What does great customer experience really look like?

Q&A with Holly Hicks, our Customer Experience Director

Holly Hicks is our Customer Experience Director at Liberty Blume, where she leads initiatives to enhance customer trust and satisfaction. In this Q&A, she draws on a career built around customer-centricity to challenge industry assumptions about what good customer experience really looks like. She also examines how the sector is set to evolve in the face of AI and shifting customer expectations.

What is Blume’s approach to customer experience?

HH: For Blume, partnership means really understanding what matters most to our customers, going beyond their operational needs. It’s about going deeper into what they genuinely want from a supplier and then intentionally designing their experiences around that insight. All of this comes together in a partnership model that feels distinctly Blume . We’re fortunate to have deep subject matter expertise and passion across the organisation and long-standing relationships with our customers. That gives us such a strong foundation, because our customers are open with us about what they need and where we can help. The ambition is to combine that insight, expertise and trusted relationships to create experiences that truly reflect what our customers value.

What is the most common customer pain point you see, and how do you approach addressing it?

HH: People often assume customer pain points are about product or service quality. While those issues can exist, they’re easier to fix nowadays with good feedback loops. I think the bigger frustration is fragmentation. Customers expect to move horizontally across an organisation and have a consistent experience. Instead, most businesses are structured vertically, which then leads to silos. The result is repetition, poor coordination, wasted time, and eroded trust. In my experience the core pain point is usually not the product or service itself, it’s a lack of integration across teams.

At Liberty Blume we went back to basics on the customer journey, mapping core experiences end-to-end to really put ourselves in the customer’s shoes. Then it’s about bringing customer insights and voices into those senior conversations and forums, challenging ourselves to think about our decision making from a customer point of view. From there it becomes much easier to see where fragmentation can occur.

A customer outcome you’re proud to have contributed to?

HH: Before joining Blume, I did some consulting work for the Public sector, designing experiences for citizens of local councils, NHS trusts, and central government departments. That experience fundamentally shaped how I think about customer experience. In the private sector, you’re typically designing for the masses and optimising for volume. In the public sector, you’re forced to confront the corner cases. And those corner cases are often the most vulnerable people in society. What I brought back from that experience is a deep commitment to thinking about customers as individuals, not just personas. It was challenging work, but I’m genuinely proud that we got to design services around real people’s lives and real problems.

Can you share how customer feedback changed the way you’ve improved a product or solution?

HH: There’s a long-held assumption in customer experience that if we ask customers what they think and act on it, outcomes will improve. That’s half the story at best… Real insight sits at the intersection of what customers say and what they do. Feedback can give you sentiment, but what I care about more is behaviour, that gives you the truth. Often, the customers who say nothing are the most revealing. Silence can signal indifference, friction or a quiet flight risk, so that silence should be a data point for us.

And in a tech-enabled world, customers are expecting us to respond to their behaviour as much as what they tell us in surveys. We’re starting to develop more technology so we can now see patterns in usage, response times and repeated failed actions.  In B2B we have to think about those behaviour signals differently, for example, when a CFO is willing to share sensitive information with us behind closed doors – that’s because they view us as a genuine partner, that signal carries far more weight than any survey score.

B2C organisations are already operating in this AI-driven, behaviour-led model, identifying friction in real time and intervening proactively. B2B is having to catch up quickly because it’s clear that customer expectations have already shifted. I’m quite excited about the way that we can better use customer behaviours and signals to help us define what to do differently in customer journeys rather than just asking people.

Is technology, in particular AI, changing the way customers interact with solutions providers?

HH: Absolutely, AI is raising expectations faster than many organisations can keep up. Across both B2C and B2B, customers now assume that AI will make services faster, smarter and more cost efficient. In B2B particularly, the question we increasingly hear is: what are you doing with AI, and how will it reduce my costs or improve outcomes? Expectations are rising rapidly, and providers need to stay ahead of that curve. At the same time, there is a critical balance to strike. As we embed AI into our services, we have to retain the human, partner-led element that underpins trust, especially in B2B where relationships and one-to-one interaction still matter enormously.

From a customer experience perspective, AI is particularly exciting because it enables real-time responses to friction. Instead of a customer struggling through repeated failed attempts, eventually resolving the issue, and then reporting frustration weeks later via a survey, AI can detect the friction instantly and intervene in the moment. You’re fixing customer problems in the moment in their context without any human touch. That kind of real-time problem solving is already becoming standard in B2C and we’re beginning to see it increasingly shape expectations in B2B. The challenge is balancing the really high demands customers are placing on us, still fixing their problems, and retaining that humanity.

How can organisations maintain a deep understanding of customer priorities as they evolve?

HH: In many ways, this comes back to basics. An old boss of mine always said ‘what gets measured gets done’, and that holds true for customer understanding. Until you build the discipline of bringing real customer voices and insight into executive decision-making forums, and a consistent way of measuring experience – it risks becoming little more than lip service.

And I think it comes back to really understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing. Customer centric change must be an enterprise-wide commitment to doing things differently, so your story for ‘why’ needs to be really strong and well understood – and it must be one that goes beyond financial metrics, that’s when it starts to become something that changes and has an impact on priorities.