BCO launches Customer Experience Committee

As the need to “earn the commute” weighs heavier and heavier on the minds of businesses, our workspaces need to deliver more than just excellent design and a killer location. They need to deliver best-in-class customer experience.

To help occupiers, developers and designers alike to achieve this, the BCO has formed a CX Committee. A new group, comprised of passionate experts from across the industry, to help the BCO lead on customer experience across the office and workplace sector, just as it has in design and fit-out.

The mission of this new BCO centre of excellence is to enable and drive customer experience in the office and workspace sector by gathering insights, intelligence and real-life experiences from a wide cross-section of practitioners in the delivery of customer service.

The first key objective of the group will be to develop a CX Guide to Operations to sit alongside the BCO’s Guide to Specification and Guide to Fit Out. Following extensive feedback on the BCO’s recently launched proposal for a new measurement to define Grade A, the BCO CX Committee will also create a CX scoring/star matrix for customer experience in the office, all with the purpose of helping our members – and the wider industry – deliver workspaces that work for human beings, that enable businesses to be more successful, and that more than earn the commute.

The new committee will be chaired by Greenwoods partner Emma Roche.

“The continued evolution of the office is placing greater emphasis on the human experience, creating a culture of hospitality in the workplace,” said Roche. “I am delighted to be chairing this new CX Committee, which will establish a sector-wide measure to benchmark excellence in customer experience.”

Andy McBain, incoming president of the BCO, a long-time champion of the importance of customer experience in the workplace and driving force behind the launch of the BCO’s Customer Experience Award last year, added: “This new BCO CX guidance has the potential to transform the workplace sector, giving occupiers clear, comparable insight into how their customer experience really performs.”

 The committee comprises experts from across the workspace ecosystem, including:

• Emma Roche (Chair), Greenwoods, partner
• Claire Maude, Kings Cross Group, senior asset manager
• Steven Mew, Knowlemore – director       
• Zac Goodman, TSP – CEO
• Michelle Laramy, Canary Wharf Group, director of customer experience   
• Ralph Dorey, Beem RE – MD             
• Emma Goodford, Railpen – senior adviser             
• Alan Bainbridge, BBC – director of workspace & corporate real estate
• Patrick Dumas, Square Mile Farms – founder      
• Tim Wookey, Amamus – founder   
• Rebecca Stewart, Artus Air – CEO    
• Hazel Pearson, MLA Architects – director
• Dan Jaggar, Savills – director           
• James Ainsworth, PwC – portfolio planning & transactions lead             
• Andy McBain, NatWest, head of future of workspace & design property services

BCO chief executive Samantha McClary, said: “It is no longer enough to think that if you design a beautiful workspace, build it expertly and are lucky enough to be in a coveted location, they will come. Workspaces today are not simply a product, they are a service and their occupants, the consumers of those spaces expect so much more from them. Operational excellence is fundamental to performance today and at the BCO, we’re committed to providing our members with the tools to ensure they can deliver excellence, in design, in development, and with this new committee, in operation too.”