are we going, then I really believe that organizations that think about what who are we as an organization and what is important to us and to our customers are the ones who are going to win. Um, these are the ones that will stand out. All the rest will disappear in the averageness. So introspection is is is what you believe is is crucial at this point in time. This this is what you need because you need to understand who you are as an organization, because otherwise you will become average. I mean, it's so easy to attain the average right now that uh for all re for all kinds of reasons, that uh there is this sea of blandness. I mean, I'm a very active person on LinkedIn. Well, I think so. Uh and and I really there is something that rubs me the wrong way if I if you look at social media, they go like, yeah, but this was AI generated, even in comments. I mean, just be honest about yeah, just be honest about what you what you want, what you think, just be honest about that. And let's let's start with that. Even if you're completely wrong, I will still engage in a conversation with you, as you should. I mean, I'm wrong all the time as well. I mean, but the thing is that, yeah, it's in the friction that you find diamonds, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:34

That's where the energy is. Yeah. That's where the energy is. Yeah. Yeah. If if you maybe you've already answered that question with what you just said, but still, is there one piece of practical advice that you would give to organizations today that want to strengthen, really genuinely strengthen their customer centricity in their fabric, in their the true fabric of what they do, in their organization, in their teams, in their structures? What would that one hint be? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

I would say start understanding your capabilities. Start understanding Explain that. Yeah. So I would start um with four four questions. Um Do we have the skills to make a customer experience come to life? Do we have the skills for that? Those could be practical skills, those could be technical skills. Practical skills, do we have the skills to, I don't know, do the service recovery paradox, for instance, right? If you don't know what it's about, uh, I will gladly explain, but make that happen. Or it could be the very technical skills like um we want to implement uh some kind of new technology. Do we have the skills for that? Right. Then another question is uh are we are we willing to become customer-centric? Do we really want this? And that is a both a rational thing and an emotional thing. The emotional thing is what is how I got drawn into customer experience, right? It is because doing right by the customer is just the right thing to do. A customer-centric world is a great world to live in, right? That's my belief. That's the emotional call. And that but there is also a rational call to it. If we focus on the customer, how much more money are we going to make? Are we going to acquire more customers? Are we going to retain new uh new customers as well? So those are very rational decisions. So you need to make a business case uh out of that. So skilled, willing, and then of course able. Able is about how what do our processes look like? Are they customer-centric? Um, are we able to remove any barriers? Um, or is that not something in our structure? Is that not something in our organization, right? So, how are we are we as leaders going to make sure that people who are living in our walls, how are we going to enable them to do the right thing? Yes, whatever that right thing is. And then the fourth thing is how aligned are we on what customer experience and customer centricity is? Are we aligned? If we say customer centricity, do you mean the same thing as I do? And if we don't, let's have a discussion about that. Because that is also something when I talk about customer experience or customer journeys, I bet that your vision of customer journey is different from mine. So let's talk about what do we actually want to achieve with that tech with that technique? What do we want to achieve with customer experience? What is our end goal? And if you have those four things and you have the discussion about those four things and understand how capable are we on those four elements, then you will actually be able to jump much for further and far and faster than uh ever before.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Great piece of advice. You have been in that business for a long time. You're still excited by it. Why is that, Michelle? What what is it that makes you tick? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

I think I am an eternal optimist. Yeah. I I really think I am an eternal optimist. And I think that customer experience is very often about optimism. Optimism about the future, uh, optima uh uh optimist about that there is value in there. Um and I think let's take a look at the alternatives. So if it's not about customer centricity, if it's not about becoming very customer-centric and close to your customers, what is the alternative? Well, you can become the cheapest. Well, that's also a strategy. I know that it's not my kind of strategy because then you need to go go on and calculate pennies on the dollar or pennies on the euro. Um, and that is not a fun business to be in. The downside is also that there's only one who can be the cheapest, right? Um so that's not a great place to be in if you're number two and you need to catch up with number one. The other alternative is that we are the most innovative organization. So we have the best product. Now, there can be organizations or industries where there are multiple very innovative organizations. There's only one with the very best product, but you can still have that image of, yeah, we are very leading edge with our technology. But these days you can get uh caught up like in an instant, right? So that's also not a great place to be. I think it's about customer centricity. It's actually the most fun one, the most closest to me. And I also think it's uh about combining having a great product with a good customer experience or being very inexpensive or efficient with what you do with your resources and customer centricity. I think that modern day businesses have a combination, somewhat combination of both. Uh, but the most customer-centric one is the most fun one to begin. It's a fun one. Yeah, I mean, no? It gives most uh most meaning to life. I mean, I don't get up I don't get up in the morning to to build a uh the cheapest organization in the world.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Uh no, that's it chimes totally with with who you are, and I think that that optimism vibe is definitely there. So thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you for uh thank you for being here on this podcast, Michelle. It was uh very enlightening. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting us. That's all we have time for today. Uh if you'd like to keep uh updated on our podcasts and webinars and all the other information, do visit us at hellocustomer.com or drop us a line. My name is Bram at hellocustomer.com. I'd be happy to hear your responses. Always nice to connect. Thank you so much for now. Thank you on behalf of Michelle and on behalf of Hello Customer. Thank you. Have a good day. Bye-bye.