INTERVIEW
The “Broken Premise” of Customer Love
With Andy Lark – Chair, Group Lark
Should you be worried about loving your customers? Or working to make your customers love you? Our guest Andy Lark has a simple answer: No.
Andy Lark, a Chief Marketing Officer and a Chief Customer Officer several times over and someone who thinks critically and creatively about brand, customer experience, and many of the trends affecting business today. Right now, Andy is chief marketing officer at Dubber, the world’s leading provider of cloud based call recording and voice AI, but he’s had numerous executive leadership positions at Dell where I worked with him, Sun Microsystems, Nortel, Commonwealth Bank, and Foxtel. While he was chief marketing officer and revenue officer at Xero, the company was named the world’s most innovative growth company by Forbes.
In this conversation, Andy made a number of claims that deeply challenged traditional thinking about CX. He’s arguing against customer love as an organizing principle. See what you think about what he has to say. And if you agree with any of his points, I challenge you to consider how your company should approach CX as a result of your agreement with him.
Richard Owen
Well, Andy, thanks for joining us. It’s good to see you. Thanks for joining us from, from Melbourne. I’d like to start by giving you a chance to talk a bit about, you know, the new project you have, which is Dubber. And you’ve talked to me a couple of times about it, but what have you learned at Dubber really about applying AI product, you know, in the marketplace, what’s the big takeaway?
Andy Lark
I think the biggest takeaway in applying AI in the market is AI sounds sexy and has a lot of sizzle, but the reality is when you get into, whether it’s a large-scale call center environment, a distributed sales environment, whatever it might be, businesses are probably 10 to 15 years back from where we think they are.
They’re sitting there, they’ve still got whiteboards with wipers next to them for collecting information. They struggle to understand CX metrics and data in real time. They can understand it in a pocket or a silo, but they can’t get the full picture. And a lot of these businesses are dealing with really fundamental issues. And I think the crucial thing that has shifted probably over the past three years with COVID and the like, is that it just got harder because these workforces are increasingly now distributed. The economics of managing a large central call center with a lot of humans in it has shifted to people spread around the world. So, everything changed, everything got more difficult, and the pressure is on right now to better understand and better capture and use data.
Richard Owen
I have this theory that going into COVID, there were companies that were already somewhat down the curve and there were some companies that really avoided investing in digital and they avoided investing in data for maybe 20 years. And COVID was the great accelerant because if you went in and you were reasonably well prepared, you could either top up your investment and go out there and you know, survive, even thrive in that environment. If you went in and you’ve just got this big deficit from not having caught up, it’s just impossible in a COVID environment. You know, you just can never catch up.
Andy Lark
Yeah, I think, and I think, you know, people often say to me, you know, I was on a panel the other day and people say to me, sort of, what do you think is the most significant technology innovation over the past five, let’s say, years? And people, it always pays to go last when you’re on a panel. I’ve learned, and you know, they start with AI, Web3, blockchain, hydrogen, and I’m like Zoom.
Because who would have thought we would really work from anywhere? Who would have thought that our interactions would shift from conference calls to full video interaction globally? But the real shift that underpins that is our communications method has shifted from being rigid and fixed. Dial my 1-800 number, click here to chat. To now being hyper-multimodal. I’m on chat for one issue I’ve got, I’m on video for the next issue I’ve got, I’m on Zoom calls, I’m on Teams calls, I’m on mobile calls, and suddenly these organizations that could once get customers to conform to a really rigid interaction pattern are now living in a world where they’ve got a hyper-multimodal communication pattern with customers. And that interaction pattern really does shift dramatically based on customer clusters and groups within the market. If you’re dealing, for instance, in Australia heavily with a very vibrant Asian market, you better understand WeChat. And if you’re in financial services, you’ve got a large group of customers now saying, I want to do my calls over Signal or Telegram or whatever, and I want to chat to you that way. And most organizations just simply aren’t geared for creating customer experiences in this new sort of multimodal communications world that we live in.
Richard Owen
Do you think there’s a risk here that companies put the technology first instead of thinking too much about what customers actually want? And I know it’s sort of textbook thing for people in customer experience to say, but my sense is often people buy solutions because, you know, they read about it. We need bots. And so, bots are going to be really important and other people have bots. Let’s put bots in. And these modes, as you describe it. You know, the customer thinks in terms of tasks that they want achieved, right? They think in terms of what they want accomplished and all of these things are there to serve them and make it easier for them and some extent make it cheaper and more efficient for the vendor. But vendors tend to think, companies tend to think in terms of these channels as being very discrete and we’d like our customers to all go online. We’d like our customers to be served this way, which is convenient for us.
