Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot UK. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.

So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 102 with the title Humanising Business and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Ben Afia. Ben describes himself as someone who makes business more human, and when I asked Ben to describe his superpower, he said he has a particular sensitivity to the nuances of language. Hello, Ben, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Jo, it's an absolute pleasure.

Yeah, we've been having a great chat in the green room and I'm so looking forward to this humanising business. What does that mean?

Yeah, it's quite a bold statement, isn't it? I suppose, but it's been my mission for possibly the last 2025 years. I've really started focusing on language, in particular, when I was at Boots, the chemists, about 25 years ago, and I got to work on the first brand tone of voice. We were working on brand strategy, the tone of voice and language of the business. And in any large organisation, you've got a level of complexity and dehumanising, if you like, because you've got a lot of people, so you have process and you've got bureaucracy and politics, and that all gets in the way of relationships inside the organisation and that gets in turn in the way of relationships outside. So with customers. So at Boots, I was trying to help the organisation to relate to customers in the way that they want to be related to, the way they would want to be spoken to. And then when I set up my consultancy about 19 and a half, nearly 20 years ago, I found myself coming across organise other organisations who had similar problems. So I worked with companies like BP, Vodafone, Aviva, Google, and I found a similar pattern that these larger businesses, just because they're large, they have certain issues that get in the way of being human.

And what's the impact of that? Well, certainly when I was an employee, I felt slightly dehumanised, actually. Boots was a wonderful place to work. But I worked in some less wonderful places before that. Many people have this sense of working for the man and that being a dehumanising experience. So if we feel treated less than human internally, how does that reflect in the way that we treat our customers? And it's that connection that I'm really intrigued about. And what I've learned, I suppose, through all the work, that all the consulting that I've done with various clients, is that in order to change the relationship you have with your customers, you need to change the relationship with your people internally first. So that's the nub of it, I'd say.

I like that. I like that nuance. And we see that echoed in, you say the companies you've worked for, the airline industry changed the way they operated many years ago as well, we can probably imagine. I see on LinkedIn every day, people get really frustrated with computer says no, or whoever you talk to. I appreciate you're not necessarily talking about customer service here, you're talking about how you communicate. But sometimes you get a letter and it feels like you're being, I don't know, criticised or attacked or sued in a correspondence that should be friendly and warm. But that warmth never comes through, does it?

Absolutely. And to that extent, yes. I am talking about customer service, because what is a business? A business has products and services that it sells to an audience. That might be a business audience or a consumer audience, or both in many cases. So ultimately, we're creating something that serves a need for people, and people will buy that or not. And so that's where the sense of customer service comes in. Because when you get through the selling and the marketing communication, it's the customer service that really matters. Do you deliver what you promise in your marketing, through your service? And all of those tiny moments, all throughout a customer's journey, are absolutely crucial in shaping a customer's perception of what you're like as an organisation and what you believe in, what you stand for.