Bespoke Customer Service w/ Joanna Swash | builders podcast

0:00One of my key phrases is only do what only you can do. If businesses can stick to their knitting and use experts who are good at all the different areas, it's not their skill set, the better.

0:16Today on Builders, I speak with Moneypenny CEO Joanna Swash about customer service and retention. And in my weekly check-in with Marty Beckerman, we discuss Airbnb versus hotels and giving constructive feedback. I'd like to take a moment to share some information about our sponsor of today's podcast, Simply Business, a business insurance provider that makes finding the right coverage easy. With Simply Business, you can find insurance quotes that suit your business in just a few stress-free clicks. Simply answer a few questions about your business, and Simply Business will shop their digital marketplace to find coverage options from leading insurance carriers in just a few minutes.

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1:26All right, here with Marty, this time in person, live, together at last, not over Zoom. Nice to see you. Great to see you in person, John. We're going to talk about a couple of the stories you're covering. One is about Airbnb and hotels. Do you stay at an Airbnb or a hotel generally? I usually do hotels, not Airbnbs, because I've had experiences with Airbnbs, trying to find the key in a lockbox and it's raining and it's cold and I can't get the combination. And I just know at the hotel, there's going to be an open lobby with someone there who's going to hand me a key card. Yeah. And it feels like Airbnb has been a media darling, an entrepreneurial growth story, a builder story for a long time.

2:09I know that during COVID, I was very intent on staying at Airbnbs with my family. You get a little bit of isolation, get a little safety maybe as opposed to hotels. But I stay at hotels more now, too. And you covered a recent poll or study done by Boston.com about what travelers prefer these days, right? Travelers have boomeranged back to hotels. Airbnb was huge in the 2010s. But the combination of rising prices, cleaning fees, having to do chores, having to clean your own bedsheets and pillowcases. Because people are just like, if it's going to cost the same as a Marriott, why not go to the real thing?

2:53It is true that if the checkout instructions are longer than like 30 words, I'm pretty annoyed. I think that's why people are going back to hotels. Even though Airbnb is still making a lot of money, there's still a lot of people going to Airbnbs. The people that are getting hurt the most from this trend are Airbnb landlords, Airbnb entrepreneurs. who there's so many people in that game now. So many people have bought properties to rent them out that they're competing against each other. Individual owners are not making that much, even though the company itself is. Some of them are down 80 % year over year because there's so much competition.

3:32And it's only getting harder with rising interest rates. And cities are starting to look at actually limiting Airbnb ownership because it's hurting the housing market for people who live in cities by driving up costs. Right. And if you live in like a condo building or something, and half of it are now people that aren't going to be your neighbors, but sort of like fly-by-night folks, maybe their HOAs are cracking down on that. Sure. I mean, I don't mind living around the fly-by-night folks. I don't even know what that phrase means, just seeing appropriate. I forget. I've been known to fly by night.

4:09I don't know what that phrase means either. Anyway, okay, so we're going to move on to the next thing, which is about feedback. And how do you take feedback? Do you like feedback? I like praise. I like unlimited and unqualified praise. Yeah. Marty, you're such a hard worker. Marty, you've had so many gains at the gym this month. I'm pro-praise. I like undeserved praise in addition to deserved praise. But I was more talking about critical feedback. How do you react to that? I guess your child's too young. My children don't really love feedback. How do you do with feedback? Well, I mean, it is an important part of managing people, and feedback makes us better when it's not delivered in a way that crushes our self-esteem and souls.

4:57Yes, but we need to get better. And so you assigned to one of your writers how to give feedback using some inspiration. Right. She's a huge fan of The Great British Baking Show, which is back for a new season. And she was talking about how the host of that show, Paul Hollywood, delivers feedback in a way that's honest, but also boosts contestants' belief in themselves and their ability to bake the perfect cake. Well, what percentage of the success in his feedback comes from the British accent? And then how much of it are these tips that the writer provides? I think anything in a British accent is usually better.