And so, technology gets put in front of a basic understanding of what customers ultimately want. I mean, is the, is the, some of that going on? I mean, I certainly see that in some.
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Andy Lark
I think that’s spot on. I think the thing I often say to CX leaders is that CX for generations has been focused around happiness. It’s like how happy is the customer and obviously with the evolution of NPS how probable is it that customer would recommend us to somebody else? And that’s all really, really good because organizations should focus on those things.
But at the end of the day, CX is fundamentally about the management of human behavior. And the challenge we have today is that organizations got to dictate the behavioral pattern. And banks suffer from this in the extreme. You go to open a mortgage, and they want you to print documents and mail them. They want you to drop documents off. They want you to email them documents. And I’m like, can I just send you a Dropbox link? They’re all in one folder. Like, no, I can’t access Dropbox.
That’s not how I want to work. So, I’ll go find someone who can work with me the way I want to work. And I think the other challenge is the general assumption in CX, particularly in the sort of digital first environment that human behavior goes based on. If you imagine an axis, a vertical axis is the priority of the problem. And the horizontal axis is the convenience of the means for me to deal with it. So, if I’m missing my package, I’m fine using a web, a bot or something to ask them, where’s my package and getting a response. But if I’ve got a serious problem or a serious issue, I might want to talk to them. If the airlines lost my luggage and I’m freaking out, I want to talk to them. But I don’t want to sit in on hold for three hours, which is my current experience to find my bags.
So, most organizations still suffer from what I call the core customer conundrum, which is they are the economics of their business are fundamentally driven to disrespect the customer and not actually be nice to the customer. The economics of the business are not geared that way. So, and so how does an organization do it? And I think that’s the promise of digital, particularly as we look forward five, 10 years with the evolution of, if you want to call them this, digital humans that are driven by AI, for me to actually have an intelligent conversation with a business about a problem I’ve got, using the means that my need requires based on these two dynamics, right? I’m in the Uber on my way to the office and I just want to ask a question, I can do that digitally, but if I’ve got a real problem or an issue, I need to deal with that verbally. And I think it comes back to this fundamental issue that organizations perpetually have to ask themselves is how are we managing the behavior of our customers on their terms, not on our terms.
Richard Owen
Yeah, we did a study several years back and we, one of the big cuts of the punchline, the most insightful thing for me about it was if you divide the kinds of things people want to do into two different types of tasks, you’ve got very friction-orientated tasks. And the friction-orientated task, I want to make a change, I want to reschedule something. It’s a highly defined process.
And customers in general, their reaction to a friction task was, I don’t want to speak to humans, automate it, make it simple, make it self-service. Look, I just want to get from point A to point B. It’s really a lot of the work that, you know, if you recall the guys from the whole Customer Effort Score camp came from, it was like, look, let’s, let’s make it super easy and friction-free, lots of different ways to do it. Then you had tasks that were more complex. They’ve lost my bags, right? Uh, your example. And it was the exact opposite approach.
Andy Lark
Yeah.
Richard Owen
People cannot stand being forced into automation alleys. It drives them absolutely insane. It’s this sort of, you know, well, I know you want to speak to a human, but first, can you just give me more information? Because really, you should visit our online show. You know, our online offering will solve most of these problems, and it won’t. And so, it’s company’s ability to understand when they need to be able to provide sophisticated solutions to complex problems that aren’t going to be easily solved without human intervention and when they’re going to be able to fully automate and provide simple solutions. And you know I see the pendulum swinging too much towards automation at this point. There’s sort of a sense of, to your point, we haven’t staffed the contact center up. Now that might be a short-term issue associated with labor challenges but there’s this sense that we’ve now discovered in a lot of companies the silver bullet and it’s called don’t have any humans involved.
And yet we’re not ready for that because we don’t have that kind of problem to just focus on.
Andy Lark
Well, I mean, I think the challenge with the logic around digital transformation effects around, hey, look, digital is better than a human, is that it completely ignores the customer priority. It ignores entirely what the customer wants to solve a problem. So, customer effort scores are great because they started to look at what is the effort that a customer has to apply? But I would say that most people are only about 5% down the way of really understanding the effort in relationship to the priority of the issue the customer has. I think the other flip that we’ve really seen that is quite dramatic in the world of Dubba, which I’m really pleased to see is this increasing intensity of focus around using voice analytics, voice data. So, every conversation captured turned into data to better understand the experience of the employee. And it was interesting yesterday, I was talking to a person who was sort of managing a mid-sized local council call center. And I sort of said to her, what do you think is the most profound impact of conversational AI on your business? And she immediately went, it wasn’t what I was expecting.
