Relentless Customer Leader Podcast

Dr Chris L. Brown (00:01)
All right, well, I'm here with Adrian Swinsco today, all the way from Edinburgh. Hi, Adrian, how are doing?

Adrian Swinscoe (00:08)
Hey Chris, very well, how are you?

Dr Chris L. Brown (00:10)
Very well, mate, very well. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. Adrian is someone that's a prolific author and keynote speaker and consultant and advisor in the world of CX and someone that I've been keen to talk to for a little while. And so it's great to have you on the show today. And I thought probably a good place to start was, you know, where did it all start for you, Adrian? mean, how did you get involved, I guess, in this world of customer experience and business and...

and how did you arrive at the point you are today?

Adrian Swinscoe (00:43)
Okay, so let me think about the, well, it's the long story. Well, the long, the short long version as it were, is about 20 years ago, I left corporate sort of life and I was working sort of independently doing some other sort of freelance consulting projects with different groups of people, some of which were at risk and.

And there was a point where we'd done this big project and we tried to buy this company and that didn't work. And we'd done a lot of stuff that was at work and I was thinking, know, I don't really want to do the emotional up and down of this all of the time. So I wanted to, I was going, well, I need to, I like working independently. So I wanted, need to focus on an area that I feel strongly about or I care about. And

So I started, I set my own website, I started writing, because I could see the way that the internet was kind of developing, having a digital footprint was something that was going to really matter. And initially I started writing about just general stuff. And then I was like, I got very boring very quickly. And I thought, well, actually, is it don't like? What is it I really want, I care about? And I figured out that I really don't like bad service. And the...

Dr Chris L. Brown (02:06)
Hmm.

Adrian Swinscoe (02:11)
One of the biggest reasons having built and developed sort of businesses and propositions that always had like customer and employee value at their heart over the years, it's always frustrated me that many organizations get in the way of their people doing a good job. And that could be process, system, management, technology, all these different sort of things. don't give them the of the tools, the support that they need to do the right thing in the right moment as it were.

And that's always frustrated me. And so I thought, well, I'll tell you what, let me ask about, let me investigate what it takes to deliver better service. And to start thinking about that, researching that, looking for clues in terms of how we best do that. And that's where I started. So that was about in 2008 when I started probably writing about it. And then we're now four books later, a 13 year old podcast.

a Forbes column for about 11 years and a footprint that I've developed over time where I just get to rummage around this area. And it's kind of changed remarkably in particularly in the technological sphere over the last 15, 16 years. But it's good because it's a rich vein of source investigation and ideas. Frustratingly,

service hasn't really got that much better.

Dr Chris L. Brown (03:42)
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point to sort of nudge in on a little bit. mean, over time, feels like customer experiences are getting worse. Certainly down here in Australia, there's a lot of chatter about customer experience actually not improving, actually going backwards. Why do you think that is? What's been behind that?

Adrian Swinscoe (04:02)
Excuse me. I don't actually think it's going backwards. I think there's an interesting thing that's happening when that is that actually our expectations as consumers are going up at a rate faster than which kind of then going up or going up faster than then brands can keep up with. And so you end up with this, you know, increasing gap between what customers expect.

and what brands are able to deliver. And brands are held back by all sorts of different reasons, that, know, themselves, their mindsets, their budgets, their people, their culture, what they believe about customers, how much they value them, their technological architecture, all these different sort of things. But I think the thing about customers is that we're holding everybody to the same high standard. As before, if you had like a local...

grocery store, then you saw generally comparing them. You know, so like 10, 15, 20 years ago, you're comparing them to the other local grocery store that was in your neighborhood, right? Whereas now, we're comparing everybody against the best experience that we've that we had, regardless of the category. And that's in that was almost solely in the B2C space, but is now starting to seep into the B2B space as well.

So there's nowhere for people to hide. And then people are then also then applying those expectations to all the different spheres, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's to with public sector and government and so on and so forth. And so everybody's expecting a level of service and experience that compares to the best that they've experienced. And so that's hard for brands, but that is the challenge. That is the environment.

Dr Chris L. Brown (05:52)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (05:59)
and

Here's the thing, it's like when you get it right, customers reward you. Because that's the game, right?

Dr Chris L. Brown (06:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's really an expectations versus delivery gap that you think is sort of increasing over time because of these exceptional experiences that we get from companies like Apple and Amazon and these other really exceptional ones. And that's sort of driving that gap.