5:36Okay. But yeah, so our writer is saying that Paul Hollywood is really great at identifying things people might not even know they're good at. Saying, you did a great job in the souffle by doing X. And they'd be like, I did. And that gives them confidence in their own ability and the ability to focus on that one skill and make it even better. But Paul Hollywood will also be in a kind of Simon Cowell way, sometimes very honest about here's what you did wrong, which is also what people need to hear sometimes in order to realize that they have an area for improvement. Right on. All right. Well, thanks.

6:11Well, we'll tune into the newsletter and I'll talk to you next week. Thanks, John.

6:20Today, I'm with Joanna Swash. She is Group CEO of Moneypenny. Hi, Joanna. How are you? Hi. How are you? I'm good. Thank you very much. Thanks for being on the pod today. So I remember in my very first job after college, there was a phone in the room adjacent to where I sat that just rang all day. I asked, what is that phone? They said, the CEO said, that's our customer service line. Nobody answers it. True story. Oh, no. Oh, no. We can't start off like that, John, honestly. Well, I think in some way, Moneypenny solves for this sort of thing. I guess my first question is, why do companies struggle with what could be considered like a simple task, whether it's answering the phone or now in more modern business, chatting with customers or answering email, etc.?

7:17Don't you think though that you set up your own business or you're working within a more mature business and there's so many different plates that you've got to spin. So you've got the reason of your business, whatever your product or service is, and you've got to be able to market it. You've got to be able to look after your customers and you've got to be able to do your finances and all that stuff. and I just think that you know for businesses to go and actually break down all these things that they've got to do um one of my key phrases is only do what only you can do so if businesses can stick to their knitting and use experts who are good at all the different areas actually that's not their skill set the better um because it is a big struggle isn't it just trying to keep an eye and trying to keep a tab on all these different areas of the business that all you know they're all really, really important.

8:08And I think that's outsourcing has become so much more prevalent over the past 10 years, even. And I think that's been sped up to by the pandemic. So, yeah, I think it's a question of doing a bit of an audit of your business and saying, what do I absolutely have to do? And what can I get somebody else to do instead? Yeah, I was with an entrepreneur yesterday. He's the CEO of a fintech startup. And he's a brilliant guy, but marketing and customer service just has no background in that at all. So he doesn't necessarily know where to start. Speaking of startups, at what stage in your mind does someone need to devote their time to saying, I've got to figure out what I do with service and basic communication with customers?

9:00You obviously can't maybe do it on day one if you're a two-person startup, but when does somebody start to think about that? In our experience, they either think of it very, very early on in that customer journey, in their business journey, in that they think, right, okay, I want to set up a business. I don't necessarily need additional employees, actually, that I don't need on a full-time basis. How can I be smarter about this? And then they'll start up and they're a tiny little micro SME. Or it's as they start to scale. So they might have five employees. They might all be really busy. And actually what they want to do then is utilise some of their incredible in-house talent to go and grow and have a different kind of skill set, actually, rather than the simple admin tasks and the things that actually can be outsourced.

9:50and sometimes there's a little bit of a gap so they might start off outsourcing some things and then they bring it in-house and then they go and outsource again and I think that good credible outsourcing providers need to work as partners and be there for that appropriate life stage of the business and let's face it everybody's business is different isn't it everybody's got their own unique challenges they've got their own set of problems that they need to solve and I just think There's no one size fits all as far as we're concerned, but we do see an awful lot of people at startup stage thinking, right, OK, this is my plan.

10:27And how can I go and kick it off really with minimal cost, let's face it. And if you're a larger company with an established operation and you're kind of asking yourself, where do I invest? It's 2024 and I feel like I need to do better. I'm not sure if I can. And how should I think about budgeting and outsourcing? What would you recommend to a larger company that feels like it needs to evolve and needs to audit or understand their current service operations? Well, for starters, I'd say listen to your customers because they'll be telling you. So if you've got a problem in your business that you urgently need to fix, somebody somewhere is telling you, whether it's your suppliers, whether it's your customers, whether it's your in-house team.

