At RACQ, trust is a key competitive advantage. In this episode we cover how Insights Managers should actually go about defining and measuring two key metrics, trust and transparency, to deliver genuine customer-centric change and business results.

Show notes:

Guest: Karen Wynn

Get in touch with Karen: LinkedIn

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Transcript

[Ryan] Welcome to Insightful Leaders. I’m your host Ryan Stuart and this is the show where I interview proven leaders in Customer Insights and CX who share their stories, strategies, and insights to drive meaningful change at your organization. Our guest for today's episode is Karen Wynn, General Manager of Member Value Proposition at RACQ. In this episode, we discuss why your customer should be at the heart of your organization’s decision making process. Welcome to the show Karen!

[Karen] Hello! How are you Ryan?

[Ryan] I’m good, thank you! I thought today, to kick things off, we could touch on the role of the customer experience function in most organizations. In your view, what’s the scope of customer experience and what areas of the organization should it influence in order to deliver a customer centric strategy?

[Karen] Well it certainly seems to differ in most organizations and I think my view on this certainly comes with a caveat that it needs to be fit for purpose for the organization. But I think in a general sense, the customer experience or the customer strategy function (whatever it happens to be called in your organization), there’s some key elements it ideally has within it to drive right outcomes for the business. The first and most obvious one is customer insights. And I look at customer insights through two lenses, one is a qualitative lense and the other is a more quantitative or hard core data lense.

So on the quantitative side you’ll ideally have your market research function in that area, which would include your VoC (or Voice of the Customer program). And ideally if not complaints management, the insights that come from member feedback and complaints themselves should be within that area. On the quantitative side, I think analytics is such an important part of CX these days as well as business strategy, so ideally you’ve got your analytics function within that same area (if you look at it through an executive lense). And that includes things such as behavioural modelling, propensity modelling (for retention and acquisition and those sorts of things). Overarching, the most important thing is that function must have a deep understanding of customers and their problems and how the organization is looking to solve those problems. Ideally you’ll also have a CX designed function there, creating a bit of a centre of excellence across the organization. And that team should also expand in my view to a strategic advisory role.

CX design functions are normally fairly small, so it’s really important that you can provide advice and guidance to people in the service delivery areas across the business to ensure there is consistent experience. And I think really importantly this function needs to have carriage of monitoring and measuring tools so that there is an independent voice in how the business is actually delivering on its customer experience. And that really avoid hubris and drinking your own kool aid and ensures you are really honest about what you are delivering. The last thing I would say, and not alot of organisations have this, is to have accountability for an overarching value proposition that really sets the scene from brand and the brand expectations you set in the market, through to how you deliver your service. That becomes more important when you’re working in an organisation which has multiple verticals. At RACQ for example, we have insurance assistance and bank, those are all the verticals, and we have a customer function that sits at the horizontal level and manages the customer relationship through that lense. Probably the most important thing after having said all that is you do have representation at the group executive level for the customer, to be the custodian and steward of all the customer outcomes for the business.

[Ryan] Yeah, I would imagine that executive representation would be super important, otherwise it would be particularly difficult to get that buy-in and permission to accomplish what you need to accomplish. The other thing that stikes me from what you’re saying is the potential for misalignment on brand and the promise that brand, how that promise is articulated to customers and how it’s lived by that organization. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on this. Are there any case studies that you know where the organization, the outward facing articulation of the brand, and the living of it internally, particularly by the CX function gets absolutely nailed? They have it down pat?

[Karen] Yeah, one of my favourite case studies is actually ALDI. ALDI Supermarkets. ALDI is obviously a global player. They’re one of the world’s largest retailers. They opened their first store in Australia in 2001 and in 20 short years they’ve grown that to 550 stores nationwide. They’re now one of Australia’s top 10 retailers. They’re really changing the way Australians look at private and generic brands and they consistently rated as one of Australia’s top CX brands as well. So, for me, what ALDI do well (and I’ll start at the corporate strategy level). First of all they have a really clear vision of what they want to do in market and what they want to do for their customers. And that vision is to enable Australian shoppers to live richer for less. So it’s very clear, it’s about value and quality there. They have a clear vision and clear alignment between that vision and the brand expectations that they do set in market. And that flows right through all parts of the value chain to all the products and services they deliver. It’s embedded into everything they do.

