Designing For How People Behave, Not Just What They Say

Andy is Propositions and Partnerships Lead at E.ON, with 25 years’ experience helping organisations turn strategy into commercial impact. Across banking, energy, and beyond, he’s seen first-hand how behavioural psychology shapes what customers really value, and what makes them switch.

Joining hosts Chantelle Casey and Mark Clydesdale, Andy explores why customer experience is the true competitive edge.

They discuss what it takes to design propositions that people genuinely adopt, why simplicity often beats feature-rich complexity, and how organisations can restructure around customer outcomes instead of product silos.

This episode covers:

• How to identify what customers actually want beneath surface needs
• Why simplicity in proposition design drives adoption
• The behavioural psychology lens for smarter segmentation
• How to structure organisations around customer experience
• Why one bad experience now carries lasting impact
• Designing for behaviours customers haven’t adopted yet

It’s a thoughtful, practical conversation about how to compete on experience in markets where price and product alone aren’t enough.

Listen now on your preferred platform:

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Intro – 0:16: Welcome to the CX Equation, a podcast by TapCXM. We share actionable insights and real world case studies to equip you with the tools you need to drive loyalty, engagement, and sustainable growth. We’re your hosts, Chantelle Casey and Mark Clydesdale.

Chantelle – 0:32: On today’s episode of the CX Equation, we are very lucky to be speaking to Andy Sage, who is currently leading propositions and partnerships at E.ON. Andy has spent more than twenty five years working on proposition strategy, product innovation, and transformation that is centred around the customer, across both energy and financial services. At E.ON, he’s been working on everything from pioneering tariffs to demand flexibility programs, helping customers navigate the energy transition and reduce costs, carbon footprints, and complexity. Today, we’re going to dig into how behavioural psychology shapes CX design, particularly when you’re trying to get people to adopt new products in categories that are changing fast, just like energy. Andy’s going to share how he creates propositions that actually move people and markets, from getting early adopters excited, to helping mainstream customers make the shift. Welcome to the podcast, Andy.

Andy – 1:19: Hello, Chantelle. Good to meet you. Hi.

Mark – 1:20: Hi. So I’ll dive straight in, Andy. We did a little bit of homework on you, and it looks like you actually grew up in hospitality with your parents owning a hotel. I’m wondering, did you grow up in that hotel, and did the exposure to the service industry kind of stick with you and influence how you design propositions today?

Andy – 1:37: It did. It was a hotel in West Wales where I grew up in Broadhaven in Pembrokeshire. It was the Broadhaven Hotel, so I won’t say too much about it because I’ll steal my Dad’s thunder. But, yes, I grew up there. I was born there. Most of my early memories and experience were living in a hotel and seeing all of the different people and making new friends. To your question Mark, I think it did somehow, in the sense that at a very young age, I realised that actually people weren’t staying at the hotel because it was there. They were staying because of different reasons and different needs. Some were to be on the beach. Some were to just enjoy Pembroke’s great scenery or its food. Others were to meet friends or family. Others were just to rest. So all of a sudden, I think it subconsciously made me realise that, actually, it’s not the product that people buy. It’s what it enables and what it does at the end and how they feel about it. And that’s where I think a lot of my customer experience thinking has then come from.

Chantelle – 2:27: And you have experience, Andy, across multiple industries. Prior to working at E.ON, you worked at Barclays, so you worked in financial services. Why did you still decide to make that move from banking to energy? And are there any CX principles that apply across both?

Andy – 2:41: I think it’s more, with any role, you get to a point where the satisfaction is that you have a belief that the thing that you’ve developed has done something good for a person, either a better experience, a better outcome, or it’s created more social value. At Barclays, I worked in consumer credit, but it was loans for things like new kitchens or phones or cars. I remember we had a managing director there, and every time we had a company wide event, he’d always start by saying, “Look, no one wakes up in the morning and says, I’m going to take out a loan today. They wake up and they want a new kitchen or a new car, and we help that dream come true” and that was just such a powerful sound bite for me in remembering is that it’s not the loan, it’s ‘where does it start?’, ‘How do they apply for it?’, ‘What do they do at the end?’, ‘Do they feel they’ve had a good outcome?’. So I think that’s where I saw the difference there. Obviously, you’ve got consumer loans for things like kitchens and phones and cars, which is one thing – and I realised in energy, you’ve got that same sense that people don’t buy energy, they buy a warm home or a hot shower or a hot meal. And then if I go on to talk about things like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, sometimes energy is about charging your car or your appliances. So you’re not buying the power; you’re buying what it comes to in terms of what your life is. But, of course, how you experience that is different depending on whether you’re in financial difficulty, or are you old, or are you vulnerable, or do you have aspirations to help fight climate change? All of those things mean that the same product has a very different lens depending on the marketing or the experience or the price or what happens afterwards. For nearly anything that you do, it’s a personal and an emotional thing as well as a physical thing when you consider a product or a service. There’s not a magic bullet like there was in the old days where a product could be cheap and that makes it successful because now people can compare anything at any time. So the principle has to be, in my view, that customer experience can be anything and everything that the customer goes through within the context of their daily life. I think it’s easy to assume that people make very rational decisions and they do things in isolation, but we’ve still got work, family, our home, what’s for dinner, the weather. You’ve got to deal with all of that, and it’s how products integrate into that wider picture that you’re going through rather than being isolated.

Chantelle – 4:56: And you’ve described different consumer needs, obviously, consumer needs are very different between energy and banking. Why does energy require such different thinking compared to financial products?

