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Renata Novotná has been working in customer and employee experience since the days when CX was barely talked about in the Czech Republic. At Ipsos she works as a Strategic Processes and CX Consultant, helping major brands weave customer and employee data into something that actually works as a whole. Alongside that, she’s been running her own consultancy since 2017, where she helps owners and managers of small and mid-sized businesses set up processes so they can free up their hands and their heads for what really matters.
At Ipsos she’s worked her way up from coordinating data collection to leading a team that specialises in customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty research. Her own long-standing focus is on employee experience and on bridging two worlds that, in her view, talk to each other far less than they should: HR and CX.
In her conversation with X Pulse, we talked with Renata about why the real problem in a company is almost never the one you’re called in to solve, why delegation won’t save any process if the boss can’t mentally let go, and where AI genuinely helps in customer care versus where companies are overshooting.
You’re running two parallel roles that look quite different on the surface. Holistic CX consultant at Ipsos, where you work with big brands, and your own practice, where you set up processes for small companies and law firms. What do those two worlds do equally well, and what can they learn from each other?
Small companies have one huge advantage: everything moves faster and more simply. Changes aren’t as demanding organisationally and you see the impact very quickly. That’s not the case in corporates. There it takes enormous effort to nudge that massive ship off course, and from the moment you turn the wheel to the moment it actually changes direction, quite some time passes. The decision-making is also considerably more complex.
On the flip side, corporates naturally have more money. And more money lets you do bigger things, and decisions there aren’t as emotionally charged. In many ways that can be easier.
Each world has its pros and cons.
When you walk into a company that’s brought you in for “customer experience”, what’s the real problem you usually end up uncovering? In my own practice it tends to be something completely different from what was expected. Do you find the same?
The real problem is often somewhere else than the one that was named. One of my first tasks is to find the actual bottlenecks and propose solutions. In smaller companies it tends to be a process issue, whereas in corporates it’s a very complex matter, much more political, because you can only manage customer experience there if you have buy-in across the company. So first you need to build allies and put the whole system in place.
In small companies you can get straight to the point and build things up step by step. The impact shows incredibly fast.
You talk a lot about delegation and about freeing up your hands and your head for the important things. What do you think is the most common mental block stopping owners and managers from genuinely delegating, and how do you get past it?
Always the same thing. The feeling that no one will do it as well as they will, that’s the first one, and the second is the feeling that they have to have absolute control over everything, because if they don’t, the system will fall apart. But with those two beliefs you’ll never delegate. At best you’ll micromanage, and that’s never reduced anyone’s workload. The only way past it is to genuinely let yourself release the grip. There are various techniques for it, but no technique will change how you think. They’re process matters: how to assign tasks, how to set checkpoints, how to give feedback, and so on. You can set it up well. But if the owner or manager can’t mentally hand it over, no process will save it.
When we measure employee satisfaction, people often talk about the link to customer satisfaction. Do you genuinely see it as that clear-cut in practice, or is the relationship more complicated than it looks?
The link is there and it’s very direct. More satisfied employees really do lead to more satisfied customers. What’s trickier is how to pull both of those numbers up. Employees are looked after by HR, customers by CX in the better case, by marketing in the worse case. And those teams don’t really share their strategies. Each area is also influenced by other areas, so if you want to lift both, the work is highly complex. If a company is serious about it, you have to look at it holistically, talk to each other, and ideally have your data set up so it can be evaluated together.
Is there an “aha moment” from some research or project where the numbers or employee feedback genuinely surprised you and changed your view on something you’d considered obvious?
Not much surprises me anymore 🙂 But there’s something I found interesting and have shown a few times because it sets a nice context: 65% of employees say customer satisfaction matters to their company, 43% say their employer cares as much about employee satisfaction as customer satisfaction, and 34% feel their employer takes a regular interest in their satisfaction. Those numbers come from a regular Ipsos survey on a representative sample of Czech employees. And they really do capture the picture of most companies. Leadership wants happy customers because they know that brings in more money, but interest in their own people, who are actually doing the heavy lifting, is much lower. And honestly, it doesn’t matter whether a company does something about it or not, if the employee doesn’t register it, the effect is the same as if the company did nothing.
