Aileen Day, Founder and Owner, Aileen Day Advisory, Value Driven Brand and Meraki Business Solutions
Aileen Day is a globally recognised and certified customer experience professional (CCXP). Based in Melbourne, Australia, Aileen speaks and coaches businesses worldwide on how they can become a trusted and value-driven brand using the disciplines of customer experience.
She started her customer experience journey working in Bunnings as the person responsible for customer experience in Australia and New Zealand. Then, she moved to Officeworks, helping to build brand loyalty there. Now on a mission to spread her message about 'The Joy of CEHX (pr. seh-x)'.
Aileen shares her skills and knowledge to business owners, leaders and entrepreneurs everywhere on how they can create experiences worthy of their customer's loyalty using customer, employee and human experience as the foundation.
What is your favourite social media platform, and why?
Twitter is really taking over as my favourite platform. It's where so many customer experience experts and advocates revolve, so there's so much wisdom to absorb, and it forces you to be sharper in your content than other platforms.
Tell us about you and your current role or area of interest.
I am the second oldest (by 4 minutes) of six children. I moved all over Australia for half of my life due to my Dad being in the Navy. This helped me learn a boatload of resilience and quickly relate to people and adapt to new situations. Fast forward 20 odd years, and I now thrive on change management; I love people feeling valuable, and I love learning and helping others be better than they were yesterday, so I went out and figured out a way to do that on the regular, on my own terms and make a living out of it.
As a team member on the shop floor, I started my customer experience career at Bunnings (think the Australian version of Home Depot). I was so in love with the means by which we created loyal customers that I grew through the business, eventually becoming the national customer insights manager for Australia and New Zealand. It became my job to create strategies that saw customers never want to leave Bunnings. To be become mad, raving advocates. After some time, I moved to Officeworks (think Office Depot) to do the same thing for their organisation.
Fast forward a little while and my life got turned upside down, so I decided to bow out of the job I loved and take a hiatus. After some months off, I realised I had such a massive opportunity to share my skills and knowledge that it would nearly be a waste to return back to another big corporate organisation. It also didn't help that the few I interviewed for didn't want me; they wanted a graduate with my skills and knowledge [face palm].
So these days, I now speak, coach and consult to organisations and leaders around the world on how they can tactically manufacture their own businesses based on the disciplines of customer experience, which when done right, creates a trusted and value-driven brand which then feeds into my vision of helping 10 million people to live a value-driven life. The two can go hand in hand.
What do you like about your career or area of focus?
I love that customer experience is still so relatively unknown in its truest form that even small changes in strategy can create massive shifts in the customer, employee and human experience felt from the outside in of an organisation. I also love that not one single day is ever the same, which when you thrive on variety is bliss. Finally, I love that I am only the 18th person to be designated with the CCXP distinction (PhD of CX) in Australia. To me, that screams opportunity!
I love that the focus of customer experience is about the human. We need more of this in the world. Too many focus on the bottom line. The reality is that with the strategic customer experience, you focus on the human experience; the outcome is always a healthy bottom line.
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Shut the f**k up. Seriously. A colleague of mine once said, "Aileen, you're a good egg, but please just shut the f**k up". I could have taken it badly, but I knew he meant, please just go in and listen first. A predicament when you love talking, you don't listen. I have run with that advice for more than ten years now. Every day I am internally reminded to just listen first, whether it be to my son, to my partner, my client making excuses, whoever it is. Just shut the f**k up and listen, even to the silence.
What inspires you, motivates you, or helps you to move forward?
Learning inspires me. I despised the school, but now as an adult, I love learning because it's learning on my terms, in areas that bring me joy and because I want to, not because I have to. I am certainly motivated by people who want to be better. If they want to help themselves, I am there beside them, being the loudest cheerleader and their greatest support!
Having a vision for myself helps me move forward. My vision of helping ten million people is not just a brand vision; it's a personal vision too. I want people to live a life that they value and for so many reasons that we probably don't have time for, but when they value what they have, they learn to value those around them as well.
What are you proud of in your life so far?
I'm proud of being the first person in my family to finish university (even if I was 35 when I did it). I'm super proud to be recognised with a global designation for customer experience through CXPA. I'm proud of the cool AF son I'm raising, and I'm proud of believing in myself (it took a little while at the start).
What is your preferred way to meet new people/network?
I thrive on human interaction (person to person), but there has been little of that in the last couple of years. I miss it. Virtual services have certainly filled a part of that gap, but once we can get back out and meet face to face, the happier I am.
What skills or qualities do you feel have helped you?
I'm highly adaptable, thanks for the most part to my growing up around the country, moving states every 18 months, starting again constantly. I have become very good at reading people and their body language (this stuff fascinates me). I am, as far as archetypes go, regularly found to be the Nurturer of the Hero, meaning that I am always putting myself in front of the battle, protecting others and fighting for them to get what's theirs but also nurturing them to become strong enough to fight for themselves.