11:12So ask open questions, listen to the responses that you're getting and try and put a plan in place. But isn't it the case that one of the best moments as leaders we can have is that blank sheet of paper moment? is to say, if I was going to reimagine how my business works right now, today, how would I set it up differently? And actually, we don't necessarily need the office space that we used to have. We don't necessarily need the headcount that we used to have because technology and outsourcing plays its part. And good luck to those leaders that are taking the time out, out of their day jobs with their A3 paper and a Sharpie to say, let's redraw what my world could look like.

11:54So ask your customers, look at your data. Everyone's got data. We've got data coming out of our ears. But what's the point in having data if we don't use it to tell stories, to draw conclusions? So I think we're all surrounded by this information. Sometimes we're too busy for reality. We like to keep our heads down. We're just in delivery mode. But it's so important, isn't it, that we just take that step back sometimes and have a think about what the alternatives might be. Yeah, no question. I agree with that. And I want to talk a little bit about what Moneypenny does specifically. And I guess maybe to get into that, one of the concerns I think that I would have or a typical business would have in thinking about outsourcing some customer service or some service or operations function is like, I have a brand, I have a personality, I have a vibe.

12:50how is another company going to represent me authentically? And so one question is how do you do it? But the other question is, do you have like a piece of data that's sort of like specialization, personalization, that benefits someone's business? So how do we match the right business with the right receptionist at Moneypenny? That's all on personality because every business is different. Every business's brand is different. Their personality is different. What they want from their customers is different. How they want to deliver customer service to their own customer base is, you know, there's a wide variety of ways that that can be done.

13:37And so I see it as my job to make sure that we understand our customers' needs well enough so that we can match the right personality to the right customer. and then you don't have to script because actually what happens is that somebody naturally understands what the objective is of a telephone call or the objective is of a chat because if you can understand your customer base enough then you know what the objective is you know what I need to do from a telephone call and because you can actually put yourself in your client's shoes and the more we can think and act as our clients and think and act as our own people internally as well then actually the better service that we can deliver for them.

14:18And a follow-up question to that. How do you know out of the get-go when you've assigned someone to a company? What are like your KPIs or measurements to know if something's working, like there's a fit? I kind of think like if I go to a doctor and, you know, you don't write off the bat, like, is this going to be someone I want to have a long-term relationship with? Yeah, so straight away, you know, it's all about getting that relationship started straight away and just making sure there's an emotional connection between the business owner or the management team there and the people that we're trusting to go and take those calls and chats and be the front face of their business.

14:55So number one is what's the feedback from the receptionist? Have they got a nice relationship? Do they feel like they're the right person? We'll always go and do CSAT questionnaires with the clients as well. So are they happy? What kind of feedback are we getting from a data perspective? and our account management team as well we're all asking open questions and saying um how can we be better tell us one thing that we can do for you so that actually we can be a better supplier better partner um and just make sure that we get it right i think it's the same as in our personal lives isn't it if we can all have open honest trusting relationships with people whether that's personal work with our customers then actually we find out all the truths then that we need don't we and again, as long as we're listening to them, as long as we're putting actions in place as a result, then we need to use a wide variety of data and feedback at our fingertips.

15:51Yeah, no question. And I think up to now in the conversation, we've been talking a lot about the human component of customer service, establishing a human connection. And in my understanding of Moneypenny, over time, you've evolved significantly. And I don't know if you You call yourself a technology company now, but you have technology that helps your business pretty significantly. Maybe could you talk about that evolution, if you don't mind, over the last decade, over the last 15 years, how you've invested in technology and what it does? Yeah, I mean, look, all our businesses are completely different, aren't they, than how they would have been even five years ago, never mind in the last decade.

16:35And I think where our responsibilities lie as leaders of businesses, and whether that's to our customers, whether it's to our people, to our investors, to ourselves as leaders, we've got to make sure that we invest in people who've got the headspace to innovate. because if you don't invest in a tech team that's actually got time to think about the art of the possible or you know to go and look at the marketplace and say what's available now today rather than only being able to solve current problems then I think that is the absolute key and so many people are cutting costs to a degree where you're not actually able maybe at the moment and the current environment to go and make sure that you've got your headspace, you're looking out, you're saying, what's all this new technology and how can we adopt it?

