The Pioneer interview with... David Wales

As the first Customer Experience Manager in the Fire & Rescue Service, David pioneered on behalf of the people it served, finding new ways to improve the experiences people had when the Fire Service got involved and reducing the long-term impact the incidents have on people’s lives. 

Joining Kent Fire & Rescue Service at 18, David worked in a range of front-line roles before moving into management. As his career progressed, he became increasingly curious about the ways his colleagues thought about the needs and experiences of those they served.

David spent six years researching what people do when they experience a fire, listening to the personal stories of those who had fires and other emergencies. Through this research, it became clear that the relationship between the Service and the public was distant at best and this gap was affecting the performance of the Service and wellbeing of the people it rescued. 

It is unusual to think of the Fire Service having customers or having a customer experience. How did people react to the change in language? 

For 20 years, I’d only been taught the scientific and technical side of my job. I’d never actually spoken to a member of the public meaningfully, never asked them about their experience or their priorities. We told them what we expected of them. 

When we started talking about customers, we started to create a sense of more of a relationship, something that flows both ways. There were a lot of objections to the term customer. Many people in the Service became quite defensive and there was a lot of resistance. It wasn’t a term you’d see in any documents, it wasn’t featured in any conversations. 

We spent time constantly asking if we don’t use ‘customer’ then what? How would you describe the people we are here to serve?  

It’s just a word, but it is a gateway to the kind of relationship we want to have and what we’re going to do. 

Some came on board straight away, saying yes, this makes perfect sense. That’s how I want my friends and family treated, it’s more than just putting a fire out. Others found an answer to something they knew was missing but were unsure what it was. And there was a third group who were very resistant. 

Changing the language is something that you can do tomorrow, you don’t have to wait for a new budget cycle or for funding to be approved. 

How did you develop and introduce this more human-centred approach? 

The initial stage was to do in-person interviews, to listen to people’s stories in their own words. When you hear these stories, you realise how much we missed and how many opportunities there were where we could have done that bit more. 

Just saving a life is a very low bar given how long we’ve had the Fire Service for and how much has been invested. This should be the minimum that was expected. It was almost like we had found a resting place – nobody’s going to get upset with us if we just do this. The Service had a halo effect – the public was so grateful because we had done something at the worst point in their lives. 

But rather than just focusing on saving lives, we needed to look at how we could make those lives we saved worth living. How could we limit the impact of the event and put people back in the condition they were in before the fire. 

For example, I co-wrote a report called ‘Saving Lives is Not Enough’ which examined the journey of burn survivors. We identified that for most people with burns, a key part of healing is being cooled by water within the first three hours. This makes a huge difference to the outcomes in most cases – from something that clears up in a few weeks to potentially an injury with lifelong scarring. [What makes the difference is ideally lukewarm or tepid water, applied freely for 20 minutes.] 

Mapping the experience through the services, we realised that people weren’t getting to the burns specialist until six to eight hours after the event. The Fire Service was concerned with getting the survivor to the ambulance because they deal with the people, we deal with the fire. This is what our training centred on – bringing a dummy out from a building, placing it on a salvage sheet with the first aid kit and moving on. However, the ambulance service doesn’t carry water and is often in a rush to get to hospital. At hospital the patient is then triaged. While the burn might not be life threatening, it can be life changing and we found the window where you can make a real difference was closing. 

Looking back down the process we realised how disconnected it was. The first point where there is water available is right at the beginning. Changing the process would lead to much better outcomes for people. 

This is the same for many organisations – a problem is approached in a functional not in a human way. 

What challenges did you face when introducing this more joined-up human-centred approach? 

The Fire & Rescue Service is a very traditional organisation, there is a lot of conformity and compliance. The way of doing things is hierarchal – we tell you what to do, you do it. But the public doesn’t always act in that way. Why? 

We started with the question of why people weren’t doing what we asked. Why, if we’ve told them what they should do, were they going back into their houses? We needed to understand this.  

When we started the research, there was no real expectation that it would lead to much more than a change in advice. But by talking to our customers, we found a real and fundamental disconnect.  

It was very challenging, especially discussing it within the Service. But someone once said to me that you sometimes need to rock the boat, to upset people to create change.  

I set up a group of advocates – a collection of people representing every department or every specialist functioning service. We spent six months working with customer experience experts to develop an outside-in mindset. For the next six months, I set the group the challenge of working out what this meant to them and their teams and how this thinking can be sustained. I was going to be leaving at some point, it couldn’t all rest on me. 

Rather than creating a whole new customer experience, we built the thinking into existing projects. One example was a review of the disciplinary procedures. In the Fire Service, this is kind of semi-military in how it works. It is fairly quick in itself, lasting just an hour, but it also takes some time before it happens. Meaning no matter how confidential it is, word gets out. For the person involved, it is really horrible. So, we started looking at the human dimension and changed it from a functional process to something more fundamental. 

By the time I left the Fire & Rescue Service, it was normal to talk about customers. It wasn’t a linear process and didn’t quite happen as you might expect. But it was great to be at the front end of disruption asking the questions, saying why is it this way? How else could it be? Why do we believe that? 

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? 

It’s not just customer initiatives, we need people to rethink how organisations can be more responsive in a very changeable world, so we don't just have great initiatives coming through then fading away. We need to understand how to sustain the ability to be customer-led, and employee-led.  

One of the challenges for most organisations is how to go from business as usual to a different working model without losing momentum or performance.  

I think what Timpson’s do is really clever and they’re doing it for the right reasons. If I'm not coming to work worrying about a whole load of other things, then when I arrive at work, that's my focus. [They give their people an amazing level of freedom and lots of support.] Timpson’s genuinely care about their employees and other people, but it’s also a very smart business move - to make sure that when I arrived at work, I'm focused on that, [trusted, motivated and helped to do better – and as a result I do my best for my customers, whatever that means]. 

I'm really encouraged by them. They see people not just an employee or a customer and understand what that means in a much more rounded sense. 

Are there any examples or organisation that you particularly admire who are doing something customer-led? 

I’ve mentioned Timpson’s and I think there are some great examples within the Customer Pioneer community that The Foundation set up and the work that people in it have done – first direct, Octopus Energy and so on, but I'm slightly reluctant to focus on one or two because I think we should be looking more broadly than we normally do. What we understand customer pioneering to look like may be much broader than we currently see, or certainly it may need to be broader as we look forward. 

We see a lot about human-centred design, human experience...but does your experience of life mean that you would have the same outlook as I do?  

And loyalty is something that I think of as a person-to-person scheme. I'm not sure many companies actually have loyalty schemes, I think they have frequent use or incentivised schemes. Loyalty has different connotations. 

We need to pause and just take stock of what customer pioneering really means – in the future as well as the best examples of where we are now.