They also have a really deep understanding of their customers and what they are looking for, and they understand shoppers are time poor, so they’re looking for a speedy shopping experience. But they’re also looking for quality and value, particularly if they’re buying produce for their families. I think what’s very important with ALDI is that they’ve made a conscious decision to not do certain things. Like all good strategies it’s ultimately making the right choice between what an organisation will do and won’t do. And they’ve done that in their CX strategy. If you think about the products they offer, incumbents such as woolies and coles have an incredibly broad set of products that they retail through their stores. What ALDI have done is actually have a narrower product set, but they invest significant time into curating their products and services around those core insights of highest quality and lowest possible price. They’ve actually turned what could be seen as a weakness (in a smaller product range) into real strength for their customers. And what it does for example is facilitates a faster shopping experience in store.

Which is, their customers know what they’re looking for. It’s also reduced their expenses which in turns allows them to offer greater value to their customers. And you can see that through their entire value chain, their entire supply chain, that focuses on value and efficiency. From the technology they implement through to the training that they provide their staff as well. It doesn’t mean to say ALDI aren’t focused on customer service. They train their staff to be friendly and courteous and focus on the needs of their customers in store, but they’re really clear about what their offering is. They’re not trying to be a high end department store offering the most expensive brands.

Everything is really focused around high value at the best possible price. So for me, they’re one of my favourite case studies. They’re not often used, but it’s probably because supermarkets aren’t necessarily sexy, but I really like what ALDI have done. And you know, they’re really starting to provide an alternative to the incumbents (Woolies and Coles).

[Ryan] Something that strikes me about that story is almost predictability. When you go shop at ALDI you know what experience you’re going to get because they are so true to that brand and they understand it, they’ve defined it and they’re living it. I’m curious, and you might not know the answer to this question, but the value proposition and the brand they have in Australia, does that differ from their brand internationally? [Karen] Certainly their focus on efficiency and value is consistent worldwide. And that’s really when they are in the UK in particular, when their core focus there is well to compete with some of the more upmarket supermarkets there through this value price equation. Consistent price strategy!

[Ryan] Awesome. I know listeners of this show are tuning in for practical advice and it would be remiss of me with someone such as yourself to not try and delve into your background and find some useful nuggets for the listeners. So would you mind drilling into a little bit more into how RACQ builds trust and transparency with their members (you call them members, other people might call them customers) and how you go about defining, measuring and building that trust and transparency?

[Karen] Yeah sure. I think for me I look at trust as really being the basis for all connection. I think that’s true for your personal relationships in life and it’s definitely true for the relationships customers have organisations and organizations aspire to have with their customers (or as you said in RACQs case, our members). Trust has always been important but it’s becoming increasingly important and seen as a must have for organisations and certainly 2020 and the COVID experience has certainly reinforced that. A brand and organisation that has trust, trust has this incredible power to really elevate your brand and your business and drive growth.

At RACQ, what we talk about is this notion of extreme trust or the notion of trustworthiness. First of all it’s really important to recognise that trust has a multitude of attributes. It’s more than just reputation, it’s more than just ethics, it’s more than just credibility. They are important components of trust, but it’s more than just those things. If organisations are measuring reputation, I think that’s great and that’s really important, but it doesn’t equate to trust. I think it’s really important to remember that trust is granted to organisations by consumers. It’s something you have to earn and then maintain.

There’s a bunch of different measures and tools for defining trust. The Edelman barometer is one that I would recommend people have a read of if they’re looking to learn more about trust. But at its core, there’s two distinct attributes. The first one is really around competence and capability, and that’s really saying, can you deliver on the promise that you’ve set in the market. And the second one is about the behaviour of the organisation. Is the organisation doing the right thing? And then of course underpinning all this is you need to make sure the promise you have made as an organisation is actually aligned to the same goals that your customers have. So if I think about what we do at RACQ, first of all, and this probably sounds a bit basic, but we measure trust. We measure trust across all our key member journeys, just as much as well measure NPS, CSAT and Effort. And it’s not a complicated measure, we literally ask our members the extent to which they trust RACQ on a scale of 1-10.

RACQ consistently achieves scores above 90% so we tend not to measure distrust, but I would recommend that organisations with lower trust scores, that they also measure distrust as well as trust and look to understand what are the drivers of that distrust. So think of them as detractors for NPS (if that makes sense). We then conduct driver analysis across all our key journeys so that we understand which service attributes are most important in maintaining this trust for RACQ. At a relationship level for RACQ, the key drivers of trust are reputation, reliability, consistency and empathy. And they’re all things which the data tells us, and our members tell us, we do perform well on. We measure trust, we understand the core elements of trust and then we just design it into different parts of our experiences. Monitor the delivery of course and we build that into our coaching and training programs for our frontline staff.

