Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 11 Episode 2 - People before Profits - Annette Franz

There is one content producer in the CX Community we have wanted to have as a guest for some time; Annette Franz. As a consultant, author, trainer and mentor Annette has spent a slice of her career working with clients to improve outcomes for their customers, colleagues and communities. This was a key part of our topic of this CX Superhero podcast episode. In conversation with Lexden's Christopher Brooks, Annette shares her journey through CX and why putting people at the heart of a CX transformation is essential to succeed. 

This is just one of the insightful and brilliantly written chapters from Annette's latest business book, 'Built to Win'. The discussion covers the origins of the book, its novel structure and taps into some of the themes which Annette brings to life with examples and practice templates. 

To condense the highlights from Annette's impressive career into a short podcast isn't possible, but we thank her for her generosity to share so much in the time we did have. We hope you as inspired as we are. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Customer Experience Superheroes. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your host throughout this series, where we introduce you to some exceptional talent from across the globe. We bring you those who inspire, those who inform, and those who are ideas generators. We've spoken to many individuals across the course of this podcast, but perhaps this one is slightly different. This is someone who I personally have been a huge fan of for many years, finding the commentary she shares both practical but also progressive. And as times have changed, so has she. Annette Friends is an author, a consultant, a speaker, and very much a voice of the world of customer experience. We caught up with Annette to hear about her excellent new CX strategy book, Built to Win. So here we are with uh Annette Franz, one of the industries certainly most well known, but also uh the most admired in terms of her consistency and uh constancy of making sure the customer is representing the organization. Annette, welcome to the CX Superheroes Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

No, it's great. We want to get on to um talk about your Smash Hit book, Built to Win. Um but before we do, there may be a few people have been living under rocks out there. So can you and I'll say this carefully, can you take us back to where it all began? Well, you seem to have always been with us in customer experience, which is a great comfort. But can you give us an appreciation of where you started and your path to where you are now?

SPEAKER_02 2:04

Absolutely. I have always been with you. I started 31 years ago when I was four. So that is a joke that a former uh president at a company they worked at said when he read my bio and didn't realize I'd been in the industry for this long. Yeah, but I I started at JD Powered Associates in 1992. So yes, I have been around for a while and it's been quite the careers, you know, evolving from market research where we talked about customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Customer experience wasn't even uh a word at that point. Through, you know, working through some of the major VOC vendors running their consulting services organizations, have had three stints on the client side working in customer experience strategies. So there's been a lot going on in the last 30 years, but about seven years ago, I decided it was time to go out on my own and started my own consulting firm. And I work with the clients really on Soup to Nuts CX strategy.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Hey, so you come to this with a lot of authority. Then I'm sure you've seen people you've worked with and people in on the consultancy side who have quite a thin wedge of experience when it comes to C and maybe they've got a heavy customer service background or marketing, less so operations, but you seem to have sat at the table in many of the different seats. Are there roles you've not had and are there roles that you think perhaps give a better view of customer experience than others?

SPEAKER_02 3:40

This is true. I've done sales, I've done marketing, I've done, I've been around the horn there, that's for sure. Have not done product design, but have been involved. Obviously, if you're going to do voice of the customer and you're doing the work and the market research, you're doing that. I've certainly been involved in that. Some of the things I've been involved in tangentially, but but sales was probably my least favorite. So I'm fine if I never do that again. Although as a business owner, you're doing that pretty much every day in and day out. But well, what else haven't I done? I don't know. There are probably things that I haven't done, and that's okay. But it's always been important just to really have a strong understanding of what's going on around the organization, right? You can't be a solid customer experience professional and just live in this vacuum and this lane, right? You've got to make sure that you're involved and touching other parts of the organization and really have a solid understanding of what you know operations look like.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

I find that I've spoken to a couple of kind of newly graduated executives who in organizations are, oh, I'm now off to product design, I'm now off to compliance. And I'm like, my God, honestly, lap it up because to have the ability to go and sit in each of those functions before you decide where you can add value, it's not something everyone has. And as much as I I guess you don't want to think there isn't any, there's always going to be institutional bias depending on where you come from, which is why I want to go. I want to come on to the research because obviously in research, we're typically known as being quite introverts. So how how did you back back then when you know customer wasn't really mentioned unless it was with the word sales afterwards, did you go from where you were to having the customer and improving the customer experience recognized as something an organization should do? Because it seems like a small change now, but it's a massive shift from where we were.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