Adrian Swinscoe (06:28)
But I think the thing that's important to point out as well is that...

Brands end up kind of suffering in silence.

And what they don't do is they don't try and manage expectations. They're kind of like going, the expectations are the expectations, and then we're just trying to struggle to keep up.

Dr Chris L. Brown (06:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (06:52)
But actually there is a kind of a thing where you can go, we can manage expectations. And we could do a much, much better job at managing expectations by communicating better and more and possibly more proactively. that's the one of the biggest things that I think customers, well, one of the biggest things that brands miss and one of the biggest things that customers hate is not knowing what's going on.

Dr Chris L. Brown (07:21)
Yeah, exactly.

Adrian Swinscoe (07:23)
It's

this kind of like principle, which is nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of other stuff, we make things up. But then brands have an opportunity to fill that gap and manage those expectations, but generally they don't.

Dr Chris L. Brown (07:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah

Yeah, it's interesting because that's a real low hanging fruit, isn't it, Adrian? it just reminds me, you know, I was chatting with a mate this morning and there's a big trend here. I'm not sure if it's the same up in Edinburgh, but there's a big trend here around ice baths. You know, everyone's going into ice baths and, you know, part of a sort of de-stressing and so on wellness trend. And so there's huge demand for these ice baths. And this mate of mine has bought one, had to put half of his money down about six months ago.

Adrian Swinscoe (07:45)
100%.

Right?

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Dr Chris L. Brown (08:09)
and

hasn't heard anything back from the company since. And he was getting aggravated by it, right? And that's a great example of what you're just talking about, right? Where's the expectation management around, when's it going to be delivered upfront? Do I expect to wait six months for this or those sorts of things? Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (08:14)
Right?

And

so I think as you're right, it's completely low hanging fruit. And when people talk about a customer journey or a customer's journey, that's part of it, right? So take them on a journey. Make them part of the story. Now, even if it's when things go wrong, don't make people...

Dr Chris L. Brown (08:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (08:57)
chase you for information.

Dr Chris L. Brown (08:59)
Yeah,

Adrian Swinscoe (09:00)
because you're the ones

that have the information, so push it out. Push it out and make it readily available and do it kind of frequently, and then you keep filling that gap.

Dr Chris L. Brown (09:08)
Yeah. In your experience, in working with different companies, what's holding them back, do think, from really building this type of culture in a business, building a more customer centric approach? What are the barriers that you've seen?

Adrian Swinscoe (09:28)
I mean, I think for me, think one of the biggest things is the biggest Achilles heel, I think that many companies have when it comes to delivering in this sort of space is that I actually don't think they have a clear idea of what their vision is and what the strategy is to achieve that vision.

And I assume there's probably lots of people that listen to that and go, no, we've got that handled. You're like, do you though? I don't think you have handled a level of granularity that really matters. So I think a lot of people have this almost grandiose statement. This is what we want to do. It's like, it's connected, it's AI powered or enabled, it's seamless, it's digital, it's omnichannel, it's blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things. You're like, so what?

What does that mean to the person that's in that office over there, that office that over there in terms of what they're going to do, what they have to do in order to deliver or enable that to show up for that kind of customer at X point in the journey? Do you know what they need to do? And I don't think we necessarily have gone to that level of granularity, sophistication of understanding in terms of what is our vision or what does it mean across different parts of the

of the customer journey, what it means across different types of, for different types of customers. What is the human and tech balance that we're going to try and strike at different points in that kind of journey? How is that going to work? What is it now and where does it want to be? What does that say about our technological infrastructure? Where are the gaps? What do we need to build to? And then all of that, how does it connect to our commercial objectives?

Dr Chris L. Brown (11:24)
Yeah, yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (11:26)
And if you think of you, if you develop that sort of almost that sophisticated map in terms of here's where we are, here's where we wanna be, and these are the gaps, and this is what we're gonna do to build the gaps is what we're building to. And this is why it's important to us commercially. Then you do that and it's, you're pulling everybody together. So everybody's got a role to understand who's playing what role to deliver on.

this and I don't think we've got it all knitted together well enough.

Dr Chris L. Brown (11:58)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah. So this is another gap really between a vision and, really what, what's concrete and what can actually be executed and delivered by people in the company, right? Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (12:08)
Yeah, I think

so. I think the thing is that, but I do think there's a culture, I think in modern business that we talk about the craziness vision, but I actually...

actually thinking about and dreaming about and imagining what it is that we want to do looks a lot like this.

which then to many people looks a lot like you're doing nothing.

