Clare Muscutt talks with Melissa Moore about frontline customer service and dealing with bullying in the workplace

Melissa Moore, Founder of The Retail Advisor, joins Clare Muscutt on the Inspiring Women in CX podcast to talk about the moment she realised she’d been in CX all along, putting on her “brave pants” and launching her own podcast, ‘The Retail Tea Break’, the disjunct that exists between those in the “ivory tower” and our frontline workers, and how we must engage, empower, and listen to our frontline workers if we wish to ensure long-term success in business.   Listen in to the full episode as Melissa talks about… 👣 Her route into CX and realising she’s put the customer at the heart all along 🛒 Starting out on the shop floor and how this ‘operational grounding’ informs her role today 🚧 The disjunct between the ‘ivory tower’ and those working on the frontline (and how the pandemic accentuated the sense of ‘us versus them’) 💥 Experiencing bullying within the workplace and how she channelled this pain into power 🤝 Why we need more “joined-up” thinking to engage and empower our employees long-term ✍️ The importance of focusing upon qualitative and quantitative research, and service KPIs, as opposed to ‘productivity measures’   For more information on joining the world’s first online community for women in Customer Experience, head over to www.womenincx.community/membership

Om Podcasten

By way of introduction, my name is Clare Muscutt and I have the pleasure of hosting and producing this new female-focused Customer Experience initiative. I had the idea that we needed a space for women when I appeared in CX Magazine’s Top 50 stars as the UK’s Top Female Influencer last year. It seemed strange to me that in a disproportionately female industry that the rest of the Top 5, were male. My newly found platform meant women started to reach out to me for help on social media and I found it surprising that they found me inspiring. I helped wherever I could, sharing my personal career story and experience of successes and ‘failures’ on the corporate road to starting my own company. I saw my mentees getting braver and felt tremendous pride at seeing them go for bigger opportunities, start their own blogs, try their hand at public speaking and some even make the jump to freelance. The theme that repeated over and over again in these conversations was the shared feeling of a lack of self-confidence to stand up and be noticed. And a lack of accessible female spaces with role models who openly share their experience of getting over similar challenges, to look up to. I found a community of awesome women through Instagram and reached out to them to get the conversation going. We started having ‘real-talk’ conversations on Zoom about our views on CX and experience of being women striving to achieve our goals. I found a collective across the globe who wanted to take part in building something ‘for the girls’ and by sharing our stories, together we found CX sisterhood. We have a dream to shine a light on more women in CX and inspire more of us to stand up and be noticed. We believe the CX world would benefit from a space dedicated to women and that a great place to start is to hear more of our stories… So, to begin with, I have handpicked a selection of the women I got to know, from around the world who have tremendous stories to tell that will be published here. Over time, I hope to get feedback on where you need more inspiration and introduce guests from other areas of interest such as health and wellbeing, business and social media skills to support the personal and professional development of women in our industry. Thank you so much for listening. If you’d like to join the sisterhood, please visit www.womenincx.community to subscribe to our list and be the first to get news and updates as we grow.