How did you when you work for JD Power and Associates? That's the first step in your career. That's pretty much what you do. And I remember when people had asked me, What do you do? What is JD Power? So what do you do? And it was exactly that. You just said you exactly what you just said working with clients to listen at the time I was listening to the customer. I would always go out to clients and say, Hey, let's listen to your employees too. And they would say, Ah, we'll do that later. And let's we see how that's played out, right? But we listen to our clients' customers, and we take what we hear and use that to improve the business. I remember there were so many times where it's funny because people talk about elevator pitch, and I would often be asked that while I'm standing in an elevator, and I'd be like, you know what? Work with companies to help them improve their business so that they can grow just in a nutshell into like a one-sentence kind of quick thing. And that's what it was back then. It's certainly evolved over the years, but I but we still can say the same thing. It's just it's yeah, the experience itself. We definitely still have work to do.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

So I don't know if I answered your question, but we definitely are working. It is, I guess, with JD Powell, you've got that position of authority because you're you're leading the conversation on customers. Now, what I find interesting is you take something like a recognized research house like that, or you move on to some of the the voice of the customer technology platforms. One of the areas I'm really interested to understand, and I'm sure you've done work on this, is the kind of so what? These are all the things I should do. How do I do it? Turn turning that insight into action, which almost feels like your career has moved a bit from okay, I collect the insight, I'll work with the vendors to show how you can analyze the insight, and then you've ended up either working in organizations or as a consultant, helping them turn insight into action. So would you say that's the biggest challenge still in CX, getting that insight into action?

SPEAKER_02 7:35

I I think so. It really is. And I think unfortunately, I think there's still too many companies that are just checking the box. Either they're not listening or they're not doing this work, or they're still just checking the box. I talked to somebody the other day about the feedback that they were getting and what they were doing with it. And the only feedback that they were getting and how they were using it was they were asking for comments, and how they were using it was just to make sure that those comments get put up on Google for Google reviews and things like that. And I was like, there's more to it. There's more to it than that. You have this richness, great, you've got this feedback in customer in the form of customer comments, but you've got to analyze it, you've got to dig deep into that, and you've got to use what you are hearing there. And sadly, they were just way more focused on how do I make sure that these people just check the box and yeah, put this out on Google reviews. And then there's still way too many companies doing just that. So yeah, it is. And a lot of that has to do with they don't have the right skill set in-house. I think there's people who think that they're doing the right thing, but I think if you don't have somebody who's a you know, customer experience professional, whatever you know, that may be, whether it's an analyst or it's a VOC person or it's a whatever it is, if you don't have someone there who's really setting up how we've got the platform, we've got the feedback, we've got the data. Now, what are we gonna do with it? And really setting up that whole process, that whole closed loop process, it's not gonna go anywhere. And I think there's still, and honestly, that's part of the catalyst for writing my blog starting back in 2011 or writing the books and everything, is that I think there's still so many people out there who are so new to this field or who just got tapped on the shoulder and said, Hey, you're gonna, you're gonna get us some surveys, get us some feedback, you know. And then that's it. They really don't know what that means, and they're capturing feedback that doesn't, it's not actionable or it doesn't mean anything. Or once they get it, they're just not doing anything with it. And so I think there's a lot of education to still be had out there.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

So I see a really healthy connection between your two. I think most of us have got a copy of customer understanding, which helps us kind of you know why you should listen to customers, how you should do it, and what you should do with it. But then it feels as if built to win is almost like it's the older sibling. It's it's kind of now that now let's get serious about it. Okay, now you need let's get to the top table and let's build customer experience as a business practice, it's a strategy. You need to really understand you're going to change a culture if you're gonna be a success here. So is there a natural evolution or is it just a happy coincidence?