And so we get stuck in this thing as like, let's imagine something and then get on with it rather than going, should we just not take a little bit of time?

Dr Chris L. Brown (12:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (12:51)
and do the thinking, do the work before we set off. And I think that's where we kind of think is because, you know, envisioning what it is we want in a level of detail that's really gonna help us, that is as inclusive involves all different stakeholders around the business and helps you understand, you know, what the full picture is, can a lot of time look like people are sitting around in a room having a chat, which is...

Dr Chris L. Brown (12:55)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (13:20)
in many people's eyes in our modern business culture looks like a waste of time.

Dr Chris L. Brown (13:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (13:27)
But I don't think it is, it's an investment in alignment and it's an investment in planning and investment in vision making. It's an investment in all these different sort of things. And I think if you do that work upfront, it's almost like go slower in order to go faster and go further and go for longer. I think many people miss that. And I think that's a real Achilles heel for many brands.

Dr Chris L. Brown (13:42)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. When you think about leaders that you've worked with or you've seen, what stands out about them that these are leaders that you would sort of describe as being very customer centric, that really understand these connections and really understand how to mobilize an organization to deliver great customer experiences. Are there certain attributes that stand out or characteristics of those people?

Adrian Swinscoe (14:21)
Yeah, no, think there's a, I think there's probably, well, there's probably more than two things, but there's two things that occur to me. One is that they care. That they care about what their customers go through. And this is not, there's a difference between just the rhetoric of saying, yeah, customers are the heart, are very important to us in their heart, everything we do. It's like, they really do. They care what people experience, they care what people think.

They care about the standard of the service that they're delivering. But they also put their money where their mouth is, or actually more importantly, they put their time where their mouth is. And so they'll go off and they'll do things. Like I remember, just the other day I heard somebody tell me about a...

company where they've got a new CEO. And the new CEO, as soon as he came in, right, went, said to the folks in the customer service, customer support department, schedule me in for an onboarding session in the customer service, customer support. I want to spend.

Some regular time of the first two weeks that I'm gonna hear, like on the phones, on the email, on the chat, actually kind of like helping customers and understanding the kind of problems of getting stuck in. didn't wait to be asked to do that. He just did it. And I think that's the thing is that the CEOs and the leaders that do...

Dr Chris L. Brown (15:47)
Yep. Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe (15:59)
that actually really make a difference. They go off and they will gather this data themselves. So for me, think about, it's because we talk about data driven, being data driven decision makers, whether that's an organization level or leadership level. And for me, I think there's three levels of data that we acquire from a decision making perspective.

And I think the first level is that it's just the standard sort of data, and it informs us. So data informs. So we get it all, it's in spreadsheets or dashboards or whatever, and it informs us. And then we enrich that data with things like stories, testimonials and verbatims and all this stuff. And I think that those stories, they move us because we hear people's voices in those things.

And that's the second level. But the third level...

is when we go and experience things ourselves. it, because experiences compel us.

because we get that visceral, emotional connection to what somebody else's experience is or how we've responded to their experience. And so it's that inform, move, compel spectrum, as it were. And the majority of leaders are on this left-hand side. They're like, we've got all this data. You're like, okay. And then you've got then a very, very,

Dr Chris L. Brown (17:30)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (17:41)
a minority of people that are going, we go further in the data, we gather these stories and they kind of, they move us because they bring our data to life. You're like, okay, brilliant. And then you've got a very, very small percentage of people that are over here where it goes, I'm going to seek to collect those stories myself and to move myself as close to the experience as I possibly can because I want to feel what it's like.

Dr Chris L. Brown (18:08)
Yep. Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe (18:11)
And for me, that's kind of the difference. There's people that want to make the time to go and seek those things out and see with your own eyes.

Dr Chris L. Brown (18:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And I think what you're describing is this, there's this big psychological distance between senior leaders and really what's going on in the business often, right? Particularly in large businesses. Yeah. And so you have the only way to bridge it is to become a customer yourself and find out what's it to be a customer of this.

Adrian Swinscoe (18:30)
Yeah, 100%.

or get on

the tools and go and serve a customer and wait for the wrath to come. When something messes up and you're like going, I'm going to pick up the phone and the customer is going to be completely hacked off and you're going to put yourself in the line of fire and go, hi, I'm Adrian, how can I help?

