What Does Customer Focus Look Like for an eCommerce Business

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for building
your business online
well hello and welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me matt edmondson uh this show is
a podcast dedicated for all of those who are in e-commerce who have an e-commerce business who want to
do e-commerce in some way format shape or other and it's all designed to
help us get better at running our e-commerce businesses so welcome my fellow e-commercers
uh if that makes any sense at all uh it's great to have you with us uh tonight we have a very special guest
neil roberts who is the product director from mood.com uh and if you you'll know what move.com
is if you haven't where have you been uh but neil was also the product director for eurostar so you know some big names
following uh neil around so it's going to be great to have him on the show and we are going to get into
customer service customer focus we are going to talk about what agile sprints are how all kinds of stuff we're going to
get into all kinds of stuff is going to be really fascinating i'm really really looking forward to this one let me tell you so uh neil will be long
in just a minute or two uh if you are watching on facebook as we record this interview uh
give us a wave say hello it's great to see you uh great that you are here and
enjoying the broadcast uh if you are listening to the show on uh your podcast app of choice
uh whether that's through apple or other there are of course other makes of mobile phones um whether you're in the car on the
train in the bus walking around the park if lockdown is still carrying on wherever you are listening to your podcast it's
also great to have you as well make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast from us we put out weekly
content uh all about how to set up and run and grow and develop your own e-commerce business
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hopefully you can come join us join in the conversation which is always great to do okay
so uh at the time of recording we are still we're just about to enter june actually
so um uh lockdown is still going on covid is still very much on the lips of people and e-commerce is
very much in high demand and you know what it's it's i've seen this in my own e-commerce
businesses i've been talking to other e-commerce business owners i was talking to one guys today their
demand is shot through the reef let me tell you over the last few weeks uh for their products and a lot of
e-commerce companies are seeing double triple growth figures at the moment some are seeing
increases year on year whatever it is e-commerce is a great business
to where it's a great way to service your business at the moment having an e-commerce outlet
and if you are in the market for a new e-commerce platform a new e-commerce website you are you know wanting to know
which way to turn which way to go then make sure you check out this week's show sponsor
let me give a big shout out to one of our show sponsors curious digital you know what i love its flexibility it's such a great
platform you know how when you start out you might typically use an online platform because they're cheap
they're easy to use super accessible but you know what they aren't that flexible and as your
business grows you end up moving to an agency right because that's just what you do and at
some point you're going to have this nightmare to deal with and it can be incredibly expensive
and the thing for me that i love about kd is it will grow with you you can start out on the
platform easily and as your business grows then kd will adapt with you now i don't
know of any other platform that does all of that so if you're in the market for a new e-commerce platform
make sure you follow the links from edmondson.com take advantage of the offers that
they've got for you and let me know what you think
a big shout out to another show sponsor the light bulb agency these guys basically do those bits of
e-commerce that you either don't want to do or don't have the skills or expertise to do right
it's a great service let me tell you these guys do fulfillment e-commerce marketing
content creation customer service product research i mean the list goes on so if you need help with your
own online business you're looking for ways to grow and you need some help to get there do get in touch with them and again just
follow the links from today's show notes head on over to mattedmanson.com and you can follow the links to the
light bulb agency we'd love to put you in touch with those guys uh for those of you who have been long
time listeners to the show you will know we have actually on the slide you may have picked this up
subtly change the name of the podcast it is no longer called the curiosity podcast we just call it the e-commerce podcast with mad
edmondson it's a bit more kind of does what it says on the tin type thing do you know what i mean
and there's no real reason for the brand changer then it's just a little bit clearer on what it is um the curiosity podcast especially when
we spelt it with a k um and a shout out to curious digital sponsor
people didn't didn't really get that um and so so we've changed the name
ecommerce podcast with madmans and we are now in season three believe it or not and so it is amazing to be here
uh with you chatting with you and uh let me tell you about tonight's guest on the show so we
have neil roberts um and neil has spent most of the last decade with eurostar
if you don't know who eurostar is basically is the train company that takes you from london to paris through the channel tunnel
one simple train journey amazing and so he spent the last decade with eurostar creating digital strategy that
builds a great customer experience so he's got a wealth of experience in digital and building customer
experience on digital he has subsequently moved to mood.com helping them scale their ambition to
bring great design to everyone and mood.com is a great website if you're looking for things like stationary business cards basically
print on demand type stuff um i've got some business cards actually i should have bought them to show you that
was a bit remiss of me but i'm at home i'm under lockdown and the business cards have seth godin
quotes on the back which i love and my details on the front all from me they do all that sort of stuff take care of all that design so
without further ado i'm going to bring in neil and this is technically take two because
you know on monday we tried to do this and technology totally failed so uh neil welcome to the show
thank you for being flexible and coming back and hopefully the technology will work and function for us this time
fingers crossed that is a sign of a great coder a man
who knows technical let's just cross our fingers and hope because we just genuinely don't know
i haven't started praying yet just
defconexcellent how are you doing neil yeah
i'm good i'm good i'm good how you finding the lockdown um
i guess like most people ups and downs it's kind of it's nice to spend a bit of time at home with the family and then
sometimes it's not so nice to spend some time with the family yeah
well um so you know there's plenty to be grateful for um everyone's well and healthy so i
can't really complain no i mean that you know we everyone complains about something don't they but ultimately
you're right i'm at home i'm with the family we've not killed each other yet the kids are still talking to
me they're fit they're well we're getting on it's there's a lot to be thankful for which i am
you know very thankful uh so i know this isn't in the script but it's
just a question in my head how do you think business is going to change for moo
post sort of covert do you think do you think it will all return for you guys back to normal or do you think things will move on a little bit i think
as with any business it will move on um i think we were very fortunate in that i suppose being a very technology
led business moving to working remotely was actually pretty smooth it was sort
of hours um and we had the right infrastructure in place to do that and it had been
something that the the business has aspired to do because we have offices in the uk and
the us so we're a bit disparate anyway so you a great user of
um different video conferencing tools so that was you're already partially
down this road and it was yeah and everything runs off you know google docs
um there are other online people just to say there are other line
companies but we use google docs as well yeah yeah
and slack google docs and slack everything happens in those two environments and and i think so i think
it will just it's accelerated that kind of transition for us we were already using you know other
tools like we use miro which is a sort of group facilitation white boarding
tools so you can do things like that um and again there's other tools like mural and a few others
in that space which are pretty new and exciting because you can do things that often historically would have been you have to
be in the same space you can do much more readily um with everybody disparate
so i think all of that is going to change and i think we will become more more accepted um to
do that um i think people will be a lot more familiar with it and what i hear in other businesses
is um who weren't perhaps as far forward in the technology they've
had to adopt it so i think there's going to be a much broader adopted adopting those kind of i suppose being
able to work remotely or work from home much more regularly or being completely remote there's lots of um