17:25And at the moment, you think about AI and conversational AI at the moment still in its infancy. And it will change greatly over the coming years. And my view on it all is that actually the best businesses are a mixture of brilliant technology and brilliant people and those two things are intertwined and we all have to be very very flexible in our approach without fixed ideas about where the businesses are going because it's changing so rapidly that it's about re-evaluating all the time it's about seeing what's out there how can technology make us more efficient how can AI deliver a better service to our customers how can conversational AI in the future deliver a different kind of service to our customer base than we've actually got at the moment.

18:13So for me, invest, keep your eyes open, don't have a closed mind about it. Think about the art of the possible and put yourself in all the different shoes to make sure that actually we're seeing situations from lots and lots of different angles. And then how are you using conversational AI with your with your customers today? Are they, is like there's, is it like some of the chat is being done by that and some of it's being done by humans? Am I thinking about it right? At the moment, yeah, it's a mixture of technology and humans. And there will be an element that, you know, clearly we're delivering chatbots, for example, and more of the automated services too.

18:55But at the moment, most of our products are actually the mix of technology and people. And that will shift over time. And I also think, well, our approach to efficiencies and productivity, for example, is about making sure that we're building it into our systems, into our current systems, ensuring that actually we've got the platforms and the foundations that we can keep building all this new technology and actually make our people more efficient and more knowledgeable so that we can do a better job for customers. We are finding that over the years, call durations are increasing. And it's because, you know the normal run-of-the-mill calls are being automated the easy stuff it's not a problem you know go and send that to a chatbot go and send that to automation but when somebody actually comes through to a real human being those calls are infinitely more complicated than they used to be as a percentage and actually it's about delivering that red carpet treatment to those edge cases that can't be automated where maybe the technology from wherever it's come from hasn't answered the customer's question.

20:03So in order to deliver top of the range, top class customer service, those human beings then have to be brilliant human beings able to use their initiative, but really well and truly supported by the very best in AI and technology to be able to give them the information at the fingertips that they actually need. I totally agree with that. And the call duration anecdote is really interesting because I think that rings true for me. I can think I'm a frequent flyer. I don't call my airline of choice that often. But when I do, I have a hairy problem. And I want somebody who knows how to solve something that I know is an edge case for an airline and to do it quickly.

20:49So, yeah, that's right. You know, you could have been through every single level of automation. And then as a consumer, you're getting frustrated there. And you're just thinking, oh, just let me talk to somebody. Let me put me through to a real human being. And those real human beings, then they can't be mediocre. They have to be absolutely top of their game. And how do you think about personalization? McKinsey studied personalization quite a bit. They have an interesting stat as it relates to customer acquisition, which is that the highest performing companies in a sector generate 40 % more of their money from personalization.

21:25than lower performing companies. But I would think the same thing would apply to service. I mean, I think we all know it costs more to acquire a customer than to keep a customer. And so you've got to keep customers to keep your business going. And anyway, this is sort of a long-winded question. But with calls that I make or chats that I make, when someone establishes a connection to me right away, it could be simple. Like I call that airline. It already knows I'm a frequent flyer. It already knows who I am. And so it just routes me to someone faster. They know I want to talk to an agent. They don't put me through the long tree.

22:04So I guess how do you react to that? How should customers think about personalization? I think we are all consumers. We are all humans. And we all want to feel special and loved, don't we? And so those brands that we interact with, whatever they are and whatever they do, So I walked into a restaurant, you know, a couple of weeks ago in London, and they said, aha, your usual table. I've not been there for two years. It's clearly in the CRM that last couple of times we sat there. And actually, it does make you feel special, although I know it's on a computer system. I know she hasn't remembered me, but it's just that moment of thinking, oh, that's nice.

22:42And the more moments like that that you can create, those little wow moments, I think the better. and you know gosh we're all leaders of so many different businesses so whether you use that personalization comes from knowledge of the of a key member of staff then that that plays into staff retention so how do you make sure that you retain the staff who can deliver that personalization from the heart you know to that customer that one time how do you go and make sure that your crm systems are absolutely bang up to date and let's face it how many of us have got crm systems where we use 10 of the fields they're all there for us and if we can be bothered and if we can be consistent and absolutely driven to make sure all the information gets put in at the right time into the right place and back against my point no point having data if you don't use it so whether it's people who know things and we can retain those people or the other end of the scale is data the more we can do to actually personalize a service, then the better.

