Are “silent complaints” killing your brand? (with Adrian Swinscoe of Punk CX)

Summary

Most companies measure CX through surveys, reviews, and dashboards. But there is real danger in “silent complaints”: the underwhelming experiences that customers never report, but quietly share with friends or that stop them from coming back.

In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, your host Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Adrian Swinscoe — author, Forbes columnist, and host of Punk CX — to explore how AI is reshaping customer experience, and why technology alone won’t save you from these hidden risks.

They discuss:

• Why “silent complaints” are often more damaging than bad reviews
• How AI can surface insights from conversations that surveys and dashboards miss
• Why frontline employees still see problems before the data does
• How leaders can balance technology with humility, curiosity, and human insight
• What it really takes to deliver on the old promise of being “customer-obsessed”

Key Takeaways

• Bad service is universal — but solvable: Adrian argues that organizations often block employees from doing their best work, creating poor service experiences. CX must start with removing friction so customers can get simple problems solved quickly.
• Technology isn’t the culprit — design is: While 70% of customers want self-service, only 17% succeed. The issue isn’t tech itself but how it’s designed and implemented — a lesson PolyAI applies by building voice AI that truly works in real-world conditions.
• Silent complaints are killing brands: Most customers don’t voice dissatisfaction — they simply don’t return. Both Adrian and Nikola stress the importance of listening to frontline staff and real conversations to uncover hidden pain points.
• Vision over tools: Just as Michelangelo envisioned David before carving stone, businesses need a clear CX vision before deploying AI. PolyAI aligns with this by leading with desired customer outcomes rather than tech-for-tech’s-sake.

Transcript

Nikola Mrkšić
00:04 – 00:50
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of deep learning with PolyAI. Today with me, I’ve got Adrian Swinscoe of Punk CX, And, kinda looking talking, I’m really excited about this one.
And in general about your role, and kind of, like, the role of kind of, like, just looking at CX in relation to technology and what it can do to promote a better interaction between companies and their and their customers. There’s a lot to it.
I’d love to hear well, first off, welcome board, and I’d love to hear, you know, the background story of how you ended up doing what you’re doing.

Adrian Swinscoe
00:50 – 01:40
I left the corporate world in 02/2004. So as of the day of recording, it’s, you know, September 2025, And I’ll have been working independently now for twenty one years.
And so during the first few years of that, I was just doing various sort of consultancy sort of jobs. Some of it was still in that kind of corporate venturing space.
Nearly bought a steel company as part of that. So, I mean, that’s another story for another day.
But when I was thinking about that whole thing and I thought, well, actually, I need to do something that I really care about or even focus on something that I really care about or something I wanted to change. And it struck me that I don’t like bad service.
You know?

Nikola Mrkšić
01:40 – 01:44
What experience prompted it? There must have been one pivotal one.

Adrian Swinscoe
01:44 – 03:05
Oh, no. No.
No. It’s just an accumulation of things.
Like, having kinda built and developed sort of, like, things that had employee and customer value at their hearts in the past. It always kinda struck me that it’s oftentimes organizations get in the way of their people doing a good job.
Right? And so that’s why I wanted to say it’s like, well, actually, let’s see if because I have this idealist utopian sort of view of things that if we make services you know, bad service is tough for the people that are trying to do well by the customers, and it’s tough for the customers. And it affects us all.
And I thought, well, actually, why don’t I kinda try and investigate this, look into it, try and come up with clues of how we can do that. And so since about 02/2007, 2008 through to now, I’ve written all comers, over a thousand articles, four books, had a podcast since 02/2011, do a lot of talks, all blah blah blah, all these different things.
I’m still finding clues. And increasingly, over the last few years, a lot of it’s involved technology in terms of thinking about how we can use technology in the mix to try and drive those better outcomes.
Because that’s all ultimately, the thing that I’m really interested in is how do we drive better outcomes for our customers, our employees, and then ultimately our businesses.

Nikola Mrkšić
03:05 – 03:14
Yeah. So when you think about kind of, like, jarring those outcomes with technology, I mean, does technology sometimes get in the way much kinda like how, companies.

Adrian Swinscoe
03:14 – 03:15
100%.

Nikola Mrkšić
03:15 – 03:16
An example of that.

Adrian Swinscoe
03:16 – 04:02
and it’s not the technology’s fault, obviously, because technology is not yet a sentient being. Right? But then I remember going into an event where I was quoted some research, and the research from Gartner was that, you know, recent research, I think it’s from last year, that said, 70% of customers say that they want to self-serve.
And that’s great. I think technology has almost, like, taught us how to do that.
But yet, only 17% of those customers were able to solve or achieve their jobs that they wanted to do using the self-service facilities. And then when you looked at even the most simple queries or inquiries, that number only went up to 30%.

