Sarah Williams is a seasoned CX professional with over two decades of experience in Customer Service, Strategic Planning and Organizational Leadership. A Head Judge for the national Contact Centre Awards and as the Chief Customer Experience Officer at Westminster City Council, Sarah leads a dedicated team of CX professionals in ensuring that residents, businesses and visitors receive the highest level of service.
With a passion for innovation and commitment to excellence, she drives CX initiatives to enhance the customer journey, streamline processes and implement cutting-edge technologies to meet the evolving needs of the community. Sarah’s collaborative approach fosters strong partnerships both internally and externally, driving positive outcomes and continuous improvement. With her passion for putting the customer first, Sarah is instrumental in shaping Westminster City Councils reputation as a responsive, customer-centric organisation.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CXO Magazine, Sarah shared her career trajectory, insights on the three key components necessary for building lasting customer relationships, the secret sauce behind her success, significant career milestone, future plans, words of wisdom, and much more. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
Hi Sarah. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path in customer service?
I’m the Chief Customer Experience Officer at Westminster City Council. I’ve been working in the Customer Experience industry for over 25 years, starting in outsourcing, banking then moving into public sector where I have been for the last 15 years. Like many in our industry I started on the phones and have been very fortunate to have been afforded a varied and interesting career path that has kept me interested, excited and engaged. I’ve always been passionate about delivering excellent customer experiences and ensuring that our customers have access to accurate and timely information and empathy and support. In my current role, I oversee a team of about 200 staff across various disciplines from User Research and Service Design who work in multi-discipline product teams designing our digital platforms and services as well as customer service teams who handle calls, emails, chats, and social media inquiries from the public on various local government services. It’s a very challenging and rewarding job
What do you love the most about your current role?
I love my current role because I get to make a difference in the lives of our customers and communities. I enjoy working with a diverse and talented team of people who share the same passion and vision for delivering excellent customer experiences. I also appreciate the opportunity to learn and grow as a leader, and to embrace new challenges and innovations, such as generative AI, that help us transform our services and outcomes.
I was drawn to this career path in customer service because I’ve always been interested in understanding human behaviour and motivation, and how to influence and persuade people to achieve positive outcomes. I started my career in contact centres, where I learned the art having great conversations and where I applied my skills and knowledge to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy. I found customer service to be a rewarding and fulfilling field, where I could use my creativity and problem-solving abilities to design and deliver solutions that meet and exceed customer expectations and needs.
In my role at Westminster I am fortunate to have teams across a number of disciplines from user research, UX, UI and service design to leading Product and Customer Service Teams, that means that my teams can positively impact the full customer journey, through research, design, development and day to day customer service delivery.
In today’s fast-paced and constantly evolving landscape, what strategies should leaders employ to maintain a strong connection with their customers and anticipate their changing needs?
Some of the strategies that leaders can employ to maintain strong connections with their customers and anticipate their changing needs are conducting regular and systematic customer research to understand their pain points, desires, expectations, and feedback. This can be done through surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing, online reviews, social media listening, and other methods that provide insights into customer behaviour and preferences. I tend to participate in any group sessions with residents and businesses so I can hear first-hand their experiences. I also attend resident groups and recently attended our leaseholder forum.
Creating and updating customer personas and journey maps that represent the different types of customers and their interactions with the brand across various touchpoints and channels can help identify gaps, opportunities, and areas for improvement in the customer experience, as well as align the organization around the customer’s perspective and goals, we have recently kicked off a discovery session to do just this for our planned contact centre transformation.
Developing and implementing a customer-centric culture that fosters empathy, collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. This means involving customers in the design and development of products and services, empowering employees to make decisions that benefit the customer, rewarding and recognizing customer-centric behaviours, and measuring and monitoring customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics. We have recently implemented two new teams whose purpose are to support our most vulnerable, understanding their needs and case manage their queries until resolution.
Leveraging technology and data to personalise and optimise the customer experience. This can include using artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, automation, and other digital tools to deliver relevant, timely, and seamless experiences that match the customer’s context, preferences, and needs. Technology can also help collect and analyse customer data, generate insights, and provide recommendations for action.
Building trust and rapport with customers by communicating clearly, honestly, and consistently, providing value and support, soliciting and acting on feedback, and resolving issues and complaints effectively. This can help establish a positive and long-lasting relationship with customers, as well as increase customer retention, advocacy, and lifetime value.