23:46And it's no surprise to me whatsoever that the best performing companies are those companies that deliver this human special service, which, again, I suppose goes back down to the difference between tech and people and how actually maybe the best customer service is delivered by the best of both worlds. Yeah, I agree. And I wonder if you could furnish with another wow moment. I find those so interesting. I'll give you one that I had a couple of weeks ago, and it was sort of an in real life one. So Google hosted my company at their headquarters. Shout out, Google. And at the end of the meeting, they had these little desserts brought in, cake pops, you know, those like popsicle looking things that are cakes.

24:35but they were in our company's colors with our company's logo on them. And totally unnecessary and very much appreciated. And just like a touch that showed that they were thinking kind of next level in their approach with us. Any pop out to you, whether it's in real life or over the phone or via chat? Oh, do you know my latest wow moment actually is I walked into a new supplier of ours. And last time when they came to do the pitch, it was a marketing agency. When they came to do the pitch here, we gave them some of our money penny socks. OK, we give money penny socks out and they're just fab and I've not bought a pair of socks for a very long time.

25:23And we walked in and they'd got everybody wearing their money penny socks. and I just thought, you know what? They needn't have bothered. They needn't have remembered and it's just those little moments where actually it's the effort. It's not necessarily it being delivered, is it? It's your cake moment. They've made the effort. It's the sock moment. They've said to everybody, come on then, let's all wear our Moneypenny socks and I just think it's those times where people just take a moment just to think about how to make people smile. Yeah, that's an amazing story. That's a really, really, really good one.

25:55It's sort of next level from when you walk into a place and they have your name. Thank you. Thank you for coming in. It was everybody took five minutes out of their day to coordinate and think about it and plan ad. That's really cool. Yeah, all put their socks on. So Joanna, I talked about how or you talked about how Moneypenny evolved over the years. You have too at Moneypenny. Your first job at Moneypenny was not group CEO. Maybe talk about your journey from when you started, why you originally chose to go to Moneypenny and how you've evolved into CEO and sort of what your key decision points have been for you to stay with Moneypenny through your career, kind of what makes your story unique and special.

26:40What I love about my journey at Moneypenny is that every six months, it's been completely different. So I've been so fortunate to be part of a business that's grown and scaled and developed internationally. So I've been here about over 18 years now, heading on for 19 years. Started off as our founder's very first sales appointment. So and because I'd had my own business, I understood the challenges of running a very small business. And when I realized that something so simple as outsourcing your telephone answering as it was then, it was just telephones, could actually mean that you can, as a business owner, focus on what you do best.

27:23And I knew that the people that we had were the very best people available and that our customers trusted them with their, it's almost the equivalent of giving somebody your front door keys, isn't it? There you go. Here's my telephone. You answer it whenever you like. And so what I've loved about my job is, number one, the contact with so many different businesses. so many different business leaders, everyone's stories. And don't we all love other people's stories? So I've loved that. And I've loved the fact that we deliver what it says on the tin. And whether or not I go to big magic circle law firms who now outsource their entire switchboard to us, and we look after the live chat on their website, and they trust us with their brand.

28:10And small businesses where you're doing a presentation in a room and people put their hand up and say, I'm a client and I think you're great. that I absolutely love how proud that makes me of the job that our people do every single day, consistently a good job for our customers. And so I think that's what I've really loved about it is that I love representing a product that works. I love representing a product that helps businesses grow. And I've grown and I've been in all these different situations that quite frankly, I've thought, God, I can't do that. I'm not capable of that. and look where we are you know we've got 1200 1300 people across the UK and the US we're acquiring other businesses we are you know creating innovative products we are sometimes flying by the seat of our pants but aren't we all sometimes you know and we all went through the look at the some of the high points and low points you know pandemic for instance 2020 if you said to me, what's your biggest problem?