Nikola Mrkšić
04:02 – 04:02
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
04:02 – 04:10
So you look at it and just go, oh, that’s not necessarily technology’s fault. It’s almost like how it’s been designed and sort of implemented and architected and all that sort of stuff.

Nikola Mrkšić
04:10 – 04:26
that 70% still prefer to self serve? Because to me, that was always interesting, like, that feedback loop. Because if it’s that bad, why would they prefer? Right? And that’s why I think a lot of them still prefer calling and kind of trying to get to a human.
Although, again, that human is often stopped from doing the right thing by the company as well. So it’s,.

Adrian Swinscoe
04:26 – 05:54
yeah. I think we’re completely conditioned by our environment, by our experiences.
So it’s a bit like if we’ve sent an email and then you just go, you’ve been waiting for days, if not weeks, for a reply or whatever. There’s no auto auto acknowledgment where it sort of sets and manages your expectations, then it’s a bit or you go on to try and call somebody and then you’re in this IVR sort of doom loop type of thing.
Or or you’ve got you you’re not somebody’s you’re like going, why isn’t somebody giving me a callback option? Or why isn’t somebody not telling me kinda how long the estimated time to wait is? I mean, these are just bits of information that have been around. We’d see it in public transportation.
Right now we’re like going, oh, buses coming in x that time or trains coming at x time. And that stuff, that information, that way finding in that sort of whole experience helps people manage their expectations.
Right? But yet it’s been missing from that whole service sort of space. And so people are going, oh, they they I don’t wanna go and do that because I there’s I don’t understand how long I’m gonna wait or when I’m gonna get answered or so.
Or I don’t wanna send an email because it feels like it’s going into a black hole because nobody auto replies and manages my expectations. And so you end up getting forced to other routes.
Some people default to going, I’m gonna scream on social media because that’s the best way to get attention. But some people go like, well, I don’t wanna do that.
I wanna just I’m more interested in solving my problem rather than screaming.

Nikola Mrkšić
05:54 – 05:54
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
05:54 – 06:10
Right? And so I think we’ve been conditioned by our environment. And and and I think now a lot of that comes back to how much attention and, also respect that we give the role of the whole service and support function within a business.

Nikola Mrkšić
06:10 – 06:11
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
06:11 – 06:32
I mean, let’s not get into the idea that even now the contact center or the help desk or the support desk is the biggest and the fastest growing real time dataset of any company anywhere. If you wanna know what’s going on in your business, go and speak to them over there.

Nikola Mrkšić
06:32 – 07:33
Yep. Yep.
So, I mean, that’s a really interesting one, and maybe it’s a segue into one of the things that we hope to discuss. A lot is made of kinda, like, data literacy in these deployments that we had, you know, especially with agents on the phone through chat, able to and this is a personal fascination of mine.
Like, if you think of, like, the roll call in a contact center and see you had, like, 10 hypotheses you wanted to explore, it’s really hard to get, like, 10,000 people, line them up and say, okay. Half of you do this and half of you do this.
And now for this other thing, I want half of you to do this and half of you to do this. Right? It’s just really hard to get those kinds of experiments through a human workforce, but it’s much easier with AI because all you need to do is, like, program and get into the voice station.
But going back to data literacy, and you mentioned kinda like all you have to do is ask in a way, like the danger there. And I think many would say if you ask only those people calling you among your customers, you’re gonna get a very skewed data set towards those that are calling you mostly because they have a problem, really.

Adrian Swinscoe
07:33 – 07:33
Sure.

Nikola Mrkšić
07:33 – 08:11
Right? Or, like, you know, it’s a well known thing with CSAT that you really get outliers responding much more than the average person who’s had. Maybe an okay time, maybe not.
You kinda wanna know both. But how do you go about, like, instilling this, like, data literacy? Because I’ve been surprised by how even in our teams, you know, people with maths degrees aren’t necessarily trained in that kind of maths, and the discipline has not been, you know, forced into them.
I think if I hadn’t done a PhD where I had, you know, one one person I worked with very closely who was positively fascist about doing those things right, I wouldn’t have known. Right? And
How do you, like, spread that institution?

