CIO Interview: How to Create End-User Centric Culture?

Pasi Nikkanen: Welcome to Happy Today podcast. This is a podcast for those who want to improve service experience of internal services. If you use Service Now or other enterprise service management system, then this is for you. Hello, Happy Today podcast today. I'm sitting here with Chris Woods. You're the CIO of Campari Group. Tell a little bit like how did you end up in your position?

Chris Woods: Hi Pasi. It's great to welcome you to Campari today.

Pasi Nikkanen: Thank you.

Chris Woods: I joined Campari three years ago. I moved to Milan with my family three years ago. And have been focused since then really on how we transform the IT organization to be much more of a business partner organization. And how we ensure that the group benefits from technology to drive business results.

Pasi Nikkanen: All right. All right. Sounds really good. What about employee experience and customer experience? What does it mean to you and in Campari?

Chris Woods: It's absolutely essential. Is that the heart of what we're trying to do. I really want to bring the concept of consumer experience that we experience everyday outside, internally into Campari and embedded in the way that we deliver IT services. When we have a great experience you want to consume more. So I want my Camparistas, my customers to consume more of my technology.

Pasi Nikkanen: Right. What about the challenges? So starting something that you haven't really thought about before, you haven't measured before. So what challenges did you face with the employee experience calling it out to the organization or with culture?

Chris Woods: I think the biggest challenge is that we have faced and we are still facing is culture. How do we move the mindset of people from focusing purely on SLAs and KPIs to what is really important, which is actually how do our customers feel, how are they measuring all service? How did they experience our service and it takes time. It takes time to get that change embedded in the everyday way of working. And not just internally, also with our providers as well. There's not many providers as well and partners that also have this consumer experience mindset.

Pasi Nikkanen: True, true. People are still stuck in the old ways of having SLAs and just doing the minimum. But maybe not thinking about how does the consumer actually and the employee actually feel about the service. What kind of pains or problems do actually seek to fix with having experienced data? Having it available all the time?

Chris Woods: I think being able to address the core problems around all or the core pain points around service would actually lead to better adoption of technology.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Chris Woods: And actually help strategically drive better digital transformation within the organization. So it's absolutely fundamental for me in terms of delivering a seamless consumer grade experience with service, to the with delivery of the IT strategy as a consequence of the business strategy.

Pasi Nikkanen: Okay. Okay. Are you also using employee experience kind of part of this showing the value to your business stakeholders of what is IT actually providing so that IT is not always thought about it as a cost? How does that resonate?

Chris Woods: Yes, absolutely. I think we always fall in the trap of having the discussions with the CFO on how much percentage we can juice from the budget. And I really want to be able to flip that discussion to being, "How much money, how much budget do you want Chris, to be able to continue to transform our business through technology?"

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. Now that you have had the data for a few months, how would it feel to come now to work and not have it?

Chris Woods: I always use the analogy of the first thing a sales director looks at when he gets in the office is his daily sales report. How much did my guys sell yesterday?

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes.

Chris Woods: And am I tracking online for the month. For me it's the same thing. I come in the morning. One of the first things I will look at is, what is the progression of the reports be it the consumer experience reports.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Chris Woods: Not having that, I would feel very, very exposed in talking to my business stakeholders around the service that we are providing as an IT organization.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. Yeah, I can believe that. I think nowadays being data driven actually is saying that this is why we are doing something. It's so essential in the organization. What do you think next? What are your plans in the future? How do you want to use the data? What kind of initiatives do you see that data you're taking to consumerize and make the employee experience better?

Chris Woods: So I think the initial focus on the service, how do we use this data to continually improve our service? And really aim to deliver consistently excellent experience for our consumers.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Chris Woods: And I think then looking from that, is how do we take the same concepts around consumer experience into other areas of IT?

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah.

Chris Woods: So in terms of how new IT capabilities are being delivered, how they're being adopted. And how can we have this same focus on the experience of the end user on these new technologies in order to drive better usage or better adoption.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yep. Yep. All right. What has been the biggest surprise to you? Like a happy or unhappy in the past couple of months? Anything coming to mind?

Chris Woods: How honest the end users are.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah. I think we were talking about this earlier that you kind of knew it, but then when you actually see the comments it kind of just justifies that, "Yes, something that we need to do on it more."

Chris Woods: Absolutely. I think, I think you can probably live your life in this kind of bliss of ignorance.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yes.

Chris Woods: And the first time you see the data, especially when you've just initiated a big change around service, it can be quite shocking. And a temptation can be, "Let's hide it away, let's not look at it." But when you start to spend time looking at it, it really opens your eyes up to what people are really saying. And I think that's the key point.

Pasi Nikkanen: Sure.

Chris Woods: You actually get the feedback from the people receiving the service. And the opportunity from that is enormous to drive a personalized response to them. And for them, despite having potentially a negative performer take a negative experience on the support provision, overrule the experience as positive. Because if somebody came back and actually took the time to have a personalized discussion with them about their problems.

Pasi Nikkanen: Yeah, yeah. That's really powerful. So thank you Chris. Thanks for the interview. It was a pleasure. And like we say, it usually in the end, "Stay happy."

Chris Woods: Thank you. I will aim to stay as happy as possible. Thank you.

Pasi Nikkanen: Thank you.

Chris Woods: Bye, bye.