In conversation with . . . David Shieff

Verint Team October 8, 2020

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Episode Transcript

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Martyn Riddle: Hello, and welcome to In Conversation With, a series of podcasts on Verint, featuring chats and discussions with leading figures from the contact centre, CX, and customer engagement industry in the Asian Pacific region. During this series, we want to find out what customer service organizations are doing during these challenging times, and try and discover what it is that drive the leaders in this space, and what makes them tick. My name is Martyn Riddle, and as well as being your host for this series, I’m also Verint’s Vice President of Marketing for the region.

What is my pleasure to chat with so many great leaders on this podcast? I thought it’d be nice to have some of my colleagues sit in the host chair from time to time. It’s my pleasure today to hand the baton across to a colleague who has decades of frontline, client-side, customer engagement experience, Verint’s Director of Customer Experience Optimisation, Mr. Ian Harrison. Ian, over to you, sir.

Ian Harrison: Thank you, Martyn, for the introduction. I’d like to introduce David and his team at Incisive. The Incisive experts in defining, measuring, and modelling customer’s perception of value. This is highly actionable data that inform strategies and it gives us guidance on capitalizing customers in a way where we can assist them maximize financial value, capture or win stakeholder support as well. David’s been working extensively over many years with several of the top 100 companies in New Zealand and helps them by informing strategic market decisions with a special focus on differential strategy and performance improvement. David, welcome to the podcast. It’s good to have you join us.

David Shieff: Thank you, Ian, and thank you very much for having me here.

Ian: It’s nice of you to take the time, given you been finally I think, hopefully, let out of lockdown in New Zealand a bit more recently.

David: We’re been let out a minute to midnight on Wednesday night. I expect to be out and about and drawing the new freedoms sometime after midnight.

Ian: That’s good to hear. David, you and I have spoken several times previously and always I found those conversations to be incredibly thought-provoking. They often leave me with ideas bouncing around in my head, which probably a good sign that I’ve learned something new and interesting. I’m really keen to get right to it and understand some of the things that you work on as you think about customer-centricity and adding value to organizations. Maybe the first question for you to tell us a little bit about is, what exactly it is that you do and define your profession to our listeners?

David: It’s a good question, I sometimes wonder myself in. I started my journey in this field with a real interest in strategic marketing, which at the time, I was teaching at the University of Auckland Business School. In that field, you talk about where to compete and how to compete. There are questions really you should resolve by having good information at your fingertips. The question of where to compete and how to compete leads you ultimately to talking about differentiation strategy. Along about that time, I started reading intensively around service quality because everybody was saying that this was a new tool for differentiation. Banks were saying, the Westpac saying they were going to differentiate on service.

The question is what does it mean and how do you actually achieve that, how do you achieve meaningful differentiation? I started looking more closely in areas like service quality. That movement moved into customer satisfaction, which of course, includes satisfaction that you like with service. The question is what aspects of service do you have to be good at? I was exposed to a guy called Claes Fornell, who was a professor at the University of Michigan. He set up a thing, he called the American Customer Satisfaction Index. That was the forerunner to a company called Foresee, which happens to now be in the Verint’s table.

That company was very successful at building a robust model based on statistical analysis that demonstrated a relationship between the level of satisfaction that a company might have and the strength of the loyalty of its customers. At the same conference, I was exposed to another fellow called Ray Kordupleski who was the Customer Satisfaction Director of AT&T. At a time when they were losing market share, but their customer satisfaction scores were going up, he was on a team called Fix the Business Team.

Interestingly, he was an electrical engineer and not a marketing man by background. He did what engineers always do, which is to look for problems and look for data to solve those problems. He ultimately discovered a very strong predictive relationship between customer perceptions of value and the strength of their loyalty. What we now know is that there are at least eight customer behaviours that are profitable for a business that are driven by the level of value that people see they’re getting. Now, you asked what I do.

What I do is, to a degree, I talk to executives about predictive metrics and predictive analytics so that they can understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do to fix it and critically, what’s likely to happen if they stay on the path they’re on. A bit of strategy, a bit of facilitation of strategic development, and strategy development, and a lot of information collection and analysis.

Ian: You’ve mentioned a few times their customer satisfaction. I don’t think you’d mentioned NPS, but every time I hear customer’s side, I think of NPS. Many organizations would think they’re measuring those things, and they know hopefully what their NPS is, and they’d have some measure of customer set. Is that not enough? Is that measured to blunt and do they need guidance from someone like yourself to think more broadly around there measures of customer-centricity?