Andy – 5:06: Well, there are two parts. I think one is that it’s not something that you cannot use. Now, see, with financial services, there’s an extent that, though you can’t avoid using money, you can avoid borrowing it, as an example. But with energy, it’s just absolutely inherent in everything that we do. So the experience has got to be great. And as I say, it’s the experience around the energy, not necessarily the energy itself. When we think about energy transition, a lot of that will involve things like behaviour change and trying new technology. So what’s really important to remember is that the experience between those early innovators that will try new technology and new things versus mass adoption, we’ve got to remember how customers perceive that change is positive. And there’s probably an element here of talking about what psychology comes into it, and I’m not a psychologist by any stretch, but I can see where these things are quite influential. Obviously, our brains have got a limbic part (that makes those emotive, impulsive decisions), and then we have a pre-frontal part (that makes more rational, logical, more considered decisions). But that creates the phenomenon that if something’s easy to do, we perceive it as more valuable. So that’s why people eat cake rather than exercise because one is infinitely more nicer than the other. And that’s your limbic brain. It gives you the perception of value even though you would rationally say that it’s better to exercise, but it’s harder and longer term. Now when we think about action on climate and energy transition, you’ve got that same perception as it’s very hard for people to see the value of change. So we have to understand what that means in terms of them perceiving it as being a threat or being something they don’t want to do. And that’s where the role of experience is, that as they start to experience new technologies and new bits of software and things like AI starts to do stuff in the background. But, actually, they only see it as being obvious immediate value for them. And you’ll have seen things like some of the tariff designs that E.ON have got and others as well, where it’s very easy to have a very, very complicated experience where you change prices every hour. And for some people, they’d like to figure that out. They’d have a spreadsheet and they’d figure out the times of the day and then they’d work out what’s the best thing to do. But think about it if you’ve got a young family, are you really going to have the time to spend to figure out each second of every day, when’s the right time to use electricity? You need something far simpler than that, and tariff design is shaped by that. There are times in the day that are set, and it’s really clear what the benefit is of using electricity in those times rather than others. That’s the important part – the tariff doesn’t matter,it’s the experience around it that counts.

Mark – 7:34: I guess there’s quite a lot going on in energy at the moment, right, with the transition to more renewable energy? So you’re talking there about tariff design, and I guess we’ve been at a point where customers have been used to electricity always being the same price. But with the energy transition, we might get things coming in such as demand flexibility, and you’ve obviously got the growth of things like electric vehicles and what it costs to charge them, or you might be offering lower carbon tariffs. So how do you use some of that psychology that you’re talking about to help the customer understand what these things are, but also drive those behavioural shifts that are needed to take advantage of those products?

Andy – 8:13: I think it goes back to that point about how do you offer immediate obvious value? And when we think about the different types of customer segments that there are, I think people will remember (If not, I’m sure you can Google it) but Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is quite an important benchmark to understand how different customers will perceive different energy propositions or indeed any products and services. So if I take an example, if someone is elderly and vulnerable and unable to afford their electricity bill to stay warm, there’s probably very little point talking about decarbonisation or sustainability. They’ve got a much more important and very critical physiological need there. But the same energy tariff to someone who is not in financial difficulty but understands the need for climate action, they would respond to a completely different marketing message even though the actual tariff is the same. And I think that’s the critical part of a lot of this is when we think about where people are in terms of what they’re actually trying to do, what experience they want, it’s very different depending on their perception, what they want to achieve. Also where they are on things like a product adoption curve – where some people are happy to take the risk and try something new because they want to appear different, they want to appear as pioneering, but then you have mass adoption where people need a far more simpler option. And it isn’t just necessarily the energy tariff. It’ll be, well, “what kind of software helps them understand price changes?”, “What options are there for technology to make a difference?”. Because some of it might not be behaviour change. It might be, for example, installing a battery, or you’ve mentioned there, electric cars. Well, future electric cars will plug in so that they connect back to the grid or your home. So actually your behaviour doesn’t change at all, but the storage means that you avoided the high costs of grid when renewables are low, and you made the best use of cheap electricity when renewables were in high productivity. So it’s understanding all of those different contexts and different journeys to different people.

Mark – 10:05: That’s fascinating. How do you identify some of these trends around the customer? How do you know if someone is struggling to pay their bills or is interested in climate change?

Andy – 10:15: I think part of that goes to obviously, there’s a lot of data out there. There’s a lot of segmentation. There’s a lot of ways to understand it. But I think the important part for me is I think this is where things like behavioural psychology comes into it because you can identify customers in terms of where they are on adoption curve or Maslow without necessarily knowing everything about them. I think it’s important with a lot of these times is customers won’t necessarily tell you what they want or they need because they’ve got no context to understand what good looks like. All they know is what’s immediately in front of them and what’s the obvious thing to do. Again, their limbic response is “I don’t really want to deal with a lot of complexity. I just want electricity when I want it. Why is that so difficult?” And it’s hard for them to understand that there’s an underlying reason why the energy system is changing. I think a lot of these things is, if you start to segment customers based on, look, are they likely to be an innovator, obviously, things like income are an indicator that someone might be more of an innovator group. But it’s important if you look at things like what other brands they use, what cars do they drive… Often you can determine whether customers are the sorts of people that are likely to adopt technology early or whether they’re more likely to wait, and then that shapes your marketing message or it shapes the experience. And I think we noticed this with a few. I mean, can I mention Tesla as an example? In my mind, Tesla had a masterstroke in terms of the way that they entered the car market. If you think about the early model Tesla, I think in 2012, they sold 3,000 of them. But if you look at the actual car itself, it looked different, but not that much different. But it had gull wing doors and no door handles and a giant TV screen for your controls. And they had quality and reliability issues. But they were still selling for £90k or nearly a £100,000. So you’d argue as well that you can’t imagine any customer considering that, given that type of customer would normally buy really high end, prestige, performance vehicles. But Tesla, I think, had nailed that it’s that innovator group that wanted something different. So you’ve got a bunch of people out there that could buy prestige cars, but, oh, look, I’ve got a car where I can unlock it with my phone, and it has over-the-air software updates. What Tesla realised is that it wasn’t the car; it was the prestige around it,it was the experience around it. So they never actually said it, “but it’s an electric car”, but they challenged the fear that people had, which is lack of range, which is that you’re stuck on the motorway and your batteries run out. So actually it wasn’t the car. It was the fact that they had a charging network that was really quite wide, readily available, fast, and free. So all of a sudden it’s “well, range doesn’t matter because you’ll find a charging point pretty much everywhere you go, and it’s really simple to use”. So they certainly realised that the experience here isn’t the vehicle. It’s something else, but things like stripping away the complexity of buying a car. Most new cars or any used ones, when you buy one, it’s unbelievably painful to buy a new car. And it should be really exciting. You should really enjoy buying a new car. It’s new technology. It’s new excitement. It should be great. But the amount of options and packages and all the dealer haggling and the cross sell, it’s just an awful experience.

