Can you be an expert on someone else's experience?

The experience space has become this little cottage industry. It's become almost overly interested and really focused on itself and how it does things.

When it comes to customer experience and service, there are different perspectives and approaches. MyCustomer recently sat down with Adrian Swinscoe, a seasoned advisor, speaker, and best-selling author, to talk about various aspects of customer experience. The discussion goes into Adrian's background in education, the idea of being an 'expert', and experiencing rather than criticising. 

Adrian Swinscoe, who is known for his fresh take on the experience space, talked about how he doesn't really believe in labels like 'expert' in the CX domain. He believes that people should focus more on the influence and impact they have instead of self-proclaimed titles. Adrian also shared his commitment to shaking things up and making experiences better for customers, employees, and businesses. 

We can do things to try and maximise the likelihood that they're going to have a good experience, but we have (...) no real absolute control of the experience that they're going to have.

You can listen to the discussion now or read the full transcript below. 

Sabine Groven: 

Adrian, firstly, I know you're not necessarily a fan of the term expert or leader. So, how do you feel about being on the MYC'D UP with CX leaders podcast?

Adrian Swinscoe:

So well, first of all, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me to come in and or be a guest on the podcast and have a bit of a rummage around some of these kinds of issues. So, I don't mind the leader tag; it's not a tag that I would give myself because I think leaders are people that people follow. As it were, leadership doesn't necessarily come about by dint of possession and authority. Sometimes, that's the way that people think about it. But actually, it's more about whether you influence people and you affect the way that people can do things. And so I would; I would never ascribe that term to myself because I think that's about vocabulary for other people.

I just do what I do, in pursuit of, you know, trying to advocate for trying to agitate for trying to instigate sort of better outcomes, you know, customer employee sort of business outcomes, you know, that trifecta. But in terms of the CX expert sort of term, I have a problem with that terminology. And that's something that we talked about before. And I think about it from a perspective of, if you think about a customer experience expert, and I think it's an interesting thing. Because if you think about it, think about if you break it down, think about the words as it were, it sort of means that you're an expert in customer's experience. And the thing that makes me think of the thing I think about one of the things about that is I think about actually the idea of, like, how can you be an expert in somebody else's experience. And I think that's when it makes sense, the only person that's an expert in their, you know, in their own experiences themselves. And I think that's one of the speaks to this sort of thing that we can we, I think we are in service to the other people's experience, we can do things to try and maximise the likelihood that they're going to have a good experience, but we have actually no control, no real absolute control of the experience that they're going to have. I mean, you can take the same things and run to different people with different backgrounds, different experiences, and pretty much had had different days up until the point that they have that experience, and what they will get and what they will take out of that can be very, very different. And I think that's kind of it's sort of the idea that you can be an expert, an expert on that. I don't necessarily like that way of describing kind of things. Also, I don't necessarily like the term expert, anyway. Now, if something wants to call me an expert, that's fine; that's on them. I personally wouldn't describe myself as an expert. I may have expertise, and I have a bit of knowledge and a bit of experience in it, but I don't know everything. And I don't assume that I know everything. I'm always trying to almost like take a position of, you know, trying to be humble, trying to be respectful, trying to have humility, trying to always be open to learning, kind of like new things and new perspectives. And that's how I try and approach it. So I sort of issue a lot of these kind of terms. I feel like I'm, you know, in service to service or in service to experience and better experiences for people. And that sort of informs how I go about doing things. Does that make sense?

Sabine Groven:

Yeah. You refer to yourself as an explorer.

Adrian Swinscoe:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the thing is it's like, I don't think there's there is an I don't think there's like a, there's no answer. There's no one-size-fits-all all. And I think that one of the challenges is that we're looking for many of us are looking for answers in order to do to delete us off to the, whatever Promised Land, it might be, or, you know, this better position. But I sometimes think that it's not as simple as that. Sometimes, we need to really dig into it and really explore it and think about what's the most appropriate sort of thing. So, we need to explore and look for clues. And think about how we piece all those things together to produce the right sort of map or the right sort of plan for our particular context. And yeah, frameworks and tools and all these things can help with that. But I think that we need to explore and understand this, so it's a bit like, there's a saying that comes from Einstein that says, If you give me a problem and an hour to solve the problem, I'll, I'll spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and five minutes solving it. The challenge is there. In modern organisations and modern kinds of ways of working, we generally do the opposite. We spend five minutes thinking about it, and then fifth, you know, or 10 minutes thinking about it and then 55 kind of minutes or 50 minutes, sort of like implementing the solution. And I think that probably underlies some of the lacklustre results, or the lack of significant improvements that we see in these spaces because we do not really understand it, we're not really exploring it, we're not really kind of kind of getting into the sort of the nitty gritty, nitty-gritty of it. I don't mean that just from an understanding of the customer perspective, but also from understanding the organisation that needs to deliver to them because there are two sides to Aquinas. Something that you have to match the organisation and what the organisation does to meet the kind of customers' needs, and I think they're, they're the, the two sides to it. And I don't think we'd spend enough time thinking about an understanding and exploring what the customer really needs, what they really kind of want, what would really work for them, and also what that means for the organisation. And how do we actually kind of do that?