SPEAKER_02 10:17

No, there is definitely an evolution, and I I I hint at a lot of the things in customer understanding that I talk about in Built to Win. And certainly customer understanding is one of the chapters in Built to Win and one of the principles. So, yeah, there is there is a healthy connection there, and it was the right evolution, I think. I think you can go from hey, as I say, customer understanding is the cornerstone of centricity, but in order to be customer centric, there's so many more things that need to happen around that and before that to make that happen. And there's got to be this foundation in place, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

And I love with built to when you start out quite bullish. You know, I think there's an expression of no shrinking violence here. You make it quite clear if you want to pick this up and use it as a bit of holiday, holiday time fodder, great. But actually, this is gonna really make you challenge your organization. And I I worry there'll be some people who are kind of like after page one go, okay, this is this is serious stuff. I thought this was gonna be a light ring.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

It's exactly the book. Yeah, no, seriously. I mean, I I sometimes you have to hit people over the head, and if you got to hit them over the head with the book, that's even better. But I think the first chapter, I think it is, I haven't looked at it. It is the first paragraph in the first chapter, not the introduction, not in the early preamble stuff, but the first chapter is where I liken customer centricity to teenage sex, right? So we dive right in right from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

So I'm glad you brought that one up. But also you get to that point. I mean, you're sitting around the board, and we hear so much about organizations saying, or certainly articles about you have to demonstrate the ROI and six. And I think you've got a couple of chapters which actually say, hang on, profits follow people. People must come before profits. And actually, we need to put our people before our measurements. These are these are things if you're sitting around as an FD or a south, you're gonna say, hang on a look, I don't quite get this. So these are I'm not saying red line topics, but they are topics that make people go, what are you saying there? You recognize they're gonna create a little bit of not confrontation, but certainly engagement in terms of I'm not with you. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

And really, if you write a book and it's a book where everybody goes, Yeah, I'm there, I'm there. You want you you want to write a book where people think differently. And I think I outlined that in the introduction where I say, I wrote this because I want people to think about this differently. And I think if you don't smack them in over the head, or if you don't put some statements out there that, like you said, not controversial, but just things that make people go, huh, what does that mean? And how do I do that? Why is that important? Just to get people to think differently. We're so we don't just all fall in line with the same stuff and nothing changes.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Now, I wonder if this was deliberate or if it's just how I've read it, but obviously, with customer understanding, you kind of line up the customer and you stand next to them. You anyone who thinks of putting customers first and how we do it would reach for that or talk to yourself about how's best to do this. Yeah. When I start to read through the structure of built to win, I think it's chapter seven before we really start getting into the customer. Before then, it feels much more like you're sparring with the business leaders on their conventional ways of doing business. Is that deliberate that you've kept the customer from the business?

SPEAKER_02 13:47

It is because and people always ask me, like, are the principles in order? And I'm like, loosely, the first one is about culture, and the second one is about leadership, and it it's that's where it starts. If somebody just asked me, why do transformations fail? Because the cult and the leadership isn't supporting it, they're not committed, they're not aligned. So definitely I needed to hit that point home before we dove into the customer. It really is that those two things are so critical to the foundation of the business and foundation of a transformation that I've talked to people, I've had people call me and say, Hey, will you do journey mapping workshops for us? And I've actually turned them off from doing it because I've asked them, well, do you have the budget? Do you have leadership support? What's the culture like? If you get this feedback, is it and this data from these journey mapping workshops? What's going to be done with it? Oh, good point. You make a good point. You know what? Usually when we do this stuff, it just sits in a box or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, then let's not waste time or money doing it because it's pointless. And so that was really the point that I wanted to hit home before we got into the customer. And I think also having the fact that we talk about in the book the employees before the customer, I think is very intentional as well, because I believe and it's been proven that the employee experience drives the customer experience. And so we can't forget about them in this equation.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

I was so glad you say that because we've got clients where we've been working for a long time and actually there's no point doing journey mapping because it's a lot of effort and a lot of energy. Yeah. And it they're not going to necessarily haven't got the right culture, they haven't got the right support to actually have permission to drive that through to change. And I think that's I get frightened when I hear people say, Well, let's start with the journey map, let's understand where we are. That's not what you need to understand where you are on. Don't worry about it. That also is late later on. Exactly. What one one of the things that you provide throughout the book, which is really helpful, are these assessments. Are these what you practice already, or is this kind of a culmination of what you've been doing and you just were able to bring because they're very succinct. And you look at those, and I think if you're in the space that we are, you read, oh wow, yeah, that really hits the mark. That one. Are they new? Is it a new tool you brought to the book, or do you use these?