What is really valuable to me is my ability to look at the data and go, hey, look, Jess has had 32 really negative phone calls in a row. And it’s not Jess’s fault. No one phones the city council happy. Right. Everyone, no one phones us to go. I just, I was just calling to say you guys are.
Richard Owen
I was gonna say 32. That sounds like a regular day at the City Council, isn’t it?
Andy Lark
Yeah, yeah. No one phones us to say, I just want to give you a call and say, you guys are amazing. They phone us to complain. And so, and the degree of complaint can vary. So, what I now know I need to do is that flags up on my screen and says, go see Jess, pull her off the line, you know, give her a break, have a conversation with her, make sure she’s doing traveling okay, is immensely valuable to me. Because our biggest, if I don’t do that, I have high churn, I have employee burnout.
And inevitably, inevitably those people become very negative as well. I mean, they’re not happy either. So, I think this intensity of focused on CX needs to be paired with an equal correlated focus on PX, what your people experience, and how do you navigate that in this new distributed world?
Richard Owen
I buy into that. I mean, the historical focus on employee experience, I’ve never particularly loved the whole employee satisfaction. I always thought it was highly unactionable. Companies sort of did it as a mandate. I think the idea of employee productivity, which is the essence of what we’re trying to create at the end of the day, we’ve got to see a productivity shift. And by the way, productivity can be also expressed as turnover, but as you said, burnout, ineffective negativity, these are all productivity elements. And if you think about that, we want to use technology to augment human decision-making, to augment their performance, to make them more productive.
I mean, in developed countries, we need to see a surge in employee productivity, just economically. We can’t keep paying, we can’t pay people what we want to pay them, if their productivity doesn’t increase. And so, technology has the ability to make people much more productive because either we’re going to focus them better on things humans are really good at, or we’re going to be better at managing them. To your point, your example, we’re going to become much more sophisticated in how we manage them. But some way or another, we’re going to increase productivity. I think that’s a huge opportunity. The general narrative that AI replaces people, I think is misdirected and I think is clearly going to happen in the instance of some very remedial tasks, but certainly in developed countries, that’s not our concern. Our concern is how do we make highly skilled people more productive? And I think technology can really help with that.
Andy Lark
Look, there’s no question in 10, the next 20 years, AI will have a profound impact on our workforce. But for those of us like you and I who are old and tired now, we remember that precise same conversation about the internet. The same conversation occurred before our time when the typewriter emerged, and then the computer person or computer emerged. All these jobs are gonna be lost. Well, we’re actually quite adept as humans about creating entirely new economies around what’s being built. So, it’s no question jobs will change, things will be different, but this whole inflation of the idea that there’s going to be a massive drop off in employment is ridiculous in my book.
Richard Owen
No, I think I’m much more optimistic than that. I think it’s going to result in a better work environment. Let’s change topics for a second, because in the past, you and I have certainly talked a lot about CX. And I think, in general, whether companies are legitimately committed to it or more optically committed to it. I mean, I think one of the things we’ve talked about is the tendency of companies to want to tell a narrative about being customer centric. But when it comes down to it, you know, they don’t really want to make the hard decisions. You know, is that still your point of view? Do you, are you more optimistic now? Do you think that COVID has changed anything?
Andy Lark
I have this sort of counter view to a lot of people out there I find, which is not unusual. And it means I’m either definitely wrong or definitely right. And what’s interesting to me is I think there is a small group of companies out there who are openly disdainful of their customers, and they don’t care. Ryanair, being a great example.
There’s a great YouTube video you can watch of Karen’s Diner in Melbourne where the whole brand is built around just being rude to customers, just rude to customers. It’s hilarious, right? And I think there are more companies out there now in that bucket than there are in the real bucket. Every company says, oh, we love our customers. We’ve got to care for the customers, but they don’t because capitalism’s weak link is actually with the customer.
Any business that exists in an open, democratic, and capitalistic market is fundamentally driven to optimize for the P&L, not for the customer. Customers don’t want products and pricing optimized for love. They want it optimized for cost. There’s this natural tension in the market today between what customers want and what companies are able to do.