Adrian Swinscoe
08:11 – 08:53
I mean, I think it’s I think it comes back to I think it comes back to leadership and because just people in general. I mean, because I think that for the longest time, we’ve, you know, I think one of the biggest skills that we don’t have in leadership, we don’t sort of necessarily nurture it as much as possible.
One is humility, and the other one is curiosity. And how you fuse those two things together with time to be able to go and find out actually what’s gonna going on and to ask those thought questions or those things that are like, let’s go and find out about what’s going on over here.

Nikola Mrkšić
08:53 – 08:53
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
08:53 – 09:11
Let’s go ask some people. Because what we do is we default to what we think is expertise, and it might be hard expertise around data or engineering or technology or whatever.
But we. don’t see human insight as hard.

Nikola Mrkšić
09:11 – 09:12
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
09:12 – 09:24
So let me give you an example. I remember I spoke to a friend of mine who was working on a mortgage improvement project for a big bank.
Right?

Nikola Mrkšić
09:24 – 09:25
Mhmm.

Adrian Swinscoe
09:25 – 10:16
And they were like, okay. Fine.
We are going to go and gather all the data, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna analyze all the data to try and identify what the biggest problems are with the mortgage application, like, process. And so they gathered all the data, and they got the big data analytics and continuous improvement team.
And they took the data, and they went away, and they squirreled away for about six weeks to come up with recommendations, identification, whatever was going on. This is before Generative AI, so it’s a few years ago.
And then it and while they were away doing the work, one bright spark in the contact center turned around and said, why don’t we just get 15 to 20 agents together in a room, give them teas and coffees and a tray of donuts, and tell their team leaders to go away so they could speak freely and say, right. I want you to tell me what the top 10 problems are.

Nikola Mrkšić
10:16 – 10:16
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
10:16 – 10:59
in the whole kind of the whole mortgage application process. They listed them out.
Then the data analytics team came back six weeks later, and they realized there was an 80% fit between what the agents had seen and what the data analytics team had seen. So here’s my question.
My question would be, as leaders, would you like to be, 80% right and only out the cost of a bunch of teas and coffees and a tray of doughnuts, and so you can just get started and you can learn as you go, by employing or leveraging the network of biological supercomputers that you have at your kind of control.

Nikola Mrkšić
10:59 – 11:01
That’s exactly it.

Adrian Swinscoe
11:01 – 11:10
I always like to wait six weeks to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds or euros or whatever to come back and have things absolutely nailed on.

Nikola Mrkšić
11:10 – 11:13
What is the right answer?

Adrian Swinscoe
11:13 – 11:31
Well, if you wanna build a culture of experimentation and collaboration and all of those and all those good things, I would say, I’d start with the first one, involving your people and then refine as you go. Because everything I think in this game is about momentum.

Nikola Mrkšić
11:31 – 11:32
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
11:32 – 11:57
You gotta take people with you. We see all this research around where it talks about people talking about technology creating techno technology implementations.
Or whether it’s any big transformation, projects where the famous stat from McKinsey is like 70% of all transformation projects fail. And
If you dig into that, the reason why they fail is largely because they haven’t managed the communication, the change, the vision.

Nikola Mrkšić
11:57 – 11:57
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
11:57 – 12:15
They’ve taken people with you a bit. And because it feels soft, but it’s not soft.
In the words of Tom Peters, the legend that is Tom Peters, is like, what is soft is hard when it comes to organizational change.

Nikola Mrkšić
12:15 – 12:16
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
12:16 – 12:26
And we, you know, we should lest we forget that, we could we need to kinda lean on that. And it’s even more so right now with kind of, if we wanna harness the potential of artificial intelligence.

Nikola Mrkšić
12:26 – 13:12
No. I couldn’t read more.
And I think that, you know, how you measure, what you measure. And, I mean, the reason I asked which one is right.
I mean, obviously, you always wanna keep, like, positive momentum and moving forward. And I think a lot of the times when people kinda, like, pay for those projects, they’re again, like, asking incomplete questions.
So it’s not gonna be a 100% in any case. It may be higher.
But, I mean, some mix of the two when done dynamically and often is probably the best. But when you go back to, like, the CX fundamentals and, you know, I’ve looked at kinda, like, places where, you know, one thing that we are at board level, I’ve always had questions.
And initially, I tried to answer and then it got to it’s very complicated and then it got to, like, I have a better view now. But a universal view of kinda, like, what good looks like for our clients is very different depending on the industry.
Right?

Adrian Swinscoe
13:12 – 13:12
Mhmm.