Dr Chris L. Brown (18:42)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah. Do you think, I mean, in terms of companies investing in building these sorts of leadership capabilities, which is really the way I describe what you're talking about, what's stopping them from building these leadership capabilities? Because they're crucial to, in my view, to business performance. And yet we don't have, you know, I don't think we have enough of them.

Adrian Swinscoe (19:12)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Chris L. Brown (19:28)
What do you think's holding companies back from really investing in it and making it part of how they do things?

Adrian Swinscoe (19:36)
hey, there's probably a number of different things. One is the stories that we tell ourselves about the importance of doing that work. Because I don't necessarily think it's a capability. It's not a skill that can be learned. It's almost a characteristic that you have, which is.

around humility, around respect, around care, around curiosity, around value.

I think that's more comes about the person. You there's nothing to stop anybody going, I'm going to go and do this. I don't need to ask for permission. I just need to go and speak to the right sort of people and make, make enough time to go and do that. Whether it's a case of like, you're going to mystery shop yourselves, or you're going to take somebody that you know, to become a customer of your, your own firm. And you're going to try and experience it that way. Whether it, you just go and hang out with your

service and support people and actually understand what it's like to be them and what the customer is talking about and doing that on a regular basis, not on a stage managed type of thing. It's like, you just show up. You make the right connections and you just show up because it matters. And so I think it's not a capability, it's more of a, it's like a mindset thing about how we think about sort of stuff and the choices that we make.

Dr Chris L. Brown (20:55)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (21:09)
In terms of the things that stop us, think many organizations, they have this narrative around, and also the culture of...

How many meetings can we be in?

I remember talking to a CIO a little while ago, and he was reflecting on his ability to kind of deal with these kind of back-to-back meetings. He remember telling me, one of the pandemic first kind of like, you know, took off or we first went to remote. said, we're having all these meetings. I was, he said, I...

remember, it's not unusual for me to have a day which had 14 half an hour meetings and back to back. And I was like, that's wild. I said like, so when did you actually do any work?

or I mean, that was being slightly facetious, but.

did say that I don't think there's anybody in the world that's got a job description that says one of your objectives is to attend as many meetings as humanly possible. And I think what we need to do is we need to think about releasing ourselves from that almost a tyranny of meetings and sort of clear some space to do some of these things. The more strategic stuff.

Dr Chris L. Brown (22:30)
Yeah, yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (22:47)
we can start to really lean in and understand these problems or actually undertake some of these tasks. Something like doing the visioning, know, go and do the investigation, create that sort of space to think.

Dr Chris L. Brown (23:00)
Yep. Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe (23:01)
Because it's incumbent on leaders to do that. Because if they're not going to do it, how do they give their teams the permission and the space to do it themselves?

Dr Chris L. Brown (23:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (23:16)
And so if we're gonna set the tone, the only thing that we can truly control in our own lives is our time. That's our only gift.

Because it's ours, right? So we should be able to choose how we spend it and how we manage it.

Dr Chris L. Brown (23:31)
Mm.

Adrian Swinscoe (23:36)
And then from a leader's perspective, they have to figure out how they create some space. And I've said jokingly to some leaders, I I think you need to kind of, you need to start canceling or opting out or saying no to between 20 to 30 % of all meetings that you've been asked to kind of attend on a weekly basis.

Dr Chris L. Brown (24:05)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (24:06)
In fact, just keep going until somebody notices. If you can clear out your whole calendar for a week, it's a bit like cutting your nails, know, when you get back to kind of the point where it starts to bleed. You don't want to start to bleed, obviously, but you want to get to the point where it's like, you can cut it as close as you possibly can.

Dr Chris L. Brown (24:12)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (24:26)
Because it's an exercise, again, it's a habit. You gotta block things out, block time out, and make it sacrosanct. That's my thinking space, or that's my doing space, or that's my investigating space, or that's my talking to people space. That's my space.

Dr Chris L. Brown (24:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes a lot of sense. your recent books. So you wrote a book, How to Wow a number of years ago. And when you think about sort of the companies and examples that you use to sort of demonstrate how companies do that, there, are there some favorites that you have that you can share with us?

in terms of how companies really do this effectively.

Adrian Swinscoe (25:12)
crumbs, that's plumbing the archives.

