Reflections on a Customer Meetup

Early this week, my team and I had the pleasure of [virtually] hosting a number of our Financial Services customers for a Customer Meetup. These meetups are great because they give our customers the opportunity to come together in a friendly, safe and open environment to share experiences and learn from each other. This was the first time we’d attempted to virtually host an event such as this and while there is no denying it is less effective than bringing people physically together, there was some great conversation and some interesting insights shared. 

I wanted to share my reflections on a few of those insights here, because in my ever-so-humble opinion, they are important for anyone that is trying to affect change within an organisation.

The first was triggered by something that someone from a Finnish Bank said, which was about how the customer experience bar is now being set by other industries, not necessarily your own. It's absolutely clear to me that banks and broader financial services organisations are no longer simply swimming in the financial services fish tank (to use the analogy of an aquarium). The whole tank has been tipped out into the ocean and the effect of this is that the experience bar expected by your customers has been raised accordingly. It makes me wonder how many of you can see and feel this within your organisations? Are you and other leaders within your organisation mindful of this shift and stepping up to the challenges (and opportunities) it creates? If not, I would suggest you cast your net wider and spend some time thinking about (and maybe reaching out to) peers in other industries. Their wisdom is likely more relevant now than it ever has been and could be the source of some great inspiration for innovation.

The second was triggered by something that someone from a Dutch Bank mentioned, about escalating discussions about integration up to the CTO/CIO. The context of our discussion was about APIs and the comment made me think about the power of an API First Mandate (search for Jeff Bezos API Management, if you're not familiar), but it’s applicable to the power of a mandate on any topic. It made me wonder how many of you have this strength of direction from senior leaders within your organisation? Does your relevant CxO "get it" when it comes to the power the thing that you are advocating for? You cannot use them to create momentum, if they haven't totally bought into what you are advocating for. In the context of our conversation, this requires them to understand the critical role APIs play in enabling innovation and responding to disruption. It may be that an investment in educating your CxO’s, if you haven't already done so, is needed so that they may become a powerful advocate for your ideas.

The final point was from something that my colleague, Paul Rohan said about starting new things without stopping old things. We often see that organisations have little problem doing new and exciting things, but they have great difficulty in stopping the old things. The consequence of this is often a significant growth in complexity, driving up the cost of doing business and slowing down the rate at which you can do new things. As human beings, stopping old behaviours or ways of working is hard because they often represent the safety blanket beneath the new things we do. We like the safety of being able to "fall back" on the old ways. Being aware of this and making conscious efforts to include activities associated with turning off old ways or decommissioning old processes or systems, is imperative to making effective change.

I continue to be intrigued by the amazing things our customers do and the complex challenges they face. Thank you to those that attended the event and I look forward to having more great conversations in the future.