Sabine Groven: 

So that term, then referring to yourself as an explorer rather than an expert, seems to be influencing your approach, or even their approach has kind of influenced that. But if people approach the industry from that frame of mind, then maybe being a bit more interested and, yeah, open to exploring rather than kind of having made their minds up.

Adrian Swinscoe: 

Yeah, I mean, I think the thing because one of the challenges is that this is where the customer experience sort of space or industry, I think falls into that sort of trap is that people then go and take certifications and courses or read books or whatever, and then they think they're there. They're like, wow, I'm good. And then but, all that all you really become is effectively a tool head. You're like, you're like, I've got my Spanner now I'm going to figure out how to use it, rather than actually going actually. I'm going to the tools are there to help me and inform me and equip me with some capacity to try and address and solve this kind of problems, but actually, I don't, you know, I'm not really looking at him, then I'm more interested in myself, and what I can do rather than actually what's in front of me. And understanding the kind of the problem and I think that's that becomes the, you know, the thing is everybody is trying to get skilled up and tooled up with these sort of things. But we ended up this is one of my challenges with the whole experience sort of spaces there. And this is one of the reasons behind the whole punk CX sort of set of books is the idea that the experience space has become this little cottage industry. And it's become almost overly interested and really focused on itself and how it does things. And its ways of doing things rather than how we have its framework and benchwork, benchmarked and certified and codified and all these different sorts of things. And yet, the customer feels like it's separate from that. And not an intrinsic part of that, and not central to that. It feels like they're there in name only, in many respects, and I think they get lost in that whole kind of process. And that could be part of it because it's a new-ish space, and it's maturing. But there is always time to drag the most important person in this back into the centre of the conversation; what about the customer? 

Sabine Groven: 

And you mentioned qualifications there. I'd like to pick up on that because you have a background in education, working as a teacher, so it'd be interesting to hear a bit about how that's influenced the way that you view things and also your career.

Adrian Swinscoe:

Yeah, so I mean, the thing I learned about teaching is that you can very quickly grow, to understand or come to understand rather, or I came very quickly to understand that different people, I mean, be can, you can read about it, in theory, in terms of like different learning styles, and communication, kind of have two different types of kind of people. But when you see it in practice there, and how different people learn, and how different communication styles can affect different sorts of people, it makes you really appreciate that actually, it's not about necessarily my role as a teacher just going, these are the things you need to know, go ahead and learn them. And this will help you pass the exam. The problem I had with education was that it felt like it was becoming too focused on passing exams rather than learning. I learned subsequently that the education of the word comes from the Latin educator, educare, loosely translated from Latin; I don't speak Latin, only had to look this up, but it loosely translates as lighting the fire within. And I love that idea. Because it's like, lighting a passion or lighting a fire or a desire to enter about the learning kind of process, and you find your way of doing it and think and, and keeping that, that that that fire kind of burning. And I think, for me, there's, there's something to be learned with respect to that when it comes to customer experience. And it's like, Where's the fire? What is the fire within you that wants to improve, kind of keep improving kind of things? It might; you might have all these qualifications, you might have written all these books, you might have done all these kinds of different things, you might kind of be kind of, you know, a big, you know, big title person, or you know, you know, well-respected kind of, you know, person, but where's the kind of Where's the fire to keep going to keep yourself, you know, seeing new things, learning new things, being exposed to new things, you know, understanding new perspectives, all these different sorts of things. For me, that's the fire. That's the thing. 