And that is actually getting more and more extreme and is likely to get more and more extreme as we enter this sort of deep recessionary period. There is no better example than banks. Okay, banks walking around increasing mortgage rates or energy companies here in Australia, we have one of the worst energy markets in the world where my energy bill is up threefold as a consumer, threefold, and it’s staggering. It’s absolutely staggering. And yet I pick up the newspaper and they’re making profits. They’re printing money.
They’re announcing their new brand campaigns. They’re announcing all these fantastic things as a shareholder. And you go, there is an incredible incongruity between loving your customer and running a business. And it just gets amplified during these periods. I fundamentally believe that starting with the premise that we love our customers is a broken premise.
And that we’re customer centric because most of these businesses are not customer centric. They don’t do the right thing for the customer. They do the right thing for the balance sheet. And I understand why. And I run businesses too, so I do the same. I think at the end of the day, what you’ve got to be looking at is the fundamental premise of building a business, which is how do I build differentiation? How do I build customer attention and lifecycle curves?
And how do I effectively run a P&L? And I don’t think most businesses are nearly mature enough in that thinking. A great example, this was with a business earlier this week, he sort of said to me, oh, our churn rate has gone up and we’re gonna invest all this money in correcting customer churn and blah, and we’ve got to be more customer centered. And I said, whoa, hang on a second here. Maybe you don’t want any of those customers.
Richard Owen
It’s good.
It’s no question jobs will change, things will be different, but this whole inflation of the idea that there’s going to be a massive drop off in employment is ridiculous in my book.
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Andy Lark
Maybe you actually have completely the wrong customers. Maybe you’ll never fix this problem. And I don’t think there’s enough maturity in the thinking.
Richard Owen
Right.
Well, and I think the point I do agree with you on this, there’s a lot I agree with you on this statement, but I think some of it is because we’ve wrapped this up in the wrong language. So, we talk about the language of love, which personally, I reserve for my family, my friends, and my dog. I don’t think I necessarily want to love my customers because that implies that this isn’t an economic relationship, which it is.
Andy Lark
Yeah.
Richard Owen
It makes us then establish a standard for customer centricity, which somehow seems altruistic. When that’s not what either party wants at the end of the day, a business is in business to make profits. And it’s by the way, it’s one of the reasons I’m skeptical about stakeholder capitalism. Not a huge fan of this idea that this, that this thing is I’m more of a sort of Milton Friedman guy myself. And I’m like, look, at the end of the day, you do the rational things to maximize shareholder value. That path should run through doing the right thing for customers, at least the profitable segments of customers that you serve, and figuring out how to optimize to deliver what they want, how they want it, when they want it, to a very high standard of quality is, to me, that’s good customer operations, that delivers profits, everybody wins, it’s a win-win.
Capitalism is about striking a balance that is a win-win between the buyer and the seller at the end of the day. And companies that get that balance absolutely right, tend to grow and be very profitable. Um, and when I think back to, you know, Net Promoter Score, the idea essentially is that you want to segment your customers into this group. That it shows strong indications of repurchase really that the people stick in a hand up saying, I’m going to buy from you again and again and again. Now we can call that loyalty because that’s a nice way of framing it, but it’s really an economic group of customers.
Andy Lark
Thank you.
Richard Owen
That are highly aligned with you as a business, and they’re gonna keep repeat purchasing. And detractors are really not people who necessarily hate you, just not to say some might not, but they’re really a group that has such poor alignment with your product or service or the way they’ve experienced it, that they have no future intention of doing anything good with you. It’s an economic equation.
Andy Lark
What you’re getting at there is the fundamental truth for me. And it’s where it continually saddens me the amount of people who don’t understand what marketing is. Marketing’s job in a business, for instance, is fundamentally to build mental, physical, digital availability for a brand, right? You can’t, love is something granted to you by a customer should they feel that way, it’s not something you get to define. The reality is most buyers in the market and it comes down to this famous rule, the 95-5 rule, where only a very small fraction of your market is actually in the market to buy anything at any one point in time. And the truth that’s buried in that rule is the majority of customers are fundamentally indifferent. I was with the CEO of a major US bank last week having a chat with him and he said, you know, going on about customers and talking about customers. And I said, no, you don’t understand. The fundamental truth of banking is we actually don’t care about our bank.
We only care about our bank in that very fleeting moment when I desperately need you. Beyond that, I’m largely indifferent. Indifference is the way I feel towards banks. Indifference is the way I feel towards energy companies. Indifference is the way I now feel to my airlines who have higher prices by 300%. I’m indifferent. I’ll just pick whoever’s gonna get me there and who I have reasonable faith in, and there’s three of them, so I’ll pick one of the three. And so, I think what organizations have to care about in this new world is first their employees and understanding that dynamic and then secondly, they have to become fanatical about aligning CX to the P&L and understanding the fundamental drivers in the business that predict and determine CX, not some abstracted CX metric sitting over here of whether I’m happy or sad. They have to actually understand.