jobs that i'm seeing advertised at the moment which is sort of saying completely remote yeah so that mental shift has really been
accelerated um and i think i guess we were we were predominantly an online business anyway
so i think that's just more of the same um and i'm sure there'll be you know a shift in the product mix as
there often is but so we'll we shall see we should wait and see as they say did you work from home a lot anyway
before this or is were you more of an office guy um i think more at moo than i did at
euresta um so and i think that was a cultural thing because
um it was more i suppose just just accepted it was the norm but um probably regularly one day a week
occasionally two days a week but probably not more than that so it'll be interesting to see if that tips you know got friends that even
before coded were working from home um either permanently or um you know
three or four days a week yeah mainly coders that tend to get away with that well
they actually prefer to be just head down and focused in don't they and they don't want the distraction of the office
i think one of the things that um i don't think i've solved yet but is one of the questions
sort of in the back of my mind is i get that people are going to work more from home and we have sort of an open plan office
um and you know it's it's it's actually quite a nice working environment and one of the things that i love about our
office um is we would often have what um i don't know where i've picked this term up but the water cooler moments do you
know what i mean where you would you where you would go you'd make a cup of tea you'd turn the cattle on and you just get talking to one of your
co-workers and an idea would form it wasn't a planned meeting it was a spontaneous thing and something would
happen that magic that spark or even just a simple hey hey how are you do
what i mean how you doing because when we're on zoom all the time it just tends to be business it's not
hey how are you doing do i mean and so i'm curious to see how how we
keep that aspect of of of work in a remote setting if that makes
sense i don't know if you've got any experience yeah i was listening to a podcast the other week while i was going for for
a ride and they were talking about exactly this it was a mind the product i think was the the
podcast and they had a facilitation coach on an agile coach and she was talking about how to build
communities and build communities remotely um and they were talking about
yeah because you don't have those accidental interactions how to recreate it and i think it's one of those things
that's perhaps slightly more foreign is how to have a social conversation
um and what they talked about is when you're running a session um actually thinking about structuring
so that you have an introduction so not icebreakers as in some of the crazy games that you can do
with the other animal which one would you be
um yeah everybody in the group an opportunity to introduce themselves and talk about what they want to get out of
that meeting or session um and then intermittently having different sort of
icebreakers which like get get something from a house that is a fridge magnet was the example that
they used because often if you have them they tell a story and you can get to know the person a bit
more that's a great idea and that was called mind the product i might have a little listen to that yeah yeah
mind the product so they do a whole series of product based and around agile and agile coaching so they
do events and conferences a lot of online content um and yeah they're really good um
that'd be really interesting focus around the facilitation stuff yeah i'll have a listen to that i'll
have a thing because that fascinates me because one of the things i think is going to happen with this online working is actually
because we are more now willing to have remote workers it it means actually um i mean we talked to in the last
podcast to jesse about this about how he's an american who lives in the philippines but his office is
his team are basically all over the world and this is now starting to become much more the norm and so you're getting
access to um a much different type of person
by being a remote working organization you're sort of opening up the doors from the geographical sense i mean we're
based in liverpool and one of the things that you know liverpool's got a great digital culture but man do you have to pay the
developers a lot of money if you want the good ones and actually all of a sudden this sort of flings the door open and it makes
it makes what you do accessible to a whole bunch more people yeah i think i think it does and i think
you saw i mean i lived down in kent so and i worked in in a regional business
as well so i felt the challenges of of trying to build teams that are in regional locations and
it can be difficult if you don't have i suppose a network of businesses around you with a similar skill so when you're in a city
you you've often got lots of businesses that can help you can borrow people from them and that sort of stuff but when
you're more reasonable it's much harder but yeah remote working makes a big difference
expertise irrespective of where you are so it should make a big difference to a lot of businesses maybe less focus on the cities which
which can't be a bad thing no and yeah i say knowing yes follow
that that doesn't make any sense in this i just heard that back in my head what are you talking about uh but i i think you're right i think
i'm really cute like i say i'm really curious to see where all this plays out and uh so i thank you for that wisdom of
that podcast and i will share it now i like those ideas um really really intriguing at the
moment uh how it's all gonna play out so neil you uh mentioned and i've mentioned that you work for
mood just tell everybody i mean i give a brief intro to what it is but what is moo moo.com you're in the
uk you're in the states but what is it for those that don't know yeah so moo is about years old
um and it was one of the original startups around silicon roundabout you know whole street so
you know in a single office with a big printer downstairs by the way how in the uk we have
and silicon the states they have a whole valley roundabout and if the americans listen to the show
right now again what's around about probably probably yeah
yeah mind-boggling but there's a small area within london where the sort of the startup scene was odd
years ago and richard founded the business and it was um it was basically small business cards uh with a unique shape um
he partnered with flickr and you could put your image on the back
of the cards and you can have different images on the different back of the back of the cards and it was really popular within what we
call the soho community it's a small office home office and particularly with artists and photographers because they could use the
business cards as a portfolio and out of that's grown a business card and marketing material so everything that is
is print based really um still business cards is a core part of the business but we do
you know leaflets and notebooks and all that sort of stuff but always with a focus on the quality of design and the
quality of materials so we do a great luxe line which is actually a number of
pieces of card that laminated with a seam around it and it makes it a really tactile and
noteworthy product so people actually comment on it and all delivered through an online platform so you can design your
own or use some of our templates that we've built for you and adapt them so the idea is that you can democrat
democratize good design so design yeah i struggled with that that's fine
i would too so that it's more accessible so if you're a small business and you
don't have the uh print expertise or design expertise that we can make that accessible and you can customize it so that you can
i suppose be true to the business that you're trying to build and get access to skills that you wouldn't have um and it's it's great
no it is and i i said at the start that i've actually i'm a customer of me and i i i i have to be honest these days i
really rarely give out business cards um i just different world isn't it when i
first started in business every man and his dog said to you what should give me a business card but people just don't do that anymore um
but the business cards that i got with the seth godin quotes on there they're the ones which everybody commented on
yeah that they they became a talking point and people almost put them up on the wall which i mean because they liked the
quote on the back and so um i i think what you guys do is great i am a customer uh just
you know full disclosure and i'm not being paid to say that
i'm similar i've still got business cards from a business that i was working in years ago stuck in a draw because i
was so proud and loved them so much they're hard to throw out aren't they
they throw out it's really bizarre uh even when they become outdated they're hard to throw out i get that it's just
it's a strange strange strange thing so what's your so that's what mood does but what's your
role at meow i use the phrase product director but what is a product director a very good question um i was still
trying to find out the answer well i think it it's it's very much um
it's defining the what and the why of what you should build or how you could improve you can have it in the physical
product world so you know business cards for example or cycle helmets there will be
a product person defining what that product should be and what the proposition should be and in the software world as it often
does it's it's adopted or borrowed or stolen that terminology