Mark – 13:22: and still dealing with that guy in a suit and tie, trying to get you to spend more money.

Andy – 13:27: Exactly. And “I’ll throw in the car mats” and all those sorts of things. But innovators and early adopters just don’t have time for that. Buying a Tesla is unbelievably easy. Most of their specs are exactly the same. You don’t go to a dealer. You go to a shopping mall. You go to a shop, and you can research one there, but you buy it online and you finance it online. Everything’s very straightforward. No cross sell. So all of a sudden, you’ve targeted that group that just don’t have a lot of time to think about this, but they want to look cool and different and wealthy. And that’s what Tesla did. That’s what they nailed. But it wasn’t the car. It was the cool, convenient mobility experience that they offered, and that’s the difference.

Mark – 14:02: I once had a debate with a former boss of mine as to why do we all buy so much from Amazon. Now I think the obvious answer is because so much is available on Amazon. I know I can go to Amazon, and pretty much what I want is going to be on there. But his argument was it was more than that. It’s the sheer convenience because you know when you buy it, you know exactly how it’s going to arrive. You trust that it’s going to arrive. And if there’s a problem with it, you know, you can just send it back, and there’s not going to be any long phone call and justification as to why you’re sending. Just send it back, and you get your money back a replacement. They’ve made it so easy to purchase from them.

Andy – 14:41: They have. And the other part is the integration of payment. I think there’s a book called The Customer Copernicus, and it’s by Sean Meehan and Charlie Dawson. But that talks about the fact that a product operates in the customer’s universe. The customer’s universe does not operate around your product. Let’s compare eBay and Amazon, in the very early days back in 2000, which frighteningly is over a quarter of a century ago. But actually eBay’s market cap back then was about $10,000,000,000 and Amazon was only $5,000,000,000. But you look at the difference now: Amazon, I think, is worth something like $3,000,000,000,000, and eBay still is worth about $40,000,000,000. So Amazon’s grown by nearly 50000%, and eBay’s only grown by 300%. But essentially, they’re the same thing at the same time, which is an online platform for sales. So, exactly to your point, Mark, how have they become so radically different in success is that Amazon knew that the experience wasn’t buying things online. It was getting what you want, how you want it, when you want it without the regrets and without the hassle. And eBay was still focused on the platform. But classic example is Amazon integrated payment, which if you said, well, why is that important? Well, it’s critical because it’s part of the experience. It’s the ability to pay. It’s obvious, but yet we take it for granted. Whereas eBay still had PayPal and it was like a painful login experience, and PayPal’s journey was quite clunky at the time. So Amazon certainly made it easier to buy, which even though eBay may have the thing you want, the easy payment made Amazon more attractive.

Mark – 16:08: Oh, it’s scary how easy it is to buy things on Amazon sometimes.

Chantelle – 16:13: Get it when a few within a few hours now if you need.

Andy – 16:17: But it’s wonderful. And if you think about it, think about how valuable, on a social impact, that is. So imagine if we’d had lockdown and not had Amazon or digital. Can you imagine the difference there of how much of a decision that would have been as to lockdown, but people can’t buy anything? No goods or services. And I think that’s the difference is that’s where Amazon has seen that the customer need isn’t online. It’s getting it to your door. And, look, if I give you a great example of why the experience can be anything or everything at any point is if you’ve used the Amazon app, that the ‘buy’ button is the thickness of your screen. That’s not a fluke. That’s a very deliberate point because it means you can shop with one hand. So if you’re holding your phone, you’ve still got your thumb, you can click to buy with your thumb. If you’re holding a coffee or anything else, a child in your other hand, you haven’t got to switch and move around. And it’s little things like that that suddenly become important as they’ve probably thought, most of the time people are on their phone, they’re at the kitchen table, they’re eating their dinner. How do we mean that they don’t change hands or they don’t have to adjust their grip on their phone? Tiny little details, but that’s the difference. Fascinating.

Chantelle – 17:20: The theme all over is convenience regardless of where it is in the customer experience. They’ve just focused on convenience.

Andy – 17:25: Absolutely. But all of those touch points really matter. If you look at how much marketing Amazon and Tesla actually do, it’s very, very little compared to some of the big brands because the experience is more valuable than the message. And I think that’s the proof point , that’s where your business model can leverage customer experience very strongly.

Mark – 17:42: Can I bring it back to energy there? And in terms of some of those psychologies and insights, are there any insights that surprised you about customers adopting new energy propositions?