I never got into fights growing up due to my own behaviour. Still, I would often be found fighting on someone's behalf if I ever thought their vulnerability was being targeted. I feel like this has helped people realise that I want them to feel safe around me and that I have their back, but it comes with realising they also have to learn how to have their own courage as well.
And in that, I believe I am courageous. Not in a Wonder Woman kind of way, but in a resilient, take no bullsh*t, get what I want through grit and determination kind of way, and people want that for themselves, so they are attracted to that. Then I can preach to them about customer experience once I have them in my lair.
What do you wish you had known when you started out?
I wish I had known that nearly no one knows what you mean by customer experience. It took me four years to realise this. I took for granted working in a big corporation and just thought (assumed) everyone knew. It turns out they didn't, so my whole business strategy and the tactics to achieve it went out the window.
I had to start from a baseline of zero when it came to consulting. So it went back to just starting with the basics. Educating people on what customer experience is, how it works, what it does for businesses. Why you would bother applying energy to it has been a whole journey starting from the beginning.
Who do you most admire in business, academic or creative circles and why?
Steven Pressfield (Author) - The War of Art changed me. Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist) - Never wanted to learn more about the cosmos and at the same time feel so insignificant.
Creatively, my partner, Nailz Van Diggele. He is an artist, a painter, a creator, a successful tattooist. I watch his creative process roll out every day. Some days he is the epitome of a tortured artist, other days, the creative gods kiss his hands, and he sits there inflow for hours creating some beautiful, unique piece of art. It is fascinating to observe.
In business, I admire any leader who implicitly understands they are not the be-all and end-all in the success equation. Thankfully, there are many of these people. I'm working on making more of them, though.
Outside of your professional/work area, what hobbies or interests do you have or what other areas of your life are of real importance to you?
Day drinking in isolation has become a hobby(hahaha). However, I'm a social creature, so any opportunity to get out and about, be it to a musical, an outside adventure, sipping champagne with friends in the sun, listening to a band, networking the weekend away whilst learning great insights. I'm all about it. Also, is buying shoes a hobby? If so, that too.
Has the pandemic had a positive or a negative effect on you and/or your business, and how have you managed it?
It's had quite a positive effect on my business in the sense that it allowed me to sit back and assess what next. As a result, I did things that I truly don't think I would have done, if not for the pandemic. For example, I became a Twitch Affiliate after starting a business talk show on there.
I created The Value-Driven Brand podcast. I put myself out to the global public in ways I was previously too intimidated to do. Every activity has paid off, whether it be financially, through great lessons learned or through helping me realise where my calling is. Thanks, global pandemic.
Do you have a mentor, or have you ever mentored anyone?
I mentor business leaders regularly. I love the feeling that mentoring brings, like passing the baton in the relay race and seeing your team win. As for being mentored, I have had many mentors come in and out of my life, dropping gold nuggets here and there, but I've not particularly had an ongoing mentor, maybe until recently. It's still early, but I love learning from so many varieties of people that I don't particularly think I'd be a one-person fit all mentee anyway.
What advice would you have for someone looking to get into the same area of work or interests?
1. Be observant.
2. Ask great questions.
3. Become trusted - to help you learn and decipher more accurately.
4. Love humans and believe in their ultimate potential.
5. Think strategically - this is your chance at uniqueness.
6. Practice makes it possible - nearly nothing works the first time perfectly, so always be ready to learn, evolve and try again (in life and customer experience).
What do you feel is the most common reason for people failing or giving up?
They don't believe in themselves, and they let others keep them down rather than holding themselves accountable for their ambitions, which of course, are going to be hard. Nothing worth having comes easy.
Is there a phrase, quote or a saying that you really like?
I heard a saying recently, "If you are willing to do only what's easy, life will be hard. But if you're willing to do what's hard, life will be easy." - T. Harv Eker". This really resonated with me. One I use regularly is "If not now, then when". It's short and to the point.
What companies, brands, or institutions do you like or do you think are getting it right?
I think globally, organisations like SaaS producer, Lately.ai founded by business superstar Kate Chernis-Bradley along with her amazing team, are on the money with their products helping content creators create better; I think AppSumo and Noah Kagan are on the value add train with their customer experience and brand promises that actually deliver.
How do you define success, and what lessons have you learned so far that you could share with our audience/readership?
In all honesty, I used to define success by the amount of money I made. After a life upheaval, I then defined success by the amount of time I got to spend with my son, even when this meant living by the skin of my teeth. These days I define it by the value I get to add to others, which I know what goes around, comes around and that if I do that with genuineness, it will, in turn, bring me the money, bring me the value-driven life I want for myself and those around me.