and it's really trying to work out what is the what the software product what is it you need
to build and why do you need to build it um and it's you're quite often the
middle person sort of working with the engineering teams and working with the business partner commercial partner business
and the ux and designers and bringing everybody together um to get a consensus or at least a
joined up strategy of what you should be delivering and why um and that's that's what i do so
work very closely with the designers and the user experience and user researcher people there is
researching people to understand what the customer needs are um and looking at the existing products
and working with the analysts to see how that's performing and looking for opportunities to to make it better yeah um and that
that's yeah but that's what i might do that sounds fascinating i like that phrase the what and the
white trying to understand what and why um what are some of the things then working at moo that maybe have surprised
you that you've discovered um it sounds really cheesy but just how
nice the people are um we like cheese cheese cheese works yeah but generally
richard's you know built a culture there where um you know it's just a really
positive culture so really uh investing in people and you know help focusing on how they work together and
making a pleasant working environment and and the i suppose the bit that i'm
really fascinated as as well as that is is the physical product so in the middle of the london office
is where the real product people are they're
um and so you've got all of the the materials everywhere um and they've got all these
little prototypes that they put together a testing with people um and i think that that was just
that was a new thing for me to see i suppose the more traditional product design and development process and be able to see
it in the heart of the office and when you talk to them it's utterly fascinating and how they go in and the effort they go into research
materials and manufacturers you know looking at how can we make something
you know with less or no plastic and make things out of hemp as they did
a few years ago out of recycled t-shirt cotton t-shirts so how they could use the remnants from
cuts out of t-shirts and refactor them into into business cards and other materials
and it's just i think that's what surprised me is the depth of thought that goes into all sorts of things even even the
notebooks and so the notebooks so you look at this and when they opened it
you can see the spine comes off and this is all sort of stitched along
the side but that's so that when you open it and write on it it's flat and you don't get that crease on them and the attention to detail
is extraordinary extraordinary extraordinary so i think it's that i don't have to try
one of those notebooks i'm uh i am a bit of a pen and notebook fan i have to be honest
and um i i can't pronounce i don't know how i pronounce the brand of my notebook
like lichtstein i'm really sorry that i've gone and butchered that brand
um but i've i i i've tried very many different
notebooks so if you've got a great notebook i would definitely be trying one because you know that a good notebook is essential i think
a good pen and a good notebook you know why would you not have one um so how long have you been with me now
um i think just shy of two years okay so do you feel like you're still new in the post or do you feel like
you kind of established i think getting more established i think it's the nature
of sort of a younger younger business and a business that's growing and things change all the time so it's definitely
it's not boring um these things never ari one of the things that you said actually in our pre-call that i've written down
in my notes here and i i would love for you to expand on it further because it really piqued my interest now this is obviously an
e-commerce show and e-commerce podcast and moo has an e-commerce site
and that's how you generate your business right um and you you said uh people don't come to us
because of the e-commerce experience but because of our physical product in other words they come to the site because they want to
buy the physical product not because of the e-commerce experience but they couldn't get the product without having the e-commerce experience
yeah um and i thought they were very wise words and i thought that was a really interesting tension so how do you how do
you balance that um i think it's an ongoing balancing act
and i think for something on the digital product side of things it is um you have to put
i suppose i understand the the what your customers are after so if you're truly customer-led it does mean perhaps that you recognize
where your position is in the in the pecking order of their desires is um they come for the physical product
and my role there then in is to to make it easy to understand and access that
product almost get out of their way so i have the i suppose benefit of working with a
great product physical product business but i have the the risk that if i get it wrong i can
actually devalue the whole brand experience so for example if it's really difficult
to find stuff then um people will get frustrated or if they can't or if the site doesn't work then it can
actually be damaging to the brand and particularly a company like moo that positions itself in the quality
and the design aspects of it there we have to live up to the brand in the e-commerce side of things um we couldn't do you know a
really you know ugly site for example because it wouldn't fit with a brand and if it doesn't work and if it isn't
if it isn't smooth then you know customers let us know um they they expect a
standard that is equivalent to the quality that they get in the business cards and the networks
um so i think it's just knowing why people come there i think if
i was working for spotify you know that is well even there actually they come for
the media but yeah they come for the music yeah all the podcasts obviously if you're listening to this one
but there's also there's a so there's a real opportunity to help the business grow by getting that experience right and but it is not everything and if you
look at netflix amazon um and all the sort of predecessors that were in the the sort of
streaming section there is a reason that netflix is the biggest is actually the user
interface is i feel more elegant it's unbelievable yeah it's chalk and cheese isn't it
yeah but also they have the right content and the right volume of content so you need both so you need this sort
of great product and but you need a mechanism to demonstrate that product
in a way which is almost out of the way i think was afraid to use you sort of you want to get out of the customer's
way make it easy for them to understand the product um and you for me that if i'm
understanding you right now for me that is about design on the site matching up to the design of the actual products obviously you can't have an
incoherent or an incongruous sort of website and physical product and but also making that experience
seamless and i think that's a great sort of description um you know when we're thinking about our e-commerce websites is actually
it's not about the website it's about the products that people are buying and the website is secondary to that in
some respects and needs to make the whole process of getting that product um congruence but it also needs to be
almost invisible yeah and it's the balance between um aesthetic and function
one of the examples i always use is um corkscrews so there are i think probably a million
designed screws i think i probably got half of those in my kitchen to be fair there's probably two go-to's so there's
one which is the waiter's friend which is that small one that folds up all the way yeah yeah it has the foil
cutter and everything and it just works and then the other one i like is the one with the arms that you can
sort of you screw it down and then do that and the lady in the dress yeah so you can have the most beautiful
and elegant looking product but if it doesn't perform the function you purchased it for it stays
in the drawer and you never use it and the website's the same so as that as a product its job is to present the product and get you
through that journey to take your money um as efficiently and effectively as
as possible and so that's the purpose so you need to balance the ascetic with the function if we
don't get the function right it doesn't matter what it looks like and it's the same in the physical product
experience as it is in the customer experience if you don't get that base reason that customers come to you right
it doesn't matter what else you do you can't you can't really recover it um
that's great that's great so um i think that's very good advice for
anybody running an e-commerce businesses to uh to understand the purpose of the e-commerce website
um in relation to the actual products you're selling whether they're physical products or digital products
people ultimately are there to buy the product they're not there to experience the e-commerce website um but they have to to get the
product and i i like that way of thinking um again in our pre-call we talked about
how you have um quite a strong agile culture in terms of this development and
growing things and moving things forward um
but again you made well hang on before i get into that quote because i thought it was a great quote and i'm going to pull it up in a second
let's just explain to the listeners what agile is if in just in case they don't
know and why it was part of the cultural moon yeah so there there are multiple ways of