And for some reason, think there's a, I don't know, there's this one, and I think it might just be, I've I noticed a couple of books on my shelf in the office. This is my home office, but the, in the actual office. Yesterday, there was a book called Loop Tale. And, and it was written, I forget the gentleman's name, but it was written by a guy who started this company called G Adventures. Just a big, they're a small group travel firm. And,

One of the things that they did, which I thought was, mean, people might just say it's just, it's almost like wind address, just labels and stuff. But I think sometimes these things can be really important. And what they did, what they did was they said that he's the CEO of the company and the founder. And then he made everybody else who dealt with company dealt with customers, and also who are running tours and everything else.

He said, you're all CEOs too.

And so everybody's a CEO. He's a chief executive officer, but they're the chief experience officers because they're chief, because the chief for their customers, their clients in that moment. They're the only person that really matters. And then just pushed all of the resources that they needed to the front to enable and to empower them. And so then they can curate the experience and take the decisions that they need.

Dr Chris L. Brown (26:37)
.

Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (26:55)
that are right for their clients to make the kind of most of their trip. it seems kind of, sometimes it seems like a really simple thing, but I think that's the key. I mean, I think the whole thing about the how to wow stuff is people get caught up in this idea like, we need to wow, surprise and delight our customers. And you're like, well, you don't really, you know, to go back to the expectations kind of point.

Dr Chris L. Brown (27:21)
Mm.

Adrian Swinscoe (27:25)
You just need to keep up with their expectations.

Dr Chris L. Brown (27:28)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (27:29)
And that can equate to just doing the basics brilliantly. And I think the thing is what we forget is like psychologically as human beings, that's really important for us. Trust, reliability, credibility, showing up when, know, doing what you said you were gonna do when you say you're gonna do it, that type of idea.

Dr Chris L. Brown (27:35)
Yep.

Yep.

Yes.

Adrian Swinscoe (27:55)
That's like, if we think about our best friends or the people that we hold dearest to us are usually the ones that have been these constant, the constants in our lives. The people that we rely on, the people on when things are tough, these are the folks that we call and they show up. They say, they're gonna take, they're gonna do the thing that they promised to do, because you rely on them and you're comfortable.

Dr Chris L. Brown (28:15)
Yes.

Adrian Swinscoe (28:24)
in that idea. Now, if we did that as branches, and that's the basics, we did that brilliantly, and we execute it brilliantly all of the time, then it gives us this massive foundation, and a solid foundation with which to build.

and nurture a much grander, bigger relationship. And I think that again, that's the thing that we miss. We miss the basics stuff because it's not very exciting. It's not very sexy. And it's hard work. It's a bit like anybody who knows who's been in a relationship for a significant period of time. It's not all roses, right? It takes work.

Dr Chris L. Brown (29:11)
Not all myself. Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (29:15)
And it's not sexy and it's not necessarily exciting, because it takes work and continuous work. But this is the secret that's hiding in plain sight. This is what most of the big brands, do this and they do this super well, because they execute on this and then it allows them to do all this other stuff. And that's kind of the thing that...

Dr Chris L. Brown (29:30)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (29:44)
that people don't do because it takes hard work and commitment and dedication. And so I think those sort of things are, and sometimes like in the loop tail example, the G Adventures example, sometimes there's little nuances that you can use to customize to your situation. So it's not like the same recipe for everybody because everybody's situation, everybody's customers, everybody's context is slightly different. So your basics will be different.

Dr Chris L. Brown (29:49)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (30:13)
and how you approach those is gonna be different. But I think that's, for me, that's one of the keys and that's one of the companies that I remember just fascinatingly because I spotted the book in my bookshelf yesterday.

Dr Chris L. Brown (30:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, triggered it.

And your more recent books are Punk CX and Punk XL, think, are the two books. And this whole theme around punk, tell me a bit more about how that idea came to you and where that sort of came, because it's an interesting concept to think about.

Adrian Swinscoe (30:36)
Yes.

Well, thank you. so.

It was born out of, well, the backstory to it is it was born out of too many pints of Guinness in a pub one night called the Basket Makers in Brighton where we used to live with a friend of mine called O'Sheen. And we were both in that sort of experience sort of space and we were talking about this, that, they were saying, it's all this excitement, all this investment, all these different things. But it wasn't really having an impact on the outcomes.

And I blurted out, I wish somebody would do something a bit more punk to try and move the needle. And I thought about that. Well, I promptly forgot about that. You know, it's a function of having too many pints of Guinness. But then I remembered it again a wee while later. And it made me think about that, I'm a fan of punk music and

Dr Chris L. Brown (31:39)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (32:02)
It made me think about what punk is and where it came from. And is there anything that we could learn from that? And what it helped me do is it helped me understand that, so punk exploded out in the back of progressive rock in the 1970s, the original punk. Progressive rock was popular, also got accused of being overly elaborate, self-indulgent, more interested in its own virtuosity than anything else. And punk was like, meh, you don't need a PhD in music.

to be in a band, you can just pick up some drumsticks and a mic and a guitar and just have a go.

