How Simon Clarke tells the story in CX

At Australia’s Suncorp Bank, CX lives at the intersection of research capability, service design, design thinking, and journey map ownership, and digital strategy and CX lead Simon Clarke is responsible for a combination function of digital products, CX and insights.

In this role, Clarke leads all digital customer reporting including Net Promoter Score, Voice of Customer, app reviews, industry insights and “basically anywhere where our customers provide us feedback”. The role builds on Clarke’s passion for UX and digital product ownership, areas of interest he got into in the mid-naughties when they were emerging trends, and not the lynchpin of CX that they are today.

In the years since, the humble debit card has become a fully integrated feature of the mobile phone, which means that as both UX and product have become central to the experiences of banking customers, there’s now a big opportunity in how brands “interact with a customer's device and add value to the interaction”. 

As he joins the CX Network Advisory Board, Clarke shares more about his role, how his career in CX started, and the most exciting aspect of working in CX today.  

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CX Network: Tell us about your work at Suncorp Bank.

Simon Clarke: I currently run a combination function of Digital Products, CX and Insights. In terms of breaking that down, I look after all of our digital customer reporting including NPS, Voice of Customer, App Reviews and basically anywhere where our customers provide us feedback plus industry insights. It allows our broader digital team to keep our finger on the pulse and through fortnightly huddles. 

Here we pull all the data apart and overlay it across our journeys to see whether it's a look, watch, fix or park opportunity.

From there, I look after CX which to us is a mixture of internal research capability, service design, design thinking and journey map ownership. We tend to shift across either large strategic customer/business challenges and use our toolkit to unpack a problem, validate a proposition or assist with ideation flavoured workshopping to assist with product road mapping/opportunity creation.

Lastly, I have recently taken on product management remit (after a few years off), looking after our Suncorp Bank App. Having Insights and CX makes it quite handy to infuse into our digital banking and “digital first” strategies which drive a lot of the experiences we build in our app and beyond.

CX Network: What inspired you to work in customer experience?

Simon Clarke: My career started off as a business analyst, moving into digital product ownership in its very early infancy in the mid-naughties. I've always had a passion for UX design but over the years my passion has probably broadened into pure design-based problem solving.

I love solving problems creatively and being the noisy introvert, I am always keen to facilitate a workshop and tackle something head-on with a Braintrust. It's an increasingly popular paradigm incubated by Pixar when it comes to throwing all of their senior creatives into a room to pitch concepts, ideas, and stories.

It is always a respectful environment to evolve ideas into a mature, formed product. It's a critical part of the "Imagineering" culture at Pixar/Disney and we completely embrace it when it comes to our CX ways of working.

We even refer to our broader Suncorp Bank digital team as "Digital Imagineers" as we are completely inspired to solve customer problems and make our customers feel good about their banking via creativity and cutting-edge technologies.

In spending time learning and mastering the craft of Customer Experience Management – particular on the design thinking / ideation side of things – I fell in love with living on the “left side of the double diamond” to incubate ideas and opportunities to help customers understand and manage their money.

CX Network: What’s the most rewarding or exciting aspect of working in CX today?

Simon Clarke: I think CX, like most disciplines, had been able to take advantage of new technologies be it journey tools, surveys and of course artificial intelligence (AI), and then wrap it all in creativity. I always think CX is like any artform – there are plenty of toys and technologies out there, but the quality of the output still comes down to the natural talent of who is painting, directing, recording or in our world, having a true understanding of the current state to drive teams to an appropriate customer outcome. 

I used to work in TV post-production before working in digital and the parallels are always the same, you can be tempted to drench your work with technology, but story and character remain critical. 

In CX, we simply convert it to journey and customer. Craft a “good journey” that inspires customers and you get the “good reviews”.

CX Network: What do you see as the biggest challenge CX faces?

Simon Clarke: The fundamentals of speed, quality, and time will start to interfere with CX. Tools will be able to rapidly curate surveys or journeys, synthesize data and provide you with a bunch of bullet points to throw into a report for executives. The tension between managing time expectations of “tell us what the solution is this afternoon please” vs a traditional, methodical approach by the purists will potentially undercut the value (and appreciation) of CX professionals. 

As we're all told to “embrace AI in our jobs”, we need to know in a generative AI world where we best place our expertise vs leveraging tools to provide indicative value to those who expect faster outcomes (rightly so) to remain competitive.

CX Network: What is the best professional advice you've ever received?

Simon Clarke: Something short and sweet from a GM when I took on my first executive role. I was still honouring my perfectionism to get the “what” or the story right and I'm sure like most, adjusting to generalized leadership took a little while to adapt to. 

My GM said, “Worry a little about ‘the what’, worry more about communicating the ‘so what’ and the ‘now what’.” 

It's brutally simple and I echo his feedback everyday whether it be providing recommendations or even for triaging of CX pain points. I still use this simple advice when coaching my team to provide a circular narrative to leaders on the relevant story they are trying to tell. 

CX Network: What do you believe to be the most important thing happening in CX right now?

Simon Clarke: One of the things we've been working on is taking our traditional approaches but adapting to emerging if not scaled behaviors. 

A tactical piece is firstly mapping the communication triggers across our journeys. We send push alerts, nudges, emails but in large companies, maintaining a cohesive story for customers and ensuring they have the right insights, call to action or simply emotive state can prove difficult. 

We've since focussed on the “communication” swim lane and by identifying, testing and optimising triggers, events and UX/content strategy, it has helped our NPS immensely. 

In terms of something a little more strategic, working in financial services, embedded finance as a term was coined years ago. It hasn't come to fruition in Australia as much as hoped but there is certainly a need to know what interactions are executed within our own experiences and which ones can be executed off-platform such as the phone's operating system. 

Banking inherently is very conservative in this space, but when you think about how your debit card is completely infused into your phone, your “banking” become an experiential extension of your phone – rather than your bank. Whether it be digital wallets, phone widgets, transactional summaries or payments, we understand that for many bank interactions, the bank app is often not the entry or exit point of an interaction anymore.  

Back to the professional advice piece before, post a banking interaction, most customers want to understand the “so what” and “now what” when it comes to that interaction and their financial position.  We've done some work but I think those “positive experiential disconnects” of sticky brands, how they interact with a customer's device and then knowing how to add value to an interaction that with security and privacy in mind, I think is a big opportunity for brands to get right and overcome brands that perhaps create negative disconnects by being too intrusive on a customer's device.

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