building software um the more traditional one is something called um waterfall which is a sort of phased
project management process so you'll define the products you'll scope it out you know probably the best
analogy is to think of if you're building a house so talk to an architect and a draftsman and
they would build up the blueprints and you talk about where the rooms are going to go and where the toilet will be
and all that sort of stuff and then you progress onto you lock that down and that's rigid um and then you lock
down and you give it over to the builders and they go and build it against the the plants that's kind of
and you can do that same process with software and lots of software projects still work in exactly that same way
which i think works really well when you know the outcome that you're going for so if you know that then it's going to
be you know four bedrooms and you know how much you're going to spend the challenge in that way of building
software and actually in the same way building houses is at the start of the project is when you know the least
so working out um how much it's going to cost what the labor costs are going to be is
extraordinarily difficult um and invariably what happens is you go through the process that you
find something that was unforeseen that you didn't expect something's a bit difficult with our house we found that the
previous guy had done the plumbing in the toilet and he hadn't done it particularly well and it was eroding the corner of the
house oh that's not good not good but you know we couldn't not once we found that we
couldn't not deal with it yeah you know fix that good but yeah i'll be i
wouldn't be sat here now in it um and the same happens with software projects
and so agile is uh so waterfall works and i think there's you know if you look
at some of the project management philosophies like princewhich is one
of the more um i suppose document heavy process heavy
it has its place so if you're building a military aircraft you probably want that rigger
to make sure that it works um well because the risks the consequences of it not working
are you know life threatening [Music] but then you move into
something where perhaps the risk is lower but also where the outcome is
um less certain so if you're trying to solve them um and so you know
put up netflix for example as an example so they originally i remember went in to pitch all the
urban myths they went to pitch to blockbusters and what about this live streaming thing they probably at that stage had no idea
how to use the technology what the user interface was going to be um how to get traction with people
whether people would actually develop it so the outcome of what they were building was very uncertain of how they were going to
do it but the vision was there and agile works with that because you're it's a it's an iterative place
process it has different methodologies you can use so one of them is scrum and that under that process you you go
in two week sprints or short sprints and you take a small module and you build it
and then you push it out and you test it with real customers and you can do prototyping before but the idea is you
take a small iteration rather than spending months build the moving piece and then testing it
you do risk the project by doing a small increment putting it to market does it work if it works you keep it if if it doesn't
work you get rid of it and you go for the next iteration so it's this constant learning process so when you're not clear on the outcome
it's a better faster cheaper actually way of finding what works
um and that's kind of where it's born out of so a lot of silicon valley
and software companies trying to build and iterate and learn and evolve their product rather than having a big vision and
spending two years building it and then you put it to market and no one wants it
no one understands it no one gets it yeah no i appreciate that so that's agile and the thing that you said that the quote that
i loved was agile is great where you're and you've you've actually just said it a little bit again agile is great where you're breaking new
ground otherwise waterfall works really well yeah
and it's and it's kind of i guess understanding which one is where you're at
yeah and there's a guy i didn't i don't know if i mentioned this before there's a guy called uh dave snowden he's an academic yeah
and he has a process called kanevin it's a welsh word so it's felt differently to
i would say it but knebin um i can't spell it but it begins with a c
but if you google dave snowden he's he's um he's the thought leader on that piece and it looks a it's a decision-making model
so it looks at the problem you're trying to solve is it simple and well understood and therefore then
there's probably a process that will allow you to do that efficiently and if it's complex and not well
understood then actually you probably want to lean towards something like agile because it will allow you to evolve and learn
and in time when that space is is well understood maybe it will move to something where a process is would
optimize what you what you're doing yeah and so yeah it's it's
five six seven years ago i've spent a lot of my time being told agile's the thing we all
need to be agile we need to do that stuff and just blindly taking a methodology and applying it to your circumstance
your organization i don't think really really works so you just need to really make sense did it
no and we were part of that actually part of that story is like everybody was agile and everybody read the book scrum
everyone's like well now we need to be scram we need to be agile we need to do this we need to do that and it's like goodness me and you had to work you then had to go
and get a consultant to explain what all the different terminologies meant because they they renamed absolutely everything yeah
and um and so you're right it's i but i thought this was a really good um breakdown it's like should i be agile
yes or no and i liked your phrase if you're breaking into new ground look at agile otherwise
don't reinvent the wheel you don't need to just go with a well-documented process you know learn from what other people
have said funnily enough here sean's written in the facebook comments um god i have a headache the more i
learn the more questions i have and i think you know what that's my life
every day sean to be fair when it comes to digital that is life isn't it
it's a book i think it's called mindset um it talks about growth mindset and fixed
mindset and the concept is that you can learn most things um but you know depending on your intelligence
level and your ability it might take you a bit longer but the brain and the body does evolve so
you can learn stuff so you know i think if you want to you can learn till till you go to the grave new things
new ideas put them together and more stuff and it and yeah we're always going to be learning i think that's interesting
isn't it as long as and i don't think this is what you mean i as long as it's not that case of
i see this all the time people spend all their life learning and hardly any time doing
do you know what i mean do you know the kind of people that i mean in fact if you're listening to this you will all know the kind of person
that i mean they spend all their time learning and never in any time doing and there has to be that balance um so moving on you've got agile
uh this sort of agile culture and you said um when we talked last time you employed
you called it the spotify model at moo you had this spotify model what do you mean by that
so the spotify model is um i think in essence it was a concept it's probably six or seven
years ago which was popularized by spotify as the way that they were looking at
their organizational design at the time um and what they were trying to do was
scale the the the product development so they could have multiple streams of work um and it was kind of a matrix
structure so you had different crews or squads and they were the idea was each one of those units would be
autonomous but they had the ability to understand the problem they were trying
to fix and they had all the resources they needed to actually then go and fix it and put it into market so then have a designer ux person and
engineers front front-end back-ends qas testers that sort of stuff there's about eight people wasn't there
in a particular group small groups no larger than two pizzas is the
sort of the phrase that comes out you know the number of people that you could feed with two teachers it
depends if you're getting from mazda or domino's but anyway it's um so it's this it's a sort of the
small groups um and they uh that each group is autonomous and
they they have a very clear problem which they're trying to solve or a very clear thing that they're working on don't they
yeah so you might have someone who for example is focused on
new
you have someone who focuses as you get thanks to all the transactions
um really smooth and clean and focused on payment providers to make sure that the
transactions are successful more often art and school prevention and all that sort of stuff so each area each
team has its own mission and part of the application that um it could focus on and make that part
of the experience so the idea is then is that you can scale up that organization
much more readily as your business grows or your application grows and then they have a kind of matrix
structure across it which is looking at guilds and chapters and now to share the learning learnings
between the different um specialisms and the different teams so you kind of end up with a sort of matrix
structure um and yeah that that's what mu had until