Andy – 17:53: I think I was pleasantly surprised by the take up of the flexibility service. Now I was part of a really talented team that got that all working, but the opportunity to have a situation where you communicate to a customer and you say, “just drop your electricity use for an hour, and we’ll pay you a small amount of money as a reward”. But it reflects the fact that if we can do that more regularly, we can balance a grid that’s based on renewables. So I think the key with that is that if you’ve just said to a customer, “yeah, just switch things off” without anything about the information or an alert or a text message or anything that kind of helped them understand what the purpose of this was, you’d have a very different response. But the reality is we had a tremendously positive response, from the customers that we targeted, but it showed that people are willing to adopt something. Again, if the value is obvious and immediate. So a lot of the team designed really good comms, that were nice and simple. But equally, some of the experience is not offering it to people, which sounds bizarre. But actually, there’s a group of customers where offering flexibility service actually could be harmful. They might switch off medical equipment or they might switch off heating because they see the value of money more than the value of their health, which sounds strange, but we all do that. That’s why we drink or smoke. So that’s one of the things we’ve got to bear in mind is there were groups of customers where, yes, saving money is good for them, they are in a financial difficulty situation, but there’s no point offering them something that causes harm. So that’s also part of customer experience, choosing your segments quite carefully. But overall, the response, very, very positive. And it was about not turning down. It was the communication before and the timing and what we say and how do we follow-up and is payment timely? “I switched down. Where’s my money?” So crediting it to the account is probably as important as the communication upfront. And, again, the end to end experience proved it was a really good starting point to prove that consumers are ready to adopt behaviour change that will help with the renewables grid. And, of course, that is now the precursor to what you see now, which is a lot of time-of-use tariffs, which are very much just about behaviour change. They’re not attached to having a car or a particular asset like a heat pump. Anyone can move their electricity to different times and lower their costs, but they’re not missing out by staying where they are. And that’s the most important part. There’s a huge psychological difference between changing action for reward and not changing action for punishment. So I think important to remember is that when we think about energy transition and how customers experience this, if a customer’s feeling, “well, I had no idea that using my air fryer at 05:00 would suddenly mean I’d pay twice as much as I would normally”, that’s a bad experience. Even though you might have clear terms and conditions, everything could be really obvious, but remember, that person has got 20 things to think about that day. Energy bills is not one of them. So you’ve got to remember, it’s got to be, “I changed behaviour and it was good” or “I didn’t change behaviour, but I’m not worse off”. I think that’s a really important distinction to make. Fascinating.

Chantelle – 20:52: So at EON, you’ve created some super successful propositions, including what you’ve just spoke about there, but also pledged tariffs and electric vehicle charging propositions. They’ve both been really successful in terms of adoption and margins. What’s the secret to designing propositions that customers actually want but also hitting sustainability goals? How do you find that balance?

Andy – 21:12: Keeping it really, really, really simple, which sounds like a tremendous cliche. It’s remarkable how often the customer experience is assumed to be more or extra or wider. And in reality, if you look at where the customer is in a point in time, to my point, they’re not using energy. Energy is enabling what they want to do. Once you know what they want to do, you then understand is that your proposition design has got to fit that model. And much as it pains me to say it, customers probably have very little, if any, interest in their energy consumption. We’d like them to do more in that, but we have to accept the reality is very few in the mass adoption space are going to want to spend every day looking over their bill and figuring out what’s going on. We need to do it for them. With both those propositions, again, talented team around it, it wasn’t all me, but one of the principles of design is to not overcomplicate, a, who can use this tariff, and b, how the tariff actually works. So Pledge is a great example where we had a situation where, and without going into the complexity of energy markets, it’s best for most customers to fix their tariff because then we know how much energy to buy in advance, and we can balance that out. During the energy crisis, it made more sense for everyone to stay on a variable tariff because you have the price cap, and that means your unit price can’t go above a certain level. But the problem is that creates a lot of instability in terms of how do you plan ahead when any customer could leave at any time, and you’ve got no way to know what your customer base will look like. But the challenge being is, how do you convince customers to fix on a tariff when their belief might be that prices are going to come down so they miss out? So it’s very simple as well. They’re not going to be too involved about this, but they’ll feel bad about missing out if they fix and then prices drop. How do you balance the two together? It’s very simple as well. Just mix the two together. So, yes, your prices can go up or down, not as much as the price cap would. But if you do fix now, you’re not going to be left missing out. But this goes back to the point about understanding everything else in a person’s life. Think about the experience people had with their mortgage when the interest rates leaped up. So people had no choice other than to stay on a variable mortgage rate, which was at that stage nearly 6%, fixed at five, and then myself included, interest rates dropped about three and a half percent. So all of a sudden, I’m paying a few £100 a month more for nothing. Bring back the pain. But remember, that’s exactly the same scenario that would be with energy. It’s a bunch of customers going, “well, why am I paying more for my energy than the neighbour when I should have just waited?” So you need to find the middle ground that says how do you connect those two things together? But the point is their experience, in a way, their pain, their lack of trust is from a completely different product. But the customer’s perception is the same. “I fixed in good faith, and now I’m worse off. Why did I do that? Bad move. I hate you for making me pay more than I need to.” That’s the essence of customer experience, it’s what else was happening in that customer’s life that shapes their expectation of energy.

Chantelle – 24:05: And then just looking into the future then. So, obviously, we’ve spoken about the fact that the energy market is changing very fast, customer expectations and regulations are changing, and technology is evolving. How do you design for behaviours that aren’t necessarily mainstream yet, but they will be essential in the future?