This embedding of trust, I think it’s very important to do this across all parts of your value chain, through to your marketing communications through to little things like if you have an internet outage for your website. If you really want to drive trust, you’ll be very transparent about why, as opposed to saying, “oh it was a scheduled outage”. We will actually say, apologies for this inconvenience, this outage wasn’t planned, it will be fixed by this time. And of course you will need to deliver on it. So I think, as I said, it’s about measuring it, understanding what the core elements are of trust and then designing it into every aspect of your experience, just as you might with empathy and reliability.

[Ryan] Yeah awesome, I’m curious to know this initiative at RACQ around being so focused on trust to the extent of measuring it, perhaps even measuring distrust, what was the inspiration for that? How long ago did you decide it was important to focus on and what were the triggers for making that decision?

[Karen] Yeah, well we’ve been measuring trust for probably a good 3-4 years now as part of our Voice of the Customer program (or Voice of the Member program). I think at RACQ we have incredible brand strength, incredible equity in our brand, and a material amount of that is based around trust. For RACQ strategically, we really see trust as well as our independent voice in media, we see that as a real asset we want to protect. I think COVID’s just increased the importance of that. I think it’s just been part of one of the core assets we wanted to protect and of course measuring that is key to measuring those things.

[Ryan] Got it. Something you said earlier, was that it’s very important to have support and buy-in at the group executive level, you know having someone with a customer aligned title at that level, and it strikes me as something key to implementing an effective CX strategy.

Two questions for you, one I assume RACQ didn’t start day dot with that executive representation that represented the customer, so what was the journey toward getting that representation and two, for those whose organisations and pushing towards that direction or at the infancy with having that executive representation, what are some pointers for implementing culture-change across the entire organisation to become more focused on the customer?

[Karen] I think one of the things that’s a little bit different about RACQ and something for me as a CX professional I’m very grateful for, is that RACQ is a member owned organisation, so that does change the culture and focus of the organisation, as opposed to a listed company, so you know we’re not beholden to shareholders, we’re beholden to our members. We’re not having to report to the market every 3 months and what that means is we do actually have a little bit of flexibility to invest in long term outcomes and we are naturally, culturally very much focused on the customer.

So I think that’s just very much been part of our culture and our heritage for so long because we are member owned. Very fortunate from that sense. Certainly in terms of RACQs journey, I would say it’s probably one more of maturing than of having a focus on customer, if that makes sense, so I think certainly the trigger for some of this maturing has been when RACQ and QTMB (Queensland Teacher’s Mutual Bank) merged about 4-5 years ago. You know, historically, RACQ really focused in on the roadside assistance and insurance. Creating a third vertical bank, really started to create this need to have a horizontal focus and not just a vertical focus. So I think that was a trigger for really creating more formal frameworks and triggers around CX.

Whereas before it just kind of happened within each of those verticals. In terms of most advice, or advice you know that I would give, and this advice does assume that organisations already operate with a balanced scorecards, they have some kind of custom metric at that organisation, but it’s really to look at how to connect each division of your organisation or each group executive with the outcome you are trying to achieve from a CX perspective. I know that sounds pretty simple and pretty obvious, but I can recount many conversations I’ve had over the years with group executives who have said, “I can’t contribute towards NPS or towards customer satisfaction, why would I have this in my scorecard?” So it’s really important to not assume they don’t have an impact or won’t have an impact and draw that connection for them.

Like any human, senior leaders need to believe that they and their teams too can influence the outcomes, can influence CX to really be accountable for, to really have some skin in the game. For example, you’re having a conversation with, it might be the HR executive, it’s really important they understand how critical recruitment process is, recruiting the staff into your frontline channels for example, the training, coaching and support functions are for getting that customer satisfaction score in channel, in the contact centre, in your face to face channels for examples. If you have data, absolutely recommend using that, if you can show which service attributes are contributing most towards NPS, CSAT or whatever metric you are using. And that’s certainly what I’ve found really helpful. But if you don’t have a mature Voice of the Customer program, most of this stuff is fairly intuitive. Have a conversation, even if you don’t have the data to necessarily support that.

I can remember having a conversation a number of years ago with an executive who was responsible for investment decisions on digital and automation. And that executive did not actually believe she was going to be able to influence CX outcomes. And once I started to draw the link to the member effort measure that we had in our scorecard, they could really start to see not only that they could influence, but that they actually had a really critical role in influencing that outcome. So definitely, a piece of advice, if you want to drive ownership at that executive level, and then start to drive that cultural change, is making you make that connection between what that executive does, day to day in your business and customer outcomes.