very recently so we tried to adopt that okay but you guys have moved away from
that yeah and as i believe spotify have as well yeah
so what have you found that worked well for you guys and maybe what didn't work as well
yeah i think there's more to just the way you organize your people to actually
making agile work um and found this with eurostar to eurostar we had a couple of
re-platforming projects in the time i was there and where it worked was on the third
third time where we built the software in the right way so it was
in components it was a train companies who used to use the language of
components that were loosely coupled like a train see carriages in a train so they know how to work together but if
you want to take one out and replace it with something new you can that's important to give the teams
autonomy so they need to be able to work on their little part of the application without negatively impacting other
people so you need the software to be built in in the right way and then the organization reflects it
and what moves some of the moves has some challenges is the software isn't universally built in the right way
so it may you have teams that were set up to to work um autonomously but actually
they couldn't work on a discrete piece of the code base without negatively in fact impacting multiple teams which
increased the sort of coordination and communication overhead of doing it so that was one of the challenges that
we had probably the biggest challenge um because the the software wasn't as elegantly designed it evolved with
the business as as it had grown um so that that was a real challenge for
us so you kind of almost had a negative effect that we were with the intention of creating intolerance autonomous teams
we'd created an environment where they had to spend a lot of time talking and liaising between each other increasing the overhead of doing that
but one of the benefits that we had i think was the the chapters and the guilds so the
learning continuous learning between those those teams and particularly the agile chapter which are a great facilitator
for that um so the learning culture was was really uh really good and uh you know that kind
of so we differentiate so a chapter as i understand it
is where you have say a group of product managers and the idea is that they're trying to learn from each other's
experiences and share learning to improve how they do product management as a group and you'll
have this with front-end engineers or design ux people so they're doing that and a guild is is more open than that so
anyone that has an interest in perhaps usability can come and join so if you were in the sales team but you
were curious about how it worked you could be part of a guild or the way that we used it in the wider
organization so we might have um things around the the culture around diversity so we would have a guild
around diversity and it was just a group of people that were interested in
um improving the diversity and culture in the business and they would
pull together to learn and implement initiatives across across the business and improve stuff
so that that was really positive and i think when you're in a business that is growing they're really useful uh ways to
organize yourself to share learning and and speed up the learning so that everybody grows um at the same
time with the company don't they and people aren't getting left behind how many people work at moon um it's around oh wow so it's pretty
size and sizable i don't even know what that means but it's a pretty sizable organization so you need
um you can see why that would work really well for for you guys definitely yeah yeah so
let's move uh on to um uh the sort of the customer focus
aspect of of life if we can um and
sort of talk about that side of things and again one of the phrases that you used in a pre-podcast call
which you kept using which i quite like and i've heard it before is this whole supply surprise and delight idea
um that customer focus surprises and delights what do you mean by that or what do you think is meant by that is
maybe a better question yeah so when i was at eurostar
that's where that phrase was used most often so i spent a lot of time um working with the physical customer
experience in the customer experience team and that was a phrase that was used
quite a lot so the idea is that you customize in within customer experiences
we should be surprising our customers and giving them a delightful experience um and what it i think where the risk of
using that and focusing on that so for example if you give people a free cup of tea or some sunglasses or
whatever they might initially be quite delighted so there's some eurostar glasses that actually my kids have still got
bright yellow and and and they were great people were generally delighted and they they they hang around
but actually they weren't going to build loyalty they weren't going to get someone to book another trip
okay that's nice that's cool yes that's cool um and um
and so if you look into customer experience in a broader thing and the sort of processes and
and thoughts around how that works is it it's a pyramid and right at the top of the
pyramid is the surprise and delight sorts of things to add that extra you
know touch yeah and they're in the hotel industry they talk about this the
last experience which can be your lasting experience um so it's how you the doorman says goodbye to you and
opens your door and that sort of stuff but they're right at the top but if you don't get the fundamental service right so in the euro-style
experience if the train is late or it's cancelled it doesn't matter how many pairs of sunglasses i give it's not going to help
it's not going to make a blind bit of difference and it's not as sexy to sort those sorts of things out
but it's absolutely critical if you get it right because if you don't get the base layers and build your way up
through this you know to make right so in software is it get it get it to work if it doesn't work
it doesn't matter what it looks like um you know whether it's easy to use if i
can't use it so you know we would spend a lot of time looking at errors
so putting in error handling to understand where the software wasn't working so we got visibility of all of
those errors because when i started at eurostar we would get visibility of the website
errors through the contact center that's a really good place to get some feedback
when you don't have the error handling in the software but it's a terrible customer experience because they're on there in the evening
they want to book their trip for their business trip the next day and the site lets them down and then it's awful
and it's a terrible customer experience and eurostar's rubbish so yeah it's really important to get
that that visibility of how it's performing functioning and then you can look at how
to make it easy and then you can make it delightful and then you can start surprising people but if you don't do something
really good hierarchy um and i like that because like you say people want to move
straight to the sexy because it's sexy people get excited about
yeah but the fundamentals have got to be right first um i like that this is a great
we um i often talk about the opening experience at jersey and with clients when i do coaching and
um and what i mean by this is when you deliver a parcel to your customer or when dhl or whoever you've used to
deliver that parcel the first time they hold that box is their first physical interaction with
your business everything up until that point has been pixels and now they're touching something and
it's real and it's genuine and it's you know and it's in front of them um
and it's at that point you you've really got to pay attention to how that customer feels
um did it turn up late didn't it turn up on time is the box in bits was the career rude
to them do i mean these are the fundamentals aren't they which people just don't think about or talk about but when they get hold of that box how
are they feeling what i mean and what's the emotions that they have because you can put all the sexy stuff
inside the box that you like but the fundamentals are if if this box
is battered the courier was rude and it's days late and i've had to call times just to get it
yeah there's an issue isn't there yeah and and and you'd have that and move for example
so with me we spend a lot of time i don't but the physical product guys
getting that when you open the box that it makes that sort of sucking feel um
yeah um so that feels quality but also a lot of time spent on um time to manufacture so that
when we're making a project promise um that you can have your your business cards or marketing materials
because often it's event driven the reason you're buying it if it turns up a day after that event or even an hour
after you have to lead that's you know it's it's a fail a
complete sale or if it turns up with a spelling mistake or whatever um then that's a complete fail um and so
we have the mood promise that if you're not satisfied in any way even if it's a mistake that you've made
we'll reprint it free of charge to deliver on that experience as best we can but also we
we spend a lot of time looking at couriers and making sure that the couriers can fulfill the time that we're
talking about every time so that they can actually that the product gets the
to the to the customer when when they need it um and and that's i think why you know you
used to do this a lot at euro style but it moves just as important any e-commerce business is just as important
is think about the products that you're selling and also the context in which they're going to be used and that's where design the interest in
