CX Superheroes podcast - Series 15 Episode 1 - Leading CX at Sclae - Tina Lilje

Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Customer Experience Superheroes Podcast Series. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your host throughout this series. A series in which we introduce you to some of the wonderful people in the world of customer experience. They share their ideas, they share their insights, and hopefully give you inspiration for your own endeavours and help you accelerate your customer experience plans.

Today's guest is quite an exceptional individual. You'll find that when you hear the conversation that we had. Tina Lilia is the global customer experience lead for healthcare at Philips. Yes, it is a big role, and yes, it requires a big character, and yes, it has a lot of expectation on that role.

We spent a good time talking about the challenges, the opportunities, and the continuous need to raising standards and helping everyone in the organization appreciate and value customer experience. So I'd like you to enjoy that conversation and have a pen and paper ready, please, because there is so much to learn from this conversation with Tina. So, Tina, we get to speak at last. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on to the Customer Experience Superheroes podcast series and welcome.

Hi Christopher, nice to meet you. And thank you. How could I resist with that title? Well, look, I mean, we're going to have a really good conversation today because I think you probably hold that role that a lot of people aspire to have.

A household brand, well established, really super cool sector, and global in the title, global head of CX. I mean, it is, it's the dream job to have, isn't it? So could you give us an appreciation? I'm sure this isn't your first job.

I'm sure you've had a few on the way to get here. What has your pathway been to arrive at where you are today? It's lalom, I think, is the best way to say it. And yes, so it is absolutely a dream job for me, completely.

The way to get there was through so many different roles I held in this company. I think actually for this role, it's important that you understand the company quite well, and we'll get to that in a moment. I've worked in marketing, event management, program management, change management, business excellence, and then in customer service. Customer service was the longest time that I've worked in one function.

And I think the key to that was that I noticed after a while I kept fixing the same issues over and over again because we were keeping, we were fixing symptoms. We were not fixing root causes. So a customer call would come in, we would send somebody out to fix the symptom. And so it would reoccur.

And at some point it's like, I want to fix different problems. I just want to fix something else. And when the idea came up for the role that I currently have, which is that of global customer experience for Philips, like you mentioned, and then focus on the healthcare space, so B2B mostly. I was like, okay, I finally get to fix root causes.

So let's do that. That sounds exciting because there is so much to do in the space, and you always want to evolve, you want to move forward, and you want to keep delivering better and better experiences to your customers. So I mean it's interesting to say that. I'm sure we'll come back to other aspects of your career so far, but this sort of transactional focus, do you think that's a systematic of the way an organization is set up, or do you think it's just human nature?

If we see a problem, we fix it and we move on rather than taking a step back and wanting to understand, you say, the root cause and look at the strategic impact of change. I think what you just mentioned, seeing the problem in fixing it is how you usually start out. And then at some point in time, hopefully you'll notice that's not the way to go because there is it's a big company, right? Many products, many countries, like you said, and there is a lot of stuff going on, and you cannot fix every single problem, and not every single problem is as important as the other ones.

So you need to find a way to prioritize, and you do that by how what's the impact, how many people are impacted by it? Can I actually do it? That's a big one for me because you always want to help, you always want to fix it. But is it actually possible?

What are the roadblocks to it getting fixed? Right? Do you have the support of the organization? Do you have the budget?

All these things, do you have the skill sets in your team? And you need to prioritize, and you do that by building your activities on data, right? Looking at data, not just I talk to one person, one customer, and that customer has that problem, so I'm gonna go and do that. But how many customers do have that problem?

And how much is the impact? Well, how big is the impact of that issue that we're seeing? Is it worthwhile to focus on that first? Um, so you have to be strategic about it, and it has to be aligned with the company strategy and brand as well, right?

It's the whole picture always. So curiosity is important in this, isn't it? I mean, you've just made loads of kind of questions there, not being settled on the convention. Now, when you mentioned the role, it sounds as if were you the first person to hold this role?

Yes and no. So there were some wonderful colleagues, Anouk Mareike, that held this role basically from the service organization, from the global service organization where they were based. And they did amazing work with the countries in driving improvements and the journey mapping piece, bringing in journey maps, bringing in the customer view. What was new for my role was it was a central role and it wasn't in service.

And the reason for that is that when Mareike and Anouk did their role and they did such an amazing job, there was a lot of people in the company that were just sitting back saying, Hey, you know what? I'm busy. Customer service is gonna fix this, they're gonna take care of it. That's great, I'm gonna leave it to them, which I totally get.

But in the end, you can't do it if everybody isn't on board. So we moved the role into the COO organization, so the reporting line to the executive committee, and then COO, because at the time the integrated supply chain had manufacturing and had a customer service, it had trade compliance, it had logistics and a long part of the journey for customers. And the COO wanted to be the executive champion for it. So that's how we made that choice.

So there were people before that paved the way, and I built on the work that they've done, and we took it to a different level in terms of let's look at the whole organization and move it into a more central resting place in a way or central space. I think, I mean, I hope people listening to this will appreciate that. That is what CX Maturity looks like. It's about typically starting with a superb service team who sort of defend your cause and but you know, but it's so good.