Dr Chris L. Brown (32:39)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (32:40)
And it was all this back to basics approach. It's all about impact and being daring to be different and so on and so forth. And it struck me, said, at the time and even today, it struck me that...

The CX space shares a lot of the same characteristics that the progressive rock space had in the 1970s. Because I think that the CX space is overly codified, certified, benchmarked, frameworked, et cetera, et cetera. And ends up being more interested in itself as a little kind of function or an industry.

Dr Chris L. Brown (33:22)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (33:32)
than its constituents, a like progressive rock. We're like, look at me being a virtuoso on the guitar.

Dr Chris L. Brown (33:38)
It's pretty ironic

really, isn't it, Adrian?

Adrian Swinscoe (33:41)
Right? Hence, my

hypothesis was if this is true, then what would a punk version look like? What would a back to basics approach to CX look like? Which was all about daring to be different, about thinking different, to be focusing on outcomes and impacts rather than fancy ways of doing things. Or, know, journey mapping and technology and all these different sort of things where the customer gets lost or disenfranchised in the whole.

Dr Chris L. Brown (34:04)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (34:11)
sort of space and you forget that about why we're here and what we're here to do. And so that was all hypothesis. And so the punk book was an exploration of that in a very almost like punk fanzine graphic novel sort of way. It's all very short tracks. So it's not like it's like full color. So it's not like a standard business book where you've got black ink on white pages. It's like.

Dr Chris L. Brown (34:17)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (34:39)
an explosion of color, is, it was fun. It's like an art project. And it was cool. And, and Punk XL was an extension kind of of that around the idea that it's no longer sufficient to talk about just customer experience in isolation and that we have to think holistically. We have to think about customer experience, employee experience, the experience that our partners.

Contractors kind of have that the experience that our leaders have, the experience that our wider community has with our business because we've got responsibility in all these different domains. And that we have to think in a knitted together holistic way if we're gonna be successful and we're gonna move with what matters for our customers, what matters for our employees, what matters for our communities, if we wanna keep building success kind of going forward.

Dr Chris L. Brown (35:32)
Yeah,

yeah. It's a nice way to contrast really the, you know, the progressive rock being self-centered sort of company, right? Versus the punk rock being outward focused and customer focused and really taking the customer's perspective and being different, noting value. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great way to think about it. Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (35:53)
Well, thank

you. it was seriously a decent art project and it was like a fun thing to do. And it was very much one of those things where was like, I don't think anybody's done this before and this might not work. But I was like going, yeah, well, it's punk, right? It's like, that's the point.

Dr Chris L. Brown (36:09)
Hmm. Yeah.

Yeah,

that's it. it. Something that I was looking at sort of some summaries of the book and I think you kind of emphasize creativity, bravery, a sort of do-it-yourself attitude in the Punk CX book. How do you cultivate those things do you think in organizations? How do you create the space for people to do that?

Adrian Swinscoe (36:44)
Well, again, I think you've just kind of come up with the answer yourself. You just talked about space. You've got to create the space, right? And then you can decide what you put in that space. So which is very relevant to what's happening now with the evolution of much of this new technology, which is...

Dr Chris L. Brown (36:44)
Have you seen that done?

Adrian Swinscoe (37:13)
has the potential to automate a lot of the mundane or the manual sort of repetitive tasks that we do.

But then it frees up space for us to focus on doing the things that we as human beings are better at, whether it's in sales or marketing or service or whatever.

Dr Chris L. Brown (37:34)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (37:35)
And

I think that's a really kind of thing. So how, when you get to the point where you're harnessing the potential of these new technologies and these new tools and it's freeing up that space, then our choices is like, what do we want to do with that space? That time that it's free. Do you want to spend it more time connecting with customers and finding out about them? Or do we want, know, or

And we might wanna do that, but we might say, we want to do other things. We might wanna do other things which goes, well, let's go and investigate this, or be curious about that, or think about that problem, or whatever it might be. And I think that's the point, because I think that it's creating the space and then what we fill it with. And a lot of people, if they take, a lot of people will get to that point.