Andy – 24:20: My view, and we’ve started this with the PlayMaker app that is in beta testing, it’s not in full rollout. But the E.ON PlayMaker app recognises that actually the secret sauce in all of this is software. Whether people like it or not, so much of their life is actually kept simple because software absorbs the complexity of what you’re doing. Most modern cars, the amount of complexity that goes on must be absolutely mind blowing if you saw all of the different maps and journeys and electronics and everything that it does to make the car work, but also to keep you safe. All you know is there’s a button there, there’s a screen there, and there’s a few pedals, and off you go. And I think that’s exactly the same we’ve got to think about with energy is, let’s think of this as how does a customer feel they get good value for money from their energy, and what amount of behaviour change or technology take up are they willing to do, and that depends on an innovator, an early adopter, and the majority adopter. But the role of software can take what could be incredibly complicated scenarios. So imagine if you have got solar panels, a battery, electric heating, how do you decide every second of every day whether to use the panels to charge the battery or power your home or heat your home? Or do you have a huge air frying session because electricity is cheap? There are too many choices there. But a bit of software that just says, “look, we’ll figure all this out for you. We’ll use a little bit of AI and, look, we can see your diary. So we know when you’re out the house, just tell us, do you want it really, really cheap, middle ground, or are you happy just to pay whatever you’re going to pay?” But what it does, in the background, is figure out everything that makes that outcome work. And as I say, customers aren’t feeling that not changing their behaviour leaves them unaware and caught out. There’s the old phrases that people forget pain and they forget words, but they never forget how they felt. And every time a product lets you down and all of a sudden you realise you’ve been ripped off, even if it’s just because you just were just ignorant at the time or you didn’t have the time to understand something, how incredibly lasting that break of trust can be.

Mark – 26:20: And energy’s just got to get beyond that. Doesn’t the research say as well as time’s going on, a consumer’s tolerance for a bad experience is just getting lower and lower? I think they say something like a third of customers brand that they love after just one bad experience nowadays. So you’ve you’ve got to get this stuff right. Oh, it’s absolutely savage.

Chantelle – 26:39: Because there’s so much more choice. Right?

Andy – 26:41: There’s choice, but I think I think this is one of the things about what brand really means. And I think to some degree, people forget what brand actually does for a customer. And it things like logos and slogans and colour palettes, they’re a beacon for a brand. But a brand fundamentally is trust. For those old fashioned in the marketing world, you used to have the AIDA model, which was you had awareness, interest, desire, and action. So, obviously, you discover a product, you research it, you kind of like it, then you buy it. Brand means you just go straight to action because you trust that the experience you get will be a good one. But it’s like in any industry, whether it’s hospitality or energy or anything, trust takes ages to make and it’s seconds to break. And exactly to your point, brand loyalty means you can get away with a few mistakes. If you correct things quickly and you’re a brand that is slightly more innovative, you can get away with it. But you’re right. The minute someone feels like things aren’t the way they should be, to your point, Chantelle, they can move very quickly to something else. Digital has enabled that high footfall, that ability to switch. And that’s a good thing. But it forces the competitive space to be customer experience. There’s no point just going cheaper or doing more marketing. People have already figured you out at that point.

Mark – 27:55: I had a terrible experience with a bank several years ago. I won’t name them, but it was so bad. It led me to close all of my accounts and move banks. And the way I chose which bank I went to wasn’t who was on tele. Obviously, there’s an element of presence, that those big names do have a trust to them. But I asked all of my friends and family, who do they bank with and and who do they like? And the same two banks, one was a bank, one was a building society, they were the two that everyone told me were great and they’d never had a problem with. And that’s a brand. That is a brand when I go, “Okay. I am going to move all of my accounts to them because I know that everything’s going to be fine.”

Andy – 28:33: Yeah. And this is the weird thing about it. Some part of brand is the fact that you don’t have to deal with them. So if you think about it and again, same with energy, same with us. No one wakes up and goes, I can’t wait to talk to my bank today. What you want is something where you don’t even know it’s running. It just happens in the background. And the only interaction you get is when you get cash in your hand or you tap your card. To be honest, I’d be surprised if people actually knew who their credit card company was these days. It’s on your phone. It’s completely devoid. But the brand is that it’s a seamless experience and it doesn’t go wrong. That’s the experience part is you can be perfect in every aspect, but if you let the customer down at that critical moment where they tap their card in a restaurant and it’s declined and there’s no obvious reason that your brand is lost, and even worse for a lot of brands is you may have no control over that because it might be the card reader that’s broken. So what do you do? And this goes back to where I think Amazon realised customer experience defines your operational strategy in the sense that they’ve realised, I think, Mark, you said it is, how do I get it to my door reliably and trustworthy? Then you need to own the value chain, which is the distribution channel as well, not just the platform. That’s the same with that. If a credit card company also owns the terminals, the acquisition point, then they own more of the experience. Then they can guarantee that the end to end experience is positive.

Chantelle – 29:49: So I’m going to slightly change subjects here. We’ve spoken a lot about product innovation and proposition strategy. You’re also responsible for partnerships at EON as I understand it. So you’ve produced partnerships with some big global brands. What makes a partnership actually enhance the customer experience rather than just being commercially attractive?

Andy – 30:06: I think it’s to understand where that other partner, that other brand or product or service fits into the experience. So I think I can name it, but if I take Woodland Trust as an example… when we thought about what customers in some of our segments were trying to do, it’s “I want to do something good. I’m using energy already, but I want to do something better.” But it’s very easy to fall into the trap of trying to turn that into a transaction, which is, well, “I want to plant more trees.” But using that same model all the time, no one wakes up and says, “I can’t wait to plant five trees today”. People just want to feel better about it and it’s a far simpler feeling in their mind of what good looks like. So previously, we had partnered with firms and said, “if you take out our energy tariff, we will plant five trees, and that will reduce your carbon footprint by a certain percentage”. But that didn’t really resonate because customers can’t see the value of the tree. They can’t see the value of carbon coming out of the atmosphere. When we met with Woodland Trust, the thing that was, it sounds strange, but it was really good to hear is they really challenged us and said, “you guys are getting it wrong. Planting more trees doesn’t necessarily produce a good result”. And you’re thinking, “well, okay, you want to be a partner, right, but you’re criticising us in the first call”, but they were right. The protection of ancient woodland is a far better outcome for carbon reduction, native species. But when you think about what the customer’s trying to do here, they don’t care about native species. If you think about it, it’s the value, it’s what they perceive. So rather than say, we’ll plant trees, it’s you’re making a donation to the Woodland Trust. Well, you know what they do. Figure it out for yourself. But that green thing there is a forest and it’s nice and it’s fresh air and you can walk around it. But customers’ perception of the value is for them to figure out. All we’ve done is we’ve offered it in a way that’s really simple, which is if you take out the tariff, we will automatically make a small donation. No further action required. You get the good feeling. Woodland Trust gets the donation. Everyone wins. That’s the difference in thinking about the experiences. I don’t have time to figure out what good looks like for the environment, but this is a way that I can do it without having to change too much of myself to do it.