Nobody knows that they're actually keeping everything going. And but only by bringing it in centrally and make and exposing it to operations, to product, supply, logistics, do you start to get to the root causes? But as I say, I mean, that's it's quite a difficult thing to accept. A company would jump to that first of all.

They need to find the evidence. And it seems like your colleagues in service have been demonstrating that to the point where the I guess it's the chief operations officer has gone. This is where customer centricity or customer experience needs to sit. So you must have been gratified to know that we're going to move from putting out fires to actually identifying where the root cause was.

Ah, you would think, wouldn't you? So when I so one point is to your point about my steps before, I think the fact that I worked in services for so long helped me appreciate the fact that service was probably the biggest part of the customer experience puzzle in our company, but not necessarily the right landing spot for this role because service already knows. That's not the people you need to convince they know. But also, we still we started and we did this exercises and workshops about planning and horizons, and we're gonna do this in a year, and we're gonna do this in three years, and then in five years, you're gonna right.

You start from fixing the basics and you end up with that unique experience that you deliver that's just signature for you. And the plan was great, but after a while, you just you don't get over fixing the basics. There's always new basics to fix. If the company is big enough and the product is complex enough and the journey is long enough and you have a detailed view, there's always something to do on the what we would call basics, and we can talk about why that would be basic and not something else.

And so after a while, we say you have to do this in parallel. And I was lucky that the pull from the organization got larger. So when we started out, maybe taking a small step back, I was heading emerges and acquisitions strategy and operations for the supply chain organization, the integrated supply chain. And my boss, the CEO, basically asked, can you do this on top of?

Because there's always in MA, there's always times when you're just not buying companies and you have some time. And then the pull from the organization became stronger. The CEO got involved. We started scheduling meetings with him to get his support.

And you can't say to the CEO, hey, can we move this out by four weeks because we just got in this project? So at some point in time, the role became full-time, and then after a while I was able to hire a few people, so small central team. And then we started when we get to this point of fixing the basics versus the future distinguishing customer experience, I started splitting up the team somewhat. So we had a person that was purely focused on that future view, purely a designer by trade, very versatile with data and analytics, purely focusing on that future piece and other people fixing the basics so that you wouldn't you wouldn't get dogged down too much in the day-to-day, and you could still go to where you want to distinguish yourself.

And maybe that's two years out, or maybe that's three years out. But if you don't do it today, in three years you won't have it. So that was something that we started doing. I mean that there's a there's an expression, and I'm gonna give this to you whether you like it or not, but enlightened leader.

Because to your point there, you're absolutely right. If you'd have had the team looking at issues and opportunities, well, the opportunities would have been at the end of the day when all the issues which are still coming would have been dealt with. So you need that separate resource who thinks differently, thinks about untapped opportunity, the unknowns, and is probably an experimenter, an explorer, an adventurer by nature. Whereas the other types, you need kind of resilience and solving problems and a different type of individual.

So it's quite, I mean, I've not heard that happen too often, I'll be honest, Tina, where people have gone, right, I'm gonna split this resource to cope with the very different demands on us. And to be very clear, at the time we were four people, right? It's not like I had this huge team and we had two departments, right? It was a small team and you have to.

It would have been a risk to take, to be honest, I would have thought, putting resources onto that. And you need to shield that, right? It's very tempting to pull them back in to fix something that's burning today. Yeah.

But I think it did pay off. It really did pay off because the vision, the vision that comes from that future focus, is what aligns people behind the common goal in a way, and you want the whole organization to pull in that direction. So we started with this function, and my boss at the time, Sophie, we had this discussion and we said, okay, customer experience, what should be owned by that team or function or program or whatever you want to call it. And in the end, if you say everything that has to do with customers, then I'm gonna be the second person after the CEO.

And that's not what it was supposed to be, right? So, but everything in a way touches customers, which became our mentor. Customer is customer experience is everybody's business, is our hashtag. So, what should that group own?

And so, in the end, it was the raising capabilities, the training, the educating, right? And then the vision. And then the idea is that you can align the organization behind the vision and that they will all pull in the direction and bring in their unique expertise from their unique touch points and areas into the whole for our customers. And I think that's important.

You have to create that vision, and you will not create the vision by saying we're gonna shorten delivery times. This is people are not gonna come into the office, especially if you work not in logistics. You're not gonna come to the office and say, hey, ho, today I'm gonna shorten delivery times, even though I'm in marketing. That's not gonna happen.

So you needed that future vision to align the organization in a way. We've got someone we're working with at the moment, and they would just absolutely love that statement because it's kind of something that they challenged against all the time. Well, customers just want it quicker, get it delivered quicker. And it's like, no, it's not about shortening delivery time, not about shortening delivery times.

For some maybe, but that's not even if it is, you should we still worked on that. It's just not what gets people out of bed in the morning. I'm not a morning person. That's my argument.

What do I get out of bed for? And it's not the delivery times and it's not some other things. It's a vision. Is this where we want to go?