My example to people is this. I was talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs recently down here and I said, how many of you deliver your product through Australia Post? And they were like, hands went up. I said, okay, I’m not buying from you because Australia Post has a complete incapability to actually deliver something to my front door. They’re incapable of it. So, I continually have to go to the post office to pick things up. So, I’m not, I’m not buying from you. They’re like, what? So, who are you going to buy from?
Anyone that doesn’t use Australia Post. And that’s why I use Amazon for everything because they have an unnatural ability to deliver stuff to my door. Do I love Amazon? No, not really. But they meet my needs. They just meet my needs. And I think Amazon’s quite happy with that, you know?
Richard Owen
Yeah, and it’s a different definition. I mean, this is where the word love becomes complicated, because the end of the day, the most important thing is you’re placing your business with them, and you’re going to continue to repeat business with them. And they’re probably going to be able to sneak in and Amazon’s done a good job at this, sneak in margin, because of that. You know, if you look at commodity industries the risk is you think the entire universe is commoditized, right? Then it’s just about price, price. I mean, to some extent, being out of price position is a problem. Look, if you can’t get into price position in your product price mix, you’re in trouble. That’s an issue. But once you’re in price position, how do customers choose between you? And a lot depends on the customer you think you want to serve. You know, a lot of companies come in and say, well, we have an NPS of 20.
The answer is sort of who cares? If your most profitable customers are at 10, and you’ve got a whole bunch of customers you can’t make any money from and won’t grow, who are at 70 and you’re averaging it to 20, then you’re in trouble, because you don’t have this balance.
Andy Lark
100%. And then you’re hitting the nail on the head, right, which is for me, I was joking with some CX leaders the other day that you should take the word customer out of CX and replace it with convenience. Because I could actually rate you quite low on NPS, but because you’re the most convenient to me at the best price point, I might not actually particularly like your product and service, but it meets my need, it fulfills my need, it does what it needs to do.
You largely keep your promise to me, and you do an okay job. I’m not really going to rush around recommending you to anybody, but it’s good enough for me. I just use you every, and there’s no better example than this, than the endless amount of streaming services. I mean, we pay this ridiculous amount of money for all these streaming services. And the, you know, and why.
Well, because it’s just convenience. You know, it’s convenience. And if I was a real budgeter, I’d just delete them all every month and then sign up the next month and figure out if there’s anything to watch and cancel it again, but I’m too lazy. You know?
Richard Owen
And yet we do know Andy that there are businesses, and you spent a big chunk of your career in SaaS businesses. And so, you understand better than anyone, the fundamental economics of, of SaaS businesses. And at the end of the day, if you’re not going to get customers to renew, you’re, you’re not going to build an effective business. I mean, you know, we’ve gone from an environment where 10, 15 years ago, investors didn’t care too much about churn. They focused on acquisition costs.
Then they suddenly woke up and said, wait a second, we’ve got a bunch of portfolio companies that are losing 10% of their dollarized value every year. That’s crazy. That’s the easiest money we’ll ever get back. And it’s also indicative of some other fundamental problems in operations or product. So, they started turning that around. Then you fast forward and you get to a company like Snowflake with 200% net retention, I think, the first year they went public or the year before they went public. A company that’s doubling in size without acquiring a single new customer.
Now, some of that’s an expansion, a land and expand model. And that can confuse the metrics because if you sell in cheap and you naturally expand, then that is going to change things a little bit in your business. But we’ve realized that the economics of customer driven growth and being able to take advantage of that customer base you have are extremely compelling and that they’re extremely damaging if you can’t get them right, right? That even more so if you’re in trouble on that, you’re not going to grow a good business.
Andy Lark
100%. And what you’re getting at there is the inherent dilemma of being a SaaS business. There are SaaS businesses like Snowflake, like Xero, who are able to continually improve their revenue yield from existing customers while adding some new customers. But it’s the yield from the existing that matter. And you can make arguments all day long about, oh, they’re fantastic businesses, and they’re so well branded, and they love their customers.