That keeps me going because I guess the backstory to how I got into this space is that I wanted to start writing about something I knew back in about 2007 and 2008 that I liked: the idea of working independently had been doing so since about 2000, for the students in general sort of stuff. And I thought I could see the way that the market was going very digital things. I needed to develop this digital footprint so that I could establish what I refer to as being trusted at a distance if people can get to know you a little bit and can understand how you think and what you can think about a distance in the eye via a website or a blog. And I started writing about sort of just general stuff, and they got very boring very quickly. Because it didn't really have an angle or an edge or a point of view to it. And I thought, well, actually, I need to write about something that I either didn't like or that I wanted to change. And I figured out that I wouldn't say I like bad service. And having been involved in a number of different, you know, businesses and projects and ventures and things that always had customer and employee value at their hearts. They've always frustrated me, and always first to sell frustrates me to this day. Then, often, organisations get in the way of their people doing a good job. Right? And so that just made me curious, like, why is that? And what, how could that be better, and what could be better and better? And so I started sort of just researching and writing and thinking about it, and podcasting, and exploring and interviewing and all these different sorts of things. And it's that 15 years later, I'm still kind of doing it because you still come up with stories about new, different people doing new things, or people producing new technology that can produce kind of the really kind of cool, kind of like outcomes and all that sort of stuff. And so it feels like a never-ending, ever-evolving groove that I'm exploring; hence, we come full circle back to the exploration, so I'm just always looking for clues. And then you can start to piece them together to then, you know, help people, you know, change their perspective, or kind of add kind of like, these ideas into their sort of like plans or experiences to try and kind of help them kind of move forward and generate that momentum. And so that for me, is that is my fire as, as it were, and hence why it's, and that's what I really learned as a teacher, I didn't really spend that much time in education. But that's so it was, it was a, I learned a lot in the short time about myself and about that whole kind of process.

Sabine Groven: 

I suppose the fire within might be more difficult to prove than your qualifications, though. And also, you see a lot of jobs where a qualification of some sort is required. So I suppose it isn't easy sometimes to know when to put that out there and talk about it and when not to.

Adrian Swinscoe:

Yeah, I think the thing is, is that the note, what I'm not saying is I'm not saying that you shouldn't understand the rules of the game that you're playing, and having qualifications and all these different things, because kind of helps you gain entry to the game, right? It's a bit like sport. So I yesterday, I was watching the football on the TV. And I know this is going to go back later. But this is kind of Brighton. We're playing Brighton Hove Albion, which is my team, because we have lived in Brighton for about 15 years, and I was a season ticket holder. We're no longer there now in Edinburgh, but then I played in the Europa League, which is like a big deal. And they were playing I x at home like I x is this big team. And I actually rubbish but bright, we're you know, we're quite, we're pretty good and bright and beat them to nil.

Tell the story about Ken like sport, because here's the interesting thing is that there are rules that govern the game of football that govern any kind of game. And it tells you what you can or what you can't do and what you need to do in order to decide who wins in the end, right? So it guides that kind of thing. But it doesn't tell you how to play and doesn't tell you how to win. It stipulates there are 11 different players on the pitch. And you have to have a goalkeeper and things and tells you when things go out of play and when a goal is scored, and all these things, but it doesn't tell you how to play the game. And I think that the point is that you can gather these qualifications to allow you to get on the pitch if that's what's required. But then you have to decide how you play the game now. So, for example, I would say I was speaking to there's a difference. I was doing this project for a big publishing firm. And it's been to a bunch of their product managers. And one person was telling me a story that they'd heard about a colleague of theirs who had decided within their game, as it were, to play differently. And what they've done is they, and this is very much in line with getting them closer to the customer through their initiative. They went in and sourced a list of customers. And then every week for the whole for a whole year, they went off and systematically kind of contacted customers I went, I'd like to speak to you for like 1520 minutes, just to understand a bit more about your experience, what we can do better and all these different things. I just did it systematically and scheduled this kind of conversation every week. Nobody asked that person to do it. But they will use that intelligence, and they didn't formalise the gathering of that, that you know that that insight that intelligence, they just use it to inform themselves. It was a thing that they did, but then they took all the learnings that they were uncovering out of those things and started to feed them into meetings that they had a work that they were doing, they were like, Ah, I was speaking to a customer last week. And they told me, and they were every was like Word, you know. And it's like because it's different. And then here's the, here's the very, really simple and often, but often hard thing to do is like, if we want to achieve different, we have to do different. And somebody says it's just little things that we do. But little things done well and consistently and sustainably can actually kind of all add up to a whole heap.