David: Ian, it’s a very thoughtful question. I say that genuinely. NPS is a fine metric in the same way of taking your temperature is a good metric. If you’ve got a fever and your temperature goes up, the doctor can see that you’re sick and something needs to be done. It’s not in itself as a construct, if you like, particularly insightful. It just says that you’re doing well or you’re doing poorly with your customers. In that sense, it’s very useful. It’s a very reliable measure of your franchise with your customers if you like.

What we know is that the intention to recommend is driven by the level of value that people see in the offer that they’re receiving from the company. People who are highly likely to recommend are also likely to be seeing a higher level of value delivered to them, and vice versa. People who think that value is poor will not be likely to recommend. On its own, it’s a useful indicator of whether or not a company is in good shape with its customers, but it’s not particularly actionable.

That’s when you’ll hear people use the term driver analysis, that you need to understand the drivers of that level of NPS, in order to be able to determine where to put your resources to pump that number up and turn it around if it’s poor. What we do know is that there are at least eight behaviours, including intention to recommend that are driven by perceptions of value received from a provider. Is it enough? I personally don’t think so. The key is really the driver analysis and the degree to which the questions you’ve gotten your questionnaire, fully explained variation in the way people rate their intention to recommend.

Ian: For many organizations and certainly the ones I’ve worked in, it’s often felt to me like NPS was measured by the marketing team once a quarter, a report comes out and everybody devours the information and then sets about trying to make some changes. It always seems to me that that’s far too after the event. In the current world of changing pace and the nimbleness that we require, what are your views on the timeliness of the need to be finger on the pulse of the customer sentiment?

David: I’ll put it to you this way, Ian. Would you feel comfortable with measuring, for example, the financial performance of a company on a three-monthly basis? Would you think that was adequate for managerial purposes?

Ian: Certainly, not.

David: No. The same applies to measurement of what it is that’s actually driving your financial numbers. If you accept that satisfaction with quality and with price and costs or let me put it another way, satisfaction with the value that a combination of what you get and what you pay is delivering to you, you need to know as frequently as you need to know how frequently the tills ringing.

That actually is what attracted me to come and talk to Foresee in the UK over a year ago now, I think months ago when I became aware of the fact that companies need to see that real data close to real-time as possible, where you’re dealing with customer experiences, for example, as you know from your work. If a customer experience is broken, the quicker you know, the quicker you can fix it, and the less likely you are to start losing market share.

Ian: Yes.

David: There’s a flip side to this if I might just comment on it. If we accept that perceived value drives behaviours from customers that are actually essentially profitable for the business, the more we know about that and the quicker we know, the more chance we’ve got of driving up the economic value, the financial value that we capture from our customers, which drives up the value of our business. Your customer base becomes an asset in your hands because it generates cash flow. You’ve always got to look at these things together. What do we need to know and when do we need to know it to protect and grow our cash flow and our profitability?

Ian: Is there a shift in the ownership of customer-centricity? Is there a change that’s required as to whether it’s the marketing team? Where does customer-centricity sit within an organization and is it sufficient to think of one owner within the business?

David: Well, you’ve asked two or three very insightful questions. The answer to the last question is absolutely not. Customer-centricity belongs to everybody. It’s cultural. It’s about leadership. It’s about a belief that’s instilled in behaviours and attitudes that if we don’t deliver value to customers, we’re not going to deliver value to shareholders. The second point I’d make is– and it sort of goes back what I said before, I used to believe that markets were a given. There’s a couple of flaws in that thinking that I’ve come to realize.

One is you have to think about not just your products and services and how satisfied people are within, you’ve also got to bear in mind how your customer’s trade-off, what they get for what they pay. Satisfaction with per price and other things that cause concerns or anxieties that represent a cost to the customer. Last point, when I was teaching marketing in the business school, I used to believe that markets were a given. It’s now increasingly recognized that markets actually are malleable. You can shape them. An example of that would be if you think about the iPad.

No, you didn’t get up one morning thinking, “I need a television set that I can carry around with me, have it in my briefcase, make phone calls on it, look up information, et cetera, et cetera.” That market was shaped by Steve Jobs. He told the world, “You’ve got communication needs, I’ve thought of a better way to meet them.” He created the market for personal communication devices. Uber is another one that’s reinvented the market for taxi rides. I like that notion of market-shaping.

