Q&A: Paddy Power Etches Customer Experience Into its DNA

Renowned for its innovative marketing, Paddy Power also has an outside-the-box approach to the customer experience is also outside of the usual.

In order to unpack the company’s unique customer experience ideas–and the associated benefits–wespoke to Ronan Wall, Paddy Power’s head of operations. Ronan speaks about how customer experience is part of Paddy Power’s DNA and how even the CEO and the C-level managers spend time in the contact centre. Ronan also describes his 3 keys to ensuring a high quality customer experience.

You can next hear from Ronan at Call Center IQ’s Customer Experience Transformation: Gambling conference.

Gerald Clarke: Ronan, why is customer experience so important in the gambling industry?

Ronan Wall: I guess to start with, Gerald, I wouldn’t say that it’s just important to the gambling industry. I think customer experience is important to any business who wants to build a happy and loyal customer base, irrespective of industry. If you look at some of the leaders in this space, the likes of Amazon, Zappos, John Lewis, Southwest, I think what they have in common is their passion for customer experience and not necessarily the industry that they’re in. But I would say that our industry is no different to any other industry, so I don’t think we can afford not to be as passionate as others about customer experience.

And to give a sense of how we think about this in Paddy Power, there’s this thing which is that good customers will say nice things about you when they’re asked, but advocates will say nice things even when they’re not. And that’s a real area of emphasis for us to try and build a customer base of advocates of our brand and I think providing a great customer experience is how we’d actually achieve that.

Clarke: You mentioned there about this being not just an industry-specific thing. What can people in the gambling industry learn from other industries’ approaches to customer experience?

Wall: There are certainly things that are very specific to our industry in terms of our product and in terms of some of the elements of what it is that we’re offering. But I think customer experience is one that just, it works across any industry, so I don’t think we should just look at one another for influence when it comes to customer experience.
I think we’re in the lucky position that we can, I named a few of these companies earlier, but we can look at the likes of Amazon, the likes of Zappos and Apple and everyone who’s renowned in the customer experience area and learn from them. It’s predominantly around just thinking from the customer’s perspective and actually designing your product and your service for the customer, which I think sounds very, very simple but not everyone has this cracked and I certainly think we can learn from those who have.

Clarke: What specifically is Paddy Power’s approach to customer experience?

Wall: Our ambition on our mission statement is to add excitement to life and within our corporate pillars customer is one of the four fundamental pillars. So for us this is critical, it’s within our mission statement, it’s within our ambition to actually add excitement and decent experience to our customers. I think being that explicit with how important the customer is and how important experience is means that it actually filters all the way down into the organisation. And so we don’t simply have a customer experience team, we don’t have a customer experience person whose job it is to advance our customer experience across our product. It actually lives within our DNA, essentially.

And to give you some context as to how we make that live and how we maintain that over time, every year we’ve got, let’s say 1,000 or so people in our head office every year. A few hundred of those will actually work in our customer support department and it ensures that they remain close to our customers and ensures that they’re hearing the customers’ voice. And when they go back to what it is that they do, be it in technology or in marketing or in accounting, it doesn’t matter. They need to have the customer in mind when they’re doing what they do.

And again I think that not only filters down, but I think the fact that our senior leaders within the business have decided that customer is a key pillar and adding excitement to customers’ lives is what’s important to us, it means that we’ve got that level of seniority that are just utterly passionate about delivering this level of experience. We actually recently had Patrick Kennedy, our CEO, and all of his C level managers spend the day in the contact centre as well, just to get a feel for our customer base. And not only do they provide us with lots and lots of really valuable feedback, but out of that one of the customer pain points was identified and reduced to the point that we’ve reduced by half the number of contacts that we actually get on that subject. I guess it’s within our DNA but it’s, critically it’s taken very seriously and fanatically by those at the very top, as well.

Clarke: I was going to ask you, what are the three keys to ensuring a high quality customer experience? Obviously you very highly value corporate culture and getting buy-in across the business; what are your other two keys to ensuring a high customer experience?

Wall: I think I’ll follow up on that point that you just made there, the one that I made earlier, which is around the people, and the phrase we use in here again is to, that we hire for personality and we train for knowledge. Culture is incredibly important and our company values are incredibly important and the way that we use them I think is what differentiates us a little bit.

We very much hire based on these values and we develop our people against these values, because the truth is that if you don’t have the people within your organisation you can’t train empathy, you can’t train humour, so you need to introduce that into your business and maintain it within your business. And by doing that, again, irrespective of what position the individual is in, be it in technology or accounting or anywhere within the business, they just exude those values and that starts to filter its way back into the customer experience. You are your brand, is an old saying, and that’s very, something we very much live up to here. I think for me that’s the second one.

And then the third is, it’s around simplicity in the design of your product; if you design your product or your service in a way that your parents could use it I think you’re going to be solving for an awful lot of the customer experience challenges. And probably you’ve heard of Steve Krug but one of his early books, Don’t Make Me Think, is one that I give to all of the leaders within my department and I think we’ve got about a dozen maybe in our library down the hall, as well. But the message is, it’s really, really simple; design your product and service to be as easy as possible and you’ll avoid alienating people and making them feel confused and foolish and they’ll come back.

It’s quite simple, the message. And I think often enough you can really over-complicate customer experience when the truth is at any given point on any given page on your site what you want your customer to do and what your customer wants to do are very often the same thing; it’s just about designing your product in a way where you’re making that activity and that call to action as simple as possible. I guess they’re the other two for me, hire for personality, train for knowledge and design your products so that your parents could use them.

Clarke: Within customer experience do you believe that the ROI Paddy Power is seeing from this absolutely justifies the investment in it?

Wall: It’s funny, it’s a question that always comes up when you talk about customer experience. I think there’s, I think the financial people tend to get a bit nervous when you talk about something as intangible as spending money on experience. I don’t think a great customer experience necessarily means great expense. Often enough they go hand in hand, so I do think there’s a value, monetary value, to improving customers’ experience.

We’ve gone through this in many other companies as well but, as an example, the best service that you can offer, the best level of support you can offer is for your customer not to need to contact you in the first place. And so by removing the need for them to contact you’re in conjunction removing the contact and as a result you’re reducing your overheads. So there’s definitely a value-add and you can certainly calculate it in some instances, but I do think it’s very important to note that it’s not always easy or possible to understand what the ROI is when it is you’re improving the level of customer experience. Sometimes you just need to make that decision. But I think the way we think about it in here is that we have faith that by improving that experience and offering a better product and a better service that that starts to pay for itself in, through loyalty and customer satisfaction, over time.

Clarke: What are the next steps for Paddy Power to improve their customer experience further in the future?

Wall: You’re looking for some Paddy Power secrets! I guess there isn’t really any silver bullet. I’d love to tell you we were doing X and that X was going to solve all of our customer experience problems, but it actually just comes down to an appetite to constantly improve. And it comes back to the point I made around the three key areas for us. But if you don’t have the right people it’s just not going to be possible, so we’re constantly looking to our values to hire and develop the right people in our organisation and then looking for technology to advance and simplify our product and service even further.

I think mobile and social are two experiences that are really big for us at the moment and areas that we put a lot of focus on, so I guess that’s going to continue to be the case in the future. But for us it’s about developing a really high quality experience and maintaining that over all of our products and all of our services. There is no one answer, unfortunately. It’s not easy and it’s a lot of effort, but it’s one that we love. It’s a really great challenge, so it’s what brings us to work in the morning.