design thinking comes from is you need to understand the context of how it's being used and the purpose your
customer's going to use it for to make sure that it's a good product and that it's packaged right and
what's important to them and often you'll find with a premium product that people will
be um prepared to wait or there's some sort of part of your proposition i can remember
listening to was it gerald ratner who used to run ratner's the jewelers had a new business
venture um and basically what it was is selling through television um but really cheap so they
sort of those advertise type things um but it would really be really really cheap cheaper than you
could get in the high street but the trade-off was it would take you two or three weeks to receive it
um and so what he'd understood is there was a segment of the market that was prepared to wait to have a
certain quality but cheap um and he said the the guys in the in the factory would literally be seen
watching the show as well to make sure so they knew what they were about to
so changed the manufacture model as well because only they didn't have any stock so they only that what that allowed them
and and um that's why they could do it cheaper because they didn't actually have to have the stock i swear made.com the way that they
worked is they would only um fulfill an order once they'd actually got a container
full of purchases already happening and the trade-off was you could get really well-designed
furniture but it was a fraction of a price that was the origins have made yeah it's a clever way of doing it a
clever way of thinking it's um and it's an interesting model because people will wait there's no doubt about it people will
wait yeah well okay so um
of the we were laughing about this beforehand uh neon we've got to that stage in my notes where it says other
toilet example we were both going what do we mean by
from from our original conversation what did we mean by other toilet examples do you want to talk about that
um yeah you do now because everyone who's listening to the show watching this game what are they talking about
i'm so glad i thought up just before we got otherwise
so this comes back so this and this this is so when i was at eurostar the digital strategy that we were
devising was not just e-commerce of how can you sell the tickets and how do you expand reach and how do you
make the online purchasing experience or you know retention or ticket issuing experience wallproof
but it blended into the what i would call the real world so when you're in the station and you
arrive and you your battery on your mobile's gone flat or you've forgotten your ticket or the train's been cancelled and how do
you how could technology help with that um and so when you're working on that kind of strategy the
best way that i've come up to come up with that kind of strategy whether it's an overall customer
experience strategy or a digital strategy or the blending of the two is something called design thinking or
human centered design which is um one of the i think one of the great thought leaders
around this is a company called idm ibo ideo and they do some really
accessible you know quite reasonably priced online courses and what they look at is um a series of
very cheap techniques if you do it yourself um to try and understand how people use
your product or service and how you can improve it um as design thinking is you go through and
you look at how people use um the service it's not a great example
for toilets because that would be good but it sort of talks about we were talking
about the difference between men's toilets where there's rarely a cue
and women's violence where there's often a queue and i'm reading a book which was about sort of data biases and
the na and the invisible influence that has on gender bias particularly towards women
and they used an example of toilets so when you think about how to design a
building with a toilet facility for men and women you think okay roughly population split so
we're expecting a similar volume of men and women so we'll give them the same square footage
for um through a toilet yeah equal size toilets and that's fair except for the
ergonomics of the male body and the ergonomics of the
female body are different um so you can actually
you can use the toilet as a man quite easily standing up for for me
i'm trying to politely say we're trying to trying to dance around in case there's kids listening in the car what are you talking about man i don't
know what's he talking about i don't know well the point is you can get um more facilities per square foot for a man
in the general way that they use a toilet than you can for a woman but also other things the unseen bias
around the data is that often women will be the primary carer whether it's for an elderly person or for a child who will be there
with them so you can't get you can get urinals in with cubicles for
men in women's toilets it's generally i haven't spent a lot of time in them but generally it's all cubicles but often
they will have a dependent with them which means that it takes longer so therefore the dwell time in the toilet is longer
therefore the same square footage isn't sufficient therefore you get cues and you only get this insight
by actually walking the walk and using the experience in the same way and it's something the japanese used in gemba walks was where
you get um so in manufacturing in the s one of the ideas they had was get get the execs down and actually get them
to um to experience the manufacturing floor to see how it works and sainsbury's i think
do this every christmas and then you see the problems first hand and you get a lot more empathy for them
um and then you actually sort them out rather than there's actually a whole bunch of tv shows about it now isn't it where they make the ceo of large
companies go and work on the shop floor factory floor and he he understands his
business in a very different way once he's done that yeah yeah he was an undercover boss
when i was a kid i used to watch with my dad this is really sad i should have been out playing with cars or something on football
it's a john harvey jones he was the chairman of ici yeah and he did a series called the
troubleshooter and i still today and he used to do that and he went to morgan cars and just looked around and going so why
do you build the chassis on this side of the road a public road and then stick it on a
trailer and wheel it across a public road to the other side where you put and all of these sorts of yeah
and it intrigues me because i mean going back to the toilets is we still in modern st century britain have this
issue where um i mean i was mentioning it to you you know we have a fairly new john lewis building in liverpool um
and the queues are always greater for the latest toilets in the men's toilets and and somehow we've we've not quite
figured this out yet we still create for ourselves the same problem because no one's taking this step back and thought hang
on a minute um we need to think about this differently or we need to look at this differently or we need a different type of response
or we need to design this differently um we'll use it and then
you get the experience that your customer has and then you know how to improve it and
that's what the design thinking kind of process is you know interviewing and observing so
at eurostar we used we used to get customers to do video diaries of their journey so we could see it
firsthand we would shadow the train managers uh trains and station staff
when there was a disruption and this was probably where you learned the most when you know when you've had trains cancelled on an easter weekend
you'd get drafted in to help the staff station staff deal with the fallout of that and then
you all right all right that it system falls over when in volume or i can't reissue tickets from a third party
um and you get a completely different insight and genuinely improve the
product or service that you're delivering so in effect what you're saying is and because in my head i'm thinking this is
this is great but how does this apply for someone who's running an e-commerce business you've got to actually get in the trenches and you talk about
shadowing your customers talking to your customers yeah walk in the walk have parcels delivered to
yourself what what you know it's that kind of thing isn't it yeah so i mean online you can so there are some very expensive tools
that you can use which can capture you know every interaction on your website so you've got big budgets you
can go through and you can capture all that stuff and you can almost play back
the the the sessions that people have had yeah i mean you know if you're a big organization then that's maybe worth
investing if you've got the revenues coming through there's actually a tool you can use
that's free and it does the same thing called hotjar i don't if you've come across that yeah yeah hot chocolate yeah same
thing yeah and and so um you can earn i mean when i used to start
i did this pre-euro style first time i did this it was all three and sort of tools that we used to use
so screen that's interesting at eurostar a big massive organization you were using free and
tools to measure customer engagement uh to start off with yeah because i had
to prove a business case no one was going to give me you know tens of thousands of pounds to
implement this thing that they didn't understand so literally we would use and we still now use things like usertesting.com
where you can recruit people to use your website and they agree to um be videoed and they'll give