Mark – 32:17: I’m loving this conversation. And it’s really clear, Andy, that to you, customer experience is the right way to go. And offering customers the best experience is the best for the customer and is best for E.ON. It’s  best for everyone. We fully agree with that at Tap CXM as well, we’re always talking about optimising customer experience. We then go into lots of large scale organisations, and I would say E.ON’s a large scale organisation, as are some of the financial services companies that you’ve worked with. And you tend to go in, and what you find is that business is organised around its product groups, and it has a P&L to sell each of its products. And the focus is on selling more stuff and not on optimising a customer experience. So what have you learned about how you kind of drive that change in thinking and that change of behaving in a larger organisation towards the customer experience?

Andy – 33:12: I think it’s something where it’s definitely a leap of faith, and it’s probably a very big thing to consider. But I think structure and culture is absolutely critical if you’re going to compete on customer experience alone. And I’ve seen it start in a few other places, you have a team that’s a much clearer owner of the end to end experience. And as we’ve discussed, that can be any part of that experience, the marketing, the digital, the screens, the buttons, the communication, the Ts&Cs, the service. Any part of that can affect your decision about brand. If you have a team that owns all of that, they understand that it’s the consumer need and it’s defined clearly and the consumer experience is the thing you’re competing on. I think a structure like that means that the functional areas like marketing, even pricing, or things like regulation and law and service, all feed into that team. But that team owns one change activity, but it means it can see that actually for certain segments, marketing’s more important, but the tone of the marketing is determined by the segment. As I used example earlier, if you’re marketing solar panels, if you know your customer segment are all climate change sceptics, there’s no point having a message that says this will reduce your carbon footprint. Those customers are not interested in hearing that. If you market the same solar panels with the phrase, it gives you energy security during a power cut, that all of a sudden, that same marketplace is responsive because it meets their need. And that’s the trick, you’ve got something that says the product is fine, the price is fine, but how you talk about it is different. And like I said, using the Amazon example, those little nuances where you’re thinking, well, a customer is doing a whole bunch of other stuff while they’re dealing with us, therefore, our mobile app journey can’t have too many clicks or it can’t have buttons in the wrong place because they’re doing it on their phone and they’re doing it whilst they’re cooking dinner or watching TV… It’s understanding those different parts, I think, that’s important in an organisational culture. And it creates more of that Dawson and Meehan were talking about in Customer Copernicus, which is, “have you got an inside out lens?” Mark, you said absolutely on the button there is it’s very easy to look internally that says, how do we get the customer to buy what we sell rather than thinking, “What’s the customer need from us in order to consider our brand?” And I think that’s such a critical change of culture that sees that shift. And in my view, I think it helps because it if I use the analogy, if you had a football team where you told every player, right, you’ve all, at the same time, got to get the ball and score a goal, can you imagine that the amount of overlap and how people would get in the way? You’ve got to have structure where but you’ve got to have a set point where it’s ” no, you start and do that, you help that, and then you feed the striker who then scores”. Now by all means, go off piste at times, but that shapes a very different culture in the way that you design products and services. But it means you’re not then in a situation where a customer will decide the customer need for themselves. And if they’ve got individual performance metrics, they will achieve those metrics. So a marketing team, for example, will be targeted on click through rates or brand consideration. But if they’re only going to focus on that, the customer might go, “well, I’m considering your brand, but your product’s too expensive or it’s suboptimal or your service is bad”. But the marketing team don’t care about that. They just care about the click through rate. So they’ll do things that the customer experience becomes quite disjointed. I won’t name names, but I’ll use an example as there’s an electronics manufacturer that’s got 30 odd different types of toothbrush, electric toothbrush, and they’re priced between £40 and £570. And they’ve got names like Prestige and DiamondClean and and all those sorts of names. But in my mind, that’s a symptom of a business that’s saying, right, product team, just make a different toothbrush each month, and that’ll give marketing something to talk about, And that means we’ll be different. But different and faster is not the same as better. And the point is, is a customer really going to spend their time figuring out which is the best toothbrush? The name of the toothbrush doesn’t tell them anything. How is a £570 pound toothbrush better than a £40 pounds one? I have no idea. And even worse, my and a personal experience is from this brand is I don’t know which toothbrush heads to buy because there’s no compatibility chart. So all of that innovation that they think they’re doing and all the extra, the experience is dreadful. I’ve got no idea what to buy now.

Mark – 37:25: They were meeting an internal need, not a customer need. Yeah.

Andy – 37:28: And that’s the point. Individual targets are product, you make new toothbrushes. Marketing, you talk about it. Rather than, well, the customer doesn’t need more of these things. They just need one that works really, really well. And I think that’s where structure and culture can really start to nail the difference.

Mark – 37:42: And measurement, as you’ve said, targets, KPIs, you get what you measure.

