CX: behind the scenes
“...always positive, enthusiastic and willing to do whatever it takes to help the team. A natural collaborator who thrives in an agile environment. As creative and strategist, he has a broad skillset, the ability to work through complex test matrices, and he genuinely cares about the results.”
Throughout my career I’ve found great joy in making magnificent creative leaps from all kinds of briefs. But my true value lies in a deep appreciation for understanding the systems we’re trying to fix.
Putting things in context, joining dots, and leading the team to make leaps – all day, every day as Head of CX / Senior CD for Singapore Airlines at TBWA.
I find it helpful to think of CX like a haystack.
A messy pile of useful stuff, fairly uniform from a distance, but pretty complicated up close.
And wherever there’s a haystack, there’s always – always – a needle. Sometimes, there are many.
If you want to make some great ads about how great your haystack is, I can definitely help.
But we really should do something about those needles.
What I do best is lead hybrid teams to find needles in haystacks, and apply creativity to fix the problem in a way that works for the business.
Sometimes, we’ll search the whole damned haystack, and stumble across something really interesting besides the needle. We did that for Mercury and won the Grand Effie for having an effect on the company’s share price.
Sometimes, we’ll apply tech to the challenge (the equivalent of using a magnet, for example). Maybe we’ll bring some new tech to bear; say, automating a process and investing the effort we’d save into another project. At FCB we built a dynamic web-ad engine under the guise of improving efficiency when automating variants; then we threw data at it and boosted Flight Centre’s sales by 28% YOY (case study pending!).
Sometimes I’ll lead the team to ask, how did the needle get into the haystack in the first place? What problem are we really solving? That question helped us create a city guide designed to get people lost – and helped make Melbourne the #1 searched destination in its category.
Mid-week in a ten-day turnaround as Creative Strategist for ANZ at FCB, and I’m leading a team to work up everything in this room – from solving a client’s explicit need (a systems approach to B2C acquisition), to satisfying their unspoken desire (NPD, innovation, and eye candy).
There’s a set of skills, tools and approaches I’ve built up over the years that helps me lead teams to look at haystacks in all kinds of ways:
Kickstarts – strategic, creative, CX, innovation; a kickstart is typically a formal, four-hour session designed to extract and define the issues and ways forward, followed by distillation into whatever format suits – a strategy deck, a workshop, or even a coffee.
Pitches – creative, CRM, business; identifying opportunities, workshopping solutions, working at pace to build representative executions, and presenting with confidence.
Workshops – any combination and timing of gatherings, sprints, prototyping, CX focus sessions, content creation, futurism, innovation, quality control (campaigns, working culture, digital builds…), retrospectives, you name it, I particularly enjoy giving the standard toolkits a jolt of energy.
Brand Support – Guidelines, strategic brand behaviours, tones of voice, UX and UI standards…
Training – Innovation, Design Thinking, Agile culture, digital application…
Sharing – Client conferences, industry meet-ups, guest speaking, mentoring…
…I love it all. I really do.
Clockwise from top: final QC on the Mercury rebrand; democratising knowledge in a Strategic Kickstart for Vodafone; mapping the Customer Journey for Noel Leeming’s membership programme; content from Day 1 of a Design Thinking workshop.