An example of this in action was our approach to the discovery phase for report-it, which is our online service that allows residents to report issues such as fly-tipping, graffiti, potholes, noise, or antisocial behaviour (over 26 categories and even more sub categories). We wanted to improve the user experience and efficiency of this service, as well as reduce the workload of our teams who had to handle a lot of calls and emails as well as those officers in the street delivering the service.
We took a user-centred design approach to understand the needs and pain points of our users, both residents and staff. We conducted over 500 interviews, surveys, workshops, and usability tests with different user groups. We also analysed the data and feedback we had from our existing channels, such as web analytics, call logs, and complaints. Through this process, we identified some key insights and opportunities for improvement.
One of the main findings was that users wanted more clarity and transparency on the status and progress of their reports. They also wanted to have a more personalised and conversational interaction with the council, rather than filling out long and impersonal forms. We realised that we could leverage generative and image AI to create a natural language interface that would allow users to report issues using their own words and images and receive dynamic and tailored responses . We also envisioned that this interface could generate rich and structured data that would help us prioritise and resolve the issues more efficiently.
To test this idea, we formed a cross-functional product team that included developers, designers, data scientists, content writers, and service experts. We also partnered with an external AI vendor that specialised in natural language generation and understanding. We adopted an agile and iterative approach, where we prototyped and tested different versions of the AI interface with real users and stakeholders. We also followed ethical and responsible AI principles, such as ensuring data quality, privacy, security, fairness, and explainability.
Through this process, we were able to deliver a working prototype of the AI interface, which we integrated into our report-it service. We launched this in an iterative approach and continuously collected feedback and metrics to evaluate the performance and impact of the AI solution. The initial results were very promising, as we saw an increase in user satisfaction, engagement, and trust, as well as a decrease in call volume & processing time.
We also received positive feedback from our staff, who appreciated the improved data quality and workflow.
We secured the mandate and funding to scale up the AI solution and roll it out to all our reporting journeys and are currently developing potholes and pavement damage as our next release. We also identified other use cases and services where we could apply generative AI, such as chatbots, email automation, document generation, and content creation. We are now in the process of expanding our AI capabilities and transforming our customer experience across the council.
One of the challenges we faced in implementing our AI solution was the gap between the public sector and the private sector in terms of innovation and customer expectations. We realized that in the digital age, people are used to engaging with services that are personalized, responsive, and intuitive, such as Netflix, Amazon, or Spotify. These services use advanced AI techniques to understand their customers, anticipate their needs, and deliver tailored content and recommendations. We wanted to bring the same level of experience to our council services and make them more accessible, convenient, and user-friendly for our residents and businesses. By harnessing the power of generative AI, we were able to create a dynamic and interactive interface that adapts to the user’s input and generates relevant and accurate information. This way, we can offer a more seamless and satisfying service that meets and exceeds the expectations of our customers.
How can companies employ strategies to strike a balance between driving revenue and profitability, and focusing on building customer relationships and loyalty?
To achieve a balance between driving revenue and profitability and building customer relationship and loyalty, companies need to adopt a customer-centric approach that aligns their business goals with their customers’ needs and preferences.
With the lens on Local Government the focus shifts more to value for money and delivering the right outcomes for our users, data for us is an asset and we must leverage our data and analytics to understand our customers’ journeys, pain points, and expectations, to optimise our processes and channels accordingly.
While investing in AI solutions that can enhance user experience, such as personalisation, automation, self-service, voice and chat channels it’s also important that we offer more personal engagement with our communities.
One of the strategies that we are adopting to foster deeper and more personal engagement with our communities is the implementation of the customer advocacy team and the housing care and support team. These teams are dedicated to providing proactive, personalised, and compassionate support to our customers, especially those who are vulnerable or in need of extra help. They work closely with our customers to understand their needs, preferences, and aspirations, and to provide solutions that meet their needs their circumstances. They also advocate for our customers’ rights and interests, and ensue that they have a voice.
Another strategy that we are using to enhance our customer experience is the use of customer empathy training. This is a training program that helps our staff to develop the skills and mindset to empathise with our customers, to see things from their perspective, and to communicate with them in a respectful and empathetic manner. The training program covers topics such as emotional intelligence, active listening, rapport building, and conflict resolution. It also includes practical exercises and simulations that allow our staff to apply their learning to real-life scenarios and to receive feedback and coaching.
So while we have big digital ambitions to innovate using new emerging technologies such as generative AI and other technologies that allow us to create and deliver online platforms and services we must retain our public sector values and mission.
In your experience, what are three key components of building lasting customer relationships?