Andy – 37:46: And this sounds really cold and calculated, but the only metric that really matters is your EBIT, your earnings, and your margin. Because that’s the only proof that a customer is going to give you money for your product. And you can do it over the longer term, there’s lots of metrics below that can diagnose if you’re not getting that money in: do people hate your brand? Or are people getting a bad experience? Or is your cost to serve too high? But they alone do not assure success because you can be very cheap to serve, but if the experience is dreadful, what was the point? And I think that’s the really important part of of how cultures and structures and metrics all start to coalesce – it’s ‘what does the customer care about?’ And you can’t necessarily metricise that, if that’s a word. You’ve still got to think about it’s an emotional, personal, individual decision that customers are making, and it changes all the time.

Mark – 38:34: Excellent answer. Love it. I’ll get you to come and talk to some of the other clients that I go into.

Andy – 38:41: No. Okay. I’ll send you my hourly rates and what percentage introducer you want.

Mark – 38:49: So as we look towards the next few years of the energy transition, Andy, what upcoming shifts do you think are going to most impact how you design experiences, and what excites you?

Andy – 38:59: Use a guarded response. It’s AI. But I must admit my experiences of AI so far have been very bad. But and I think that’s the trick of the difference. AI isn’t the thing that I wanted, but it can help me achieve what I wanted better, but the experience of it is not necessarily the way that I need it at the time. And I’m different from the person next to me as as always. But what’s exciting is, as I say, when I think about how this is going to change and how you’ll have very dynamic energy availability in the day. There’s so much going on there, that software that’s super clever. I can figure out, think of the millions of data points, trillions of data points is going to be of every second of every day because energy will be generated at different places at different times at different rates, and people will use energy in different ways at different times. The amount of change there is really phenomenal, but what’s exciting is that you’ve got software and technology and real smart folks that can turn this into an experience where a customer literally almost has no idea any of this was really happening. Now we want customers to understand it, but not necessarily to fear it, but to see it as ‘actually, there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening in the background, but you’re fine’. I go back to the analogy (to me, it’s an important one) is think about what your car does. There’s probably a number of times that an older car, you’d have probably had quite a serious accident. But the amount of software and all of the cool stuff going on, it just became a little jiggle on the road as you slipped or you aquaplaned. But you’ve no idea how much is going on behind the scenes. All you know is that just, “oh, that was close”. And this goes back to when you get older, you realise how at a step you are with the next generation. But when explaining to my son what a handbrake was or what ABS is or what airbags are, I grew up at a time when a car just did not have any of these features. And now they’re completely normal. And much to our misfortune, we had a crash on the motorway a few years ago. And I remember thinking at the time, it was absolutely fine. Someone aquaplaned into us. But the point is we’re all fine because the car just became a giant marshmallow, and the software took over, steered us into safety, and we just in the end, it turned out to be very, very inconvenient. Now an old car would have almost certainly have been seriously injured. But explaining to my son that is that, well,” no. The airbag’s just deployed, and everything was fine, and my seat belt held me. And it was all just walking away from the wreckage thinking, well, that was alright”. And it’s only afterwards you realise, but I didn’t choose all of that. I didn’t press buttons to make the car safer. It just happened. Energy’s going to be the same. I’m really hopeful that over the next ten, fifteen, twenty years, we’ll be explaining to our grandchildren what energy used to be like. And they’ll go, why were you doing it like that? That’s not why were you burning stuff for energy when it was available in abundance all around you? Why was it so hard to make that transition? And you’ll be struggling to explain why it hasn’t been done that way. But for that generation, it will be, “well, I had no idea that wind turbines have been shut down here because my battery kicked in from my car. Well, that’s normal, isn’t it?” And I think that’s the really exciting part about this is that if we do it right, customers will have no idea about how dramatic the change in the system will be, and that’s how it should be. That to me is value. That’s a good experience.

Chantelle – 42:11: And just to close off the podcast, and we’ve really we’ve spoken a lot about behavioral psychology today. I’ve learned a lot myself. What advice would you give to CX and product leaders in behavior led industries?

Andy – 42:22: I think it’s don’t underestimate how deep you can understand a customer. I think a lot of the times, and this is because it’s easy to do, people use a lot of metrics that can build a picture of a customer, and there’s things like Mosaic and different segmentation. (and they’re pretty good. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticising them) but there’s a lot about a customer that you don’t necessarily see, but it actually shapes their decisions. As I’ve said, knowing where they are on the adoption curve, what their hierarchy of needs are. But, again, it’s things like knowing who they vote for, which sounds strange. But imagine if you’re marketing solar panels to an area which votes for Reform, and we know Reform have talked about scrapping net zero and it’s all a load of rubbish. So there’s no point talking to them about sustainability or decarbonisation. That marketplace just will reject your product outright. But if you knew that that was the case, you would market the product as energy security or prestige. And all of a sudden, it’s exactly the same product, but the marketing has been different. But you would not get that data normally. Knowing who the customer and what motivates them is very, very different. And again, are they Apple or are they Android, which sounds very innocuous. But think about what an Apple person is like in terms of the fact that they want to feel innovative, they want to feel different. Apple is not a tech. It’s a status symbol, really, in a way, and the connectivity. But an Apple person likes the fact that they are only with other Apple people and only Apple stuff works with Apple stuff. Now you’d argue that’s a bad experience, but that’s the feeling that they want. But if you know your customers are in that sort of space, that can quite dramatically change the types of marketing that you do and the types of products. And even the price that you charge, you can charge more if you’re convenient and wanted, which is bizarre, but that’s how things work. That’s how premium brands can work is that they are a status symbol as opposed to an actual functional product. So it’s really important that leaders understand that there’s way more to it than just a set of questions about would you choose product a or product b. Ask the question, Why would you choose product a? What’s making you do that? And and think carefully about their response. And customers will say, oh, it’s cheaper or faster or nicer, but look deeper below that. What are they really saying when they answer that question? I would really encourage folks to get into that level of detail.