And this is, I understand where my part is in that puzzle that we're building. I understand what I'm contributing, and that turned out to be key with the organization to help people understand their role. We kind of frame it as kind of the three M's. You've got the motivation, and you've you've spoken about that with the vision.

You've got the methodology, and you started to unpack kind of how your teams do it. The third M we talk about is the mindset. I'm just wondering how, in an organization like Philips, it's it's it's based on manufacturing good quality products that deliver great, deliver solutions. What were the what are the challenges in terms of the mindset with perhaps leadership team or other stakeholders to put the customer as the central currency rather than the product or the technology or the IP?

How's that play out? For me, the customer experience is the uniting factor. Everything that you just mentioned contributes to that. Right?

A big part of what Philips does and what distinguishes Philips is the innovation, is the IP, is the solution that wasn't there before. It's the thing that makes customers' lives easier. And so that's a big part of it. It's just that there's more.

And the stakeholders get that, and nobody's ever gonna say customers are not important. The piece I think is the key piece is you have 75,000 or even more people, and there is a lot of noise in the organization. There is brand, and there is this, and there is analytics, and there is IP, and there is innovation, and there is marketing, and everybody has messages to the organization, and trying to bring it under that one umbrella, and that umbrella, in my view, is customer experience because everything contributes to that and needs to be aligned to that.

And you can't really steer it because customers will perceive things differently, right? You do the best you can, you deliver the best you can, and you make sure it aligns with the brand that you're putting out there that you want to be known that you want to be known for what you want to be known for. And I guess for senior management, it's about the long-term thinking that's behind it. Very often you would get questions around so how do you contribute to sales?

I think that's something that many of our colleagues have had to answer. And my question was a little picture I drew of a like a scope wheel, and I put product and experience and service and pricing and features and everything behind that. Each got his own little chapter. And I said, All these eight, ten things contribute equally.

It's not just the person that's signing the contract, and I'm just one out of these eight things. There's never gonna be a cell that's just gonna be because of Tina. That's not gonna happen, right? It's always gonna be more than that.

If you can have the best experience, if your product is crappy or if it gets delivered to your earlier point five months later than you want it, they're still not gonna buy from you, even if the rest is perfect. So it all needs to fit together. It's like an orchestra. Yeah.

And I think that is the piece when you have so many different players in your orchestra to make them aligned to one song. I think that's the key. But you will never ever have somebody say, Well, I don't care about customers. No, I don't think so, right?

I love the analogy of the orchestra. I've come across that previously. And I think it's again, this is maturity, Tina, I think, talking about sort of a mature organization, you sitting in it and being able to understand working within the organization for some time. So you've got an appreciation of its heartbeat, how it flows and everything.

I mean, with that many employees, that many product lines, you're never going to know everything. But that reality that, you know, there's a table here, we can all pull a chair up to the table, and we all contribute towards it. And I have heard it said before to say to the CEO, okay, well, look, if you don't think you need me, that's fine. Let's spin the wheel.

What about if we drop brand? We have no brand at all. We'll just sell it. Would that make a difference?

Okay, let's spin it again. We'll have no distribution channel. Well, it's and it's okay. Now you're starting to see that we can either contribute or we don't.

And if we don't think it's needed, we won't be here. We'll we'll if customer experience is not going to contribute to that overall sour and longevity and sustainability, then let's not embark upon it. Now, I mean, I had this put to me before around the difference between B2B and direct to consumer because everyone will talk about the emotional connection you'll get if you're getting that family car that you've always wanted, or you're having that meal out on that special occasion.

But when you're in B2B, you're buying kit for your business, or you're buying services that help your business. How different is the construct of an experience in B2B? And who are you? Who are you?

Are your procurement clients? Do you have, or are you dealing directly with doctors or hospital admin? I mean, give us an appreciation of your client mix. Everything is really that mix that you just mentioned.

It the it really depends. So you mentioned the global part of my role before. There's countries that where everything is like a government tender, the buying of medical equipment. So just my customers, in a way, are hospitals.

So doctors, nurses, private practices as well. They're not always making the purchase, but they're the ones that are using the equipment, and in many cases they get a say. But it's investment goods, it can be very expensive. You have private hospitals and you have state hospitals.

There's some countries where everything is a tender. So basically, the government will put out that they need to buy, I don't know, 55 ultrasound MR systems, magnetic resonance systems, and then they'll have special requirements, and then you can kind of apply for it. My colleagues from sales will probably yell at me in a moment, but you can kind of apply for it and see where you fit in and you submit, and then they pick. And it's more complex than that, but on a very high level.

And then there is hospitals where literally the doctor can make the choice, and he can say or she can say, I like this product, I've used it before, and I would like to stay with it. Or I want to try something new because something other didn't work. So it can be very different in terms of where you hear about things that might not go so well. That's always the doctors and the nurses.

They're the guns they call you, not the government agency that put out the tender. So it depends on the country you're in, it depends on the healthcare system. It's usually investment goods, so they take a long time to decide, and it's very important. The barrier to change can be quite high because you're used to it both how you use the equipment, but also how you get the service done and how you deal with the company and what's part of the contract.

So that is that comes with certain expectations, which is important to understand. I think the biggest difference with direct to consumer is in in this case, then the investment is so big, it has a different importance and a different long longevity. Sometimes the barrier to change is very high, and you always your customer, you have data, you have names, you can go and talk to them, you can call them, you have a very close relationship if everything goes well. I think for direct to consumer, that's not always the case.

Yeah. And it's sorry, and it's you sell directly basically with your own organization. So when you look at, and Philips also, of course, has the shavers and televisions and coffee machines, but then you have the company that produces, and then you have the Saturn or MediaMarkt or Amazon where it's bought, and then who owns the customer? There's more players in the mix.

When you buy a magnetic resonance system or X-ray machine, it's this one company. They sell it to you, and they're also the ones that made it in most countries. And I mean, we talk often about pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. I would imagine the post-purchase experience for you is significantly high and important because it's that's the usage, isn't it?

When then you're gonna have many 10 years, usually. But a lot of turnover during that time in terms of personnel using the systems, lots of other systems coming in that need to integrate with yours and vice versa. So so getting across the line in the sal, you know, it is really post-purchase, is where you'll demonstrate your experience capability. Yeah, I mean they use it for 10 years, and if that experience isn't good, they're not gonna buy it again.

It's very simple. If the most important thing is it needs to work, it needs to give you an image that helps you heal the patient. It needs to be easy and it needs to be up and running. And that's it, right?

And if you have that 10 years of usage, uh that's what you will judge us on. Yeah. Or the competition. It's the same for everybody.

And you work it as a global, you mentioned a country level. Are there is it country level customer service or is there global or regional? I mean, it feels as we start to explore, it's a very complicated landscape, isn't it? Yeah, yes.

And no. Customer service, obviously, yes, definitely is in every country. Has to be every function is in every country. I think for customer experience, it's more about because we're still in early stages.

We're not one of the companies where I would say we've done this for 25 years, so we're still kind of figuring out the best way to handle it. So you might have a country where it's a service person, that's my main coin of contract, and you might have a country where it's a brand person or it's somebody in marketing, and it will depend sometimes on the person themselves, because in some countries it will be a like a real role, a full time role. And in some countries it will be somebody picking up the baton because they really believe in it.

And so I think one part of the magic kind of in my situation in Philips is that my small team and I, and by now we're eight people, everybody is there because they want to be there. When you and I talked before, we We mentioned the kind of career path. Where do you go from CX or where do you get how do you get to CX? And it's all still so undefined in many cases.

And so there is no one in that team that's in that team because they have their eye on the bigger price two years down the line. In fact, when I have with my team development discussions and kind of how can I help you prepare for your next steps, it's like, yeah, I really just want to be here. Or maybe there's a foundation where I can do some good. A Phillips Foundation, maybe I would like that.

But there's people that are there for the cause in a way for helping customers. And that's very different from any other role I've had before. It's very heartening to hear that because I do feel it's a it's it is one of those sort of roles where, I mean, one, it's continuous improvement. Secondly, there's we always want to get better outcomes.

So you could stay in the same role forever. And by the end of it, someone would just simply pick up the batter and continue your high standards. But that point you make about career path is quite an interesting one because I mean, I think probably I've got and I know people who have been marketing directors and gone on to be CEO. Other people who have been heads of legal and gone on to be CEO.

So there seems to be kind of a natural path. I've also know other people who have gone really high up in the organization in a CX role and then moved across to take over a function because that was their stepping stone to move up. So they've almost relinquished customer experience because they want to continue their career path. And I just wondered from your perspective, what your view on this is.

Have we established that career path yet for the CX leader to kind of naturally make their way up? Or are we laying the grounds for the next generation still helping the boards to understand the value of having CX leaders at the top? So fantastic questions. And I would say we probably we as a community haven't established yet.

I think there is a few companies that may have what is very heartening to see, in my view, is that many of the smaller companies, the startups, they start out with like a CEO, chief commercial officer, and then a chief customer officer, right? You already have that CC ex person, and that's amazing to see. The bigger ones maybe take some more time and are trying to put it into buckets, right? Is it marketing or is it this?

They're trying to kind of give it a kind of a header or put it in a special place. And I don't think it needs to be. I don't see it as relinquishing if you move on. If I had a choice, if I would design an organization, I would everybody work, make everybody work in customer experience for like six months or a year, and then they can move on.

But having a chief legal officer or chief innovation officer or chief marketing officer or CEO, even amazingly, or CFO who has worked in customer experience, that's my total dream. Because then like you can cut the discussion time and the convincing time in half, basically, and just get down to getting things done because people will get it. It's the same alternative would be have everybody work with an account manager for half a year, right? And really, because they know and they face the customer issues every single day.

And once you have that experience, things will flow much, much easier. The different backgrounds are also important. So when we built the team, my team we made sure, or I made sure to have people that come from different parts of the organization. So we would have a built-in network and we do have continuous improvement people, and we do have analysts, and we do have designers, and we have me from service, and we have someone from supply chain.