[Ryan] You mentioned, you know, you made particular mention of, if you have a mature Voice of the Customer program you can rely on the data, and if you don’t you have to rely on other mechanisms. When do you think, is there a common criteria or pattern matching for determining when is the right time to invest in and mature that Voice of the Customer program?

[Karen] I think, look I’m biased. I don’t think there is ever a wrong time to mature a Voice of the Customer program. That being said, it’s obviously going to depend on the size of the organisation and the funds they have to invest. That being said, there are lots of ways to do it without a lot of cost, and I’ll talk about those in a moment. For me, the core kind of attributes of a Voice of the Customer program are that you need to have an overarching Voice of the Customer program to start with or a set of experience principles.

At RACQ, we developed what we call our member experience principles, you can think of them as experience pillars perhaps. And there are three pillars which really guide experience design across the entire business. And they also guide how we measure CX. Those principles are ease, trust and empathy, which certainly links to some of my earlier quotes around trust. Having those guardrails is really important for organisations where service delivery occurs across different areas of the business with different executives responsible for it. It kind of sets a common or shared understanding of what a good CX sets for your organisation and how that aligns back to your brand promise and expectations you set in market. You need to have consistent measures across all of your journeys. That enables internal benchmarking and comparison and ultimately helps with setting consistent customer KPIs across the business.

At RACQ, our common measures that we measure across all customer journeys are NPS, member satisfaction, effort and trust. We also then have, you know, a bank of service level measures that sit underneath that. There are a common set of measures but they are deployed in a way that’s contextual to the specific experience that the member has had. That really helps you to measure internally and to measure the effectiveness of some of your coaching and training activities and your digital design. For example, we measure empathy across all of those experiences, which allows us to understand, well is the training we’re training and coaching we’re providing for empathy in our claims area as effective as it is in another area of the business for example and how we translated human empathy into digital design. I also believe it’s really important not to rely on just one measure.

I know NPS tends to polarise views. I think NPS is fine, so long as it’s part of a suite of measures. In terms of building your voice of customer program, build repeatable scalable processes and automate as much of the program as you can. And that will happen naturally as you start to mature the program. The more you can automate some of those processes, the more time your team will have on the real value add activities, which is of course generating actionable insights, sharing those with the business and working with that to translate them into meaningful change. Absolutely you need to democratise your data as well, so the way we’ve achieved that at RACQ is to build a set of self serve dashboards which all staff can access from the CEO down to frontline staff. And there’s a broad range of drill downs available. Leaders can compare results by team for example, by different parts of the supply chain, which has become really important for organisations who partner to achieve their strategic outcomes. And leaders can also read customer verbatims through that dashboard.

One of the things that I find really useful is if I see NPS dip for example, or detractors in place, is I’ll just sort the verbatims by practice and spend 20 mins reading through those verbatims, and it really brings to life what that, you know that number doesn’t really mean a lot without the context, so it really contextualises that number and gives you a real sense of what’s going on with our members at that point in time. We send surveys automatically everyday, immediately following every interaction the member has had with us, and this dashboard is updated every day as well. So the data is, you know, not quite real time, but quite close to real time. So it means if you are looking through this, you can be more responsive and course correct as needed. We’ve integrated our Voice of Customer platform with our operational data. Now this is certainly at the higher end of the maturity curve, but again I think this is really important because it allows you to then model and measure, and monitor the impact of various operational levers you have on various CX measures.

So we can now see, well if our average speed to answer for example now goes up or if our time to get to a member who is stuck on the roadside, how that varies, we can then measure the exact impact on NPS and CSAT. And that’s really critical because it allows you to invest in those parts of the experience that matter most to your members, not just matter most to you. So again, it allows you to be more efficient and get better bang for your buck in terms of your invest in service delivery.

And lastly, implement a close feedback loop. If you do this right, you’ll be able to respond to customer issues before they actually manifest as a complaint. That’s RACQs voice of the customer program. If you are in a small to medium sized business, there’s a number of different freeware survey platforms out there which you can use without having to pay for expensive licensing charges and there’s a number of templates for standard questions, so NPS and CSAT, all those measures I’ve just been speaking about, they’re all just standard questions you can ask. I think, even if you’re in a small to medium sized business, you can implement elements of what I’ve said with very little cost. [Ryan] That’s awesome. For accessing survey software, there’s definitely no shortage of choice out there. Even if you are just reading the verbatims everyday, I think that’s, I’d argue even when you get big you don’t want to lose some degree of that, because when you do, you lose some degree of connection with the customer.