Nikola Mrkšić
13:12 – 13:45
Some measure it in revenue uplift. Some measure it in the hundreds of people that they would need extra to service a demand during a certain peak hour.
Right? Others look at, like, the value of data insights for, like, demand curves that they have. But, like, when you go back to those CX fundamentals and look at what really matters, when you kinda, like, work with a new client, what do you look for first? What do you look to learn about first in, like, the CX estate of a company?

Adrian Swinscoe
13:45 – 14:33
So I often, more often than not, start with service. And the reason why I start with service is, one, because I’ve always been interested in the idea of of of service.
But I also kinda think that services are one of the things that we can control. Right? People talk about being, oh, we wanna create a great customer experience.
You’re like, oh, yeah. That’s fine.
But ultimately, you don’t have any control over that. Because the reality is there’s stuff that.
happens and there’s what we make it mean. Right? Two different people can have two very different days and can have exactly the same experience, and then we’ll feel very, very differently about it.
Right? So what we have to then focus on I always think we have to focus on understanding what we can control.

Nikola Mrkšić
14:33 – 14:34
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
14:34 – 15:42
And what we can control directly is how we serve people. And that might be informed by what our customers are telling us and how we respond to that.
But ultimately, I go and try and look at what’s working, kind of where the failure demand is. You know, where are the kinds of people asking you about? Is there a better way of responding to those, you know, to those questions? Are we making that as easy as kinda, like, possible? Are we creating our own kinda, like, kinda problems? Those types of things.
And a lot of the time that’s that that comes from both the data, but also comes from just talking to people and understanding how they’re gonna work, and also how things connect to each other. And so that’s for me, I think that’s because if you can turn around and actually think about it, then you can start to really define what the basics means for that brand.
Because from a customer and a psych psychological perspective, here’s the interesting thing, it’s like, people talk about, oh, we should be really focused on wowing and delighting our customers. You’re like, okay.
Fine.

Nikola Mrkšić
15:42 – 15:42
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
15:42 – 15:42
Again,.

Nikola Mrkšić
15:42 – 15:42
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
15:42 – 16:10
you have no real control over that. But you have control over whether you show up and can solve somebody’s problem.
Right? Here’s also the psycho psychology behind it, and this is a fascinating thing. This thing that I’ve learned and fascinated by is that we hold on to why things go wrong and they are memories of problems way, way, way longer.

Nikola Mrkšić
16:10 – 16:11
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
16:11 – 16:46
than any surprise or delight initiative. Because.
all this rumination thing is linked to our survival instinct a little bit like, woah. What if it what if and so if you remove that, then what you end up doing is you end up building trust and credibility, and reliability, and loyalty.
Because people go, oh, you showed up when I needed you, and you made it easy and helpful, and all those different sorts of things. Like going, regardless of what happens, I am sticking with you because you saved me when I needed to.
saving.

Nikola Mrkšić
16:46 – 16:52
Yep. Yep.
Yep. And then the fear of and I guess versus other brands and? things.
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
16:52 – 16:55
But that’s not sexy.

Nikola Mrkšić
16:55 – 16:56
Well, you know, I don’t know.

Adrian Swinscoe
16:56 – 17:05
It’s sexy in terms of ROI and return and retention and all those different sorts of things, but it’s not sexy in terms of a marketing, branding sort of thing.

Nikola Mrkšić
17:05 – 17:43
Yeah. I found it quite interesting.
I mean, with the number of customers we have and stuff where, you know, yeah, like, to while to delight, etcetera. It’s kinda like, hey.
People are mostly calling you because, like, a key element of your service doesn’t work. So your Internet is not working.
Right? And it. goes back to your, like, experience of the day.
Right? If I call you, pick up immediately, and tell me it’s gonna be fixed in six hours and I’m on the way out, I’m gonna be like, cool. Okay.
Done. Not too bad.
Not too shabby. Right? If I’m here.
waiting to record this thing with you and my Internet’s not working, like, there’s no way you’re getting anything other than, like, a one out of five on CSAT and me, you know, spreading negative sense about your brand for, like, months to come.

Adrian Swinscoe
17:43 – 17:45
Yeah. For years.

Nikola Mrkšić
17:45 – 17:45
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
17:45 – 17:45
You know,.

Nikola Mrkšić
17:45 – 17:45
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
17:45 – 17:54
that’s. the thing.
For years, it’s not just gonna be months to come. It’s a bit like going.
I think there’s also a thing around that people don’t acknowledge. There’s a thing called silent complaints.

Nikola Mrkšić
17:54 – 17:55
Mhmm.