Ian: Injecting the customer view into an organization’s decision-making process obviously is critical. If I think back to many of my past roles and many of those organizations we had, somebody comes to the meeting and assume the mantle of the customer. It became a bit of a trend to say, “Who’s representing the voice of the customer in this meeting?” In the conversations I’ve had with you over the last little while, one of the things that keep coming to mind for me is how did that person who was representing the customer actually know what the customer wants?

I’m interested in the old thoughts around what are the key areas that an organization needs to focus on to really understand how they can deliver a competitive superior value to their customer? Where is that? What are the focus areas?

David: Firstly, you’ve got this paradox of the inside-out thinking, this is outside-in thinking. I encountered that back in the ’80s when I did some work for Auckland City Council. City Councils are not always particularly customer-centric because they are composed of people who have got professional views as to what the city needs. You might call that an inside-out view. The engineers know what sort of sewage system we want, right? A panda wouldn’t know. Customer-centricity always has to be tampered by the business economics, by the strategy of the company itself, as to how it wants to compete and how able it is to compete in different ways.

You clearly need leadership. You need metrics that reflect the needs that you’re trying to meet so that you can check whether or not the things that you’re trying to achieve are actually working and the people you have to ask about that are the customers. What I like about that notion you have just talked about is that someone is even introducing, how does the customer feel about this to the decision making. I’ve sat in rooms with clients where the managing director actually said, “You know, David, sometimes you’ve just got to do things to customers.”

We’ve all been in meetings like that and we probably have sometimes seen the results of that way of thinking. You need leadership and the culture that says, “We shouldn’t be doing this or making these decisions without at least considering the likely impact on how customers feel about us, our products, how you’re using our products, and so on.” You’ve got to get a balance.

Ian: What you’re telling me is there’s no magic measure or lead key indicator that’s a bit of, I don’t know what we’d call that, a canary in the cage.

David: Well, there is. There is a canary in the cage. No, I didn’t say that. Push back on that. There is a canary. You can see that if we continue on this path with this level of satisfaction or value if you’ve got a variable that you know has a relationship with what people intend to do, then you follow that variable on a regular basis. Why wouldn’t you? If you see that number dipping, you act.

I talk a lot about having information on the table at the sort of meetings you’re talking about which enable managers to see sooner and act faster because that’s the world we live in. It’s what customers are doing, so why wouldn’t you want the same important legal management meetings where you’re making decisions that impact customers?

Ian: It’s not sufficient to say or it’s not an excuse to say that there are too many variables and too many factors that you as an organization need to set about to understand those?

David: I don’t think that it’s any sort of excuse. You’ve got to know what are the key metrics and you’ve got to be on them. The decision-makers have to feel comfortable with the data. They have to be satisfied that the data is rigorous, that they can rely on it to make decisions. That is a critical catalyst to the company as a whole taking more notice of the metrics that are put in front of them. They need to believe in those metrics. You need to be able to demonstrate why those metrics are the ones that matter, how they are linked to the outcomes you’re trying to drive, and be able to demonstrate that over time.

Ian: You just used a phrase which I’ve heard you use several times in different conversations that you and I have had which is this, “See sooner, act faster,” which I love. I think it reminds me obviously of the immediacy of the experience that guys in contact centres have when they talk to customers and have a finger on the pulse. Often I always smile and, later on, some senior exec finally decides to act on an insight that they’ve heard about from our contact centre that finally feels its way up the organizational hierarchy in the contact centre staff.

When they say the big announcement all groan and roll their eyes and they’re all, “We’ve known that for the last 25 years. Why did they only just figure that out now?” I’m interested in this. They’ve obviously been seeing soon and not able to act. What are the key things to getting that insight and foresight up into an exec-level view?

David: Look, you asked me good questions. I’ll be honest, I don’t know what are the answers. Sometimes I literally shake my head in frustration at things that happen. I think it comes back to the leadership and culture because, at the end of the day, what the chief executive wants to see on his or her desk are end numbers that they are focusing on driving. The other numbers that the people around them focus on. I can remember our chief executive saying to me on one occasion, “David, if you don’t know the answer, ask.”

What he was sending signals to his team was, “I don’t want market research, I don’t believe in it.” Why would you listen to customers? Your boss doesn’t. I always come back to that you have to build credibility, you have to be able to demonstrate course and client relationships. That’s critical. Here’s a concrete example and I like this one. If I asked your customer, Ian, to rate Verint’s products and services on a scale on 1 to 10, bearing in mind the cost of those services, how would you rate them as being worth what you paid for them? 10 to 1 scale, 1 equals poor, 10 equals excellent.

