{"id":886,"date":"2019-04-11T07:38:25","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T06:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dimelo.corp.ringcentral.com\/en\/blog\/interview-colin-shaw\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T19:49:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T19:49:34","slug":"interview-colin-shaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/gb\/en\/blog\/interview-colin-shaw\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Colin Shaw – Driving Value In Customer Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Recognised for his influential business consultancy and as a world thought leader on Customer Experience<\/a>, Colin Shaw<\/a> has accumulated years of knowledge in Customer Experience. He has been recognized by LinkedIn as one of the top 150 business influencers worldwide<\/b>. Colin leads Beyond Philosophy which has been selected by the Financial Times as one of the best management consultancy companies in the UK<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your background?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

My name is Colin Shaw, I am the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy<\/a>. which provides consultancy and training services<\/b> for medium to large corporates throughout the globe. We help organisations do all these things and one of our clients, Ricoh, improved their Net Promoter Score (NPS)<\/b> by 34 points over 30 months that led to a 10% rise in printer sales.<\/p>\n

My background is mostly in corporate, where I worked in the B2B field at British Telecom. Then I had seen that Customer Experience was going to be a big thing back in 2002 and moved into that field. I then wrote my first book on Customer Experience and have now written six books in total <\/a>on the subject. I have been recognized by LinkedIn<\/b> as one of the top 150 Business Influencers from around the globe and have a number of awards too.<\/p>\n

What’s the importance of Customer Experience for companies?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Basically, the issue is that everything in the world is becoming commoditized. So the time from innovation to imitation is now down to a matter of weeks. So whatever product or service that you have is basically something that somebody else has or can copy. The bit that they struggle to copy is the customer experience.<\/p>\n

So the way that organizations now realize that they need to differentiate themselves<\/b> is not just on the product or the price that they provide, but also on the experience, they give their customers. That is the foundation of the Customer Experience movement<\/b> over the last 15-20 years.<\/p>\n

What’s the impact of Digital Transformation on Customer Experience?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Digital Transformation<\/b> is clearly part of a customer\u2019s experience, so how the customer interacts with the organization is obviously changing now to digital channels<\/b>. I personally love technology and think that it is a good thing.<\/p>\n

I think that there is a distinct danger. Having worked in corporate life, I know that costs are a key issue<\/b> and the danger is that everybody will see these crown jewels as a sign that we need to change what we\u2019re doing and transform ourselves. But the danger is that they are going to \u201cthrow the baby out with the bathwater\u201d if you know the expression.<\/p>\n

What do I mean by that? Well if I give you a brief example. In England, we used to have milk deliveries, where the milk was delivered to your door. So I said to my wife, \u201cWhy are we paying to have the milk delivered when we might as well go around to the grocery store and get it?\u201d She said; \u201cI would actually prefer to keep having the milk delivered\u201d because on a Friday night when the guy used to come around to collect the payment, they would have a laugh and a chat together.<\/p>\n

But because of the decline in sales, a new delivery guy doing the rounds decided it was a lot more efficient to collect it from under the empty bottles instead of calling to the door. It meant that within two months of having that we stopped getting the milk that way. The key issue here is that customer experience is not just about rational things, it is about how the customer feels, subconscious signals, and psychology. <\/b>These are part of four elements of customer experience which are rational, emotional, subconscious, and psychological.<\/p>\n

The point is that in digital transformation, the danger is people are digitally transforming parts of their experience that drive a great deal of value i.e the human interaction at some points. I am not saying all human interaction needs cannot be digitized. The question that I don\u2019t see people asking is \u201cWhat is the point of my human interaction that drives the most value for me?<\/b>\u201d and \u201cHow I am going to digitally transform things around that but keep that human interaction there?\u201d. That is the key thing of a customer experience that drives value.<\/p>\n

What’s the most significant change in terms of customer behaviors you’ve observed lately?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A big transformation has just been the digital market for retail and other sectors<\/b>. That obviously changes by generations who don\u2019t necessarily want to talk on the phone as were older people do. I think that human behavior is a really important subject<\/b> because not many organizations in my view actually understand it. For example, Disney know that when they ask their customers what they would like to eat at their theme parks, they know that people would like them to say there\u2019s an option of a salad. They also know that when people go to their theme parks they don’t eat salads, they eat hot dogs and hamburgers.<\/p>\n

So there is a big difference and this is where the psychology part comes in. There is a difference in what people say and what people do. So understanding what is truly driving human behavior, not just at a superficial level becomes key. <\/b>In our Beyond Philosophy Podcast<\/a>, \u201dThe Intuitive Customer\u201d, \u00a0myself and Prof. Ryan Hamilton talk about the psychology of human behavior. It goes in-depth more than people realize. \u00a0Just like my digital transformation story, somebody may say \u201cthe milkman coming along on Friday night is not important to me\u201d but in fact it is. Maybe they don\u2019t want to say it in case they embarrass themselves or it could be that they just don\u2019t know themselves. It is almost like the expression \u201cyou don\u2019t know what you have got until it’s gone\u201d.<\/p>\n

For customer behavior, on one side I see nothing has changed and human behavior continues to be human behavior. \u00a0But the other part of it is I don\u2019t see organizations really understanding human behavior and therefore, you get the problems with transformation, and the whole trend of AI is going to be critical as well going forward<\/b>. Again, the same issues will apply. Do people really understand why customers are doing things because the danger is people will only look at it superficially.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n