James Johnstone is passionate about working with organisations to deliver on their core purpose, reducing delivery risk, and optimising their spend. With a specific interest in how customers interact with organisations through service delivery models and technology James works with clients on how they can activate a service experience for both customers and employees. James’ career has evolved from delivering technical support for one of the largest brands in the world, before working in IT Managed services, where he gained a deep understanding of business drivers and risks. Today, as Associate Director of Managed Operations Presales, James combines formal education, including an MBA, GAICD, and various industry certifications, with market insights to solve client puzzles and inform corporate strategy.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CXO Magazine, James shared insights on the most pressing challenges faced by organizations in delivering exceptional customer experiences, his significant career milestone, personal hobbies and interests, future plans, words of wisdom, and much more. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
Hi James. What drives your passion for helping organizations deliver on their core purpose, and how do you stay current with industry trends and developments?
It is an organisation’s core purpose that is the only differentiator. That differentiator is important for attracting the best talent to join your organisation in addition to standing out in the marketplace to attract customers. I personally find it fascinating to understand how a business ticks – what are the challenges, what are the business drivers, and how do they connect to their purpose to be in service of the community (public sector) or grow their customer base (commercial). It is this natural curiosity that I have which I can combine with my experience in operations, financial performance and analysis, and more recently as a subject matter expert in the Customer Experience (CX) domain that fuels this passion of understanding combined with a natural desire to want to help and support another person.
For me, understanding what is happening in the market is incredibly important to be able to fulfil my role as an advisor to organisations that are looking to understand their options for growing, reducing risk, or optimising their spend. In the real time nature of our world, I find LinkedIn an incredible resource for learning better methods for discovery, the latest CX trends, and business trends. There are also newsletters like the one HFS Research put out that I find are very well written and offer great insights on the technology and service industries. There are also more infotainment sources that I enjoy like the interviews Stephen Barlett does on A Diary of a CEO – I find the topics in these interviews are great conversation starters!
What do you love the most about your current role?
As technology becomes more intelligent and more human-like it is our human traits that become more valuable. For me in my current role, that is creativity and connection. This primarily comes down to three things:
- the ability to come up with creative commercial models to solve for a client need now and into the future though built-in innovation programs.
- the opportunity that I have to meet with so many organisations and executives to hear what they are trying to solve for and come up with service models to solve those needs is incredibly rewarding.
- I am ultimately a connector that is able to distil insights from different conversations and experts that I have the opportunity to meet with and share those insights with the customers that I get to meet. As an example, I met with a customer this week that has a need to solve for outbound campaigns. They were operating a legacy on premise contact centre platform that will be end-of-life mid this year. The truly fascinating thing was they were buying stacks of sim cards to present different numbers to customers when they were calling them. I was able to acknowledge their challenge. Talk through how we can eliminate their infrastructure, introduce rolling numbers through the provision of a number block, and onboard a single application that could solve for both telephony and digital campaigns in a single interface for their people. This solution delivers cost savings, new levels of redundancy, and a better customer and employee experience. What is not to love about helping a customer transform their world like that?!
What do you believe are the most pressing challenges facing organizations looking to deliver exceptional customer experiences?
It is common in the industry when answering this question to talk about things like talent transformation/re-education, ability to adopt AI in a way that doesn’t expose them to litigation or unwanted media attention, or the ability to be agile enough to adapt to changing consumer preferences. However, more broadly I see three types of organisations at very different stages of maturity when it comes to driving CX transformation:
- Capital and tech debt constrained: These customers are yet to find their way to the cloud. They are desperately looking for ways to free themselves from their technology constraints to be able to more effectively compete. For the most part, education and understanding of what is possible is lacking within their organisation. When speaking with these organisations there tends to be a sense of relief that there is a way forward and that they can optimise their spend and unlock new levels of efficiency. For companies like these I encourage them to find a navigator. Someone that can help them navigate the options, someone that has lived experience in delivering on those solutions, and someone that can pick up the phone and say – I have heard about this thing, would it work for me?
- The experienced majority looking to do it better: In the Australia and New Zealand region we are quite progressive and have adopted cloud solutions at a rate that is faster than many other regions. This means, I have the opportunity to speak with organisations that have already tried a solution, found it hasn’t worked for them – or they have outgrown it, and are now seeking to level up but in a very focused way as they have a very clear understanding of their problems and what needs to be solved. Coming from an informed place is fantastic. What these organisations need to focus on is to clearly articulate the pain that they are enduring right now. Transformation of pain is prioritised far higher than a nice to have. Where that pain isn’t clearly articulated and quantified at the executive level, I have seen these projects flounder and get deprioritised.
- The industry leaders living on the bleeding edge seeking competitive advantage: There truly aren’t many of these organisations. Getting to meet them in itself is a privilege. Challenges that these organisations tend to have include buy-in from across the organisation. This means, ensuring interoperability across teams, applications, infrastructure, and suppliers. Projects for these businesses live and die by the ability to effectively drive organisational change. This means articulating the what’s in it for me (WIIFM) to each of the key stakeholders, including them in the decision and change journey, and ultimately celebrating together when it all goes wonderfully well!
How do you see the role of technology evolving in the future of service delivery, and what implications will this have for businesses and society?