[Karen] Yeah absolutely. I think everyone quotes Amazon, but I was reading an article about Bezos’ approach to customer at Amazon, and even as CEO he would take the time to email customers directly and ask them about their feedback and read through all of their responses. Each month he sends a random 200 emails out to 200 customers. It certainly worked for Amazon.

[Ryan] Let me take you back one step. We’ve just heard your articulation of a mature voice of the customer program, which RACQ clearly have, and we spoke about the balanced scorecards, how important it is for various scorecards across the business to have some kind of measure of the customer experience that they can affect on that scorecard and how difficult that was for you to get that buy in, initially.

Or how difficult it could be for you to get that buy in. So, you’ve got the qualitative data and the voice of the customer output on one side, you’ve got your executive who perhaps doesn’t see a clear connection between how they can affect that customer experience metric. What are some of the tools that you’re doing to try and take and translate that customer feedback into something that’s more relatable to the executive, to convince them that yes, this is something they can affect and is something they should care about?

[Karen] Yeah, we do a few things and you’re absolutely right. That ability to translate what could seemingly be a meaningless number (such as NPS), into something that’s really tangible, particularly at a board and executive level, can be challenging. And I think that the thing that is absolutely key is to ensure that you put yourself in their shoes. I think as CX professionals, because it’s something that you live and breath everyday, you gotta remind yourself that there’ll be other people who have (particularly if you’re a director on a board), CX is part of your remit, it’s not your entire remit, so you gotta make that real and tangible for those people.

So, you know, I did talk before a little bit before about RACQ’s culture and the fact we’re member owned. So, again, our board is very focused in on our members and they’re really keen to hear what our members are telling us as well as what our frontline staff our telling us. So a few things we do to bring this to life are, first of all, we do have a structured onboarding program, an ongoing program, for our group executives but also our directors, for our board. This involves providing them with a variety of opportunities to really connect with our frontline staff and really connect with our members.

It’s not rocket science, it’s simple things like ride along with our patrols so they can spend half a day sitting in a cab, sorry in the cab of the truck, with a patrol or tow truck driver. They can spend time side by side listening in the contact centre, visit our retail stores and we have really high attendance for our directors at our member events as well. So all of those opportunities really allow directors to experience that member service delivery and also speak to frontline people. Frontline people are really an amazing source of insight when it comes to customer experience. COVID did change things a little bit for us, last year (like most people). So we couldn’t have directors do ride alongs for most of last year, and we certainly couldn’t have them sitting next to someone in the contact centre last year. So we’ve overcome that last year through a number of means.

One of those is, for example, to over virtual call listening, where the director can dial in from anywhere, just hear the call, see the screen the staff member’s using and they can still talk to the staff member as well. So that actually works better in a way, because you can see very clearly what the staff member is doing in the system whilst they’re talking to the member. The other thing we did last year was we ran some, what we call our deep dives. So every three months we have a deep dive with our board. We set aside a critical chunk of time, normally about three hours, to focus in on specific topics that we feel would be of interest to the board. Last year we used these to focus in on our members and our CX. Because of COVID, we weren’t able to do some of those other activities I just mentioned. And we really guided those topics based on what our complaints data was telling us and what our voice of customer data as well.

So our session for example, in August last year, to help our board understand how RACQ was responding to COVID, how we’re helping our members through, you know the COVID crisis and the experience our staff were having. And I brought in 6 frontline staff for our session with the board. And it was really a facilitated conversation for that hour we had with them. And you know, it’s always risky taking in a group of frontline people, saying go for it, be honest, transparent, you know, answer all of the questions honestly and obviously we didn’t have a scripted list of questions with the board, but the session went incredibly well. We had one female, one phone consultant who was actually part of the financial hardship team, and it was great to hear her stories about some of the members she had been able to help through that experience and it really helped connect the directors with what are the real issues that our members were facing at that point in time and how RACQ needed to help our staff to support our members.

So you know, that’s that has continued, we’re continuing to run those sessions every three months. We did one just before christmas with our patrols where we invited half a dozen patrols to speak to our board. Our board really got a lot out of it. I know our deputy chair said at the time how energised she felt by speaking to our frontline teams, so that’s something that, kind of using that storytelling approach, but getting your actual frontline people, the people at the coalface, to come in and do that storytelling. It’s really powerful.