SPEAKER_02 16:08

Uh, I do use these. I've actually got one on my site and at France.com that I use. I've used, I have other ones that I use when I first start working with clients. The ones in the book are there's one in there that's big that I do use with clients. There's smaller ones at the end of each chapter, you know, three or four questions that are a subset of the bigger one, but also relevant to the chapter and really sort of reflection thesis, aren't they? Yeah, strive some of the point for the chapter. Yeah, absolutely. But those assessments are really important. Absolutely. I think that we have this sense or we think we know what the business is like, we think we know what our leaders do, or we think we know what the culture's like, or we think we know these things about our business. But if we sit down and we answer these very direct and pointed questions, and it's funny because when people take that assessment on my website, it comes, the results come to me. And I just smile because I'm like, I wonder at the end of it, how many people think that they we thought our business was customer-centric, or we thought we had, but then answering all those questions and then seeing what the score is, I've not seen any great scores on those assessments. I will just say, and I'll read through the comments and I'll read through the things that they've the answers that they've selected. And just like, wow, we have a lot of work to do. We have our work cut out for us, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

So, do you think your book is for someone who has been around the block and kind of failed in glory, or is it for new business? Who do you think gets the most value from? Well, there's a there is a lifetime's worth of experience. There's loads of things you don't talk about, which are the things that you don't need to do that perhaps others are talking about. If you stay very pure to the book, you go a long way. But I wonder if if I'm naive and new in, am I gonna go, oh, I think there's some shortcuts here or different ways. Is this a book for people who have been burnt and gone, hang on, I know this works, I just keep getting it wrong because it feels like a really strict manifesto for success.

SPEAKER_02 18:19

Yeah, absolutely. I I think you make a great point. I think it is for newbies, but I also think it's for the folks you just described too, because it does work, right? You can be customer-centric, and there's there are proof points out there that it's the way the business should be. And if it is, then here's the outcomes, right? Absolutely. I think if someone's really frustrated and says, I know, I thought I knew what we needed to do, or I know this can work, reading the book, I think maybe we'll bring some of that a little bit tighter and go, Oh, I didn't think about that, or oh, we didn't do that, or whatever. So, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Excellent. And and I'm sure it'll be interesting to understand where you've practiced. I guess you've practiced across many different kinds of industry sectors and different geographies. So, so how did you square that? Because obviously, context and expectation changes wherever you go, and sometimes to find a framework that kind of fits. So, were you very conscious of that when you were writing?

SPEAKER_02 19:17

What's funny is somebody asked me yesterday, who's your ideal client? And I I remember when I first started my business, I had a call with somebody from Gartner. And it was somebody from a previous relationship. I'd known him through working at a couple of other companies, and we were just catching up. And he said, Who's who's your ideal client? And I said, if you have customers that you want to keep, you're my ideal client. End of story. And I think the crazy thing is that okay, so the book and the things that I've done and the things that I've learned, they work from industry to industry. It doesn't matter what you know. I've had clients in the construction industry, we've applied these principles. I've had clients in software and clients in retail, clients in automotive, right? Across the board, these these things work. It's really just it's not a one size fits all, but it is a hey, these there's these foundational principles, and we need to just adapt them to every situation. But these 10 principles that I write about in this book fit every industry. They really do, and every business, small, medium, large, whatever. I mean, if you start when you're a startup and I'm working with a couple of startups right now, we get these in place. Absolutely, you're going to you're gonna get yourself set up to grow and scale and keep the business customer-centric as you do that, you know. So I think that's a really key thing is that these principles in the book apply to any business. It's just we tweak it and we adapt to the specific scenario and the specific needs of that business as well.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