Mark – 44:35: I will ask one final question then because it’s a question we’ve been asking everyone that comes on the podcast, which is who has been the biggest or one of the biggest influences on your professional life? Any great leaders or great colleagues or people that have really inspired you?

Andy – 44:50: There’s a couple of authors out there, if I might name a few. One is Simon Sinek, and he has a book, Keep Asking Why. I think what’s really important is a lot of the times is you take at face value, but you’ve got to keep going and keep digging into the real detail of something at times. Another author is Geoffrey Moore who wrote Crossing the Chasm. And even though that book is, I think it’s about 50 years old, it’s still incredibly relevant in terms of how businesses go from being volume led and selling on price and product to being proposition and experience led. But as I’ve mentioned, that’s a huge shift in terms of org structure and culture and the mentality of how you deliver things. It sounds a bit cliched, but definitely my dad. So, obviously, he ran he owned the hotel. But there’s a few things I’ve noticed that actually probably I didn’t realise at the time, but subconsciously now I realise is actually he was really good at customer experience without even knowing it himself. But he had good emotional intelligence as well. I never remember him losing his temper or or coming across as stressed. When you’re a kid, I think you observe emotional behavior far more strongly than when you’re an adult because you can’t filter it out. But he was always that sort of person that just understood what people were trying to do, and he just seemed to understand how to connect that together in terms of customer staying in a hotel, but, actually, what are they trying to achieve from that stay, whether it be for a wedding, honeymooners, holiday, family, individuals. It didn’t matter. I think he just figured all that out. And the final one is is the MD that I mentioned, at my time at Barclays. And that every now and again, you hear a sentence that’s so profound, but somehow it just rewires your brain. And I remember that phrase of “people don’t wake up to take out a loan” because I, in my head, my product management was make the loan better. And it completely dawned on me that the loan’s irrelevant. It’s the fact that a customer can go and buy something in the way that they wanted and fulfil a dream. All of a sudden, that completely changed the world in terms of, actually, the focus here isn’t the loan. It’s the application process. It’s the documents. It’s the fact that they get simple communication. So sorry. Quite a few answers to that question, Mark. But as always, there’s so many people can influence you, and there’s never really one magic bullet. But there’s so many that that have helped me coalesce what I know today.

Mark – 46:59: Well, brilliant.

Chantelle – 46:59: He’s a well rounded person. Lots of different influences.

Andy – 47:03: I’ve got a huge reading list if anyone’s interested. So there’s other authors and ones out there that, again, sometimes you have to read a huge book to figure it out, but there’s always that one sentence or that one paragraph that just completely flips your mind. I love that experience of the journey of, well, I’ve read a lot about you. Oh, right. Yeah. Now I’ve got it. I wish I could do that one day, but but I’m not ready for that quite yet.

Chantelle – 47:24: Well, we’ll, you’ve mentioned some books throughout the podcast, so we’ll pop them in the podcast notes or something.

Andy – 47:29: Thank you. I’m not being sponsored or anything, so I don’t get any money for it. I should’ve thought about it. I shouldn’t. I should’ve. But, but look, I would encourage everyone, always read books. It takes time, but it shows your commitment to learn. And this is the thing that scared me is you never leave school, but you don’t. You’re always learning. You’re always seeing. And bad experiences are just as powerful as good ones. It’s not always about positive. But I would strongly encourage everyone to just keep finding those books and just pulling those nuggets out as you go.

Mark – 47:53: Fantastic. Thank you, Andy. It’s been genuine pleasure. It’s been really, really fascinating talking to you, so thank you for coming on.

Andy – 48:00: I’ve loved it. Really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Chantelle – 48:02: Yeah. Super interested. Thank you. It’s lovely to meet you as well.

Mark – 48:09: I love that chat. I don’t know about you, Chantelle. I thought Andy was fascinating. And what I really liked was hearing someone speak so passionately about the importance of customer experience, and actually bring some proof points to the fact that if you do offer a better customer experience, that your business will grow.

Chantelle – 48:31: So Andy spoke a lot about knowing the customer and what motivates them and, as a product designer, focusing on that rather than what you can offer to them and assuming what you can offer to them. I think delivering customer experiences that are super simplified in an industry like energy where customers aren’t they they want things to happen in the background and not necessarily know when things are going well?

Mark – 48:53: I’ve not worked much in energy, but I think listening to Andy, I see how his skills from financial services are actually quite transferable to energy because both financial services and energy are commoditised products, want of a better term, something that I don’t feel emotionally connected to. It’s something I there’s something I need, and not something I look forward to buying. So it was great to hear him talk then about understanding what those customer needs and motivations were, and then how do you actually present something to the customers in terms of how it’s how it’s helping them as opposed to it just being the technical specifications of a loan or an energy tariff.

Chantelle – 49:32: Yeah. Exactly. And I think the points that I found, it was a lot of new information for me about behavioural psychology that I hadn’t ever thought of before having not, like, specifically worked in the product space, but the idea of identifying early adopters versus mass adopters, identifying segments of customers that will react to experiences in different ways, and adapting the product just on that, not just like your marketing and the message that’s coming across, but actually what you’re offering to them on the product.

Mark – 49:58: Probably, slightly longer podcast today, but I guess the keynote was understand your customers and understand what motivates them. And and if you can then better meet their needs, then everything will improve. So thank you for listening to today’s episode of the CX Equation. I hope you enjoyed listening to Andy, and if you want to hear from more great speakers there with your friends. So thank you for listening. The CX Equation is brought to you by TapCXM. Find out more about what we do and how we can help you, visit tapcxm.com.

Chantelle – 50:32: And then make sure to search for the CX Equation in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you usually find your podcast. Make sure to click subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.