they'll do a dialogue as you do it and you learn so much through that and i've used that
everywhere that i've worked in e-commerce to see testing.com yeah usertesting.com
hotjar allows you to do it in a bit of scale and also google analytics so when i when we did the first free platforming
eurostar we used the free version of google analytics because we had the expensive my
predecessor had implemented the really really expensive top-notch um solution but nobody
understood how to get insight out of it so we flipped it on its head and said we'll have
the absolute minimum and then when we find that we're meeting reaching the the limit of those features
then we'll talk about whether we upgrade yeah there's a guy called avenish kaushik who works for google as an
evangelist or he used to in analytics and he said generally as a ratio of how much you spend on the
analytics tool versus the analysts should be nine to one okay so
if you don't have someone looking at the the data so whether that's your user testing your
session replay or your analytics if there's no one looking at it you're probably wasting your money so
start with the free tools and invest in the good people to actually get you the insight and find
out where those friction points are um and that's still every business that i've worked in in the last
years i would say that has absolutely been the way that i've approached it and
we've found some really good results so what sort of things would you look for then in google analytics what
things would throw out the warning signs um so you can work out whether you start at
the top of the funnel or the bottom um and where i've tended to look at is at the bottom so the people that have
gone through the process that are committed they've selected something put something in their basket and you're looking at that conversion
funnels where are the drop-offs so the the problem you're trying to solve is why don't i get
of the people to that that are elusive yeah and click to pay and
what you find out is and then you do more user research and you understand more about your customers is at the top of the funnel not everyone's
coming to buy so sometimes they're going right is this a credible website and you pass the brands kind of thing so
they're looking for um recognition and there's a great book on this so i think it's called always be testing which talks a lot
about how amazon constructs web pages and the different personas that they they design their pages for and it still
seems to be in the architecture of their pages now you've got different users coming at different stages of their purchasing
path with different needs and motivations so the reason you can on an amazon page
see the product the price and press buy above the fold is for the people that know what they
want to buy want to confirm the price and they want to get out there as quickly as possible and buy if you go down the page the
people that are researching and thinking about is this the right product for me is this the right vendor for me
there's more and more detail the deeper you go down we've all met the really detailed
oriented people that will read a thousand reviews and they will compare products
and it's for those sorts of people so that they have the depth of information as well but you get out of the way that people
that know what they want and they just want to buy it yeah so at the top of the funnel you
have those people um so that they're just researching and as you get further into the process
so at eurostar we would have a lot of dropout when you start seeing the prices people
right just initially when we did user testing and we did use a research we found that people were just doing qualifying prices comparing
us to flying yeah yeah yeah is the trade-off for the you know city to city journey worth the
premium and so you're right then you'll you'll you have a more realistic goal because you're not saying i want to get everyone
to buy all i want them to do is be able to see the prices and if they're if they are um very price sensitive
make sure that the tuesday morning is visible so that they can see there is a low price office
if they're willing to do the trade-off or that you can look so we looked at developing a monthly view or a weekly
view so you could see the different trends because you know train companies airlines hotels
all yield up and down based on them so the longer you can look as a consumer the more you can see if
you're price sensitive when to buy and adapt and there are some people you know if you're retired for example
you might be flexible and on a budget and it could still be that eurostar or easy debt or whatever is
part of that so the goal was show them the prices and make them so this was um we used to use an online
exit survey yeah and you can do this really cheaply or free and it was
why did you come here today were you successful if not why not yeah that's three great
questions yeah three great questions i've stolen them from avinish kaushik um
and what it says is what was your goal today were you successful so you then have a micro conversion rate that you can say
did this page perform what it used to be it should have done yeah the third question is if you didn't you
then get insight from those customers as to why you can do something about that it's actual insight so you would do this when
they left the website yeah so with an exit service you can do it in different ways
and you there's lots of is it going to stop them from doing what they're going to do our pop-up survey is annoying but with
the exit surveys you can do it with a small sample you know you can say do it for one percent or two percent of the traffic
if you're a low volume site you might have to update you know increase the volume and you just take the hit for a short
period of time yes um and or you can trigger it on movement of
the mouse the javascript triggered if they're going up to switch tabs or close the browser you can trigger it then
and you can gather over a period of time quite a lot of insight into where your site isn't doing what
your customers want them to do to get them to the next stage of the purchasing journey and you end up with these micro
conversions which you then understand what is the per what do i need this landing page to do
yeah why people coming here and there might be different reasons and you can start getting volume metrics of the reasons why people are coming so
you can prioritize which ones to do first um and you say right the purpose of this landing page is to get them to
the next stage or show them the price and it allows you to get lost not get lost in things like bounce rate so on a
landing page a bounce rate can be a good thing if people have got the information they wanted and they've left they'll
come back and so you look at that through the funnel and then you look where the
biggest problem areas are did you did you incentivize people to fill out this exit survey no because
they just popped up do you mind if we ask you these three questions three questions and we're going to show all three
questions at once so would you do one question then another or just test it and see which one works best for
you i would test it i think there's from people that are far better at user research than i am
i know there is a correlation between the length of a survey and the completion rate just like there is with the length of a
payment form as there is you know um so i would play around it and work with it but literally
it takes you know seconds seconds for someone to fill that out
and be prepared if your website isn't great you will get abuse death threats and all those sorts
of things that come well apart from the death threats you actually want all that information don't you because that's what's going to help
you improve and it's right right so absolutely gold um and so we used a different place you
know i've used it in every that process in every business i've worked in and what it helped us to do at
eurostar probably the biggest win was to find and find out so that what you can target it as well at different
parts of the site so the first bit you asked me how did you use google analytics the first thing we looked at that funnel
and we said right where do we want to improve so if we saw i don't know a progression from stage
one of the process to stage two it's like how can we get that to yeah
um you know that's that's a big drop off um so how can we improve that and then
you do an exit survey just on that part of the site yeah try and understand that and what we found is there was a big drop
off on the payment page um so the previous business i was out holiday extras it was actually filling out the
payment details so there was a tool that we use and i don't know if hotjar does this where you could actually look
at a microfunnel of the payment page so how many people completed fields one two three four per
page so you then can say right actually the sticking point i think was around the address field and the problem
was that actually we didn't have a postcode lookup that worked properly for all geographic geographies so what google analytics
allows you to see is where the anomalies are the quantitative allows you where the anomalies are so are we seeing a drop off so we saw a big
drop off from memory it was in germany okay so the booking process was working
wonderfully for everybody else globally but not in germany so you then narrow down that field of focus and you
look into germany and it was we didn't have the right payment methods for germany [Music]
simple as that so they they didn't at the time there was a culture where credit cards weren't loved in germany
