“Excellence in CX” Awards 2022 – That’s a Wrap!

Congratulations to all the Winners

We cannot wait to send this year’s Deep-Insight “Excellence in CX” Awards to their forever home.

These awards focus on customers who have embraced our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) framework and methodology to make meaningful change for their customers.

That makes us very proud!

Before we talk about the winners, we’d like to take a moment to talk about the award itself.

So, first of all, who are we?

Deep-Insight is a small team of Customer Experience (CX) consultants who work extremely closely with our customers. The single question which drives us in each engagement is, ‘will this CX programme inspire transformation in our client organisations?’.

Transformation does not need to be, and usually isn’t, a huge significant event in itself. When done well, transformation is a series of small, well thought through changes and improvements.

Transformation is only worth it if it leads to growth, and it always does when it is inspired by the customer.

What do we mean by ‘Excellence in CX’?

Simply put – we are not interested in vanity projects! We do not care who got the highest scores or the best feedback.

We are completely focused on our core mission of Inspiring Transformation i.e. effective, growth-oriented use of CX.

This is what excellence in customer experience looks like and it is the foundation on which our customers grow their CX programmes.

Why award customers now?

This year we realised that we talk about our customers behind their back All The Time!! We are always telling each other about the great thing Customer A did to engage their organisation, or the great thing Customer B did when communicating back to customers.

That’s when we had our eureka moment – we can recognise the great work our customers do publicly, without it feeling counter to our core CX belief of ‘Value before Vanity’.

All of our customers do amazing work. They wouldn’t put up with us and our challenge mentality if they didn’t, so these awards are here to stay! (But I can’t promise we will stop talking about them behind their backs.)

AND THE WINNERS ARE

Best Newcomer to CRQ

Congratulations to everyone in Vreugdenhill Dairy Foods, and a special shout-out to Leonie, Erik, Jeroen, Gerben and Harry!

When we started working with Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods they were quite vocal about being relatively new to anything Customer Experience Feedback related. They then impressed us by embracing the process like they had been at this for years. They got stuck in from the word ‘go’ (and even before) and kept their momentum up all through the live survey and throughout the reporting stages. They dove deep into their results to ensure they had specific actions for each area of the business that they could follow up on.

“In Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods, customers are at the forefront and are top of mind in everything we do. It is important to Vreugdenhil that we understand how our customers value the relationship they have with us. The research done together with Deep-Insight has given us a clear picture on how to develop even stronger relationships with our customers, with the hopes of an even better outcome in 2024.”

Gerben van Schaik, Commercial Director, Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods

Best CRQ Focus Amid Change

Congratulations to everyone in invenioLSI, especially Arun Bala, Nader Tirandazi, Tatiana Pankrats, Caroline Silva, Paula Rowlinson, Sudheer Nadipalli.

invenioLSI has grown at a phenomenal pace which has included a successful merger to expand their presence in the North American market. Customer Focus has been at the heart of invenioLSI since the start yet preserving core values is difficult during expansion and change. Despite this, invenioLSI has successfully maintained exceptional Customer Focus.

Using the Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) methodology has helped invenioLSI to stay close to their customers over the past three years allowing them to measure, understand and respond with action to their customers directly. Better still, their strength in customer focus continues to be recognised by their own customers

As invenioLSI drives change and transformation within their own customers, we are impressed that invenioLSI leads by example by putting their customer relationships at the forefront of what they do.

“invenioLSI is honored to receive the “Excellence in CX” Award from Deep-Insight. For the past 3 years invenioLSI and Deep-Insight have worked together to improve customer experience. Supporting efforts to improve customer relationship quality is something I believe is an essential part of running a company. Partnering with Deep-Insight has been a pleasure and an important part in our company’s mission to help our customers succeed.”

Nader Tirandazi, CEO, invenioLSI

Best Leadership Response to CRQ

Congratulations to everyone in SixDegrees, especially Chris Abbott, Kirsty Chapman and Tony Wells.

This is a truly deserved award, everything in Customer Experience starts with leadership commitment and drive and Six Degrees have this in spades.

Through working closely with Six Degrees we got to know a leadership team who are fearless in their ownership of every piece of customer feedback. They listen openly and without agenda and immediately review if their current strategies align with what their customers are telling them.

Most importantly Six Degrees’ leadership team supports their people and their teams. We have seen firsthand their dedication to their teams including, attendance & support at client feedback sessions and full transparency on strategic initiatives that will help their people to better support their customers. It is no surprise that Six Degrees have also been named in Newsweek’s list of the UK’s Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces for 2022.

“On behalf of the Six Degrees Leadership Team, we’re thrilled to be recognised for this award. This year’s survey is the first of three annual CRQ surveys Six Degrees are conducting as we work with our clients to continuously improve the relationship quality and client experience. We recognise that the whole organisation needs to own Six Degrees’ response if we’re going to be successful in delivering on the promises we have made to our clients. So, we are actively planning to bring our teams, as well as our clients, on the ‘Close the Loop’ journey in the New Year and throughout the programme.”

Kirsty Chapman, Director of Customer Success, Six Degrees Group

Trailblazer in CRQ

Congratulations to everyone in BT Ireland, especially to especially to Alan Shanley, Barry O’Shea, Deirdre Tyrell, Mary McDonagh, Conor Devlin, & Aisling McLaughlin.