So we all have different backgrounds, so we can rely on each other's networks and knowledge for every single project or activity that we pick up. And like I said in the beginning, it's always the orchestra. If I had only people from one function, even if everybody in my team was from service, it would not have the impact it has with the mixture and the different backgrounds that we have. And now as people start to move on, it's the same.

One person moved on to HR and is now doing employee experience. So that's perfect. It's aligned, and then you have someone who moved into a bigger program role in sales. Awesome.

You spread the word there. So you really want people moving into different directions. That being said, I would love if every company had a chief customer officer, of course. So one person, yes, it should be a career path also to have it at that level to be part of the discussion, seat at the table, as we tend to say.

But other than that, I think it's amazing if people work in customer experience and then go to finance, go to legal, go to sales. My reporting line has changed. We stopped with the COO earlier, that was the beginning. I'm now reporting into the sales organization.

And it was also my wish to do that, because that's where we can make a huge difference as well, and where it's really important to bridge gaps and bring the view from the customer-facing folks back to the organization, to the people that are not customer-facing, because they sometimes don't understand their impact. So you can you can switch things around and you can get new impact and new insights. And in the end, the value to the organization is not customer experience. Of course, you want a great NPS, but a great NPS and a not great sales or a not great brand reputation, it's no value to the organization, right?

So the question is always why are you this is a tool? Why are you using this tool and where do you want to go? And then that'll help you align where you can have impact and drive things forward. And that'll help you hopefully also bridge uncertainties and difficult times as we're facing right now.

Because if you can establish the value you bring, and it's not just a good score, it's literally add-on sales, or it's repeat sales, or it's retention rate, or it's brand value, or whatever it might be that your company is after. Yeah. I think it's a very again, you can tell you've had experience and you've had those tough conversations in what you share back here, because we have something, the customer-centric mindset, and one of the uh behaviors of successful CX leaders is share everything in the spirit of progress.

I love the philosophy that actually let's let people progress and move out. They may be the best people and it's gonna be hard to replace them, but they're now gonna be in another function and they're gonna be raising that question, how does that impact the customer? Whereas that question wasn't said before. I mean, we did an exercise which I love doing it.

Sometimes it can be the first and the last commission you get with the board, but you put a scenario in and then you ask them all to write down what you're thinking. And what you really want to get is because they say, Oh, we're customer-centric, is everyone should write down how does that affect the customer? But you get written down how much will this cost us, or this is gonna, we're gonna custom. And you don't have to say that that's fine.

But you know, you if you say you're customer first, how come the first thing you're thinking about is the legal impact of this situation and not how's it going to affect the customer? But actually, the only way you're gonna do that is to put people in the legal team who have not just a passion for customer centricity, but have had a capability and a learning and a development and a kind of a leader like you to give them that sort of guidance, and then it spreads around, doesn't it?

It becomes kind of through osmosis, you get to that point where more people are asking the question how does it impact the customer? Until no longer is it a kind of a silent murmur, it's a loud booming voice across the organization. Number one in every template for project management. So just said something fantastic, in my view, which is asking the question.

I do, to the point of engaging the organization and having the orchestra play at the same tune. I've I'm doing a ton of training and webcasts and workshops and everything. And I always tell people you have to ask the question. You change something, you start something new, how does it impact the customer?

And you can ask it even if you don't know the answer. Just start the discussion. It's not like you have to be able to answer it, just put it in the room and see what happens. Just ask the question.

Everybody can do that. There's not a single person that can't do that. Yes. And so I think that's very important.

And yeah, it's like you said, the more people ask that question, at some point in time it's gonna be in the template, and then it's gonna be at the different stage gates for development, and that's where it needs to be. And one thing and we've talked about this before as well, is what was different than what you expected a little bit, right? So when you look at customer satisfaction kind of on a PowerPoint perspective, sometimes I say this is a PowerPoint decision, and what I mean by that is I can tell that it looked amazing on a slide, but in real life, something is not working the way that you envision it when you look at it on a slide.

And for customer satisfaction, there were all these ideas that would impact that. And I started my role around 2021, so was during COVID. And we had all these ideas at what would impact customer satisfaction, but when you look down at the analytics and what customers are actually telling you, it was totally 95% different than what we expected. Yeah, so you have an idea of what it is, and to your point about people have to experience this, you might think you're customer-centric and you might think you know what it is.

I can promise you it's different. Absolutely. And we've had that. I mean, one of my favorite quotes is a guy who was head of customer operations and done it for 30 years and said, I talk to customers every day through service, and then we trained him to do active listening in a different way.

And he said, I've never had a conversation like that before. I've just learned so much. And I think perhaps this is where we have to become more comfortable as customer experienced professionals. And we don't have the answers.

That's okay. Our responsibility is to hear what the changes are and help the business to respond to them. That's what we're there to do, to see how it can improve the experience to affect sales. I think sometimes customer experienced people believe they need to be the smartest people in the room.