Sabine Groven: 

I'd also like to talk a bit more about Punk CX because you've described it as a visual slap in the face for the customer experience industry. So, is that something that you think the CX industry needs a slap in the face?

Adrian Swinscoe:

Well, the book was born out of my frustration with the idea that there was a lot of investment, a lot of activity, and a lot of enthusiasm about the whole idea of customer experience. But I was, I was and continue to be frustrated by the amount of significant improvements that there are in customer outcomes. And also business outcomes, to be fair, but primarily customer outcomes. The book was more of a challenge to people to do better work. And it was an invite but also a challenge to do better work. And to say there are different ways to do things. And I call it a visual slap in the face because of the style of the book, kind of how it was designed and what it meant. So it's like a full colour, kind of like a book, which is very short ideas that started like an album. So it has tracks rather than chapters. And so it's like, like, and like any album, you might not like all the tracks on the album; you might have three or four different favourite kinds of tracks. But that's the point. And because it was like full colour, very short, very concise tracks, kind of like raising an idea, asking a big question, challenging people to do something, there's like getting; there's always trying to shake people to do something. But because of its very visual and very colourful nature, that's why I called it a visual slapping. They're not advocating that we physically abused our colleagues by any stretch of the imagination. It was just there. It was, it was ostensibly designed as an art project. I was completely happy with the idea that this might not work. But I was okay with it. Because it was it was it was it was done from my heart. And it's like, this is why I feel this is what I think. Are you with me, and people might have gone blue? Go away. But if they did that, that's fine. Because it's not for everybody, but it was just me putting out there and saying, look, I think we can do better. Yeah, I think customers deserve better. And, and it was, it's there. It's it keeps resonating with people, which is a very nice thing to have happened almost by accident.

Sabine Groven: 

It has a very interesting structure, like you said, and it does challenge the reader and really engages you to think about the different challenges. So yeah, it's it's a good read. 

Adrian Swinscoe:

Thank you. 

Sabine Groven:

And you've carried that on, obviously, with a second book and also with your podcast.

Adrian Swinscoe:

Well, yeah, I mean, I guess in it, it's allowed me to, I guess, embrace that as an idea. And to start to ask, so continue to ask kind of challenging questions like, why is that? Why is it like that? Why can it not be any different? How do we? Why do we have to start there? What do we know about this? And the Pockex album, which is an extension of the punk CX, was just a reflection of actually, as things have evolved, particularly over the last few years, that it's no longer sufficient to talk about customer experience in isolation. We have to think about things systemically and holistically in an integrated confession, and that makes our jobs harder. But it's also just the way that the things that it seems to me kind of have evolved, and we have to, and it struck me there and because the XL stands for experience leadership, because the thing that has struck me when in producing that book, The follow up is that we talk about, you know, in business terms, we talk about market leadership, we talk about brand leadership, we talk about technological leadership, we talk about all these different ways that we describe companies and brands. And yet, we are also going to talk about how customer experience is the thing that we're going to be competing on. It's the big differentiator in many markets for many brands, yet we need to talk about experience leadership and what that means. And so the book was just an effort to try and introduce that into the conversation to say, Well, what does that mean? What does it lead to to experience? Or what does experienced leadership look like? What is it? What is it comprised of? What does it take to win, you know, and to be different and to stand out? And like anything, like the book before it, it was never an answer; it's not a map, it's not a framework, it's almost again, it's a challenge, an incitement to an invite to people think, to think about that, and to step up, and to do that kind of different things. Better Work.

Sabine Groven:

We've spoken previously, Adrian and you gave me something to think about last time because I'm quite new to the experience space; I'm very new compared to you. So very switched on, constantly thinking about customer service and customer experience. It's kind of like when I was studying film at uni; I couldn't go to the cinema without kind of thinking about the audio and analysing it, you know what I mean? And you told me if you're criticising, you're not experiencing? So, can you elaborate a bit on that?

Adrian Swinscoe:

Yeah. And so, I mean, I completely get the idea about the film thing. And I think it's it's a challenge when you when you're developing your knowledge in something, you these become the things that you filter, kind of through, that you filter things through, and but it does, I do think sometimes hamper us when we think about that when from seeing it as another film, Gore or another customer would see things. So, for example, we talked about putting ourselves in walking a mile in the customer's shoes. Well, a customer might criticise, but they will experience first and then criticise because they'll criticise based on their experience. And so rather than actually looking for the flaws in something or thinking about how something is constructed, you're sort of just going about your business doing your thing. Right. And, and, and I think that's the that's what I meant by that, is that when you're always switched on, you're always looking at it through a professional lens, rather than looking at it through a customer lens. And it might be this really nuanced distinction. But I think it's it's it's an it's, I thought it was an important one, or it's an interesting one to consider. Am I criticising? Am I just looking for this than the other? Or am I just going, huh? That's weird. Like, for example, I'll tell you give you an example.