The CEO of Atom Bank, a digital only bank in the UK, said in a recent interview that a 4-day workweek isn’t ‘progressive’, AI will make it ‘bloody logical’. What is clear is that the nature of work is changing. We have historically scaled businesses with more people. The CX industry is now focused on scaling by augmenting people and technology to work together. There are the use cases we hear about that range from surfacing knowledge at the right time so our people can be across a broader range of services through to dynamic workflows that adapt and guide your team member as the conversation changes. These advances in technology are allowing us to realise new levels of efficiency without the need to scale the workforce.
HFS Research predict that by 2030 this will change again. We have all head of Software as a Service. The future is Service as Software where software delivered outcomes are delivered to customers at scale. There will be people in the background training models, managing exceptions, and developing future service strategies. What will be different is the focus of human delivery will change. I personally believe for those moments that really matter we will still seek the connection and empathy that a human-to-human connection offers. This might be in moments of loss – this could be loss of health or loss of income. Moments of advice in critical moments – this could be in times of ambiguity where you might not be able to even form the right question, and you need guidance such as with your career or financial advice. Also, in moments where a premium or white-glove service is provided – this could be the purchase of a new luxury item where the buying experience is part of buying the actual good or service.
What is clear is that how we learn, serve, and contribute in the world is changing.
What is your leadership philosophy and how do you keep team engaged and motivate them?
Every time I meet a new team member or bring someone onto my own team I explain my ways of working. This offers up front clarity in how I work and my expectations of them. I have five principles that I follow:
- Communication: Silence is the enemy. I would much rather you ask a question if you don’t know or call out if there is a problem. Being in the services industry it is our ability to communicate effectively to our customers and within our own business that matters the most. Communicate often and with purpose.
- Speed: Customer’s value responsiveness. Speed is premium and is valued in so many aspects of our lives. We need to acknowledge customer needs, deliver and solve promptly otherwise our competitors will beat us to it.
- Transparency: Hiding things from each other or our customers only ever backfires. There is no need to carry this burden. What is valued, is the ability to be open, honest, and transparent about a situation. It will foster trust and allow you to focus on solving for the problem rather than trying to obfuscate it.
- Presentation: Consider any premium brand. How the product or service is presented matters. For me, this means how we present our work needs to be premium and how we present ourselves needs to match. Turning up with a presentation that looks like it was built by a child, and you are wearing what you might wear in the backyard offers non-verbal cues to a customer that are not going to support your messaging.
- Can do attitude: This positive and expansive mindset can solve anything. Take on the challenge with energy and passion will lead to both personal and organisational growth.
The same passion that I have in helping our customers is also applied to supporting the people in my team. This is my own demonstration of a can-do attitude where I’ll jump in right beside them to solve a problem or complete a proposal. The feedback I have received is that my team feel that I have their back in working in this way.
What has been your most career-defining moment that you are proud of?
A little over ten years ago I was a consultant advising how to elevate the operational maturity of the processes that govern a technology delivery unit. I delivered a consult to a team that was not in a good space following a production outage for their customer made national headlines. I came in, assessed the operating practices, and two weeks later delivered a transformation plan for them to follow. A few weeks later the General Manager called me and said, we love your plan, but we don’t have the capability to deliver it – will you come and work for me and deliver on your plan. I said yes! Four months later we restored service stability and doubled client satisfaction. A year on from that we increased profitability for the team by 46% while still maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.
The ability to effect change at a community level has been a theme in the roles at my current employer. The project I’m most proud of is our expansion into South Australia. I was the co-author of a business case that received support from the State government that ultimately saw us employ over 1,000 people in twelve months. This was at the same time that the car manufacturing industry was coming to an end resulting in entire communities being disrupted. The re-training, offer of employment, and career pathways that we could provide offered a community hope and transformation. It has been modelled that we would contribute more than $1 billion dollars to Gross State Product over a ten-year horizon. The local council wrote to us at the time thanking us for the investment in the community as they had been able to measure a full percentage point drop in the unemployment rate following us establishing our operations. That level of community change will stay with me forever.
What are your passions outside of work?
The last six months I have focused on being more active. We sit so much of our day that actively focusing on finding time to move now has to be a conscious decision. I started off walking with the objective of ensuring I do 200,000 steps a month – which is harder than you think as you have to be consistent. More recently, I have moved to running with the goal of being able to feel comfortable after running 5kms in 30 minutes – I’m currently panting and in a hot mess at the end. I also buck the trend as I’m not a morning person I tend to go for my run at night after dinner and I don’t listen to anything. Just being present, feeling the cool night air, and allowing my mind to wander is an amazing way to reset.
I’m also the father of two primary school aged girls, love to catch up with friends, and keenly follow Formula 1.
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
Throughout my whole career I have adapted. I expect that the role I play in industry will be very different to the one today as I identify new needs and new problems to solve in order to stay relevant. The opportunity to lead a brand through a transformation program, rather than be the advisor that I am today, would be incredibly rewarding and inspiring.
What advice would you give to aspiring leaders looking to drive business growth and transformation?
The common path and common advice is not necessarily worth listening to. For me, at 18 working as a retail sales assistant was an amazing education in building self-confidence to approach people and solve a problem for them. We also aren’t ready for things at the same time. When I first went to university at 18, I didn’t have the maturity for it. After dropping out of Uni, I found my way into working in a contact centre which was a great moment in learning how business works and what customer service at scale looks like.
My primary advice is, put your hand up for any opportunity that comes your way. Also, leaders appreciate anyone who is proactive. Identify a problem and ask if you can be the agent of change for that problem or project. Also, self-educate. Read widely, enrol in courses, expand your personal network – these things will stay with you, and you will draw on that knowledge for years to come.