A chance encounter in January 2001 changed my life. As fate would have it, meeting a guy at a party sent me in a new and exciting direction. Sounds like a romance novel, doesn’t it? It’s not, obviously, but this meeting is where my love for customer experience began.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and I’d arranged to pick up a friend at her family barbecue to go shopping. When I arrived, she wasn’t ready (of course), so I took refuge from the heat with her family. I’d been listening to their banter for a while, enjoying their animated stories, when her uncle asked me what I did for a living.

I explained I was a speech pathologist working with people with disabilities to improve their communication and swallowing. When I told him a little more about my area of specialisation, namely speech recognition, he offered me a job on the spot. He said, ‘Our clients want more customers to conduct business over the phone. We need your help to work out how that can happen.’ He said his company was building internal capability to help clients do this, as well as designing speech recognition applications for businesses. He gave me his card and told me to send my résumé.

At that stage, nobody was talking about customer experience. The focus was on doing business in lower-cost channels. Contact centres, then referred to as call centres, were seen as cost centres in the organisation, so it was a priority to keep costs down, even in that channel. The management world had set out to streamline dealing with their customers by establishing these centres, and my skills were in demand. Organisations saw the importance of working out how to make customers feel comfortable interacting with them over the phone, whether it be with a person or with an automated system using speech recognition technology.

I found myself having lots of conversations with clients about this. The discussions were similar to those I had in my days as a speech pathologist. I would stress how important it was to show empathy, provide information in a meaningful manner, paraphrase what the person was saying, and use other counselling skills I was taught in psychology at university. Now these attributes, which are referred to as ‘soft skills’, are standard in most training programs.

Speech recognition technology wasn’t very sophisticated in those days. It was a balancing act to design systems that wouldn’t put customers off, but fell within the constraints of a relatively immature technology.

My first ‘voice user interface’ design project was a payment application that allowed customers of a large national organisation to pay bills by phone. From my training in speech pathology, I knew that people couldn’t handle a lot of information presented verbally, especially over the phone, where they couldn’t get extra clues from looking at a person’s face. The technical term for this form of auditory comprehension is ‘cognitive load’. If you offered a customer a menu, it couldn’t have 20 options (or five options with several sub-options), because people would get confused, forget the first few and choose the wrong option, or simply hang up.

Similarly, when designing applications to capture a person’s address, converting a customer’s words into an accurate suburb or street name was a major challenge. Factoring in the system limitations back then, we used a reverse look-up format, where people were asked to give their postcodes as a preliminary filter. I wrote prompts to explain why they needed to do that, then produced phonetic transcriptions of the suburb and street names so they could be linked correctly. I knew that if the speech recognition system could offer the correct option quickly, people wouldn’t hang up.

I spent most of the next 12 years working for large organisations, watching as the fascinating field of customer experience (CX) grew and diversified. My work included improving the effectiveness of all customer contact channels, integrating customer engagement across digital channels, and encouraging staff involvement to foster strategic and cultural change. At the end of that time, I decided to branch out on my own and establish a CX management consultancy. I called it Villani Consulting, but it quickly outgrew that name and I rebranded it as Exceed Global.

I knew I wanted to work with organisations to develop leading- and bleeding-edge CX transformation strategies and programs, and I decided that the only way I could do it was to start my own business. I changed my LinkedIn profile to reflect that, and my business was born. The phone began ringing immediately; before I even had business cards or a website, I was busy doing what I loved.

I had already seen huge changes since I began working in this field. When I started, the phone and face-to-face channels overwhelmingly dominated customers’ engagement with large organisations. Staff in call centres handled queries in specialised workplaces where customers communicated almost exclusively over the phone, sometimes supplemented by faxes (remember them?).

Email was a relatively new channel. Customers were keen to use it, but it was time-consuming to administer. At first, unanswered emails simply piled up in staff members’ inboxes, and customers’ email communications were lost. The situation improved after email management systems became readily available, allowing staff to deal with the most common enquiries from a prepared script, forward complex enquiries to the most skilled consultants, and record email exchanges in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Within just a few years, call centres had evolved to offer a wider menu of communication channels. The name had changed to ‘contact centres’, the new terminology signalling a qualitative shift. Although many customers still relied on contact by phone, a growing number preferred to use other channels, or at least began in them. They used search engines to locate suppliers and follow them up on the internet, made enquiries through online chat and posted questions and comments on social media. There was also much stronger demand for information to be incorporated into apps that could be accessed on mobile phones and tablets.

Customers now order and pay for goods, solve problems, acquire new services or discontinue old ones, all without directly interacting with another person. They are increasingly inclined to resolve issues themselves by exploring options on the internet, and will pick up the phone only if their attempts at self-service fail.

What this implies, though, is that when a customer does pick up the phone, it’s likely that their problem is one they have already tried to solve without success. While the number of phone calls to contact centres has fallen, the individual calls are more complex, demanding higher-level skills of staff and taking longer to resolve. As online communication proliferates, there has been a steady growth of digital. Online contact is superseding the voice channel in many instances, particularly with the advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and process automation. The practices developed in contact centres are now being absorbed by other business units, including those formulating approaches adapted to remote working. Contact centres are becoming relics of the past as customer experience is managed in functional areas within the business.

This is occurring against a background of sharper competition in almost every industry. Organisations today have realised the importance of retaining their existing customers as well as acquiring new ones. A robust customer experience strategy is required to ensure that services are consistent and actively designed to meet customers’ and organisations’ needs. Measures of customer satisfaction and customer effort are now performance metrics across organisations, cascading from the top down. Improved operating practices and rapid advances in technology are changing the corporate landscape.

This book shows you how to manage customer interaction in this omnichannel environment, placing customers at the centre of your organisation, where they belong. I’ve based parts of the book on case studies of my work with various organisations, but I’ve changed details such as the industry, the organisation size and any metrics that might reveal my clients’ identities.

I have also sought commentary from thought leaders in customer experience, as I felt they deserve recognition as some of the key figures in the industry who have made a difference to customer experience. No matter the industry or size of company, these people are doing their very best to drive CX innovation and delight their customers.

If you’re reading this book, you’re keen to explore new ways of having a positive impact on people’s lives by improving their customer experience. As a bonus, you can improve your organisation’s efficiency and profitability while making it a better place to work.

Customer experience is something I’m passionate about, and I hope this book empowers you to transform the world around you. I don’t want the customer experience you offer to be just good — I want it to be great.