Transforming customer centricity with Stan Swinton

In July 2022, Bain & Company launched NPSx a new venture intended to help companies create superior CX through its technology and training.

At the helm is founder Stanford Swinton, a former partner and advisor for Bain whose CV also includes roles with PwC and three years as global VP of customer service for Deliveroo, a period that included the Covid-19 pandemic and the firm’s IPO.

“The NPSx mission statement is to help companies enrich the lives of their customers. NPSx exists to help companies live that strategy,” says Swinton, who also currently oversees the NPS Loyalty Forum at Bain.

NPSx offers training and certification, which covers earned growth and customer economics, insights and analytics, CX design and other areas. On the technology side, Bain’s proprietary data solution, Customer Kinetics, unifies customer, financial and operational data into a single set of actions and recommendations.

Swinton says: “There are a couple of problem statements that we are looking to address with NPSx. We recognize that a lot of companies have been on a journey the last few years trying to put the customer at the heart of everything they do, with varying degrees of success. One of the things we recognized was that, on the consulting side of Bain, consulting and advisory alone is not enough to drive and sustain that transformation.”

What is needed instead Swinton says, is a new set of tools and upskilling opportunities for talent.

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Technology enabled customer insights 

During his time with Deliveroo, Swinton discovered the hard way that the vendors and tools needed for the job were not as readily available as anticipated.

At the time he solved this by creating bespoke solutions, including data models, processes and applications to support Deliveroo’s CX program, but in the longer term he saw a much bigger opportunity.

“We think there is an opportunity for a product that is more focused around actually developing customer insight rather than just some fancy technology,” he says.

At present, the CX ecosystem comprises thousands of vendor companies. In one corner are the all-in-one platforms, offering multiple functionalities, but these are becoming “quite cumbersome as you try and do everything through the same platform”.

In another corner are the smaller and niche solutions, for example chatbots or AI-assisted translation, where there are four or five strong players in each field, but each tool only solves a small part of the overall CX puzzle.

“You think, OK I can add you to my ecosystem, but I will need 10 other vendors to do what I need to do within CX,” Swinton says.

In the middle are the business intelligence tools, which bring data together and connect systems, but require expertise to reap their full benefits.

NPSx does not seek to introduce additional corners, nor does Swinton see this as a situation for the vendor market to address. Rather the next frontier for CX is in connecting the corners that exist at present – this is where NPSx comes in.

Swinton explains: “Where we want to add value is in coming between the big systems and the more specific, narrow pieces of technology to help stitch that together. Kind of like the middleware for CX that allows people to take stuff off the shelf rather than having to build everything from scratch. I think that is where we have seen the biggest gaps to date.”

The profit imperative

During InMoment’s XI Forum 2022, Swinton delivered a keynote called “Enriching the lives of your customers vs the "profit imperative".”

It covered how companies, despite many reporting a “customer obsession”, remain locked into a financials-first attitude which relegates CX into the shadows of quarterly results.

Swinton explains: “The profit imperative is more of a quarter-to-quarter focus on short-term profitability of a company and that is always front and center. You might have delivered a great quarterly or annual outcome on the financials but actually tanked your experience long term or not invested enough in creating value in the future. That is the risk.”

“In these situations, the CX imperative, the customer imperative, comes and goes when it is convenient, rather than living side by side with the profit imperative as a balanced scorecard,” he adds.

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Proving his point, Swinton says the most successful companies are the ones that work to balance both.

“What we are finding is that if you focus on the customer longer term the financials tend to work themselves out as opposed to the other way round. If you focus on the long-term and the health of customer relationships, then over time the companies that do that are outperforming others financially,” he adds.

How to achieve CX greatness

To join the ranks of the world’s most successful companies Swinton says there are five major disciplines to master, each with its own set of capabilities and standards:

• Customer value management
• Feedback management
• Journey management
• Data management
• Great employee engagement practices

A robust and competitive ecosystem is required to succeed in all five.

“Whether it is InMoment, NPSx or other vendors out there in the ecosystem, I don’t think any of us can claim that we have the silver bullet or magic solution,” Swinton says.

The need to combine multiple solutions in order to succeed in these key disciplines amplifies the call for leaders across the industry to collaborate in order to deliver on their CX goals.

“I am hoping to see more collaboration in the ecosystem and more joint innovation as we support companies with this important vision of enriching customers lives,” Swinton adds.

After all, no company is an island.