Dr Chris L. Brown (38:27)
Thank

Adrian Swinscoe (38:31)
where they create this space and if they're just taking a let's put it this way, a 20th century view of things, they'll see things from a, excuse me, they will see it from a, it's like a purely efficiency perspective and it'd be like an accounting exercise. we can save this and if we can do that or we might be able to reduce our costs on this and things.

Dr Chris L. Brown (38:49)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (39:03)
But another way of thinking about it is to see it as an opportunity, an opportunity to do things differently or in addition. Like here's a fascinating example. I split somebody.

Dr Chris L. Brown (39:15)
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe (39:22)
recently and they said that they'd implemented a bunch of AI enabled tools into their service sort of space to help a lot of their agents, freed up a whole bunch of kind of time.

What's fascinating is that what they did in response to that, freeing up that time, what they said is they're going, you know what it's allowed us to do? It's allowed us to turn the phones on.

Dr Chris L. Brown (39:51)
Hmm. Hmm.

Adrian Swinscoe (39:53)
So

rather than turning the phones off, which would be kind of a thing, because it's an expensive channel in some people's kind of minds, they were like going, we've never been able to turn the phones off, the phones on rather, because it's always been a bit too expensive. It takes too much time. It's harder to manage in terms of the cues and everything else. Because we've got quite a small tight sort of team. But because we've implemented this technology and it's taken a lot of the repetitive work.

away from us, freed up that sort of time, we've been able to make decisions about what we do. So we actually, we've turned the phones on because then it allows us to speak to customers directly and connect with them and stuff. And that's a really great thing. And then it's allowed us to do, move into not just doing service stuff, but actually start thinking about doing, helping out in the customer success domain. And then maybe thinking about doing some, some cross-selling or upselling.

Dr Chris L. Brown (40:35)
Yes.

Adrian Swinscoe (40:50)
type of things because we're not just focused on fighting the fires. We can start to think differently. We can start to think about how do we add value to different parts of the organization. And I think that's the point. that creating that space is the one thing you should definitely do when you create space is fill it full of curiosity.

Dr Chris L. Brown (40:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. That's a great example, Adrian. I mean, I think you're right. There's two ways of looking at AI, isn't there? There's this, you know, cost reductionist sort of way of how do we reduce costs with it? But the bigger opportunity is the growth side of it, right? And really the roles are going to be coming more and more creative because a lot of that sort of mundane, repetitive tasks that people don't want to have to do can be taken care of.

by those systems. it's a fascinating time. A few just last questions for you.

My podcast is called the Relentless Customer Leader. And when you think of the term relentless, what does that mean to you?

Adrian Swinscoe (42:04)
well, I'm sure you know this because it's the Relentless Customer Leader podcast, but I will check. Do you know where relentless.com goes to?

Dr Chris L. Brown (42:23)
I'm pretty sure it's Amazon, isn't it?

Adrian Swinscoe (42:25)
You're 100 % right. And I think they acquired lots of URLs back in the day when Jeff Bezos was setting up Amazon. Because it's been like that for a long time. And I think it says everything you need to know about Amazon, whether you like them or not, and about what they do or not, it doesn't matter. It tells you about what they do. They're relentless. They keep growing. They keep...

experimenting, they keep building, they keep testing, they keep doing all these different things. And I think that that's what a relentless customer leader does, is that they are, it doesn't matter how fast they go.

It's like, this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. And whether you finish a marathon in six hours or just over two hours, you're still finished a marathon, right? And you're still better than all those kind of people. Well, you still have done that, where most people haven't done that. You know, it's a little big deal. And I think the thing...

about being relentless is that you're always learning, you're always looking to progress, you're always paying attention, you're always keeping kind of moving. And it's never just the same answer. It's about responding to your environment and keeping going and bringing your people with you as you.

as you go. And I think that for me, that's what being relentless means. It's about movement, but it's also about growth. And growth doesn't actually have to mean bigger and better all of the time, because it reminds me of a, here's another, almost like a thought piece.

which a story that I tell people from time time is a bit like.

My dad's a grower of bonsai trees. He has been for years. you know, bonsai, knows what this is, it's a Japanese art of miniature trees. And what's interesting is the work, the.

practitioners work really hard to take a lot of care of all these trees to sculpt them and make them kind of like beautiful and things. And so you can have these trees that are like hundreds of years old, but they're like only like two feet sort of high.

And that's growth, but it's like sculpted growth. But here's the interesting thing is you can take that tree out of its pot and its restricted growing environment and you could plant it in the ground and it would have the potential to grow to a full-size tree again.