But I think, like you put it, they need to be the most quizzical people in the room. They need to make you feel kind of marginally uncomfortable that if you don't know, we better go and find the other. Please invite me. I'm like you feel awkward.

It's okay not to know that well, what is the solution here? It's like, I don't know. Don't ask me. I'm not No, let's figure it out together.

It's a group exercise. But so here's an interesting conundrum, in my view, is that as a customer experience professional, and we've talked about the future view and the day-to-day. And unfortunately, the day-to-day will always take up, I think, for most people, much much more time than that future vision creation. And so you tend to have a lot of problems in your day, right?

And I did or do a fair amount of escalation management as well. So something goes really wrong, you go talk to the customers and see how can you fix it and what can you do to make it better, or what could you learn from what happened. That's for me very important and a key part. But again, I tend to hear probably 80% of what I hear is problems, and maybe 20% if I get lucky is success stories because for NPS surveys, people will fill it in.

But usually when people call you or write you an email or whatever, send a letter, it's not because they're so happy. And I think that's normal that we all consumers, right? I tend to talk to a company more if I have a complaint than if I need customer service, than if something went awesomely well. And so you don't want to be the downer in every room and every meeting, right?

You don't want to come in and every time Tina or Christopher walks through the door, they have a file full of issues to address. So, how do you find that balance between celebrating the good stuff but also highlighting the stuff that's not so good? Because that's a learning opportunity. And I truly believe that one of the many roles I've had has been in lean and continuous improvement and business excellence.

So I see areas for improvement and not necessarily problems. But you still have to find that balance and also bring the good messages and the uplifting pieces, because otherwise people will just start leaving the room when you come in and you lose your voice, you lose your impact. In your view, is there a way to balance that? Or have you seen companies or people do that really well?

I love the way that you've become the interviewer in this interview. I kind of suspected that might happen, but yeah, there we go. Well, I'm totally with you. I mean, I think you cannot.

We actually, I remember someone talking to me. He was he used to get told we're gonna go see the pod. Go see the pod, get the answers. And uh he was the head of research and he was oh it's great we go see the pod.

And then someone revealed to him that actually the pod was not a place, the pod was him, and it stood for Prophet of Doom. And he didn't realize, but he because every time he brought like, here are the things that are broken, here are the things that broken. We're doing a podcast here, you know, and he was called the Prophet of Doom. He was like, Oh my god, I've realized now that what I've never taken to them all the great things that they've done.

And I do remember I worked with another CEO who actually kind of wanted to start the program. He said, We've not been doing this customer experience officially, but I know there's bits of it, there's like sparks of excellence everywhere. And I think you have to start your first step has to be here's based on what customers told us before, the improvements we made, and let's recognize we can solve these issues. We this here's one issue we solved today.

Here's another one that's more of a strategic improvement, so therefore it's going to be longer, and that's why we're not dealing with it. But just sharing back with the team what we've actually achieved before you move on to the next, okay, so on to the next challenge. And also to remind people that I mean we have a uh customer-centric operating model, which is intentionally a continuous piece, to kind of recognize that recognition is the first step in the journey before the second step, which is listening.

And if you just flip it around and say that's the first thing we're going to do, it's just recognize how awesome we are based on following this methodology. Now we'll go back to it again. But I think it's you have to then be creative because if you just suddenly come back every time and go, Can I call out Tina for a great piece of work she did there? A friend of mine, and he is a friend, and we worked together many years ago, stay friend.

He told me a great example of what he did, which was he works in mobile phones. And uh, if he had the team, when the team performed really well, what he would do was he would drive over to their house, pick them up from work, put on their favourite playlist, have bought them a coffee, and he recreated the James Corden carpour carryover. He would drive to work, they'll all be singing and everything else. So, although he did it again and again, they didn't know when he was going to turn up at their house.

He'd have checked with their partner to say, I'm gonna do this. And it was just, you see his face and everything. He's loving it. He just gets so much out of it and it's and it just carries so far.

And he at the end of it, he was saying, Thanks so much for your idea, or thanks so much for the time you put in to kind of solve this. So, so I think we have to become role models in that respect and deliver a great employee experience in the way that we recognize and celebrate our achievements. That that's my view, and I've there's many different ways you can do it, and I think probably those ideas are unique to Tina and Phillips and your team, as opposed to here's a list of 20 that you could roll out.

Because they have to be very authentic when they come from you. I love that. Yeah, because I've heard this before, right? I've heard you you bring usually bad news, and for me, I just have a different way of looking at it.

For me, I get motivated by issues, right? Because, oh yeah, let's go fix this. We can prove it can be done, we can make this better. And not everybody's like that, and I need to recognize that more.

But can I just give a quick shout out to my colleague John Keely in Australia, New Zealand, who would give every great CX success a song that he played on the guitar for them. And it worked a charm. Like because he's good and he's funny, and like you said, it's authentic and it's something special to the team, and they all enjoyed it so much. So it's uh picked up the guitar and tried it, they'd hate it because I can't play the guitar.