Fundamentally, they’re highly sticky products that have high utility and are very difficult to get off once the degree of getting off them is so hard, you just keep going and you keep expanding on them. Look, I love Salesforce, being a Salesforce customer since they were very first founded. I don’t think the product’s really changed that much since they were first founded. It’s an average product at best, but bloody hell, it’s hard to get off once you’re on and every problem leads you to a new product with them.
And they just bring into that cross sell up sell, increasing the size of the wallet.
Richard Owen
Wasn’t it Peter Thiel who talked about moats originally and I think, or monopolies? I mean, you’d rather be in a business that was a monopoly or had a substantial moat than necessarily be good. But there are lots of industries, lots of products where you don’t have that kind of switching cost, right? We talk about examples that are stupendously successful because of those switching costs. But for 90% of other products, customers do really have a degree of choice.
Andy Lark
Yeah, yeah.
100%.
Fundamentally, they’re highly sticky products that have high utility and are very difficult to get off once the degree of getting off them is so hard, you just keep going and you keep expanding on them.
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Richard Owen
And when they have choice, you’d better be pretty good or the next best product’s coming along. And in tech especially, where there tends to be tech debt that accumulates, code debt. If you’ve been around for 10 years, your competitor who shows up probably has a more contemporary architecture, better looking, I’m sure that Dubber to some extent takes advantage of that in its marketplace because it’s a relatively contemporary company. And that tech debt that’s been accumulated by other companies. That’s a hard thing to escape from if there are possibilities to substitute.
Andy Lark
That’s spot on. And I think it’s particularly true when you look at other industries like airlines, you look at fast moving consumer goods, you take any of those categories where switching could be immediate. How do you build that stickiness? And it is based on experience and quality of service, but Cronos for instance, can build the best airline lounges in the world and they definitely create some preference in my mind when I look to fly with them. But now…
I pick the best fare with the highest quality vendor and I’m done. This notion that loyalty exists is just a fiction. It’s just a fiction.
Richard Owen
So perhaps that’s a note to end on, maybe not the most upbeat note, but it’s a really interesting observation. And
Andy Lark
But it’s a really, for me, once you embrace that truth, you discover magic in your business because you actually get back to the fundamentals of the service. Are we priced right? Are we packaged right? Are we placed right in the market? You get back to the truth of the business. And so realigning your CX to the truth of the product and service you deliver, right, is the essence of the magic here. And that’s what AI and
AI generative efforts coming from the P&L can start to indicate and signal to you beyond soft woolly, are they happy, sad metrics.
Richard Owen
Yeah, well, so it’s time to get more grounded, more realistic about businesses. And if we’re going into a recessionary environment and to some extent, we’re at least going into a slowing environment. I don’t see that trend going in any other direction. I think we’re getting into hard nose and we’ve had a 10, 15 year period of low interest rates. It’s been easy. And I think that, you know, a tougher economy makes an even bigger case for what you’re saying, which is.
Look, get back to brass tacks here at the end of the day, figure out how to execute your business, figure out how to make these indicators about customers tie into profitability and growth and make it work because otherwise you don’t want to get too romantic about these views. Andy, it’s been an absolute pleasure as ever. Really appreciate your time. Thanks a lot and good luck at Dubber and hope the Australian economy doesn’t descend under a weight of energy costs.
Andy Lark
Exactly, exactly. Take care. Nice chatting, Richard.
ABOUT THE CX ICONOCLASTS
Andy Lark is a globally awarded marketer and leader in social and digital technologies. He has an impressive track record across various sectors, including business-to-business and consumer domains. Notably, he served as the Chief Marketing and Online Officer for Commonwealth Bank, where he executed innovative marketing strategies. Beyond corporate roles, Andy has contributed to start-ups and advertising agencies. His blog, The Daily Lark, is ranked among the Top 100 marketing blogs globally. Currently, he leads Group Lark, a global consultancy, and serves on advisory boards for tech ventures.
Richard Owen is celebrated as a leading figure in the Customer Experience industry, primarily known for his contribution as CEO at Satmetrix, where he and his team, along with Fred Reichheld, developed the Net Promoter Score methodology, now the globally dominant approach to customer experience measurement. His efforts further extended to co-authoring “Answering the ultimate question” with Dr. Laura Brooks, establishing netpromoter.com, and initiating both the NPS Certification program and a successful conference series. Owen’s diverse 30-year career has seen him drive technology-led business transformations at Dell, lead software companies like AvantGo to a Nasdaq listing, and Satmetrix to acquisition by NICE Systems, while also engaging in venture investment and board roles. Today, he spearheads OCX Cognition, leveraging machine learning for real-time NPS and customer health analytics.
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