Adrian Swinscoe
17:55 – 18:05
Right? Let me give you an example. How many times have you been to a restaurant, right, where it was okay, but not great.

Nikola Mrkšić
18:05 – 18:05
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
18:05 – 18:17
And if anybody can, it wasn’t bad enough that you were gonna complain or you’re gonna do something on social media or whatever. But if anybody asks you, you’d be like, meh, don’t go there.

Nikola Mrkšić
18:17 – 18:19
Yeah. Yep.
Yep. Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
18:19 – 18:24
Probably done that tens, if not hundreds of times.

Nikola Mrkšić
18:24 – 18:24
oh,.

Adrian Swinscoe
18:24 – 18:24
Right?

Nikola Mrkšić
18:24 – 18:26
Well, I think I think of one of those.

Adrian Swinscoe
18:26 – 18:35
Those things exist, and people talk. about those things, but we can’t track it.
We can’t say it, and the ratio is.

Nikola Mrkšić
18:35 – 18:43
Yep. No.
No. You’re absolutely right.
I think I read one of those, like, kinda, like, corny LinkedIn things, but it might have been LinkedIn. But, it was a classic, like, you know,.

Adrian Swinscoe
18:43 – 18:44
huge.

Nikola Mrkšić
18:44 – 19:37
restaurant owners talking to, like, their stuff. And it was, like, pay attention to the people showing up for the second and third time the most.
Because many people show up the first time, but where you’re really building a habit is, like, second and third. And past that point, you can probably then get away with a lot more, but, you know, it’s really kinda, like, you know, double down on your winners and build, like, a positive habit and experience.
You know, when you think of, like, what you do and kinda, like, people are challenging different assumptions about their customers, I’m particularly interested in collecting these silent complaints and stuff. That sounds very cultural.
Right? I think that. The way that this works or, you know, what is, like, a positive endorsement versus a negative one, say, in The UK versus The US, that’s quite a different thing.
Right? I, mean, the number of times I’ve had Americans go like, oh my god. That’s great.
I love that. And then I’m like, here’s something else among you.
Don’t really love that in comparison to kinda like, you know, if you heard I love that from a person in The UK, that’s, like, quite a ringing endorsement. Right?

Adrian Swinscoe
19:37 – 19:37
I don’t know.

Nikola Mrkšić
19:37 – 19:39
What do you think about all that?

Adrian Swinscoe
19:39 – 21:17
But I think that’s the thing is that when you when you, when you lean into it and you think about it, ask yourself, well, what does great service or what does a great experience look like? There’s a problem in that many people make an assumption that great service and great experience looks the same wherever you are in the world, and it’s not true. You know, different, different communities, different cultures, different people in different countries speaking different languages have very, very different experiences or very, very different sort of outlooks and preferences.
And so that’s where it gets really complicated. And that’s where you have to not come with a cookie cutter approach that you actually have to kind of have to go and speak to customers and.
I really understand what’s going on. You have to go and observe them.
You have to speak to them. You have to interact with them.
And, I think it’s like your data will only tell you so much. And sometimes you actually have to, as leaders, you have to go out and and, and really investigate this to get, like, a visceral connection to the experience that you want to, that you wanna create and see it in the wild in many ways.
And there’s not. I don’t think there’s enough leaders that do that, sort of spend time either speaking to and or observing customers or hanging out with those people that are, that are serving your customers, that are delivering. to them or answering their phones, their phone calls or responding to their emails or whatever or serving them in a shop or whatever it might be.

Nikola Mrkšić
21:17 – 25:40
Do you have a good anecdote? Just kinda look from any of the kind of engagements you’ve had where, like, talking to kinda, like, frontline staff surfaced something that was almost, like, obvious to them, but not to the management?