Building lasting customer relationships in particular in the public sector is a challenging but rewarding task that requires a lot of dedication, creativity, and empathy. In my experience, the three key components of achieving this are:
Understanding the needs and expectations of our customers. This goes back to my point about understanding the pain points, user needs and customer journeys
Delivering consistent and reliable service quality. This means ensuring that our services are accessible, efficient, accurate, and secure across all channels. It also means setting clear standards and metrics for our performance, and monitoring and evaluating them regularly, for example in our mission teams in our product space we create quarterly OKR’s and our contact centre teams have monthly performance objectives. We also strive to continuously improve our processes and systems, benchmarking, learning and adopting best practices and innovations from other sectors.
Building with our users is key. This means communicating with our customers in a transparent, honest, and respectful way. It also means listening to their feedback and complaints, and addressing them promptly and effectively.
Have you seen, firsthand, any AI impacts on the practice of CX? What impacts are you expecting in the next few years?
I’ve mentioned our report-it assistant that uses both image and generative AI to take the effort away from our users, we are also experimenting with copilot tools in our contact centres. I’d like to take that one step further and explore how we can use conversational AI and natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to a wide range of customer queries before a user needs to call in our contact centres. Exploring how we can handle transactional queries with a bot and providing the interaction history to the agents so they understand the context of the query and summarise the case notes so that all interactions are an accurate reflection of the conversation will be a real game changer for us.
Throughout your career, you have been a recipient of several awards and accolades over the years including Contact Centre Manager of the Year 2018 at the UK National Contact Centre Awards and Director of the Year 2018 at the UK Contact Centre Forum Awards among others. Our readers would love to know the secret sauce behind your success.
One of the main factors is my passion for customer-centricity. I honestly do believe that the customer should at the heart of everything we do, and that we need to constantly listen, learn, and improve our services based on their feedback and needs. I also value innovation and creativity, and I always look for new ways to leverage technology, especially AI, to enhance the customer experience and make it more convenient, personalised, and engaging.
Another key factor is my ability to lead and inspire my team, who are the backbone of our CX operations. I believe in empowering them with the right tools, skills, and opportunities to grow and excel in their roles. I also foster a culture of collaboration, trust, and recognition, where everyone feels valued and appreciated for their contributions. I communicate clearly and frequently with my team, and I encourage them to share their ideas, opinions, and challenges with me. I also celebrate their achievements and reward their efforts, both individually and collectively. True authentic compassionate leadership is so very important to me.
I think these two aspects of my leadership philosophy have helped me achieve many milestones in my career, and I am grateful for the recognition and support I have received from my peers, colleagues, and customers. I am always eager to learn from others and improve myself, and I welcome any feedback or suggestions that can help me become a better CX Director.
What is your leadership philosophy and how do you keep your team engaged and motivate them?
My leadership style is based on a real desire keep my team motivated and engaged, I provide them with meaningful and challenging work that aligns with their strengths, interests, and goals. I also give them autonomy and flexibility to manage their own projects and products. I support them with coaching, mentoring, and feedback, and I help them develop their skills and career paths. On the other hand, I also recognise and reward their performance and achievements and I also create a fun and positive work environment, where we celebrate our successes and milestones together. It’s really important to me that all of my teams feel supported, value and engaged and can see that they are making a difference to the lives of our residents, business and visitors.
I also am not afraid to experiment, innovate and learn from failures – of which there have been many. Creating a safe environment for my teams to learn and grow is really important if we are to have continuous improvement. I always put the customer at the heart of everything I do, and I strive to deliver exceptional value and satisfaction to them.
What has been your most career-defining moment that you are proud of?
I think taking the leap from Customer Service to Digital and Innovation, it was such a steep learning curve for me, one that excited and terrified me in equal measures, but now that I look back at what the teams have achieved over the last few years, I know that this was the right decision and an opportunity that I will be eternally grateful for.
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
I love my role at Westminster and the community that we serve so I hope that in some shape or form I am still part of this community and fantastic organisation. In the next five years, I see myself as a CX leader who can drive positive change and impact in my organization and industry. I hope to continue growing and developing my skills and knowledge in CX and lead a team of passionate and talented CX professionals. I also hope to share my insights and experiences with other CX enthusiasts and learn from them as well.
If you could give any advice to someone striving to be a CX Leader, what would it be?
Some advice that I would give to someone striving to be a CX leader are: Keep learning and innovating. Stay updated on the latest trends and best practices in CX and seek feedback from your peers, customers and stakeholders. We are a great community that are always willing to support new talent and learn from each other. Experiment with new ideas and solutions and test them with your customers. Learn from your failures and successes and iterate accordingly.