and they might shrift and other sort of payment types so we needed to implement that to see it see an uplift we also managed
to identify that there was a big drop off between pressing the button pay and actually the
transaction going through successfully and that was more looking at working
with payment service providers looking at our fraud rating and how successful we were
putting through legitimate transactions and those sorts of things
so it's using the quant to look at things that look wrong and then using the qualitative to understand why
yeah so coming back to the product director what do they do is the what and the why yeah and you use the quantum the qual in
combination to a lot of data one of the examples um
one of the examples you gave in our pre-chore which i thought was fascinating was uh and maybe you could just expand on
this a little bit was um how you talked about on eurostar where you
when you booked the ticket you had the train displayed in a certain direction yeah but then when you flipped it around
seen the thing i'll be back you're you're gonna stop that halo effect yeah yeah for those listening to the
podcast um it looked like uh like you were getting raptured this sort
of this light shone behind him all of a sudden yeah yeah so yeah so
um you're a star seat map yes so yeah that was
uh i suppose the the theory of um going through the customer experience
and living it yourself um so i was on a train coming back from paris um and
occasionally they let us go in business class which i was very grateful for
um
you know the free drinks and food and that sort of stuff okay um so yeah and bigger seats
and stuff um so yeah i sat on on there and what i noticed is everybody else in
the carriage was facing backwards and i couldn't quite work out why
because what did you say facing backwards as in backwards to travel yes backwards um and i was facing
forwards and i just couldn't work it out and then in business class often it's not at full
capacity um so as the train started to park pretty much everybody in the carriage stood up
turned around and sat in the seat opposite you're like why didn't you just book
that seat in the first place exactly um and you know if you're a train manager i've
spoke to the train manager and said does this happen often they're like yeah every day
um and it was kind of a communication breakdown is one is from a from a train manager's point of view
it's inconsequential doesn't matter from a customer's point of view it's irritating and particularly for
that group who may not book for themselves they might have a pa or an assistant that books for them
and the root cause when you look through the organization the root cause diagnosis was was asked online seek map so we had
the seat map um and we the way that we found that was did more user research and spoke to
people did user testing of different prototypes looked at other competitors and how they were doing it
and our seat map was horizontal because eurostar's effectively a shuttle service so the train goes back
and forwards it has an engine and it goes back and forth so logically internally within the business you go
that makes sense you have it like that and it just it wasn't like this but for customers they couldn't work out which end was
london and which one was paris yes so they booked a seat and it would be facing backwards
and also chance of getting the one they wanted and all we did is we made it vertical
yeah because in equals mental models up is forward and that fits the problem
and it solved the problem just by reorienting it and people could then comprehend which was forwards which was backwards and they knew which
place to sort of get their seats i have noticed that i thought it was really clever when you're telling me about it
because i have noticed on the virgin trains although it's not a virgin anymore is it is it avanti anyway
whoever it is um they actually draw an arrow saying direction of travel now
on the c maps and we we tried all of those things because it was actually quite hard to
re-engineer it to make it very vertical but the vertical actually gave you the better results
well yeah so we tried so people don't read come on especially on a website it's funny that
isn't it no they don't read so you need a visual interface that's intuitive that fits
with the way they interpret the world so we tried having arrows we tried having words
uh we tried having pop-ups um you know saying are you sure none of it worked stick it horizontally
and people intuitively knew how to use it yeah and that to me is great product design when it's intuitively
works and works smoothly yeah that's great that's a great example listen neil i'm aware of time uh and i
appreciate you giving us so much of your time um and uh giving us all your insight
there's so much packed into what you've said so many uh ideas so many website references and
for those of you who want to know what they were we will we will endeavor to put them in the show notes on the website at madman.com
you'll be able to find them there uh all the links that neil mentioned to all the websites we'll put them in the show notes so do check them out at
madbinson.com listen neil how do people get hold of you if they want to reach out connect
you what's the best way to do that um i'm on linkedin it's probably the best way um
neil roberts moo i should pop up just let me press and you'll find him
yeah pretty much um uh yeah that's probably where i'm most active um i do have a twitter account
but it's very dusty um and yeah now actually more and more
people when you say to them you know it's great thanks for the show how do people get ahold of you i would say now the default is everybody's
giving their linkedin details i'm on linkedin yeah um it's quite interesting it's not twitter it's not really instagram or
facebook it's linkedin and there's a there's a social media platform amongst business people it
seems to be growing quite rapidly at the moment yeah and i think they're doing some interesting stuff in the way that
they're sort of evolving the products to make it easier to network yeah and i think yeah it's and and also
the the learning platform i think is is absolutely brilliant it's one of the best learning platforms
um that i've come across the thought that they've gone in so they bought um we partnered with them when they were linda
yeah i was gonna say they bought
the content on there is really easy and digestible it's brilliant stuff so i think they're awesome great so check
neil out on linkedin.com forward slash kneel at me or whatever
you know we'll put the links again in the show notes but if you search for neil roberts at me you'll find him neil thanks so much for your time bud it's
been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to talk to you i really really do appreciate it thank you so much good job
enjoy it great thank you so that was our conversation with mr neil
roberts and as he said do connect with him on linkedin i'm sure he'd love to connect with you reach out to you and
wasn't he super generous with his stories about mu and eurostar and i always find it fascinating what
the inner workings are and the ideologies that bigger companies have i do not have people working for me
but i love to hear about how the bigger companies do it because a lot of the time do you know what a lot of those
principles still work for us as you know in the smaller businesses and it's great and just some of the stuff he was talking about in terms of improving
the customer experience was just utter gold so next time you're online booking a train ticket
you'll remember the horizontal the vertical next time you're in a queue to use the restroom the toilet the bathroom just
you'll remember that conversation right and you can apply that to your own business in terms of where
where's the equivalent of the queue the toilet cue for the ladies on my website what where is that
happening because i can tell you this it will be happening and using things like hot jar and analytics
and customer service customer focus exit service all those kind of things to find out you'll be amazed at what you can do and
just put those principles into action now i'm down i'm sort of not doubting i reckon if you've
heard this podcast you are going to want to hear it again because there's so much gold in there and you can subscribe
to the podcast wherever you get your podcast from if you want to watch the video recording
and see the actual video we will put it on youtube it is also on facebook and the links to all of
those will be in uh in the show notes on my website matt edmondson dot com just head on over to
matt edmondson.com and you will find that the search for new his podcast will come up
all that information is there or just head on over to youtube dot com forward slash madness if you
watch watch watch the videos um and you'll see all those videos there as well
so thanks for listening uh like i said make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcast do join us on facebook live
hit the little notification button so you get the dings when we do go live sign up to the email list and we'll let
you know whenever we're going to do a recording so you can be involved and enjoy those conversations
it's great to be able to bring this content to you i'm so thankful for my sponsors thanks
to you guys for watching and to listening and making this show possible so i get to talk to some really amazing
people around the world and hear their stories all about e-commerce neil was no exception so thank you so
much uh god bless you good night and we will see you again real soon
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