Being Bionic: What I’ve been doing since Albion
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Long story short, we shut Albion in April 2019 and I immediately went to work at our last new client, Make It Cheaper.
You’ve never heard of Make It Cheaper, because we had an awful, forgettable name and got the vast majority of our customers from white label partnerships. But MIC is a great fast-growth company with a genuinely amazing culture. In a decade it grew to become the largest energy broker for SMEs.
Oh…
People are surprised when I tell them where I am. I think they expected me to turn up at a hot new VC-backed startup, take a trendy role at a tech giant, or to start another agency.
But I’m loving what I’m doing, for several reasons:
- It’s a real revenue and profit earning business, growing fast
- I’m learning tons about a very different way of doing business, all about operational excellence, daily trading, commercial deals
- The business is big enough to make a difference, but small enough to change
- It gives me a chance to actually deliver some of the amazing thinking we did at Albion in the energy, insurance and telecoms markets, but that our clients frustratingly weren’t able to get live
- The diversity of our team make most agencies look stale, male and pale. The energy of the place is amazing, it crackles. It has a real and tangible culture with codes and rituals.
Chief Customer Officer? What’s that?
I ended up with this year’s trendy title, Chief Customer Officer. Most normal people haven’t heard of it yet and think it’s a bit odd, that it means I’m looking after the call centre. How I’m defining the role is:
Joining-up the different parts of the business to create a more coherent, productive and distinctive customer experience.
What I’ve actually spent the last 9 months doing is:
- Loads of customer insights, to understand who our current customers are and why, and who our next customers could be and what unmet needs we could fulfil for them
- Starting to build a customer…