[Ryan] Yeah I’ve heard other people even get to the level of trying to get customers in to see the board and have the board speak to those people directly. [Karen] Yeah.

[Ryan] And everytime someone told me that story, it sounded quite powerful, the effect it had on them and the members of the board. So definitely a great idea if you can pull it off. One final question for you before we get to the rapid fire round. I believe you’ve just commenced a new role at RACQ. So what’s the role and what are you working on?

[Karen] Yeah I have! So new year, new role. So the new role is General Manager, Member Value Proposition. It’s leading the group wide transformation of RACQ’s value proposition. And this really includes looking at what segment opportunities we have, identification of future products and services for RACQ, so that we can continue to be sustainable and drive relevance, and reinventing how RACQ rewards, recognises and creates value for our members. And part of the value proposition and the thing I’m really excited about is, it’s an opportunity to look at how we can leverage some of our assets in a way across the whole business. So I spoke earlier about how RACQ saying we’re member owned is a core asset that we own as well as having such a high level of trust is a core asset. So, you know, part of the work on leading this transformation of our value proposition is to look at how we can continue to leverage that trust and our member owned or mutual status to drive competitive advantage and consumer relevance so that it continues into the future. So yeah, I’m excited!

[Ryan] Yeah I can see why! It sounds like a great role! Ok, so onto our rapid fire question round. I’m going to ask you five rapid fire questions about customer experience and about yourself. Are you ready?

[Karen] Yes I am.

[Ryan] Ok, first question. What’s the best piece of CX or insights advice you’ve ever received?

[Karen] The best piece of advice I’ve ever received was from my prior manager when I was Head of Customer Experience at BUPA. And his advice was, just get the basics right when it comes to CX metrics. Just make sure you get basics right. And I think that advice is just as relevant today as it was 10 years ago when he gave it to me. [Ryan] What are you most excited about in the world of CX right now? [Karen] I think I’m really excited to see how organisations continue to innovate in response to COVID. You know, we saw some fantastic innovations in 2020 from organisations who have had, government for example, who had prior to COVID, would have thought things would be impossible to do. And they did it. Organisations were able to turn things around in 2-3 months and really look at their business differently. So, really excited to see how that continues into 2021. [Ryan] Yeah, nothing like a crisis to crystallize thoughts and drive actions, huh? What book would you recommend to our audience, and why?

[Karen] Ok. So I have two books I would recommend. The first one is called The Effortless Experience. The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi. It was quite ground breaking at time when it was released and it really challenged the idea that delighting your customers was critical to building loyalty and instead proposed that removing friction and removing pain points was actually more important. The second book is actually called Extreme Trust. It’s where we get the term Extreme Trust from internally. It’s written by Don Peppers and Mark Rogers and it’s a really interesting examination on the drivers of trust and the role that having extreme trust can play in driving growth for your business.

[Ryan] Sounds like great books. I have a book called extreme ownership, I doubt they’re related, but it will be good to read extreme trust! If I was to ask you which person or company was really nailing it when it comes to CX or insights, other than ALDI, who comes to mind?

[Karen] I’m going to pick one which is probably not commonly picked, and that’s the ATO, the Australian Tax Office. And I, you know, what the ATO have done really well is they have absolutely nailed the effortless experience. They have made it super super easy to get your tax done (for obvious reasons!) But you know, along that whole digital journey, it’s personalised, your data sources are integrated, it’s super simple and easy to do your tax return online and submit it on time. So ATO!

[Ryan] I didn’t see that coming but I think you raised some valid points, it is very easy to do your tax.

[Karen] It’s not sexy but you know, from the government’s point of view it achieves their goal, which is revenue.

[Ryan] Final question for you. What’s an interesting little fun fact about you that people would necessarily know.

[Karen] Ok so, I, my husband and I, we share our home with seven large pythons. We have reptiles. The garage of our home is converted into a number of snake cages and snake homes and yeah we have our largest python is called Max, an olive python and he’s about three metres long.

[Ryan] Wow, I’m going to be honest, the thought of walking into your garage scares me slightly, but that is definitely a fun little fact! That’s really awesome Karen, thanks so much. If folks wanted to get in touch with you, perhaps pick your brains a little more about what you’ve been speaking about here today, what the best way for them to do that?

[Karen] Yeah, look LinkedIn is probably the easiest way on there, so yeah go for LinkedIn.

[Ryan] Great. We’ll put a link to your LinkedIn into the show notes and to the books you recommended. Karen, thanks so much, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show!

[Karen] Thank you! Have a great week!