Adrian Swinscoe
25:40 – 28:04
There’s an insurance company in Australia. And as part of our leadership away day type of thing, they organized a whole bunch of those leaders to go down to the contact center where they set up this big conference room, and there’s a whole bank of phones and things.
And they wanted to call customers. Now that was kinda gonna frighten most people because it’s like they were like, oh.
But here’s what they wanted to do. This is how they wanted to frame it.
They’re getting a little script and they were to go and call the customers. But they were gone. They were gonna call customers that had given them a really great review.
They said it was a great job, dah dah, all this sort of stuff. So run the focus on the complaints.
Let’s focus on the brilliant ones. But here’s the trick.
They were to call them and say, hi, Nikola. You know, how are you doing? I just wanna kinda call you back to thank you for the great review.
And I wanted to ask you a question, if I may. I know that such a person served you, and I wanted to ask you, if you were to send them a personal message, what would the message be? And that’s because they introduced themselves as an executive of the company, and they were saying that, like, if you tell me what the message is, a short message, I’ll write it down, and I will hand deliver it to the agent.
So they made a couple of calls, had all these kinda, like, kinda cards that they needed to go, and they went around the organization and hand delivered the hand delivered them. The impact was enormous.
Because what it did is it took kind of the distance between senior execs and people that were serving customers, and it just smashed. all the walls.
And, you know, because this was done when somebody was probably coming up and tapping some of the shoulders, like, by the way, my name is such and such. I just spoke to the customer you served yesterday.
They thought you did a brilliant job. Here’s a message that they gave me to pass on to you.
And I thought that was just a beautiful example of how you can weave together this whole experience and service and culture and leadership sort of web to try and build new behaviors and habits and then and and collapse all those that distance between leadership and and and and and the frontline.

Nikola Mrkšić
28:04 – 28:09
Yeah. I guess it also sends a very clear signal that it is important and that they care.
Right?

Adrian Swinscoe
28:09 – 28:10
100%. 100.

Nikola Mrkšić
28:10 – 28:10
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
28:10 – 28:18
But because it’s done in public, people are like, why is that person getting tapped on the shoulder of the like, how can I not get one of those?

Nikola Mrkšić
28:18 – 28:26
Yeah. No.
No. Absolutely.
Absolutely. That’s really interesting.
That’s really like, it’s a good effort by the company. Right? I wish more people did.

Adrian Swinscoe
28:26 – 28:59
they did, they did give the execs an opportunity to continue that. So they gave them the producer facilities or the ability for them to continue to do that on a weekly or monthly basis.
And I must say that the drop off was quite dramatic in terms of who kept it up, but there was a cadre of execs that went that that lent into it. They thought it was a meaningful thing.
And so I think it becomes about personal responsibility.

Nikola Mrkšić
28:59 – 29:00
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
29:00 – 29:09
You know, it’s not just as much as it is about the things around us, it’s not just about what we say is important. It’s like what we show is important.
as well.

Nikola Mrkšić
29:09 – 29:28
Yeah. Yeah.
No. 100%.
And, you know, when you think of kinda, like, your career and kinda, like, you know, when you started and today and, like, how customer experience as a whole has evolved, are we further along anything? Has all this tech and innovation and effort helped, do you think? Or, you know, like, are we as far along as we should have been?

Adrian Swinscoe
29:28 – 30:17
I mean, well, who knows? I mean, I remember I wrote a thing. Somebody prompted me, the other month or so and said, we’re twenty five years into the twenty-first century.
And he said, a quarter of the way through the twenty first century, I was like, blimey. When you put it like that and they said, well, have you thought about doing something which focuses on the evolution of the retail experience over that time? And, I said, no.
Well, let me think about that. And so I did.
And I thought about how things have dropped. I mean, crumbs.
At the turn of the century, online shopping was a very new thing.

Nikola Mrkšić
30:17 – 30:17
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
30:17 – 31:23
Right? I mean and most of it was done on dial up. Does anybody remember dialing up? Who’d take that now? And then, you know, how things have changed around, you know, the introduction of mobile phones, smartphones, but particularly kind of with the evolution of, you know, the introduction of three g and then four g and now five g and all of those different sorts of things.
And I think it’s fascinating how far we’ve come. And then and what we’ve had to navigate what with, you know, the the financial crash and the the, o seven, or eight, and then the recession that followed after that, and then we had the kind of COVID, you know, pandemic and all these all these sort of things.
But reflecting on all of that, I think that, I mean, we’ve come so, so, so far. I mean, I think if you asked me in the year February, say, tell me what things are gonna be like, I mean, would or to ask anybody, would we have been able to predict all of this? Well, no.
We probably thought that flying cars would be a thing. And,.

Nikola Mrkšić
31:23 – 31:36
I come for a customer experience. Right? Like, when you.
Think of, like, you know, you’re, like, a large company that existed, say, a retailer in 2000 and today. Do you think that, like, they’ve done enough to become a better version of themselves? Or.

Adrian Swinscoe
31:36 – 32:18
I think there’s still peep. I think the key thing that’s happened is that consumers have. adopted technology faster than companies have been able to keep up.
100%. But I think also, I think a lot of people kind of assume that everything’s really changed around consumer behavior.
And I dispute that. I don’t think it has.
I think that things we’ve changed a little bit, but I think the fundamentals are still the same. I think, you know, we were always seeking.
value. We want things to be as easy and efficient as they can be.
And At the same time, we wanna be seen, heard, and respected.