One thing I'm really interested in is obviously it feels like the enlightened leadership and also having the right culture are prerequisites that you need to have for success. Understand because they write down tools on everything else. We need to focus on that first. But then always within an organization is that healthy tension to say, I want to see some deliverable change. It doesn't have to be metrics, but I want to see some change. How do you square those two off? Because obviously the leadership piece and the culture takes a while to get to, and the business is impatient. So, what how do you deliver some results to give them enough to go? Okay, I can see where this is going.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Yeah, a great question. And I I gotta tell you, there's so many times when leaders ask me, can we get this done in three months? Six months? Can we do that? And I'm like, no, this is not something that's gonna happen in three or six months, but we can start to show you to your point quick wins. We've got to have some quick wins. And so it's just part, it's part of the process, part of the work that I do. When I first start working with a client, I'll do, I'll interview the leadership team, some employees, and some customers, and just really get. Get an assessment of baseline because they'll come to me and they'll say, Oh, here's the issue. We we we can't be customer centric just because of this, right? And I'm like, okay, hang on a second. Let me talk, let me talk to some people and see what's really going on here. And usually at the end of that, it's, oh, wow, missed that. Didn't see that coming, those kinds of things. And so we start from there, right? Build the roadmap from there. And then to answer your question, we identify where those quick wins are, but where can we start to show that this is really impactful, right? What are the things that we need to change immediately or that are manageable that can be changed within the next eight weeks or 12 weeks that we can immediately show results to not only the executive team, but also to the employees because the employees start to think, oh gosh, here we go again, or it's another transformation thing, it's another flavor of the month, whatever. Employees want to see that too, right? And so we need to start identifying those things that really can make an impact and make an impact quick and keep those things coming and keep communicating about what we're doing and what those things are that are the quick wins and what are the longer-term wins and what's going to take us two years to do kind of thing. So we need to set expectations. But having those conversations up front with the clients' leadership and employees and customers really sets the stage for what we can do. And what I'll usually do, and I've done this with the last several clients, is lay out the quarterly roadmap. Here's what we'll get done this quarter so that the expectation is set that okay, we probably won't have anything to show people tomorrow. But over the next 10 to 12 weeks, here's what we're gonna do. And we're gonna start communicating and talking about these things. And here's what we're gonna do next quarter, and here's how we're gonna start communicating about these things as well. And people can see the progress. And I always advocate, too, for having somewhere on the intranet or a portal or something where employees and leaders can track what the work that we're doing and the progress that we're making as well.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

I do get a sense reading this book that one of the things you must have encountered in over your time is perhaps the pressure that has put on the workforce to deliver the transformation. It feels like a lot of what you're doing is giving the workforce a life jacket. And some of the quotes you landed upon, you know, you you build people, people build your business, and work is uh is what a company does, workplace culture is what a is how a company does it. Seems to be that you're really pushing it. It feels like I'm maybe jumping the gun here, it feels like book three is going to be all about employee experience because there's so much more in this writing than I've seen before, Annette, in terms of your writing about the importance of bringing the workforce with you. And treating, you know, built to win means that they succeed as well, they feel engaged, they feel committed to it. Am I reading that correctly?

SPEAKER_02 24:55

You are absolutely right. Number one, yes, there is potentially a third book.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

And so I think you've got you have a lot to help people on in that space.

SPEAKER_02 25:04

Yeah, it is definitely employee leaning on that one. And yes, to your point, there's so there's a chart in the book. It's it when I talk about fix the culture, fix the outcomes, right? There's a chart in the book that shows that we've got this foundation, and that foundation, if that foundation in place, then the employees have a great experience. And here's what happens, and employees have a great experience, here's their outcomes, here's what it means for the customer, their outcomes, and here's the outcomes for the business. And I think that's such an important thing. I think, and I've seen this. I remember sitting in a leadership meeting with a client, and we were talking about how the employee experience drives the customer experience, and we have to take care of our people. And it's so important for leaders to take care of the people, and here's what that means. And the gentleman sitting next to me leaned over and he says, I'm so glad you said that. I never really thought about that. That employee experience drives customer experience. And I was just, I and it's not the first time I've heard that, and it just blew my mind. It just blew my mind. Who do you think delivers the customer experience? Ironically, one of that company's employees was the one who said, and it's in the book, and I've used that quote elsewhere. He was the one who said to me, We don't have the tools and the resources, our policies are outdated, our processes are broken to serve our customers the way that they deserve to be served. So employees get it. Employees get it. They're the ones who design and build and sell and service and do all these things. And without them, there's no need for a customer because who's doing all these things for the customer? So, yeah, so interesting connection there. And I think it's so important. I think I could have called the book or I could have talked about the book instead of customer-centric, being people-centric. To your point, I have chapters where I'm talking about people before product and metrics and all that. I could have said building a people-centric business, but I think the term customer-centric is such a big term out there that in order to be customer-centric, there's this precursor, there's this thing that has to be in place. And that is you can't take care of your customers if you don't take care of your employees and the employees first. And so that was the thinking on that. That I hope people make that connection. Yeah, she's talking about being customer-centric, but it really means that we take care of our people first.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

And I think I think there's another quote you got in there the way you touch people's lives, and it is about very much how you touch your employees. And if they're touched in a special way, then they're going to want to create magic moments for because I'm probably going to misquote him badly here, but someone said about uh Richard Branson's approach to leadership with culture, bring in brilliant people and then get the hell out of the way. Absolutely. That's how you do it.