No, that's one can do it. I think you have to be, and I say this uh carefully, but you have to be vulnerable to kind of allow yourself to be yourself and come into that to show that I'm gonna remember he's gonna remember playing the guitar for his colleagues in 20, 30 years' time, and vice versa. And we just have to accept that's okay because as you said before, I may not want to have a career path that accelerates me up to the board. This is my role.

I love doing it. So let me solve things. It's a role of passion. Absolutely.

And I think what we've spoken about kind of having permission to progress or the passion to progress, to be allowed to be passionate about what you're doing, which is where I kind of want to, you mentioned earlier about making sure and sitting under the source function sounds really interesting. How do you then get the customer strategy aligned or hardwired into the business strategy so that you're not seen as a marginal gain or you're not seen as um as an extra when time allows, but you're seen as a fundamental, a core part of what Philips stands for?

Yeah, that's a great question. And the question is also what comes first, right? I think ideally it would be co-creation. So ideally, I or someone on my team would sit with the business as the strategy is developed or with the strategy team whoever's doing it in your organization and you do it together.

Like I said before, nobody is ever gonna say the customer is not important because obviously they are, but at some point in time it's also easy to get distracted by other KPIs. I usually try to do it via customers. So if I come in and say, this is the feedback we're getting, this is the result from the surveys, this is what we need to do, they'll sometimes be arguing. And I think you sometimes have that in an organization where you have maybe a lot of scientist people or like we call them blue people that are very data and numbers focused.

And so, as an example, you can say uh quality of something isn't great, and this is the result, and then they'll go and say, Hey, let me prove to you that actually in comparison, this is actually a great result. It doesn't matter if the customer is unhappy, so you need the customer to speak because you can't argue with that. So bringing that in, we have in our executive committee they have a dashboard or scorecard for the company and the customer, there is a customer KPI that is for everybody, and that is shared and talked about a lot.

And then translating that down into the organization and figure out, make it very specific to them. What is it that customers say about you and what would get them to buy more? So I talked about the fact that I do escalations before. If customers are willing, I will do a video recording and I will always ask the question what could we have done differently?

What would you have liked us to have done so that despite this issue, you will stay with us? How can we prove our value to you that you stay our customer? And then you make that specific to the business and you have that discussion and you say, Okay, this can happen, and this is what we need to put in place so it matters less. And then bring it in that way.

And then in the sales organization, there's the very interesting short versus long-term, right? A lot of the time salespeople or commercial roles are incentivized by quarterly order intake or sales or whatever it might be in your organization, but the customer experience is always long-term. So it's very easy in a way to get a short-term sale. You just promise stuff, and then somebody signs, and then by the time they notice it's the next quarter, and maybe you can't deliver it exactly that way.

There's ways to, there's always, if you've worked in business excellence or program management or lean, you know the word sub-optimizing, you can always set KPIs that you can follow, and then you'll make something else worse. So you need always to find the balance. And then having that view is like, okay, when this happens, then how do you handle it? So long-term, there's still a good result, but you can still make your whatever your KPI is for the quarter, how can you balance it out so everybody wins?

And I think that's the kind of the holy grail to figure that out and to make everybody understand that customers are partners too, especially in B2B. Yeah, so I mean, I think that just is a it's kind of a beautiful place to kind of conclude because it's back to that really understanding your customer, whether they're an internal customer or an external customer. But also what you're just saying there, you may not be aware of it, but you've still got that lovely balance in there of solving the problem, but also saying to the customer, what could we have done that would have been better?

You're also giving them that springboard for improvement growth. And I think it's really important for a customer experienced management team to always live in both those spaces. It's actually very difficult. I was talking to a scientist who said, we struggle as humans to live in more than one time paradigm.

And if you go into people's houses, it's evidence. If you if they live in the past, there'll be lots of photographs and things around. Other people live in the present, there's lots of notes about what have got to happen here. And then some people live in the future.

So it's all about planning retirement and holidays and things like that. But we actually try struggle to transcend two time. Everything. Yeah.

So so to do that in business, to live in kind of the solving today and the fixing tomorrow, I mean, you don't find the strategy team say, well, next week we'll do sales and sales, you do strategy. There's a reason for that. Yeah, it's in CX, we need to. And I think people need to recognize that is a responsibility that no one's gonna give it to you as your permission, because as you say, they'll happily let you just fix, fix, fix, fix.

But you need to find that space, find ways in which you can always be living in the future as well as the present. I'd almost want to do another discussion with you because a lot of what you just said and a lot of the success around CX comes from sometimes it's just reframing. It's just reframing things and helping people understand better what's it about and look at it from a customer view. Sometimes that means you need to change your KPIs, your delivery KPI, for example, and sometimes it means you just need to phrase it differently to bring across that customer view.

So not everything has to be a big change, something that's tiny changes, and how much does mindset play a role in that? But one thing you just mentioned, my my bug beer is internal customers. For me, that doesn't exist. And I know that might not be the usual point of view, but one of the things we're trying to do is to get people to always prioritize the customer.

