Customer business guru Si Elliott reveals seven things that have helped shape his life and inspired him
I’ve spent over twenty years trying to understand why people do what they do. Somewhere along the way I wrote a book about it. Here are seven things that hopefully explain how I ended up here.
1. I worry that we’re starting to serve our technology, rather than it serving us
I’m genuinely optimistic about technology. But somewhere along the way, the relationship got the wrong way round. It was meant to serve us, but increasingly we serve it.
Look at social media. Sold to us as a way to connect, it trained us to check, scroll and refresh on its terms, not ours. We were promised a tool and ended up with a habit. AI is the next chapter of that story, and one we need to be mindful of. We should be the masters of our technology, yet too often, we’ve let it become the master of us.
2. I’m a dad to two daughters, and it shapes how I see everything
I think a lot about the world my girls are growing up in, and the world they are inheriting from us. It’s more connected than any generation before them, and in many ways more lonely for it. That tension, being surrounded by technology yet craving something real, sits right at the heart of what I write and talk about. I want them to grow up in a world where progress makes life warmer, not colder and more distant.
3. I believe we need to reconnect as people
We live in a world obsessed with measurement. Especially in marketing, everything gets counted, tracked and optimised. Some of that is genuinely useful and informative. But somewhere along the way, I think a lot of businesses have started measuring so much that they’ve lost sight of the point. We don’t exist to hit a metric on a dashboard, we exist to serve other people. The more digital the world becomes, the more convinced I am that we need to stop and reconnect as people.
4. I believe size isn’t everything
Some of the best customer experiences I’ve ever had came from small businesses, not the giants. A smaller company can’t always compete on price or scale, but it can out-human the big brands every single day. I find that genuinely exciting, and liberating too. Size isn’t everything. Behavioural thinking is the great equaliser, and watching a challenger use it to punch well above its weight is one of the most empowering things in my work.
I’m lucky enough to lecture at a few universities internationally and work with students who are just starting out. Every time I’m in a room with them I come away more energised and optimistic than when I walked in. They often ask better questions than most boardrooms do. Hope is a word I use a lot, probably too much, but spending time with the next generation is a big part of why I have so much of it.
6. I’ve never stopped learning, and I hope I never do
I’ve got a lot wrong over the years. Decades of it, if I’m honest. But I’ve never stopped learning, and that feels more important now than ever. We live in a world where answers arrive instantly. Ask a machine almost anything and it hands you something back in seconds. That’s remarkable, but it can rob us of something too. Writing my book taught me that. It forced me to slow down, to sit with the hard questions, to do the work rather than reach for the quick answer. Some of my biggest growth has come from the messy, difficult stretches of learning, not the easy ones. In an AI age, I think doing the work yourself matters more than ever.
7. I’m happiest with a whiteboard and a marker
I’ve been fortunate enough to speak at all kinds of events, from workshops full of senior executives to a parliamentary reception, and I enjoy all of it. But if you really want to make me happy, give me a whiteboard, a decent marker and a problem worth solving. That’s where I feel most at home.
Everything I do—the book included—started with scribbling ideas on a wall and trying to make sense of the latest challenge. For all the technology available to us, sometimes there’s still nothing better than standing in front of a blank whiteboard and asking: what are we actually trying to solve?
Customer Eperience Thinking – Si Elliott
Customer Experience Thinking by SI ELLIOTT is available from Amazon click here
Si Elliott is the author of Customer Experience Thinking, a strategic marketing leader, award winning educator and customer experience expert with over 20 years of experience helping brands build deeper, more meaningful connections and relationships https://fabricx.agency/book/.