SPEAKER_02 27:46

That has always been my approach. When I had a team of folks, you know, in the past, I was always like, you know what? I'm hiring these people, not to bring them in and micromanage them and watch over them like a hawk. I bring people in with different experiences, different value, the different value that they're bringing to the table. Everybody's got their lane. Bring them in and let them do it. They know what they need to do, just let them do it. Provide the foundation, provide the tools and the resources, the things that they need. And then, like you said, get out of the way and let them do their job.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

So I'm really interested to get your view on this because with that point in mind, about let people have their lane. Are there any parts of the organization that you feel are not brought in enough or brought to the top table? And it's a bit of a leading question because I'm thinking about operations here. Am I some of the organizations I've worked with where operations seem to sit behind because they're not the customer facing, they're the customer fulfilling functions. Do you think that they are still we are missed?

SPEAKER_02 28:47

Yeah, I agree. And I think, and it's funny because whenever I give my definition of what customer experience is, I always talk about what it is not. And one of the things that I say, what it is not, is it's not just about the front line. People in the back office, people who don't touch the customer face to face every day, are still a part of the customer experience. I mean, it's the person who designs the invoices, your accounts payable and your accounts receivable, like the people behind the scenes who are your janitor, your all of these things, right? That people be in the back office who don't talk to people, talk to customers face-to-face or on the phone every day, they're so involved in building that customer experience. And that this is why we do the journey mapping process with the service blueprinting. So we can see with the service blueprints, people, tool system, everything that's happening behind the scenes to support what you know the customer is is experiencing. And that's such an eye-opener for people because it's like, oh, I didn't even know that I impacted the customer experience in any way, shape, or form. And so I think it's so important that every department is brought to the table. Every department has a clear line of sight to the customer and how they impact the experience. And there's far too many who think that it's just the front line.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

Yeah, absolutely. Now your book's been out for a while. Have you had uh people come back to you and say how they've started to use it and started to practice with it? Are people you because I get the impression it's it is a business, it's a book, of course, but it's a business, it's a set of tools in here, isn't it? Are people starting to use it as you is that how you want it to be used?

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Yes, uh absolutely my I think my biggest and I've heard from from several people, I've heard from many people, but my thing my biggest fan is Neil Top. He has just callzilla, yeah, yes. He took the book, he took it to heart. They did a book club too within their organization, and he's shared with me some of the things that they've done, and it's just been I just I'm floored by oh wonderful taking that and the outcomes for his business. And so yeah, it's been awesome to hear that. Um and I've heard from others as well, and it's like, wow, thank you for sharing that because that's very cool. That was why I wrote it. So that's great.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

Because I guess getting a book published is one thing, seeing it on a shelf or on a bookshop is another thing. But when someone comes back and says, You're changing the way we do business here, that's gotta be the that's what you're looking for, isn't it? Amazing, yes, absolutely. I'm really pleased, and of all the people as well, because I'm a big fan of Neil, so it's really good. Yeah, he's great. Look, I've really enjoyed spending time with you here. Um I'm sure uh there'll be many more Neil Tops contacting you and saying thank you. I've certainly got a lot of value from it. That there's a lot in here uh that will kind of remind me of it's a wonderful life in the sense of there's this great stuff happening, and if if you just see what customer centric can do, it does have a major impact on lots of people. It may not need to necessarily take the credit, but actually it is transforming a lot of people's lives. And I think people like yourself and books like Built to Win and previously Cast for Understanding are contributing towards that. So thank you for being a part of our thank you. I appreciate it. And we've got you in our CX book club as well, so we're gonna very much uh look forward to spending some time with you and really getting into the details in the book. So thank you for that. But for now, and thank you so much, and uh and good luck to you and all you do.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

Awesome, thank you so much for having me.