I’m sitting around the table with a senior lead team. They’re sitting there and sort of estimating what they think the number is going to be. I came up with a score and I say, “Actually, the number is 7.6 on the 10-point scale.” There’s a bit of a nod around the table. Oh, shit, I thought it was going to be worse than that. That’s actually very good. There’s a bit of satisfaction about it, right? You showed them the relationship between people who had rated our value at that level on average and what the strength of their future intentions to repurchase or recommend are.

Typically, you might find that at that level, 60% of your customers are highly likely to recommend you. What does that mean about the other 40%? What that means is, if they are not highly likely to recommend you or if they are not highly likely to repurchase from you, then potentially 40% of your net profit is at risk. If your 7.6 is– If you’ve measured your competitor’s performance in the eyes of their customers on the same metric and their competitors’ performance is 8. That says, not only have you got market share at risk, you’ve got a churn rate and need either at risk.

It’s probably going to be accelerated by the fact that your competitor is delivering superior value. 7.6 isn’t good at all, it’s bad. My friend Ray Kordupleski used to say, “Good is bad.” It’s a wakeup call. It all depends on the level of loyalty that people are saying they will deliver at the level of value that you’re currently perceived to be delivering. In terms of talk about the managing director that he’s got 40% that is either at risk, you’ll get a response.

Ian: Yes, it’s interesting. You’re saying that often it’s more the way we measure things, particularly in customer experience functions, or in call centres. I often say the word average has snuck into our vocabulary. We’re talking about average handle time, and average performance and average, average everywhere. In fact, who wants to be average? If your child comes home from school and says, “Guess what, Mom or Dad? I got the average mark for the exam.” The first thing most parents said is, “Well, actually what was the best mark?” We allow this complacency to sneak in, and we think that average performance is okay. In fact, well, no one really wants mediocrity.

David: You raised your point. Value is both absolute and relative. What I get for what I pay is relative to what I could get from somebody else. If you’re giving me a 7.6 and a competitor is giving their customers an 8, they’re the ones who are going to be growing market share, no question.

Ian: There’s an element isn’t there around organizations who’ve become complacent because it’s only that organization’s industry solid that they function in, and that customer segment that they’ve dealt with. It’s almost a little bit like, they don’t know what hot’s like because they know what cold is. They’ve only got one point of reference, which is their own internal reference, with their own customers, with their own old way of doing things.

David: Exactly, that’s what Kordupleski discovered. When their customer satisfaction scores were going up and their market share was going down, which was a combination of not getting as many of the new to market customers, and losing customers they already had. What they discovered was that the competitors were getting better in absolute terms and relative terms across the full spectrum of benefits and costs. Not all experiences have the same impact on perceptions of value as others.

You need to know before you invest money in improving a particular experience, what impact that’s going to have on perceptions if value, and therefore, loyalty intentions and behaviours because then you can quantify the likely revenue effects. That’s critically important.

Ian: What you’re reminding me though is it’s very relevant to the current context of today. Well, with the pandemic, in a sense, there are suddenly new lenses and new points of reference that have been introduced into this whole perception of value and customer’s perception of an organization. What was good enough, six months ago, pre-pandemic, from an organization doesn’t meet their expectations any longer. The same thing for organizations that are suddenly having to shift from a traditional go to market model to a more digital model.

What was acceptable in the past isn’t sufficient for the future, and the customer expectations have changed. Perhaps you could talk a little bit of it, David, about the impact of the pandemic in your mind and some of these changing environmental and commercial and societal factors upon the customer.

David: A really good question, Ian, and I’m genuinely glad you raised it. If you look at what’s going on around us, if you look at the forces of disruption around us, we’ve got environmental factors, such as climate– by which I mean the commercial environment, we’ve got things that competitors do, new entrants doing new things, shaping people’s expectations accordingly. Secondly, we’ve got natural events like COVID, the pandemic. We’ve got what people call the fourth industrial revolution, for example, the Internet of Things.

People’s awareness of this thing called corporate social responsibility, or social value, which will bring you back to the topic of stakeholders in a minute. We know that over time, people take on board some of these things, and they become part of what they look for when thinking about value and who they want to deal with. In some industries, and with some customers, these things are becoming more dominant, and they’re thinking when they’re choosing, “Who do I want to give my business to?” Then they– [crosstalk]

Ian: Customers know that that’s why they feel drawn to a particular organization because it’s almost an intuitive gut feel as do you feel aligned to a particular organization and something about its values and its market perception that particularly attracts you. My sense is if I use people I know as an example, sometimes they don’t really know, they just have this affiliation with that particular brand. I think what you’re telling me is that the magic for the organization is to understand those intuitive, almost intangible things in a new way is one of the multiple data points that they’ve got to try and get their heads around.