I went to I was flying as a while ago, actually. But I was flying to an event somewhere, or I was flying for work to go for a piece of project work or something. And I went to the airport and I checked in. And that was all queued. I went through security and got all my bags and everything else and then got through to the departure lounge. And then, I get a text message or an SMS message on my phone. And this is from the airline. And the airline Can I say, How was your experience? And I'm a bit like, Well, I haven't even gone and gotten on the plane yet. And I just felt weird. I was like, huh, and then I thought about it, and when I go in, it feels like everything's kind of slightly disembodied because actually, when you know the airline, they staff their desks at the airport, but they don't run the airport. And so the thing that you're what you who you're interacting with from the airline is the people on the desk, and then ultimately when you get onto the plane, and then the flight and it seemed to me like it was a strange thing to ask at the wrong time. And it would have been better if they timed it. When I got off the plane or a little bit after the plane, how is your experience that it's a whole thing now? If He wanted to be kind of more specific, like how he was checking the experience, then be specific. And that's what I mean is like, I wasn't, I was just travelling. And then something happened. I was like, well, that feels that's just odd. How does that work? Consider that you're going to start to see this kind of like, this kind of, you start to feel the inconsistencies, or the oddness and then start to think about, well, why does that happen? And so you might not agree with the, with the distinction. But for me, I think it's; it's, it's, it's an important one, we have to remember that we're in service of customers. If we want to understand a customer's perspective, then maybe we need to try and feel what a customer feels and what the in terms of what they go through before we start trying to break it all down. Yeah, about what worked and what didn't work.

Sabine Groven: 

Yeah, no, I do agree with you. I'm hoping it will kind of ease up a bit, I'm sure. 

Adrian Swinscoe:

Well, I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a bit like I am, I am sure that it's a bit like, you know, there's he talked about learning, and, and stages of learning. And it's a bit like driving a car, right, or learning how to drive a car. You know, there's, there's this, there's a first stage, which is you're unconsciously incompetent, incompetent, or you don't really know what a car is, you don't know what driving is, because you're just too young. Then you grew up, and you're like, going, Oh, I am consciously incompetent. Right. So I know there's a car, I know, there's driving, I don't I know, I don't know how to drive. And therefore, I know that I don't, I can't do that. And then you learn to drive, you're a new kind of driver. And you are consciously competent, that you have to really pay attention to what you're doing. So it's a bit like, it's all like a mirror, signal manoeuvre, all these, all these little mantras that go on in your head, and so becomes quite a mechanical sort of thing. And then when you get more and more used to that, you get to the point where you become unconsciously competent, where the typical example in a driving situation is there, you could drive from somewhere, point A to point B, and it might be throughout, you know, an extended period. And somebody could ask you, well, what happened in between you were like, I don't know, don't remember, just just driving, because you did it almost like subconsciously. Because it becomes such a learned habit learned kind of behaviour. And then you're kind of focusing on other things rather than just the mechanics of stuff. And so I think it's natural, when you're super keen, super interested, super motivated, and driven, to try and make a difference and to, to get involved in stuff is to kind of be like always looking around, oh, wow, look at that. And that and that, and that and that and that and that. That feels like a natural sort kind of thing, but realise that actually, that's possible; you're not necessarily realising that's possibly also a trap that doesn't necessarily allow you to fully see or fully experience what a customer would go through.

Sabine Groven:

Yeah, for anyone in the same boat as me, then we could either say that we are just very motivated and not critical. Or we could try and, yeah, get out of our heads a bit and just try and experience rather than criticise. I think that sounds like a nicer way to go about things. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Adrian. It was lovely speaking with you. 

Adrian Swinscoe:

It's always a delight talking to you. I admire you, you know, your drive and your desire to contribute. In this space, I tip my hat to you. I hope you can have all this success. But thank you so much for inviting me on the podcast. I'm always happy to come on and share a few ideas and tell a few stories and have a bit of a rummage around, and I hope, fingers crossed, that some of this, if not, you know, at least a small part of it made sense to a few people.