So if a request comes in from a customer or an account manager that's sitting with the customer, that good should go before Tina's email or your email or whatever, if we're in the same company, because that's uh More urgent. And if people don't see external customers a lot, they tend to look at their colleagues as internal customers. But then the whole prioritization piece again goes out the window because then they're actually asked, right? They prioritize the person next door anyway because I see you every day and I don't know who that person is.

And so for me, we have tried really hard to have partners, like suppliers and retailers and dealers and colleagues and customers and really make that distinction. But it is a very difficult discussion for people that are not customer facing because they feel I have nothing to do with this. Which they do, but that's a different thing. Yeah, I mean I've done it as an exercise called the six degree the Kevin Bacon six degrees of separation.

Yes, I've done that too. It's not even not even six. And if you're not serving customers, you're almost certainly going to be serving someone who is. It's very rarely you get three steps for the party.

And you when you're like talking to the fleet manager of the company cars, they'll go, What have I got to do with it? But they go, Well, hang on. The person who drives the company car is going to go and see the visitor, the customer. Oh, I'm one step.

Yes, you're one step away from the oh, I didn't realize that. Okay. And it just helps them really get that kind of context. But I think you're absolutely right.

I think when I think about prioritization lists, you might have your ways of working and your customer-centric improvements you're making internally, but actually that prioritization list only exists for the customer. So then if you're bringing in lots of your internal colleagues work you're going to fix first, then guess what? You're not going to get through that list you committed to. So I think that's a very healthy challenge to you.

I respect that. Yeah, I've done this. How many steps am I away from a customer a lot? And I always start with, hey, it's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Nobody has ever understood it. So thank you for mentioning it. You're the only other person who knows this. That's good.

No, I think it would be great. I'd love to do another podcast and call it that kind of mini transformation, that sense of a major transformation you go through. But actually, just free framing language, doing small little adjustments can get you a long way. I think that'll be quite interesting to share kind of examples of what that could look like.

So uh let's do it at some point. Let me know, because sometimes so healthcare is maybe specific, but many people work in the healthcare industry because they see the higher purpose and they want to improve lives. And then you walk through the door and you're in trade compliance and you sit at your desk, either at home or in the office, and you say, Okay, like I'm filling in documents every day. And the terrorists are relevant to me now, but like how I don't I don't improve lives this way.

So I I don't feel like I got what I kind of wanted when I walked through the door. And you can tell the moment people understand how they impact the improved lives, what their contribution is, things change. The motivation changes and the purpose changes and the engagement changes in a way. And the way to do it sometimes is just to say, well, you're not filling in documentation, you're ensuring the customer gets the X-ray machine installed at the day we said it would be installed, and no patients need to be rescheduled.

That's on you because if you do your job right, it just flows through customs and we stick to the timeline, and every patient that was promised gets the diagnosis they need. That's you, right? And that is a totally different view than saying I just sit here in my office and fill in documentation every day. It's still the same job.

Yeah, it's still the same KPI, but your view changes because suddenly you have a very immediate impact. You are responsible for not like 50 patients getting rescheduled, living in uncertainty for two weeks longer because you did this right. And I think there is something like this for every role. And once you figure this out, and you can set the KPIs or the incentive schemes, the targets accordingly, and you can make people understand that this is what it is.

This is you, this is the journey map, and this is your part, and it's just like two steps that changes. And so that's what we could be talking about more. You must have heard the stories, but there's I think there's a couple's English, so you may not translate very well, but there's an American one, which maybe is better. JFK turning up to NASA and seeing a person with a broom and saying, What do you do?

And they say, I'm helping to get someone on the moon. It's recognizing that it's not filling out a form, it's actually making sure that the healthcare can be delivered because that machine is going to be there when the patient comes in. That's very, I mean, and that is very, it's got like kind of goosebumps, goosebumps on the back of my neck because that's very empowering, isn't it? You kind of then feel, yes, that's why I decided to go to university.

That's why I chose to work for an organization like this, because I'm making a difference. I just didn't understand how I would make a difference. And ticking that box and descending that form off is me making a difference. Yeah, and you can still be behind the bigger company purpose, but once you understand your own role, I think it makes a difference.

And then obviously it depends on what your industry is and what your company priorities are, but everybody will have a reason why they are where they are. Yeah. Everybody will have made the choice to join this organization, and then are they getting out of that what they were hoping for? And it's up to, I guess, people like yourself to as their leaders and their mentors to bring that out of them and make them feel proud about that work and go back to that point that so they are morning people.

They want to get up and they want to come to work and they want to do it for the bigger cause. But Tina, it's been a delight. Thank you so much. And I know we had a rough structure we wanted to work our way through, but I think we went wonderfully off-piece and found some new areas of exploration.

And I love the idea of doing a mini transformation webinar as well. So we've done. But in the meantime, I wish you well. Thank you.

Good luck with everything you're progressing. And I know we spoke earlier about a charity piece in the customer experience world games, so I will look out for that for you as well. That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing.

Thank you. Exciting. Take care.