David: Sure. You’ve got to strike a balance between the different stakeholders and their needs. That’s why I think it’s very difficult for something like a City Council you can– You know the old saying, you can please some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. It’s interesting. You probably know we’ve got an election campaign going on over here at the moment. The polls come out literally daily.

It’s interesting, you asked me a question earlier about how frequently you should, for example, run surveys, is it quarterly enough or whatever? I’ve always favoured possible now, we have the technology at our fingertips to do it, to be measuring as close to real-time as possible. That’s what’s happening with the political events here. What we’re seeing is every time they release a new poll and there was one last week, there’s another one tonight, the numbers have changed. What that says is that people are placing different emphasis on different aspects of what attracts them to vote for a particular party.

The perceptions of the performance on those parties, on those aspects which drive as a voting choice are also changing literally daily, weekly. Why wouldn’t you do that if you’re running a retail business?

Ian: Yes. It highlights to me that the analogy I always use is– a couple of weeks ago, I did one of those little dipstick things in the swimming pool to check the chlorine and the pH balance, and then I checked, it was okay. Later on that day, I thought I better take the bottle of water up to the pool shop to get them to test it. Of course, the dipstick thing looks great. Everything is in balance. I go to the pool shop, and it’s like, “Oh, no, it’s terrible.” There’s all these other variables that they check in their computerized water testing system.

My little dipstick is obviously only a very, very small sample and only measures a couple of parameters. Obviously, the pool shop can do the full range of analysis across multiple factors. I think what you’re telling me is the one little dipstick thing, every now and then, is not good enough.

David: That dipstick is impervious.

Ian: That’s right, yes. The complexity of all the other variables.

David: Not you, Ian, I’m not saying you’re the dipstick around here.

Ian: Thanks, I feel so much better. If I take that pool shop analogy, as an organization, are there in your mind, a group of other measures that they must have their fingers on, and they must understand and they must be considering, as a magic set of things that are critical?

David: Here’s the kind of architecture that I’ve come to know as useful. I won’t say it’s the best in class or the best there is because there will always be someone with something better. What I know is you need to understand what’s driving decisions. Who’s the person who makes the decision whether we’re going to bank with ANZ or Westpac? Where we’re going to open our account? You need to know what drives value for the decision-maker and their key influences.

In a business setting, when it’s business to business, you’ve got this idea of a buying centre, or a decision-making group or a decision-making unit, where somebody ultimately is the final decision-maker. It might be two, or three, who together agree but there might be five or six or eight people around the table who have an all-rounded decision. When you’re looking at– and that’s a sort of high-level decision-making group but when you’re measuring, for example, customer satisfaction with a particular experience, you go to the user of the experience, you go to the recent user of the experience.

When you’ve got certain indicators that you know, certain measures, that you know are drivers of overall evaluation of value, you then set up a series of hard measures which I would call hard measures, observation measures. For example, customers might tell you they don’t want to have to wait around in the bank, standing in a queue for 20 minutes to get served. Not many people would like that. Let’s say that you find that there’s a high impact on customer perceptions of value, and you’re not performing particularly well on it. As a business carer is to drive that up, right?

You measure the time, actually the waiting time the people have. You line up your fact-based measure with a perceptual measure. Over time, you would calibrate the level of waiting time that is optimal. If you go beyond this, people are going to start to show discontent when they fill on your survey. If you go better than that standard, it doesn’t change the perceptual score much but it costs you more money to deliver, given level of service.

I like the idea of having a decision-making metrics of having predicted the outcome metrics and of having actual metrics related to the outcome that I had and that you can see the relationship between your perceptual metrics and those outcome metrics.

Ian: For me, you’re getting me to think about what I’ve learned, I guess from you that are more of the, as I said, the futuristic measures. Probably not really and I probably shouldn’t describe them like that from your perspective but predictive and prescriptive. Is there a quick summary definition you can give our listeners in terms of why prescriptive and predictive measures are so important and how to evolve to that level of insight in their organization?

David: Well, I can’t talk about prescriptive measures so much but I certainly can talk about predictive ones. The reason that we want to talk about predictive measures is that we need to understand what’s happened. We need to understand the past and you could call that hindsight. We need to understand what’s happening at the moment and we might call that insight. We need to understand what’s likely to happen because if it’s bad, we want to nip it in the bud.