Dr Chris L. Brown (45:28)
Yeah.

Well.

Yeah, that's amazing, isn't it?

Adrian Swinscoe (45:49)
No,

so growth is a choice.

And when being relentless is about, well, actually, yes, you're pursuing growth and development stuff, but it doesn't need to be about more.

Dr Chris L. Brown (46:05)
Yeah, yeah, different types of growth. yeah. Fantastic, fantastic. Well, thanks, Adrian. Where can people find you and connect with you and connect with your work? What's the best way for them to follow you?

Adrian Swinscoe (46:06)
It could be about better.

Well, I'm pretty lucky in that if you type my name into a search bar, regardless of what your flavor of search bar is, it's Adrian Swinsco, so A-D-R-I-A-N, Swinsco, S-W-I-N-S-C-O-E, it's a relatively unique combination of names, and you'll find me pretty quickly.

Dr Chris L. Brown (46:52)
Yeah, yeah, a lot better than my name, Chris Brown, which is quite a few of us around the world, particularly a famous rapper in America.

Adrian Swinscoe (46:58)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, I've been blessed that I have a name which is reasonably unique in this sort of space, and I've got a digital presence that it's when you type that and you tend to find me quite quickly. that's a great asset.

Dr Chris L. Brown (47:16)
No, that's fantastic. Mate, is there anything we haven't covered that you wanted to share in terms of your own experiences in this space?

Adrian Swinscoe (47:25)
No, think it's, I think that the.

I'll you what, I'll sign off with two quotes, because I love quotes. Because it's a shortcut to saying something kind of meaningful.

Dr Chris L. Brown (47:40)
Fantastic.

Adrian Swinscoe (47:51)
Henry Rollins, who was the leader of, lead singer of Black Flag and a big figure in the whole punk scene, was asked at one point, what does punk mean? And his answer was, question everything.

And I think that's great advice. That doesn't mean to say you need to be problematic or troublesome partner sort of thing. That you're questioning and challenging everything. It's just no, no, no. It's a bit like going, don't take things for granted. Question your assumptions, question the way of doing things. Is this the right way? Is there a better way? How can we do this differently? And the other thing is when you are embarking on this,

Dr Chris L. Brown (48:24)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yes.

Yes.

Adrian Swinscoe (48:49)
journey of trying to do things differently, trying to step outside the mainstream, looking for those better outcomes. I will give you this quote which comes from Woody Guthrie, who was asked about the role of folk songs in protest.

And he said, the role of folk songs in protest is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

And I think that's a really useful and interesting quotes when you think about the leaders journey in this space in terms of wanting to do things differently. Sometimes you're going to have to embrace a bit of Henry Rollins and question everything. And that might push you outside the mainstream or the main way of people thinking it, but realize you're not alone. And your role is to disturb the comfortable.

and comfort the disturbed.

Dr Chris L. Brown (49:53)
Yeah.

Yeah. Great quotes, great quotes. I mean, they really speak to challenging the status quo too, right? Which is a lot of what's required of a leader in these organisations if they're going to create change and move them forward and execute in different ways and everything. So very, very nice way to finish off, Adrian. So thanks so much for your time. Yeah, likewise, likewise, mate.

Adrian Swinscoe (50:10)
Absolutely.

Thank you Chris, it's been a pleasure.

Before we wrap up today's episode, I want to share a few powerful insights from my conversation with Adrian Swinscoe that you can apply immediately to your leadership journey:
First, the expectations gap. While it may feel like customer experiences are declining, what's really happening is that customer expectations are rising faster than most organizations can adapt. We're all being measured against the best experience a customer has had—regardless of industry.
Second, proactive communication is your secret weapon. As Adrian said, "Nature abhors a vacuum." When customers don't know what's happening, they fill that space with negative assumptions. The simple act of keeping customers informed can dramatically improve their experience.
Third, get beyond the data dashboards. Adrian shared a brilliant framework about the three levels of customer understanding: data that informs, stories that move, and firsthand experiences that compel action. The most effective leaders seek out that third level by experiencing customer interactions directly.
And finally, Adrian's bonsai tree metaphor reminds us that growth doesn't always mean getting bigger—sometimes, it means becoming more refined and intentional. As relentless customer leaders, our pursuit of excellence might come through focus rather than expansion.
If you found value in today's conversation, please share this episode with a colleague and leave a review. Until next time, keep being relentless in your pursuit of exceptional customer leadership.