Nikola Mrkšić
32:18 – 32:20
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
32:20 – 32:42
And how that has changed over the last quarter of centuries, all those different things, they have changed, but our desire in each of those sorts of domains is the same. You know? We think about personalization and, you know, the use of data and privacy and things.
Are we being really seen and heard and respected?

Nikola Mrkšić
32:42 – 33:28
It’s almost like. But, I mean, when you look at, like I feel like there was, like, a world, and maybe this is, like, you know, romanticizing the past, but maybe in a world with, like, fewer large companies, accounting for so much of the services and things we consume, there was an inherent local level of personalization and adaptation that existed.
Whereas now, I feel like we first went through this, like, conglomerization where companies got, like, bigger, and then they started professing to serve us and to put customers first. They all became customer obsessed and focused and centric.
Right? And, you know, they worked with consultants and many others to really kinda, like, up that experience, but I feel like they almost, in many ways, end up talking about it more than they end up really living it on the ground because they not empower their people to be, like, reactive to those things.

Adrian Swinscoe
33:28 – 33:58
I think that that is very true. I mean, I think that all of the different developments have particularly with the rise of the Internet and ecommerce and things and all the economics that go with that, has we’ve seen a demise of or rather not a demise, a a radical changing of the kind of the local commerce base and the local, say, high street in most of towns and cities.
And, yes, that personal touch is where we would get the personal touch there.

Nikola Mrkšić
33:58 – 33:58
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
33:58 – 34:14
I think that brands have always struggled to deliver that personal sort of touch or that personalization touch at scale. And because I think about the things that they do.

Nikola Mrkšić
34:14 – 34:14
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
34:14 – 34:20
they get wrong if they put their bottom line results over and above anything else.

Nikola Mrkšić
34:20 – 34:38
Yeah. I guess, like, in doing and improving on those at a scale, they do provide, you know, an experience or a product that scales more cheaply and, you know, more efficiently than those local guys could have.
Right? But then I feel like we’ve implicitly accepted to have, like, a generic product.

Adrian Swinscoe
34:38 – 35:13
Mhmm. But I do think there’s I do think there’s ability you know, what’s interesting is what we’ve also seen is we’ve we’ve seen in that evolving landscape, we’ve also seen people coming up with creative ways to compete.
And. I think that’s always been that that will continue to be the case because I think what’s really interesting is how that the retail landscape, I think, has changed.
But I think kind of twenty five years ago, kind of probably, you know, over the twenty five years, it’s changed from being, I think, largely bell curve shaped,.

Nikola Mrkšić
35:13 – 35:14
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
35:14 – 35:36
where you had very few low value players and very few luxury kind of players and everything in around the middle. And then it flipped.
And you’ve got people that go, we’d have to do value at scale, and then we can. do luxury, sort of, you know, the explosion of luxury brands.
And if you’re caught in the middle,.

Nikola Mrkšić
35:36 – 35:38
Yep. Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
35:38 – 35:54
you’re toast. And so consumers are like, generally, people are we’d like to purchase on some value, but the regular consumers go, I’m gonna purchase on value because I have to manage a budget, but I’m also gonna be looking over here for the the nice things to have every now and again when I can afford them.

Nikola Mrkšić
35:54 – 35:55
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
35:55 – 36:14
And if you don’t. haven’t if you haven’t if you haven’t thought about that and you don’t sort of think about how you respond to that and what service and experience looks like in those two different sorts of domains, and it’s relative to those domains, then it’s you look kinda slightly directionless.

Nikola Mrkšić
36:14 – 36:49
No. Are you right? Because, I mean, I guess what’s really happening with technology rather than it being used to improve that middle layer, it allows the white more scaled kinda like bottom layer to improve so much that I wonder if at a certain point, you know, like, a bank with a really good app where you can, you know, like, a few clicks to get a loan, etcetera, became a better experience than either a Swiss private bank that has a banker on call, but they don’t work day or night, like and they can’t get you an answer day or night whereas the app might be able to.
Right? And then at. At some point, they challenge those guys, and then they, again, flip around, like, who gets to be the luxury item.