If we can see that the level of value we’re delivering is dropping and it’s dropping on a couple of measures that we know are drivers of value like in the case of Vodafone, I mentioned at the time we did that work back in– It was BellSouth actually so I’m going back to about 1996. They were bought out by Vodafone. Their customers placed high waiting on the issue of calls staying connected. Not surprising, is it really? 61% of the people who are making phones in the car. Their calls in the car. They were getting a poor score of calls staying connected.

They needed to firstly figure out why they were dropping calls and what they needed to fix in order to drive up their performance on that metric. When that performance metric improved, smaller percentage of calls was being dropped. The overall value metric went up and the intention to recommend went up. They could have actually quantified the financial impact of improving the performance of dropping calls but, of course, until you get this problem fixed, you aren’t going to be adding customers at the rate you want.

Ian: Right. Look, David, I’m going to change tech for a few minutes just as we wrap up our conversation which has always been very enjoyable. I’ll just ask you a question around things that you like to read. I imagine you’re a fairly wide reader of different books and articles and materials. If you had to share one top recommendation for our listeners around an insightful book to read, maybe I shouldn’t use that term when talking to you.

David: We’re talking about business books here, aren’t we?

Ian: It could be business or fiction, really. I mentioned–

David: I’m going to give you three.

Ian: A feel for what you like personally.

David: I’m going to give you three books I’ll recommend you read. Two I recommend and one I think have a look at it and see what you think. There’s a book written by a colleague of mine from Wharton Business School, I think I’ve mentioned to you before. I stole the title from him. See it SoonerAct Faster. It’s about the use of foresight and the importance of detecting what he calls signals of change and doing that. One of them, I could have talked about today but didn’t choose to was the need to be systematic in collecting data that indicates things might be changing around you.

He even insists that most of us see the strong signals not so good at picking up the weak ones. That need for force. That’s a very good book and his name is George Day. D-A-Y and he’s from the Wharton Business School. You can get it on– Well, the authors are actually Moorman and Day. M-O-O-R-M-A-N and Day. You can buy it on Amazon. If you want to read a book that is all about Machiavellian behaviour, I recommend John Dean’s book, Blind Ambition. John Dean was the White House Counsel at the time of Watergate.

Because he was in the gun and he realized he was right smack in the middle of a conspiracy to obstruct justice charge, he decided to come clean and he didn’t spare any punches. He’s the guy who said there was a cancer growing on the presidency. That is a fascinating book for anyone who remembers Watergate. In more recent times, if you wanted to try and understand what’s going on in the White House at the moment, John Bolton has written a book called The Room Where it Happened, something like that. It describes a completely dysfunctional group of decision-makers. It’s a bit scary when you realize the power they’ve got in their hands.

Ian: All right, interesting selection there. Maybe now if I ask you, a non-business, non-work-related question about favourite shallow movie, what would you recommend? What are you watching on Netflix when you’re locked down at home and you have nothing else to do?

David: I watched a fantastic Netflix show the other day called– Well, two I’ll recommend, one is a Norwegian one called Nobel. N-O-B-E-L. It’s a groping drama. I’ll put it that way. With some relationship to the Nobel Peace Prize but it’s essentially political. The Scandinavians have got– Their style is more like English TV than American TV. It’s very good. It’s on Netflix. There’s another. It’s an Israel program called Fauda. It’s based on the internal intelligence service and its attempts to anticipate terrorist acts and snuff them out before they occur. There are a couple of programs that I recommend.

Ian: Thank you. I’m sure our listeners will enjoy chasing those up and getting involved in reading and watching. David, unfortunately, we’ve run out of time as always we could keep talking forever I’m sure and I’ll look forward to our next conversation but, for now, it comes to the conclusion. I just wanted to wish you all the best and I’m sure you’ll enjoy getting out of lockdown in the coming few days. I’m sure your family will have a great lead up to the election as well watching with interest what happens.

David: Thank you, Ian. I’ll look forward to hearing the results of this podcast. I’ll probably listen to it and– Did I really say that?

Ian: Yes. Well, I’m just glad–

David: I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and discuss some of these things that we’ve got so much interest in common.

Ian: Thanks, David.

In conversation with . . . is a series of podcasts from Verint featuring chats and discussions with leading figures from the contact centre, CX and customer engagement industry across the Asia Pacific region.