Why CX Corner Exists

(and Why I'm Probably not Qualified to Write it)

I know what you're thinking. Another white, middle-class, middle-aged bloke wanging on about his opinions on CX. A thinly veiled attempt to peddle his crappy software. Where do I sign up?

Ah, dear reader. I promise you, this time is different.

You see, I'm not really supposed to be here at all. When I started this journey back in 2017, I knew absolutely nothing about customer experience. Not a thing.

The Accidental Techy

As a bright-eyed, floppy-haired Gen Xer emerging from the party decade that was the 1990s - a time when everything felt possible and we were all much more innocent (and significantly more drunk) - the plan was to be a football journalist.

And write about football I did. First for my own club, Sunderland, then later getting involved more widely with magazines like FourFourTwo, Total Football, and various newspapers.

But in the early 2000s, I experienced what turned out to be the first technological shift that would turn my world upside down. As football fans became early adopters of the internet, the magazines and newspapers paying my wages started to die. At the same time, football was undergoing its own transformation into a professional industry, and some of the things I loved about my job started to change.

Refusing to admit defeat, I bought a book called Learn HTML in a Weekend and built a very bad website with the hope of replicating the sort of content we were producing - with absolutely no plan at all for how we'd make any money. Within a few weeks, we had 80,000 visitors a week coming to the site.

As we got deeper into the new millennium, I got hooked on this new technology. I got a credit card, bought a suit and a computer, and set up a web design company.

This was new tech. Everybody was making it up. Unaware of my abundant ignorance, I figured I might as well have a go too.

This second chapter of my working life saw me learn sufficiently diligently to bring my communication skills into the digital age. Before long, people were actually buying this shit, and I needed others to help me. At which point, I was lucky enough to learn how to build a team, demand, a business.

The Nissan challenge

Fast forward to December 2016. Our agency had grown to 26 people, seven-figure turnover, some amazing clients - predominantly up here in the Northeast of England - when we were invited to take part in a challenge day that Nissan was hosting.

Their challenge? Help them detect problems with cars from people complaining on social media, to shortcut the feedback loop from dealers which took two weeks. When you produce a car every 29 seconds (as Nissan did at that time), that lag time meant 17,000 cars were at risk of all sharing the same problem.

As an experienced digital agency, our instinct was to scan the horizon for software to analyse text and spot a knackered fuel pump from a crap sat nav driver. And we realised text analytics was not fit for purpose.

Happily, I'd been introduced through one of our software engineers to a rangy linguist by the name of Steve, in a pub a few weeks beforehand. With a head the size of a small meteorite and the brain to match, Steve at the time was working on Victorian ghost literature and experimenting with comparing what universities said about themselves to how they were experienced in the minds of students - which I thought was possibly fascinating and almost certainly useless to human beings.

At the same time, some new technology was coming out of Germany that turned out to be a breakthrough in the world of artificial intelligence. We wondered whether this nascent AI could parse language sufficiently into its constituent elements - verbs, nouns, tense, subject, cause, etc.

And despite only knowing me for four and a half pints of his life, Steve stayed up all night, wrote 21 syntactic rules, added three examples of how this might work, and I pitched to Nissan the next morning.

"You asked us to look at your data - we didn't. You asked us to show you software - we haven't. But we have a half-arsed idea about how some very, very new artificial intelligence and some very, very old corpus linguistics might be able to solve your problem for you."

To our shock, horror, and delight, we won the challenge. Nissan gave us £25,000 to build a prototype.

And Wordnerds was born.

The Accidental CXer

What started as a side project for the agency in the corner of our office rapidly attracted interest from clients much bigger than we could usually attract as a regional digital agency. It grew and grew until, eventually, it ate the organisation that bore it.

By 2019, we had interest from investors who were able to give us the kind of financial backing required to build a deep tech company properly - on the condition that we closed the agency.

Steve (far right), our Financial Director Angela (middle, obviously), myself (left of Ange), and a small team of engineers and customer-facing people made the jump to Wordnerds full time.

So my subsequent life in customer experience came about entirely by accident. And I profess to knowing absolutely nothing at all about any of this before we stumbled into feedback analytics through those first few years with clients like Nissan.

As a result - and cognisant of my own enormous stupidity - I made it my business to surround myself with people who know much more about these things than me.

Internally, that meant hiring a wonderful team of talented software engineers, customer experience experts, and supporting cast.

Externally, it meant really listening to first the problems, and subsequently the suggestions, of our wonderful customers who embraced what we were trying to do with such enthusiasm and alacrity, and who have been so generous with their thoughts, ideas, and expertise.

What CX Corner Actually Is

CX Corner is the distillation of all of this.

Sometimes I write about the issues occupying us in the Wordnerds penthouse on the banks of the River Tyne as we navigate the crushing wave of AI and the Gartner hype cycle.

Sometimes I write about the many conversations I have with CX leaders, voice of customer managers, industry experts, and any number of people who are somehow connected to the problem of finding out how to improve businesses from the thoughts, reactions, suggestions, and complaints of their customers.

At Wordnerds, we take our work extremely seriously. Ourselves, less so.

We love this world we've stumbled into - and particularly the opportunity it affords us to learn new things every day or week. We're committed to that learning journey above all things, except enjoying the ride along the way, looking after each other, and having bucket loads of fun amongst the very serious aspects of what we do.

I hope that my writing in CX Corner reflects this approach, and that if you sign up, you'll find it informative, interesting, and occasionally amusing enough to look forward to it landing in your inbox every fortnight.

Keep learning!

Pete