We talk to Joe Skinner about the challenges and rewards of being a CX Consultant

Tell us a bit about you

I started working in contact centres from the age of 19. I had not planned on staying there very long, but I absolutely fell in love with it, and I never left! Working in contact centres throughout the years allowed me to cover all areas – from being an agent, and running teams/departments, to change management and resource planning. I’m lucky enough to have basically done it all!

After developing my career with Domestic and General, I decided I it was time for a different career challenge – and so I joined Davies six months ago.

Tell us about your role. What do you do, and what do you find most interesting about it?

As a consultant for Davies’ Consulting and Technology division, I am lucky enough to get to work with clients of all shapes and sizes – helping them to make their business better in all kinds of innovative ways. Whether they have a goal in mind or have simply identified a specific issue that needs solving, I enjoy stepping in to see how we can help them achieve the best outcome. I get a kick out of working with so many different clients from a broad selection of industries, and over the years have worked with some well-known brands, at the top of their game. I love the problem-solving element to consulting and enjoy building long-lasting relationships with clients.

What made you want to work in this industry?

Contact centre roles are sometimes considered an accidental profession – not many people grow up saying they want work in a contact centre when they are older, but I absolutely fell in love with it! A contact centre is the point where the business interacts with the customer, whether the customer is calling in, sending an email, or joining a web chat, and in my opinion, that makes it the business to be in. The reason why I ended up really enjoying working in this industry is because you can genuinely positively affect a business by improving the contact centre. It can be hugely rewarding.

What are we doing as an organisation to address your clients’ challenges?

We help businesses make sure they have the right technology to deliver an omnichannel contact solution – giving the customer multiple touchpoint options such as telephone, email, chatbot – that they can pivot between easily. We ensure they are using the right technology to interact with customers the way that they want.

The world is constantly moving and changing, especially now, so having the right change capability to ensure you can handle that is super important. We help clients define and build their customer contact strategy and change capability.

What do you expect to see happen in the industry in the next 12 months?

I think there will continue to be a big drive towards digital self-service. That won’t remove the need for the contact centres but may change the role of the contact centre as a place where more complex customer issues are dealt with. This will result in businesses requiring the need for a different type of technology, a different type of agent supported through knowledge management and operational structures as well as new ways of monitoring through the likes of speech analytics. Going forward, contact centres are not going anywhere, they are just going to change a little bit as businesses digitalise and get rid of the low value transactional demands.

What challenges do you face in your role?

The biggest challenge I face in my role is learning about each business before I work with them. In order to help a client achieve the right outcomes you need to make sure you have spent the time to really understand who they are and what they’re all about. It is not a ‘one size fits all,’ and different solutions are needed for different clients. Working across multiple clients simultaneously can also be a bit of a juggling act at times.

What are they key things you’ve learned in your career?

1. Wonderful things can happen in a business when everyone is aligned with a common goal, purpose, and target
2. Never underestimate the power of a good or bad manager. It makes a massive difference to you as an individual. Equally, if you’re a manager never underestimate your power to be a good or bad manager either
3. Everybody wants to do a good job; I don’t think anyone comes to work to do a bad job on purpose so being mindful of that in your interactions with people is important
4. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have a fantastic strategy, a brilliant plan but if the culture of your business is not right then it won’t work.

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