When you help a company set up a new process, designing it is one thing and getting people to actually stick to it is another. In your experience, what works to stop the change from fizzling out after the first two months?
The key is getting people involved in creating the new process. So they take ownership of it and, crucially, so it reflects how they actually work and what their day-to-day reality looks like. That’s the design phase. In the maintenance phase, the key is having a clear process owner who watches that people are working according to the new process, and if they’re not, actively does follow-ups and gives feedback. With bigger processes I do follow-ups myself, where we improve the process in iterations based on feedback. You’ll never get it bulletproof the first time. The important thing is not to think you’re done once you’ve put the process on paper. That’s actually when the real work begins.
In CX there’s been a lot of talk about AI in recent years. Chatbots, automation, call summarisation, predictive models and much more. Where do you think AI genuinely helps customer experience, and where are companies overestimating what it can do today?
They overestimate the process side and underestimate the human factor. You can see it in various examples from abroad, where companies got excited about AI, scrapped their customer support and automated everything. Process-wise it kind of worked, but people weren’t happy. And in reality it did more damage than good. That’s why we’re now seeing a return to a more hybrid approach. Let AI handle part of it, but keep the human factor in there. The data also shows that your relationship with a brand breaks down the moment you, as a customer, need to deal with something out of the ordinary. I get that it’ll take some time and so on, but if a company helps me solve my problem, the relationship gets stronger. If it doesn’t, it cools off. AI is great for initial screening and simple operations, or on the other end, for follow-up evaluation. But the customer needs to be able to reach a real person easily and quickly. Because they often need help with things that aren’t standard, and that’s where the system has no autonomy.
If you had to bluntly recommend five things a good company does so its employees value their work, and through that their clients, what would they be?
I don’t think it’s so much about whether they value their work but how they feel in it. Whether they’re content, have a good team and manager, whether they see meaning in their work, whether they’re proud of their work and the company they work for. Most people need a degree of autonomy, independence and growth. And it’s always about finding balance and working with each person individually. You need to spark in people the desire to do their work well and channel their energy in the right direction. So they actually have the capacity to help clients. The worst kind of employees are the resigned and disengaged ones.
At X Pulse we have one favourite question we ask all our guests. How would you explain to your grandma over Sunday lunch what you actually do for a living?
That’s a good question and I never know how to answer it 🙂 I’d probably tell her I write recipes for work inside companies, so anyone standing at the stove can cook, and Sunday lunch doesn’t depend on a single cook who happens to know how the dish is made. That just like with cooking, it’s the same with what people do at work.
How do you think customer expectations in the Czech Republic will evolve over the next few years? What will they expect from us, and what are most companies still not prepared for?
No one dares predict several years ahead, because we’ve seen how much has changed in just the past few months. But the fundamentals will probably stay the same. It’ll still be about finding the balance between efficiency and being human. Customers want companies to ride the AI trend, but “not too much” 🙂 and finding that “not too much” will, in my view, be the hardest part, because I’m convinced customers will become more and more ambivalent and finding the sweet spot will simply be difficult. It’s also a fact that the relationship with a brand will increasingly be about a fair deal. The combination of brand, people, product, care. You’ll need to have these areas more connected and consistent with one another. For now they’re still areas handled by separate teams that don’t really collaborate.
And to wrap up, the classic. Do you have a favourite CX story, whether as a consultant or just as a customer, that’s stuck with you and you love to share?
I’m a well-known collector of bad customer experiences, my notebook there is rather colourful 🙂 But my favourite CX story has got to be dm. Who doesn’t love “dm” 🙂 I happen to know that company from the inside too. I’ve trained dozens of store managers, regional managers and leadership, and if there’s anywhere that consistency I mentioned earlier actually works, it’s right there. Whoever you meet from dm, they’re the pure essence of the brand. Whether it’s people from head office, the warehouses or the stores. And as a customer you really feel it. You might not even know exactly why, but you enjoy going there, you feel comfortable and welcome.
