Marc Cooper reflects on an enriching career with brands as diverse as McDonald’s, British Airways and EE. We quiz him on how to balance the unique demands of a Chief Digital & Information Officer (CDIO) role, delivering compelling customer experiences alongside technology value and performance for the brand.

Taking Off

Marc's journey within Digital and Customer Experience (CX) began as the Brand Manager for the British Airways Executive Club frequent flyer program in the late 90s. At the time, BA was managing significant pressure from low-cost airlines and needed to strengthen its position within the emerging digital space.

“I was working on flight status updates via text message and got invited as one of about 100 people to set up a new digital function,” explains Marc. The new department went on to deliver profound digital transformation during the 2000s, with Marc and his team building out new customer touchpoints including the original mobile check-in product.

Having caught the digital bug, Marc hasn’t looked back, bringing similar success to EE and McDonald’s.

“My test is always – what is the company trying to do? How is it trying to grow –through share, new products or markets? Are we trying to protect or grow existing customer relationships? Then you look at the best value tech to deliver that, balancing incremental wins with strategic investment. At EE we had to deliver a big bang transformation for a new UK brand. At McDonald’s on the other hand, it’s all about how to scale globally while respecting local differences and the franchise model.”

Technology& Customer Experience

Marc explained to 3pX Group why technology is vital to businesses trying to optimise their customer service, against a backdrop of challenging economic conditions.

“Customers are having to make incredibly difficult choices, with both their money and their time. If our jobs touch millions of people, we have an obligation not to make life harder, and ideally a bit easier,” urges Marc. “And from a commercial point of view, fixing customer pain points is often lower cost and risk than adding new features or finding new customers”.

Marc also stresses you can’t deliver a great customer experience in isolation from your broader tech ecosystem.  

“Let’s say you are an omnichannel retailer with a lot of in-store customer touchpoints. What if your network is worse than you have at home? Slow service and poor CX. But great connectivity could mean the ability to crunch a lot of data, and provide a fast, personalised service.”

And what about the employee experience?

“If you have crappy EX, at some point, it doesn't matter how good your customer touchpoints are. Hybrid physical/digital experiences will fall over, and employees will question how much their leaders care about them. You solve for that by building experiences with and for employees."

Walking the Walk?

In our discussion with Marc, we explored the biggest organisational challenges and his learnings for successfully delivering great digital experiences. He highlighted three factors that stood out to him for any large organisation.

“Firstly, you need an operating model that fits your level of maturity. Let’s say you are a company that runs an annual budgeting process with little flexibility.  You need enough runway before the dollars are locked to determine the priorities. That means heavyweight, upfront planning. On the other hand, if you are on the journey to real agility, you might review investment quarterly or even more often, matched to an ability to test, deploy and learn on shorter cycles.”

“The second thing you need is a culture that drives strong collaboration, especially as you evolve your operating model. Yes, that means great cross-functional working. But you also need shared values and a purpose, to foster an inclusive, supportive and fun environment.  That’s because great people and strong relationships bridge the gap while you figure out the path from the old to the new way.”

So, who decides what is a great customer experience, we asked Marc.

“That’s the third jigsaw piece.  As multiple teams work to deliver a joined-up experience, there’s sometimes some grey around who ‘owns’ CX. Is it Marketing, Product or a separate CX function? Maybe Marketing owns the customer outcome and Product own how the digital experience manifests. There’s more than one way here. You just need to be deliberate to protect your agility.”

Building a Winning Team

When discussing what Marc looks for when bringing talent into his teams, the right skills, experience, and knowledge were a given.

“Wherever you are in your career, I’d expect to see a passion for the actual customer experience. Talk to customers and your own customer service colleagues. Go to a store. Review the research (especially the verbatims). Download the app, but do the whole journey, not just the digital bit. Review telemetry and trends from your data. Run experiments. Do this over and over, in different places, with your own products, competitors and with brands from different sectors. Anyone who does this has the right instincts.”

Yet the right values were equally important- individuals who are curious, kind, and willing to invest in one another’s success.

“Most of all, it’s about fit,” adds Marc. “Do they bring something different but complementary, which prevents group think and helps us succeed. When stakeholders look at my team composition, I want them to see a balance of credibility and trustworthiness, alongside encouragement to embrace some change and risk."

What should talented teams expect in return from their leaders?

“We all want to feel valued. Our work feels more meaningful when our leaders involve us setting the vision for their area, and even the purpose of wider function. Being sensitive and adaptable also makes a great leader,” adds Marc. “We demand a lot from our teams. Everyone, including the highest performers, are going to have competing demands and bumps in the road. Supporting people when they are struggling isn’t just the right thing; it deepens loyalty and trust, and teams work harder for each other.”

How should ambitious companies navigate the current job market?

“2023 was challenging – for employers, candidates and search firms,” offers Marc. “There are critical decisions to be made around existing teams before you even get to new hires. Inevitably, that means the market is softer, and making a great match between candidates and clients is taking longer. The trick for employers is timing – when does the absence of critical role holders start to hurt, and will my competitors snap up the best talent first if I wait?”

EmergingTechnology Trends

As the interview winds down, we discuss with Marc what’s on the technology horizon and unsurprisingly, AI was a dominant focus. Marc believes that we must understand the opportunities, limits and challenges, even if we don’t aspire to be engineers or suppliers of AI-powered tech.

“For the rest of us,” suggests Marc, “the question is a familiar one – which business problems can AI help to solve in a valuable way for my organisation? We are already seeing companies getting this wrong - DPD’s chatbot is a recent case in point.”

Marc continues, “Gen AI is very good at answering questions, summarising stuff, extracting insights and finding patterns. Wonderful for things like customer research, data analysis or even synthesising ideation work

But someone needs to vet and edit it, so letting it provide unsupervised customer service feels less smart.”

The new skills we will all need to cultivate include the ability to pick the right AI use cases, and boosting productivity by smartly supporting human activity. And, Marc adds, still taking a balanced approach to allocating time and money: “Don’t lose focus on the basics of great service and tech performance!”.

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As we take our leave from Marc, there’s just time to ask him how he likes to spend his downtime, and whether there are any parallels to his working life.

“Time with my family is super-important. Watching old movies, going to gigs with my sons, and setting the world to rights on our nightly dog walk with my wife. And we do love a skiing holiday, which is great for a CX analogy! Now my kids are better than me, I’ve learned to love the end-to-end experience, much as I do in my working life. The long lunch, mulled wine and afternoon steam room are at least as important as the skiing!”

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