Adrian Swinscoe
36:49 – 37:24
Yeah. I mean, I want to. I spoke to a guy recently who had put together a solution where they’d worked with a bank where they were able to employ, it’s like a human plus tech collaboration sort of like space.
But it was a memory, and it was something that people can go back to. And it worked twenty four seven, seven days a week, you know, three hundred, six, five days a year.
And because it was, people could collaborate and do different sorts of things according to, let’s say, loan applications and things.

Nikola Mrkšić
37:24 – 37:25
Yeah. Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
37:25 – 37:30
They were able to put a quarter of a billion dollars worth of business through that channel.

Nikola Mrkšić
37:30 – 37:34
Yep. Wow.
Okay. Wow.

Adrian Swinscoe
37:34 – 37:59
Just because they just looked at it from a processing perspective and where people needed to weigh in and and and where automation and an intelligent agent can kind of do things, you know, how people can self-service, how do you what you know, signpost people to the right sort of things to get them to come back and do that, how do what documentation needs to upload and so on and so forth. When they needed to schedule a call with an adviser and so on and so forth, it just worked.
It was beautiful.

Nikola Mrkšić
37:59 – 38:00
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
38:00 – 38:04
$250,000,000 worth of extra revenue.

Nikola Mrkšić
38:04 – 38:06
Yeah. No.
No. That is a mighty number.

Adrian Swinscoe
38:06 – 38:18
And I think but I think the thing that I would say about all of that, it’s like that the technology was brilliant, but the key thing about it was I was imagining kind of what it is we wanna kinda create.

Nikola Mrkšić
38:18 – 38:18
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
38:18 – 38:22
and how can we use the technology to bring that to life.

Nikola Mrkšić
38:22 – 38:56
Yeah. No.
100%. I mean, for a while, I think, until, the marketing team reigned me, and my whole notion was, like, superhuman customer experience.
Right? And, not superhuman because it’s better than. humans.
In some ways, it’s far better. In some ways, it’s vastly inferior.
Right? I think it’s really, like, technology can allow you to do some things like that, like memory layer there. if done right.
And I bet it wasn’t easy to make it flow and, like, do all the things it had to do. But once you have it, it will be better than a human.
Because a human at scale cannot have that for every single customer, whereas you might be able to as a brand if you build a technology for it.

Adrian Swinscoe
38:56 – 39:20
Yeah. And I think that’s the thing is that we’ve got some amazing tools that are available to us.
And some of the stuff that’s coming out that that and that you guys are at the forefront of developing around sort of voice AI and things is truly remarkable about where it can be deployed and how it can be used and things. But I think it’s incumbent on us to imagine what it is.
is what we want to deliver.

Nikola Mrkšić
39:20 – 39:20
Yeah.

Adrian Swinscoe
39:20 – 39:34
Because we’re a bit like if we are sculptors or we are carpenters or we are painters or whatever, Is that we see, you know like Michelangelo didn’t start with a chisel and just went, I will see what happens.

Nikola Mrkšić
39:34 – 39:35
Yep. Yep.
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
39:35 – 39:40
Right? He goes like, I know what David looks like, and I’m now gonna create David out of that.

Nikola Mrkšić
39:40 – 39:40
Yep.

Adrian Swinscoe
39:40 – 40:16
release David from that piece of stone based on the kind of the tools that he’s gonna use. And I think that I think I get my artists and statues kinda right.
I think it’s Michelangelo and David, is it? Yeah. I think so.
But I think that the point is to envision, imagine what it is you want to do, but you have to in order to help you understand what the art of the possible is, you have to educate yourself around. the tools.
But don’t be led by the tools, be led by the vision, and then pick the tools in order to bring the right sort of tools to bring that vision to life.

Nikola Mrkšić
40:16 – 42:33
That’s wonderful. That’s kinda like a wonderful visualization to leave it, to leave it on.
But, yeah, I think that, like, yeah, the way the product flows through everything, including the, like, CX channel really is. Like and we see with a lot of our customers and kinda, like, how they approach things, what they prioritize within their CX estate.
So you’re you’re you’re you’re you’re completely right about that. Well, ok again thank you.
Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure.

Adrian Swinscoe
42:33 – 42:34
my pleasure.

Nikola Mrkšić
42:34 – 42:48
well. Thanks for sharing everything with us.
And, you know, hope to have you again, as we kinda, like, see what AI does to the field of CX. And, hopefully, it’s not just people doing tech for the sake of tech and more kinda, like, in reacting to the problems they really have.

Adrian Swinscoe
42:48 – 42:52
100%. And thank you so much for having me on.

Nikola Mrkšić
42:52 – 42:56
It was a pleasure. And to everyone watching, like, share, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next.