BT Ireland has been on a long and successful CRQ journey, each year carefully listening and responding to their customers. Their customers truly value their relationship with BT Ireland, and they have seen tangible benefits from the BT Ireland CRQ programme.

BT Ireland do not want to stand still in this area – they are hungry to be market leaders in CX and are taking significant steps and risks to ensure their customers at the heart of everything they do.

BT Ireland used our ‘CRQ Healthcheck’ to inspire a change programme to disrupt how they measure and manage their Customer Experience to re-focus the entire business on the basics – the value of growing customer relationships. Their pioneering efforts are paying off leading to them winning suite of CX honours, most recently on the European stage.

“I’m immensely proud to lead a customer-focused organisation, and I’m very thankful to everyone in BT Ireland for their commitment to winning, developing and retaining customer accounts. Our customer experience culture is a differentiator for us as a business, as our customers have told us in our annual Deep Insight report, and it continues to set us apart.”

Shay Walsh, Managing Director, BT Ireland

This is the BT Ireland story.

It’s a story about Leadership, first and foremost. But it’s also a story about Strategy, Execution and Culture – the key themes in a new book about how B2B leaders build customer-centric organisations.

Shay Walsh is the Managing Director of BT Ireland and was our guest speaker at a recent breakfast seminar at the Irish Management Institute. His topic was ‘Customer at the Heart’ and Shay told the story of how BT transformed itself into one of Ireland’s leading customer-centric companies. It wasn’t an overnight transformation but BT was lucky enough to have a series of MDs, all of whom shared the passion for putting the customer at the heart.

LEADERSHIP

BT’s Irish operations are purely business-to-business (B2B) unlike its British Telecom parent which sells to both consumers and businesses.

Back in 2008, BT Ireland knew that it had poor or deteriorating relationships with some corporate and government customers but didn’t have an accurate assessment of the quality of these relationships. Chris Clark is the first leader in Shay’s story. He was the MD who first engaged Deep-Insight to find out.

The initial customer feedback was poor. Very poor. BT was in the ‘Danger Zone’ but Chris Clark now had a baseline from which to start rebuilding the business.

Shay Walsh was part of Chris’ leadership team and ran the Irish wholesale business. Chris and Shay had no easy fixes – there was no silver bullet. Just a lot of poor processes, unhappy customers and a leadership team determined to get to the bottom of the issues and do the right thing for their customers.

FROM BAD TO GOOD

Chris, Shay and the rest of the BT leadership team all believed passionately that the journey to financial success had to be built around a clear focus on the customer. They set about fixing what was broken and repairing the damaged client relationships. When Chris got promoted within BT, Graham Sutherland took over as MD. Progress was slow at first but Shay and other members of Graham’s leadership team finally got to grips with the underlying problems. One by one, they fixed them. They called the overall transformation programme ‘Customer First’. By 2011, BT had not only exited the ‘Danger Zone’ but had managed to get into the ‘Performing Zone’.

BUILDING AN EXECUTION CAPABILITY

Colm O’Neill accelerated BT’s ‘Customer First’ programme when he became MD of BT Ireland in 2011. He appointed a Customer Experience director called Mairead McSweeney who drove the programme with ruthless precision. Mairead initially assessed how customers felt about BT every six months before moving to an annual cycle. She put governance rules in place to ensure that the right individuals in the right clients were contacted. She made sure that the ‘Customer First’ programme could not be ‘gamed’.

Shay Walsh was now MD of Business Sales and he and the entire organisation (not just the sales team) were incentivised on the quality of the relationships they had with BT Ireland. Sales teams had targets set either at an individual level or at a team level. The senior leadership team had an overall BT Ireland target to hit for Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) before incentives were paid out.

FROM GOOD TO GREAT

Shay, Colm and Mairead now embarked on the second half of the BT customer journey – going from Good to Great. A different set of skills and capabilities was required because you can’t fix your way to greatness. Now it was down to the sales and service teams, working together, to identify where they could bring added value to clients. Then they made sure that the BT organisation could deliver on those promised value-adding improvements. In 2014, BT reached the ‘Unique Zone” – essentially the top 10% of Deep-Insight’s database.

THE ENEMY: COMPLACENCY

When you’re on top, the only way is down. The enemy is complacency. What was refreshing about Shay’s talk was his honesty about the fact that not everything is perfect in BT. They still get things wrong some of the time. The majority of customers may be extremely happy but Shay and his team are not resting on their laurels.

Shay Walsh became MD of BT Ireland in 2015. Since then, he has been pushing an agenda of continuous improvement in the company. There is no room for complacency in Shay’s organisation as the pressure in the telecommunications industry for better, cheaper services is relentless.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

Absolutely, says Shay Walsh. BT Ireland is still in the ‘Unique Zone’ but more importantly, the company is in a profitable and extremely stable position. Shay’s final slide sums up the BT Ireland story and the benefits of putting the customer at the heart:

Long-lasting relationships with clients
Increasing revenues from those relationships
80% of next year’s target revenues already contracted
Extremely happy customers – 57% are Ambassador clients for Shay and his team

PODCAST

This is a summary of the BT Ireland story. To hear Shay Walsh tell the story in full, listen to the full podcast on the Irish Management Institute website.

If you want to find out more about the BT Ireland story or how to put the customer at the heart of your company, contact us today or click on the link below to read about how business leaders in BT and several other organisations have transformed their companies to become truly customer-centric: